Europe has survived 3 energy shocks in 4 years. The only way out is to stop buying power from its enemies | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2026/03/25/europe-3-energy-shocks-in-4-years-what-to-do-next/
Europe has survived 3 energy shocks in 4 years. The only way out is to stop buying power from its enemies | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2026/03/25/europe-3-energy-shocks-in-4-years-what-to-do-next/
But nuclear is so bad!!1! Better burn coal and oil and “clean” gas!!
Renewables FTW, with a nuclear backdrop til we can phase out that too is the way forward IMO.
You know nuclear isn’t self-sustainable? Uranium is mined in only a few places.
The volume of uranium used is so low that is feasible to store years of supply; this is not possible with gas.
But it should be noted as a risk, of course.
Uranium-based nuclear power isn’t ideal, but thorium-based nuclear power shows a lot of promise, because thorium is both way more common than uranium, and way harder to weaponize.
It is the other way around though: because it cannot be weaponized, there was no incentive to develop an industrial reactor and a supply chain. The remaining technical and scientific challenges on this technology are non-trivial too as I understand, so it will be a few decades before we see one in action even if we took the decision to invest in it today.
Yeah but that’s still experimental, right?
Thorium reactor rely on transmuting thorium into a form of uranium, a form which itself can be extracted and weaponized…
And? You’re trying to argue it’s like oil?
So you advocate for coal, gas and oil until we can be 100% reliant on renewables?
There’s no option. Transitioning to nuclear will keep you burning stuff for 10-15 years whilst they’re built. Even SMRs will be 5-10. Renewables come online with a much smoother transition curve. You reduce burning stuff sooner, and we need whatever is quickest.
Still need batteries big enough to power global shipping etc. Nuclear can do that, even though building reactors takes time
It can, and I’m not anti-nuclear for all use cases. I just don’t think it stops us burning stuff soon enough.
No perfect solution, sadly. We’re also very late to start reducing emissions. And humanity doesn’t seem to be able to get their shit together and actually do something about it any time soon
That’s a bad faith interpretation of the above comment. We already can be 100% reliant on renewables. Nuclear is so clownishly expensive that it’s far cheaper to provide baseload power via solar, wind, batteries, and other energy storage mechanisms.
Well what will you use for power generation before we have enough renewable energy? You say it yourself: “can” be reliant. Yes but we are not, so what’s the way forward? Nuclear til we have enough renewables, or you know, my question : shall we burn coal up til then?
And nuclear energy is less expensive than coal, oil and gas IMO.
What are you on about? We don’t have the nuclear we’re talking about. This is about future plant construction. And new renewable capacity can be deployed in a fraction of the time that nuclear can.
France have upped their production massively, you don’t always need to build a whole new nuclear central to augment production.
This is the correct answer. Nuclear is not a perfect energy source, but it fills one big gap that we currently have with the renewable energy sources.
I would also say that gas can be an ok alternative in some situations. For example as replacement of a coal power plant if it is built together with solar and/or wind power. The gas power plant can increase the power when the renewables does not produce energy and be turned off during sunny or windy days.
What exactly is the big gap? Are you going to mention baseload, a concept that’s been obsolete for a decade? The baseload power demand, according to the according to its actual definition, is zero on many grids. Solar and wind produce energy Joule-for-Joule far cheaper than fission. And we have any number of ways of storing that cheap energy. Renewables are the cheapest form of baseload power. It’s not 2010 anymore.
Plus, if we’re talking national security, we’ve seen from the Ukraine conflict that every nuclear plant is a huge geopolitical liability. There have been many near misses and scares relating to Ukraine’s fission plants. Many have had to be shut down due to the risk of being struck. And hell, Iran’s plants are actively being targeted by US and Israeli air strikes. In a big war, your enemy can create an instant chernobyl in your backyard if they want. You can design a reactor to be intrinsically safe, but that doesn’t help if someone drops a ballistic missile on top of it. And yes, if you did this to a nuclear power like the US or Russia, it might provoke a retaliatory strike with actual nuclear bombs. But there are dozens of countries that have nuclear reactors but no nuclear weapons. For them, having nuclear power plants is a huge strategic liability. Far better to have innumerable solar panels and wind turbines scattered across the countryside than one big vulnerable reactor, an Achilles heel that an enemy can target to knock your whole power grid offline.
Solar and wind power are dependent on the weather to generate power, where nuclear power is not. I agree that there are many ideas on how to store the energy from solar and wind power, but how many of them is used on such large scale that it makes a difference on the grid?
Out of topic but do you have any data that shows that the baseload is obsolete? I have a hard time to believe that based on the definition from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/baseload
Yes, but unless we figure out how to store a ton of electric energy, renewables are limited in use and somehow counterproductive as it makes energy cheaper during sunny days and thus making nuclear even more expensive (due to the fact that nuclear can’t be easily throttled). 🤷
In practice you only need to store about a day’s worth of electricity, a few hours really. Solar panels are so stupidly cheap now that you can solve seasonal variations in production by just spamming solar panels. You deploy enough panels to meet your demand on a cloudy day in winter. Then the rest of the year you have dirt cheap abundant electricity. Maybe shut down some of your most energy-intensive industries on the cloudiest winter days if you must. Give everyone at the steel mill a week off and instead ask them to work longer hours in the summer.
And what about people living in extreme latitudes? We can use excess solar power during the summer to capture atmospheric CO2, use that to make synthetic liquid fuels, and the handful of folks living north of the arctic circle can just keep burning carbon-neutral diesel fuel forever. You could use small fission plants for these remote locations, but there’s unlikely to ever be enough demand just in the high latitudes to sustain an entire nuclear supply chain. Synthetic carbon-neutral liquid fuels would have many applications, so a supply chain could be developed.
For places up north connected to the grid, would it not be enough to send solar-generated electricity from sunnier areas to the south most of the time? (Although synthetic fuel burning sounds like a good backup plan for when the grid connection fails).
Storing a ton is easy. It’s storing gigatons that’s hard.
Uranium is one of the most dense elements. It’s like 30x more dense than gasoline.