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In 2025, solar and wind produced more electricity than fossil fuels in the European Union
(ourworldindata.org)
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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Alternative energy will never make enough energy, we have to hyperfocus on nuclear energy! See!
One problem that I see with nuclear is that energy production has to be accessible enough such that anyone can create their own independent network. I don't believe nuclear has achieved this yet.
One thing nuclear energy has over wind and solar is that it's very reliable. Cloudy day? No wind? No electricity, or much less anyway.
Water turbines in a dam seems to be quite reliable, even though it varies with the seasons of course, but more reliable than wind at least.
What people overlook that reliability doesn't matter that much. What actually matters is availability exactly matching the demand. And guess what... constant nuclear production is as far off as fluctuating renewable power.
Everyone can seemingly grasp the concept of solar production peaking at noon while the demand peak is about 5 hours later and that it needs storage to shift the production to the demand peak. But they don't understand that constant production of nuclear needs a similiar amount of storage to shift all that power produced at night and not needed to the day when there is demand.
And the exact same thing is true for seasonal changes. It would be insanely expensive to produce the amount of nuclear power you need in those few cold winter nights and then have moverproduction most ofthe time. So you need seasonal storage for a lot of it, so you can instead build capacities for your average demand over a year and shift the produced energy around.
The storage you need for renewables is again comparable. In fact the pure capacity you need is actually lower, but then you need the ability to unload much more in a short time frame should weather patterns be really bad for renewable power. Which evens out in regards to costs. Renewable storage need less capacity but has higher demands on the storage and grid.
Thanks for the insight
Nuclear is an expensive alternative to big batteries. Iβm not sure about the long term economics but a megawatt of nuclear is more expensive up front
There are two countries heavily pushing for a properly sized hydrogen market for industry use as well as long-term storage: Germany and France.
So basically everytime you hear arguments of storage in a nuclear vs renewable discussion, you can be sure it's bullshit. The people actually doing the planning know well that nuclear as well as renewable models need similiar huge amounts of seasonal storage.
(The French model of today explicitly only works economically via exports and only as long as all their neighbours use fossil fuels. That's not a viable model when nuclear and/or renewables are in use everywhere.)
Right, so nuclear should probably be sort of a filler during a period of low output from renewables, I guess?
It serves as a base, yes. It doesnβt respond to changes in demand quickly. I suspect that tech has gotten to the point where batteries are a better investment.