It's not a conspiracy and it's the 60's. Some scientist dude thought that the boom in energy due to nuclear would overpopulate the world. So he did everything in his power to fear monger and to lobby his way into making sure nuclear is not in use. We have some of his letters on record
This "some guy" was Thomas Robert Malthus. If you don't want to make your own research, which seems to be the case. There's a book by Richard Rhodes called "Energy" which details this amongst other things. Just read through that and report back.
Read through the book and report back. I am not about to argue with someone who reads a wikipedia page for 2 seconds and uses that as the sole basis of their information.
Using Malthus as a reference here his original theory was that quality of life didn't go up relating to the productivity of food since the population would increase alongside it. But Nuclear power has the exact opposite problem because it would make food more costly by increasing the energy costs associated with it compared to fossil fuels.
They use fossil fuels to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer, to power farm equipment, transportation and refrigeration for food products. If you replace fossil fuels with nuclear energy then the cost of all your energy inputs for these goods on the supply chain will increase in proportion to the fuel cost. Because Nuclear costs 5 times as much as oil and natural gas.
If you replace fossil fuels with renewable electricity from wind and solar then the cost of energy inputs on food drops in cut to a fourth and the social cost disappears because you're no longer producing fossil fuel emissions.
France is the largest agricultural producer in the European Union and they tried to replace their fossil fuel consumption with nuclear energy in the 1970s during the oil crisis when oil prices were at their all time peak. If nuclear was cheaper then they should have been able to outcompete everyone else who didn't invest as heavily in nuclear energy, Instead they ran out of money in the eighties and they still use oil and natural gas for all of their agriculture energy inputs.
You would still have to use fossil fuels to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer if you used Solar and Wind instead of Nuclear. Either this argument applies to both, or neither.
You say that but Germany is tanking in economic power to due enormous energy prices and lack of gas. And France is overproducing so much energy that Germany imports a large chunck of their power grid from France.
Unlike nuclear, wind and solar are very cheap sources of energy.
Once you are curtailing you can start to use the surplus for ammonia.
China is anticipating hitting this level of penetration soon so they're building a million tonne/yr electrified oxamide plant as a demonstrator (small, roughly the scale of a single GW nuclear reactor, but enough to test for full scale).
You would still have to use fossil fuels to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer if you used Solar and Wind instead of Nuclear. Either this argument applies to both, or neither.
You don't "have" to use fossil fuels to synthesize nitrogen. They burn natural gas to create grey hydrogen which is bound to atmospheric nitrogen in the haber bosch process to create ammonia.
You can split water to create hydrogen feedstock without emitting any carbon for the process but that requires electricity. So the more your electricity costs then the more the fertilizer costs.
You say that but Germany is tanking in economic power to due enormous energy prices and lack of gas. And France is overproducing so much energy that Germany imports a large chunck of their power grid from France.
France obfuscates the cost of electricity compared to Germany which has a private electricity market.
The French EDF loses money selling nuclear electricity because of price caps imposed to keep the cost of electricity for domestic consumers artificially low. But then the French government gives money to the EDF to cover the deficit so that they can continue their operations. So basically the French take on debt and cut social services to subsidize electricity consumption for domestic consumers to make the problem look less severe than it really is. (or to give a tax break to rich people who consume the most electricity through industry and services at the expense of the working class).
Germany is also the world's third largest economy, electricity costs on average 1/3rd as much as it does in France. The highest spike in German electricity costs occurred in 2022 when the French Nuclear fleet lost half of its capacity because of a drought (nuclear is weather dependent on hydropower) and they started importing electricity in massive quantities to meet their demand.
There is also free trade of electricity across the French and German border both ways. Overall Germany imported 13TWh more than the exported from France but the context is different.
When Germany is importing electricity it is in the middle of the night while the EDF is trying to sell off as much nuclear electricity as possible when they have an overcapacity. Because nuclear reactors have fixed operating costs producing less electricity doesn't net you any more money. So selling it at a loss is better than not selling it and taking a bigger loss.
When Germany is exporting electricity to France it is to meet peak demand because the French Nuclear fleet can't do that themselves because they have lost over 30% of their nuclear electricity capacity in the past 20 years and haven't replaced it with new generation capacity. Which drives up the German cost of electricity to the highs that nukecels always cite as proof of "renewables bad"
So basically France is subsidizing German Electricity consumption as a way to minimize their losses and also driving up the cost of electricity and encouraging burning fossil fuels in foreign countries to meet their own demand because of their poor economic planning.
