> We have basically started the renewable energy revolution

We subsidized China's renewable sector with German taxpayer and electricity consumer money. China says thank you!

Alas, renewables are not viable as a primary energy source, due to their intermittency (at best) und unreliability. They need vast amounts of backup.

The dirty little secret of Germany's "renewable energy revolution" is that it only works with lots and lots of backup...and that backup was Russian gas (because Gas plants can ramp up quickly). Or coal.

Neither option is exactly ideal when the purpose of the exercise is to reduce CO2 emissions, and it turns out that Germany, despite many decades and hundreds of billions of investments, has the second dirtiest electricity in Europe. Not the second cleanest, the second dirtiest. After Poland, who just use coal for everything, and are now starting to invest heavily in nuclear.

And of course, the solution is even less ideal when the Gas is coming from a maniacal dictator, who uses that dependency to blackmail. (And who miscalculated that the blackmail would work, and thus invaded Ukraine).

Germany's solution was to reactivate lots of coal and to essentially buy up all the gas on the international market, at sometimes exorbitant prices. But hey, we're rich, so who cares?

Except of course a lot of that wealth is built on industries that are now struggling...and moving.

Furthermore, one country buying up essentially all the gas on the free market is not a scalable solution for multiple countries.

Which is why, after the Ukraine war and its repercussions, basically the entire world re-evaluated nuclear, and found that the mostly imaginary risks and problems were outweighed, dramatically, by the practical advantages.

> Nuclear is at best stagnating in authoritarian surroundings (China, Russia, ...). In the west it is struggling (US, France, UK, ...).

Incorrect.

It is being dramatically expanded all over the world, and the problems with the EPR are outliers, they are not typical. Average time to build nuclear plant has been remarkably steady at 7.5 years since the 1970s (with some fluctuations above and below that line).

> not able to demonstrate safe storage of nuclear waste,

Incorrect.

Storage of nuclear fuel at interim sites is safe and unproblematic. Which is one of the reasons the purely political problem of a permanent site can be kicked down the road by spineless politicians. Technically, safe final storage is completely solved. Finland's Onkalo site just opened, Sweden is also close to completing theirs and Yucca mountain was also ready.

"The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

One of the reasons nuclear fuel is unproblematic is that there is just very little of it, because the fuel is so energy dense. For example, just the single Herfa-Neurode site in Germany stores an order of magnitude more of both arsenic (enough to poison the entire world several times over) and heavy metals than there is nuclear waste. In containers that are far less safe. And of course arsenic has no half life, it stays poisonous forever.

Last not least, there would be even less nuclear waste (and it would be even less dangerous) if we actually used up the nuclear fuel. Currently, we use less than 5% of the nuclear fuel we feed into the reactor, and throw away the remaining 95+% after it comes out of the reactor. Unsurprisingly, this 95% of the original fuel still contains a lot of energy, and so that is producing the most radiation.

We should be recycling this, but alas fresh Uranium fuel is so cheap that recycling is at best marginally economical at this point.

And since waste disposal is also not an actual problem (just a political one) there is also no real incentive coming from that side either.

> UK:

Yeah, the EPR is apparently a difficult design to build, and these are the first reactors of that type built, so it is at the start of the learning curve and last not least, we let our know-how on how to build reactors slip away, so we are now re-learning how to do that.

The Chinese already finished their copy of the EPR, and the average time to construct a reactor has remained steady at 7,5 years, including and notwithstanding the outliers.

And yes, if it's 7,5 years including the outliers, that means that a lot of reactors get built much quicker, 5 years and less.