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 wanted a bomb after WW2, so they pushed the industry (which is btw in pretty bad shape).
There is exactly ONE person in France who is pro nuclear and say accurate things about climate and it's Jancovici. All the rest of the crowd is like in most countries corrupt by petrodollars or other polluting industry, and is saying crap about climate. and the rare times they are not saying crap they are lying about their intentions.
No, France is nowhere near serious about climate, like most countries they bet on a +5 degree futur. I think i have read enough papers to tell you that 5 degrees will be very very hot and a very very sad point in human history.
Jancovici is a legend. Listenening to him and reading his latest comic book (Le monde sans fin) made me very aware of climate issues and directly influenced my behavior.
He deserves to be better known by international audiences. Here are some of his talks in english:
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.
I live in Switzerland, 60% of my electricity comes from hydro.
Ok ok, De Gaulle was maybe more concerned about energy independence.
France doesn't do too bad? Any link? As far a i remember only a few African countries do "not too bad", but perhaps you were referring to former colonies as well.
> I live in France, never heard of this "Net Zero" you're talking about.
I then suggest some good climate information channel, Bon Pote is pretty good in French [0]
Swiss and Austrians are an exception with the hydro and should stop rubbing it in all the discussions. In Slovakia much of whatever could be dammed already is and still hydro makes only up to 20% of the mix, despite being one of the more hilly countries. Were it not for 70% nuclear, I have no idea how to even go near carbon neutral electricity. Having German electricity prices to pay for renewables is completely impossible.
>exception with the hydro and should stop rubbing it in all the discussions.
True, and it's not a exception, but geographically "luck", without mountains and the glaciers that comes with them, Switzerland would be as dry as Turkmenistan. It's just a matter of commonsense to use those altitude differences and water....but when all our glaciers are molten away, we for sure have to go back to nuclear-power.
>In an initial phase, climate change will actually cause the runoff to increase, as water stored as ice is released. However, if the glacier becomes too small, it will reach a tipping point, which we call “peak water”.
>Our study highlights the “hot spots” where retreating glaciers will cause water shortages in future.
But hey maybe you know some other mysterious ways water is stored in in mountains.
Sorry to tell you but there are not many lakes in the Maintains, and they are often fed through snow and water-sources from glaciers/snow-fields, from higher above. And there is not a single lake in the mountains with nearly the size/mass of a single glacier.
Pumped water storage is unsurprisingly limited by the same factors as hydro - there aren't that many steep mountains suitable to put lakes on top in most places.
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)
If we look at CO2, which is far from the only metric, but the easiest to compare, then solar panels make up for their production in a period on months and for wind it is a period of years.
Both solar and wind provide a significant net reduction of CO2 when you take into account their production. Long term, materials in solar and wind can be re-used. So you would need to mine them only once. Currently, mining is just too cheap to effectively recycle all metals.
Wind doesn't takes hardly any space. Wind is not compatible with airfields and residential areas, but that's about it. Wind mixes perfectly fine with argiculture.
Due to you people complaining about wind in their neighborhood, there is now a lot of wind at sea. The good thing about offshore wind is that typically there is more wind at sea. So the construction cost is higher, but the production is higher as well.
For solar it is more an issue of price. Putting solar on a field is cheap. To some extent putting solar on a field is good for nature. An undisturbed area with shadow is quite nice for small plants, insects, etc.
The potential for solar in urban areas is enormous, but often not cheap. For example, existing roofs of large building are not strong enough for lots of solar.
Solar can also be mixed with smaller scale argiculture.
In the UK at least, and in general I think, this is not really true. There is plenty of land that is marginal for arable farming purposes and this is what is targeted for wind farming.
Solar on the roof only matters for single family homes, of which you won't find too many in European cities. Solar on the roof of a 12 story apartment building is not going to do much to help the residents.
> If you're in a neighbor country of France: congrats, your electricity is much more polluted than France's is.
Sorry but that statement is absolutely true, even of Switzerland.
As I write, France's consumption-based carbon intensity is 92g, Switzerland is 130 (importing 2.36GW of dirty electricity from Germany, 1.44GW from France)
yes! and we are the worst on many other metrics!! for instance one of the biggest marketplace for worldwide oil. take any of the worst polluting company, most have their headquarters here.
For the energy transition, it is not enough to look at the way electrictity is currently generated. All use of fossil fuel needs to go, transport, industry etc.
A rough estimate is that the production of electricity needs to double.
I'm curious how France is going to double the production of electricty. The current plans for new nuclear power don't seem enough to increase capacity and retire old plants at the same time.
Well, now France is not being serious about climate, and has not been since at least 10 years, when we had Hollande on the throne. We've had talks about closing down nuke plants that are still in working order, the next one is taking forever, and we still have many people who want to shut it all down in the very name of the environment (overall, the French people are woefully misinformed about the pros and cons of nuclear energy).
I think it is getting better, though. Environmentalists are slowly waking up to the fact that nuclear energy is not nearly as bad as we make it out to be, even compared to windmills & solar panels, which requires many more times the ground surface and/or concrete.
Oh, and we got a recent report from our national energy company (or something close), that laid out several plans to reduce our CO2 emissions, and most contingencies involved both nuclear and renewable, including the "nuke max" scenario. We'll definitely need renewables, but it's pretty clear shutting down nuclear plants is one of the riskiest plans — hopefully our politicians will wake up to that.
Yeah things are getting better. The IPCC report was discussed for one 1 day in French medias.
> Oh, and we got a recent report from our national energy company (or something close), that laid out several plans to reduce our CO2 emissions, and most contingencies involved both nuclear and renewable, including the "nuke max" scenario. We'll definitely need renewables, but it's pretty clear shutting down nuclear plants is one of the riskiest plans — hopefully our politicians will wake up to that.
Great. Hope they don't forget what scientists say: we must use much less energy.
> "windmills & solar panels, which requires many more times the ground surface and/or concrete"
There is no scenario where a comparable wind or solar farm requires more concrete than a nuclear plant. Not even close. A modern nuclear plant requires hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of concrete (ie: over a million tonnes), as well as hundreds of thousands of tonnes of steel.
Yes, a solar farm may require more land surface area, but it can be very quickly and easily deconstructed and removed when no longer required. Where as decommissioning a nuclear plant can cost tens of billions of Euros, and can take 60 years or more to complete.
Yes, a modern nuclear plant requires tons & tons of concrete. Yes, it costs tons & tons of money. It also gives you gigantic amounts of energy, and you can adjust its output. Windmill and solar panels only produce energy when there's wind or sun, so their actual energy output is much lower than their peak power output, and you can't decide to turn them on or off at will like you can with a nuke plant to adjust it to the energy needs of the country.
You want to be renewable only? Then you need to install several times the power output you need, and enough energy storage to have your energy at will: dams, batteries… This is going to cost a lot.
Also, shutting down a nuke plant takes about a minute, then you need very little water to keep it cool. Completely dismantling it takes much longer of course, but it takes so little surface compared to its energy output that you might as well just leave it there to rot.
> "overall, the French people are woefully misinformed about the pros and cons of nuclear energy"
Not as bad as the Germans. The decision to build new nuclear plants is one thing, but to close down perfectly good and safe existing nuclear in the name of the environment is madness.
Especially when the alternative to those nuclear plants is to burn more lignite coal and build new pipelines to import more Russian natural gas.
You are correct, the 5 degree might be a bit high in this context. It's quite possible however in SSP5-8.5 and even SSP4-7.0 from IPCC's predictions for 2100 ([0] for instance). A more conservative 2-3 degrees might be more accurate for climate pledges [1]. This is based on quite a few assumptions tho and varies between authors. 2300 projections can go up to 12 degrees in IPCC AR5 WG1, Figure 12.5 [2] (for the old RCP8.5 scenario).
"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."
French government is not a shareholder of Total at any meaningful level, less than 30% of Total shareholders are French and Total is a multinational paying taxes in multiple countries, so I don't know from where your petrodollars are coming from.
There is a lot that can be say about French energy policy but mentioning Total is really the less relevant one...
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.
The cost of nuclear goes down if we build more of smaller standardized reactors rather than a huge, advanced plants every few decades where everything is new and untested each time, warranting long periods of validation and certification, and where the people building it have changed after each built power plant.
I doubt that there are numbers to prove that. SMR might just be a buzzword. From the page below there don't seem too many operating or under construction (5 operating, and 4 under construction). https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
france has a bunch of standardized reactors: doesn't mean they don't suffer from engineering issue, that they don't leak hot water or radiation every now and then, or that we even know how to tear them apart when they reach end of life.
You should probably do some reading about the many scandals of the nuclear industry in France, from colonial exploitation for uranium to jailing/crippling/assassinating anti-nuclear protesters, with a bunch of nuclear scandals and accidents in between.
From what I understand small modular reactors are not ready for production. Macro announced government money to help their research. The goal is to a have a prototype end of 2020s.
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 1,262 MW online, compared to 640 MW in 2020. ... with the next two largest systems in Texas, namely the 102-MW Gambit Battery Energy Storage Park and the 100-MW North Fork Battery Storage Project.
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.
With how slow utilities are to adopt cheap new technologies, that will be a while. But cost-optimization strategies for carbon free grids tend to select a lot of excess solar and wind capacity, and almost no nuclear at all. Though I would say that those models are flawed in that they assume that nuclear can be built, when the last decades have shown that it can not really be built.
>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.
Grid assets are usually measured by the size of their grid connection. These are lithium ion batteries, and in the 100+MW power capacity, you will usually have 2-4 hours of duration, as the economic use case for something that big usually requires replacing gas peakers to some degree.
Prior generations of lithium ion on the grid were more used for frequency regulation, and would be far smaller and have far higher power/energy rations, like 15-30 minutes. Though this was an extremely profitable market for a while, once people figured out how easy it was to get batteries to do it the market was flooded and frequency regulation does not take a massive amount of battery to accomplish.
Though lithium ion is generally viewed to cap out at 4 hours of duration, I'm thinking that it may get cheap enough per kWh of capacity to install undersized inverters and go to 8-12 hours of capacity. This could compete with other emerging battery technologies targeting that length of duration. An early test of this will be the "long duration storage" component of the replacement package of Diablo Canyon; I dont think that a particlular vendor has been chosen, but most people seem to think that it will be non-lithium-ion that will win the bid. There are other early stage battery startups with ~100 hour duration chemistries. All of these vary based on round-trip efficiency, cost per kWh of energy capacity, and lifetime over cycling.
I wonder if a country will just mandate every household to have a Tesla like PowerWall installed within x years. Or some sort of incentives to have it installed. You can then have additional Grid Battery as backup. It is quite hard to store a week long electricity needs without some redundancy.
This won't be possible in all homes, batteries are a security risk so for sure you need safe conditions and space to install similar on how you need to pass inspections for gas. The only way I could see it working is introducing an increasing electricity tarigf. First 50Kw are cheap, next are 25% more expensive, next 50% etc (this are random number I don't stand behind them)
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 efficiency is much lower in winter.
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 < 7 year lead time) than building nuclear plants (up to 20 years).
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 energy only really make sense because it lets you share some of the rather high costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal. The environmental movement is being coopted/guilted into supporting its subsidization.
France has never generated more than about 75% of its electricity (not power which is much lower because of diesel cars, fossil heating etc.) with nuclear.
It regularly imports electricity from its neighbours, as well as selling its surplus (which it has even at only 75% electrical because the supply doesn't match the demand peaks.)
The current best nuclear rollout on the planet falls far short of your test for being able to run France for a week, has never passed that test, and will never pass that test so why is this considered an argument against renewable plans?
There is no anti-renewable plan.
I want to install a solar roof, my brother has one already, in summer he sells electricity but in winder he has to buy. So what happens when we all have solar roofs or we are powered by solar and is winter so cloudy for 2 weeks?
It is obvious that private companies or people will not buy some extremely expensive batteries for 1 week a year, it will not make economic sense. T he country needs some power plants that could work extra in winter or low light conditions, or we all buy 3x more solar panels and expensive batteries.
Yes. This. Storage is still expensive. Also France is already a world leader in nuclear grid energy. They already have a long history of building and maintaining nuclear plants.
The nuclear grid in France is ageing, as is the expertise needed to construct and maintain. The decision seems to come at a critical time to maintain France's nuclear capability.
"urope could make much better use of its wind resources if capacity was spread out instead of being concentrated around the North Sea."
It does not claim that wind and solar can replace gas and coal 100% just the super obvious conclusion that we could do more if we invest more in wind turbines and also in the grid (the disadvantage is how you balance the surplus, like companies from country A and B and C have too much electricity most of the time but only 25% could be sold so who gets screwed and has to turn off it's production? If they get screwed then why invest ?
Nothing can replace gas 100%. Hyper-nuclearized France always produced (and now produces) between 7% and 12% of their gridpower thanks to fossil fuel (gas/petrol/coal). This is not about 100% but about obtaining a baseload.
"we could do more if we invest more in wind turbines" is not obvious when it comes to continuity of production.
Selling anything (even only 25% of your production) can be a financially wonderful operation if done when many customers need it.
Turning off production is only necessary if you cannot store more of it.
>Turning off production is only necessary if you cannot store more of it.
Storing is not cheap and batteries are also diry. not green.
My idea is that we need to work on all in parallel, solar, wind, research better and cleaner batteries, nuclear, fusion, invest in the grid and try to connect over larger distances. There will not be 1 solution that fits every place in the world.
True, however energy produced thanks to renewables already costs way less than its nuclear counterpart (and the gap is growing), offering a way to recoup investments (grid, storage...). Bonus: no risk of major accident, no fuel (uranium), no nuclear waster...
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
Batteries aren't the sole way to store energy. Dams (potential energy), for example, are another one (already exploited and quite powerful and flexible).
There are many other ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Methods
"work on all in parallel" <=> (often massive) investments aiming at designing something isn't recouped as efficiently as possible (less units built).
"work on a single one" <=> bumping the probability of failure (all eggs in the same basket)
There is a middle ground to find!
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 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.
>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?
> 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.
Reducing consumption is part of the solution and only on some countries.
Solar panels are also part of the solution but batteries might be more toxic/dirty then nuclear plants.
However we do it, it looks like nuclear won't be it, because we can't build nuclear. Some of the more likely routes, with clearer cheaper cost curves than advanced nuclear or SMRs:
1) advanced geothermal (using drilling tech developed within the last decade, not the older ones)
2) flow batteries
3) chemical storage of electricity, whether as ammonia, hydrogen, methanol, or whatever tech path becomes cheapest.
4) for cold climates: district/neighborhood heating with massive seasonal storage
All of these are being developed, and experiencing falling prices on the tech. In contrast, building the same nuclear reactor design gets more expensive successive time it is built. This is true even of France's builds in 70s.
If we are betting on future tech, nuclear is not in the cards. It would have been great it nuclear had put coal out of business in the 1980s, rather than having a ton of build delays in the 1970s that jacked up nuclear's price. But it's ship has sailed, until nuclear can build.
If France completes a single reactor by their planned 2035 date, I will be seriously impressed. However, 1GW in 13 years is not a climate solution.
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.
Lack of enough wind and sun is basically what happened in EU end of last year and caused energy and gas prices to sky rocket. It is not as rare as you think, moreover it happens over large areas at the same time which exacerbates stress on the grid.
This is nonsense. The crazy gas prices had two main causes: insufficient gas buffers during the uptick of the economy after Corona, and Russia closing part of its huge gas supply to Europe.
> insufficient gas buffers during the uptick of the economy after Corona
this is true
> Russia closing part of its huge gas supply to Europe
this isn't, afaik. Russia doesn't sell on spot market, they prefer long term futures contracts, on which they reliably deliver. They delivered on their 2021 commitments a bit earlier, hence they closed off the valves
Basically, the gas supplies were low during summer, but the spot prices were significantly above long term average, so energy companies delayed their purchases, hoping the price will come back down soon. It didn't, reserves dried up, and everybody was forced to buy at the same time
The gas prices spike has also other causes, like gas-powered electricity plants replacing or partly replacing nuclear facilities like Fessenheim in France. Gas-powered electricity plants are flourishing everywhere in the world, including China to diversify from coal, obviously at some point the available offer is not going to be enough.
Some businesses have a choice whether to use gas or electricity for example for heating. High prices of one caused them to switch too. I agree that effects on gas demand were secondary relative to energy, nevertheless my point stands that it is not unusual, and also we can’t count on gas when wind and solar farms are quiet.
... 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.
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.
Such long-distance backbones and interconnections between nations are quickly gaining speed in Europe since the 1980's, as they reduce the risk of blackout and enable savings (a temporarily useless production unit here is used to feed a another nation).
We fire up coal/gas/biomass plants. Nature doesn't care about the ideological purity of the electricity grid - all that matters is total cumulative emissions
People treat this question with religious mindset, as if burning fossil fuels is a sin that must be banished. In reality, there's nothing wrong with powering countries ~80% of the time with renewables + storage, and ~20% of the time with fossils - that's still a decently decarbonized grid
Most developed countries have net zero goals that are not consistent with continuing to pump out 20% of current electricity-related CO2 production forevermore. Also, keeping those coal and gas plants operational isn't exactly cheap either, though it is probably still cheaper than storage.
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]
Nice! It turns out we have a few (12) pumping stations here as well, but there is little information on how often they've been used. The high electricity prices we've seen lately have reactualized this, with spikes of around $1 USD/kWh.
Current water levels are at approx 47% capacity [1], compared to around 64% same time last year. Unless we get a wet spring and summer it could get exciting come next year...
Same, we're also facing issues with water level this year, to the point that several of the dams were ordered to stop producing electricity in order to save the water.
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.
We are going to have massive amounts of excess energy production as renewables gain higher penetration on grids. The rea problem will be transmission capacity, or alternatively phrased, making sure storage is close enough to the generation.
California usually curtails large amounts of renewable energy in the spring, but even their smallish installs of 1-2GWh of storage recently has massively reduced that wasted energy. And they aren't even at super high penetration yet for renewables.
We will probably keep lots of backup gas turbines for a decade or two, but by the time significant nuclear could come online, other tech will probably have solved it.
And unfortunately in the US, our nuclear fleet is really close to retirement, and we are going to be losing a ton of nuclear generation capacity soon, with no way to rebuild it. We need other solutions fast.
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).
If we get sodium ion grid storage, another 50% drop in wind/solar utility LCOE, and residential solar gets on par with natural gas LCOE, and good-density LFP batteries deliver 100 mile PHEVs and 250-300 mile EVs in 10 years, then we might actually have a cslim hance of handling global warming
It isn't a solved problem, but there is already industrial scale deployments happening, and what that means is there is a massive market to chase and the ball is rolling fast. It's not like fusion where we are waiting on tech hurdles before the economics are even tackled.
Gas plants will have to do for flexing, much better than coal. It's not like politically they'll all get shutdown (I mean, they should or get a two year warning, but that won't happen).
I think residential solar should be vastly more subsidized. That way the solar that does get made doesn't have as much transmission losses through the grid, it gets used directly, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
I would also like a good synthetic fuels strategy that isn't a creep marketing conspiracy to keep fossil fuels business running (hydrogen "green/blue/gray" color BS falls into this category), that could handle aviation, long haul shipping, and home heating at at least carbon neutrality.
> 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.
> I think residential solar should be vastly more subsidized.
I don't. The grid has to be sized for the worst case load, not for the average load, so reducing the latter with residential solar doesn't reduce the cost of having the grid around. And utility-scale solar is much cheaper per unit of power than residential solar.
Isn't pumped hydro-electricity a solved problem for off-peak energy storage? Granted, only for countries with hills/mountains (not the Netherlands etc.)
You still require a place to pump that water into. Forming a lake isn't exactly a very ecology-friendly thing, and as much as you'd love to drown <city>, requires absurd amounts of work.
It's a relatively new development that solar and wind are so cost effective, even though nuclear had a decades long head start and enormously more taxpayer subsidies over decades and decades. Maybe it's not a law of the universe, but there is a lot of experience showing it's slow, risky and expensive.
> 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.
In my eyes, this is a very indecent way to express ones own position. The discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear energy is not conducted lightly. Nuclear energy has a long list of casualties and severe environmental damage. Nevertheless, I do not imply a priori that anyone who argues in favor of nuclear energy is frivolous; and I expect the same respect in reverse.
> 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.
This is not true. The agreement between the federal government and the energy supply companies to phase out nuclear energy dates back to 14 June 2000. The first nuclear power plant was shut down permanently in Nov. 2003. At this time the power generation from coal (both hard coal and lignite) was around 300 TWh/year. It almost halfed to 162.6 TWh in 2021. The all time low was in 2020, though, due to the pandemic.
Coal has only increased in 2021, but fossil fuels have increased since 2002 (from 69.9GW to 78.9GW), i misremembered that statistic as coal instead of fossil fuels
The consumption of natural gas itself has indeed increased. But the sum of natural gas + coal has still decreased a lot. From aprox. 350 TWh per year in the early 2000s to 251,6 TWh in 2021. The partial replacement of coal by natural gas is at least in part caused by the transition to renewable energies. Until the transition is complete, natural gas is the best fossil fuel option to even out fluctuations in the production of renewable energy, because gas power plants can be switched on and off very quickly at peak times (in strong contrast btw to nuclear power plants) and they can be built relatively decentralized, each with a small volume. Therefore it is not likely that we will see a major drop in natural gas consumption in Germany in the next two decades.
> gas power plants can be switched on and off very quickly at peak times (in strong contrast btw to nuclear power plants)
Not true - from the wiki: Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.
A nuclear reactor can only do this (depending upon combustible bars state) at most twice per day. This is a severe limitation.
France is a leader in this field.
Source (French language ahead!):
https://new.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
Gas plants have a possible rate of change of aprox. 20%/minute. Admittedly, it may be a matter of taste whether a fourfold rate might be called a "strong" contrast. So let's just say that the rate of change of gas plants is typically four times higher.
Besides, the actual rates of change for nuclear power plants vary widely, depending on the current load of the power plant. According to the German Wikipedia the actual capabilities of (former) nuclear power plants in Germany ranged from 1.1% to 10% per minute. When the plant was below 50% of its load, the possible rate was near the lower end of this spectrum. The maximum of 10% was only possible when the plant was already running above of 80% of their nominal power. The value was also very much dependent on the operating state of the plant.[1] So the 5%/minute you mentioned are just an average.
Historically, nuclear power plants have been used as load following plants in Germany, but this was during times, when the overall volatility of power production was lower than today. And when it comes to new nuclear power plants currently being planned elsewhere, their load following capabilities are to my knowledge typically an afterthought.
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)
So capacity of fossil fuels went up, but I suppose natural gas shuts down while renewable generation is high so it doesn't use its capacity all the time - my bad
Yes, the easiest way to get a stable grid with wind and solar is to have natural gas capacity equal to what you need from wind and solar. Gas is not used when there is wind or solar, and is very easy and quick to turn on when needed.
In the future when more green gasses become available, bio methane, hydrogen or syn methane, those gas plants can be filled with those as well.
(In a hurry, could not find newer numbers for France.)
If one looks at the CO2 emissions per capita the gap is not so large. I could not find any new numbers for this either, but in 2018 the values of CO2 emissions in metric tons per capita were as follows:[3]
France 5.0
Germany 9.1
For comparison: United States 16.1
If one looks at the timelines, the gap between France in Germany seems to close more or less fast/slowly everywhere.
How is "people who don't do solution X for climate change are unserious" different from climate change denial exactly?
You're claiming entire governments are proposing and committing to expensive and sweeping actions, but because they've not done X (for possibly several different reasons) you are openly accusing them of not wanting to solve the problem. Why wouldn't they want to solve it? We are spending that money to avoid paying more later aren't we? It is a real problem, right? You think that, and you think they think that, correct? Because if you didn't this would just be climate change denial.
Why can't you just say, "I think X is an important part of solving the problem of climate change". Why does the conversation have to revolve around attacking other people who are trying to solve a problem you appear (on the surface) to agree is a problem?
Oh, just noticed the scare quotes around "climate emergency" in your comment so I guess you don't think its a real problem, you just really want them to use nuclear to solve the problem you don't think exists, which seems odd, but at the same time not unexpected.
Because they're rich as fuck and will never have to care about finding clean water to drink? Because they're profiting directly from destroying our planet, being part of the capitalist establishment? Because the hundred of millions of climate refugees will mostly be from poorer countries, and France will only have to relocate a few coastal cities and deal with more hurricanes? Because they're hopeful their descendants will go pollute Mars thanks to assholes like Bezos/Musk after they're done fucking up Earth?
I'm not defending nuclear energy, far from it. But pretending governments around the planet (except for a few smaller ones) care at all about planet change when all they've done since the 70's (the time we've know this is the most massive/pressing issue for humanity as a whole) is giving away money to the people who destroyed the planet in the first place (green new deal kind of stuff)... that's political denial if you'd like to call it that ;)
We need degrowth immediately. Heavily criminalize planned obsolescence. Outlaw industrial farming. Tax concrete industry 1000% and legalize eco-housing (illegal in France due to housing regulations). Reduce energy/resource waste on all levels and all fronts. That's the only way you can fight climate change. Keeping the same capitalist recipe that produced the disaster and hoping for a different outcome is either naive or manipulative.
Six new nuclear power plants are most likely not even enough to replace those that will be shut down due to old age in the next decade or two. It's not anywhere near enough to reach climate targets.
Serious I'd think would involve a global solution that actually makes a difference. I haven't seen much of that yet. A lot of talk and local restrictions that don't do much while CO2 emissions go up and up.
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.
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...) they will end up a lot cheaper than Hinkley Point.
But that money could also be applied in other areas of the economy, that might have far better payback. And with France's current track record of nuclear construction, throwing more money at nuclear without fixing the fundamental problems first is serious misallocation of capital.
Just the latest news that is the same as the last decade of bad news:
> EDF now estimates the total cost of the project at 12.7 billion euros ($14.42 billion). Its expected cost has more than quadrupled from the first estimate made in 2004.
$15B of lithium ion battery factory would have far far greater carbon impact, dollar for dollar. $1B on early stage startups would similarly be more impactful.
The total cost (to date, as it isn't yet delivered) of the EPR was mid-2020 established by the "Cour des comptes" (Court of Audit) at 19,1 billions euros.
A recent official announcement added 300 millions euros.
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
Uranium is also much easier to trasport than gas thanks to the ridiculously high energy density of uranium. Reactor grade uranium has an energy density of about 3,500,000 MJ/kg in a light water reactor, whereas natural gas is about 55 MJ/kg - so uranium is about 64,000 times more energy dense on a per kilo basis. You don't need pipelines or fancy LNG terminals, either - it's pretty easy to transport in relatively unexciting bulk containers.
So, once the security concerns are addressed, you can buy uranium from any country willing to sell it to you and ship it. The number two and number three producers of uranium worldwide are Canada and Australia, both of which France is very friendly with (a submarine kerfuffle with the latter notwithstanding).
Sure, and France reprocesses, too, which aids fuel security.
Of course, this doesn't mean they control the entire supply chain for needed parts for nuclear-- but if some critical piece broke they wouldn't have no energy immediately, either.
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?
I don't think that's really a worry (running out of resources). Our deepest mines are a paltry 4km; forests can be managed. Oil, gas, and coal will eventually run out, but the prices will have by then have risen to the point that use at scale will be impractical.
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 incurred for cleaning up Chernobyl.
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.
However thats how it remains until now where the Iranians need uranium after their enrichers were destroyed with Stuxnet, so you have one potential customer there, you also have India & Pakistan, Israel as well as the UK and France who will all be needing a bit more uranium as we get off fossil fuels to reduce greenhouse gases.
> 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
> The same type of reactor as Chernobyl is still in operation at the Leningrad NPP
Along with three units each in Kursk and Smolensk NPPs. Plus I think a lot of people don't realize some of the other reactor units at Chernobyl continued operating until the last one finally shut down in 2000.
The other reactors at Chernobyl continued to operate for years after the incident at reactor 4. The last reactor there closed in 2000, and only as a result of being strongly incentivized by the international community. All the RBMK reactors were retrofitted with additional safeties after the incident. They're not really a risk.
"The very architecture of the Chernobyl reactor was faulty", often repeated in some media, is a lie, and therefore the more-or-less implicit "our architecture cannot lead to such a disaster" falls flat.
On the wiki page, a weakness was powergrid failure and the minute or two it took for the diesel generators to come online. They looked at whether any of the energy from the reactor turbines could be used to keep the water pumps going in this 1-2minute window until the diesel generators were up to full speed.
It needed a massive amount of water to pumped around which explains why many nuke power stations are positioned on the coast.
Of course, wiki is wiki, but is no more or less valid or invalid, than other reports when being mindful of bias.
In terms of Chernobyl and radiation leaks, an airburst instead of ground burst would spread more radiation and could parts of the Ukraine become radioactive wasteland to prevent Nato pushing right upto Russia border?
Russia hasnt moved an inch, but NATO has so could NATO end up on the wrong side of history with this one? Wars are always good distractions for domestic failures.
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?
Do you really think there's any just lying around? The other reactors continued operating at Chernobyl after the accident - the last one didn't close until 2000. I seriously doubt there's piles of usable ready to go enriched uranium just lying there for the exclusion zone visitors to trip over.
Reactor grade: more than 19% 240Pu and less than 80% 239Pu
If the irradiation period has been short then the plutonium is weapons-grade (more than 93%).
Chernobyl's life span was cut short, so do we really know what things are like?
Edit.
Lets not forget being a member of NATO means nuclear weapon sharing, so is Russia not justified if it made a grab or made Ukraine a radioactive buffer zone?
Where does China come into all this with their new missiles after backing Russia?
Edit 2
Nato has become unpopular in Europe since the middle east wars and the ensuing migrant crisis. How do you know there isnt a concertive effort to rein in the Americans who spend the most on their military, not just within EU NATO members but within the wider global community? In other words are the Americans walking into a trap?
If a nuclear 'renaissance' arises, strategy will be at play: Russia and the US will obtain uranium from their 'partners', in Africa China will probably gain new partnerships, and other nations may encounter some difficulties.
Moreover (source: UNECE): "mining impacts are technically highly dependent on ore grade, as the efforts required to extract a fixed quantity of ore is proportional to the amount of rock to be extracted, therefore inversely proportional to the grade. This is true at the individual mine level, for which such a model could be derived; more importantly, this assumption is valid for open pit and underground mines. Warner and Heath test this relationship and its
influence over the full life cycle of the technology, showing that a lowering ore grade may lead to tripling life-cycle GHG emissions by 2050 in case of a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity"
In general, whatever a politician's motivation is for any particular bill may or may not be aligned to yours, even though you may both agree on the outcome of that bill. And that's ok.
> Keep in mind that the presidential election is in 3 months.
Exactly, Macron has a very long history of changing of advice, sometimes after just a few days. In 2017 he campaigned to stop most nuclear plants in France (which are really old anyway) [0]. I think here those statements were more to sooth the "CGT" and the big companies in the field after the government last statements on EDF. [1]
He was the guy who dismantle Alstom to GE's and EDF's profits, then made Alstom buy what it just sold. It's hard to see any consistent strategy in any of his actions, except from a political point of view. He probably don't care of anything on any subject, it's just a matter of having the best posture to win elections.
> 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 increase, and then it will take many years of operation to "pay that back." By then it will be far too late.
Nuclear is one of the most expensive electricity generating technologies and it has only gotten more expensive, while solar, wind, and battery technologies are following expected plunging cost paths. Nuclear power plants are difficult to site geologically, difficult to site grid-wise (because the only way they are economical is through massive scale, and you can't just drop 5, 10, or more gigawatts onto the grid just anywhere), there is no need for base load which is the only thing nuke can provide (either in terms of capability, or economically), they don't like fussy climates/extreme weather (and if they use natural bodies of water, are vulnerable to invasive species, increasingly a problem around the world), they have very deep and exacting supply chains when countries have experienced significant supply chain problems for numerous different reasons, and you can't just snap your fingers and have qualified staff to run the plant. They require significant socio-political stability (functioning education, security, accountable political leadership_, and generate material that is extremely dangerous to life for generations, and have the potential to render entire geographical regions uninhabitable, again for generations.
Guess what has none of these problems? Solar. Wind. Hydro. Energy storage.
Nuclear power also doesn't solve the fundamental problems: the environmental impact of staggeringly large militaries, the amount of 'disposable' packaging used in almost everything, the cross-planet shipping of consumer goods most of which are, frankly, useless, heavy use of low occupancy vehicle travel, poor building efficiency, and proof-of-work cryptocurrency schemes.
> Guess what has none of these problems? Solar. Wind. Hydro. Energy storage.
Right. Because all of those grow naturally in the wild and do not require fiberglass, concrete, various metals, digging for ore, diesel for transport, and on and on and on...
Look at almost any chart online comparing estimates of carbon footprint and you'll see wind and PV are well below nuclear, and they pay back within months.
Nuclear takes a decade to even start operating and by some estimates is worse than natural gas in carbon footprint. Uranium refinement and waste fuel processing take up a massive amount of resources.
Solar pays back its carbon footprint within months, whereas nuclear may very well have a footprint much larger than natural gas.
Look around. Do you see any utilities or investors building nuclear plants? No? Meanwhile wind and solar deployments are skyrocketing, both grid and small scale.
Do you think maybe the people running power grids and investing in power plants know a little bit more about this than HNers like yourself do?
I'd love some sources comparing the carbon emissions from building them, because otherwise I'm a big supporter of nuclear energy. I'd rather go solar/wind/hydro but I think they have some (not all) of the issues you've noted as well.
Google image search on "energy source carbon footprint" and see that even the charts with very low carbon impact estimates for nuclear still place it at roughly twice wind, and more than solar.
Look at what power companies, investors, grid operators, and most countries are putting money into. Not nuclear. If you think it's just because the public finds it unpalatable, well, the public finds a lot of things unpalatable and that doesn't stop industry and investors from doing whatever they want.
Solar and wind deployment in the US is growing massively as the price of solar panels and wind turbines plunge, especially solar. Battery storage is also plunging in price and rapidly maturing into grid-scale solutions like flow batteries.
Nuclear hasn't gotten cheaper over many, many decades and it provides a kind of power we don't need - base load. In many countries there's an excess of renewable power on many days.
Solar is highly distributed which helps decentralize the grid and localize power generation, lowering losses. It's a lot more efficient for your EV to get power from your neighbor's rooftop panels than from a power plant hundreds of miles away.
How many of those countries rapidly building new green planta are actually below France's GHG emissions? Germany definitely isn't, much of Europe isn't (and where they are, they typically also use nuclear). The USA is laughanly far off.
