181–190 of 256 posts
There is a pro nuclear power lobby that loves to trivialise toxic radio active waste. They argue that storing it in caves with clear warning signs will deter future generations from accidentally messing about with its content. They forgot historical context can be quickly lost over a few thousand years and assume there will not be a technological dark age in the future. CO2 might well introduce long term damage to th…
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This would be great if CO2 was the only waste product of a nuclear plant, but it's not. You not only needed to keep building plants, but also designate proper waste storage sites, which are still up in the air to this day, and some sites like Hanford are utter ecological disasters. It also did not help that the 70s ended with the Three-Mile Island disaster and serious construction flaws being found at Trojan. Then in…
How many people have died because of that lax safety attitude? Less than any other power source. To call it waste is even debatable as it is still usable for energy production, it just costs too much right now. In the future, this may change. Low level and high level nuclear waste are not the same and the high level waste, as done in some countries at cost, could be reprocessed for fuel. In addition, what is the resu…
Just because someone doesn't kill someone driving recklessly does not excuse their behavior, nor does it mean they won't kill someone next time.
The rest of your post seems to be hand waving away serious safety concerns. Chernobyl and Fukishima involved the people who were in charge of the plant making poor decisions. They both played stupid games, and they were not the sole recipient of the stupid prize. Neither of these events were cakewalks for the people affected by them, or the people fighting to prevent an even greater disaster. Dumping ocean water on damaged reactor cores is not standard operating procedure. Lots of uncharted territory in both. It was not sad that a major nuclear meltdown was one of the main focuses of the disaster. Your downplaying of these events is not reassuring. This is why nuclear has a bad image. Very shitty things have happened due to human negligence and they're just hand waved away, as if they won't happen again, but they do happen again, and both of these examples could have been much much worse.
>To call it waste is even debatable.
Are you volunteering your basement to store it in? Even if it can be reprocessed at some point, ya gotta store it somewhere until then, and that day may never actually come.
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I was already aware. How does pointing this out solve nuclear waste storage issues?
Coal was the alternative we chose, so it set the standard to beat.
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As stated in the article, the 40 year lifespan is a lie from 'les verts'. The facility was built for 40 year with minimal maintenance. This is not the lifespan if the facility was well maintained.
Maintenance for nuclear in France is not "minimal": for the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1) For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2) (1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.…
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> Afaik originally the life-span for most reactors of that kind was 40 years It is not. That number was made so that EDF would get a proper return of investment. Some plants based on the same design have been granted lifespan to 60 years in the US. > how far past that are we willing to go? As long as its safe. Why throw away something that works, is safe and reliable on the counts that some folks put out a number?
How can anyone call nuclear power "safe"? Have we discovered a way to actually deal with the nuclear waste yet?
One is captured, packaged, and stashed away; the other is poured into the air in high volumes, continuously fueling a runaway scenario.
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If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, and had simply kept building at the same rate, our grid would be (near) zero carbon today . Not several decades from now if we hustle our asses off, today . But that's not what happened. The anti-nuclear team won and we collectively made the responsible decision to fill our atmosphere with CO2 instead. Yay?
This would be great if CO2 was the only waste product of a nuclear plant, but it's not. You not only needed to keep building plants, but also designate proper waste storage sites, which are still up in the air to this day, and some sites like Hanford are utter ecological disasters. It also did not help that the 70s ended with the Three-Mile Island disaster and serious construction flaws being found at Trojan. Then in…
> The saddest part of this story is that there is no new renewable plant being built overnight to replace Fessenheim. It will be replaced almost entirely by fossil fuels. > It’s worth noting that, as Fessenheim closes, Germany is commissioning a new coal-fired power plant, in Datteln Exactly. Why are so many people ignoring what happens in step 2? When nuclear is shut down, it gets replaced with something worse. Ofte…
> When nuclear is shut down, it gets replaced with something worse. Often coal! The implication that this is what happened in Germany is misinformation. None of the energy production of retired nuclear plants in Germany was replaced by coal. Renewable energy replaced the vast majority of it over the last 10 years, and coal use is down by 50% in that period.
France still has a lot of nuclear plants left (and of course hardly any coal at all). The one discussed in the article was the smallest one in any case according to this overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran....
Interestingly, this overview excludes solar and wind. Especially solar would be popular in the sense that there are loads of small domestic deployments and comparatively small plants that collectively add up to a lot of production with more coming online all the time. Most of the country gets a decent amount of sun throughout the year and like pretty much anywhere else, the French have been deploying loads of solar panels on their roofs. Also they've been growing their wind deployment in the order of about 1GW/year in recent years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_France
Basically, what the article conveniently also overlooks is that France actually exports more energy than it imports: it produces more than it consumes. The numbers in this article are a bit out of date but paint a clear picture of imports decreasing year over year until 2015 and actually being smaller than exports in any case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France. I did not find any more recent number but I have no reason to assume that this trend turned around in the last 6 years (the opposite actually).
Mostly imports and exports are driven by capacity and energy cost. Nuclear is not exactly known to be cheap, so exporting over capacity with tiny margins (or at a loss) in a market increasingly dominated by new, clean, cheap energy sources is less attractive than shutting down what was probably a plant with a comparatively high operational overhead. I'm guessing more plants will follow in the next years for exactly the same reason.
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So the people you want to oversee the safety of nuclear installations are people who do not know reactor physics or civil engineering? Also, universities are quite far from the political elite in France, none of which actually know about anything related to nuclear power plants. Engineer at the ASN are just that: engineers. They don't take decisions.
It's just like every other example of regulatory capture, really - the people who're qualified to assess the safety of nuclear power plants are those who have training in reactor physics and engineering, which is of course the same pool of people that plant operators draw from when building and operating their plants, so you end up with a revolving door effect where the nominally independent regulator is incredibly c…
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> Afaik originally the life-span for most reactors of that kind was 40 years It is not. That number was made so that EDF would get a proper return of investment. Some plants based on the same design have been granted lifespan to 60 years in the US. > how far past that are we willing to go? As long as its safe. Why throw away something that works, is safe and reliable on the counts that some folks put out a number?
How can anyone call nuclear power "safe"? Have we discovered a way to actually deal with the nuclear waste yet?
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No it's not dishonest. Where are the storage facilities? Is Hanford a disaster or not? Were there fundamental quality and safety issues in the 70s(and before) around nuclear facilities? Pointing out that other stuff is "just as bad as nuclear" is not helping the argument for nuclear.
> Where are the storage facilities? Yucca Mountain was bulldozed by the anti-nuclear faction. Hooray? > Is Hanford a disaster or not? Unquestionably. > Pointing out that other stuff is "just as bad as nuclear" is not helping the argument for nuclear. That's generally how decision-making works: you weigh the tradeoffs and make the best choice. Well, that's how it's supposed to work, I suppose. If you refuse, well, nat…
You weigh the tradeoffs and make the least bad choice. We've decided as a society that we cannot live without electricity. No method of generating that electricity is without negative implications. (yet?)