Europe

Renewables correct prices downward from where a fossil-only system would price electricity …

They would, if they weren't four times more expensive than nuclear, and 13 times more expensive than gas.

… so that’s the heart of the matter: Russia’s actions increasing the price of fossil fuels.

It's certainly one of the issues, but not the only issue. The gas price is close to historical averages now, yet UK electricity prices remain very high.

And does that make any sense at all, given Russia’s domination of nuclear supply chains? France’s nuclear program is mortally dependent on Russian cooperation in a lot of ways too.

Russia controls approximately 22% of the world’s uranium conversion capacity and 44% of its enrichment capacity. This is hardly insurmountable. It should spur investment from other nations. China accounts for approximately 70–90% of the global market across all stages of the lithium-ion battery value chain. Does that mean the world should give up on EVs and battery storage? Surely not.

Meanwhile over here in Germany, the designated chancellor and his “Christian Democrat” party quickly stowed away their pre-election rhetoric about building new nuclear plants/reviving existing plants, after an informal paper from their own party made the rounds, outlining that reviving nuclear in Germany would necessitate massive state aid or even having the state itself run the plants.

I don't know what you mean by "stowed away," but their policy shows they are still very much open to nuclear energy.

But realistically, I think they’d need 2 or 3 times that, right? Afaik, France is currently building just a single domestic plant and they’re not exactly executing there. Neither are they executing on the Hinkley Point project. And Olkiluoto was a massive shitshow where French taxpayers financed the 3/4 of the costs that constituted the cost overrun. There are basically two countries that still know how to build nuclear reactors, those are Russia and China, everyone else just incurs perverse cost and build-time overruns. And it does make sense: A centralized, dangerous, expensive technology that works best for centralized, authoritarian regimes that can afford to put all their state power behind these projects. (And yet, China is building out solar/wind much more aggressively than nuclear.)

France definitely doesn't need 2-3 times that based on current implementation of renewables.

You won't catch me defending the speed of large reactor roll-outs. Despite this, and the high costs, it's still much cheaper than renewables. SMRs will be much faster to deploy, much more flexible, much cheaper, and require much less planning.

China is also building two "mega" coal lignite power plants per week. I don't think we should use them as a role model.

New nuclear plants are also completely useless against climate change, given their decade/multi-decade build times, especially compared to renewables where plants can be rolled out in a matter of months. Meanwhile, existing French reactors need to be taken offline in summer because their water consumption is woefully ill-adjusted to climate change and they turn France’s rivers into bouillabaisse.

CO2 production is expected to continue to climb for 50-100 years, and we won't reach CO2 neutrality for hundreds of years, if ever. A 7-10 year timespan is very little compared to the enormous environmental benefits.

Nuclear capacity has been flatlining (at best) for two decades, while renewables have exploded. Even if you assume just 10% utilization for the renewable plants, yesteryear’s addition of 6GW nuclear capacity pales in comparison to the 600GWp PV/wind capacity.

This is a political decision, not one based in science or finance. Despite renewables being far from ready to replace Germany's nuclear generation, the public voted to switch to much more environmentally damaging gas generation. That gas was primarily coming from a hostile, authoritarian nation. The public voted to place the economic prosperity of Germany in the hands of Russia. It was one of the most tragic examples of democratic self immolation in all of history.

Even the author of that study admits to (latently pro-fashy shitrag) NZZ that cheaper batteries would solve the issue. Incidentally, what we’ve been seeing over the past decade is steadily decreasing battery prices, as scale goes up and cheaper materials substitute more expensive ones.

And I fully agree with the author. In 30-50 years when battery technology becomes cost effective at grid scale, we'll be having a very different discussion.

I don’t really want to know what else is wrong with that study of his, given that the largest part of it is concerned with the near-pointless thought experiment of using 100%/95% exclusively solar+batteries. It seems massively more pertinent to worry about the final 10% renewables when the time has come. One major bit that I don’t see reflected in the study is flexibilization of demand e.g., which is a thing already. I recently saw a documentary that e.g. included a cold warehouse that could scale up/down its cooling in response to renewables availability. I visited a company producing electric componentry which is doing its electronic component testing on sunny days where they have a lot of solar. I know similar concepts exist for aluminum smelters.

That's fair. It expands on the even more flawed LCOE metric which is widely (and incorrectly) used to compare wind/solar with nuclear/gas/coal.

Are there even SMR projects that haven’t been cancelled?

Rolls Royce isn't due to deliver commercial SMRs until the early 2030s. Until then designs are either bespoke (and expensive, and untested), or using the GE Hitachi BWRX-300, which is also very expensive because it's only licensed, and built on site to spec. It has many of the same issues as traditional large reactors. GE began licensing that design in 2020, and the most advanced project is I think in Canada, due to be completed in 2028. Once RR figures out their production lines, I think we see huge efficiencies of scale and much easier planning.