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The article discusses France's history of building nuclear reactors and its potential as a model for other countries, sparking a debate among commenters about the pros and cons of nuclear power.
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However, the opposition to nuclear is currently being reevaluated by the German government.
> Sex is good but have you tried having your country shutting down its last nuclear power plants in 30 mn?
It's so absolutely horribly short sighted.
Not well enough - the crystalline parts of earth's crust are still too porous to reliably keep it contained. It would - in the long term - leak like radon gas.
People such as yourself, just blandly stating plain nonsense with certainty are cause for many problems in the world, and for nuclear energy, they're as common as fruit flies, buzzing around any serious debate.
Maybe it's not quite as easy as the layman thinks, especially considering that Germany has a lot less space then, say, the US.
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[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150217045132/http://www.bfs.de...
[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/endlager-atommuell-1.569...
The bureaucrats already take forever to do anything because they get paid regardless and they even have an incentive to make stuff look more complicated than they are (look how important the work is). Add to that your typical political nonsense, especially from a government that was readily hostile.
Add to that the typical nonsensical German overengineering, where they find ways to make stuff in an absurdly complex manner for what are generally little benefits. They briefly mentioned that problem in the article: Flamanville was very late, in large part because it was a collaboration with Siemens, who forced the use of stupid German regulations. The result is that nobody wants to buy this stupid design, because why would they, when there are perfectly viable alternatives without the German overengineering bullshit.
By the way, I have a strong feeling that this is industrial sabotage from Germany, using Siemens as pawn. Considering their reluctance for nuclear since basically forever, it makes no sense that they pretend to even be working on it.
So, if there is one thing that should be absolutely clear to anyone not ideologically corrupted, is that nobody should give two shits about whatever Germany does/think around nuclear power. They have proved to be largely incompetent and politically corrupt in the matter.
Small feeder shops can contain a few hundred containers. Actual container shops contain thousands.
47 does not seem like much?
Its not like you can put it into a dump and its "gone" like household trash. Radioactivity is ionizing, so it corrodes all materials and cannot be physically contained. The earth's crust is to porous (i mentioned the radon problem in another post) to keep it underground.
It's a bit absurd, what you say, like arguing that it's good to stop using a stove in your apartment and just eat food raw, because one of your neighbors already did enough bad because they burned their entire house down while trying to make a bonfire with piles of coal in their yard.
I would not advocate against having some fossil emergency backups. I think the planet can cope with a few percent of that. If this were our only concern, then we would have basically solved the problem.
Today France takes more than a decade to build a single reactor (Flamanville 3) and the debts incurred nationalizing EDF, are now causing serious concerns about the whole nation defaulting. As clean and safe as nuclear power might be, I think the world will be fine not following that example.
China added 277GWh of solar (45% increase) and 80 GW of wind (+18%) in 2024 compared to 3.9 GW of nuclear (+3%).
While the percentage of nuclear power of overall electricity generation was increasing between 2012 and 2020 it is falling again. The national plan was for 200 GW of generation capacity from nuclear by 2035, that less than what was added from solar alone in 2024 and unlikely to happen (approved projects would add another 60 GW to the current 60 GW total in the next 5 years, but it is not clear if they will be build).
Sources https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/chin...
https://energyandcleanair.org/analysis-clean-energy-contribu...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
The direct comparison of solar/wind nameplate capacity with nuclear is extremely dishonest. They NEVER reach full capacity even with favorable weather and it's absolutely not comparable to nuclear if you don't have at least a decent amount of storage built alongside.
They are still using coal/gas predominantly (around 70%) so renewables are still peanuts. They are building solar/wind to supplement their other sources, since they can't build anything else fast enough. None of their other sources of electricity generation has gone down since they started investing in renewables. So, it's not replacing anything, and it still technically can't anyway.
In any case, they have 1408GW of installed solar + wind that generated 1836080 GWh (1836 TWh) of energy and they have 61GW of installed nuclear capacity that generated 450850 GWh (450 TWh) of energy. So, their solar & wind installation is 23 times larger but only generates about 4 times the amount of electricity, that isn't even reliable.
It doesn't matter if they hit a speed bump in their nuclear rollout, it doesn't have to be as fast to deploy as renewables because it fundamentally doesn't give you the same things. It is a true replacement for coal, which renewables aren't at this stage.
China has been reducing approvals for new reactors in recent years, to the point where the share of nuclear electricity generation is actually going down. Maybe 40 years down the line, they'll want to build just one more reactor to deal with increased demand and discover that the supply chain has atrophied so the project becomes an expensive boondoggle.
