JoNova » It’s a crisis (for renewables): The EU finally start throwing carbon credits at nuclear power

Phillippsburg Nuclear Power Plant by Lothar Neumann, Gernsbach [1]

By Jo Nova

A few days of war and a $100 oil spike was all it took for the EU to figure out the bleeding obvious after wasting a $1000 billion dollars.

Couldn’t they have seen this coming ten years ago, or a hundred?

German Chancellor Merz lamented the loss of Germany’s nuclear plants 6 weeks ago. Ursula von der Leyen must have been shaken by events in the Red Sea:

Reducing Europe’s nuclear energy sector was ‘strategic mistake’, EU chief says

PARIS, March 10 (Reuters) – Reducing Europe’s nuclear energy sector was a “strategic mistake”, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday, as governments grapple ‌with an energy crunch from the Iran war.

Europe produced around a third of electricity from nuclear power in 1990 but that has fallen to 15%, she told an event in Paris, leaving it reliant on oil and gas imports whose prices have surged in recent days.

This is a long contorted way to avoid saying that “fossil fuels are extremely useful”:

Being “completely dependent on expensive and volatile imports” of fossil fuels puts Europe at a disadvantage to other regions, von der Leyen said in a speech.

“This reduction in the share of nuclear was a choice. I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back ⁠on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power.”

Likewise, The Blob arrange their sentences so oil and gas are mentioned at the same sentence as “soaring energy prices”, so we are left with a bad taste, but the word that matters here is not oil or gas, but the adjective “imported“:

The continued heavy reliance on imported oil and gas exposed European countries to soaring energy prices in 2022, when Russia cut gas deliveries after the invasion of Ukraine.

They speak with forked tongue. Oil and gas don’t cause “soaring energy prices” — it’s a lack of oil and gas that does that.

Finally, carbon credits are flowing to nuclear power

It is a sign that the end is near for the renewables fantasy — it never made any sense that nuclear power couldn’t earn credits for low emission electricity, unless of course, it accidentally ‘solved’ the climate crisis.

In a sign of the EU’s increasing acceptance of the technology, von der Leyen said the executive Commission would offer a 200-million-euro guarantee for private investments in innovative nuclear technologies.

She said the money would come from the EU’s carbon market.

Australia can’t build a nuclear plant by 2040, but the EU will have SMRs “by the early 2030s.

There is a revival of nuclear power on all over the world.

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