Live data from Hacker News

France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

politico.eu

371–380 of 450 posts

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Meanwhile, we are deploying GW of solar, wind, and storage on time, on budget, ar ever decreasing costs. That is the easier part, show me the battery deployments please , the ones that can backup the country/state for a week.

We are just as of 2020 reaching cost effectiveness for batteries, and planning by utilities is often on five year time lines and uses outdated data, so they are slow to pick up new technology. Nonetheless, storage is ready, and even in profit driven grids like Texas' ERCOT: > Citing lower costs and increased renewables, momentum continued in the growth of battery energy storage systems in 2021, roughly doubling with…

>If you want week long batteries, you'll first have to show the need for that, but something like that won't be built until it is needed: enough cheap solar and wind on the grid.

This is not realistic, you could build storage but if is super expensive who wants to pay for that.

We will probably have to have an excess of solar and waste energy rather then pay for ton of batteries.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Meanwhile, we are deploying GW of solar, wind, and storage on time, on budget, ar ever decreasing costs. That is the easier part, show me the battery deployments please , the ones that can backup the country/state for a week.

We are just as of 2020 reaching cost effectiveness for batteries, and planning by utilities is often on five year time lines and uses outdated data, so they are slow to pick up new technology. Nonetheless, storage is ready, and even in profit driven grids like Texas' ERCOT: > Citing lower costs and increased renewables, momentum continued in the growth of battery energy storage systems in 2021, roughly doubling with…

> growth of battery energy storage systems in 2021, roughly doubling with 1,262 MW online

That makes no sense. How much do they store?

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Meanwhile, we are deploying GW of solar, wind, and storage on time, on budget, ar ever decreasing costs. That is the easier part, show me the battery deployments please , the ones that can backup the country/state for a week.

> That is the easier part No, that's the hard part. The easier part is to reduce energy consumption and adapt to production. The problem is some people think we can live in eternal abundance and not think about it, and these people are making billions of dollars of tax money on "green new deal" types of contracts. But the truth is degrowth and lowtech are the only option for climate change. Look what "green capitalis…

>But the truth is degrowth and lowtech are the only option for climate change. Look what "green capitalism" has done for us since the 60s: yes things keep getting worse, and it's not gonna change as long as money and industry are involved, as they are the problem not the solution.

You can't just close coal plants and petrol industry and replace it it with dreams, even if you reduce word wide consumption you still need to replace existing dirty fuels with cleaner ones.

We were burning coal and wood here in Romania before capitalism so energy is needed for all political systems to improve the population life.

sure we can invest in better isolation, tax dirty industries and services but is not enough. Am I wrong can we stop burning coal and extracting oiuld and gas and survive as a civilized species?

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#374

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.

yes thanks you so much germany for your wonderful "green" gas plant.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#375
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would need to build much , much more storage, and I hope you know water dams are not easy to build(a lot of humans and wild life needs to be moved), if you don't already have them probably is impossible to create them. >A week of no solar power or wind is unheard of. A week of no wind is very very rare. You don need no solar or no wind, you need a few weeks of super low solar and wind, like say in winter, solar ef…

We would need much much more of anything to make our power fully renewable. It's still cheaper and faster building pumped storage, wind and solar (all This is not even accounting for the nearly free insurance granted to nuclear plants putting taxpayers on the hook for costs like the $800 billion cost of dealing with fukushima (which involved burning a lot of coal and gas). The economics of nuclear power as green ener…

>It's still cheaper and faster building pumped storage, wind and solar (all Any numbers on that pumped storage? how much is needed to store 1 week of France energy needs ? How much it costs then?

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#376
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has been burning more and more coal since shutting down their nuclear plants in favour of renewables What a great green strategy that was

That's wrong. Germany was significantly reduced the amount of electricity from coal over the last decades. Renewables have picked up both the reduction in coal and the reduction in nuclear power.

Sorry I misremembered the statistic. They've been reducing coal usage slightly over the last 20 years, but burn 50% more natural gas. overall energy generation from fossil fuels is up over the last 20 years (since their first nuclear plant was shut down)

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's tons of uranium everywhere. You certainly don't have to put on the lead underpants and root around in Pripyat for it. Canada and Australia have massive amounts.

I know, I can pull uranium nodules out of the cliffs along the Jurassic Coast in Dorset UK. They are like blobs of clay, its the enrichment process which requires lots of it, so with all that enriched uranium in Chernobyl, why not flog it?

