not this again…
sure nuclear WAS fine, french power plants are getting old, can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves and regularly have major accidents. source (german)
in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.
also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct
Don’t forget they have been basically stealing the required Uranium from African Sahel countries like Niger for decades.
Kazakhstan: 30%
Niger: 25%
Canada: 20%
Australia: 15%
Russia: 10%
And France is blocking importing solar energy from Spain. Also France has to do some shenanigans in Africa to secure their uranium supply.
Sure nuclear is far better than fossil fuels in terms of global warming, but it has similar geopolitical problems to the oil industry. It makes sense to go to solar and wind, but there’s a nuclear industry that’s doing the same kinds of things the oil industry does to block it.
deleted by creator
sure nuclear WAS fine, french power plants are getting old, can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves and regularly have major accidents.
Plus: Building nuclear power plants requires huge amounts of concrete. And making huge amounts of concrete requires extremely huge carbon emissions.
did you calculate how much gram of CO2 that is per kWh actually?
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.
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.
Still massive exporter of electricity. I wonder how much coal and gas would burn in Europe if French npp weren’t there.
They have to export because you can’t just shut down a Nuclear Reactor. So they sell it for cheap to other countries. It would be more expensive for them to shut down a reactor because they produce too much. The other countrys gladly take the cheap energy. But france doesn’t really make profit with this, it’s just less expensive for them.
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
…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.
Too bad this also slows down their renewable energy projects, which would make it cheaper. But Nuclear Reactors + renewables is a bad combination. Nuclear Reactors can’t be adjusted to renewable energy, because you can’t just shut them down when the renewables producing lots of cheap energy. Nuclear Plants always have to keep running, which is also expensive.
France is already doing just that
As I said, Nuclear Plants are slowing down their expansion of renewables. No idea why people downvote me.
Well maybe because of your assertion that renewables and nuclear are a bad combination. Renewables are notoriously unstable sources of energy and you need grid stability or you will have power outages.
This has traditionally been achieved by coal, gas and oil plants. Nuclear power plants are a non GHG emitting way to replace this stability. Countries that have a larger share of renewables but much less nuclear than France still have to fire up their coal and gas powered plants on quiet winter nights after an overcast day. Which means more GHG emissions.
What I meant by “France is already doing just that” is that they are running their NPPs in load following mode, which means they have the ability to adjust their energy output capacity based on the share of renewable energy available.
So while I don’t know exactly why you are being downvoted (not by me in any case), it could be because you’re attacking an ally of the fight against GHG emissions. The goal is not simply to have as many solar panels or wind farms, but to reduce GHG emissions. And that’s what we have to keep in mind. So while, yes France moved to more nuclear there are more ways to look at the same news item: they are still going for 60% electrification of the nation by 2030, up from 30% right now and still going for massive expansion of renewables.
But the nuclear plants will always push the renewables away and keep the price up. It is a bad combination. You need something like gas (later hydrogen) which you can just turn on and off again. It’s just physics. Nuclear Plants will always push the price up.
That’s not necessarily true. There is less need for them if NPPs are there, sure, but the price tag is always king. If renewables are simply much cheaper they will proliferate.
And we will always have to fill in the gaps for when renewables aren’t available. Betting it all on battery tech mostly coming from China is a dangerous game in this geopolitical era.
I don’t understand why people are so anti nuclear. It doesn’t have any emissions. The US, Canada and especially Australia have massive uranium reserves. It provides grid stability. Except for being expensive there is almost nothing going against it. And life cycle costs are likely coming down substantially in the near future with emerging technologies.
Renewables + Battery is the most cheapest way. If you don’t want to import Batteries from China then you need to starz to build your own factories. Nuclear Reactors make you also depend on other countries.
I’m not directly Anti-Nuclar. I’m anti bad financial decissions. Spending so much money on Nuclear just to produce expensive electricity is just stupid. All the money needs to go to Renewables + Batteries, now.
Yes, but factories are expensive and cost a lot of time to build. So I’m not that sure about the financial picture of that either. Not to mention finding the space to put those factories + battery parks + more space for extra renewables to charge those batteries.
Nuclear also only makes Europe dependent on Canada or Australia, although Ukraine and Estonia have some too. The US has their own.
Not to mention batteries require a lot more resources. Whereas uranium is only a few million tonnes per year, lithium- or sodium-ion battery technology requires resources that run in the trillions of tonnes. That’s because of the difference in energy density:
- Pure U-235: 144,000,000 MJ/kg
- Reactor-grade uranium: 3,456,000 MJ/kg
- Sodium-ion battery: 0.27-0.72 MJ/kg
So to put this in perspective: to get the same energy that only 1 kilogram of reactor-grade uranium (at 3.5% U-235) provides, you would need sodium ion batteries with a total weight of 4.8 - 12.8 million kilograms.
Now of course batteries are reusable and nuclear fuel rods are only partly recyclable, but batteries don’t generate any energy by themselves. They need to be recharged with extra solar or wind power, on top of the ones directly feeding into the grid that you also have to build in even more factories, place onsite and individually connect to both the grid and the battery parks, etc.
This is a more rough estimate: but here they did the math:
A rough estimate suggests that about 3 million to 3.15 million solar panels may be needed to match the annual output of a large nuclear power plant
And even then you still haven’t solved what to do on all those quiet winter nights after an overcast day.
Betting it all on one horse it what’s stupid. Especially one that needs a mind boggling amount of resources. Yes we need to make batteries, but we also need to diversify and reduce dependency by expanding our nuclear power capacity.
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?
