It's great to shift on renewable energy, but the end goal is to reduce greenhouse gazes, and mostly Co2. Regarding this, they are still doing really bad [1], compared to countries like France who kept nuclear plants. I think that shutting down their nuclear plants and shifting on coal is a weird move. In the end, they couldn't prove that shifting to renewables was efficient. They also still buy some nuclear power to other countries.
The goal is to use the technology which brings us world-wide fastest and cheapest forward. That's not nuclear, which stagnates mostly in building&deployment and is getting more expensive quickly.
"forward" doesn't mean anything, please specify ? But I'll complete for you, by "forward" you meant producing energy free of greenhouse gases (and ideally pollution), all-year round, and all-day round, and unless there are breakthrough in electricity storage, that's not solar, not wind power either.
one thing is to build, another thing is to keep what you have. The beauty of nuclear is the longer it works, the cheaper the avg energy gets since most of the cost is actually building the infra
That's not true. There are huge investments needed to upgrade nuclear power plants over their lifetime, which typically will need to be run long past its estimated lifetimes. A lot of upgrades are even not possible. The powerplant also ages. The steel ages. The pipes age. The software and computers are no longer in production. France now needs billions just to keep their old fleet running, which is based on outdated technology and designs. "Grand Carénage" is estimated to cost 50 billion Euros. EDF, the owner would be bankrupt, if the French government hadn't taken over the whole industry, where the tax payer now finances the losses.
Plus most nuclear powerplants don't cover the costs after a shutdown, incl. dealing with the materials and their radiation. We have often seen that the money available is not covering the costs of dealing with waste, spent fuel, etc. -> tax payer covers it -> the French government can't increase the state controlled electricity prices, without huge public protests.
It's true, nuclear energy costs more, but you're avoiding the elephant in the room and don't address the core issue that solar and wind energies are intermittent, and that you will anyways need to use some controllable energy source (batteries, coal plans, nuclear plans...) to offset this issue.
The part about public protests is kind of cliché, as a french myself, rising the electricity prices happened and people were fine. The protests happened mostly for the oil prices. One thing about french electricity, is that because of the European agreement "ARENH" [1] (will end in 2025), they are forced to sell at capped price to private actors, in order to boost the competition. If this wasn't the case, then maybe the nuclear power sector could be much less costly, or profitable.
> don't address the core issue that solar and wind energies are intermittent
I was under the impression that that problem is easier solvable than making nuclear cost effective and making it scale in a safe way. For decades nuclear power deployment stagnates, while renewable technology is rapidly expanding and getting cheaper by the day, with more storage options. Nuclear power already has difficulty keeping the current level of electricity production, while increasingly outdated and aging nuclear powerplants need to be replaced.
> rising the electricity prices happened
The state rescued the French nuclear industry from bankruptcy, it's now a full government owned monopolistic electricity energy landscape. If the electricity price would be high enough to pay for the costs of the nuclear landscape, that would not have happened. Why were companies like Areva such a commercial failure?
[1]: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE