It's much larger than it used to be but is still very much a minority. My impression is that pro-nuclear stances are more common among North Americans with a science background than in the environmental movement as a whole.
Okay, this sounds like it isn't that much of a difference compared to us here.
I suppose the question is: why did it used to be possible to build nuclear plants without breaking the bank, but no longer is? Was the regulatory environment tightened up everywhere so dramatically after Chernobyl that new plants became economically impossible to construct, or were other factors involved?
If it is mostly a story of regulation, and if we lived in a world where this was politically possible, it would make sense to me to relax regulations back to the standard of c. 1975. This would sound reckless to some people, but their safety record so far has been quite impressive, easily beating coal even without considering climate change. To my mind some new nuclear construction is worth the trade-off, provided that the economics aren't completely absurd for reasons other than regulation. I'd much rather they be Gen III or better, of course, but even older versions might make sense if the cost of new models is prohibitive.
I strongly suspect nuclear power never was as cheap as it was presented to the public in the first place.
As I mentioned, the situation here was that Big Energy didn't want nukes at all, and had to "convinced" by a big stick and lots and lots of carrots to built them.
The government wanted them, because they wanted the option to swiftly built nuclear weaponry if necessary. So we not only got nuclear power plants, but also a (abortive) fast breeder and a even more abortive nuclear reprocessing facility.
Nuke plant have massively frontloaded costs, so once they were built and the initial problems were ironed out, everyone was happy with them. Until the nuclear waste started to pile up, and nobody was able to find a satisfying solution for disposing of it.
Somewhere in the late 70s our energy consumption started to basically flatline, and the demographic transition was well underway. So the prospects for multi-billion-Deutschmark investments in power generation that would need decades to pay of wasn't really that attractive anymore.
If there would be the need to expand baseload power, our plentiful and cheap lignite was the the more economic alternative.
So our last batch of nuclear powerplants started construction in 1982, and the planning process for those probably in the mid-to-late 70s, about a decade before Chernobyl. As far as I know, there were never plans for new batch of nukes after that.
For a more global perspective, I suspect the changes in "economics fashion" in the last few decades were much more lethal to nuclear power than over-enthusiastic regulations.
"The markets" are mostly looking for the quick buck, not for multi-decadal investment schemes.
The big utilities that once were either state-run or basically oligopolies backed by government guarantees for ROI have to actually care about profitability now, and nuclear power simply isn't making the cut, given the alternatives.
So the only nukes built/planned right now are still backed and/or paid for governments one way or the other, regardless of how tough regulations are in the respective country.
As far as older western nuke designs are concerned, I suspect this is about as feasible as resurrecting the Saturn V. Technology and corporate culture has moved on, and you had to reinvent them from scratch anyway. To keep with the rocketry comparison, you would have to buy a Proton/Saljut from the Russians to really keep the costs low.
And for most of the countries that stopped building nukes 30 years ago, you have the problem of a vanishing skilled workforce for operating the plants. The US probably doesn't have that problem, due to its vast fleet of nuclear powered warships, though.
The German solution of rapidly shutting down all nukes causes emissions to be considerably higher than they would be if the nuclear plants were still operating and coal plants (especially the ones burning lignite) were shut down instead. But I can grant that, on some level, this makes more sense than what the rest of the developed world is doing. Leaving aging nukes running past their designed ~60-year lifespans while de-facto preventing new ones from being built is the worst of all possible worlds from a safety standpoint, and Germany is at least avoiding that.
"Rapidly" is stretching it a bit. Initially, the nuclear phaseout was enacted in 2000, with 2 reactors shut down in 2003 and 2005, the rest to be gradually shut down between 2010 and 2021. Plenty of time to plan for replacements.
But Big Energy was betting on getting that phaseout revoked by a new government, and they got it in 2010.
Only to get an about-face only one year later (after Fukushima), and now the phaseout was indeed looking rushed, with 7 reactors shut down basically instantly, and the rest to follow within 10 years.
The initial idea of the
Energiewende was to shut down both nuke and lignite plants, and replace that with renewables and gas powered plants.
But somehow, nobody bothered to actually design a new electricity market that was actually suited to that vision.
So how can the market for renewables be improved? My impression is that economic problems do show up as the fraction of solar and wind is increased to something like 20-30%, because sunny/windy conditions result in a large supply of energy available all at once. Although the grid could still handle it, this crashes the spot price and makes it hard for solar and wind to become profitable on average even once they've reached relatively high penetrations. Of course if you've also got coal producing flat out, the problem would get even worse.
Yeah, and it doesn't even take 20% intermittent renewables to run into this problem.
Is this currently happening in Germany or is this effect not large enough to cause serious problems?
Exactly that is happening here. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place, with the traditional large utilities (we have basically a 4-way oligopoly) sleepwalking towards bankruptcy, desperately yelling for the government to stop renewable expansion and prod them up them with subsidies for their unprofitable plants.
The Big Four were surprised by the speed with which solar took off between 2009 and 2012, basically eliminating the midday peak in the summer half year, and killing profitability for any gas plant that wasn't used for co-generation anyway.
And they didn't really took the steady increase in on-shore windpower serious either; that now is choking their baseload plants, too.
Also, what do you mean by the Mittelstand renewable industry? Were there significant medium-sized domestic manufacturers who suffered once China started producing cheaper solar panels, or smaller-scale utilities that can't compete at the current sizes?
Now that our Big Energy has woken up, it has used its lobbying power to basically kill both solar and on-shore wind, just at the time it would have been able to compete on a lifetime $/EUR per kWh base. Solar cost came crashing down tremendously the last few years and on-shore wind has been competetive already for years.
But as you noted, in a traditional, merit-order based electricity marked solar and wind power will get killed by its own success, regardless of how cheap it is.
Solar panel production in Germany was indeed killed by Chinese manufacturers, but there's much more than just the panels to solar power.
At the moment you can get residential and small business sized rooftop PV for 1000-1500 €/kW nameplate capacity (depending on size and location), panel cost are in the 500€/kW ballpark. A lot of the difference is local labor cost, i.e. potentially creating jobs in Germany.
It looked even better for wind power, as rotor blades typically are too large to produce them overseas, and Germany is a leading country in generator manufacturing anyway. So an even larger fraction of costs were going into the local economy for wind power.
But pretty much all the companies involved in solar and wind installations are small to medium businesses without much lobbying power, so solar is pretty much dead in the water with tens of thousand of jobs lost in a few years, and on-shore wind is in its last gasps this year, probably dead next year, too.
But at least the rest of the world can now enjoy cheap renewable energy, after we have coughed up much of the expense to scale it up to economic feasibility
Off-shore wind of taking off an the other hand, although it's roughly twice as expensive as on-shore, again thanks to the lobbying efforts of the traditional energy sector.
Also, is it possible to subsidize/cut taxes on the natural gas operators while taxing coal, in order to keep the gas plants afloat? Although of course the very high gas prices there are going to seriously hurt gas no matter what you do. Y'all need to start fracking everything in sight like we do!
It would be, if our biggest strip-mine/lignite plant operator wasn't also basically keeping half the cities in western Germany afloat with his taxes and dividends
.
Most of our current electricity market problems would vanish if half the lignite plants were shut down (yes, our spare capacity is THAT high), but nobody is willing to eat that bullet for the team.
And I think over there you are just starting to notice that fracking isn't the magic bullet it's marketed to be, aren't you