Sure there are redundancies.

Sure there are threat models.

However, everything fails. Mistakes happen, black swan events occur. What is the calculus here? How can it ever be made in good faith?

What exactly do you want France to do in Niger to atone for their sins? Build infrastructure, fund businesses, make deals with their government? In other words, you want to solve colonialism with more colonialism?

I think nuclear doesn't make sense nowadays, but it's hard to disagree that there are many groups working hard to stop it. How you decided it's a conspiracy cabal somewhere eludes me, they are very visible and very loud.

i love how rude, physics based and down to earth he is, a legend indeed!

A more continuous development of plants and less costly decommissioning could keep the stream of expertise and advancement flowing.

You should probably do some reading about the many scandals of the nuclear industry in France, from colonial exploitation for uranium to jailing/crippling/assassinating anti-nuclear protesters, with a bunch of nuclear scandals and accidents in between.

However, the absolute numbers for Germany are declining fast as renewable energies are taking hold:[2]

  2017: 485
  2018: 471
  2019: 408 (preliminary)
  2020: 366 (estimated)
  

If one looks at the CO2 emissions per capita the gap is not so large. I could not find any new numbers for this either, but in 2018 the values of CO2 emissions in metric tons per capita were as follows:[3]

  France 5.0 
  Germany 9.1  
  For comparison: United States 16.1 
  

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136192091...

[2] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/37...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

No it doesn't. It's about a third.

The total at the end of 2021 was about 8500 million cubic metre, divided as follows: Norway 3000, Russia 2300, LNG 2200, Algeria 640.

https://www.bruegel.org/publications/datasets/european-natur...

Nuclear takes a decade to even start operating and by some estimates is worse than natural gas in carbon footprint. Uranium refinement and waste fuel processing take up a massive amount of resources.

https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-...

Solar pays back its carbon footprint within months, whereas nuclear may very well have a footprint much larger than natural gas.

Look around. Do you see any utilities or investors building nuclear plants? No? Meanwhile wind and solar deployments are skyrocketing, both grid and small scale.

Do you think maybe the people running power grids and investing in power plants know a little bit more about this than HNers like yourself do?

> Well, of course, there are ecologists on the first round of the vote, but on the second rounds, both candidates are always pronuclear.

Well, since nuclear power is such an important part of the Greens political platform (for better or for worse), you might argue that the fact all second-round candidates have been pro-nuclear sor far _is_ the result of the population voting on the topic.

And the fact that it happens _before_ the elections is, on the contrary, a way to trigger the debate.

The process to build plants take years - if the population is strongly opposed to, they can vote Macron out, elect Jadot or Melenchon, and the process will be canceled.

(The sad thing about French democracy is that the Presidential Election is virtually the only moment to have all debates)

Other countries (Germany, Belgium, etc...) decided _not_ to use nuclear energy without asking there population any more directly.

Populations are not asked explicitly about plenty of very dangerous industries (I leave near Toulouse, yet I still have to see "Get out of fertilizers !" stickers on cars following AZF explosion.)

Is this the kind of topic where the rules of representative democracy is to "let the elected governement govern" ?

Or is there a right way to get the opinion of a country, knowing that, in those matters, the population that vote will not be the population that deals ?

I have no idea what would happen if we had a referendum about nuclear energy, as they had in Italy and Switerzland.

I'm also no so sure what I would vote for !

Every time I ponder those questions, I open this [1] or [2], and I wonder: who's ready to switch off their lights first ?

[1] https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ... [2] https://app.electricitymap.org/map

What about the fallout from the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior? It was my understanding that nuclear technology was a source of national pride at the time, which emboldened the French government. Public support for nuclear power seems much less enthusiastic these days. Still, I'm curious if there was ever an election where candidates' positions on the event were at issue.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13143-021-00225-6

[1] https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/

[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/long-term-climate-change-...

> CNN said French energy firm EDF, which helps run the site, had warned the US government that China's nuclear regulator had raised limits on permissible levels of radiation outside the plant to avoid shutting it down.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-58026038

Hinkley Point C is looking to be an at least £50 billion cool transfer from taxes to private corporations. Renewables have also gotten way cheaper today compared to 2017.

