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France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

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Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#211

Post by ClumsyPilot »

stubish wrote: post #202
Retric wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear can spin up and down rapidly, it’s simply really expensive to do so. In the mid term heavily subsidized Nuclear is the fastest way for most countries to reach a 90+% clean grid. The risk is ever cheaper grid storage can quickly render such investments obsolete. A nuclear power plant that comes online in 5 years and operates for another 40-50 is going to be part of an extremely different grid in 25-55 years fr…

> A nuclear power plant that comes online in 5 years The article says 6 facilities, of which just one is expected to be operational in 15 years . I think this is the reason nobody except France is pushing nuclear. Starting today, by the time your first nuclear plant comes online, you will have been forced to deploy an alternative making it redundant. People make the case for nuclear being cost effective today, but I…

"Starting today, by the time your first nuclear plant comes online, you will have been forced to deploy an alternative making it redundant."

If only we had the ability to plan energy policy decades ahead, because we know how long each powerplant will last, and when it will need to be replaced! If only we had energy consumption and CO2 emissions predictions going forwards and backward almost a century!

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#212

Post by pfdietz »

p1mrx wrote: post #177
Gwypaas wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Australia is getting close. [1] Give it a year or two. > Sometimes the sun does shine and the wind does blow. That’s most of the time in South Australia, apparently. The average share of wind and solar during October was 72%. For 29 out of 31 days, 100% of the power used in South Australia (SA) was renewable. The sky didn’t fall, the grid didn’t collapse, and the apocalypse is not nigh. [1]: https://cleantechni…

If renewables provide 100% of power on good-weather days, doesn't this mean they've picked the low-hanging fruit, and additional renewables no longer have a stable source of income? What incentive exists to decarbonize the remaining 26%, and provide clean power on bad-weather days?

The incentive is ever-increasing CO2 charges, and also high prices per kWh on those off days. The CO2 price is already up to 100 euros/tonne of CO2 on the European CO2 market.

Renewables will go further with some combination of short and long term storage, dispatchable demand of other kinds, and outright curtailment.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#213

Post by ClumsyPilot »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #127
d--b wrote: post #71

Keep in mind that the presidential election is in 3 months. Macron wants to show he is being pragmatic. Nuclear energy allows to reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing the economy. It's particularly smart in this moment of tension with Russia, as Europe depends a lot on Russian energy. But whether this happens or not remains to be seen.

> Nuclear energy allows to reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing the economy. Only over the course of many decades do they net reduce carbon emissions, at the cost of much higher carbon emissions during the construction phase. Right now we need to be implementing the fastest carbon reductions possible and this does the exact opposite; for the next fifteen years, these plants will be a massive carbon emissions i…

What does nuclear power have to do with single use disposable packaging?

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#214

Post by SECProto »

stubish wrote: post #205
robertlagrant wrote: post #2

I keep hearing from people who think nuclear's a bad idea that "France is ramping down its reliance on nuclear power, so what does that tell you?" I wonder whether any will change their minds based on this news.

I don't think it will change any minds. Bringing a new power plant online in 15 years is irrelevant to just about everybody. Most people are concerned about switching to renewables right now . It might have interested people 20 years ago, maybe even 10.

> Bringing a new power plant online in 15 years is irrelevant to just about everybody.

I mean, it's very relevant to the population of France, who are currently relying on a huge number of aging nuclear plants that will be retired in the coming few decades. I for one am hugely relieved to hear this news and hope it works out.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#215

Post by pfdietz »

988747 wrote: post #159
Gwypaas wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the "Electric cars will never work until I can drive across the country on one charge" argument all over that line of reasoning. Different areas will require different trade-offs. Higher latitudes, excluding inside the polar vortex, tends to have larger amount of wind in the winter. Currently storage does not make sense because the cheapest store of energy is a smart consumer. It will be very interesting to see…

>> Higher latitudes, excluding inside the polar vortex, tends to have larger amount of wind in the winter. "Larger amount of wind" still means at most 3-4 days of decent wind per month, that has been my experience living in Poland. There are some windy regions like the Baltic Sea coast, or Tatra mountains in the south, but that's still not enough.

Poland is one of the worst places in the world for renewables.

Which is sad if you want Poland to have an industrial future. Having Poland's industry be powered by expensive nuclear energy when solar is $0.013/kWh in sunny parts of the world will not bring happy experiences.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#216

Post by skhr0680 »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #204
baud147258 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, with nuclear you're (and in this case, we're) still dependent on uranium mines and all the equipment that's require to build and maintain those power plants, some of which might not be manufactured in the countries

The largest uranium fuel depot in the world is Chernobyl, Ukraine. Russia nearly bankrupted itself when it contained the nuclear disaster and even Gorbachev thinks it was Chernobyl that ultimately destroyed the Soviet Union. Now with this in mind, I wouldnt be surprised considering the sanctions on Russia, if they perhaps make a grab for the uranium in Chernobyl and sell it, to claw back some of the costs they incurr…

> Strategically, it was useful for Russian politics to have something as risky as the Chernobyl nuke power station in the Ukraine during the soviet union era, ie different country if anything went wrong nothing to do with us sort of thing.

The same type of reactor as Chernobyl is still in operation at the Leningrad NPP

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#217

Post by magicalist »

Manuel_D wrote: post #195
magicalist wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were still over budget and late, but that chart (which was created to try to claim all the overhead can largely be explained by regulatory changes) strongly argues against > When the United States built nuclear plants at scale, in serial production, plant costs were also much lower.

See this cluster of power plants in the second half of the 1960 [1]? This is when lots of plants were built around the same time, leveraging economies of scale. All of those plants were built at less than $2 billion per gigawatt of capacity, most of them closer to $1B per GW. This is about an order of magnitude less than the one-off construction that's been done since then. 1. https://i.imgur.com/yKqGXyL.png

Those are construction start dates, and construction duration in that era took 5-10 years in that era according to that paper. Construction of that cluster overlapped considerably with the later more expensive plants (some even finishing after 1979).

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#218

Post by gnulinux »

dghughes wrote: post #200

Is it my imagination or has France lately been trying hard to be more noticeable on the world stage? I feel as if the soured sub deal pissed them off. Now they seem to be wanting to be seen as a bigger world power.

This is a good thing. The way I see the more EU states take attention away from Russia and especially China the better it is for the world.

Well, I'm biased but as an American I think US has been nothing but utter farce last few years in every way possible, so I'm happy to see other democracies thriving at least on paper. Excited to see shit actually happening.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#220

Post by [deleted] »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #209
Xixi wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also keep in mind, a lot of the cost of Hinkley Point is not so much the cost to build the reactors, but the financing. Speaking from memory, we are talking about borrowing at something like 10% over 35 years. If France finances these new power plants, financing cost goes virtually to zero. So even if actually building the new reactors cost the same (unlikely, I hope they learnt a thing or two over the last 10 years.…

Also insurance. All plants in the USA are insured by the government, I'm sure the same is true in France as well.

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