This is so crazy and irresponsible given that the Iran war is due entirely to the secret development of nuclear weapons under the guise of civilian nuclear energy.

Trump approves U.S.-Saudi civil nuclear energy agreement

"The deal leaves open the possibility that Saudi Arabia will enrich uranium domestically in the future, the officials said, a prospect that could raise concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation."

"In the deal, the United States and Saudi Arabia have agreed to safeguards to inhibit any weaponization effort, the sources said. But that framework would be governed by the two countries themselves, instead of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which conventionally oversees nuclear pacts."

Do not trust anyone pushing nuclear electricity for any reason. They have no idea the implications of what they are doing. https://abcnews.com/International/trump-approves-us-saudi-civil-nuclear-energy-agreement/story?id=134976263

Rosatom CEO Alexei Likhachev officially confirmed that the Russian state nuclear corporation is cutting its 2026 investment program by nearly 50% to over 900 billion rubles due to poor economic conditions. The corporation is also targeting a 10% reduction in operating costs over the next 18 months to protect profitability.

🇺🇿 Uzbekistan's Renewable Explosion

• Current Footprint: The country has already integrated 5,600 MW of operational utility-scale wind and solar into its national grid. Renewable generation surged by over 24% in the first half of 2026 alone.
• The 2030 Target: Uzbekistan is targeting a massive 30 to 35 GW of installed renewable capacity by 2030, aiming for clean power to cover 40% to 54% of its entire electricity mix. [1, 2, 3]
• Storage Rollout: To prevent grid collapse, the government is commissioning 884 MW of dedicated battery storage by the end of 2026. This is heavily backed by global giants like Saudi Arabia's ACWA Power and the UAE's Masdar. [1, 2]

🇰🇿 Kazakhstan's Green Grid Shift

• Current Footprint: Kazakhstan actively operates roughly 162 green energy facilities accounting for 3.5 GW of installed capacity, pulling 7% of its total power generation from clean sources. [1]
• The 2035 Target: The state is aggressively auctioning off capacity under its QaJET initiative, aiming to deploy an additional 10 GW of renewables by 2035.
• Mega-Storage Partnerships: Kazakhstan has finalized investments for its first grid-scale battery systems. French firm TotalEnergies and China Power International are constructing 1 GW wind farms paired with 600 MWh power banks to anchor the grid.

Rather than just "exploring," these nations are utilizing international capital from China, the Gulf, and Europe to actively phase out their heavy reliance on legacy Russian fossil fuels and delayed nuclear projects. [1, 2, 3]

https://thebulletin.org/2026/07/data-centers-powered-by-next-gen-nuclear-dont-fall-for-big-techs-pr-hype/

Germany blew up two nuclear cooling towers and had a 700 MWh battery under construction four days later. France just set a regulatory floor to keep nuclear power on the grid even when nobody wants it.

While Germany decommissions plants and repurposes the sites for storage, France spent this summer cutting nuclear output by 4 to 6+ GW across repeated heatwaves, over a tenth of national demand at points, because rivers ran too warm to safely cool the reactors. That's happened in 2022, 2023, 2025, and 2026. But heat isn't the only thing France is throttling for. Solar capacity nearly doubled from 16 GW in 2022 to over 30 GW in 2025, and on sunny days generation now regularly exceeds what the grid needs once nuclear baseload is accounted for. The result: nearly 3 TWh of renewable power curtailed in 2025, almost double 2024, with solar taking the brunt of it.

Here's the protectionism part. In March 2026, France's energy regulator approved an agreement between grid operator RTE and EDF setting a minimum output level for nuclear generation. EDF keeps selling that output onto the day-ahead market "at any price," even when prices go negative, which they now do in over 90% of April days. So instead of flexing nuclear down when solar floods the grid at midday, France is flexing solar down to protect nuclear's market share. That's not a technical constraint. That's a policy choice to keep sunk-cost reactors running full tilt and make newer, cheaper generation absorb the cutbacks instead.

Compare the build economics on top of that. Gundremmingen's replacement battery: about 230 million euros, groundbreaking days after demolition, reusing existing grid infrastructure. France's EPR2 program: tens of billions of euros, over a decade of construction, and a track record of slipping deadlines going back to Flamanville. Germany bet on the option that gets built fast and gets out of its own way. France is spending both money and grid capacity defending an asset it already sunk the cost into.

Check out the full story https://interestingengineering.com/energy/germany-detonates-dead-nuclear-plant

China's utility-scale battery fleet has outgrown all other countries combined in 2025 Total battery capacity in China DOUBLED in 2025 with the addition of 189.5 GWh in “new energy storage”.