So, it seems to me that while many grids are switching to renewables, they are still far away from matching Nuclear's emissions.
The carbon cost of extraction and transportation of fuel should also be added to the spreadsheet, both for nuclear and for fossil fuel generation.
Finally, if we're accounting for the cost decommissioning old nuclear stations and long-term storage of nuclear fuel, we should also account for the externalities of fossil fuel power, such as health consequences of pollution, the existential risk from global warming, and turmoil due to geopolitical tensions.
> It's particularly smart in this moment of tension with Russia, as Europe depends a lot on Russian energy.
This may help lowering the reliance of France on Russia but its energy production will still be reliant on other countries, as 100% of the required fuel (uranium) is imported.
Can't tell if you're joking, but I think they mean that the positive effects of making the promise are immediate for Macron, but he won't have to deal with the actual cost, logistics, political maneuvering, etc., until after he's re-elected, if at all. Cynically, he could make promises he has no intention of keeping.
It goes both way, isn’t it? Whoever in power in 2035 who will get to cut the ribbon of the reactors will make it like their own victory. Macron’s name and whatever he would do to make it happen will be conveniently forgotten.
It's a pity that we should be completely carbon neutral around 2040 give or take a couple of years and power plants that go online in ten to fifteen years (if they are actually done by that time) save zero emissions until then.
Unfortunately, there's no way of telling if it's JUST a political move. However, a political move is required before actual implementation. I can't imagine France building nuclear power without someone taking credit for it.
There's was no future where power got built without the stunt, so... It's still a move closer to extra energy production. Even though it's a political one.
I respectfully disagree on that. It"s on the contrary a decision made a few months before the elections - so that the French energy policy won't be a matter of debate on the voting day.
French citizens have never been put in a position to vote between a pronuclear candidate and an antinuclear one.
Well, of course, there are ecologists on the first round of the vote, but on the second rounds, both candidates are always pronuclear. Of course, they all started ten years to include electoral promises to balance the energy mix with more renewables but none delivered: France has recently been recognized as being at the worst country in the European Union with only 19% of renewables in our mix - despite having signed to reach 23% this year.
The left is deeply divided on the matter ; in fact, the left is divided on all ecological issues: agriculture, industry, energy ... The right is pro-big-polluting agriculture in the name of our commercial deficit (we export a.lot), anti-regulation of industry on ecological grounds because our industry is weak (which is true but not a reason), and pronuclear in the name of sovereignty - on the energy issue but also for military reasons. The fact that the nuclear energy enables France to emit far less CO2 is just a welcome argument. But if we had petrol like Norway, it would be "drill, baby, drill !".
The nuclear energy has nothing to do historically in France with ecology and the climate issue will reinforce that totally nondemocratic decision taken by the General De Gaulle in the name of our Grandeur. A policy that our technostructure follows without any true democratic supervision. Check and balances exist only on safety matters, but absolutely none of the French energy mix.
Nowadays it has become a political subject of course. But it's really just theater and will stay so for quite a while. The public opinion had been leaning on the right more and more for the last 20 years. When elected, self-called Socialists acted clearly on a center-right: really more like Manchin than Biden (in a daring transposition of very different political landscapes).
Funny detail: the French scientists had stalled in the research of the atomic bomb. That was a problem for the US in the context of the Cold War. So the US told the British to tip us in the right direction. That direction had already been deeply worked on but dismissed by the French scientists.
That was very discrete, not even officially recognized by some secret treaty. A prominent English nuclear scientist had a good friend among the French team. He visited him for lunch a Sunday. They talked physics. The UK has already its bomb, so the French noticed when his friend wondered aloud if that path come be "another way" to reach fission. But the British moved on another subject immediately. Friends don't need many words.
To thank the US, France later helped Israel - a lot - to build their own atomic bomb faster.
Then France made a 180º turn in its foreign policy and sided with the Arab countries on the Israël/Palestine issue. When Arafat and his troops were besieged in Beyruth by Tsahal, France evacuated them to Tunisia.
> French citizens have never been put in a position to vote between a pronuclear candidate and an antinuclear one.
> Well, of course, there are ecologists on the first round of the vote, but on the second rounds, both candidates are always pronuclear.
Well, since nuclear power is such an important part of the Greens political platform (for better or for worse), you might argue that the fact all second-round candidates have been pro-nuclear sor far _is_ the result of the population voting on the topic.
And the fact that it happens _before_ the elections is, on the contrary, a way to trigger the debate.
The process to build plants take years - if the population is strongly opposed to, they can vote Macron out, elect Jadot or Melenchon, and the process will be canceled.
(The sad thing about French democracy is that the Presidential Election is virtually the only moment to have all debates)
Other countries (Germany, Belgium, etc...) decided _not_ to use nuclear energy without asking there population any more directly.
Populations are not asked explicitly about plenty of very dangerous industries (I leave near Toulouse, yet I still have to see "Get out of fertilizers !" stickers on cars following AZF explosion.)
Is this the kind of topic where the rules of representative democracy is to "let the elected governement govern" ?
Or is there a right way to get the opinion of a country, knowing that, in those matters, the population that vote will not be the population that deals ?
I have no idea what would happen if we had a referendum about nuclear energy, as they had in Italy and Switerzland.
I'm also no so sure what I would vote for !
Every time I ponder those questions, I open this [1] or [2], and I wonder: who's ready to switch off their lights first ?
> French citizens have never been put in a position to vote between a pronuclear candidate and an antinuclear one.
What about the fallout from the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior? It was my understanding that nuclear technology was a source of national pride at the time, which emboldened the French government. Public support for nuclear power seems much less enthusiastic these days. Still, I'm curious if there was ever an election where candidates' positions on the event were at issue.
A point which may not be well-understood by people unfamiliar with French economic history is that for much of post-WW II period, France's power prices have been dramatically lower that other Western European countries (for industry, anyway).
One of the challenges that moves to get away from nuclear generation have caused is the prospect of hurting the French industrial base more than it's already been undermined by offshoring.
(The other concern is keeping an independent nuclear arsenal, which is completely coupled to having reactors.)
Those where low wholesale prices via government subsides. Germany “subsidized” very early wind/solar adoption by forcing electricity consumers to pay through the nose for it.
That isn’t to say either model is better, just that you can’t look at wholesale prices and see the underlying economic realities. Time is running out on early German subsides where France still needs to pay for decommissioning.
France has a great track record with nuclear and I hope they can continue to leverage that excellence. Doing so cost effectively is more difficult especially when adding ever more inexpensive wind/solar generation to the EU grid.
Wind/solar generation have fundamental availability constraints that require supplementing with on-demand generation capacity. Nuclear is not exactly an answer for on-demand capacity because it is not possible to rapidly spin up and down, but having additional nuclear availability should allow France to have greater clean, stable energy capacity. It additionally introduces the possibility of broader energy exports to other European nations.
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 from now. That’s why private investors are so hesitant, but governments have more flexibility.
It could be that subsidized grid storage is a more cost effective solution, but that’s also limited by manufacturing capacity.
> 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 don't see any predictions about it being cost effective in 15+ years either.
> Starting today, by the time your first nuclear plant comes online, you will have been forced to deploy an alternative making it redundant.
The delay is because these power plants are supposed to replace existing power plants that will be taken offline in 13+ years. What’s notable is they aren’t 1:1 replacements so they are going to end up with a lower percentage of nuclear power.
PS: I reference the a 5 year delay because that’s roughly when you’re spending real money. France could easily back out of this plan in ~7 years having spent less than 1% of what it would cost to actually build a reactor.
"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!
Not with fusion: the fusion reactors we aim at building eventually will have no relationship with our submarine fleet roaming the ocean pointing nukes at everyone.
I am skeptical to current nuclear power, would have liked Molten Salt Reactors instead. However I see leaders having to do something. Environmentalists are blocking construction of more wind power, and crisis with Russia makes gas less accessible. France has a relatively good track record on nuclear power. They may pull this off. 2035 is a really long time to wait for new power to the grid though.
>Environmentalists are blocking construction of more wind power
Environmentalists really are their own worst enemies. When I was in high school near San Diego about 15 years ago, there was a huge amount of opposition to a solar power project. From environmentalists. There was a solar power plant out in Imperial County and the environmentalists were protesting the high voltage lines that would bring the power into San Diego. Something about them going through an area full of endangered tortoises or something like that if I recall correctly.
In this article, I don't see evidence for "environmentalists" being the ones block wind-power, sounds more like argument between levels of the French state [1]. But just as much, the mantle of environmentalist can be taken by anyone, notably just nimbys. There's not a copyright on the term. But it winds-up even worse when others point to these idiot uses of the term environmentalist and then try to push actually environmentally destructive projects.
The Green parties of Europe, which are the political face of the environmental movement, all oppose nuclear power. Perhaps most strongly in Germany, but The Greens in France oppose it as well.
It's been a gradual process over the last two decades.
The cynical view would be that during that time they left the government twice to protest the government approving new nuclear power projects, and paid a heavy political price for that. They can't afford to do it a third time, and given Finland's position (can't rely on solar or wind during winter, can't build more hydro, can't depend on imports during the production troughs) it is highly likely that more nuclear will be approved at some point.
The non-cynical view is that the world has actually changed over that time. Reducing CO2 emissions is more urgent than ever, and there's no longer time to hope that we can instead reduce energy usage which used to be their preferred solution.
We’ve been promised apocalypse by now several decades ago, and literally nothing changed.
CO2 is just a misdirection away from actually dangerous things such is persistent chemical pollutants we dump into the ocean by millions of tons that cause widespread hormonal disruption or outright toxicity.
that is happening today, not at some unspecified point in the future. So weird nobody seems to be concerned about that.
Yeah, that one just boggles my mind. A few huge PV solar projects out in the desert in southern California and Nevada got stalled by environmentalists complaining about increased shading cooling down the desert.
At this point, even if solar panels in the desert kill off a few species of lizards, seriously, what's the alternative? More damage will occur if we don't. It needs to be about minimizing total damage, even if it means damaging isolated areas intentionally.
A lot of environmentalists are really just ecofascists/terrorists who would rather see the wholesale destruction of advanced civilization than make pragmatic compromises, in effect if not intent.
They occupy an incredibly infantile frame that we should be less accommodating towards if we actually want an interesting collective future.
> It needs to be about minimizing total damage, even if it means damaging isolated areas intentionally.
I think that's an arithmetic everyone largely accepts, but they just don't want to be the specific ones paying the price while others seemingly get only the benefits. NIMBYism, if you will.
Just like the complaints about how higher-density housing may hurt 'the environment' for whatever city people live in. Like, if everyone blocks high density housing, those people don't just disappear, they're gonna end up living in low density housing, and that's obviously much worse for the environment: takes up more space, which means cutting into nature more, and generally takes more energy for the lifestyle too.
But that doesn't matter to NIMBY's -- the important thing is that they don't have to see the environment changing where they live in particular.
Like the wealthy Bay Area town that just recently sought to block the development of affordable housing under the pretext of protecting mountain lion habitat.
These people would literally rather live next to mountain lions than next to slightly poorer people. (ignoring the fact that mountain lions don't actually roam bay area suburbs)
Tongue in cheek:
Of course mountain lions are preferable. They are much rarer than the hoards of poor people. Which one do I want in the background of my "chillin' at home" insta pics?
It isn’t really NIMBYism to oppose remote desert solar plants, it is just people who care, perhaps without fully weighing cost/benefit, about any negative effect on nature.
There is a rational case that the huge footprint of solar and wind ends up doing more damage than more compact nuclear or natural gas plants. I suspect most of those opposing solar also oppose nuclear and gas.
