Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#71

Post by jnxx » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

morsch wrote: post #35

Mirioron wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the consequences of the inevitable natural gas or coal power plant that will replace it? There's always a lot of talk about renewables, yet it seems that we still end up with a fossil fuel based powerplant. It's not like France is building new nuclear plants to replace the ones that are shutting down.

> There's always a lot of talk about renewables It's odd to pretend that renewables are all talk when at the moment I'm writing this France's power grid is 28% renewable[1]. And France still has lots of opportunities to expand, both solar and wind. You'd think with >4000km of coast line there'd be lots of space for offshore wind. [1] https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR and 60% nuclear, but the point still stands

And then, there is wave power, which is essentially wind energy decoupled from its origin in time and space, has(had) extremely encouraging working prototypes, like the Pelamis design:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3-SXFtPYe0

This was a [prototype 750 kW (KiloWatt) plant operating at Orkney Islands and near Portugal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelamis_Wave_Energy_Converter) - as a reference, it took wind power plants more than 20 years of enthusiastic development until the installed power reached 500 kW.

It is a shame that this development was shut down (while the design has been reported to be picked up by, guess whom, the Chinese), while being owned by E.ON. But I am sure more developments will follow, as the design is an excellent idea.

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#72

Post by bananabreakfast » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #46

Reedx wrote: post #19

> The saddest part of this story is that there is no new renewable plant being built overnight to replace Fessenheim. It will be replaced almost entirely by fossil fuels. > It’s worth noting that, as Fessenheim closes, Germany is commissioning a new coal-fired power plant, in Datteln Exactly. Why are so many people ignoring what happens in step 2? When nuclear is shut down, it gets replaced with something worse. Ofte…

Nuclear is not safer than renewables. These statistics are false, they do not include everything involved with running the plants and gathering the ressources. They get repeated every time in these threads here and are refuted every time. Your first article is provided by a pro nuclear propaganda association. It's almost certainly also false. And ignores conveniently how much more unrecycable nuclear waste France was…

There is no such thing as un-recyclable nuclear waste that cannot be stored safely.

All unsafe waste is by definition recyclable because its viability as fuel is what makes it unsafe.

If it is unviable as recycled fuel then it is quite safely storable and is no more dangerous than the tons of toxic chemicals we store regularly from manufacturing and mining byproducts.

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#73

Post by steeve » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #46

Reedx wrote: post #19

> The saddest part of this story is that there is no new renewable plant being built overnight to replace Fessenheim. It will be replaced almost entirely by fossil fuels. > It’s worth noting that, as Fessenheim closes, Germany is commissioning a new coal-fired power plant, in Datteln Exactly. Why are so many people ignoring what happens in step 2? When nuclear is shut down, it gets replaced with something worse. Ofte…

Nuclear is not safer than renewables. These statistics are false, they do not include everything involved with running the plants and gathering the ressources. They get repeated every time in these threads here and are refuted every time. Your first article is provided by a pro nuclear propaganda association. It's almost certainly also false. And ignores conveniently how much more unrecycable nuclear waste France was…

"unrecycable nuclear waste France was producing in 2016"

Yeah so nuclear waste is recycled in large part. See Mox. But I agree, I wish we'd use FNRs too. Too bad the Green party shut down the first reactor (SuperPhenix) in the 90s.

"waste we can not store safely."

Did you do your homework? See CIGEO.

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#74

Post by makomk » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #26

WilTimSon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like, regardless of what the cause is, having numerous low-level incidents means it's not exactly "safe" as the title of the article suggests. Another user has commented that the plant is nearly 100 years old while the reactors are supposed to last only 40 years before being replaced.

Depends what's classified by an "incident". Aviation has "incidents" all the time. And yet we are not grounding planes based on this. We learn about them, and improve.

The key thing that makes aviation safe is not treating low-level incidents as OK just because they haven't turned into major incidents. One of the major, repeated root causes of catastropic failures in nominally robust, redundant and safe systems, across multiple industries, is the normalization of deviance - the acceptance of safety failings because they haven't lead to a critical disaster yet. The more I hear from nuclear advocates, the more convinced I've become that pro-nuclear advocacy is fundamentally incompatible with the existence of safe nuclear power plants, if that is even possible.

