Spain pledges to phase out nuclear power by 2035
By Paul Homewood
Welcome to the Madhouse!
Spain is aiming to close its nuclear plants by 2035, joining a small number of developed countries pledging a nuclear phaseout as others look to invest further into the energy source.
The government confirmed the plans, Reuters reported, as it introduced energy measures relating to renewable energy. The shutdown of the plants will begin in 2027, and their deconstruction — which is estimated to cost 20.2 billion euros, or $22.4 billion — will be paid for by the plants’ operators, according to government officials.
Spain’s nuclear fleet consists of seven operating reactors, generating about a fifth of its electricity.
Spain joins other nations, such as Germany and Switzerland, in pledging to move away from nuclear power. Earlier this year, Germany closed down its last three remaining power plants after promising more than a decade ago to phase out nuclear energy.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy-environment/spain-pledges-phase-out-nuclear-by-2035
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Thank God for Greenpeace, the anti nuclear greens. So well informed on future energy needs. They also disagree with genetically modified “golden” rice which would save millions of kids from going blind. Forced Germany to close nuclear and go back to lignite coal. Please send us load of money to save the planet….
“They also disagree with genetically modified “golden” rice which would save millions of kids from going blind.”
Adding beta carotene to rice to nutritionally deficient populations (there is some research on this for vegans) who wouldn’t be able to convert it to vitamin A does not actually address the issue (economic development &cheap abundant energy does so people can afford a more nutritious diet as well as the expansion of aquaponics) but it makes philanthropist or white savour types feel good. This is the mistake the ecomodernist types make not everything that glitters is gold.
“Forced Germany to close nuclear and go back to lignite coal”
I would say that it is more blatant corruption to provide a market for Russian natural gas. I suspect if Germany didn’t close its VVER and modified them anti nuclear groups would have being less well funded. The lignite is more the German were not as stupid as the British and mothballed their coal instead of demolishing them without a fuel secure replacement (negligible natural gas storage) and to make it worse having the only commercial nuclear program with a obvious time limiting feature the graphite blocks – God help the UK when the next 1947/ 1963 winter happens when 60%+ of your winter generating capacity is closed without like for like replacement.
Complete and utter madness.
Exactly,
Vote for Reform , they are our only way out of this madness.
Reform couldn’t run a bath, complete amateurs, every by-election result they’ve had produced numbers in single %, close to Monster Raving Loony levels. Their ‘strategy’ (if you can even call it a strategy) is soggy leaflets at the last minute, like something from the 1950’s. Tice keeps repeating the same ‘strategy’ not learning anything. At present, all Reform will do is ensure a Labour win. 1) Don’t just attack the Tories, attack ALL establishment parties. 2) Produce a really blunt, simple newspaper that activists can buy and thus enthused, will deliver. 3) 4) 5) to ten…I’ll reply when someone with a brain responds from Reform and NOT one of those plants, telling Tice he’s doing all the right things – HE ISN’T.
Foxbarn, are you saying the country is being governed by competent professionals?
foxbarn : At the 2019 MEP elections the Brexit Party won 30% of the vote with the Lib Dems second at just 20%. So the votes are there to defeat the Con/Lab/Lib Dem/Green (communist) uniparty. Mr. Tice of Reform may not be “doing all the right things” but voters need to start somewhere and voting for any existing Parliamentary party, including the Conservatives who clearly cannot be trusted to implement their manifesto and are dedicated believers in the Net Zero Strategy, is insanity by Einstein’s definition.
Reform is NOT the Brexit Party, not even close. Tice is a classic ‘I can do it all’ one man band’. He has completely failed to appoint and promote good people as key Spokespeople. He just cannot delegate. Reform needs to be seen as a TEAM with a strong Economics Spokesman, Energy Spokesman, Immigration Spokesman, Education Spokesman, Gender Nonsense Spokesman etc etc. (all or any of these could be/should be women). These people need to be touring the country, getting local media coverage, doing village hall meetings where the local numpty MP is always invited, and have that empty chair ready for the cameras until they DO turn up for a drubbing. These spokespeople need to become popular faces, strong voices but strictly sticking to the party line…and if they don’t, Tice needs to swiftly dump them until he has a sharp team. I’m dreaming of course, it won’t happen, all we’ll see is lost deposits and Labour winning everywhere.
Something really needs to be done about the ideological blindness, arrogance and selective acknowledgement of science by climate change activists & lobby there should be no question if they really believe that climate change is an existential threat (I do wonder how many could explain why they feel this way) due to extreme weather and instead of engineering for these (e.g Sea levels – see The Netherlands) there is a belief it could be mitigated by reducing greenhouse gas emission or even removing them from the air (primarily Co2 no one seem to talk about water vapour for some reason) you cannot rationally be opposed to nuclear power let alone closing existing units or be in favour of intermittent renewables.
The fact Germany and the rest of Europe was not called out on it hypocrisy and it outright colonialist & malthusianist behaviour when it attacked the fossil fuel use of developing countries particularly in Africa while at home it closed its nuclear and replaced the lower emission (Co2 wise) pipeline natural gas with LNG (some of which by outbidding less economically developed countries and leaving many with serious energy problems + a lot of the LNG is from Russia) and coal (some of which was potentially stolen from the same African nations they attacked for using their own coal) all to virtue signal.
I keep hammering at this …..
The demonisation of CO2 is quite deliberate. It is a minor greenhouse gas and all the palæontological evidence we have appears to suggest that atmosopheric concentration lags temperature change and not the other way round.
If you want the philosophy in a nutshell, try this quote from Michael Oppenheimer: “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
The whole purpose of climate activism is to “unpick the Industrial Revolution” which means banning the use of those fuels which helped to inititiate it and have powered it ever since. And the simplest way to do that is to demonise the one thing they have in common: they all emit the same essential trace gas — carbon dioxide.