> EDF has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price – a "strike price" – for electricity from Hinkley Point C of £92.50/MWh (in 2012 prices),[20][77] which will be adjusted (linked to inflation – £106/MWh by 2021[71]) during the construction period and over the subsequent 35 years tariff period. The base strike price could fall to £89.50/MWh if a new plant at Sizewell is also approved.[20][77] High consumer prices for energy will hit the poorest consumers hardest according to the Public Accounts Committee.[81]

> In July 2016, the National Audit Office estimated that due to falling energy costs, the additional cost to consumers of 'future top-up payments under the proposed HPC CfD had increased from £6.1 billion in October 2013, when the strike price was agreed, to £29.7 billion'.[82][83] In July 2017, this estimate rose to £50 billion, or 'more than eight times the 2013 estimate'.[9]

Surely that’s the case of most everything?

Also epr was sold on outright lies, they sold the ability to build a novel plant after years of not building anything not just faster then the previous N4 (which had tons of teething issues) but faster than the P4s (the very successful generation before the the N4, which france built quite a few of).

Plus the terrible awful idea that areva (the plant designer) would be responsible for overseeing construction (on previous generations it was always edf). Strangely that doesn’t make the incentives great.

Followed by Namibia, Niger, Russia, Uzbekistan, the US and China.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Uranium_...

All over the place. Uranite is pretty common. E.g. Canada has 200+ locations: https://www.mindat.org/min-4102.html (scroll to the very bottom).

Look at what power companies, investors, grid operators, and most countries are putting money into. Not nuclear. If you think it's just because the public finds it unpalatable, well, the public finds a lot of things unpalatable and that doesn't stop industry and investors from doing whatever they want.

Solar and wind deployment in the US is growing massively as the price of solar panels and wind turbines plunge, especially solar. Battery storage is also plunging in price and rapidly maturing into grid-scale solutions like flow batteries.

Nuclear hasn't gotten cheaper over many, many decades and it provides a kind of power we don't need - base load. In many countries there's an excess of renewable power on many days.

Solar is highly distributed which helps decentralize the grid and localize power generation, lowering losses. It's a lot more efficient for your EV to get power from your neighbor's rooftop panels than from a power plant hundreds of miles away.

Finally, if we're accounting for the cost decommissioning old nuclear stations and long-term storage of nuclear fuel, we should also account for the externalities of fossil fuel power, such as health consequences of pollution, the existential risk from global warming, and turmoil due to geopolitical tensions.

Nuclear plants don't emit CO2, unlike coal and gas plants.

The current hike in electricity pricing is pretty much solely based on the fact that way too much of Europe's electricity is produced with Russian natural gas...

I would argue, by literally any meassure, French investment in nuclear in the 60-70 was absolutely paid off. CO2 saved in the 80s is far better then CO2 saved now.

The only reason nuclear didn't become universal in the US is cheap coal plants. The US would be 100x better off if they had build a few 100 nuclear reactors instead.

Also, a lot of environmental groups are focused on specific things. Expecting them to protect the whole world and all of the future is unreasonable. It's like expecting a cancer charity to reduce homelessness. Someone who loves birds just wants to protect birds.

That is not a self evident claim. At least, most people do not belong to environmental advocacy groups. The largest one is the Sierra club, with 1% of the US population as members.

It's far too easy to blame "environmentalists" for everything.

The mantle of NIMBY can be given to anyone, even environmentalists.

This seems very "no true scottsman" adjacent.

> The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.

Sure, a nuclear cycle without the use of a steam turbine may have a future. Similarly to how gas plants undercut coal, and nuclear. Simply due to the cost of the steam plant. I haven't seen any proposals though which is more concrete than a pie-in-sky powerpoint design though.

The other issue is that for wind you only need an axle and a generator, for sun it is solid state. It is hard to compete with the economics of solid state power generation.

