, while the Polish government wants to build the country’s first nuclear reactor in a bid to move away from its heavy dependence on coal.
But even countries that have enthusiastically stuck to nuclear power are experiencing the troubles that come with aging reactor fleets and delayed building schedules. At the end of 2021,nuclear reactors were paused because of planned maintenance or technical problems, forcing the country—which is usually a net exporter of electricity—to buy from its neighbors.
The problem is that not enough new nuclear reactors are being constructed to fill these gaps. And those that are coming online aren’t being built quickly enough. The UK will retire six of its nuclear reactors by 2030, but it only has one power plant currently under construction: a two-reactor facility being built in Somerset. The UK government is hoping to secure a deal for another identical plant at a site in Suffolk.
And while the construction of new plants has been sluggish, wind and solar power have been deployed at a faster rate than expected. “What’s happened is that renewables have dominated deployment in the EU,” says Antony Frogatt, deputy director of Chatham House’s environment and society program and a coauthor of an. In 2000, 860 terawatt-hours of electricity were generated from nuclear power in the EU, but by 2020 that had declined to 685 terawatt-hours.
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 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
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