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#75

Post by jhayward » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

Reedx wrote: post #19

> The saddest part of this story is that there is no new renewable plant being built overnight to replace Fessenheim. It will be replaced almost entirely by fossil fuels. > It’s worth noting that, as Fessenheim closes, Germany is commissioning a new coal-fired power plant, in Datteln Exactly. Why are so many people ignoring what happens in step 2? When nuclear is shut down, it gets replaced with something worse. Ofte…

> When nuclear is shut down, it gets replaced with something worse. Often coal!

The implication that this is what happened in Germany is misinformation. None of the energy production of retired nuclear plants in Germany was replaced by coal. Renewable energy replaced the vast majority of it over the last 10 years, and coal use is down by 50% in that period.

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#76

Post by throwaway43234 » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #63

WilTimSon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporting accidents isn't the issue. It's having them on the regular and being past the standard operational period that worries me. Not sure why that's contentious.

In an ideal world, you have your threshold for "incident" set low enough that you have a lot of them. Catching more of the distribution of problems let you increase the level of safety.

Exactly. This difference between "we're only going to update the status page if a customer comes screaming to us that the service has been unavailable for the past 24 hours and they've received no updates" and "we have automated systems in place to updated the status page if the p95 response time exceeds XXX (among other things)".

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#77

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

steeve wrote: post #67

toomuchtodo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be failures on the way to a fully renewable powered grid. India just turned up a 750MW facility successfully [1]. 70% of Texas coal plants are at risk of decommissioning as early as 2022 due to the amount of solar generation in the pipeline [2]. Spain is years ahead of schedule in coal decommissioning due to low cost renewables and pumped hydro storage capabilities being developed [3]. The UK is rapidly de…

"India just turned up a 750MW facility successfully" That number doesn't say much, since the actual output will be a small percentage of that (15-20%).

It's low carbon generation getting built that otherwise would've been gas or coal. India only has about 7GW of nuclear generation capacity (with ~5GW in development), but has a target of 100GW of solar by 2022 (which between cheap labor and cheap hardware, is entirely feasible). Ground mount utility scale solar is very cheap per MWh, and very fast to deploy (years, not decades).

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#78

Post by guerby » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

Omitted in the article: the reason why a gas plant (and not coal as written in the article) is picking up the load is because the french nuclear industry is years behind schedule for putting online the Flamanville EPR.

The original political deal was putting online the EPR then closing Fessenheim, partly to avoid going over the legal limit for nuclear power capacity set by "PPE" law in France.

According to wikipedia [1] Flamanville EPR construction started in 2007 with budget of 3.3 billions EUR and completion date of 2012.

Current estimates are 19.1 billions EUR and end of 2022 for completion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#79

Post by twic » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #46

Reedx wrote: post #19

> The saddest part of this story is that there is no new renewable plant being built overnight to replace Fessenheim. It will be replaced almost entirely by fossil fuels. > It’s worth noting that, as Fessenheim closes, Germany is commissioning a new coal-fired power plant, in Datteln Exactly. Why are so many people ignoring what happens in step 2? When nuclear is shut down, it gets replaced with something worse. Ofte…

Nuclear is not safer than renewables. These statistics are false, they do not include everything involved with running the plants and gathering the ressources. They get repeated every time in these threads here and are refuted every time. Your first article is provided by a pro nuclear propaganda association. It's almost certainly also false. And ignores conveniently how much more unrecycable nuclear waste France was…

The statistics i've seen do include resource extraction (which is pretty safe for nuclear power, because you need so little fuel).

I have not seen them refuted on HN. I would be interested to see a refutation - and if a refutation is posted every time, it should be easy for you to find.

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#80

Post by dkural » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #41

fcantournet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a independent national authority (ASN ~ Nuclear Safety Authority) which is tasked to assess the security of all nuclear power plants and certifies them for periods of 10y. The plant that is being closed was certified by the ASN. The 40y lifespan was the MINIMUM certified lifespan of the power plant. It could very well run for another 40y. These kinds of equipment are modernised every 10 years during the shudo…

You have a very focused elite building system in which the big universities creating the future members of the elite are heavily financed and influenced by pro-nuclear organizations. That goes especially for politicans, but includes engineers. The pro-nuclear propaganda repeated by the people that go through this is frightening, many of them are completely brainwashed. In no way can the ASN be really independent, as…

Can you point to any specific and concrete safety issue? (as opposed to, without any evidence, questioning the integrity of the people trying to reduce CO2 emissions by extending the lifetime of existing nuclear plants).