Lots of people shilling for Big Oil in this comment section
Yeah, everyone support your local mom and pops nuclear power plant. Best if they run on 100% home grown uranium
Ourworldindata is one of the biggest nuclear shills there is. I see a lot people shilling for real renewables in the comments here.
Unfortunately, thanks to the anti-nuclear lobby, we are in a situation where the current reactors will have to be shutdown before the new ones are available to take their place.
Yeah, the famous french anti-nuclear lobby. Those guys who control the french government with its nuclear weapons, who has also recently built a nuclear reactor. That government totally is controlled by the anti-nuclear lobby.
Or … maybe France tried upgrading its aging nuclear reactors with the new reactor in Flamanville, which went spectacular over budget? And debt ridden EdF simply has not the funds to build over 50 new reactors at 13 billion each?
We should have been deploying nuclear much earlier and then augment with renewables. Once energy storage technology matured more you could phase out nuclear plants.
Still massive exporter of electricity. I wonder how much coal and gas would burn in Europe if French npp weren’t there.
Which unfortunately now shuts down because the reactors cannot cope with the heatwaves. Turns out that no river = no cooling = no energy production.
False,
Reactor production is throttled down to preserve the river environment, not because they cannot cool themselves. Only 18% reduction on the worst event.
Dismissing the biggest low carbon energy producer because 1970 engineers did not account for the unknown temperature extremes 20 years after the predicted lifespan of the reactor is silly.
Some reactors can even cool down the river ! This is the case for the Civeau reactor for example, the water released is cooler than the water pump from the river.
Too bad this also slows down their renewable energy projects, which would make it cheaper. But Nuclear Reactors + renewables is a bad combination. Nuclear Reactors can’t be adjusted to renewable energy, because you can’t just shut them down when the renewables producing lots of cheap energy. Nuclear Plants always have to keep running, which is also expensive.
France is already doing just that
As I said, Nuclear Plants are slowing down their expansion of renewables. No idea why people downvote me.
Well maybe because of your assertion that renewables and nuclear are a bad combination. Renewables are notoriously unstable sources of energy and you need grid stability or you will have power outages.
This has traditionally been achieved by coal, gas and oil plants. Nuclear power plants are a non GHG emitting way to replace this stability. Countries that have a larger share of renewables but much less nuclear than France still have to fire up their coal and gas powered plants on quiet winter nights after an overcast day. Which means more GHG emissions.
What I meant by “France is already doing just that” is that they are running their NPPs in load following mode, which means they have the ability to adjust their energy output capacity based on the share of renewable energy available.
So while I don’t know exactly why you are being downvoted (not by me in any case), it could be because you’re attacking an ally of the fight against GHG emissions. The goal is not simply to have as many solar panels or wind farms, but to reduce GHG emissions. And that’s what we have to keep in mind. So while, yes France moved to more nuclear there are more ways to look at the same news item: they are still going for 60% electrification of the nation by 2030, up from 30% right now and still going for massive expansion of renewables.
But the nuclear plants will always push the renewables away and keep the price up. It is a bad combination. You need something like gas (later hydrogen) which you can just turn on and off again. It’s just physics. Nuclear Plants will always push the price up.
That’s not necessarily true. There is less need for them if NPPs are there, sure, but the price tag is always king. If renewables are simply much cheaper they will proliferate.
And we will always have to fill in the gaps for when renewables aren’t available. Betting it all on battery tech mostly coming from China is a dangerous game in this geopolitical era.
I don’t understand why people are so anti nuclear. It doesn’t have any emissions. The US, Canada and especially Australia have massive uranium reserves. It provides grid stability. Except for being expensive there is almost nothing going against it. And life cycle costs are likely coming down substantially in the near future with emerging technologies.
Renewables + Battery is the most cheapest way. If you don’t want to import Batteries from China then you need to starz to build your own factories. Nuclear Reactors make you also depend on other countries.
I’m not directly Anti-Nuclar. I’m anti bad financial decissions. Spending so much money on Nuclear just to produce expensive electricity is just stupid. All the money needs to go to Renewables + Batteries, now.
Yes, but factories are expensive and cost a lot of time to build. So I’m not that sure about the financial picture of that either. Not to mention finding the space to put those factories + battery parks + more space for extra renewables to charge those batteries.
Nuclear also only makes Europe dependent on Canada or Australia, although Ukraine and Estonia have some too. The US has their own.
Not to mention batteries require a lot more resources. Whereas enriched uranium is only a few million tonnes per year, lithium- or sodium-ion battery technology requires resources that run in the trillions of tonnes. That’s because of the difference in energy density:
- Pure U-235: 144,000,000 MJ/kg
- Reactor-grade uranium: 3,456,000 MJ/kg
- Sodium-ion battery: 0.27-0.72 MJ/kg
So to put this in perspective: to get the same energy that only 1 kilogram of reactor-grade uranium (at 3.5% U-235) provides, you would need sodium ion batteries with a total weight of 4.8 - 12.8 million kilograms.
Now of course batteries are reusable and nuclear fuel rods are only partly recyclable, but batteries don’t generate any energy by themselves. They need to be recharged with extra solar or wind power, on top of the ones directly feeding into the grid that you also have to build in even more factories, place onsite and individually connect to both the grid and the battery parks, etc.
This is a more rough estimate: but here they did the math:
A rough estimate suggests that about 3 million to 3.15 million solar panels may be needed to match the annual output of a large nuclear power plant
And even then you still haven’t solved what to do on all those quiet winter nights after an overcast day.
Betting it all on one horse it what’s stupid. Especially one that needs a mind boggling amount of resources. Yes we need to make batteries, but we also need to diversify and reduce dependency by expanding our nuclear power capacity.
