This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's like I've always said, "The best time to build a nuclear power plant is fifty years ago."
The second best time is forty nine years ago
69 years ago would have been a blast
true, then you'd need decommission it and rebuild it about now.
Which unfortunately now shuts down because the reactors cannot cope with the heatwaves. Turns out that no river = no cooling = no energy production.
False,
Reactor production is throttled down to preserve the river environment, not because they cannot cool themselves. Only 18% reduction on the worst event.
Dismissing the biggest low carbon energy producer because 1970 engineers did not account for the unknown temperature extremes 20 years after the predicted lifespan of the reactor is silly.
Unknown temperature extremes? We knew about climate change for much longer. And France's nuclear reactors have an average age of less than 40 years.
Yes, unknown. You do not care about when the reactor went online, but when the reactor design was finalized. This happened with CP0 design in 1970, 4 years before the messmer plan.
We knew about climate change in 1970, but we lacked reliable models and computational power to create good predictions at that time. Climate change was an hot scientific debate, not an applied principle in civil engineering design.
The only reactor not part of the messmer plan (1974) that was throttled down is the Chooz B on the Meuse river. In this case it is more of a political issue: under 1998 treaty between Belgium and France, the plant must curtail power if the river flow drop. Not as safety measure, but to preserve downstream flow to Belgium. This was not taken into account in the reactor design. The operation of the plant was restricted retroactively. The Chooz B plant uses evaporative towers to minimize heat discharge.
Some reactors can even cool down the river ! This is the case for the Civeau reactor for example, the water released is cooler than the water pump from the river.
Turns out, even when you have to throttle them down slightly due to drought, having a large amount of available nuclear power, like France and Sweden do, means you emit an awful lot less carbon.
Have you read about the Paks NPP? Not throttled, shut down. They even tried sinking barges in the Danube to raise levels enough to keep it going.
And yet, despite that, France still has some of the cleanest electricity in the world with prices in line with the rest of Europe and exported about 10TWhrs of electricity during July.
I agree that downtime is bad, but I don't think abandoning nuclear to go all in on solar which has a minimum downtime of 50% or wind which has extended periods of <10% is a solution to that. Given that we need electrification to replace fossil fuels in transport and heating over the next few decades to prevent catastrophic climate change, the only reasonable course IMO is to build out as much as possible of nuclear and renewables.
The problem is that building nuclear is slower and more expensive than just building renewables. It made some sense when labor was cheaper. But it doesn’t anymore.
Yeah we need to electrify transportation, heating, fertiliser and steel production. What you need to consider is that these all have excellent synergies with renewable energy. Making fertiliser from nuclear power never made sense and never will make sense. But with solar power it’s just now barely cheap enough to make sense. There are already plants up and running. And you then get a huge amount of capacity to balancer solar/wind for free as well. The same goes for transportation, steel production and especially heat. We already have heat batteries in production. Both super high temperature ones to replace fossil fuels in industry, and medium temperature ones that can store energy for months to shift energy from summer to winter for district heating systems.
None of this makes economic sense with nuclear (well, EVs make sense still).
I have nothing against nuclear. I love the tech. But it’s simply dead. And no, SMRs is not gonna save it.
We should have been deploying nuclear much earlier and then augment with renewables. Once energy storage technology matured more you could phase out nuclear plants.
That would've required long term planning though and what if in the end it came out that coal isn't so bad at all, huh, what then??? /s
And it turned out that beautiful clean coal is just that!
To people talking about subsides, that was always the point, to have energy production as a public service. I would structuraly never trust a private company with nuclear (actually I feel like trusting any one no matter the sector is risky)
The biggest nuclear reactor disaster in history was at a government run nuclear power plant. So you probably shouldn't trust the government with nuclear either.
* Sustained through government subsidies to create/maintain their nukes and submarines.
You mean the same nuclear power plants they need to shut down every other week because the river water they use as cooling intake is too warm to actually cool them down? They're pretty useless nowadays.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/france-nuclear-reactors-shut-record-heatwave
You should read what you link, it's the opposite. They are actually paused to not heat the river up.
Still massive exporter of electricity. I wonder how much coal and gas would burn in Europe if French npp weren't there.
yeah and until recently they imported all their uranium from states like niger which is why it took till 2023 for niger to kick out the last french troops from its country.
which is interesting because solar became the cheapest form of electricity in 2020 and france let go of niger shortly after that.
How dependent is France on Niger's uranium?
The military coup in Niger has raised concerns about uranium mining in the country by the French group Orano, and the consequences for France's energy independence.
...That they have to shut down all the time because of droughts. And they basically need to rebuild half of it, because the maintenance cost is so high, it is constantly pushed into the future.
Few emissions? Yeah. Good? Nope.
While they did well environmental to produce this and even from a cost to consumer, there are many hidden costs to the power produced which will test France in the coming years as their fleet of reactors and the coming debt-to-gdp crisis means the tens of billions required to overhaul it might be tough to subsidize.
Unfortunately, thanks to the anti-nuclear lobby, we are in a situation where the current reactors will have to be shutdown before the new ones are available to take their place.
Yeah, the famous french anti-nuclear lobby. Those guys who control the french government with its nuclear weapons, who has also recently built a nuclear reactor. That government totally is controlled by the anti-nuclear lobby.
Or ... maybe France tried upgrading its aging nuclear reactors with the new reactor in Flamanville, which went spectacular over budget? And debt ridden EdF simply has not the funds to build over 50 new reactors at 13 billion each?
If we could deal with the waste that we've already got, that would instill some confidence, but the govt has basically shrugged. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nLUAN2Rev1E
Nuclear waste is an already solved problem, we just have to use the solutions. The vast majority (>99%) can be recycled.
OK, if it's solved... Where the hell are those who take the nuclear waste of my country? Where are they??? I'm sure, we'd pay a lot of money... Where are they???
Idk where you live but the problem is likely one (or both) of lobbied politicians kicking the can down the road (cheaper in the short term) and ignorant nimby-ists who've bought the "nuclear energy is evil" narrative pushed by the fossil fuel industry and useful idiots in green movements hook line and sinker.
With more power than it generated?
No, recycling spent fuel into new fuel or even the rather wasteful process of depositing it for long-term storage uses only a fraction of the energy generated by nuclear fission in reactors.
id suggest Fiji, New Zealand, New Guinea, Cambodia and many dozen other countries will have much lower emissions. in their Navy.