Absent environmentalism or non-economic considerations (hello Jervis Bay) no nuclear power would ever be built in Australia. We have way too much cheap, conveniently located coal.

It feels like a bit of a stretch, given the major sources of funds to the two largest political parties, and the various leaders of same who are consistently on record espousing the joy of coal and other fossil fuels while (weirdly) claiming wind turbines are ugly and (disingenuously) blaming grid outages on renewables.

> Sometimes the sun does shine and the wind does blow. That’s most of the time in South Australia, apparently. The average share of wind and solar during October was 72%. For 29 out of 31 days, 100% of the power used in South Australia (SA) was renewable. The sky didn’t fall, the grid didn’t collapse, and the apocalypse is not nigh.

[1]: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/04/solar-wind-72-of-south-...

The delay is because these power plants are supposed to replace existing power plants that will be taken offline in 13+ years. What’s notable is they aren’t 1:1 replacements so they are going to end up with a lower percentage of nuclear power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media...

PS: I reference the a 5 year delay because that’s roughly when you’re spending real money. France could easily back out of this plan in ~7 years having spent less than 1% of what it would cost to actually build a reactor.

If only we had the ability to plan energy policy decades ahead, because we know how long each powerplant will last, and when it will need to be replaced! If only we had energy consumption and CO2 emissions predictions going forwards and backward almost a century!

For details of Germany's energy production and consumption since 1990 see: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Renewables have picked up both the reduction in coal and the reduction in nuclear power.

NIMBYism would kill nuclear power in Australia stone dead, including NIMBYism in conservative-held rural seats.

New-build coal, nuclear, and gas, is simply economically competitive with new-build renewables in Australia right now absent direct government subsidies - and if anyone is tempted to rabbit on about sun not shining and wind not blowing please go read AEMO's draft 2022 Integrated System Plan before replying.

You can also look at this plot of fossil fuel as fraction of all consumption and try to point out the point there there's a jump from nuclear switching off: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels-share-energy...

It's not funny, it's bluntly wrong.

The German nuclear phase-out was precedented by the EEG, the first green electricity feed-in tariff scheme in the world [0]. It was part of the Energiekonsensgespräche that went on in the 90s, and ultimately resulted in ratifying the nuclear phase-out in 2002 [1] where nuclear would be replaced with renewables subsidized trough the EEG.

It's particularly wrong in the context of Germany using most of its gas not for electricity production, but rather for industrial and chemical production, and household utilities, only 14% of German gas is used for electricity generation [2].

Nuclear fission reactors would do nothing for that, they don't help with high temperature smelting were gases need to be injected, as it's for exampled needed for metal alloys that go into all those cars Germany manufactures.

They only way nuclear fission could help there is by using nuclear energy to electrolyze hydrogen, and use that as natural gas replacement. But renewables can very much do the same, without creating very complicated waste, while also fixing what's currently holding renewables back the most; Storage [3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomkonsens

[2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37985/umfrage...

[3] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/dutch-pin-hopes...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#H...

[2]: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/average-annua...

As far as I know, there was never a time where US nuclear power plants were built on time and at budget (and that's while building more than France ever did).

If France finances these new power plants, financing cost goes virtually to zero. So even if actually building the new reactors cost the same (unlikely, I hope they learnt a thing or two over the last 10 years...) they will end up a lot cheaper than Hinkley Point.

The cynical view would be that during that time they left the government twice to protest the government approving new nuclear power projects, and paid a heavy political price for that. They can't afford to do it a third time, and given Finland's position (can't rely on solar or wind during winter, can't build more hydro, can't depend on imports during the production troughs) it is highly likely that more nuclear will be approved at some point.

The non-cynical view is that the world has actually changed over that time. Reducing CO2 emissions is more urgent than ever, and there's no longer time to hope that we can instead reduce energy usage which used to be their preferred solution.

Compare Hinkley's strike price to £40/MWh and don't mention the storage cost!

Compare Hinkley's strike price to £365/MWh and don't mention that's a spike not a long term average!

Take your pick :-)

Why diversify? If you have enough power when you need it without emitting CO2 I would think that would be enough.

