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

sustainability-times.com

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

#191

Post by missedthecue »

frogpelt wrote: post #50
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…

The whole controversy around nuclear, seems to indicate people are not as worried about the climate as they claim to be.

It reminds me of how people bash hydro for killing fish and instead advocate wind farms which kill thousands of endangered birds.

Everyone has their vested interests and pre-conceived biases I suppose.

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

#192

Post by roenxi »

oxfordmale wrote: post #177
7786655 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we worry about the tiny possibility that a few people in the future will die in the unlikely event that society regresses so much that we forget how to build a Geiger counter when air pollution caused by burning coal is killing tens of millions of people a year right now?

It might well be some teenage boys finding bright yellow coloured barrels with interesting symbols in a cave. Which teenage boy can read warnings written in Egyptian hieroglyphs? That doesn't justify burning coal, however, there are many renewable energy sources that do not produce pollution or toxic waste that is hazardous for ten thousand years.

> there are many renewable energy sources that do not produce pollution or toxic waste that is hazardous for ten thousand years.

That isn't true, most renewable energy sources, eg, solar panels [0], produce waste that will be toxic waste that will be hazardous for tens of thousands of years. Lead and cadmium don't even decay in practical terms, even after 10s of thousands of years.

Maybe for hydro what you say is true.

[0] https://www.cfact.org/2019/09/15/the-solar-panel-toxic-waste...

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

#193

Post by freeflight »

LatteLazy wrote: post #168
freeflight wrote: post #12

It's weird of the article gives plenty of direct citations from nuclear operators, while at the same time acting like French 40+ year old fission tech doesn't have any issues [0] or sustainability problems, and how the French could dare to shut down one of their first reactors. Particularly in the context that most discussions surrounding nuclear fission power generation lead with "modern designs and reactors being s…

Nuclear power is like Aboetion: a complex issue with major implications that has turned into A religion on both sides. You can't have a sensible discussion without being written off. The middle is shelled by both sides.

Tbh Fission was always considered a stop-gap technology until we could master fusion.

Fusion is still way off but solar/wind have proven to be quite the generators, with grid-scale storage or some other way to utilize the energy surplus it could probably disrupt the electricity sector quite a bit.

Those are actually emerging research fields, while nuclear fission is pretty much dated and new designs depend on materials we haven't even discovered yet.

In that context this insistence on fission reactors reminds me quite a bit about the definition of insanity; Trying the same thing over and over expecting different results, like the world is just some kind of management sim.

Meanwhile Germany is actually trying to innovate outside the box; It's been big on hydrogen research and application for a while, by now there is even a whole roadmap to utilize hydrogen as a future energy resource [0].

Which could utilize large parts of the already existing natural gas pipeline network [1], there's also pilot projects for repurposing old coal plants into thermal storage to retain more of the solar/wind electricity [2].

Yet news like that never make any waves, it's always "Why did Merkel shut down all reactors?", when she never decided the phase-out (That was ratified under Red/Green back in 2002) nor did she actually shut down any reactors, but rather keeps trying to extend their running times.

[0] https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/ueber-fraunhofer...

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/gas-grid-operators-say-...

[2] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/germany-thermal...

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

#194

Post by rurban »

cptskippy wrote: post #54
baq wrote: post #2

answer: short term political gain

Why is sensible behavior suddenly political? The owner/operator of the facility, EDF, envisaged a 40 year life for all 2nd generation reactors. That would have meant the reactor would have been shut down 2 years ago. It's in a flood zone and a 2011 commission found that it didn't have necessary redundant cooling in place should the canals around it fail. It's in a seismically active area. It's on a river over an aqui…

You can shorten that to that it's not considered safe to operate by international standards and not the national RFS standards for decades (leaked in 2002). The nuclear lobby conveniently forgets to mention that.

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

#195

Post by freeflight »

mlyle wrote: post #58
morsch wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

In this case, we're taking offline an amount of nuclear power that exceeds the entire photovoltaic contribution to the French grid, and replacing it with power from a combined cycle plant in Germany. In turn, Germany is commissioning a new coal power plant, in part because of the increased French demand for electricity.

> In turn, Germany is commissioning a new coal power plant, in part because of the increased French demand for electricity.

The coal plant was actually commissioned in the early 2000s, construction started 2007, but finished only recently in May 2020 [0].

It was supposed to replace 3 older ones that already went offline back in 2014. As such it has literally nothing to do with the Fessenheim 2 closing, the article trying to spin it like that is quite misleading.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Datteln

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

#196

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

enaaem wrote: post #134
ogrisel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

The reason for that is the coal lobby, not necessity.

Datteln 4 is going online because the government has already approved it, and is afraid that it will get sued if it turns around and rescinds the approval.

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

#197

Post by dTal »

onli wrote: post #102
jjoonathan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, that's the a common talking point that is false, "Nuclear energy does not produce CO2, or almost none". But you only see that it is false if you look at complete lifecycle analysis of building the plants, running the plants, mining and transporting the uranium, transportintg the waste, dismantling the plant etc. You can try to argue that the US would have less carbon emissions than today - something I'm inclined…

Seems to be begging the question a bit. If 100% of energy came from nuclear, then maintaining it (and all other activities) would be 0-emissions. Construction work and transportation can surely be done electrically.

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

#198

Post by meroje »

dv_dt wrote: post #103
joss82 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is misleading. You can NOT replace nuclear with wind and solar. Because you can't choose when the sun shines and when the wind blows. Hydro in France is already built-up everywhere it was feasible. There are no more spots to build meaningful hydro power capacity. Too bad since hydro is the only renewable that can really replace the nuclear power plants.

At least with studies on the Australian grid, it seems like the need for "baseload" sources is myth fueled mostly by resistance to upgrading to renewable sources. https://www.energymatters.com.au/renewable-news/baseload-ene...

There's a lot of "could" and "will need to change" there, don't see hard facts proving a myth.

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

missedthecue wrote: post #191
frogpelt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole controversy around nuclear, seems to indicate people are not as worried about the climate as they claim to be.

It reminds me of how people bash hydro for killing fish and instead advocate wind farms which kill thousands of endangered birds. Everyone has their vested interests and pre-conceived biases I suppose.

[deleted]

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

#200

Post by epistasis »

jjoonathan wrote: post #90
onli wrote: post #41

Earlier 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?

The reason that we stopped building nuclear wasn't because of anti-nuclear forces, but because of terrible mismanagement of builds in the US, mismanagement that didn't happen elsewhere in the world.

Rates of builds were declining before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and those were the events that turned the public against nuclear.

There was a great 1985 article about this in Forbes, which I highly recommend:

https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...

Ideally we wouldn't have wasted those decades, but we must go forward with the greatest speed with the best tech we have now.

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