Skill issue in your part of Europe, then. In my part of Europe, https://grid.iamkate.com/ is currently reporting 95% non-carbon sources, 85% renewables, and a power price of −£12.03/MWh.
> twenty years
When it comes online, Hinkley Point C will have taken 20 years from first approval. Too slow.
I really don't think costs and delays are well understood. The costs are astronomical and in the UK the cost of energy has been monstrously subsidized. Consumers (public) are paying for this before the plants are running and for hundreds of years after they are running.
I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear however as in terms of base load, sovereignty and environmentally it strikes me as hitting the sweet spot.
But I don't think people really appreciate how expensive it costs the public over the lifetime (even if "day to day" cost per MWh compares favourably with other sources), and how long it takes to get running. Even small modular reactors fail to address this.
I'd be willing to engage with SMRs on the merits of actually constructed systems, but if you open https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-power-... and restrict to "operational" all but two of the projects disappear.
I doubt they are talking about the same thing as the US companies. So it would be useless to extrapolate their economics.
UK is not energy independent so its not a good example.
It's certainly not £0.01203/kWh, or even in the same order of magnitude.
Later
(For context for non-Brits: there is a price cap of £0.2467 kWh currently, which many people are paying (or very close to that))
As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass.
In my opinion clean electricity is an almost solved problem, especially as storage gets better.
More electricity in Europe comes from renewables than from either nuclear or fossil, with renewables rapidly approaching 50% market share. Several countries (even the non-hydro-heavy ones) are already showing multi-day periods where renewable electricity exceeds 100% of demand.
If your part of Europe isn't showing a noticeable change, perhaps it might be because your part isn't trying?
Because there's a minimum demand you must be able to supply.
Here in Norway we get just about all our power from hydro, and we have a lot of pumped storage lakes which we use as "water batteries". However, eventually hydro relies on water falling from the sky.
Not long ago there had been some really dry years, and our storage was running at record lows. Had the subsequent year been dry we'd be in a real pickle.
Another aspect here is that production is one thing, but grid-scale renewable production rarely happens right next to the primary consumers, and has to be transported. And the grid might not be able to.
Again here in Norway, we had a situation not long ago where the price difference between the north of Norway and the south of Norway was 100x because the south struggled to produce while the north was overflowing, but there was insufficient capacity on the grid to send all the energy being produced up north down south.
I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.
First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.