However, no new nuclear construction for that many years does look like a mistake as France looks like it is slightly increasing use of coal this winter: https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20220112-france-fires-up-coal-p...

If France had more NREs it would still face the same issues without adding considerable storage capabilities (any big country that does 80% NRE thanks to storage?)

Sense of purpose. Mere incompetence is disheartening.

Nuclear is proven and proven at massive scale, its proven massive industrial nation can transition to almost 100% nuclear and can do so within a few decades.

The method that you advocate where you overbuild massive amounts of unsolved issues and it not even proven on a medium scale. And in the cost calculation sited don't account for the problem all in from production to distribution.

Methane produced in the way you advocate would still be transported in leaky pipelines. Massive power grids would need to be build to connect the regions optimal for collection with where it is most used. Massive batteries would still be required in such a system.

I am 100% sure that if a government today said, lets build 100 nuclear reactors in the next 30 years and put them next to each operating coal plant. I am 99% sure they could do it and that it would be a robust system for the next 50-100 years. For that certainty I would be worth paying a premium for.

Again, look at German, had they spent 2 decades on a green transformation on nuclear, they would now already be nearly CO2 free by now.

"Larger amount of wind" still means at most 3-4 days of decent wind per month, that has been my experience living in Poland. There are some windy regions like the Baltic Sea coast, or Tatra mountains in the south, but that's still not enough.

They occupy an incredibly infantile frame that we should be less accommodating towards if we actually want an interesting collective future.

I think that's an arithmetic everyone largely accepts, but they just don't want to be the specific ones paying the price while others seemingly get only the benefits. NIMBYism, if you will.

The hippies are right, the corporate whores are wrong.

https://www.newsdata.com/california_energy_markets/southwest...

Edit: surprise, I'm also getting silent downvotes, as if I needed further proof.

Not true - from the wiki: Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant

So capacity of fossil fuels went up, but I suppose natural gas shuts down while renewable generation is high so it doesn't use its capacity all the time - my bad

Without that it is only possible for prices to fall after we build a lot more wind turbines (projects out to 2025 are only a few Gigawatts extra, not enough) and storage (10GWh more storage in the UK would trim the top peak prices, but you'd need an order of magnitude more to make a difference on midday price trends) and the more effective that storage is, the less economic sense it makes without subsidy. If I buy electricity for £30 per MWh and sell it for £350 per MWh that'll quickly pay off my investment in storage, but if I buy it for £30 per MWh and sell it for £40 per MWh because we've stabilised prices, that's a long time to pay back my investment in storage.

Basing your figure on the consumer cost means in the current environment it just tells you what the price cap is, and that cap is set by government. It rises in April this year (to 28p per kWh) and is expected to rise again later this year, and then perhaps again next year. That cap doesn't reflect the actual cost of the electricity, the difference is why dozens (yes, dozens) of consumer electricity companies have gone bankrupt in the UK in recent months.

Just the latest news that is the same as the last decade of bad news:

> EDF now estimates the total cost of the project at 12.7 billion euros ($14.42 billion). Its expected cost has more than quadrupled from the first estimate made in 2004.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-de...

$15B of lithium ion battery factory would have far far greater carbon impact, dollar for dollar. $1B on early stage startups would similarly be more impactful.

Next door neighbour's driveway had a mauled deer carcass in middle of day, few years ago.

Definitely. Problem for us is that while more net-zero projects are being constructed than ever before, increased demand for energy has outpaced it, so we're ending up with more "dirty" energy capacity being added, not to mention the infuriating trend of decommissioning nuclear plants and replacing them with gas turbines.

We need to be building plants based on whatever net-zero technologies we know how to build. If that means more nuclear fission plants in the short term, whatever. Yeah I get that radioactive waste is a problem, but it's way easier to store the waste safely than it is to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. If something better comes about along the way, switch to building that when it comes. But don't just twiddle your thumbs and wait for it.

https://www.energynetworks.com.au/news/energy-insider/the-de...