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far more than 50%. A year ago it was normal for suppliers to pay about £50 per MWh (consumers of course end up paying a little more, this is a for-profit business in most cases) and today you're being charged maybe £200 per MWh. In one peak period yesterday it went to £365 per MWh and I'd expect the same today. Unlike in Texas, UK consumer electricity firms have to apply the price cap, so while you can get electricit…

Thanks for the detailed breakdown! I assume these are to some extent temporary price hikes caused by the fact we generate a lot of electricity from natural gas, and the weather is cold so people also need that gas to heat their homes right now (also it hasn't been too windy this winter which doesn't help electricity generation). So - ignoring the Russia thing - you still have to consider year-round averages to compar…

Sure, it's "temporary" in the sense that if suddenly gas was cheap the price goes down because it is in fact set by the fuel for gas turbines. I don't expect that to happen for a long time, even though in theory it could happen this afternoon. Traders are already assuming Summer 2022 gas prices will be very high.

Without that it is only possible for prices to fall after we build a lot more wind turbines (projects out to 2025 are only a few Gigawatts extra, not enough) and storage (10GWh more storage in the UK would trim the top peak prices, but you'd need an order of magnitude more to make a difference on midday price trends) and the more effective that storage is, the less economic sense it makes without subsidy. If I buy electricity for £30 per MWh and sell it for £350 per MWh that'll quickly pay off my investment in storage, but if I buy it for £30 per MWh and sell it for £40 per MWh because we've stabilised prices, that's a long time to pay back my investment in storage.

Basing your figure on the consumer cost means in the current environment it just tells you what the price cap is, and that cap is set by government. It rises in April this year (to 28p per kWh) and is expected to rise again later this year, and then perhaps again next year. That cap doesn't reflect the actual cost of the electricity, the difference is why dozens (yes, dozens) of consumer electricity companies have gone bankrupt in the UK in recent months.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#379
post #324
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring storage, wind and solar are now very cheap. For example, companies now pay to rent pieces of North Sea to place wind parks there.

Wind and solar need a lot of resources from mining, which itself uses fossil fuel (for extraction, treatment and transport) and creates a lot of local pollution. Wind and solar take a lot of space that could be used for agriculture, so they compete with important uses of the soil. (I don't know if it's clear how much offshore is a thing, but I suppose this increases also energy expenditure)

My comment is missing a "for the same energy output as nuclear" prefix.

Re: France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is the easier part No, that's the hard part. The easier part is to reduce energy consumption and adapt to production. The problem is some people think we can live in eternal abundance and not think about it, and these people are making billions of dollars of tax money on "green new deal" types of contracts. But the truth is degrowth and lowtech are the only option for climate change. Look what "green capitalis…

>But the truth is degrowth and lowtech are the only option for climate change. Look what "green capitalism" has done for us since the 60s: yes things keep getting worse, and it's not gonna change as long as money and industry are involved, as they are the problem not the solution. You can't just close coal plants and petrol industry and replace it it with dreams, even if you reduce word wide consumption you still nee…

> We were burning coal and wood here in Romania before capitalism

Sure, but on what scale before capitalism (16th century)? Yes, some cultures have disappeared due to over-using their resources, but none threatened to take away humanity and millions of other species along with it. Or did you mean before the collapse of USSR and so-called socialist countries (which are arguably State-capitalist and very similar in terms of industry).

> energy is needed for all political systems to improve the population life

Yes, but what energy and on what scale? Clever engineering enables crazy optimizations. When you see people building wooden houses that can be heated with simple candles, it's quite a feat of engineering. Or passive heating from the sun or underground heat. Same goes for the heating system: using a thermal mass with a little wood to burn is orders of magnitude more efficient than electric heating or a commercial woodstove.

When i say low-tech i explicitly don't mean primitivist. I mean our understanding of sciences has progressed enough that we now know that our industrial way of life is not efficient and we can do much with less resources.

> Am I wrong can we stop burning coal and extracting oiuld and gas and survive as a civilized species?

Then again, depends on what scale. Personal cars for people in remote areas is not the main source of pollution. And i'm personally glad we've got some stuff like hospitals which may be a major source of pollution but i personally think are worth the trade-off.

But there are bigger sources of pollutions we could do without. How do you explain there's more smartphones on this planet than human beings yet we keep making more? Why do we keep building more cars and make it impossible to repair the old ones? All environmental studies point out that over the lifecycle of an object, production has the most environmental impact; disposal/recycling is also something we don't know how to do (apart from shoving it down the surface to pollute everything else).

These polluting schemes were invented by the industry to keep profits going after WWI when there was massive overproduction of goodsI'm. They do not benefit humanity or the public, or the exploited workers, or the polluted communities. They benefit only shareholders and politicians who get to shake hands with them.

I'm not saying i alone have the best answers to our problems (far from it). But if we want to build a breathable future for our children, there's certainly quite a few radical changes we could envision that would not damage the way of life of common people but would certainly trade shareholder's profits for humanity's survival.

Post reply on HN