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France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

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Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#241

Post by DisjointedHunt »

joe_the_user wrote: post #56
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.

France is the only country I know that's managed to make nuclear power work. Unfortunately, they haven't been able to export that expertise. Nuclear power plants are vast construction project. The construction and large-engineering industries combined are vastly corrupt in the US (look at the 3 billion dollars planning costs of the unbuilt high speed rail project in California, look at the Big Dig in Boston, etc). In…

Construction isn't corrupt, it's the government. In both those cases as well as the subway project in New York which has the highest cost per mile of any rail anywhere, it's all a slush fund for that political party.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#242

Post by epistasis »

ike0790 wrote: post #235

Looks like a G20 country is serious about the impending "climate emergency". Regardless of the motives and timing behind this, I think its great to see a country is actually being serious and practical. Anyone going on about the climate and refuses to put nuclear energy at the forefront of the conversation is unserious and is only interested in virtual signaling in my opinion.

They will be serious if they actually build it, unlike Flamanville.

While you call non-nuclear options "virtue signaling," the attempts at building it in France and the US have been virtue signaling. We don't have the industrial capacity to build nuclear.

Meanwhile, we are deploying GW of solar, wind, and storage on time, on budget, ar ever decreasing costs.

Locking in the high costs of nuclear, for the 60 year lifetime of a nuclear reactor, after a 15 year delay for building, is not a serious solution for climate change.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#243

Post by epistasis »

Xixi wrote: post #197
mhh__ wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hinkley Point doesn't look so expensive now (Electricity forwards have been greater than the rate the reactor is supposed to cost since august)

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.…

Finance is not free, there is always opportunity cost.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#244

Post by Manuel_D »

magicalist wrote: post #217
Manuel_D wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I'm still unsure how you think this contradicts the claim that plants built together, in series, were cheaper than building smaller numbers of plants. Yes, those plants took 5-10 years to build. And? This doesn't change the fact that they were built for ~$1.5B per GW of capacity. The last of these plants were finished as construction started on later plants that would come online during the 1980s or 90s, and those later plants were much more expensive. But there were also fewer of them which leads to less economy of scale.

Let's put this in simpler terms:

* Lots of plants that started construction in the 1960s-1970s time frame -> lower cost per GW

* Smaller number of plants started in the 1970s and beyond -> higher cost per GW

Thus, a strong relationship between a greater number of plants build built and lower cost per plant. Construction time frame doesn't matter much. If 100 plants are started in 1965 and finished in 1980 and 10 plants are started in 1975 and finished in 1990, the 5 years of overlap doesn't change the fact that the former is going to have a much better economy of scale than the latter.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#245

Post by jurip »

galangalalgol wrote: post #222
imnotlost wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dependencies are a fact of life. Question is, does Europe really want to depend on journalist/dissident-murdering Russia?

It is even in Russia's best interest to ne encouraged to diversify their economy before they simply run out of natural resources. If there is a steady decrease in the sale price of fossil fuels instead of a sudden one they will have more time to adapt right?

Those natural resources will last longer than Putin and his friends will be around.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#246

Post by visarga »

epistasis wrote: post #242
ike0790 wrote: post #235

Looks like a G20 country is serious about the impending "climate emergency". Regardless of the motives and timing behind this, I think its great to see a country is actually being serious and practical. Anyone going on about the climate and refuses to put nuclear energy at the forefront of the conversation is unserious and is only interested in virtual signaling in my opinion.

They will be serious if they actually build it, unlike Flamanville. While you call non-nuclear options "virtue signaling," the attempts at building it in France and the US have been virtue signaling. We don't have the industrial capacity to build nuclear. Meanwhile, we are deploying GW of solar, wind, and storage on time, on budget, ar ever decreasing costs. Locking in the high costs of nuclear, for the 60 year lifet…

Once a few years, we get a few weeks without much wind and solar. What do we do then? Solar and wind can't store enough energy to last for weeks.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#247

Post by innermate »

visarga wrote: post #246
epistasis wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will be serious if they actually build it, unlike Flamanville. While you call non-nuclear options "virtue signaling," the attempts at building it in France and the US have been virtue signaling. We don't have the industrial capacity to build nuclear. Meanwhile, we are deploying GW of solar, wind, and storage on time, on budget, ar ever decreasing costs. Locking in the high costs of nuclear, for the 60 year lifet…

Once a few years, we get a few weeks without much wind and solar. What do we do then? Solar and wind can't store enough energy to last for weeks.

Batteries can store enough energy to last for a few weeks.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#248

Post by akamaka »

reincarnate0x14 wrote: post #183
joe_the_user wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France is the only country I know that's managed to make nuclear power work. Unfortunately, they haven't been able to export that expertise. Nuclear power plants are vast construction project. The construction and large-engineering industries combined are vastly corrupt in the US (look at the 3 billion dollars planning costs of the unbuilt high speed rail project in California, look at the Big Dig in Boston, etc). In…

The USA, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and even Russia all had fairly successful nuclear power plant production businesses until they mostly stopped for political reasons -- Areva (France), GE, Mitsubishi, AECL, KEPCO, Westinghouse, etc built reactors are all over the world. China is still doing mostly foreign reactor designs but they have at least two companies that will probably be able to build wholly China-sourced…

Canada didn’t stop building nuclear reactors because of political reasons. New reactors in Ontario were approved as recently as 2011, but the project was shelved because the costs were excessive.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#249

Post by masklinn »

Manuel_D wrote: post #70
ekabod wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"France has a relatively good track record on nuclear power" What does that means?

France built out its nuclear power generation from 10% to 80% in the span of less than 20 years [1]. While it's true that its latest plants are having difficulties, nuclear power has always been more expensive for one-of-a-kind designs rather than serial production. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...

> nuclear power has always been more expensive for one-of-a-kind designs rather than serial production.

Surely that’s the case of most everything?

Also epr was sold on outright lies, they sold the ability to build a novel plant after years of not building anything not just faster then the previous N4 (which had tons of teething issues) but faster than the P4s (the very successful generation before the the N4, which france built quite a few of).

Plus the terrible awful idea that areva (the plant designer) would be responsible for overseeing construction (on previous generations it was always edf). Strangely that doesn’t make the incentives great.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#250

Post by azinman2 »

innermate wrote: post #247
visarga wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once a few years, we get a few weeks without much wind and solar. What do we do then? Solar and wind can't store enough energy to last for weeks.

Batteries can store enough energy to last for a few weeks.

Industrial-scale batteries are far from a solved problem, and require a lot of excess energy production to fill them that doesn't already get depleted at night.

A far more realistic solution is to be able to flex with things like gas plants that don't need to be always running and can function on demand.

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