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Nuclear Power in France

world-nuclear.org

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Re: Nuclear Power in France

#151

Post by iforgotpassword »

Manuel_D wrote: post #107
jacobsenscott wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 conce…

So the testing will then also magically clean the water if it gets contaminated? Sure, if Flint MI is our baseline for acceptable living standards this is fine.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#152

Post by Ericson2314 »

oezi wrote: post #123
Ericson2314 wrote: post #24

Japan is turning the nukes back on, France with the Eastern Europeans is taking on Germany's reckless move https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/11/led-by-france-10-eu-coun... . The current energy crunch is demonstrating how "renewables now, nukes of off now, batteries later" is irresponsible both environmentally and politically, I hope it's a turning point. At the vary least, turning off the nukes is a reward one earns a…

Two counterpoints: - Isn't the current gas shortage just Putin trying to ram through Nordstream 2? - Isn't it great to have high prices fossil energy sources to drive renewable investment and stop wasteful use of fossils?

It is great the price has gone up. What's bad is people are buying it anyways.

The price needs to be high, sure, but also too high, in that demand is scared off and consumption/revenue goes down. Sadly, the price is not too high at the moment by that definition.

> Isn't the current gas shortage just Putin trying to ram through Nordstream 2?

I have no idea. What I noticed is not even a gas shortage, but a wind shortage driving up demand for gas.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#153

Post by culi »

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…

The obsession with solar panels is currently driving a major ecological catastrophe. Solar panels are known to leak lead in the environment. We also have no good way to recycle them once the cells are done for good (currently, the average lifespan of a panel is about 20 years). There is already a massive buildup of solar waste full of extremely toxic components and we're not even close to seeing the worst of it considering most solar panels today were installed in the past 2 decades.

In addition to that, the amount of space it would take to have the equivalent amount of power that a modern nuclear plant would provide is a massive ecological disaster in and of itself.

And I haven't even begun to talk about batteries...

Solar is not the solution. To be honest nuclear isn't either. Coal is obviously terrible and wind is unreliable. The real solution that no one dares to talk about is degrowth. George Bush articulated it himself when he said, "“The American way of life is not up for negotiations." And to this day we would never dare to bring up the idea that we actually just need to USE LESS.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#154

Post by orwin »

nickik wrote: post #108
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…

The reason why we still use PWR is because of pilotability. When you're able to modulate the power of a reactor of 40% in 30 minutes without damaging anything or engaging any failsafe, you can reasonably make nuclear reactor follow the consumption.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#155

Post by eldaisfish »

cogman10 wrote: post #91
eldaisfish wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is an oversimplified and thus misleading comparison. A nuclear (or any fuel-controlled generator) can generate power at-will i.e. on demand. No wind or solar generator can do this and before you say batteries, no battery in existence can power a medium-sized city for more than a few minutes. These comparisons are usually presented as an aggregated amount of energy over a year and completely ignore the fact that…

What? This infographic is proving the point that nuclear generates a BUNCH of power and a single plant would require vast amounts of renewables to replace it. Did you actually read it before ranting? > No wind or solar generator can do this and before you say batteries, no battery in existence can power a medium-sized city for more than a few minutes. This is a silly argument. The only real limiting factor on the cap…

i did read it. It is a mischaracterisation because the two are not comparable as time is ignored. To achieve functional parity with a fuel-powered generator such as a nuclear plant, you would need to guarantee identical operation with an array of wind generators. At the moment, this is only possible over large geographical areas.

As for battery capacity, you seem to underestimate how much electrical energy even small cities use. The limiting factor is capacity. FYI, the US consumes around 3,800 terawatt hours of electrical energy annually. Good luck powering even a fraction of that for more than a few seconds with a battery.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#156

Post by godelski »

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…

> You can claim that todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such thing as 100%.

I'm not sure how you wrote this and took it seriously. Should I never leave the house? How do I eat? Eating is more dangerous than that. We can't just live in a bubble. There is never perfect safety in anything you will do in life. You'll always have to make risk/reward trade offs. Historically nuclear shows the safest option.

> Nuclear waste is difficult to deal with. Our current strategies include finding a secret underground cave, and hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it. Not to mention we have no plan for dealing with widespread use of nuclear power and the waste that would produce.

You seem to be uninformed of how these work. If you care to learn more I suggest reading here[0]. I bet you're also overestimating how much waste there is. Let's look at the total waste of decades worth of France[1] and Russian[2] waste. That's the entire amount of waste since the nuclear programs started till now. France also recycles most of its waste which greatly reduces the rate of waste. Storage also doesn't have to be as long as you think. We tend to have a few orders of safety in nuclear safety. You're also not being fair in your comparisons. You're acting like strip mining and dredging for rare earth materials isn't doing crazy damage to our environment too. Pretending that these also don't pose a significant waste problem as well. Like the previous response, there is a waste tradeoff. Even the IPCC reports will demonstrate that the lifetime emissions and waste is low for nuclear. This is the part that frustrates me most about many of these discussions. People act like solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal are perfectly clean and have no problems. Doing so just demonstrates naivety. I'm happy you're passionate. Good. We need passionate people to solve this problem. BUT we can't stay uneducated and expect to solve the most complex problem humans have ever faced in history. I repeat: the most complex problem in human history. I don't pretend to be an expert. No single person can know everything. But to act like it is simple is harmful. And just to clarify, "pro-nuclear" just means keeping it on the table as an option. It does not mean using only nuclear. Energy requires a diverse portfolio of tools. The more we limit ourselves the more challenging the problem is ahead.

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

I actually agree with this argument.

> Nuclear is centralized, and vulnerable to attack.

They also are very hard to attack, never have been, and there's a reason they haven't. It is just never worth it because reactors can shut down. They are designed to take multiple plane strikes.

> Compared to other readily available green power sources, I cannot fathom why nuclear is preferred to a safe, distributed, clean grid of solar panels.

Read this[1]. You're vastly overestimating the risk. But that is unsurprising since humans are notoriously bad at it.

> edit: A large number of replies seem to think I am pro-shutdown of plants or pro-coal, but that was never stated. My argument is against further investment into nuclear when there are other more known technologies available, like solar and wind.

That's because that's what your comment implies, even if you don't realize it. Many people do not actually understand the complexities of climate change, how we got here, and how much further we have to go. Most people think green energy is simply a matter of political will. It's far from that. Physics Girl recently did a 4 part series on Hydrogen Fuel [4], Batteries and Fuelcells[5], Storage[6], and CSP[7]. Climate change isn't happening simply because we drive cars and our grid isn't green. Changing those only gets us half way there. And no, the other half isn't switching to a vegan diet, we're just talking about the energy sector. There's still major technical challenges that lie ahead, especially in mass storage.

[0] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/risk.html

[2] https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghIckc7nrY

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWAO3vUn7nw

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHmIVw9etns

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccO0_hSXMyM

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#157

Post by Zigurd »

masta wrote: post #26

What the site does not seem to talk about is that an internal commission in 2011 found[1] that the real cost per kWh is around 50-56c. Nuclear power in France is heavily subsidized, directly and indirectly. [1] https://bit.ly/3DAGW2s

France has also underestimated decommissioning costs by a multiple. The real costs are hard to know, but other nations' estimates are much higher.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#158

Post by Ericson2314 »

lazide wrote: post #56
forty wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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…

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

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#159

Post by Zigurd »

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

Here is a better analogy: Being pro nuclear is like being anti-vaxx because monoclonal antibodies work. They just cost a large multiple of vaccination.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#160

Post by avianlyric »

sudosysgen wrote: post #141
bipson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still not "sustainable". And not really cheap either.

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.
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