221–230 of 363 posts
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Nothing to be proud of. Dangerous ancient reactors owned by an almost bankrupt company about to be nationalized. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/03/the-long...
>almost bankrupt company "Published on February 3, 2023" Since then, in 2023 and 2024 EDF posted over 10 billion a year profits.
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> Or we could treat nuclear rationally and stop increasing the price three orders of magnitude past diminishing returns Who is we here? Do you have examples of any countries having successfully done what you are proposing?
> Do you have examples of any countries having successfully done what you are proposing? France pre 21st century, China, Korea, Poland.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
China is barely building nuclear power. In terms of their grid mix it is backsliding.
Poland haven’t built any so noconfirmed numbers yet?
The electricity mix in France is still way cleaner than in California: - France: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/5y/yearly - California: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/5y/year... And their kWh costs less than 20 Cents in the standard plan: - https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of... They even offer flex prices going down as low as 12,32 Cents/kWh. Nuclear power…
Even the poster boy for nuclear is reducing nuclear output as its fleet ages and filling that gap with renewables (reducing its electricity emissions from 2005 when their nuclear peaked too). So it apparently doesn't matter what your existing grid is, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, of whatever mix, the thing you should be building now is mostly solar, wind and (not quite caught on globally but just about to make a very b…
I have yet to see a cheap scalable alternative to carbon to deal with that volatility. Hydro perhaps in a handful of smaller, mountainous countries (and if you are not too regarding of the environmental damages). Right now the UK is using LNG to compensate wind.
The electricity mix in France is still way cleaner than in California: - France: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/5y/yearly - California: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/5y/year... And their kWh costs less than 20 Cents in the standard plan: - https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of... They even offer flex prices going down as low as 12,32 Cents/kWh. Nuclear power…
This shouldn't be confused for an argument to build new nuclear power in the year 2025 when far cheaper alternatives exist. It is an observation that nuclear works really well if it already exists and the fixed costs have been paid for, and that nuclear was the best choice a few decades ago.
Complexity-wise they're about halfway between gas and coal.
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Per wiki, cost midrange is now 45 BEUR. That's ~14 MEUR/MW capacity (v. solar @ ~1MEUR/MW). Ouch!
To make matters worse gas peaker plants cost approximately €1mln/MW as well, so at the cost of that plant you could have massively overprovisioned solar, backup gas plants and plenty of money for fuel to spare which you wouldn't be spending immediately, so it could be invested instead.
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Even the poster boy for nuclear is reducing nuclear output as its fleet ages and filling that gap with renewables (reducing its electricity emissions from 2005 when their nuclear peaked too). So it apparently doesn't matter what your existing grid is, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, of whatever mix, the thing you should be building now is mostly solar, wind and (not quite caught on globally but just about to make a very b…
The batteries mentioned in the article have only a few hours of capacity, and are designed to smooth the peak usage intraday. I think many people are confused and seem to think batteries are a viable way to address the volatility of wind, where you may deal with weeks with no/low wind, or solar, which in countries with cold winters is of little help. I have yet to see a cheap scalable alternative to carbon to deal wi…
There are also other ways to store energy. For polar regions sand batteries are capable of storing heat for months. High grade heat to the point they can siphon off that heat for power generation.
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> Do you have examples of any countries having successfully done what you are proposing? France pre 21st century, China, Korea, Poland.
Does anyone have actual numbers on what France’s nuclear fleet cost? I thought it was somewhat shrouded in mystery due to government and national security subsidies.
The bit they always say quietly is that you need nuclear reactors to provide the material for nuclear weapons.
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By my estimate (GPT5) Tesla has up to 17% of all front and behind the meter battery storage in CA, and is also the vendor growing the fastest in CA. The California battery storage story is also a Tesla story, but based on the positive tone of the article, it clearly made more sense to leave Tesla out of it.
> By my estimate (GPT5) You know treating a thing that makes stuff up as a source of truth is the same thing as making stuff up right? You might as well have written By my estimate (as revealed to me in a dream)
> California hasn’t issued an emergency plea for the public to conserve energy, known as a Flex Alert, since 2022. Feels like that statement deserves to be contextualized with weather data. There were a few summers leading up to that where all of the major metro areas shared concurrent record high heat days, and sometimes coincided with poor air quality from wildfires (meaning more people closed their windows and ran…
Since 2022 California has energy from solar by roughly 50%, while the population has decreased. Solar is now the biggest source of energy in California, and continues to grow. That means that future heatwaves should be handled well enough.