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France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

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Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#291

Post by gobip »

immmmmm wrote: post #271
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.

For living in a neighboring country, speaking their language and following their policy quite a bit, i can tell you that, no, they are nowhere near serious. Just as an example, the best performing company this year is Total with 15B and which is happily feeding the government with petrodollars and the other people with lies about "Net Zero " etc. "Énergie Nucléaire" as they call it is a thing there because De Gaulle…

France is not serious about climate? If you're in a neighbor country of France: congrats, your electricity is much more polluted than France's is.

Énergie Nucléaire was a thing of De Gaulle, but not for these reasons. France needed independence and needed to provide electricity, and the only way was nuclear (at the time).

Given the current situation, I think France didn't do too bad. Only one candidate in France on par with Jancovici tho, Fabien Roussel.

I live in France, never heard of this "Net Zero" you're talking about.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#292

Post by hutrdvnj »

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.

> 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.

I think it is unserious to call every other solution other than nuclear energy unserious in a climate discussion. Germany, for instance, has very serious discussions on climate neutrality without nuclear energy.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#293

Post by chha »

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.

That depends on how you want to store the energy. There have been some talk in Norway about using excess energy to pump water from ground level to fill up existing lakes as a form of energy storage. There seems to be quite a few power plants based on hydro power other places in Europe as well, so it could be a feasible strategy there as well [1, page 5]

[1] - https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/hydropower_press...

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#294

Post by pfdietz »

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…

The first US nuclear build out stopped for economic reasons. The first wave of reactors had large cost and schedule overruns, the growth in demand for electric power suddenly moderated, and new competitors (non-utility cogeneration allowed by PURPA in 1978) entered the market.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#295

Post by vaughan »

hutrdvnj wrote: post #292
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.

> 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. I think it is unserious to call every other solution other than nuclear energy unserious in a climate discussion. Germany, for instance, has very serious discussions on climate neutrality without nuclear energy.

Discussions…Germany is 10x worse CO2g/kWh than France.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#296

Post by kwhitefoot »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #261
azinman2 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sodium Ion is supposed to commercialize this year if you can believe CATL, with high temp range, good safety, good charge cycles, all supposed to be better than LFP at ?half? the cost (we'll see when it hits the market). I think sodium ion batteries will be the game changer in utility storage, like good-density (200 Wh/kg) LFP will for mass EV/PHEV electrification (sodium ion will help there too in hybrid batteries).…

> the solar that does get made doesn't have as much transmission losses through the grid

Transmission losses are really not a significant problem. Average US transmission losses are less than 6%, Norway just over, and UK about 8%.

Large solar farms are much cheaper to build per kW and are still quite local to where the energy is consumed so the losses for them will be much less than the current national averages

Mind you I'm not arguing against subsidizing rooftop solar, just that transmission losses are not a major factor in the argument.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#297

Post by phicoh »

tjoff wrote: post #259
BurningPenguin wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's very unlikely that there will be no wind or sun all over Europe. There is constant exchange of excess energy between the countries anyway. Regardless of that, there are other options too. Like water or geothermal depending on the country. Sometimes there even will be too much energy. I can imagine this being used to make some hydrogen for later use.

... very slight difference between excess energy and let's import a contries worth of energy. The cost of transmission will be insane, the grid is not meant for those kinds of transfers.

The cost of nuclear is also insane at the moment.

For example, the Netherlands has plenty of space for wind on the North Sea. But sometimes of course there is no wind. If there is no wind in the Netherlands, there is a good chance there will be wind north of Scotland.

With the current prices for nuclear power plants, you can easily run cables from the Netherlands to the north of Scotland and still be cheaper than nuclear.

At the moment new nuclear is insanely expensive. So we can do a lot of really weird stuff and still be cheaper than nuclear. Will nuclear get cheaper? Who knows.

What we do know is that the EU has targets for 2030, 2040, etc. We don't have time to wait for nuclear to get cheap. We need to act now.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#298

Post by pfdietz »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #175
oblib wrote: post #83

Meanwhile in Japan...

> Fukushima would have survived if they followed Europe's lead and improved the plant's design. In short, had Tepco and the nuclear safety agency followed international standards and best practice, the Fukushima accident would have been prevented. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/opinion/fukushima-could-h...

Nuclear is much safer if the construction and operation are not allowed to make a single mistake (and that is what it would take, as we cannot predict ahead of time which mistake will be the fatal one.)

Of course, then the nuclear stans will complain about the cost of excessive regulation.

Perhaps nuclear proponents should advocate investment in crystal balls, so we can know ahead of time which mistakes to avoid.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#299

Post by pfdietz »

morelish wrote: post #168

Every time Nuclear comes up (rational) people complain of two things: 1) cost, and; 2) safety. I think the cost argument is really an irrelevance. The electricity grid is probably the most important engineering system ever developed. Everything really relies on the electricity grid. Without it, we'd do so much less. (Think about everything that depends on it. Is anything else so significant?) For example, the Nationa…

> I think the cost argument is really an irrelevance

How could this possibly be true? Cost is always relevant. Why would one want to solve a problem in an unnecessarily expensive way?

There is excellent reason to think nuclear is more costly. Just look at what most of the people with money are actually doing. For example, look at Exelon:

> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.

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