It is not only the oil shock.
Most of the nuclear initiatives at the EU level have been mostly blocked by the German government for the last 15y.
The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move.
The German position changed significantly after the crisis with Friedrich Merz explicitly called the German nuclear phaseout 'a mistake'.
Soon after, Nuclear energy stopped to be a swear word at EU level and EU funding streams seems to have opened up again for Nuclear power.
The recent oil crisis is just the last nail in the coffin of the anti-nuclear lobby.
They should be adopting every sort of energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environme...
> For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.
We can already capture solar energy at a much better energy efficiency than living beings. Making hydrocarbons with hydrogen extracted from water by electrolysis and concentrated carbon dioxide has acceptable efficiency and already almost one century ago it was possible to do this at a large scale where fossil oil was not available.
The step that has the least efficiency for now is concentrating the dilute carbon dioxide from air, which plants do much better.
There is no doubt that the global efficiency of such a process could have been greatly improved if only a small fraction of the resources allocated to much more frivolous goals had been allocated to this purpose.
While other alternatives are speculative, it is enough to look outside to see plenty of PoCs that this is feasible.
And alternatively just making hydrogen but storage is a problem with that.
So simple with negative peak energy prices...
But the concept of “base load” is outdated. As I mentioned in another comment - Because actually “base load” nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
The only way you can make it work is state subsidies and/or forcing people to buy the more expensive nuke power. Which will be unpopular. But maybe you can sell it as a “grid backup fee” or something.
The planned solution is hydrogen power plants, but no one wants to build them because the infrastructure, including electrolysers, is way too economically unfeasible.
Therefore, Germany is and will continue to be dependent on coal and gas, as these are the main producers every night. That's your 'grid backup fee' for you.
If we have to burn some gas to cover the occasional long term weather issue, I’m ok with that , if we’re at 90+% decarbonized at that point it’s still a huge win.
Not having enough energy or having it cut off by a neighbour is very expensive.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...
Like the LFSCOE study is only using one source of renewables through all weather together with 2020 data on battery costs.
Which is why I linked a recent full system analysis. With Danish data so a vastly harder problem than a place with abundant solar. So tell me what they missed.
They even tilted the study heavily towards nuclear power and assumed that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive.
Still finding that renewables are vastly cheaper when it comes to meeting a real grid load.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-i...
The answer is usually more about how China can actually build things, not that nuclear isn't economically feasible.
Most of the countries builds _one_ type of reactor, or a group of similar type of reactor. This help reduce the cost of training and certification.
China, otoh, tries to _diversify_ their reactor type.
If you look closely on how China treat techs, they have been doing the same for all tech for past 15+ years. They are strategically growing their tech profile.
That shouldn't be surprising, because they learned it from us.
We stopped doing it that way because we effectively stopped building.
China is building enough reactors that they can do this with several standardized designs. Which is smart.
The EPR has basically failed, so in the west we currently have 3 standardized generation III(+) designs: The Westinghouse AP-1000, the South Korean APR-1400 and the Japanese ABWR.
Of these, both the ABWR and the APR-1400 have been built quickly and cheaply, with the ABWR holding the record for fastest build times: under 4 years.
The AP-1000 had some very rough initial builds, because the design wasn't actually finished and it turned out what they had "finished" wasn't actually buildable. Ooops. These issues appear to have been ironed out, and a lot of countries are betting on the AP-1000: the US, Poland, China, and Ukraine. Turkey, Slovakia and Bulgaria have also expressed interest.
The EPR is essentially dead, with only the UK wanting to build two more UK-EPRs at Sitwell-C. Hopefully the EPR2 will be better, what I've seen of the specs suggests it has a good chance.
Anyway, one point I want to come back to is the "keep building".
This is actually crucial, and one of the reasons many western projects in recent years went so badly. We had forgotten how to build, no longer building a bunch in overlapping bunches, but single units decades apart.
And there comes to rub: in order to "keep building", you have to build slowly. Slow is smooth and smooth fast my guitar teacher used to say. The French built out far too quickly, constructing 55 reactors in just 15 years. Then they were done. Nothing to build until that initial batch wears out. Reactors last a long time, easily 60-80 years.
Ooops.
The key to this comes from queueing theory, Little's Law:
L = ƛW
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law
So if you have a desired fleet size of 80 units and they last 80 years, you should be completing 1 unit per year. China is currently permitting 15 per year. If they keep that up throughout the construction phase, this would imply a steady-state fleet size of 1200 reactors.
That's a lot of reactors.
If you build more quickly, you won't be in steady state. Of course you can still do better than going full tilt and then stopping, smoothly modulating the build-rate.
For France, this would have meant a fleet size of 320 reactors at the rate they were going. Alternatively, the build rate for the fleet size they have would have been around one reactor every two years.
Something to keep in mind for the "not a lot of nuclear is being built"-crowd.