While they did well environmental to produce this and even from a cost to consumer, there are many hidden costs to the power produced which will test France in the coming years as their fleet of reactors and the coming debt-to-gdp crisis means the tens of billions required to overhaul it might be tough to subsidize.
debt-to-gdp crisis
is not an actual crisis, money on those political levels doesn’t work the same way as it would for households.
Coming back to this… While you are correct that debt for government doesn’t work the way it does for households, this is not that issues.
A government having debt at a high level only really works if they also control the currency they have it in, like the US, China, Japan, etc. France being part of the Euro complicates it dramatically.
Second, this is not just France. It’s a ‘developed’ nation issues. Seven of the twelve countries above 100% are G7 or G20 members. As in Japan, Italy, the United States, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Spain. And China is at 99% debt to GDP. So in other words nearly all major economies are starting to have interest impacts on their GDP. There are some standouts like Nederland, Germany, Australia, South Korea, etc,
Combine this with the coming demographic inversion, let alone whatever the fuck the Tech sector thinks it’s doing, and we have some major issues for the next generation to deal with…
Politicians will work with it, but probably do the shortest term solution they can at the last possible min, because that is what has happened and is currently incentivized.
You mean the same nuclear power plants they need to shut down every other week because the river water they use as cooling intake is too warm to actually cool them down? They’re pretty useless nowadays.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/france-nuclear-reactors-shut-record-heatwave
…That they have to shut down all the time because of droughts. And they basically need to rebuild half of it, because the maintenance cost is so high, it is constantly pushed into the future.
Few emissions? Yeah. Good? Nope.
Oilprice.com sure sounds like an unbiased source.
Lol 🤣, here is another biased source:
not this again…
sure nuclear WAS fine, french power plants are getting old, can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves and regularly have major accidents. source (german)
in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.
also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct
Is this the anti-nuclear talking point now?
After decades of, “we cannot do it,” it’s now, “we should have done it before, it’s not a good idea anymore”
Fuck right off
Why do you think the people who said that “we cant do it” are the same people who now say “now its too late”? The pro and contra points to nuclear energy are pretty obvious. Also obvoius is, that these pros and cons are predestinated for disagreement. Also its obvious that opinions can change, on the one hand people maybe start priorize low carbon enegry production, on the other hand rivers for cooling are drying, a few accidents happened, and the price for nuclear energy is now pretty high while the price for renewables and batteries is dropping. We had a lot of change in circumstances in the last years and decades to discuss so saying “fuck off” is pretty pathetic in this case if you ask me
The pro and contra points to nuclear energy are pretty obvious.
No they’re not, nearly everyone I have ever spoken to (online or in real life) who has been against it had no logically cogent or sound arguments.
It may seem obvious after decades of propaganda (and three specific events where only one of them was an actual event, and everything worked out fine), but it’s not.
Dude you are being handed the obvious pro and contra points in this thread if you do not take them serious I doubt it makes sense continuing to argue on the internet about this topic.
Not them, but having read this entire thread, what contra points?
Other than that, I haven’t seen much in this thread.
I see a few points of how Frances configuration for cooling may not be good, but that’s not an unsolvable problem?
At least more solvable than the energy storage problem.
Physicist, not an engineer.
You need baseline and demand power.
Renewables like wind and solar are great for demand. As they provide power typically when usuage is peaking. But those power outputs drop when its needed most, so you still need baseline power.
Nuclear power is great at baseline, but because it takes a lot to ramp power up and down, isnt great to handle peak loads.
Notice the team up here?
Why is it always renewables or nuclear. Both have their places.
This solves the energy storage problems as well. Less of a need for batteries with rare earth metals that are… Finite.
french power plants are getting old
Most of them still have 30+ years of life in them
can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves
Not this again… French nuclear plants has not being stopped because they can’t handle heatwaves, that’s plain bullshit, but because of ecological precaution, which on top of that, seems to be useless
and regularly have major accidents
Also plain bullshit
That explains a lot of you take your sources from anti-nuclear organizations
in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.
It’s not the age of wind and solar. We’re still in the age of coal (35% of electricity) and gas (22,5%). If we talk about energy at whole, it’s even worse : 30% is petrol, coal 26% and gas 23%. If you think that solar and wind will stay cheap when everybody will compete for the large amounts of metal and other sources needed to build them, and when we will run out of petrol to mine and produce them all, you’re lying to yourself. Nuclear in comparison require very little resource to build and to operate them.
And that’s without taking into account a basic fact: we don’t have enough room to build enough STEPs and we don’t have enough resources to build enough batteries to run entire countries on solar and wind. Looking at costs in 2026 is just meaningless when we’re actually talking about science fiction.
also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct
Another bullshit: EDF has been making billions of benefits out of nuclear every year for decades (except in 2022). They even made 10+ billions of euros of net benefits the last 3 years.
And EDF is subsidizing France, not the contrary: the State forced EDF to take a huge part of the cost of the Bouclier Tarifaire, and EDF paid billions of euros of dividends to the State as well
i’m just trying to be brief: the amount of space for golfing far exceeds what is currently being used for wind and solar combined. Space is not an issue and not a real concern. Every free roof can handle solar panels, it is essentially unused space and it bothers no one.
Also what’s wrong with using an activist site as a source if their information is factual?
then the heatwave thingy: those “precautions” will happen several times. Rivers are getting so dry that european countries now lifted the sunday-driving ban for trucks because shipping isn’t reliable.
In summers we produce so much electricity that the price per kwh goes negative atp and we actually have to turn off power plants remotely (which is easy to set up, i do this for a living) - if we build enough infrastructure to have overproduction in winters and enough storage we’re set.
idk why people get so defensive and emotional over nuclear if there’s just cleaner and cheaper options on hand
Don’t forget they have been basically stealing the required Uranium from African Sahel countries like Niger for decades.