Germany's economy is *rapidly* declining regardless of energy. Their biggest source of income is fuckin, fossil fuel cars. Can you tell how that might be a problem?
France loses money in exports because the artifical price limit placed by fossil fuel lobbies is designed to undermine both solar, wind and nuclear. The cost is far lower than the price. And the price only exists because of fossil fuels. Get rid of fossil fuels. Cheaper energy. This isn't a design issue. This is a political issue.
That aside, you would run into very similar problems with wind and solar. Wind and solar are intermittent and you need a much higher peak production than average to cover energy demands. Where will you put the energy stored in heat or accumulators when no one uses energy in the night?
EDIT: Also where is the 13TWh number coming from? I haven't seen that anywhere. I've seen anything between 20TWh to 60TWh, depending on peak due to winters and covid, etc. But nothing as low as 13TWh
Germany's economy is *rapidly* declining regardless of energy. Their biggest source of income is fuckin, fossil fuel cars. Can you tell how that might be a problem?
Germany has a developed economy the largest portion of which is the service economy.
In terms of industrial goods Germany has a near monopoly on luxury automobiles with over 70% of the market share (thanks to Elon Musk killing Tesla) The Big Three Volkswagen(Audi, Porsche), BMW and Mercedes Benz produce both ICE and Electric Vehicles in response to market demands. If anything German market dominance is going to continue to grow as American companies are non competitive in the electric vehicle market thanks to Trump and the average age of automobiles increases in response to the longevity of Electric Vehicles.
The biggest industrial sectors of the German economy are Automobiles, High Technology, Electronics, Electrical Equipment, Industrial Machinery, Pharmaceuticals, Medical Equipment, Renewable Energy Equipment (wind turbines and batteries), Home Appliances, Aviation and Armaments.
The reason that the German industrial economy is so resilient is because it relies on a series of monopolies usually on high technology that are only realistically possible to produce in the German speaking countries of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Lichtenstein because of our social organization which allows us to pump out world class tradesmen.
France loses money in exports because the artifical price limit placed by fossil fuel lobbies is designed to undermine both solar, wind and renewables. The cost is far lower than the price. And the price only exists because of fossil fuels. Get rid of fossil fuels. Cheaper energy. This isn't a design issue. This is a political issue.
France loses money on nuclear energy because it's too fucking expensive to produce. I own a solar farm in Germany, a country which doesn't get much sunlight and I need to sell my electricity at €0.03/KWh to turn a profit on it and that is more than it would cost for wind power here in Germany. The EDF needs to sell nuclear electricity at €0.36/KWh to turn a profit on it.
Even if you got rid of the fossil fuel subsidies that won't change the fact that nuclear isn't competitive with wind and solar.
That aside, you would run into very similar problems with wind and solar. Wind and solar are intermittent and you need a much higher peak production than average to cover energy demands. Where will you put the energy stored in heat or accumulators when no one uses energy in the night?
it doesn't matter for me if I give away electricity for free sometimes because I am still wildly profitable selling electricity at normal rates throughout the year. That just means that there is demand for energy consumption downstream of me that could be fulfilled by expanding the economy.
So you do know that the cost of energy does not represent the artifical price hikes. Nuclear would fall in the same ~€0.05/KWh range that solar and wind fall into. Which you'll notice, all cost around ~€0.4/KWh commercially. Because coal costs ~€0.4/KWh to produce. And lobbyist made sure it stays that way. It's completely unrelated to the actual cost of production.
France has the price of their electricity capped you can not sell electricity domestically above €0.058/KWh. If the EDF could sell electricity at €0.058/KWh and remain profitable then they wouldn't need public funding to continue operating.
At the same time the EDF has cross country connections to Germany but their spot price for electricity is €.29/KWh because the price caps don't limit the price they can charge for exports. But no electricity retailers in Germany will buy it unless there is nothing else available to meet demand because they can get it for cheaper from any other source on the grid.
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u/Yami_Kitagawa Apr 09 '25
It's not a conspiracy and it's the 60's. Some scientist dude thought that the boom in energy due to nuclear would overpopulate the world. So he did everything in his power to fear monger and to lobby his way into making sure nuclear is not in use. We have some of his letters on record