But their government has actually explained it. They purposely diversify any tech that doesn't have a clear winner, so in the long term a winner appears and they can focus on it.
And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.
You actually have to build out intermittent renewables much faster than nuclear even for comparable generating capacity due to the much shorter lifetime of the equipment. See Little's Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law
China recently signed up to the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear generation. In the same time period, worldwide electricity generation is predicted to rise by 50-100%, so the nuclear share will grow by 50% - 100%.
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-...
www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte.html
https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
But chinese nuclear is built faster and cheaper vs our units even during messmer in france. So their price guarantee is lower too. Probably similar to what distributed solar got there of 0.4y/kwh in the past. Albeit subsidies for solar were cut last year to stimulate a healthier growth
(Narrator: yes it will, and no it's not).
Man do I wish that were the case. In any way, we simply don't hold the cards in the EU as much anymore as the rest of the EU has recognized that we're idiots, and they're certainly not keen on joining us in that regard.
The sad thing is, you might be right. With the rise of far right populists everywhere, it is entirely possible that it will be written in the history books just as you said it. It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.
Facts don't matter when it comes to nuclear energy, otherwise nobody would pretend that it's "the cheapest form of energy" and the like me
because of the electoral threat of the Greens and an uninformed public.
The solar thing was a farce: Germany created all sorts of subsidies and big plans in the expectation that German factories would be supply the solar panels -- only to be almost immediately outcompeted by more efficient Chinese production (and likely a lot of state subsidies there as well).
Now that is a lie. The anti-nuclear push came from the Greens in the 90s. Conservatives just used it for a quick win once that policy became very popular in Germany.
It is not. And people who repeat this lie have generally very little clue of the reality of an electrical grid and how it is designed and managed in practice.
Solar and Wind are cheaper in term of LCOE. LCOE is a secondary metric in a much larger equation.
A grid is managed in term of instant power matching the demand, not in term of energy. That changes a lot over a simplistic LCOE view.
Take into consideration the cost of power lines, the necessity of backup for the long dunkelflaute, the increase of demand over winter and the problem ROI with the overcapacity of solar... and suddenly the equation is not that simple anymore.
In reality, it is not "Just build Wind/Solar + battery Bro": It is much more complex and highly geographically dependent.
(1) A country with a lot of Hydro can generally easy run full renewable with a lot of Wind: Hydro acts as both as storage and a regulation.
(2) A country without much Hydro has a interests to keep the baseload Nuclear. It is mostly CAPEX based and the most economical low CO2 source around.
(3) A sub-tropical / tropical country has all interests to Spawn solar arrays. The air con consumption tend to matches quite well the solar production. At the opposite, Solar is almost an annoyance to the grid in Nordic countries because it produces outside of the peak of consumption and is intermittent.
Like often: there is no silver bullet.
The only part of your sentence what is true, is that indeed 'New nuclear' is way more expensive that it should be. That is however not inevitable, China demonstrate that quite clearly [1].
[1]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-c...
Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
No one wants to bet $10s of billions of nuke capex against the relentless progress of batteries and other tech over the next 10 years, and then the 30+ years of plant operations. It’s a suckers bet , so the only ones who can take it are nation states.
First it should be said that this thread is primarily about decomissioning existing nuclear power plants. It makes enormous sense to keep operating those plants until we have a world like the one you describe, regardless of how much newer plants would cost.
But more importantly, your assumptions about the future are very optimistic. I'm sure the Germans also thought they were being very smart when they decided that nuke capex was not worth it because gas was so cheap and easily available, and then now we are finding out that this decision crippled their economy because it caused a dependency. In my opinion throwing all your chips into a technology that requires materials and production capacity you don't have, and in some cases doesn't even exist yet, is a real sucker's bet. All your rosy scenarios would fall apart in one second if China decides to stop selling batteries to you.
in the medium term its going to be batteries + solar/wind + gas backups for rare weather events. If we get the total annual use of gas down to a very achievable 10% we're still massively winning climate wise. California is getting there, 45% gas in 2022, 25% gas in 2025, and adding batteries at massively increasing rate. Full coverage of an average night is within sight, using gas just for shortfalls.
We can hopefully transition the last peaking gas backup usage to something else in the long term (hydrogen? SMRs if they ever exist?) but it isnt _that_ important in the grand arc of saving the climate.
No. Nuclear energy production in China continue to increase and will probably continue to increase for the next 60y.
Its relative percentage in the global mix decreased. And this has nothing to do with Solar, but with the insane amount of Coal power plants that China had to setup quickly to match the increasing electricity demand of the developing country [1]
> The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical.
Nuclear plants are mainly CAPEX based. And yes, excessive solar capacity tend to decrease nuclear profitability and increase global electricity cost.
But that is mainly a problem of public policy, not a technical one.
In country without tremendous of Hydro storage (e.g Switzerland or Norway), the most balanced economical combination tend to be Nuclear for baseload and Wind+Hydro+Storage for peaks.