China’s 2025 power buildout was overwhelmingly storage- and renewables-led. CNESA says it added 66.43 GW / 189.48 GWh of new-type energy storage in 2025, while the EIA says nuclear added just 1.1 GW that year and 2.2 GW more through May 2026. At the same time, China added 315 GW of solar and 119 GW of wind in 2025, and wind plus solar reached 1.84 billion kW, or 47.3% of total installed capacity. That is a huge difference in scale and speed: batteries are being deployed fast enough to keep up with the renewable buildout, while nuclear is still moving in small increments.

On generation, the gap is just as stark. China’s renewable energy output reached about 4 trillion kWh in 2025, while China National Nuclear’s commercial nuclear generation was about 244.4 billion kWh, with 200.8 billion kWh from its operating units alone. That means renewables generated roughly 16 to 20 times more electricity than nuclear last year, depending on which nuclear figure you use. So when people say “capacity isn’t generation,” the answer is simple: yes, and the generation story still heavily favors renewables plus storage because that’s what is actually scaling the system.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/from-scale-to-system-navigating-the-next-phase-of-chinas-battery-storage/

UK battery storage capacity has officially surpassed nuclear power for the first time, hitting nearly 7 GW according to a new report from Drax and Imperial College London. While our nuclear fleet still provides a steady baseline of generation around the clock, having 7 GW of battery capacity means the grid can now instantly absorb or discharge massive amounts of power to manage fluctuations. This is a huge milestone for the energy transition, especially as electricity demand starts to spike from AI data centers, electric vehicles, and widespread electrification across the economy.

The real reason batteries are a massive force multiplier isn't just because they time-shift power, but because they fundamentally fix the project economics of building new renewables. Before grid-scale storage, a developer might only build a small solar or wind farm because anything larger would trigger overproduction, overload local transmission lines, and lead to massive curtailment waste. Now that batteries can catch that surplus, it suddenly makes economic sense to overbuild wind and solar capacity by 5x or 10x. By smoothing out the financial risk of wasted energy, storage completely unlocks the floodgates for a massive surge of new clean energy installations that would have been financially unviable before.

from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/63436711 (locked)

Nuclear's economics are not complicated.

Nuclear's economics don't survive contact with the numbers. Lazard's 2025 analysis puts new nuclear at $141 to $220 per megawatt-hour, roughly two to four times the cost of onshore wind at $37 to $86, a gap that exists precisely because nuclear plants are financed on the assumption they'll run near 24/7/365 for decades to amortize enormous upfront capital costs. Any hour spent throttled back to make room for near-free midday solar is an hour of six-figure-per-hour infrastructure earning nothing while debt service keeps accruing. A gas peaker or a battery can idle for pennies. A nuclear plant idling is still bleeding fixed costs it can never recover, which is exactly why pairing nuclear with a grid that's increasingly saturated with cheap solar is a financial contradiction, not a complementary pairing.

The "solar dies in winter" argument also ignores the resource built for exactly that gap: wind. Eurostat's own data shows the seasonal flip in real time. In the third quarter of 2025, solar supplied 38.3% of EU renewable electricity to wind's 30.7%. By the first quarter of 2026, that reversed almost exactly: wind jumped to 44.9% of renewable generation while solar fell to 17.3%. That's the same continent, the same grid, trading the lead role by season without anyone needing to build a single reactor. Layer in storage and the case gets stronger still: U.S. battery capacity alone is projected to roughly double from about 33 GW to nearly 65 to 67 GW by the end of 2026, with a record 24 GW added this year, most of it paired with solar specifically to shift midday surplus into the hours and seasons when the sun isn't cooperating. Wind, solar, and storage are already solving the problem the graph points to, at a fraction of nuclear's cost and without an asset that has to run flat-out for forty years just to break even.

CSIRO says #nuclear power is “most expensive in each case” of its modelling, with a “first-of-a-kind” premium on building in Australia likely to cost 100% more than international best practice

It’s a timely reminder of why the federal Coalition’s nuclear focused campaign was such a disaster for the party at the 2025 election, and yet remains the favoured energy policy path for the LNP at the same time as it promises to deliver cheaper electricity while also putting the brakes on renewables.

A few highlights from the article:

“Building nuclear for the first time in Australia would take longer and cost more than building offshore wind for the first time in Australia, according to modelling by Australia’s premier science agency that once again rules out nuclear power from any and all cost-efficient scenarios for a net zero grid.”

“CSIRO’s draft GenCost modelling continues to find that a combination of wind and solar with firming technologies is the best way forward on both costs and emissions reductions.

As Graham told the conference, ‘mainly using existing mature solar PV and onshore wind is preferred, and what that looks like from a cost perspective is that the mature technology scenario is the lowest cost scenario.’”

“As Graham told the conference, the numbers still well and truly rule out nuclear, while leaving offshore wind still ‘in the pocket’ as a potential part of Australia’s future generation mix.”

A forth reactor was exempted from the excessive water discharge temperature regulation.

Golfech 2 shut down

“French parking lots could soon generate as much electricity as 10 nuclear power plants”