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  • if anything this is a win for belgium since they get all that sweet local electricity production without paying for the nuclear plant.

    • Not sure if you are joking, but the customer is paying for the plant. And you can be damn sure you’re paying premium prices for imported energy.

      • nonetheless they benefit from having local production as that reduces the need for electricity from further away, which reduces the amount of transmission losses.

        This effect is significant enough that even just rooftop solar in sweden means you're owed a rebate from the energy company, as you're saving them money.

  • Actually, the nuclear power industry did / does indeed run astroturfing campaigns

    Which nuclear power industry? Given the sheer scale of a nuclear power plant project, most research and reactor projects are public projects, with only SMRs seeing any recent interest in the USA. So you think it's the States that are conducting astroturfing campaigns? The same states that have been sabotaging nuclear power everywhere since Chernobyl? Is there any evidence of this?

    For example the “pro-nuclear civil society” in Japan.

    The only thing I have found about this is a study which I have to pay 43€ to read.

    If you read up on nuclear power online you will find an abundance of websites and groups which offer very one-sided information

    You can find that kind of content for about any other subject you can think of. That doesn't make it proof of astroturfing.

    and are tied to the nuclear power industry.

    Same question, what is exactly the "nuclear power industry" you're talking about?

    Astroturfing campaigns promoting solar and wind power can be directly linked to the oil industry, as when Jay Anthony Precourt, head of oil and energy start-ups and a major investor in gas, swung a total of $80 million over three years at Stanford University to finance the Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency, which later published a glowing report on a 100% renewable future. (If you don't see the link between fossil fuels and renewables, take a look at Germany: when there's no wind, they burn coal and gas. Fossils are very compatible with renewables.)

    Can you find the same with nuclear?

    Nuclear fission power had huge investments and substitutions but turned out to not be economically feasible in most cases. There is a lot of money to be lost and made in this industry.

    This is factually incorrect. What's expensive is investing to build a cutting-edge industry, then dismantling it before it becomes profitable under the pressure of public opinion.

    The French Court of Auditors has estimated the total cost of French nuclear power at around 130 billion euros between 1960 and 2010, including research, construction and maintenance. At its peak, a 1000MW unit of French nuclear power cost 1.5 billion euros, and the French nuclear industry produced two 900 to 1300MW reactors a year for two decades.

    Everything came to an abrupt halt in the 90s, not because it wasn't profitable, not because it didn't work, but because the Russians made a mess of their power plant, which didn't even have the same design as the others, killed a few hundred/thousand people, and traumatized hundreds of millions.

    Between scientists there is also no consensus whether nuclear power (in its current application) is a good thing.

    There is no definition of "a good thing".

    On the other hand, we know that nuclear power is the least polluting, least resource/space-consuming and safest form of controllable energy.

    The increase in nuclear power is an essential of the 4 scenarios of the IPCC reports, and the European Union, based on these reports and other studies, has recognized nuclear power as an energy with a positive impact on the environment. and they incorporated it into the green taxonomy.

58 comments