On this, another funny story that pro nuclear also don't mention: this summer when it was very hot (and electricity demand for AC was high) they had to shut down several reactors because the cooling river would have been over heated too much. People criticize renewable for not being available all the time (which is indeed a problem without storage) but here thankfully solar saved the day by being available when it was needed.
Last thing that people tend to forget when they criticize ecologists views on nuclear: part of many ecologist program is to make it so that we use less energy. Heating and cooling poorly insulated housing is wasteful and stupid. Having everyone having their own transportation mean rather than having collective and energy efficient transportation system or having housing too far from commodities such that people can't walk or bike to them is also wasteful. And AI... Bref, let's fix that then maybe we won't need that much nuclear power in the end.
We invested massively in nuclear power in recent decades? Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto, Flamanville were the west ensuring nuclear investment while at the same time investing in the nascent renewable sector.
In total something like a ~$100-200B investment in nuclear technology. The nuclear investment evidently did not pan out.
How much more should we have spent? Should we just push through no matter the cost even though we have cheaper alternatives?
France has cheap electricity because of the nuclear buildout, in other words: because engineers saved 50% on the price, not because an MBA saved 0.1% on the price.
It's not like it took much planning to avoid that outcome, it just wasn't done. But I'm sure this saved EDF 5 bucks and the costs were carried by everyone else.
The thing is that nuclear power is still a relatively new thing and we don't have historical experience to rely on. Since it is basically the first time reactors are this old and there are a lot of risks, it was decided to verify just to be sure.
But now we know they can run fine for much longer than was anticipated. That is something the anti-nuclear conveniently avoid, the reactors have cost a lot to build but they are still providing value and it's expected that their life will be extended by quite a lot.
I say "they got into trouble", which is true, they caused the trouble. But not financially, of course, WE got into trouble there. Given that the CEO is an accountant I'd bet my firstborn this was not lost on him. But all of France is paying for their systematically wrong decisions over a long period (which still leaves the power pretty cheap tbh).
If nuclear fission is "cheap, abundant and carbon-free", why has nobody put their money where their mouth is?
Then you have to deal with the geopolitics around nuclear material, since you could very much use it for military purpose (Iran problems, for example).
To finish, you basically need to build a specialized industry around it and it has to be very local. You would probably need to hire outside expertise for the first build to even be sure that all requirements/quality levels are met.
It's not something that you decide to buy overnight and just do. Since it benefits greatly for economies of scale (makes no sense to just build 1) you basically need to have full industrial planning for a very very long term. At the very least 15 years, but since you also need to deal with the waste and maintenance, you are basically committed for at least 50 years.
Which is exactly why once you know and can do it at the country level, it makes no sense to let go and do something else. You will have to deal with the maintenance of current reactors anyway and still have to deal with waste with no chance for potential repurpose.
But our current world is extremely dominated by neo-liberalism and that means short-term thinking and profit maximisation. This can be seen in the ever-changing political climate (at least in France).
I actually think this is the real major reason so many are infatuated with renewables: it can make money and they can profit from it. The funny thing is that this money-making is only possible thanks to the reliability of nuclear and coal/gas plants in Germany for example. From the most part this is predatory behavior, where they get to make the profits while not paying the full costs that would be necessary to be a truly equivalent solution (reliable electricity at any time/season).
The real reason is cost. Nuclear power plants produce extremely expensive electricity until they are paid off ~40 years later. For paid off nuclear plants the cost is acceptable as long as they can get paid for nearly all hours of the day, if capacity factors craters then paid-off plants become too expensive.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at €0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Who wants to lock in energy crisis prices until ~2080 factoring in construction time? The nukebro squad seems to think that is reasonable.
> From the most part this is predatory behavior, where they get to make the profits while not paying the full costs that would be necessary to be a truly equivalent solution (reliable electricity at any time/season).
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
But this is the issue you guys never tackle. It is all about "baseload" without the slightest understanding about how the demand curve looks.
1. Credit guarantees 2. Guaranteed extremely high electricity prices for ~40 years. 3. Direct subsides like zero interest loans 4. Subsidized accident insurance (the state takes all risk)
For example, in the UK they realized after Hinklkey Point C locking in extremely expensive electricity for 35 years that it telling the public how expensive it is was not a good political choice.
Therefore Sizewell C they instead foist the costs as a cost-plus contract on the ratepayers as the plant get built.
Pure insanity.