I’d call it Nothing Is Good Enough Syndrome instead of NIMBY.
> I’d call it Nothing Is Good Enough Syndrome instead of NIMBY.
Definitely. Problem for us is that while more net-zero projects are being constructed than ever before, increased demand for energy has outpaced it, so we're ending up with more "dirty" energy capacity being added, not to mention the infuriating trend of decommissioning nuclear plants and replacing them with gas turbines.
We need to be building plants based on whatever net-zero technologies we know how to build. If that means more nuclear fission plants in the short term, whatever. Yeah I get that radioactive waste is a problem, but it's way easier to store the waste safely than it is to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. If something better comes about along the way, switch to building that when it comes. But don't just twiddle your thumbs and wait for it.
Massive desert projects are just big subsidies to big corps. Few make money, at least one failed, others get bailouts. We could have all the same capacity cheaper, energy independence by putting more PVs on home roofs.
The hippies are right, the corporate whores are wrong.
We have high home-solar uptake here in Australia, but the problem on the whole is that you then have a grid needing to cater for peak load without having the regular income to make it financial. Makes for a bit of a death spiral. They need higher prices to cover grid costs, which drives more people to put on solar, and so on.
I have a friend who works in the energy sector and has a strong focus on solar. He's talked about this as a major issue for a few years. I don't know if it's inevitable, but would influence a lot of industry policy.
Early adopters of solar here had very strong feed-in tariffs, but these are non-existent now for new sign-ups because otherwise energy companies were paying out more and more, while still having the same grid/maintenance costs. It disincentivises people from upgrading their solar capacity too. If you got 3-5kW way back, but upgrade to 10kW now, you lose your lucrative feed-in tariff.
Going back many years, I remember my grandfather risking his health because he was scared of unpredictable electricity bills should he run his A/C. That's probably an argument against smart metering, at least for the elderly.
There's often talk of distributed battery systems. e.g., trial programs where houses with solar and batteries pool efforts.
Regardless, for every household that effectively goes offgrid, it leaves the fewer, remaining customers paying for the same powerlines and facilities. Solar uptake is about 30-40% here, from memory.
It's almost as if grid providers need to be competitive with alternatives. I'm currently getting about half of my electricity through solar+battery, and that's only going to grow until I'm no longer dependent on my utility at all.
Here in Australia, it can be argued that The Green Party's blanket ban and refusal to even consider let alone use nuclear has contributed significantly to more carbon in the air as we have instead relied on coal for the last 50 years.
Absent environmentalism or non-economic considerations (hello Jervis Bay) no nuclear power would ever be built in Australia. We have way too much cheap, conveniently located coal.
Maybe so. But imo we should have built a strong nuclear industry including refining, power generation and waste disposal. Instead of digging rocks out of the ground and selling them abroad. We should refine them in Australia, lease the uranium to consumer nations, then charge them to store the waste in Australia. We are the safest nation on Earth for nuclear waste disposal. By storing the waste we would help foster adoption in places where waste disposal isn't appropriate. Not to mention the waste is still valuable, it can be refined again.
Think SaaS reoccurring revenue for waste disposal but we can take that waste, refine it and lease it again. Then earn more reoccurring revenue for its storage. Rinse and repeat. We could corner the market for Uranium.
Without environmentalist pressure, coal would be used indefinitely. And nuclear isn't being built or considered because the environmentalists won't support it.
Accordingly they can get positive credit for the first and negative for the second.
Don't kid yourself though - no major party in Australia supports nuclear. The Liberals will say they'll think about it, knowing there's a couple hundred idiots who'll actually believe them and give them a vote while they greenlight Indian-owned coal-miners finishing the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.
Both major parties (Labor and Liberal) have huge donors from coal-mining concerns, as well as union support from coal-miners who - in a startling display of unification with the capital class - also oppose it because it's not coal-mining.
The world will be building fusion reactors in 2050, or spacebeamed solar power or opening a portal to the Warp or something for limitless free energy, and Australian politicians will still be talking about how "we can't just give up on coal".
Progress in this field is going to come from the private sector in-spite of the government who are already trying to kill solar power projects.
NIMBYism would kill nuclear power in Australia stone dead, including NIMBYism in conservative-held rural seats.
New-build coal, nuclear, and gas, is simply economically competitive with new-build renewables in Australia right now absent direct government subsidies - and if anyone is tempted to rabbit on about sun not shining and wind not blowing please go read AEMO's draft 2022 Integrated System Plan before replying.
Is this the Green party that does not, and never has, held power here in AU?
It feels like a bit of a stretch, given the major sources of funds to the two largest political parties, and the various leaders of same who are consistently on record espousing the joy of coal and other fossil fuels while (weirdly) claiming wind turbines are ugly and (disingenuously) blaming grid outages on renewables.
> Environmentalists really are their own worst enemies.
Doesn't almost everyone see themselves as an environmentalist these days? The problem is - the average "environmentalist" is not trying to maximize for anything.
It's a broad bucket that almost everyone is falling into and there's almost zero common ground, no organization, etc.
Of course there are going to be people that oppose almost everything that label themselves as "environmentalists". There's always people that oppose everything! And most people consider themselves "environmentalists".
I think most environmental argument is just normal politics. We have just expanded what people care about. A new set of things have become contraversial or virtuous. And these issues can mix in weird ways that cause friction and cost to people. But government and politicians don't really want these issues to be political. Balancing so many things is just too complex and fraught.
Also, a lot of environmental groups are focused on specific things. Expecting them to protect the whole world and all of the future is unreasonable. It's like expecting a cancer charity to reduce homelessness. Someone who loves birds just wants to protect birds.
> Doesn't almost everyone see themselves as an environmentalist these days?
That is not a self evident claim. At least, most people do not belong to environmental advocacy groups. The largest one is the Sierra club, with 1% of the US population as members.
In my example, it was other kids at my school and their parents protesting it for environmental reasons. And mind you, the powerlines weren't even passing through our town so it wasn't NIMBYism.
Lots of NIMBY anti-development people would consider themselves environmentalist. They are in fact conservatives people that would rather keep the status quo and are against free market for housing and want their assets to inflate to insane prices.
The German greens, now freshly back in government, have greatly accelerated worldwide deployment of renewables when they were in government last time. Without them it would have easily taken a decade longer for prices to plummet to the current levels. Renewables wouldn't be the cheapest form of energy. Let's see what they can do this time around. When the economics favor renewables, then its a no brainer. This makes new nuclear projects even more questionable. Note that the promises are there since at least 60 years. Lack of investment wasn't a problem. Recently a swiss energy company said they don't want to build new nuclear. Why should they, it doesn't make money unless the government is willing to provide the profits, which is only the case in some countries.
There's a difference between conservationism and environmentalism as it relates to climate change, and this comes up every time there's a debate like this. Most environmental advocacy groups are much more concerned with conservation than climate change.
The Endangered Species Act has become a blunt instrument that environmentalists and NIMBYs can use to shut down almost any major infrastructure project. No one wants to see any species go extinct but the time has come to make some hard choices. We may have to sacrifice the six-toed purple salamanders or whatever in order to preserve the rest of the biosphere.
We're not really saving these species, anyway. Climate change will eventually come for them. We can either make a few hard choices now or watch as a few... hundred... thousand choices are made for us.
Environmental people are a diverse bunch with plenty of charlatans and people willing to enrich themselves for “the greater good”. It’s pretty trivial for various interests to undermine and drive their agendas.
Remember the term "carbon footprint" was popularized by BP[1] specifically as an effort to distract from efforts at systemic regulation that might effect corporations by making CO2 seem like an individual moral concern.
Isn't environmentalists' argument that we should reduce our power consumption, rather than destroying the environment to keep providing so much power? That's not as crazy a position as you make it out to be is it?
It's an absolutely crazy proposition because there are very few people who would choose to reduce their quality of life. It's far easier to switch to net-zero energy sources than it is to completely redefine society.
Some people think it's worth redefining society to protect the environment. I wouldn't agree with that absolutely either, but it's a logical and defensible position. It's not incoherent.
It doesn't seem particularly coherent to me for a few reasons. To draw a hard line between human activity/habitat and nature seems artificial. A human settlement is not so different from a beaver dam of ant colony in many ways. The idea especially in the US that there is some pre-colonial unspoiled nature that we could preserve or return to seems historically ignorant. Native Americans were managing the land with fire in much of North America for at least 15k years and the whole place was a giant game park with archipelagos of agriculture and settlements. Early settlers remarked that upon arrival they could ride a horse through New England forests at a full gallop, which wouldn't be possible in a primeval/unmanaged forest. So redefining society away form managing nature would be a radical departure and it unclear what the end goal would even be. There is nothing to roll the clock back to really anywhere in the world, and even if you "re-wild" a lot of the continent it's not clear what you would get, it certainly wouldn't resemble the Americas of 1491 ecologically.
Mostly these folks seem like neo-malthusians who just hate people and civilization.
I'm all for increasing bio-diversity, pulling carbon out of the air, and cleaning up waste but I don't think any of that requires us to use drastically less energy. If anything we should aim to make energy so clean and cheap that those other things become cheap and easy.
The point I'm making is that there's a certain type of activist who believes these kinds o things, and they're arguing for things like reduction of per-capita energy use to reduce society's impact on the land based on the idea that there was ever really land here that wasn't actively managed by people. (At least since the glaciers receded) I'm making the case that these neo-malthusians want to protect an imagined environment of the past that didn't exist. There are certainly things we're doing that are environmentally negative form the perspective of biodiversity, CO2, local water tables, etc but I don't think fixing those things necessarily means using less energy, or having a lower standard of living.
A huge chunk of this thinking is ultimately the puritan moral code writ large. US-society in particular believes all good things must somehow involve suffering or sacrifice: so "fixing" environmental damage must involve making a sacrifice, and if it's not a constant one you "feel" then how can it be solution?
This also goes the other way: the sacrifice of the environment or air pollution or waterways of whatever is the obvious price that must be paid for luxury amenities.
I’m never really convinced of that the puritans were so profoundly influential on modern American habits. They were a relatively small group relative to the whole effort of colonization and almost everyone else thought they were crazy. Even their own children, as evidenced by the Half Way Compromise.
Notwithstanding I see that kind of “Puritanism” among European X-RAY activists. There’s something certainty very human about it, but I think people often reach for irrational, exuberant religiosity during confusing and difficult times.
The problem is there position is completely irrational when you take the amount of damage down to standards of living to the negligible environmental damage done from PV panels. It's almost like the goal is to maximize human misery not minimize environmental damage.
I also don't think it's particularly coherent. Reversing economic development in many places might actually push populations back into less sustainable modes of managing/interacting with their local environments.
Standards of living are highly connected to energy consumption. Reducing power consumption without also reducing living standards is difficult to do. Furthermore, power consumption is going to increase as transportation and industrial processes become electrified.
Electricity consumption is going to rise with electrification. Power consumption is going down. A heat pump is about three times as efficient as heating with oil. An electric engine is about twice as efficient as an ICE, and so on.
Yeah, humans have lived fine before fossil fuels so we can do it again, right?
Just kill half of them. And let 90% of the remaining population work in the fields like slaves. Easy /s
While I agree that modern society requires significant energy inputs, there is a middle ground. For instance, if cities or the suburbs were more pedestrian friendly, walking, cycling, etc. would be a viable option meaning less use of fossil fuels by driving.
Building one MSR sounds like a good way to prove the design, but I wouldn't want to see them build 6 at the same time. The EPR design that they are building is well tested.
Instead of pumping radioactive molten salt between a reactor and heat exchanger, they plan to leave it sitting in stainless steel tubes, and use simple convection to extract the heat.
