What if Germany had invested in nuclear power?

Even a lot of Dutch people don&#x27;t know this but for decades the Netherlands was selling huge quantities of natural gas for bargain prices to anyone willing to pay.<p>Why? Because some very smart Dutch experts calculated that Europe would switch to nuclear so there was a limited window of opportunity to sell this soon to be useless commodity. And to add insult to injury just as the Ukraine crisis started all the gas fields were starting to run dry.

Part of why the Energiewende was expensive was that it provided long term financial incentives for those who invested in renewables when they weren&#x27;t yet economically competitive.<p>If you bought solar panels 20 years ago you received subsidies for every year since then at the prices of the past.<p>In a way Germany bankrolled a lot of the renewable development with this. Of course it wasn&#x27;t viable to continue this so German government scaled back the scheme aggressively, which unfortunately killed the solar industry in Germany almost entirely (roughly 10 years ago).<p>Today everything has changed. Renewables are now cheaper than fossils and thus expanding at incredible rates. There is no point in turning back to nuclear power which just got worse and worse from their economics.

While this study is very interesting, the way the Energiewende itself was applied was also not ideal. Some of the steps in the Energiewende were not applied properly, probably because the German government at the time was center-right and had conscious or unconscious biases in favor of coal and gas generations.<p>It would have been interesting to compare the reasonable benefices of a properly-done nuclear path with the reasonable benefices of a properly-done renewable path (properly-done renewable path being constructed the same way: triangulating the situations in other countries), instead of comparing it with what really happened with the German renewable path.

Coincidentally (to the fact Germany is actively phasing out nuclear) Germany is the very country I would trust to run nuclear power plants without worry - every other nuclear-powered nation seems less good at quality and safety, the safety measures Germany applied seemed really good.<p>Yet nowadays it appears Germany essentially outsources nuclear power generation to its neighbors who would still contaminate Germany in case of a nuclear incident at their land.

As everybody was saying, their idea was silly at best. Good there&#x27;s a study for that now

What I don&#x27;t understand is France: they have a controlled energy price but their nuclear provider has a lot of debt.<p>And they need to start rebuilding new.ones.<p>So was it smart in France? Besides the obvious advantage regarding CO2

Germany, to this day, has been unable to fix their nuclear waste treatment. There is no single approved upon solution for radioactive waste and recently it became clear that even some facilities need to resurface and relocate waste which, again, has no clear path after decades. I&#x27;m sceptical that any of the recent &quot;influencer campaigns&quot; (it feels like that for me watching x&#x2F; twitter) have ever addressed this.

The study misses the point I think (I only glimpsed over it). But Germany invested early into renewables at a time where they were still very expensive. The goal was to create an economy of scale and bring down the price. This was expensive for Germany but ultimately very successful: renewables are now very cheap. The same thing never worked with nuclear in the past.

Then they could have giant piles of nuclear waste, that they have no idea how to dispose of, just like france...

I suggest another study, albeit very hard to do: what if Germany have chosen de-urbanisation, observing that in the denser Nederland 81.3% of citizens live in homes not apartments, like in Belgium (77.6%) or France (62%) pushing a nation-wide program to build new homes (meaning &quot;A class&quot;, well insulated, air-tight, with good windows, heat-pumps for heating, cooling and hot water) etc modeled as a State run real estate exchange a classic home against a new one, with some constraint like:<p>- similar size, more allowed but at citizen expense<p>- build in a locally hydro-geologically stable place (meaning a flood&#x2F;landslide can arrive nearby but not in the home)<p>- only offered for PERSONAL properties, or SME enterprise direct property, not allowed to be rent for 5 years at least after that bonus<p>Obtaining as a result a sharp decrease in winter consumption for heating, summer consumption for cooling, and a bit of renewable to shift a bit of load AND a bit of semi-smart grid meaning a classic &quot;low tariff&quot; with pilot wires for appliances like hot water heater etc that in a new home could run a bit independently from the heated water usage?<p>IME, having built a new home, I can state a mean of 1&#x2F;7 to 1&#x2F;10 overall consumption compared to an old one, meaning at large an enormous reduction in energy consumption and a bit of semi-autonomy allow for less urgent intervention in case of service issues witch in general means much lower costs and easier evolution for the service side. Aside building resilience and what we damn need for future evolution.<p>A small notes for those from USA: in UE there are no USA-style suburbs, meaning even in spread living homes and commerce are normally mixed, so you normally do not need to travel much for anything, and you don&#x27;t need to go to the nearest city for anything because anything is actually spread like homes. Cities on contrary are MUCH more dense than USA, to the point is practically impossible re-building simply because the construction site would disrupt the surrounding circulation in such impacting ways to be doable only in case of collapse risks.<p>A last note for all: so far many state cities cost less than living spread but there is NO REAL STUDY on that topic, especially for MODERN cities (buildings built with elevators, HVAC, ventilation, fire and seismic safety, energy performances etc etc etc not classic &quot;just a set of stacked boxes and some stairs&quot;). IME and IMO having done some very basic computing a MODERN set of small homes consume less alone than an equivalent building of apartments and urban infra around (sewers, drinking water, electricity, roads) cost LESS as well for spread areas where infra a smaller instead of having to sustain density.