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Nuclear Power in France

world-nuclear.org

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Re: Nuclear Power in France

#101

Post by andrewxdiamond »

pjscott wrote: post #67
andrewxdiamond wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 plants take ages to build, and are insanely expensive. If you look at the list of reactors in the article, most of them took only 5-6 years to build. Between 1977 and 1987, a ten-year span of time, they added 45 GW of nuclear power to the grid. Do nuclear plants really take ages to build?

You can stand up incremental solar panels at a very small scale and go up from there. Solar also requires almost 0 regulatory red tape, something that adds years onto the planning stage of a plant

You get no ROI from nuclear until the plant is active.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#102

Post by cesarb »

sudosysgen wrote: post #82
lazide wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even crazier - attacking the power lines doesn’t even require bolt cutters. A ballon or toy drone and some aluminized string or thin wire is more than enough to have it blow itself up.

The thin wire will melt appart before the power lines do.

> The thin wire will melt apart before the power lines do.

It's a bit more subtle than that. As far as I understand, the thin wire might melt, but its vaporized remnants would be enough to keep an arc going between the phases or a phase and the ground. Then the protection devices at both ends of the line would detect the short circuit, turn off the line, wait for a bit of time (enough for the vaporized remnants and ionized air to disperse), and turn the line on again automatically. Since most high-voltage power grids have redundant circuits, it's likely that no consumer would lose power even for a moment.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#103

Post by lazide »

sudosysgen wrote: post #82
lazide wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even crazier - attacking the power lines doesn’t even require bolt cutters. A ballon or toy drone and some aluminized string or thin wire is more than enough to have it blow itself up.

The thin wire will melt appart before the power lines do.

It doesn’t melt, it vaporizes, causing a live plasma channel to form and a giant arc between the lines that is self sustaining. If they have a arc interrupter, it might stop it before it destroys the lines, but not often, and at the power levels we’re talking about here, it is a very difficult problem.

The technique the US Military uses to destroy enemy power grids is to detonate a ball of long stringy aluminum confetti/Mylar above the enemy power substations. The destruction is apparently substantial.

Check out Mylar balloons and power lines (lots of compilations on YouTube if you don’t believe me.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#104

Post by kazinator »

lm28469 wrote: post #66
shakow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn’t acceptable. We do people focus so much on the danger aspect of nuclear energy only? Why not the thousands of people who died of dam break, the millions who die of lung failure due to exposure to polluants, or, the elephant in the room, the dozens of millions whoe die and will die of climate change? Sure, it's very sad that a han…

> We do people focus so much on the danger aspect of nuclear energy only? Because nuclear = bad word / bombs / chernobyl They don't mind living in cities and breathing cars exhaust all day long even though it shaves years of their lives though. Real world boiling frog situation

Indeed, the word nuclear is so bad that nuclear-magnetic resonance (NMR) has to be called just magnetic in medicine. You go for an MRI, not NMRI.

When nuclear-magnetic resonance is used in a scientific or industrial setting for analyzing the chemical content of a sample, it is properly called NMR.

[Source: organic chemistry prof pointed this out, almost 30 years ago.]

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#105

Post by corban1 »

misiti3780 wrote: post #80
corban1 wrote: post #69

Nuclear is clean, it is safe but it is not cheap. It's safe and clean because of it's moderately priced. I stand by nuclear because it's cleanness and safeness which can't be compared to anything else. What will we generate electricity with in non-windy cloudy days? Coal? LNG? ESS? Note that all of those options are more dangerous, more expensive and more dirty than nuclear.

Not sure about Europe, but nuclear seems to be expensive in the US because construction costs are high because of overcautious regulation[1]. It was considerably cheaper in the 50/60s here, and it seems like mostly a policy issue [1] https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

That's the point. Nuclear is getting over-regulated to be safe, not to make any mistakes. I don't disagree with the regulators. I disagree with overly cheap nuclear. Overall, no power generation method can replace nuclear's steady output with its level of cleanness and safeness.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#106

Post by smotah »

baud147258 wrote: post #47
andrewxdiamond wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Indeed, nuclear power plants requires way less concrete by kWh than wind turbines.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#107

Post by Manuel_D »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #84
shakow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn’t acceptable. We do people focus so much on the danger aspect of nuclear energy only? Why not the thousands of people who died of dam break, the millions who die of lung failure due to exposure to polluants, or, the elephant in the room, the dozens of millions whoe die and will die of climate change? Sure, it's very sad that a han…

> I, too, often randomly stumble on nuclear waste depots 400m deep under the surface. Such a way to waste my Sunday. When those dumps leak into your groundwater it does indeed ruin your day.

Not really. We test for uranium contamination of water. There's actually a lot of areas where naturally occurring uranium puts it above safe concentrations and it has to be filtered out. This is the case in much of California, the Rockies that feed into this area's water supply naturally had high uranium concentration [1]. Given that we already test and treat water she to naturally occurring uranium I'm not too concerned over waste sites.

1. https://www.kqed.org/stateofhealth/120396/uranium-contaminat...

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#108

Post by nickik »

pjscott wrote: post #55

I often hear opponents of nuclear power say that it takes too long to construct, so it's interesting to look at the timelines for these reactors -- most of them took about 5-6 years from the start of construction to being hooked up to the power grid, and there was a lot of concurrent construction, so their peak throughput was several reactors per year. More recently France seems to have lost the ability to build nucl…

There has been a lot of research into this.

The main thing is actually learning effects, the second thing is 'mass production'.

If you have teams that have build reactors before, they will be much better. Once you have people on their 3rd reactor, they go fast.

Its kind of like other massive infrastructure projects like bridges.

Basically nuclear reactors are large civil engineering projects, and you need experience to do it.

The second is that some parts, like the core reactor vessel are insanely complex high pressure and the production of these needs special facilities that basically only exist in like 3 places. They managed in the 70-80s to kind of 'mass' produce these but today its totally costume.

Another things is, France totally failed by themselves to build next generation plants. Its borderline crazy that we are still building PWR type reactors. All attempts at next generation reactors have been terrible.

I am really high on what's going on in Canada, real next generation reactors are FINALLY really seriously going threw real internationally recognized nuclear validation from a first class regulator.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#109

Post by _ph_ »

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://…

France isn't reducing the capacity as a targetted policy but out of necessity. They have 58 nuclear power plants, most of them quite old (before 80ies). To maintain the current level, they would have to be replaced not too far in the future, but currently only 1 or 2 new reactors are under construction and both late and way over budget. So there currently is no route in maintaining the current capacity. Consequently politics has to come up with a roadmap which relies less on nuclear power.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#110

Post by godelski »

forty wrote: post #45
woko wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Most of the French nuclear reactors were built when they had the capacity to build many reactors and thus it was cheaper. The problem with a lot of current nuclear costs is that you have to reinvent the wheel every time. If you're mass producing then things get cheaper. We haven't mass produced reactors in decades.
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