221–230 of 256 posts
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That's far from guaranteed. It's very possible to have little wind over a large area, larger than France even, during the night.
And the same for solar. There are several hours every day when the sun is shining nowhere on (Metropolitan) France.
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Fessenheim nearly got out of control in 2016 when water flooded electrical equipment racks. Control of of the reactor rods was interrupted, core temperature was rising uncontrollably. Letting the control rods fall into the core via gravity didn't work anymore either. They had to emergency flood the core with Boron, which luckily worked, the first time this has happened in a western european power reactor. They assign…
We can't be sure, but based on the french independent nuclear authority, this does not look to be accurate. Just the dramatized version of a German anti-nuclear group: https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2016/03/04/un-inciden... It is in French, but it is saying that nothing was out of control and out of ordinary small issues. The temperature was a little bit out of the normal during the operations but that is qui…
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> 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 powe…
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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…
That might be, but Germany and Switzerland assessed the safety to be suboptimal. "In 2007, the same year a Swiss study found that seismic risks in the Alsace region had been underestimated during construction, the ASN denounced a “lack of rigour” in EDF’s operation of the plant."
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So the people you want to oversee the safety of nuclear installations are people who do not know reactor physics or civil engineering? Also, universities are quite far from the political elite in France, none of which actually know about anything related to nuclear power plants. Engineer at the ASN are just that: engineers. They don't take decisions.
It's just like every other example of regulatory capture, really - the people who're qualified to assess the safety of nuclear power plants are those who have training in reactor physics and engineering, which is of course the same pool of people that plant operators draw from when building and operating their plants, so you end up with a revolving door effect where the nominally independent regulator is incredibly c…
Besides, they don’t make decisions, as the Fessenheim example demonstrates. The people making decisions are politicians who have no clue and just follow gut feeling and electoral arithmetic. Not many of them come from engineering schools, much less universities.
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The bulk of French renewable is hydro, which is not going to grow, and has been there for ages. It's actually a very good complement to nuclear plants. It's disingenuous to point at 28% renewables as if it's a sudden victory of good wind and solar against bad old nuclear. Particularly when we know that gas power plants will be built to partially replace Fessenheim.
Current renewable generation is two thirds hydro, one third solar and wind. France's installed capacity for solar plus wind already exceeds hydro. With plenty of room for more.
Comparing installed capacity without discussing average load factor is also utterly meaningless.
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Current renewable generation is two thirds hydro, one third solar and wind. France's installed capacity for solar plus wind already exceeds hydro. With plenty of room for more.
We were not talking about installed capacity, though. Comparing installed capacity without discussing average load factor is also utterly meaningless.
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> 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 powe…
I mean, I don't doubt that that's true, but at the same time a single modern wind turbine generates 2-5 MWp, up 8 MWp offshore.
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There's a significant difference between diffuse radioactivity and the sort of waste nuclear plants put out, though. In both impact on humans, and mitigation.
Right - diffuse radioactivity is harder to contain or clean up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23662241
Could Fessenheim 2 be leaking nuclear particles?