Germany is No 1 in Europe for EV production, No 2 in the world

"the U.S. Government will move into markets currently dominated by Russian and Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOE) and recover our position as the world leader in exporting best-in-class nuclear energy technology, and with it, strong non-proliferation standards"

Russia and China have state owned enterprises. Now the US government will move into their markets...

"The U.S. has ceded its leadership position to countries with state-owned-enterprises, including Russia and China,"

The US government is the actor who is directing the US industry.

> The claim that renewables foster "local ownership" and "distributed industry" oversimplifies the reality.

The topic was that "we", Germany, don't want this. We want to strengthen local ownership of energy production. There are a lot of examples here. Nuclear power plants are so far large (large plants are more cost effective) and based on large monopolies (granted or even owned by the government).

Example: Before the movement towards renewable energy, the grid and the electricity production was owned by only four large companies each occupying a region in Germany.

The electricity grid was then taken away from them and opened to many players. Now (basically) everyone has the right to be a producer and to feed electricity into the grid. Now we have a large landscape of energy producers, with the goal to establish this across the EU.

Nuclear power plants (owned by very few companies in protected markets) are dinosaurs in the effort to create dynamic energy markets.

Nuclear power demands long-term contracts and guaranteed prices for huge monopolistic players. See for example the new nuclear power plants in the UK...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

"EDF has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price – a "strike price" – for electricity from Hinkley Point C under a government sanctioned Contract for difference (CfD)."

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-seeks-more-uk...

"PARIS, Jan 25 (Reuters) - France wants the British government to contribute more money to two new nuclear plants its state-owned energy utility EDF was contracted to build in the UK, given delays and spiralling costs, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters."

A state-owned French company builds for the British government a nuclear power plant.

We are not talking about a distorted "free market". There is no market at all, it's all government controlled: building and financing.

Your position is very transparent; it’s a celebration of ideologies that prefer "good" inefficiency. Even though goodness is a completely subjective factor and communicates nothing except a political position, to me, the goodness of a technology, especially in this time of extreme climate urgency, has only one valuable metric: pollution. I understand that this might not be your priority, and for this reason, I have no intention of continuing this discussion with you.

Taking the disaster of the Energiewende as a virtuous example is laughable, given that it is one of the greatest environmental and economic disasters. And of course, the Energiewende is also financed with state money. Your problem is very simple: if the money goes to nuclear power, it's bad; if it goes to renewables, under the guise of collective and decentralized well-being, it's perfectly fine. What's "free market" about this? Absolutely nothing.

You don't like state-owned nuclear power but completely ignore my argument that every solar panel bought is equivalent to the same thing, just at a higher level. Instead of the French buying electricity from the French government, you have the Germans (like you and me, as a non-German living in Germany) buying electricity from German fossil fuels and Chinese-made panels. Are you content with this? Honestly, I prefer to give money to the French state rather than the Chinese state if I had to choose. Besides, we are talking about a democratic state that has also decarbonized. You criticize, but they are decades ahead of any European state.

Meanwhile, as we are writing, France is polluting at 18 gCO₂eq/kWh, and Germany at 210 gCO₂eq/kWh with a daily peak of 510 gCO₂eq/kWh. Moreover, if German pollution is so low, it’s also because you're importing 2.2 GW from France's "bad and evil" government-financed nuclear power. Not to mention that the French have the lowest electricity bills in Europe, and the Germans almost always have the highest. It's up to others to make their own considerations.

> The German Wind Farm "Kaskasi". The Turbines were built by Siemens. The Wind Farm is owned by RWE, a private enterprise

So I suppose you have been against the closure of German reactors, right?

Like for example the one in Emsland, built by Siemens, and owned by RWE, exactly like the wind plant you take as an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emsland_Nuclear_Power_Plant

If this thing blows up, then what happens?

> fact remains that it delivers reliable, cheap, and clean electricity

That's your opinion, it's not a fact. Don't think that your opinions are facts and thus automatically what other people say is wrong. Be honest in communication with other people, so that your opinions are just opinions. You can argument in favor of your opinions, but they remain opinions and are not facts, just because YOU believe in them.

> So I suppose you have been against the closure of German reactors, right?

I'm for closing of nuclear reactors. You ignore the other things I said: nuclear power plants work only in a political environment, where they got a state-support/owned monopoly. Who do you think insures them? Who do you think sets up the regulatory environment that the get a large part of the market, who do you think is setting up the environment for waste storage. Hint: it's the government. We have extremely costly state financed clean-up operations for nuclear waste storage. These are old reactors.

To massively reduce the world co2 production, there is currently only ONE way known: massive scaling of renewable energy. The contribution of nuclear energy is neither cheap, nor clean, nor safe. It also does not scale. Nuclear energy stagnates since decades. Remember: China is bringing new coal power plants online, each week there are new ones.

Thus the industrialized countries have the responsibility (and the opportunity) to develop and share renewable energy technology, to be able be much faster in deployment, with improving technology. It's the only cost effective way known, which also can make a sizeable contribution.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...

> https://www.dw.com/en/are-nigers-uranium-supplies-to-france-...

"He added that some 90% of Niger's population has no electricity, and price exploitation means Niger today also receives too little income for its exports."

https://reliefweb.int/report/niger/niger-uranium-blessing-or...

"Instead, say local and international organisations, uranium mining by foreign-dominated companies has caused environmental damage and health problems in the far north of the country."

"Niger is the world's third to fifth-ranking producer of uranium, producing over 3,000 tonnes of uranium a year. However, the UN Development Programme's 2006 Human Development Index considers Niger the poorest country in the world, where life expectancy is 45 years old, 71 percent of adults cannot read, and 60 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day."

These things don't look good, I would say.

> > If this thing blows up, then what happens? > Ahahaha you have to study nuclear energy more.

You have to do that. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is a nuclear power plant, which is in the war zone in the Ukraine. Russia is attacking for months the electricity production and distribution in the Ukraine. If the cooling of the nuclear powerplant gets destroyed, then we have a possible meltdown or other scenarios. We already have a million refugees from the Ukraine in Germany. If a nuclear powerplant in the Ukraine gets destroyed (for example because Russia decides to bomb it), then we potentially will see millions more refugees.

So much for safe energy. There are nuclear powerplants in a warzone in Europe, and this affects us all. Direct or indirectly.

> Which catastrophes?

You really can use Google? Just recently in the news: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/04/22/russias-record-flo...

We have here former uranium mines, which were exploited by and for Russia. Google for "Wismut". It costs us many billions to clean up the russian legacy.

> Its cheap and clean, its a fact.

Selective data does not make it "cheap" and "clean". It also does not make it a fact. Consumer prices are also not "facts" about the complete cost structure of nuclear power. Consumer prices are designed by energy policy. Much of the costs of nuclear power are not payed by consumers, but by tax payers (Nuclear Power Plants can't be insured, unlike solar panels -> the tax payer will pay for these events -> for example a single Earth Quake in Japan causes costs the tax payer of several hundred billion dollars -> TEPCO, the owner of several damaged powerplants lacks the money to pay for that...