If these same activists were genuinely concerned simply about the “polluting” effect of CO2 they would be welcoming with open arms the one ‘clean’ means of mass generation of electricity, namely nuclear power. But they are equally opposed to that, thereby giving the game away!
Estupido
The answer….Wind turbines that don’t work in high winds or calm conditions. And solar that doesn’t charge at night or rainy days. That’ll do it
You couldn’t make it up. The stupid it burns.
It appears Spain has reached peak population and peak stupidity at the same time. The population pyramid has a belly bulge, that is, an ageing population.
Without reliable energy the country will have to exist on tourism {Exp.: the Camino de Santiago or in English the Way of St. James} and selling olive oil and wine to the world markets.
Exporting cannot make you wealthier. That’s just foreigners consuming your labour and capital.
For a given country A, exporting product X to Rest of the World (ROW) while importing product Y from ROW can make A wealthier in three circumstances.
The first is the classical situation where A can make both X and Y
and ROW can make both X and Y but relative advantages make it sensible for A to specialize in X and ROW to specialize in Y.
The second situation is the extreme version of the first situation, where A can not make Y at all but Y is an essential, minor input for A’s economy.
The third situation is where exporting is subsidized and is a sort of Trojan horse for A getting a foothold in other countries, and ultimately becoming an extortioner. This is the modern version of Mercantilism, the “cunning wheeze” of rulers and elites and financiers – and rarely benefits the ordinary people of A.
I recently visited the British Museum for the first time in decades.
It was not pleasant*. It and the entire neighbourhood were swamped with foreign tourists. In the past I might have dallied at a local restaurant, but pizza and and a small glass of wine for £24.95 in a cattle-market environment hardly appealed! So the COUNTRY is undoubtedly making money but at the small cost to me and others like me of feeling excluded from an every-day cultural activity.
* Incidentally, the information plaques were beyond babyish. If I saw one more, “these pots and pans show the owner was a valued woman of high status” or “this sword shows the importance of war in the culture,” I would have screamed.
That’s simply wrong, Phoenix. Selling a loaf of bread to a guy across the border is selling a loaf of bread.
Commerce is between people, not between countries.
‘Spain joins other nations, such as Germany and Switzerland, in pledging to move away from nuclear power.’
Moving back to coal.
Just as well Spain recently inaugurated a 7th LNG terminal at Gijon to add to those at Bilbao, Ferrol, Huelva, Escombreras, Sagunto and Barcelona – and that they remain regular customers for Russian LNG.
Won’t happen just as it didn’t happen in California. CA keeps extending the closer of Diablo Canyon nuclear station because they haven’t produced replacement energy. Using wind and solar they will never replace it and they know it.
Nothing stopping Diablo Canyon operator from saying, “Okay, enough of the threats. We are closing.”
Businesses that keep getting threatened plan their own closure.
It’s a public utility and making money. They don’t care who threatens them.
[citation needed]
Financial performance has been marginal for years as the grid operator gives preference to wind/solar sources. They, PG&E, have been publicly talking about closing since 2016.
THAT is the environment in which threats are made.
Why? They’ve operated perfectly safe for decades so why? It really is simply superstition.
To answer my own question as to “why”, Spain Socialist PM (came second in the election…) needs the support of the far-left to form a government. So he agrees to something stupid to stay in power.
Started to watch a documentary on the Queen of Spain. Leftist attitudes were coming out and then she said she had been a journalist for CNN. Enough said. I turned it off.
This decision has obviously nothing to do with climate or CO2 emissions. It is simply the communists at work in Spain to destroy the West’s access to cheap, abundant, reliable and secure energy. The Spanish communists have a history of stopping nuclear energy in Spain going back to 1983.
In the UK the fifth column communists are still pushing the renewables and delaying the start of SMRs despite SMR energy being almost half the price of the AR6 fixed offshore wind and one fifth the price of floating offshore wind as well of course as being reliable. Our current Government gives zero value to reliability of supply as evidenced by the fact there is no plan for grid scale storage shown in the 2023 NGESO FES 2035 or even 2050 energy flow diagrams.
If the polls are correct our next government will attempt to decarbonise our electricity by 2030, in which case we will be in an even worse position than Spain….
They’ll have to buy it from France instead:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx
France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
Government policy, set under a former administration in 2014, aimed to reduce nuclear’s share of electricity generation to 50% by 2025. This target was delayed in 2019 to 2035, before being abandoned in 2023.
In February 2022 France announced plans to build six new reactors and to consider building a further eight.
France is the world’s largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation, and gains over €3 billion per year from this.
The country has been very active in developing nuclear technology. Reactors and especially fuel products and services have been a significant export.
About 17% of France’s electricity is from recycled nuclear fuel.
From being a net electricity importer through most of the 1970s, France has become the world’s largest net electricity exporter, with electricity being the fourth largest export. (Next door is Italy, without any operating nuclear power plants. It is Europe’s largest importer of electricity, most coming ultimately from France.) The UK has also become a major customer for French electricity.
Germany also relies on the French now and with all this demand I suspect that they can raise the price.
Way to go Spain! We all saw how this folly has worked out for The Sick Boy of Europe, Germany. Perhaps Spain can grab that honor for itself.
Perhaps the UK can benefit by enticing over to the UK highky qualified, exprienced Spanish nuclear engineers as we will need as many nuclear engineers as we can find in order to expand our nucear fleet.
One could be forgiven for thinking that all of these decisions which go in one direction are deliberate. There is just no justifiable reason for this except to make the country more vulnerable.
Well said.