smotah

The main difference is that:

- the weight of uranium compared to the weight of coal needed for the same amount of energy produced is absolutely ridiculous: 2.5 metric tons vs. 7 grams of uranium 235. That make it easy to stockpile it for years to come

- Some "waste" are already being recycled and used again

- uranium is uniformly distributed on earth, there's not the same geopolitical issues that we experience for fossil energy sources such as oil and gas

- I'm not sure whether those 20%/20% proportions are true since some EU countries does not disclose the part of uranium imported from each countries

- Australia, Niger and Canada are also some major players for EU uranium import, none of which want to back Russian war, quite the contrary according to the UN vote.

100% nuclear is not economical or practical. Nuclear is poorly suited to regular spikes and short-term load balancing.

While using only nuclear power plants for all the domestic electricity generation of a country doesn't make much sense, some reactor design, notably French ones (in particular composition of the control rods and their placement in the core, among other things) allows for very flexible control over power output. [0] EDF makes the surprising claim that their plants are as flexible as gas plants, which are generally considered as the go-to method of load following.

Also curious to why 100% nuclear wouldn't be economical, wouldn't this hypothetical situation benefits from the economy of scale and grid management simplification?

[0] https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document (PDF)

It's a bit more nuanced than that as there's just a subset of all possible nuclear power plant designs that needs the same enrichment facility than for military (bomb making) usage.

nobody wants to live next to radioactive waste.

It seems irrational as sealed high profile waste doesn't leak any radiations beyond the natural ambiant radioactive noise. The problem may arise in a very long time due to water molecules progressively entering and exiting the enclosure during thousands of years.

One could live and sleep every night in a nuclear waste storage building and nothing will happen to them. Similarly, one could swim in nuclear fuel cooling pools everyday and won't have any problem either.

It's way more problematic for health to live next to a coal power plant.

Much of Europe is following in Germanys steps I am afraid.

There's still hope, it is to be expected than the gas price surge and geopolitical implications of dependencies will make people realize than it's not conceivable to shut down nuclear power. That's not even taking into account the global warming considerations.

After closing a reactor to please the greens, the French government will hopefully come back in it's right mind by finishing it's EPR and building more (complete nuclear plants replacement is needed right now to anticipate the end of life of the current fleet).

The United Kingdom is expected to have a new EPR to enter service. Finland finally powered theirs two days ago. Nuclear phase out of Belgium seems unrealistic and The Netherlands is evaluating the possibility of building two plants.

France, Poland and Hungary are in favor of including nuclear power in the green taxonomy. It's a big deal because nearly all of Poland's electricity production is from coal.

Since building new plants is expensive and takes time, it should starts right now and be subsidized like new renewables, as Europe will need to replace it's old reactors in just some decades, while committing to CO2 emissions reduction.

Germany seems like a lost cause, though.

When looking at live data we should keep in mind that currently 14 reactors are stopped in France for various reasons (maintenance delayed to winter season due to COVID, safety measures of several reactors due to investigation in a deterioration of a comportent in one).

In normal circumstances France should be exporting to Germany right now (it would make no economical sense for German grid operators to use the very expensive gas if neighbors could deliver lower cost indigenous production). Sadly right now France can't deliver and it increases tension even more on gas demand.

Thanks to it's nuclear power, France is the first electricity exporter in the world, Germany is a close second.

Fun fact: when electricity prices from Germany are negative (when there's big spike of intermittent electricity from renewable production) French grid operators strategically lower nuclear output and import this profitable energy.

Indeed, that's a consequence of how the price is artificially calculated within the European electricity market. To avoid providing advantage to electricity resellers having providers with lower production costs the price is calculated according to the price of the last connected plant at any given time within the interconnected grid. It's most of the time natural gas or coal plants because of the "flexibility" needs.

The cost of electricity production in France is currently lower than Germany, but the resell price is currently close due to those market rules.

Unsurprisingly Germany lobbied EU members such as Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg and Spain to block the inclusion of nuclear power in the "green taxonomy" (allowing it to be subsided like new renewables are), while pushing for natural gas (emitting 40 times more CO2 than nuclear). Such geopolitical move is definitely illogical and favoring climate change acceleration.

Indeed, nuclear power plants requires way less concrete by kWh than wind turbines.

That's also utility of the "core catcher" component of some gen III reactor designs, that are specifically made to cool down corium in case of a core meltdown. For SMR, the risk is mitigated because the reactor isn't sufficiently powerful to melt itself.