Chinas coal use declined in 2025, and is projected to continue to decline in 2026 and into the future [1]. Not share, absolute. Despite overall generation growing by 5%. And it’s all driven by guess what, renewables growth.
1 https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed
That is just economics.
The intermittent nature of renewable means that overcapacity is structurally required to arrive to match partially the demand.
As an example, Germany has > 100GW of Solar installed capacity for a country where the average power demand is around ~60GW *total*.
Overcapacity means that the price of electricity naturally goes to zero (or even to negative) as soon as the sun shine. And this is very visible on the EU electricity market currently [1].
It is (obviously) terrible for the profitability of the means of production and it is not sustainable: No investor sane of mind would put money on the table for a system that sell at negative price when it produces...
To compensate that, most EU countries created the CfDs (Contract for difference) system. A minimum price is guaranteed by contract to the investor and the State pay the difference when the price are too low. The UK did it (and it costs billions) [2], France did it (and it costs billions) [3] and Germany is doing it [4].
So we are subsidizing and using public money to create an artificial profitability on top of an industry that we know is not profitable due to overcapacity caused by bad public policies.
Considering that this overcapacity is also reducing the profitability of nuclear powerplants in the first place (because nuclear is CAPEX based).
The pain is triple: The final consumer pays (1) the cost of the Grid restructuring for renewable (2) the cost of the Cfds to maintain the system alive due to overcapacity (3) the additional €/MWh to the now reduced profitability of the historical production means.
So yes, at the end, the price increase.
And it is what we see currently everywhere in Europe: Electricity price are increasing continuously even if Solar/Wind LCOE is lower than ever.
[2]: https://davidturver.substack.com/p/another-record-year-cfd-s...
[3]: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/euro...
[4]: https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/germany-to-reset-gove...
Elsewhere in the world, Australia is saving money due to the rollout of renewables [1]. So is the UK [2] 3. A billion in march alone.
1 https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/record-battery... 2 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/28/wind-pow... 3 https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-wind-and-solar-s...
The subsidy is that different technologies secure a premium on the CfD. For a UK solar farm the strike price most recently was £65 per MWh. In case you were wondering no, nobody will run a gas power plant for £65 per MWh, even before Trump's war spiked price 50-100%
Yes, the offshore wind farms are significantly more expensive than a solar CfD, their strike prices were close to £100 and for that much money (adjusting for inflation) you could definitely get interest from gas plants, especially before the war - but now we're into the weeds about platform diversity. A Middle East war seems like a particularly stupid time to insist we shouldn't desire diversity...
Because of how summer works, this "But solar energy is expensive, gas is cheaper" is going to take a break for a few months because it will seem very silly, but it won't go far, expect it back in autumn.
You can already see it in charts, initially BESS shifts some of that peak midday sun energy to evening usage where it's worth more to us, but gradually competition drives down that evening price and so the BESS cuts deep into the night chasing those higher prices. It's most exaggerated in Australia today, where the reason the power is relatively cheap when you wake up before dawn isn't that somehow coal is less expensive at night - it is because much of that is solar power from yesterday and if they don't sell it to you now for whatever price they can get they've wasted a whole cycle, 'cos the sun, with free power, is coming up like it or not.
If you live in Arizona or in tropical climate maybe. For anybody else it is bullshit.
Solar production fell to few percents of its peak when the sky is covered.
Many European regions can spent multiple weeks during Winter with the sky entirely covered.
BESS is nowhere near the capacity required to even go pass a single day. And it is unlikely to change even over the next 10y.
So hoping to run entirely on Solar + BESS for a multi week Dunkelflaute is living in dreamland, no reality.
What happens in practice is that country like Germany will need to have a backup Gaz that matches its peak consumption in Winter if they want to go full renewable.
The other option is to throw the problem on your neighbours with interconnects. This is what Germany does with mainly Norway, Sweden and France. And this is not a sustainable solution.
The next one in july should be interesting!
Get europe off their anti-nuclear, pro gas stance. France gains a fair bit from this development. Russia loses influence as does the mid-east if the trajectory holds.
Winners: heat pump manufacturers, nuclear re-processing, uranium enrichment, eVs, nuclear heavy manufacturers, solar panels (China)...
The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)
edit: got curious how much this would amount to, also since the peak demand is usually after sunset. The article (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/we.2554) which wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dunkelflaute&oldi...) cites on this topic says in appendix A
> all the three renewable power generation sources drop below 10% of their capacities for a substantial period of time (approximately ranging from 30% to 50%). Typically, offshore wind power production has a higher capacity factor in comparison to its onshore counterpart. On average, the Dunkelflaute events account for around 7%–8% of the time per year. These numbers do not vary much across the years.
That's a heck of a lot of gas still, and that's ignoring the "intermittency" part (that might mean every day after sunset, not a rare sequence of weather events). But yeah I guess they didn't mean it as an either-or that replaces other storage options