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TBF work was done to keep it sound until 2025 and it was possible to extend the operational life further (basically you can just keep throwing hundreds of millions at them every 10 years for a long time to come).

What's fucked up is that in the last few years a bunch of maintenance wasn't done because the government said "no for real though super pinky promise we're not extending the contract again they will definitely be shut down in 2025 it's the law".

So now Electrabel/Engie is rightfully super pissed because this flip-flopping is going to cost us billions just to keep the existing reactors running. And they have zero guarantee the greens won't come back into a government coalition in 2029 and fuck the schedule up again.

It doesn't need to take that long. The reason it sometimes does is almost always because laws are payed for by dirty energy companies to make it harder to build them. They manufacture barriers and discontent around nuclear to protect themselves, even though they release far more radioactive waste, and don't even have to capture and control it.

If they want to get serious about nuclear power, they could get it done in 5 years. If they just want a small plant then it could be a fraction of that even.

Yes but the problem in all of Europe and the US has almost never in history been too much power. Power requirements go up and up and up and every country wants more and more every year.

Peak loads are always the worry and cause blackouts and brownouts. Low loads almost never happen, even at night because of businesses that constantly leave everything running.

That's nonsense. In Germany, the nuclear phase-out began under the first red-green government in the year 2000 and it was completed in 2011, when the cabinet under Angela Merkel decided to phase out nuclear power by 2022. On 30 June 2011, the German Bundestag voted in favour of the exit with 513 of 600 votes from members of all parties. There's no way that this was controlled by Russia.

There's a huge movement for renewables in Germany and nuclear power always had it tough in the country where there's no space for the save storage of nuclear waste.

Edit: If anything, Russia would even have an interest in longer operating times for nuclear power plants, because the raw materials for many of the fuel elements used in European nuclear power plants still come from Russia until today.

Air and wind are inexpensive insofar as they have a low LCOE, but are intermittent, so require being coupled with energy storage, and that is not inexpensive.

If you're talking hydropower or geothermal, then they don't have the intermittency issue (well, hydro does, but to a far lesser degree), but both are subject to the geography of the area. They aren't available to everyone.

EDIT: And in the case of hydropower, there are also some environmentalists unhappy about the impact on river systems, since dams inevitably have at least some impact on river ecosystems, even if you build those fish channels.

EDIT2: "Fishway" or "fish ladder".

EDIT3: In fairness, for some uses, intermittency isn't such a big issue. That is, you may have an industrial process that you can only run when energy is available. So, for example, the Netherlands used to do this (sans electricity) with their windpumps in the process of poldering. That's not free

if you want your pumps to run only a third of the time on average, then you need triple the pumping capacity

but for some things like that, where the process is basically the pumping side of pumped hydrostorage, it might be cheaper than providing constant operation with a non-intermittent power source.

But for an awful lot of uses, people just want electricity to be available when they flip the switch.

Coal plants require an emission capture to be built into any new plants, which is exactly why nobody wants to build one.

The gas plants should have the same regulations, I agree. The subsidies is a whole different can of worms in the money debate, but my bigger issue there is more about how they were used/implemented.

Personally, I feel as if the government should buy back the nuclear plants after the shutdown and build a new core there for supply safety, and this repeal is a step in that direction. It doesn't happen often, but I think NVA is right in this case