But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.
Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.
It should be in the national interest. But every nation is determined to let Russia have the last resources in 30 years by boycotting Russian oil and gas.
As we hear downthread though, we'll have warp drives by then.
there is a strong environmental reason for this without even considering that there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear energy that do not require destroying the environment, because everything has consequences. destroying entire ecosystems puts many species at risk, mining requires huge amounts of water, money, and often involves legal slavery. plus, the extraction and processing process releases significant amounts of CO2 due to heavy machinery and refining. So thankfully, your country took a good decision
Mining isn't a great argument against nuclear. Uranium fuel has an incredibly high energy density so a relatively small amount of high grade ore can be converted into a large amount of electricity so even when compared to the one time input from mining required to produce all of the components that go into making a PV installation it can still perform favourably. Uranium mining is also transitioning away from open pit mines to using in-situ recovery where a liquid solution is injected into a uranium ore formation to dissolve the uranium before recovering the solution, about 55% of current uranium production uses this method already.
Slavery is obviously not an issue in a country like Spain, but any kind of mining operation here seems to be heavily opposed by the people that live around the potential sites, for environmental reasons.
canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too
has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it
Canadian reactors don't use enriched uranium. Also many countries have centrifuges - Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, and of course all the nuclear armed states. Further, enrichment plants can be built anywhere.
Nuclear fuel is available from lots of countries, including Canada and Australia, plus deposits in Europe that aren't being minted because uranium is very cheap.
Refueling nuclear power plants only happens fairly rarely. You hold your customer hostage a lot less if you say “ha! Next time in 8 years time when you need to refuel, we won’t sell the goods to you!” as compared to literally turning off the gas tap.
Many is how? Why are people spreading such bullshit? Only a subset of plants, mainly VVER are dependent on Russia, albeit that'll change too.
Russia is ore importer itself and Orano+Urenco have enough capacity to satisfy most of Europe, both expanding.
Decentralized is not guaranteed. You mostly deploy ren in productive areas, see northern offshore, or that most of Ukraine's ren were in the South. Guess what happened to that. France has a decentralized grid too- many plants scattered around the country, each with multiple units
Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.