Oak Ridge rejected this idea in the 1950s because they were trying to power an aircraft, but convection makes more sense when the reactor isn't moving.
Last time around it was negative learning by doing for France[1]. I wonder what magical efficiency gains they will manage to muster compared to Flamanville [2], Hinkley Point C[3] and Olkiluoto 3[4] which the state owned french nuclear industry is building. Well, more than magical "simplification", "cost cutting" and "modular design" shown on a powerpoint before reality hits again.
> The plant, which has a projected lifetime of 60 years, had an estimated construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion
> According to January 2021 estimates, the expected operational start date is June 2026 with a build cost of £22–23 billion
That seems like a... fairly modest overrun for a megaproject?
Flamanville and Olkiluoto were the first two of a new design. Historically, that rarely goes well. Taishan went a lot better, and Hinkley Point is basically on track.
> CNN said French energy firm EDF, which helps run the site, had warned the US government that China's nuclear regulator had raised limits on permissible levels of radiation outside the plant to avoid shutting it down.
Hinkley Point C is looking to be an at least £50 billion cool transfer from taxes to private corporations. Renewables have also gotten way cheaper today compared to 2017.
> EDF has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price – a "strike price" – for electricity from Hinkley Point C of £92.50/MWh (in 2012 prices),[20][77] which will be adjusted (linked to inflation – £106/MWh by 2021[71]) during the construction period and over the subsequent 35 years tariff period. The base strike price could fall to £89.50/MWh if a new plant at Sizewell is also approved.[20][77] High consumer prices for energy will hit the poorest consumers hardest according to the Public Accounts Committee.[81]
> In July 2016, the National Audit Office estimated that due to falling energy costs, the additional cost to consumers of 'future top-up payments under the proposed HPC CfD had increased from £6.1 billion in October 2013, when the strike price was agreed, to £29.7 billion'.[82][83] In July 2017, this estimate rose to £50 billion, or 'more than eight times the 2013 estimate'.[9]
Nuclear reactors have massive learning effects, the more you build with the same people and organization the cheaper it is. Nuclear own massive scale is its own worst enemy.
If we could just build 500MW smaller Molten Salt cooled reactors we could literally build them like gas plants.
The source regarding actually seeing negative learning effects I linked in the original comment states in the abstract.
> The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.
Sure, a nuclear cycle without the use of a steam turbine may have a future. Similarly to how gas plants undercut coal, and nuclear. Simply due to the cost of the steam plant. I haven't seen any proposals though which is more concrete than a pie-in-sky powerpoint design though.
The other issue is that for wind you only need an axle and a generator, for sun it is solid state. It is hard to compete with the economics of solid state power generation.
What matter to me is that within one generation they totally de-carbonized the grid from oil and coal to nuclear and have successfully been in running it that way for decades.
Germany has been doing a Green New Deal style thing with Renwables for 2 decades now, in my opinion they could have easily been heading to 100% CO2 free by now if they had just started to build nuclear plants.
The French certainty made mistakes and unfortunately technology innovation and improvement and continued expatiation of the products on a global scale didn't happen.
Of course I don't want to relay on learning effects from these large complex projects, but its better then just extrapolating from individual first time builds.
We defiantly want to move to smaller AND more efficient nuclear plants, but for that we also need nuclear industry, nuclear education a competent nuclear regulator and a government that actually puts its resources in that place.
> The other issue is that for wind you only need an axle and a generator, for sun it is solid state. It is hard to compete with the economics of solid state power generation.
That is one consideration. The real question is all in, 100% making sure all citizens have as much power as they need at every moment no matter what happens. If you approach it like that, going a all nuclear route with some localized batteries for peak shaving would be the overall cheapest solution for a largish industrial economy. You just replace current coal plants with nuclear plants and use the same infrastructure.
Doing a fully renewable massive industrial economy is totally unsolved problem requiring storage, smart grids and so on. And even then, when you consider the loses of solar in the case of a vulcano for example, you probably need some kind of gas backup.
Had the world at Kyoto just said, lets everybody build 1 nuclear plant per 1 million people, we would have de-carbonized by now.
Nuclear looks to be about 3x as expensive as wind/solar [0] and that is assuming you use it at 100% of its capacity due to the high building cost and low marginal costs. Just looking at California, winter nights drop to about half of electric demand as summer days [1] so you'd have to pay even more for spare capacity.
I think it would far cheaper to just build like 2x the wind/solar you need and use the surpluses to make methane [2] which is easily stored and already used for 40% of the US electrical grid [3].
Based on first principle I simply believe nuclear is the better long term play. In terms of total resources and land required modern nuclear beat anything by order of magnitude. Current prices based on 40 year old technology are not my main concern.
Nuclear is proven and proven at massive scale, its proven massive industrial nation can transition to almost 100% nuclear and can do so within a few decades.
The method that you advocate where you overbuild massive amounts of unsolved issues and it not even proven on a medium scale. And in the cost calculation sited don't account for the problem all in from production to distribution.
Methane produced in the way you advocate would still be transported in leaky pipelines. Massive power grids would need to be build to connect the regions optimal for collection with where it is most used. Massive batteries would still be required in such a system.
I am 100% sure that if a government today said, lets build 100 nuclear reactors in the next 30 years and put them next to each operating coal plant. I am 99% sure they could do it and that it would be a robust system for the next 50-100 years. For that certainty I would be worth paying a premium for.
Again, look at German, had they spent 2 decades on a green transformation on nuclear, they would now already be nearly CO2 free by now.
> Nuclear is proven and proven at massive scale, its proven massive industrial nation can transition to almost 100% nuclear and can do so within a few decades.
France is part of the Synchronous grid of Continental Europe and thus can run their nuclear generators at 100% capacity all the time because the other countries around them use lower fixed cost/higher marginal cost energy sources. An entire electrical grid powered by nuclear energy would be far more expensive to run.
> The method that you advocate where you overbuild massive amounts of unsolved issues and it not even proven on a medium scale. And in the cost calculation sited don't account for the problem all in from production to distribution.
What is unproven about it? Wind/solar/methane power/storage is all done on a massive scale already. The only unproven part is the methane production but when you consider nuclear is 3x expensive for base and likely 6x expensive for peak, nuclear makes no sense.
Honestly, even Molten Salt cooled reactors would be enough. The most advanced once are Terrestrial Energy and Moltex Energy in Canada. Canada is actually putting effort behind real next generation.
I am more exited about this then almost anything else. If these can work its a literal game changer.
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.
> 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.
Nothing in common? Lets see. Nuclear power plants and weapons were supported and approved by the same president, regulated by the same governments, with the same members from the same parties, sharing the same feedback and moving in the same direction as the politics requested
If you look under the masks of the people sharing the final responsibility you will see the face of the president in all cases. All nuclear things are intertwined, in the same way as Facebook and Instagram are different, but anything affecting one of them, will instantly spread and change the other.
The French nuclear weapons program was started by (right-wing President) general de Gaulle in the early 60s.
The French nuclear power program was started in the mid-70s under the (right-wing) Giscard d'Estaing government.
The rainbow warrior bombing was conducted under the (left-wing/socialist) government of Mitterrand.
France did nuclear weapons tests from 60 until 90's with many presidents. And promoted nuclear energy with many presidents. There is an extensive feedback and overlapping between both programs and the successive governments continued basically in the same direction as the former.
France just keep a clean image doing the essays as far from Europe and indiscreet views as they could and hiding the real extension of the damage done, but can't be denied that they have their own quote of evil acts also in this field, as any other countries. I'm not comparing them with North Korea, but they commit mistakes also.
France just had to turn off 3 of their rotting reactors[0] and they lowered their estimates for this year to 295-315 TWh[1]. They're desperate, it's election year and they failed to come up with a diversified energy plan for the future. Luckily the recent taxonomy decision may help to avoid sharp tax rises to finance this backward and hilariously expensive[2] strategy but those EU funds won't run forever. Expensive times coming up for the French taxpayers.
Ahah, it's always expensive time for the french taxpayer -- always have been! They even have recursive layer of taxes, where you pay taxes on amounts that have... already been removed from your revenue as... taxes.
That's not what recursion means. There are income taxes on your whole income (- a base provision for living expenses), and you can deduct certain things ( like donations to nonprofits) from the taxable income.
I know what recursion means thank you so much.
If you get $100 income, get a 20% tax on that, and then get another 20% tax on... not $80 but on the /previous/ $100, you are paying recursive taxes.
Thats what the old "CSG" was (replaced by something else but in the same 'spirit'), in france. You are being taxed on amount you already been taxed on.
Yes, all taxes ( i include social charges and stuff like healthcare, retirement, etc. payments) are counted based on your total income - some provisions.
totaling 8 now .. but in the end will need another one really going down bad to stop all the sudden pro-nuclear movement here in Europe, which I can imagine only must have some astroturfing behind.
But til then, blow more money into insurable and as much green as coal and gas power plants :(
(And that calculations done by real experts didn't even include all the other uneconomic issues from getting that stuff from somewhere til storing the waste - but yeah I know, all these waste will be taken by those new shiny molten reactors that have no problem at all on paper and will eat all the waste - both things just so far from reality in practice, which almost does not exist even).
The common stance and knowledge here at HN about all this is consternating :(
But they do generate (human-)life-threatening nuclear wastes that last 100k years. That dwarfs even the longest human civilization like Egypt[0]. 100k ago, humankind was barely appearing. Plastic in comparison takes around 450 years to be disaggregated through exo-human processes[1].
How to deal properly with these wastes is still a vigorous debate generator[2]. The thing is, with our current theoretical knowledge and practical expertise, we don’t have solutions that scale at the industrial level at which nuclear wastes are produced. Not in a way that we can say "and thus mankind will be completely free of dealing with this issue in the next 100k year".
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 an ideal world, nuclear might be great. In the existing US world, it seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
Ukraine and Slovakia both generate the majority of their electricity from nuclear [1]. South Korea and China area also building nuclear plants at a decent rate (though the former is adding a lot of fossil fuel capacity too).
When the United States built nuclear plants at scale, in serial production, plant costs were also much lower.
South Korea had a run in with a ton of faked documentation and is essentially out of the game [1]. China likes to keep a finger in the nuclear jar for diversification but the current investments are minuscule, even though they look large from an outside raw numbers perspective. [2]
> When the United States built nuclear plants at scale, in serial production, plant costs were also much lower.
As far as I know, there was never a time where US nuclear power plants were built on time and at budget (and that's while building more than France ever did).
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.
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.
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 plants in the 2030s. Sadly most of those stopped when the production knowledge and training and organizational maturity was getting much better.
Point being that multiple countries and companies had very successful nuclear power programs, and they didn't collapse because of intrinsic failure of the industry but lack of political will. And as you note, overall large-scale construction in the US in general has turned into a dumpster fire regardless of what is being built due to stupid policies and no small amount of graft.
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.
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.
> France is the only country I know that's managed to make nuclear power work.
Hello from Ontario, Canada! Have a look at the 'supply' tab of this page: https://www.ieso.ca/power-data. Most of our energy production is from nuclear. It works well, and is relative inexpensive and consistent (I mean, look at that graph, it's INSANELY consistent).
Not just France. 60 % of Belgian electricity is generated by nuclear power plants. Unfortunately the green party has decided to shut them down and replace them with gas plants to “save the climate”. Green stupidity knows no boundaries.
I don't get this logic. How does 100% reliance on Russian natural gas save anyone from anything? =)
The current hike in electricity pricing is pretty much solely based on the fact that way too much of Europe's electricity is produced with Russian natural gas...