Early adopters of solar here had very strong feed-in tariffs, but these are non-existent now for new sign-ups because otherwise energy companies were paying out more and more, while still having the same grid/maintenance costs. It disincentivises people from upgrading their solar capacity too. If you got 3-5kW way back, but upgrade to 10kW now, you lose your lucrative feed-in tariff.

Going back many years, I remember my grandfather risking his health because he was scared of unpredictable electricity bills should he run his A/C. That's probably an argument against smart metering, at least for the elderly.

There's often talk of distributed battery systems. e.g., trial programs where houses with solar and batteries pool efforts.

Regardless, for every household that effectively goes offgrid, it leaves the fewer, remaining customers paying for the same powerlines and facilities. Solar uptake is about 30-40% here, from memory.

1. https://i.imgur.com/yKqGXyL.png

Ok ok, De Gaulle was maybe more concerned about energy independence.

France doesn't do too bad? Any link? As far a i remember only a few African countries do "not too bad", but perhaps you were referring to former colonies as well.

> I live in France, never heard of this "Net Zero" you're talking about.

I then suggest some good climate information channel, Bon Pote is pretty good in French [0]

[0] https://bonpote.com/

edit: my country is terrible too, it is nothing against France in particular!!!

A rough estimate is that the production of electricity needs to double.

I'm curious how France is going to double the production of electricty. The current plans for new nuclear power don't seem enough to increase capacity and retire old plants at the same time.

I think it is getting better, though. Environmentalists are slowly waking up to the fact that nuclear energy is not nearly as bad as we make it out to be, even compared to windmills & solar panels, which requires many more times the ground surface and/or concrete.

Oh, and we got a recent report from our national energy company (or something close), that laid out several plans to reduce our CO2 emissions, and most contingencies involved both nuclear and renewable, including the "nuke max" scenario. We'll definitely need renewables, but it's pretty clear shutting down nuclear plants is one of the riskiest plans — hopefully our politicians will wake up to that.

Who are you replying to here? Who's argued this?

* https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

Better than being dependent on oil and gas, especially if your current supplier is Russia.

Question is, does Europe really want to depend on journalist/dissident-murdering Russia?

Russia nearly bankrupted itself when it contained the nuclear disaster and even Gorbachev thinks it was Chernobyl that ultimately destroyed the Soviet Union.

Now with this in mind, I wouldnt be surprised considering the sanctions on Russia, if they perhaps make a grab for the uranium in Chernobyl and sell it, to claw back some of the costs they incurred for cleaning up Chernobyl.

Strategically, it was useful for Russian politics to have something as risky as the Chernobyl nuke power station in the Ukraine during the soviet union era, ie different country if anything went wrong nothing to do with us sort of thing.

However thats how it remains until now where the Iranians need uranium after their enrichers were destroyed with Stuxnet, so you have one potential customer there, you also have India & Pakistan, Israel as well as the UK and France who will all be needing a bit more uranium as we get off fossil fuels to reduce greenhouse gases.

Nonetheless, storage is ready, and even in profit driven grids like Texas' ERCOT:

> Citing lower costs and increased renewables, momentum continued in the growth of battery energy storage systems in 2021, roughly doubling with 1,262 MW online, compared to 640 MW in 2020. ... with the next two largest systems in Texas, namely the 102-MW Gambit Battery Energy Storage Park and the 100-MW North Fork Battery Storage Project.

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

If you want week long batteries, you'll first have to show the need for that, but something like that won't be built until it is needed: enough cheap solar and wind on the grid.

With how slow utilities are to adopt cheap new technologies, that will be a while. But cost-optimization strategies for carbon free grids tend to select a lot of excess solar and wind capacity, and almost no nuclear at all. Though I would say that those models are flawed in that they assume that nuclear can be built, when the last decades have shown that it can not really be built.

A week of no solar power or wind is unheard of. A week of no wind is very very rare.

No, that's the hard part. The easier part is to reduce energy consumption and adapt to production. The problem is some people think we can live in eternal abundance and not think about it, and these people are making billions of dollars of tax money on "green new deal" types of contracts.

