This isn't really a German thing although Germany has some peculiar domestic reasons for its nuclear distaste that go back many decades. The nuclear energy industry collapsing is a secular trend globally with share of energy production steadily falling. The one country somewhat buckling that trend is China, but only due to heavy state intervention and even in China the industry is in slow decline. The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
""Nuclear energy's share of global gross electricity generation continues its slow but steady decline from a peak of 17.5% in 1996 with a share of 10.1% in 2020," states the report.
The comparatively cheap cost of renewables is at the heart of the problem. The WNISR confirms that new renewable electricity investment was above $300 billion (€256 billion) in 2020, which is 17 times higher than the reported global investment commitments to nuclear power."
> This isn't really a German thing although Germany has some peculiar domestic reasons for its nuclear distaste that go back many decades.
Believe me, I know. Having lived in Berlin the amount of anti-nuclear propaganda there is just mind blowing.
> but only due to heavy state intervention
And no state intervention was used in any of the other sectors of energy. Solar for example was just this totally market driving thing where no state intervention was needed.
To talk about the energy market in Europe and Asia as 'heavy state intervention' is ridiculous, its simply totally driven by states. Its states that decide what they want to build, its states that lay out their long term strategy.
> The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
Nuclear declined because governments decided they didn't want nuclear, solar and wind were successful because governments bet all out on solar and wind even before they made financial sense. They had good arguments like, yes its more expensive now but prices will come down once we produce more and it will make our grid green. And this was correct, but its just as correct for nuclear. Its not difficult to understand.
Had Europe spend the last 20 years collectively embracing nuclear and deployed a few 100GW hours of nuclear building 100s of plants, investing 300 billion $ in it, with a well trained workforce for and the same few models over and over again it would also very also be very cheap.
To act like this has anything to do with markets is silly.
And this is without even mentioning all the 100s of nuclear research projects that were killed up, all the nuclear plants that were scheduled to build that were prevented by protestors. In France an insane Swiss politician from the Green party literally crossed the border to shot the nuclear reactor with an RPG. All the nuclear research and education that was removed from universities as well.
There is no reason, non what so ever that we could be deploying 10 new GenIV nuclear reactors every year in Europe, had this been our policy for the last 20 years.
This isn't really a German thing although Germany has some peculiar domestic reasons for its nuclear distaste that go back many decades. The nuclear energy industry collapsing is a secular trend globally with share of energy production steadily falling. The one country somewhat buckling that trend is China, but only due to heavy state intervention and even in China the industry is in slow decline. The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
""Nuclear energy's share of global gross electricity generation continues its slow but steady decline from a peak of 17.5% in 1996 with a share of 10.1% in 2020," states the report.
The comparatively cheap cost of renewables is at the heart of the problem. The WNISR confirms that new renewable electricity investment was above $300 billion (€256 billion) in 2020, which is 17 times higher than the reported global investment commitments to nuclear power."
https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-c...