Canada has the largest nuclear power station in the world [1], led the development of one of the most successful reactor designs [2], and continues to be a leader in nuclear fuel, steam generators, and nuclear waste management engineering [3]. Also, most of Ontario's power generation comes from nuclear. You can see the supply breakdown live here: https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
> Nuclear power plants are vast construction project.
Only water cooled reactors really have that problem. Nuclear plants could be much smaller. But innovation has just done very badly.
Nuclear scale, regulation is its own worst enemy and the social movements against it didn't help.
In the US for a while they did nuclear right as well. Nuclear always does well if you actually build many in a row. Learning effects are massive in large projects. Look at any countries that build many nuclear plants, it always works.
We could literally have had 100% green energy 40 years ago no problem. It was cheap coal that prevented that. We would be way better of having built nuclear.
And Switzerland, Sweden and others have successful networks with nuclear that are very green. Also parts of Canada.
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.
> France is the only country I know that's managed to make nuclear power work.
That really depends on your definition of "making it work". France's current nuclear fleet is already underfunded by several tens of billions [0]
Now we have Marcon announcing "tens of billions" for new reactors, the first of which is supposed to go online over a decade from now, with presidential election coming up soon.
Which begs the question; If France has so many spare tens of billions lying around to invest in nuclear, why don't they use those to cover already underfunded nuclear positions?
Well, France has 58 mostly old reactors and have 1 under construction and now announced 6 more. To keep their current level of nuclear production, they would have to build like 40 in the next 20-30 years.
I was under the impression that it is in the range of 1-2x per reactor. There are some old Swedish ones that are at 800mw, while the ones I believe the article refers to are in the ballpark of 1500mw.
Older water pressure reactors in France are 900mw/1300mw, the EPR is 1650mw. I concede it's not as dramatic an increase as I made it sound. But it should also go hand in hand with longer uptimes and better safety.
The question is how much of the capacity they are going to retire in the next few years is going to be replaced. It's a highly political issue in France and it's an election season.
Nuclear from a cost perspective continues to be expensive; also for the French. And they will in any case continue to build out solar and wind as well. So, there's that.
And finally, building nuclear plants is something the French do abroad too. So, it's actually something they export that generates jobs and revenue in that way. So, they would want to at least build a few plants to keep that going. And of course they also have military interests tied up with uranium enrichment. France is fiercely protective of its status as a nuclear power.
But I think overall nuclear will be slowly declining proportionally in France; just like almost everywhere else. Unless something changes on the cost front. Which does not seem to be happening
> 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?"
A cynical person might even imagine French infiltrators behind the scenes supporting anti-nuclear sentiments in neighboring countries in order to eventually sell them electricity. Energy independence and energy costs have started wars before, so it would just be pocket change spent for a future "investment".
Or Russian infiltrators. Isn't it funny how after deciding to get rid of nuclear reactors Germany suddenly realized that it needs to build a gas pipeline to Russia to cover it's energy needs.
The former German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder is now chairman of Russian energy company Rosneft, and was a strong advocate of the Nord Stream pipeline project.
That would be ironic indeed, but of course that's pure trash history: Germany has consistently been getting around 40% of it's gas imports from Russia/USSR since 1985, so about 25 years before they started turning of nuclear.
> Or Russian infiltrators. Isn't it funny how after deciding to get rid of nuclear reactors Germany suddenly realized that it needs to build a gas pipeline to Russia to cover it's energy needs.
It's not funny, it's bluntly wrong.
The German nuclear phase-out was precedented by the EEG, the first green electricity feed-in tariff scheme in the world [0]. It was part of the Energiekonsensgespräche that went on in the 90s, and ultimately resulted in ratifying the nuclear phase-out in 2002 [1] where nuclear would be replaced with renewables subsidized trough the EEG.
It's particularly wrong in the context of Germany using most of its gas not for electricity production, but rather for industrial and chemical production, and household utilities, only 14% of German gas is used for electricity generation [2].
Nuclear fission reactors would do nothing for that, they don't help with high temperature smelting were gases need to be injected, as it's for exampled needed for metal alloys that go into all those cars Germany manufactures.
They only way nuclear fission could help there is by using nuclear energy to electrolyze hydrogen, and use that as natural gas replacement. But renewables can very much do the same, without creating very complicated waste, while also fixing what's currently holding renewables back the most; Storage [3]
Your citation #2 shows Household, Power Supply, and District Heating to total 52% of natural gas usage. Nuclear power can take over both for electric power supply and for home and district heat via electric heat pumps - which can be 250-350% efficient[0].
So, over 50% of German natural gas usage can be replaced by nuclear electrical power, based on the citations you provided :)
It's not as simple as that. The extra electricity load would require extra infrastructure on that end, you are very casually implying how a major chunk of German households should just completely retool themselves, as if that's something trivial to do.
Who is gonna pay for that? When are you gonna do that? During the 10+ years of building reactors? What if your new reactors don't finish on time?
That does not mean heating pumps are not a thing in Germany, they have been steadily gaining share particularly with newly constructed buildings [0] that have to abide by even harsher energy regulations.
But what you are suggesting would involve replacing tens of millions of "old stock" households, all to justify nuclear fission power generation while not fixing any issues as to why Germany is actually phasing nuclear fission out.
You still offer no solution to the waste, just like you don't seem to give a single thought about financing such a change or who would be willing to invest in new German nuclear reactors.
Because German nuclear companies most certainly won't, they are just as happy with this phase out as everybody else, particularly as it gave them several huge government pay outs, not just for the disposal of the waste [1], but also for the phase out [2], can't even tax the fuel rods to pay for their disposal [3].
Which makes German nuclear fission energy very likely some of the most profitable on the planet because, unlike EDF, these companies are not majority state owned.
France just had to turn off 3 of their rotting reactors[0] and they lowered their estimates for this year to 295-315 TWh[1]. They're desperate, it's election year and they failed to come up with a diversified energy plan for the future. Luckily the recent taxonomy decision may help to avoid sharp tax rises to finance this backward and hilariously expensive[2] strategy but those EU funds won't run forever. Expensive times coming up for the French taxpayers.
Why would you need conspiracies when the failure is so clear in front of you?
If France had more NREs it would still face the same issues without adding considerable storage capabilities (any big country that does 80% NRE thanks to storage?)
The word you're looking for is "paranoid", not cynical I think.
Reasonably, to drop CO2 emissions by 5% each year, ie. to have a change of keeping climate drift below 2°C avg, these reactors won't even be enough for French energy needs...
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.
This will provide a nice data-point for those who argue nuclear makes more financial sense over wind/solar/battery, but some anti-nuclear cabal is stopping their construction.
Maybe they are right and France will make lots of money selling energy to its neighbors, or they are wrong, and France will be stuck with some of the highest energy prices in the euro region.
With government subsidies everything can be made to look cheap. Not saying we should not subsidize some energy production, but nuclear seems like a woefully inefficient use of it.
>In 2010, as part of the progressive liberalisation of the energy market under EU directives, France agreed the Accès régulé à l'électricité nucléaire historique (ARENH) regulations that allowed third party suppliers access up to about a quarter of France's pre-2011 nuclear generation capacity, at a fixed price of €42/MWh from 1 July 2011 until 31 December 2025.[47][48][49]
> As of 2015, France's household electricity price, excluding taxation, is the 12th cheapest amongst the 28 member European Union and the second-cheapest to industrial consumers.[50] The actual cost of generating electricity by nuclear power is not published by EDF or the French government but is estimated to be between €59/MWh and €83/MWh.[51]
All power in Europe is subsidies in so many different ways. An accurate comparison of prices is basically impossible.
I would argue, by literally any meassure, French investment in nuclear in the 60-70 was absolutely paid off. CO2 saved in the 80s is far better then CO2 saved now.
The only reason nuclear didn't become universal in the US is cheap coal plants. The US would be 100x better off if they had build a few 100 nuclear reactors instead.
The main reason is cost. Then gas plants undercut everything which had a steam cycle and the nuclear industry has been living on government handouts ever since. Alternating between "small and modular" and "big and efficient" to have something to try and hype with.
> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[48]
> Over-commitment to nuclear power brought about the financial collapse of the Washington Public Power Supply System, a public agency which undertook to build five large nuclear power plants in the 1970s. By 1983, cost overruns and delays, along with a slowing of electricity demand growth, led to cancellation of two WPPSS plants and a construction halt on two others. Moreover, WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion of municipal bonds, which is one of the largest municipal bond defaults in U.S. history. The court case that followed took nearly a decade to resolve.[49][50][51]
> Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled,[52] and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt. Al Gore has commented on the historical record and reliability of nuclear power in the United States:
> Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable.[53]
And instead of those nuclear plants they mostly build coal plants that are still costing money and hurting people one a massive scale.
If coal has been correctly accounted for in terms of human cost even outside of carbon, nuclear would have looked far better.
And what those numbers quote actually miss is that there was a period of massive over order of all kinds of plants, including coal that were canceled during 1970s economic problems. So the fact that people were over optimistic about the future in that period doesn't mean nuclear was bad. The economy simply didn't continue to boom as much as some people had predicted.
Even back then the inventiveness for US public utilities were structured in a way that makes it more viable to buy things that require continues fuel cost, rather then up front investment.
The simple fact is, externalizes include nuclear power would have dominated and would still do today. Short sighted politics and public fear is the reason it didn't happen.
Looking back at it, its actually a no brainer and countries like France who did it certainty didn't regret it. No massive pollution from coal plants with horrible environmental destruction around them, no dirty air, no mass destruction of country side because of coal mining. Far better energy independence.
> Alternating between "small and modular" and "big and efficient" to have something to try and hype with.
With molten salt or even just molten salt cooled reactors, you can be both small and efficient there is no conflict.
Had the US continued to invest in nuclear next generation reactors were well into development. However these were canceled. And very little private innovation took place from the on. Partly because it was incredibly hard to beat coal and later gas on cost and partly because regulation were hard coded to only be viable for PWR type reactors.
I think nuclear doesn't make sense nowadays, but it's hard to disagree that there are many groups working hard to stop it. How you decided it's a conspiracy cabal somewhere eludes me, they are very visible and very loud.
Where there are large profits to be made, detractors seem to have very little effect. Why are these groups so much effective than deforestation, blood diamonds, or child labor groups?
You are asking why those groups can't stop what is mostly illegal activities, but have an impact on ones that are completely dependent on formal government involvement?
Of course, no one will know for over a decade while these are being built. Assuming they come in on schedule. And that France ever admits the costs. And by then people will be on to arguing the next next generation really will be much better this time...
I will believe it when they break ground in France to start the building process.
Saying things and making empty promises is a art western politicians have perfected over the centuries.
I'd say it's the reversal of the trend that excites me more than the single instance of the announcement itself.
For decades, Europe (and admittedly the US) has sat back and moaned against using the single most powerful energy source known to man (measured in energy density). Germany actually proclaimed in 2011 that they would be turning away completely from nuclear energy.
This is a start, executed well . . it lays the foundation for a generational shift.
Yes. It's not surprising that the largest nuclear power company is based in France because France has the largest share of power from nuclear of any country (>70%). However, like most Western countries, France's nuclear reactor building has largely stalled and they have been coasting on past accomplishments. If they succeed at building more reactors, it will be unusual (and imo good).
The fact that nuclear plants last so long is a sort of unfortunate benefit. Nuclear plant production is cheaper when multiple plants of the same design are built together in serial production. But the longevity of nuclear plants mean that the need to build new ones is spaced out over decades.
That said, it's still the only non-intermittent clean energy source that isn't geographically dependent like hydro and geothermal. Plans to decarbonize civilization invariably involve either nuclear power, or a magnificent yet-to-be-invented breakthrough in energy storage.
