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Nuclear Power in France

world-nuclear.org

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Re: Nuclear Power in France

#191

Post by robviren »

avianlyric wrote: post #160
sudosysgen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually quite sustainable. The reactor core is not a large cost for a GW over 15 years. The US navy swaps out reactor cores for 100-200 million dollars, and those are in submarines and ships. There is basically no maintenance outside of those. For comparison, a GW of wind capacity is 1.6 billion every 20 years. For solar panels for 1GW of average generation you'll be paying 10 billion dollars or so every 25-30…

I think GP meant environmentally sustainable, rather than fiscally sustainable, you need to do something with the old reactor cores.

What does a coal plant do with the emitted radiation, CO2, coal ash, and other waste products? Current spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors sit in concrete casks located on site usually. At least I don't need to breath spent nuclear fuel or have to deal with it's CO2. Not saying we should do nothing about it, but at least the impact to my life today is substantially less.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#192

Post by _ph_ »

whimsicalism wrote: post #190
_ph_ wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As have all western countries. Building a new nuclear power plant at the safety level one would expect today is hugely expensive.

South Korea hasn't forgotten. They have gotten the costs down quite a bit.

How far?

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#193

Post by _ph_ »

the8472 wrote: post #180
_ph_ wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I have not made that point clear enough in my post: currently they are failing to build replacement plants at a cost at which they could replace all of the existing reactors. Unless they can come up with an entirely new design which considerably cuts cost compared to what is considered a "current design" right now, there will be a reduction in capacity.

Building them in series tends to make per-unit cost come down.

Yes, that would be to expect. But to determine the feasibility and calculate possible savings with further units, one would have to finish the first of the series first.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#194

Post by kmonsen »

forty wrote: post #173
Ericson2314 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! Rail and nuclear power seem to play out the exact same tragedy. Very sad.

If you like trains and nuclear, you should move to France, we have lots of both. And pastry too ;)

But you also need to be able to speak French well. If not it would be my number 1 country :-)

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#195

Post by mcguire »

sudosysgen wrote: post #76
ortusdux wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with molten salt based reactors is that the high temperature radioactive molten salts destroy their containment vessels. I've yet to see a system design where the salt facing components are expected to last more that 7-10 years, which really hurts profitability.

Yes, the reactor cores would have to be replaced every 12-15 years. But if the reactors are mass produced and designed to swap out the cores, it doesn't have to be too expensive.

What happens to the used cores?

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#196

Post by sudosysgen »

worik wrote: post #184
sudosysgen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the reactor cores would have to be replaced every 12-15 years. But if the reactors are mass produced and designed to swap out the cores, it doesn't have to be too expensive.

The core will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years will it not?

The molten salt will be quite radioactive, yes. It is part of the radioactive waste generated by a molten salt reactor. Some types of molten salt reactors do not have this problem, but I don't think they are the most practical.

The metal containing the molten salts might become somewhat radioactive too.

All in all, this is still comparable in amount of waste to water cooled reactors.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#197

Post by makomk »

PaulHoule wrote: post #172
lazide wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a ‘basic capacity price’ type basis, nuclear is dirt cheap. When you throw in endless political tarpits and their side effects (like having no economies of scale at all despite the clear opportunity for them) then yes, it is very expensive. shrug Most nuclear projects outside of China basically turned into exercises in endless planning churn and endless delays for no rational reason to appease anti-progress politi…

If Amory Lovins had designed a nuclear reactor that would be unaffordable to build it would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) You can make the case that regulation inflates the cost of nuclear power plants, and that's somewhat true, but the deep problem is the cost of the steam turbine and other facilities (e.g. heat exchangers) to accept energy at the low temperatures that the LWR works at. All…

The UK tried building gas cooled reactors that produced more useful and efficient steam temperatures on the output. They worked - in fact, they make up pretty much the entire UK nuclear generation capacity these days - but turned out not to be as practical as boring PWR reactors due to various annoying engineering issues. There are other reactor concepts out there which promise to do better but they're pretty untested and would also likely turn out to be harder to build than they look.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#198

Post by sudosysgen »

avianlyric wrote: post #160
sudosysgen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually quite sustainable. The reactor core is not a large cost for a GW over 15 years. The US navy swaps out reactor cores for 100-200 million dollars, and those are in submarines and ships. There is basically no maintenance outside of those. For comparison, a GW of wind capacity is 1.6 billion every 20 years. For solar panels for 1GW of average generation you'll be paying 10 billion dollars or so every 25-30…

I think GP meant environmentally sustainable, rather than fiscally sustainable, you need to do something with the old reactor cores.

The reactor core will probably be drained of molten salts and then treated as low level radioactive waste.

Yes it is waste, but I don't see anyone making the argument with wind turbines or solar panels, which will create more waste in total.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#199

Post by concordDance »

worik wrote: post #184
sudosysgen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the reactor cores would have to be replaced every 12-15 years. But if the reactors are mass produced and designed to swap out the cores, it doesn't have to be too expensive.

The core will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years will it not?

Which is nowhere near as big a deal as it sounds. The damage it will do (on average) if glassed and buried 100ft under ground is absolutely negligible at the scale we are talking about (global climate change and energy in general).

Yes, there's a 1 in 10000000 chance that 2000 years from now industrial age humans recovering from the apocalypse might dig a well in exactly that location and thousands will get sick with hundreds of deaths. You could multiply that by a hundred thousand cores and it would still be negligible compared to the hundreds of millions likely to die due to climate change in the next century

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#200

Post by pas »

worrycue wrote: post #119
_ph_ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> currently only 1 or 2 new reactors are under construction and both late and way over budget. So in a few decades France has forgotten how to build reactors on time and in an affordable way?

It's not surprising at all.

Everything has been debundled, privatized, consolidated, streamlined, modernized. This is not "bad" in itself, but doing big public projects this way is not efficient, because this way of organization needs big volume to become efficient.

Basically we need to order 100+ reactors to get them cheap and fast. (And we need to have them use truly standardized interchangeable (modular) components. Naturally, modularity has an overhead, but it pays off if there's a long term for it to pay off. As long as we only build a few plants treating each of them as different allows for some local optimizations, but that is against large volume manufacturing, maintenance, etc.)

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