There is a pro nuclear power lobby that loves to trivialise toxic radio active waste. They argue that storing it in caves with clear warning signs will deter future generations from accidentally messing about with its content. They forgot historical context can be quickly lost over a few thousand years and assume there will not be a technological dark age in the future. CO2 might well introduce long term damage to the climate, but it is not immediately toxic.
Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
131–140 of 256 posts
Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you even glance at the numbers? Tech gCO2/kWh Coal 920 Gas 490 Solar-Util 48 Solar-Roof 41 Solar-Conc 27 Geothermal 38 Hydro 24 Wind-Offshore 12 Nuclear 12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...
It's my understanding that these numbers are not undisputed. Even https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1530-9290... lets enough opportunity to have that calculation be changed, though there does not seem to be any doubt that the emissions are minimal compared to fossil fuels. But that's not a point I made. But you are right, I shouldn't have made it sound as if no one produced such numbers.
That's not all you did.
Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a false statement. There's enough uranium in France - it's just not cheap uranium and open pit mines in Africa are more economical. Additionally, France never had to even prospect for uranium ore, as incidentally many of their former colonies had plenty of potential for cheap open pit mining using cheap local workers.... For reference, just a few hundred kilometres east of their border, East Germany was the th…
Yes, sorry, that not commercialy viable to get this uranium. > Additionally, France never had to even prospect for uranium ore But this is false. (There is no english link sorry for that). https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/UraMin
> But this is false. (There is no english link sorry for that). https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/UraMin
Context! They never had to prospect in France - I thought hat was clear, but apparently it wasn't. Sorry for the confusion.
Edit: after reading the article I'm more confused - that's not even a French company - it's Canadian...
Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Here are some numbers to back this statement: https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p... It's true that in the first 3 years after the decision to speed-up the closure of nuclear in Germany in 2011, coal use increased. But more recently it went down drastically and was replaced mostly by wind and solar on a yearly basis. Here is similar data but not just Germany (using the data from the 2020 BP s…
They still use a lot of brown coal, which is dirty as hell. The way I see it, they could have had reduced the CO2 output more by keeping nuclear and investing into renewables. Missed potential really.
The debate is not renewables vs nuclear. It's nuclear vs fossil .
Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, and had simply kept building at the same rate, our grid would be (near) zero carbon today . Not several decades from now if we hustle our asses off, today . But that's not what happened. The anti-nuclear team won and we collectively made the responsible decision to fill our atmosphere with CO2 instead. Yay?
This would be great if CO2 was the only waste product of a nuclear plant, but it's not. You not only needed to keep building plants, but also designate proper waste storage sites, which are still up in the air to this day, and some sites like Hanford are utter ecological disasters.
It also did not help that the 70s ended with the Three-Mile Island disaster and serious construction flaws being found at Trojan. Then in the 80s Chernobyl blasted nuclear fallout into the atmosphere which certainly didn't help nuclear's image.
I wouldn't say the "Anti-nuclear team" won, nuclear industry shot itself in the foot with a very cavalier and lax safety attitude, and leaving behind many scary ecological disasters in its wake.
Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
#136> Put differently, in 2019 Fessenheim Unit 1 and 2 generated more electricity than all the solar panels in France combined I learned a term recently called "base load supply". Essentially, something like a nuclear plant is hard to ramp/up down with changing grid demands, but it great at steady-state operation and can run like that for years. This takes care of the minimum load placed on the grid which is fairly predi…
> Essentially, something like a nuclear plant is hard to ramp/up down with changing grid demands,
This is untrue, we regularly modulate nuclear plants from 10 to 100% in a space of hours
Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would be cool if you sourced your statements like the article did. Like "we don't know what to do with it" which is a lie.
As someone in another field, well what do we do with nuclear waste? My guess is bury it somewhere else.
Some of it is recycled as Mox.
Most of it is stored underground (FAR underground) in special regions where we know that the geological makeup is highly stable
Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
#138I just want to point out that the headline is incorrect - there is no such thing as safe nuclear power currently. When you factor in micromorts from fuel mining and waste storage, you get a relatively low number of deaths compared to coal. But I wouldn't call nuclear power "safe". The worst part is that those deaths are delayed by years and even generations, so we feel an artificial sense of security because we aren'…
And do all other power source magically do not use unsafe materials ?
Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you even glance at the numbers? Tech gCO2/kWh Coal 920 Gas 490 Solar-Util 48 Solar-Roof 41 Solar-Conc 27 Geothermal 38 Hydro 24 Wind-Offshore 12 Nuclear 12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...
It's my understanding that these numbers are not undisputed. Even https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1530-9290... lets enough opportunity to have that calculation be changed, though there does not seem to be any doubt that the emissions are minimal compared to fossil fuels. But that's not a point I made. But you are right, I shouldn't have made it sound as if no one produced such numbers.
Even if it is a full order of magnitude larger, it still compares quite favourably to fossil fuels.
Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
#140So in order to please the environmental agenda of the Green party they are shutting down a nuclear plant and switching to fossil fuels.
Coal = Trees = Nature = Green
Obviously