Nuclear Power in France

> Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely expensive.

So do subways, these days, for no good reason!

Capitalism kinda sucks at things with upfront costs and little maintenance costs. Without operational costs in fuel, there can't be enough rent sneaking to make the investment self-funding, and without the ability to do things incrementally --- constant practice --- we can't lower costs the usual way.

Fundamentally, Capitalism is bad at capital, and good at operational. Irony in the name.

It's no secret that places like Korea are good at doing nuclear power and subways cheaply. It's the same skill. Unfortunately, to the extent it's exporters being good at it, they skill relates on our non-skill.

From OP: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

> France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation, and gains over €3 billion per year from this.

> In November 2018, a draft of the country's new energy plan confirmed that 2035 was the new target date for the reduction of nuclear's share to 50%. The plan states that 14 of the country's nuclear reactors will shut down by 2035, 4-6 of those by 2030. However the plan also states that the option to build new nuclear reactors remains

Taking into consideration France's industrial activity and being within the world's top 10 economies with approximately equal to Japan's GDP per capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_France, it is without a doubt one of the best countries in carbon emissions per capita. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

If one were to argue that not all countries are capable of following the nuclear power model, I think that would be a valid argument, but electricity and power can be exported, and France makes a profit from the nearly-free energy that it generates.

Before someone mentions renewable energy methods such as solar power, hydro, windmills, etc.: Who exports solar power? Who exports windmill energy? Who stores and uses an effective proportion of methane gas as a result of renewable energy? Is there any country with the available infrastructure of stored energy (centralized or decentralized) that can even make claim to power its own country's needs by a proportion of 70%, let alone 50%?

So what about safety?

We have been conditioned culturally to believe that nuclear power is dangerous, but stats-wise, coal mining, air pollution, and work hazards account for far, far more deaths recorded than nuclear power so far. I encourage anyone interested to Google "nuclear power deaths comparison" and pick the sources you think are unbiased, or just believe this:

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

> Nuclear energy is by far the safest energy source in this comparison – it results in more than 442 times fewer deaths than the ‘dirtiest’ forms of coal; 330 times fewer than coal; 250 times less than oil; and 38 times fewer than gas

So nuclear fission brings in money, less deaths, and decarbonization, with the only drawback being its image of how to store nuclear waste which itself shouldn't even be an issue compared to the pollution we see nowadays, and that some proportion of it is also reusable.

The anti-nuclear sentiment in favor of solar panels and more green technologies are red herrings even big companies love to use to split up decarbonization into factions and slow the movement down. The infrastructure required to construct+maintain solar panels that can satisfy our current living situation will be slower than going to nuclear, with capacity for future growth currently out of the question because fulfilling current needs is nowhere within reach.

If nuclear power is the cheapest way we know to generate power, this is the most obvious way companies can cut down on costs, and the involvement of companies is necessary for climate change to make progress, because companies are the biggest contributors to climate change. People will far more easily change their behavior if you show them something they want, rather than telling them what they do not want.

For the current energy arrangement to withstand the next century and to ignore nuclear fission, I believe one of two things needs to happen: A decoupling from opulent, wasteful lifestyles or the breakthrough of nuclear fusion. Do both sound very far from happening? If yes, then nuclear fission is the only choice unless you think every nation in the world is going to hold hands and follow through on climate change policies in exchange for their own economic prosperity relative to other nations.

The inherit risks are supremely low and the catastrophic failure mode for nuclear plants isn't a nuclear winter, in the absolutely worst case it's a contamination of the area where the plant was built (Modern nukes are all about containing failures. So even while they've optimized for not failing, they've also optimized for what happens when failure happens).

Nuclear waste isn't nearly as difficult to deal with as NIMBYs are. It's pretty easy to find enough room and locations to store nuclear waste, the harder part is convincing people that's a good place to store it. For example, a single abandoned mine could house decades worth of nuclear waste. Nuclear plants produce almost no waste and the waste they do produce is entirely self contained. Further, more modern breeder reactors produce even less waste and the waste they produce ends up having a low level or radioactivity at the end of it.

For the national defense argument, Every single power generation method has an output line to tie to the grid. Why would you attack a cooling tower (which would take a bunch of heavy duty explosives) when cutting a few MW transmission lines would have the same effect and require bolt cutters?

The only reason not to build new nuclear is because it's more expensive than the current crop of green tech and it will take longer to bring online. Existing nuclear should keep operating until the grid is decarbonized.

We've already detonated hundreds of nuclear bombs. The effects are ecologically catastrophic, but negligible compared to the damage of fossil fuels. As long as there is a single coal plant in the world, or a city whose transportation is based on burning fossil fuels, worrying too much about nuclear plants is stupid (unless you live just next to one of them).

Hydro power has greater risks.