Will green energy goals suffer as aging nuclear infrastructure is phased out? //

The French government is hoping a new kind of reactor could provide a boost for its nuclear efforts. French president Emmanuel Macron has announced a €30 billion ($35 billion) investment plan that includes funding for small modular reactors—lower-capacity plants would theoretically be faster and cheaper to build and could be placed in areas that are unsuitable for large plants. The UK government has also put £210 million ($286 million) behind the development of small modular reactors, but so far the only such reactors to have been connected to a grid anywhere in the world are two that make up a floating power plant docked in Pevek harbor, in the remote northeast of Russia.

Dries thinks the share of nuclear power in Europe's energy mix will continue to decline, even if plans for proposed plants in the Czech Republic and Poland go ahead. “I think that the declining trend is stronger than the upward trend in Europe,” he says. The question is whether countries replace their aging plants with more renewables or lean on fossil fuels to plug the gap. Not every nation will take the same approach. As Akshat Rathi and Will Mathis note on Bloomberg, the same social and political forces that led to Germany turning its back on nuclear helped it become a powerhouse for renewable energy. The path to zero emissions, it turns out, does not necessarily run in a straight line.