Nuclear is proportionally expensive for one because we build a lot less and lose insititional knowledge and manufacturing capacity.
Secondly because of ridiculous legislation and europes extreme ability to fuck with it politically.
Thirdly because we don't count the gas plant to cover the intermitency of the renewables as part of the cost and if they'd take those out they'd find they run out of options for the cheap storage options as they become a larger share of the grid nor did they drew out the lifetime cost over the full length of a nuclear plants lifetime (shit gets replaced in the meantime)
At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections)
But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades.
I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.
- nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them. China is not currently experiencing cost price reduction in nuclear. Maybe we'd experience scale reductions in cost if we were to build at a much larger scale than that, but given that the world is already spending hundreds of billions just to build a handful of plants....
- nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands
> I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage
Which one was that? Lazard has always consistently overestimated the cost of solar and solar+storage.
> nuclear increased in price over the period France built a lot of them
Let's not pretend price is any concern of the people shutting down nuclear power. That's just not what it's about. Here is their page on the subject, and as you can clearly read: nuclear power "has no future".
Second, Germany would not have to rebuild nuclear power, as the green party clearly shows. They only need to reopen existing plants.
It is STILL the case that reopening the existing plants would lower prices - a bit. But it would make a very large difference for German CO2 production because coal powerplants are doing baseload now and would be displaced by the nuclear plants. And if the Ukraine and Iran wars keep going it will lower prices a lot (or rather it would prevent another large price spike)
> nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands
This is not a good argument given that the alternative was to switch to gas for most of the baseload, then lose the gas due to the war in Ukraine, to then switch to coal and LNG (LNG might technically be gas, but due to additional inefficiency it's worse than coal), and now losing all gas supplies (ie. from Qatar) and being forced to use even worse LNG supplies from the US.
Hell you'd think the greens would massively sponsor chemical research into LNG, since LNG efficiency is actually worse than what our bodies do to make fat. In other words: turning gas into liquid fuel (not LNG, actual liquid fuel) is possible to do with a catalyst at much higher efficiency than turning it into LNG. We don't know how, despite the fact that your body is probably doing it (to produce fatty acids) right now as you read this. You want to help climate change? Let's figure that one out, that would actually help CO2 output AND lower prices.
At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections) But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades. I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.