Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

It doesn't matter when the energy is basically thrown away right now and therefore free. It's called Einspeisemanagement (EisMan or EinsMan).

At the moment: Windy & sunny day? Just throw the energy away! Future: Windy & sunny day? Store the energy for a rainy day!

There's no reason to require polyticians to be technicians, and no reason to expect less formally-educated people to be more anti nuclear (except in the presence of massive disinformation campaigns). Requirements for formal education just select for conservative and obedient people - and we put them on the leaders (we got it backwards!). The US seems to kind of got it a bit more right, but it's probably just circus.

Technocratic politics doesn't work in practice (ask USSR), and there should be no requirements of formal education on politicians (not even non technical). But politicians and administrators do need to (re)learn fast on-the-lob so in practice an IQ test requirement would be great for them and probably for them only (yes, IQ measures well only how fast someone can learn something and not at all how good is someone at doing something after they've learned it, but, guess what... knowing and (re)learning fast about stuff they don't actually do is kind of the job requirement for politicians and administrators - an 145 IQ high-school-dropout with or without some alchol or substance issues is kind of the best person for a job like Prime Minister, Energy or Finance Minister etc.).

Oh, and on the active (we know their effects, so they must exist) campaigns of disinformation against known to work tech, there's a solution for that: laws for spreading false-facts and disinformation + throwing in jail people breaking them. Glue your ass on the highway or spread misinformation on facebook fueling anti-nuclear protests: how about a 5 years prison sentence baby?

As a society we're so f terrible at allocating human resources, that it's no wonder that other resources like those involved in energy production are massively missalocated too...

I think I figured out why they like it.

There's an E (for economics) plan outlined as a proposed solution, that assumes we'll deploy a lot of the cheapest energy source, whatever that is. It then also assumes (!) that onshore wind will cost the same as Nuclear and offshore wind will cost more. Put those two assunptions together and you get a plan with lots of nuclear.

Note, he's not actually predicting this outcome, though it does seem to be his personal preference at the time. He mentions that cheaper solar-to-fuel might be an alternative, as what really mattered was which was cheapest, which he assumed, incorrectly, would be nuclear.

Actual reality looks a lot closer to his G plan, for 'greenpeace' named sarcastically because they just love wind power, because as it turned out wind was cheaper than basically everything else (until solar caught up in most of the world). Maybe Greenpeace got lucky, maybe they were just better informed.

So if he was to rewrite that same plan with today's figures, the Economist and Green party plans would probably agree. Amusingly ironic and a testament to his methods even if his clearly stated assumptions no longer hold true.

> There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully decommissioned

According to your link, there are 10 plants that have achieved "DECON status": that is, the spent fuel and machinery have been removed from the site (presumably to some other site).

I'm sorry, but that's a cop-out: it's cheating to say you've decommissioned a site, when what you've really done is transport the entire site, including topsoil, to a new location. That's like saying your plastics are green, because when they are no longer wanted they are all shipped to Indonesia. And apparently at least some of those "decommissioned" sites still have spent fuel stored on-site; I don't see how a site with spent fuel can be considered to have been returned to "greenfield" condition.

> While it's evident nuclear sentiment is not great in germany, from my point of view, I wouldn't characterize as great in france either

I think it is changing. Both the IPCC and the ERDF reports were unambiguous and politicians and technocrats who were paying attention noticed. Now, skyrocketing gas prices are a warning shot. A blackout or a brownout could completely change public opinion (not that si would welcome it, but at this point it seems inevitable; we almost had 3 last winter).

> Sadly, I think in this domain (as in many) france lives with the infrastructure and build of its past and currently fails to invest for its future, it's more managing decline than anything else.

That is very true, unfortunately. That’s why building a series of EPR would be a good thing long-term, as it would provide some justifications to train new engineers and a refreshed skilled workforce.

> My dream would be that france, with help of germany and other eu countries would build new reactors with an overcapacity for france alone and would then provide this energy to other ue countries.

This would make sense from a technical point of view (one large fleet in a single country is easier to manage and more efficient than the same number of reactors distributed across several states). But that’s very difficult from a political point of view.

> Nuclear energy is a chance and is not mutually exclusive with other energies.

This is something a lot of people do not seem to grasp. We need all the low-carbon energy we can produce, and we need it 20 years ago. There is no point bickering about the share of renewable and the share of nuclear. We need renewables where we can and nuclear where we must.

In the end, what matters is that even a carbon-free electricity supply is just half the journey, and the easy half at that. It’s not something we will solve with a one-size-fits-all approach.