Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear Power in France

world-nuclear.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 309 posts

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#41

Post by eldaisfish »

prettygood wrote: post #14
rllearneratwork wrote: post #4

being anti-nuclear at times of climate crisis is a moral and intellectual equivalent to being anti-vaccines during the pandemic

You're judging to quickly without looking at all parameters. The cost of nuclear power has only been rising and the price per kWh is much higher compared to wind or solar. Building cost and time has never been correctly estimated for new plants. Just ask France, UK and Finland. Which resulted in going way over budget. All of this while prices for solar and wind are lowering... Obviously you can't rely solely on wind…

every time someone mentions the cost of wind and solar, i remind them of the same point - there are lots of costs that are not borne by wind and solar. The “low” cost is primarily due to their fuel cost being zero and that’s not inherently a bad thing.

The problem is in assuming that the current “cost” scales linearly. it does not.

Some examples of these costs are balancing, standby, frequency support and so on. At the moment, no “cost” metric for renewables includes these costs. They assume that all energy generated is consumed by the grid and this is increasingly not the case.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#42

Post by JumpCrisscross »

prettygood wrote: post #14
rllearneratwork wrote: post #4

being anti-nuclear at times of climate crisis is a moral and intellectual equivalent to being anti-vaccines during the pandemic

You're judging to quickly without looking at all parameters. The cost of nuclear power has only been rising and the price per kWh is much higher compared to wind or solar. Building cost and time has never been correctly estimated for new plants. Just ask France, UK and Finland. Which resulted in going way over budget. All of this while prices for solar and wind are lowering... Obviously you can't rely solely on wind…

> cost of nuclear power has only been rising and the price per kWh is much higher compared to wind or solar

Do we have numbers from China? They're actually pursuing this technology. The West, largely, is not. I'd thus be hesitant about comparing numbers from a stagnated industry from one with active R&D.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#43

Post by inasio »

Fun fact I learned from a guy from the team: the team that built the Pepper robot [0] was originally employed by the French nuclear comission to build and operate robots to remotely work inside nuclear plants in the case of an accident (or when doing cleanups).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(robot)

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#44

Post by jasamer »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #19
redm wrote: post #2

"Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035." I'm no expert on Nuclear power but it seems to me were going in the wrong direction. At a time when we're investing so much money in other fuels, we could be investing that in better nuclear power, like Small Modular Reactors [1], Sodium Cooled Fission, Small Pellet reactors, etc. [2] [1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-sm... [2] https://…

Nuclear is always touted as such a good idea on this site, but I want to take the opposite stance. - Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in other forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such thing as 100%. If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn’t acceptable. - Nuclear waste is difficult t…

> They also require ... absurd amounts of space.

I'd have thought that nuclear requires the least amount of space of all energy sources.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#45

Post by forty »

woko wrote: post #18
redm wrote: post #2

"Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035." I'm no expert on Nuclear power but it seems to me were going in the wrong direction. At a time when we're investing so much money in other fuels, we could be investing that in better nuclear power, like Small Modular Reactors [1], Sodium Cooled Fission, Small Pellet reactors, etc. [2] [1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-sm... [2] https://…

The government policy for a reduction to 50% is not based on issues with nuclear power itself. As far as I have seen, there are mainly 2 reasons mentioned in the public debate: i) a concern about the disposal of nuclear wastes and the long-term cost of their storage, and ii) the desire to follow other countries' policies, with a focus on wind, water and sunlight, rather than leading the way with the cheapest and most…

Where have you seen nuclear is the cheapest solution for electrity production? Nuclear has some benefits, but price does seem to be one of them (and actually one of the reasons for preferring renewable)

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#46

Post by eldaisfish »

beders wrote: post #5
rllearneratwork wrote: post #4

being anti-nuclear at times of climate crisis is a moral and intellectual equivalent to being anti-vaccines during the pandemic

bullshit. If there are cheaper and safer alternatives. being anti-nuclear is common sense.

the problem with cheaper and safer is that you are assuming there will come a point in the future where carbon-based generation will be eliminated. That date is indeterminate and isn’t guaranteed.

On the other hand is nuclear, a technology that’s well understood, expensive, over-regulated but which does not have ongoing carbon emissions.

Climate change is a problem today. It was a problem yesterday and needs a solution ASAP, not at some indeterminate point in the future.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#47

Post by baud147258 »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #19
redm wrote: post #2

"Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035." I'm no expert on Nuclear power but it seems to me were going in the wrong direction. At a time when we're investing so much money in other fuels, we could be investing that in better nuclear power, like Small Modular Reactors [1], Sodium Cooled Fission, Small Pellet reactors, etc. [2] [1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-sm... [2] https://…

Nuclear is always touted as such a good idea on this site, but I want to take the opposite stance. - Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in other forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such thing as 100%. If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn’t acceptable. - Nuclear waste is difficult t…

> They also require massive amounts of concrete (bad for the environment, locally and globally) and absurd amounts of space.

All the other types of power plants use massive amount of concrete too and space (except solar panel installed on roofs)

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#48

Post by eldaisfish »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #36
baud147258 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are alternatives really cheaper when you need to build more to compensate for the moments when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow?

Yes, even assuming curtailment, renewables + storage are cheaper than nuclear. EDIT (sources): https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-rec... https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-sola... https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/1144654725901504512 https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/09/solar-challenging-nuc... https://www…

are you certain this remains true on a grid dominated by wind and solar? it is true at the moment because the grid just deals with the vagaries of these sources and other generators (and consumers) bear the cost.

Will this continue to be the case?

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#49

Post by timinc »

ElKrist wrote: post #20
beders wrote: post #6

Note how France conveniently placed many of their nuclear power plants close to their eastern border. With winds coming from the west most time of the year... Sneaky.

For those who actually want to see a map, showing that "how France conveniently placed many of their nuclear power plants close to their eastern border" is non-sense: https://www.irsn.fr/FR/connaissances/Installations_nucleaire...

Very interesting

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#50

Post by dehrmann »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #19
redm wrote: post #2

"Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035." I'm no expert on Nuclear power but it seems to me were going in the wrong direction. At a time when we're investing so much money in other fuels, we could be investing that in better nuclear power, like Small Modular Reactors [1], Sodium Cooled Fission, Small Pellet reactors, etc. [2] [1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-sm... [2] https://…

Nuclear is always touted as such a good idea on this site, but I want to take the opposite stance. - Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in other forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such thing as 100%. If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn’t acceptable. - Nuclear waste is difficult t…

> Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in other forms of modern energy generation.

The risk is mostly that there's a large, high-profile accident every 20 years. Coal power has probably killed more regular people (not miners) than nuclear due to its emissions, but it's metered out slowly, so it's less scary.

People are more afraid of flying than driving for the same reason.

Post reply on HN