But the truth is degrowth and lowtech are the only option for climate change. Look what "green capitalism" has done for us since the 60s: yes things keep getting worse, and it's not gonna change as long as money and industry are involved, as they are the problem not the solution.

We’re all a bit jealous of course.

Notwithstanding I see that kind of “Puritanism” among European X-RAY activists. There’s something certainty very human about it, but I think people often reach for irrational, exuberant religiosity during confusing and difficult times.

It needed a massive amount of water to pumped around which explains why many nuke power stations are positioned on the coast.

Of course, wiki is wiki, but is no more or less valid or invalid, than other reports when being mindful of bias.

In terms of Chernobyl and radiation leaks, an airburst instead of ground burst would spread more radiation and could parts of the Ukraine become radioactive wasteland to prevent Nato pushing right upto Russia border?

Russia hasnt moved an inch, but NATO has so could NATO end up on the wrong side of history with this one? Wars are always good distractions for domestic failures.

1) advanced geothermal (using drilling tech developed within the last decade, not the older ones)

2) flow batteries

3) chemical storage of electricity, whether as ammonia, hydrogen, methanol, or whatever tech path becomes cheapest.

4) for cold climates: district/neighborhood heating with massive seasonal storage

All of these are being developed, and experiencing falling prices on the tech. In contrast, building the same nuclear reactor design gets more expensive successive time it is built. This is true even of France's builds in 70s.

If we are betting on future tech, nuclear is not in the cards. It would have been great it nuclear had put coal out of business in the 1980s, rather than having a ton of build delays in the 1970s that jacked up nuclear's price. But it's ship has sailed, until nuclear can build.

If France completes a single reactor by their planned 2035 date, I will be seriously impressed. However, 1GW in 13 years is not a climate solution.

But, it is very expensive. At the same time new nuclear reactors are also very expensive.

So we just don't know. Countries like France should build nuclear reactors and see if they can get the price down.

Countries that are opposed to nuclear, like Germany, should investigate storage solutions and see if they can get the price of that down.

People treat this question with religious mindset, as if burning fossil fuels is a sin that must be banished. In reality, there's nothing wrong with powering countries ~80% of the time with renewables + storage, and ~20% of the time with fossils - that's still a decently decarbonized grid

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

[1] - https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/hydropower_press...

Storing is not cheap and batteries are also diry. not green. My idea is that we need to work on all in parallel, solar, wind, research better and cleaner batteries, nuclear, fusion, invest in the grid and try to connect over larger distances. There will not be 1 solution that fits every place in the world.

> but when all our glaciers are molten away, we for sure have to go back to nuclear-power.

this is inaccurate. you might want to go read more literature related to ice melting and energy transition.

this is true

> Russia closing part of its huge gas supply to Europe

this isn't, afaik. Russia doesn't sell on spot market, they prefer long term futures contracts, on which they reliably deliver. They delivered on their 2021 commitments a bit earlier, hence they closed off the valves

Basically, the gas supplies were low during summer, but the spot prices were significantly above long term average, so energy companies delayed their purchases, hoping the price will come back down soon. It didn't, reserves dried up, and everybody was forced to buy at the same time

Any numbers on that pumped storage? how much is needed to store 1 week of France energy needs ? How much it costs then?

Transmission losses are really not a significant problem. Average US transmission losses are less than 6%, Norway just over, and UK about 8%.

Large solar farms are much cheaper to build per kW and are still quite local to where the energy is consumed so the losses for them will be much less than the current national averages

Mind you I'm not arguing against subsidizing rooftop solar, just that transmission losses are not a major factor in the argument.

I don't. The grid has to be sized for the worst case load, not for the average load, so reducing the latter with residential solar doesn't reduce the cost of having the grid around. And utility-scale solar is much cheaper per unit of power than residential solar.

Wind and solar take a lot of space that could be used for agriculture, so they compete with important uses of the soil. (I don't know if it's clear how much offshore is a thing, but I suppose this increases also energy expenditure)