Angst mounts over Germany’s green transition

Nuclear is mostly baseload. I know that is can be throtteled, but that does not decrease the cost of the plant at all and is only necessary for grid stability.

There is no need to throttle nuclear, it is already low carbon and does not need to be replaced by renewable energy quickly, unlike ALL fossil fuel energy sources. That is the main problem I have with German Greens and climate activists, they act like nuclear and renewables cannot work together in a grid for no reason. In a scenario where there actually is too much electricity in the grid, throttling coal, gas, oil, hell, even biomass would be preferable before throttling nuclear. If that cannot happen, you can still try to export the excess electricity, which usually should not pose a problem, because both existing nuclear and subsidized renewables have a margin cost of basically zero. And if that does not work, finding ways to use excess renewable electricity (power to heat, power to gas, batteries, whatever else you can think of) is STILL preferable to throttling nuclear.

The big issue in this is Rosatom. Right now they enrich a lot of uranium especially for the US. If that stops for some reason, the Western price for nuclear fuel would skyrocket.

TBH I do not have enough insight into the uranium market to comment much on that, but even if true: The same situation already happened to renewables and their inherent (no, we do not have storage or H2 plants yet) gas backup plants. The need to diversify your energy sources unfortunately seems to be a lesson that the EU needs to learn the hard way. And fuel costs are such a small part of nuclear costs that even skyrocketing uranium prices would not change a lot.

It could be dead today if nuclear would be allowed to operate however.

You're basically seeing my point here.

In any case, thank you for your constructive comments! We might not totally agree, but I enjoy debating and you made some good points. Since not much can be changed about the German nuclear exit anymore (maybe we can still save 6 plants, but highly unlikely), this is all the effort I will expend on this topic. I just hope German climate activists (and our government ffs) will stop to block nuclear on the EU level, because I really am of the opinion that it can contribute to climate change mitigation. In ADDITION to renewables, not instead of. We need all the low carbon energy sources we can get, we have to replace the energy system of the whole fucking globe!