My alcoholic neighbour has done a lot of progress, he's decreased his drinking a lot more than I have (I don't drink).

> Europe has already enacted policies to support green hydrogen. It's not just a plan

Green hydrogen does not exist at this time. Therefore, it's just a plan.

> Does it, though? The three recent European nuclear projects (Flammanville, Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto 3) are all financial disasters plagued with massive delay

There's about 100 GW of already installed capacity. That's 100 GW more capacity on windless winter days than non-hydro renewables.

> They also plan to store weeks worth of clean fuels.

They plan, some time, maybe, somehow.

Nuclear works now. There's also a way to have cheap, nearly free nuclear: not fucking closing perfectly working plants.

I'm pointing you to real time data from right now, where nuclear produces dozens of actual gigawatt of carbon-free power and wind+solar sucks and fails to meet demand that has to be covered by gas and coal, but hey, don't let facts get in the way of your pie in the sky schemes where solar makes sense in Northern Europe and anticyclonic events don't affect the whole continent.

Also re levelized cost of electricity, do you know what the lowest sell PRICE of that wonderful Danish wind power is on the market? It's almost 0€. Not because it's cheap, but because it's next to worthless when there's plenty of wind as there's too much supply and nothing to do with it. And you know what the Danes have to do when there's no wind? They have to buy hydro from Norway at outrageous prices, because there's huge demand.

My point? The levelized cost of intermittent renewables WITHOUT pricing in storage or alternatives is just a fucking lie. Nuclear does the job, it's doing the job right now.

Wind farms don't work when there's no wind. That was the case in early december across the whole of Europe, when incidentally solar farms weren't producing much.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Currently:

France: 40g gCO₂/kWh thanks to nuclear

Germany's Energiewende: 250 g — and it's a good day, they've been at around 400g most of the winter when there was no wind across Europe.

Renewables have been a boon to the Russian gas industry. It's a scheme that doesn't work, because if you don't have mountains, what the fuck do you do with on windless winter days? Answer: you import gas.

The safe, carbon-free solution is nuclear.

> even with issues in the contract.

There was never any real issues with the contract. Just before the deal was nuked, the Australian MoD had just performed a review that found the progress satisfactory.

You're misremembering hints of problems that were planted in the conservative press by Morrisson's buddies to prepare for the betrayal.

They can't be prosecuted unless their government lifts the immunity.

They certainly can enter if there's an emergency, and the diplomatic immunity means those who hold it can't be prosecuted but that doesn't mean they can't be stopped from murdering someone.

> Batteries are economic for gird use right now. Its just production constrained. Just so happens capitalism is really good at solving that particular issue

You're just waving away a very obvious problem, and I don't understand how you can. Lithium production is constrained. Batteries cost money, that means energy, production capacity, and lithium as well as other stuff. On top of that, they don't improve à la Moore's law as you appear to believe. We gain a few % every year, not an order of magnitude every 5.

Currently, grid-level storage cover at best minutes, sometimes hours in very small areas. To cover windless, sunless periods, we need days, and indeed more like 2 weeks.

You say nuclear plants take too long to build, but there is no way we can produce enough batteries in 20 years, which is plenty of time to build reactors.

> Solar and wind can be built out much much faster.

The necessary storage cannot, even accepting the overly optimistic prediction you posted earlier.

Now look at the amount of lithium and other materials required to produce those batteries. Compare and contrast with the material cost of nuclear plants -- hint: they're the lowest of any power generation amortized over lifetime. Incidentally, they require less CO₂-emitting concrete than windmills per Wh.

> Actually batteries have come a very long way in just the past decade

Still a couple orders of magnitude off.

> e can just deploy solar/wind/batteries much faster and in smaller pieces, to save carbon immediately.

No we can't. There's absolutely no way we can build enough batteries. No way.

> While both have long lasting impacts in their waste products

The impact of nuclear waste products is completely overblown. Consider: the whole waste of 50 year of French nuclear production fits in one (1) warehouse. It's not going anywhere, it's not going to leak, it's nicely packaged and, more importantly from an ethical point of view: it's only a burden to the user who benefitted from it.

Compare and contrast with fossil fuels, whose waste is a burden to everyone, including those who never got any benefit from them.