Furthermore, it's not clear they are doing a fantastic job building Hinkley Point in the UK. First, in the decade or decade and a half they're taking to build it, you could build so much renewable capacity.
Second, Hinkley Point only went ahead when it was guaranteed an outrageously high strike price, for the electricity it will output.
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 electricity for £0 in the middle of the night sometimes (though not so much recently) that full £365 wasn't passed on to you, but of course the financial strain of such offerings under current situations means these firms go bankrupt, and sooner or later the government will end up having to fix it.
Everything paying Contract for Difference subsidies would be above water now, not just the nuclear plant, the most expensive older wind farms are actually net profitable for the government via its wholly owned energy subsidy company. If your wind farm is guaranteed £150 per MWh, and electricity sells for £365 per MWh, you're paying the government £215 per MWh of the income from selling wind power - if you put up a newer, cheaper farm and only secured £80 per MWh, that's £285 per MWh you're giving the government, and your investors are probably re-assessing their appetite for risk accordingly, if they'd just said "Fuck it, we'll build it without a subsidy" that £285 per MWh is profit.
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 compare the Hinkley strike price with the current peak. Hence my 50% figure based on our domestic price per kWh going up from 16p to 24p.
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.
Significantly greater in the period covered by that document (2020 under Pandemic lockdown) but probably much closer to equal now with people back at work. But sure, there will certainly be less usage in summer than now.
Prices though remain high and are likely to remain high for the foreseeable. Just as natural gas prices effectively set the electricity price even when a minority of electricity comes from gas global LNG prices effectively set the price of natural gas even in a country like the UK that has considerable local resources.
Today the wind picked back up and prices stayed slightly under £200 per MWh, but remember that's not actually low, it just seems low compared to recent extraordinary heights. In February 2012 £49.10 was the average price of day ahead baseload electricity by February 2015 it is £42.86, and by February 2021 it was £32.04. Despite the windy weather this month it may be north of £200 for February 2022.
The wholesale price is currently around £200/MWh, whilst the guaranteed price for electricity from Hinkley Point C is around £110/MWh. So no, it is not outrageously high.
No, was outrageously high, as highlighted at the time of approval by the National Audit Office.
As I said, renewables are cheaper and faster to build: offshore wind a few years ago was given guaranteed strike prices of only £40/MWh.
Current electricity spot prices are volatile because gas is expensive, not because nuclear is cheap. Besides, the government doesn't guarantee outrageous gas prices for thirty years.
For as controversial and catastrophically dangerous nuclear power has been over its history, it still shows signs of being one of the best power sources out there. There is plenty of opportunity for better designs, the introduction of thorium reactors vs uranium. This week MIT announced a major breakthrough in fission technology. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60312633
In an ever growing power hungry world, nuclear shows the best promise in moving the world to a reliable power source that isn't reliant on geo-politically sensitive fossil fuels and eliminates greenhouse gas issues dramatically.
I'll add that wind and solar get a lot of hype, but being cyclic and weather dependent doesn't make it suitable as primary wide-spread grid power source.
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.
Absurd that discussion of nuclear power brings out people who think it’s too pricy. 30 trillion in US debt. Ten percent of that could have nuclearized this country
And say 3% makes the entire country renewable? What is the better use of money then? Energy is energy, and even better if it is vastly simpler to generate with less headaches to take care of afterwards.
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.
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 if actual storage outside of governmental emergency backups will ever be needed in wind heavy deployments.
>> 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.
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.
With enough uninhabited desert to fit France in it, Australia is ideally suited for solar. It's great that they're pioneering solar, but I guess the numbers may look different for France.
I wonder how France is gonna plan to finance those additional "tens of billions", when those tens of billions are already missing for the existing infrastructure [0];
> France, which operates Europe’s largest fleet of nuclear plants, is heavily underfunded. It has earmarked assets only worth 23 billion euros, less than a third of 74.1 billion euros in expected costs.
> 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.
This is an illusion of control.
Once someone doesn’t follow some guideline or makes a mistake somewhere.
Would you come again with an article saying: oh it’s safe, if only we didn’t do X or Y or Z…
Yes if only…
Elevation of sea levels (and rivers), elevation of temperature lead to plants downtimes because either the plants can’t be cooled down or the water level is too high for safe operations.
So it has its own intermittences.
The other issue is nuclear waste. A small one.
I would prefer them to put a higher effort on the Tokamak iter and develop orbital plants with microwave lenses.
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.
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 National Academy of Engineering considers the grid the greatest engineering achievement since 1900. See https://www.nae.edu/19579/19582/21020/7326/7461/GreatAchieve...
In that regard, producing a stable electricity supply should be considered nearly the most cost-effective investment we can make. Arguing that nuclear is more costly than other forms is just arguing about a few pennies in the dollar. The dollar is the benefit we get from electrification. The pennies are the 'extra' cost of nuclear. (Tbh, I don't think nuclear is more costly. I think we can just _calculate_ the cost of nuclear better than alternatives. What's the cost of fossil fuels when you add in the external climate change impact? Who knows? What's the cost of renewables when you consider they don't always produce power/might not be able to meet demand/need significant grid reconstruction to work? Who knows?)
Regarding safety. This will always be a big consideration. But how safe is the world if the climate warms? I'd say not very. From what I've seen on nuclear engineering, it seems nowadays westerners really do understand how to run the nuclear plants safely. I don't believe there has been a really bad accident in the West. (5 Mile Island came close but was controlled. Fukushima was operator error compounded by cultural issues associated with Japanese management.) There will always be some risk of an accident. But, from what I've seen, actually it's pretty safe. The accidents I've heard of, can be explained as poor operation choices.
I think what really gets people in the energy debate is they are hoping for 'perfect' solutions which have no downsides. Unfortunately, there isn't one available right now.
The other thing that gets people is they consider choosing nuclear to be more risky than not choosing nuclear because they feel they know nuclear is dangerous. Whereas, from what I can see, _not_ choosing nuclear is a lot more dangerous than choosing nuclear. If we are to believe the climate change warnings, it seems that danger is much much greater than anything nuclear poses.
TLDR nuclear is risky but that risk is a lot less than climate change or bad electricity supplies. People weight nuclear risk too heavily because we understand it more and people perceive nuclear as dangerous to their person. They fail to properly account for risks they cannot easily perceive that are associated with the alternatives.
> 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.
> Arguing that nuclear is more costly than other forms is just arguing about a few pennies in the dollar.
The trouble is that cost is mostly due to the need to service considerable upfront capital investment required to build a project, starting a decade before any power is produced. No one wants to be holding the bag for that when the market can still handle some smaller cheaper renewable or natural gas projects.
Germany needs to apply its great industrial engineering talent towards doing the same thing, to reverse the amazingly stupid decision they made to close theirs.
I advise anyone not in the know to look into France's historical control of uranium mining in Niger. France's nuclear industry has long been fueled by a highly unequal neocolonial relationship with their former colony.
Great job moving those goal posts when your original premise was called out.
What exactly do you want France to do in Niger to atone for their sins? Build infrastructure, fund businesses, make deals with their government? In other words, you want to solve colonialism with more colonialism?
Locals should have been better compensated, more taxes should have been paid to the local government, costs related to environmental cleanup should be paid for by Areva. The business that went on there was fundamentally extractive and unfair to Niger - a result of a drastic power imbalance.
I fail to see how my "original premise was called out" or how I "moved my goalposts", but great job defending neocolonialism online - you really owned me!
I do not think uranium is that expensive, compared to the price of a nuclear reactor itself or other energy sources. I advise to look at wars actually occurring for the control of oil and gas (see country like the US).
Cmd/ctrl+f "colonial penetration" for a brief overview of the subject.
Not sure why so many people here seem to think the historical source of much of France's uranium is irrelevant - people in Niger are still paying the cost of long-term uranium exposure.
True. But Niger is not an exception, it just happens they had some uranium. In the other ex-colonies, it's petroleum, natural gas, wood and exotic products of all sort.
In fact, this has been such a continuum that the prefix "neo" in the expression "neocolonialism" isn't really appropriate. It's rather business as usual without having to maintain order directly. Military agreements still link France and most of its ex-colonies: the French Army has many bases and has the duty to intervene in case of coups.
Or not, depending on which side will be the most beneficial to France. In general, France helps to maintain the powers already in place, very often authoritarian regimes. Quite a few truly democratically-elected African leaders have been either bought, jailed or assassinated with direct support of France.
Things have changed though after 1991 on the political part, with a French foreign policy pushing more often towards democracy. On the business side, very little. Each country is a specific situation.
In all cases, the African "elites" of those ex-colonies are as much responsible of this continuum. Let's not be naive nor Manichean: the people of these countries have been actively betrayed by their own elites and France has cynically profited of it.
To sum it up, France behaved and still behave with its African ex-colonies very much alike the USA have and still do in Central and South America.
NB: I have both the French and the American citizenships and vote in both.
So I get a double dose of shame.
But let's not look at these countries as passive victims from bad richer countries. They have been independent since 60 years. If the local elites had been focused on improving their people's life instead of amassing tens of billions $, French cynical influence would have receded.
So it's less "neocolonialism" than converging interests between the ethically and financially corrupted elites on both sides.
In our so-called "modern democracies", American and French citizens have little influence in the foreign policy of their own country. It's rarely a matter of debate since elections mostly focus on internal issues.
Well, some of us demonstrated and petitioned regularly on obvious wrong-doings ... with just no effect. I remember demonstrating in Boston against invasion of Irak ; a few thousands people, students mostly, just to watch many Democratic officials like... Hilary Clinton voting for it.
What can we do? I still had to vote for Hilary against Trump, knowing she knew that the intel for invading Irak had been bent. Because Trump was far worse.
The French political theater is totally different, but still: the French economic and political "elites" are on both aisles implicated in dubious relations with African elites, as well as Arabic elites from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, etc etc.
What can we do really, as citizens? Foreign policies are even further a reach that a true ecological transition. On which nothing is done despite polls showing that the matter is among the 3 priorities of French voters. Democracy as we know it is a just a show.
These are the permanent ones. In you include temporary bases in Africa the list is longer. For 2021 it was: Djibouti, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Gabon, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad.
I am an ignorant prick, and if the powers that be had chosen to exploit poor people mining uranium instead of poor people mining coal 40 years ago, we would have avoided billions of metric tons of CO2 and saved millions of poor peoples' lives.
The idea of a power source that, when failed, can wipe out a significant amount of live-able land, large swaths of population, irradiate rivers, etc, seems insane. The risk reward factor just does not seem to be there.
Sure there are redundancies.
Sure there are threat models.
However, everything fails. Mistakes happen, black swan events occur. What is the calculus here? How can it ever be made in good faith?
Currently, we're mostly consuming oil and coal. The equation there isn't _whether_ it'll wipe out a significant amount of live-able land, but rather a guarantee that it will.
Nuclear Reactors destroy the environment when they fail, oil and coal destroys it when it works.
Nothing is w/o a footprint. Solar and wind requires batteries which require rare earth metals which cause environmental and social inequalities.
Right now, however, the focus needs to be on decommissioning coal and oil as fast as we can, and nuclear has an important role to play in that.
Fossil fuels are already wiping out a significant amount of livable land, through normal operation.
We need to invest in carbon-free energy sources that won't cause blackouts at the whim of the weather. Reaching 100% decarbonization via wind/solar will be very difficult because it requires overbuilding, days to weeks of storage, and transmission upgrades.
I find the truth to be quite the opposite; nuclear opponents vastly overstate risks and don't consider externalities from other power sources. For example, coal power plants largely don't have a scary, infrequent failure mode, but they cause far more deaths per kW generated than nuclear from ongoing emissions and more frequent lower scale events.
