Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#211

Post by steeve » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

FlyMoreRockets wrote: post #62

joss82 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is misleading. You can NOT replace nuclear with wind and solar. Because you can't choose when the sun shines and when the wind blows. Hydro in France is already built-up everywhere it was feasible. There are no more spots to build meaningful hydro power capacity. Too bad since hydro is the only renewable that can really replace the nuclear power plants.

> Because you can't choose when the sun shines and when the wind blows. This is a terrible argument. There is always some place on the grid where the wind is blowing and (during the day) the sun is shining.

This has been demonstrated to be false, unfortunately. See https://youtu.be/1aCHN6dytVY (in french though)

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#212

Post by steeve » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

FlyMoreRockets wrote: post #180

seszett wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's far from guaranteed. It's very possible to have little wind over a large area, larger than France even, during the night.

Do you have any actual numbers to back these claims up?

Yes, at Europe scale: https://youtu.be/1aCHN6dytVY in French

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#213

Post by Klinky » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 2:58 AM UTC

DuskStar wrote: post #204

jjoonathan wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> > Is Hanford a disaster or not? > Unquestionably. Hanford is a disaster... But just Hanford. Upstream and downstream are both fine. It's a few dozen square miles of contamination that affects people more than it does nature. (Look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone) Compare to something like ocean acidification, caused by burning coal and oil, which is killing all the coral reefs, worldwide.

Hanford is just $6 - $10 billion per year, with cost estimates up to $667 billion total over its "lifespan", but we know some of the nuclear waste will be with us for thousands of years, so this number will only get bigger. There is no end in sight.

WIPP also had a leak issue with cost estimates of up to $1.4 billion to fix.

There are also dozens of sites orphaned and essentially the problem for the DOE to figure out. The cost of nuclear waste has been heavily socialized. The problem won't be going away anytime soon.

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#214

Post by mlyle » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 4:52 AM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #195

mlyle wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, we're taking offline an amount of nuclear power that exceeds the entire photovoltaic contribution to the French grid, and replacing it with power from a combined cycle plant in Germany. In turn, Germany is commissioning a new coal power plant, in part because of the increased French demand for electricity.

> In turn, Germany is commissioning a new coal power plant, in part because of the increased French demand for electricity. The coal plant was actually commissioned in the early 2000s, construction started 2007, but finished only recently in May 2020 [0]. It was supposed to replace 3 older ones that already went offline back in 2014. As such it has literally nothing to do with the Fessenheim 2 closing, the article tr…

Commissioning means "putting into service" in this context (to me, at least).

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#215

Post by fulafel » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 4:54 AM UTC

jhayward wrote: post #75

Reedx wrote: post #19

> 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.

In electricity production, in absence of diminishing consumption, new production always replaces something. IOW - in absence of that coal plant, something else would be running (or less electricity would be used).

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#216

Post by perl4ever » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #49

I just want to point out that the headline is incorrect - there is no such thing as safe nuclear power currently. When you factor in micromorts from fuel mining and waste storage, you get a relatively low number of deaths compared to coal. But I wouldn't call nuclear power "safe". The worst part is that those deaths are delayed by years and even generations, so we feel an artificial sense of security because we aren'…

>the crux of the issue is that human fallibility approaches 100% on decades-long timescales

Pessimistically, I suppose.

But I don't understand how someone can take this position and simultaneously feel like climate change has any hope whatsoever of being addressed.

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#217

Post by Klinky » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:15 AM UTC

barney54 wrote: post #186

Klinky wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trouble at Hanford is not because of nuclear power, but from making nuclear weapons. There is a big difference. For one, you don’t need plutonium for nuclear power.

It is a site where nuclear waste has been heavily mishandled. It is an example of how not to handle nuclear waste, and why handling it effectively is difficult and can be very costly. The source of the waste does not matter all that much. If you do not deal with nuclear waste properly, you'll end up with more Hanfords.

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#218

Post by therealdrag0 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 6:24 AM UTC

makomk wrote: post #112

kergonath wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there an alternative?

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#219

Post by ogrisel » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:19 AM UTC

enaaem wrote: post #134

ogrisel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some numbers to back this statement: https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p... It's true that in the first 3 years after the decision to speed-up the closure of nuclear in Germany in 2011, coal use increased. But more recently it went down drastically and was replaced mostly by wind and solar on a yearly basis. Here is similar data but not just Germany (using the data from the 2020 BP s…

They still use a lot of brown coal, which is dirty as hell. The way I see it, they could have had reduced the CO2 output more by keeping nuclear and investing into renewables. Missed potential really. The debate is not renewables vs nuclear. It's nuclear vs fossil .

The debate is low carbon vs high carbon (if we all agree that climate change is the number #1 pbm).

Re: Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

#220

Post by robochat42 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:58 AM UTC

Klinky wrote: post #182

beached_whale wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>How many people have died because of that lax safety attitude? 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 t…

The tsunami killed 15,899 people with 6,157 injured and 2,529 people missing and in 2015, 228,863 were still living away from their homes [1]. But that story was completely overshadowed by the Fukishima melt down that killed 1 person because anti-nuclear stories are media catnip. It also led Germany to commit fully to the shutdown of it's nuclear plants and a 2019 article found that the increase in air pollution will kill 1100 people a year and an increase in C02 of 36.2 megatons per year. So where is the real disaster?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German... [3] Jarvis, Stephen; Deschenes, Olivier; Jha, Akshaya (December 2019). "The Private and External Costs of Germany's Nuclear Phase-Out" (PDF). National Bureau of Economic Research. Cambridge, MA: w26598. doi:10.3386/w26598.