France’s nuclear fleet gives it one of the world’s lowest-carbon electricity grids
4 days ago by VioletTea to c/technology
Kazakhstan: 30%
Niger: 25%
Canada: 20%
Australia: 15%
Russia: 10%
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.
Hm i think when you have a for whatever reason much discussed topic you will always meet people with opinions that have not much research backgorund or on the other hand people with very strong opinions on both sides who are not open to the other sides arguments. For example: I talked about a few "accidents" and you wouldnt try to understand, why someone like me would think there were some accidents and talk about that there was just one major implying that Fukushima was peanuts and not an issue at all. Of course the truth is (regardless the risk of what maybe could have happened, i think many people who think about Fukushima are more afraid of what could have happend than what happened), that the impact of Fukushima lies somewere between "nothing" and "Tschernobyl". I didnt even try to discuss pro or con nuclear, i just tried to explain why i think what happened or changed in the last years could easily change someones opinion on that topic. Most people i know that changed their opinion on nuclear say things like "given that climate change is now a bigger issue than i thought 20 years ago, we maybe should have used more nuclear instead of burning coal despite the nuclear waste, 20 years ago i thought different. Also given, that new nuclear plants are very expensive and existing plants are old and risky, i think we should focus on renewables and batteries, because they are clean, decentral, and very cheap now." something like that, just as an illustration.
That aside, honest question without ruse: who do you think the profiting propandagist is, which you refer to? Oil industry? Wouldnt renewables then be part of the same story?
What is extra frustrating is I have been hearing "we should have done it before, it’s not a good idea anymore” for literal decades now.
Best time to build is 10 years ago. Second best time is today.
This user (Twongo) has been posting on Lemmy for decares?
And France is blocking importing solar energy from Spain. Also France has to do some shenanigans in Africa to secure their uranium supply.
Sure nuclear is far better than fossil fuels in terms of global warming, but it has similar geopolitical problems to the oil industry. It makes sense to go to solar and wind, but there's a nuclear industry that's doing the same kinds of things the oil industry does to block it.
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
sure nuclear WAS fine, french power plants are getting old, can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves and regularly have major accidents.
Plus: Building nuclear power plants requires huge amounts of concrete. And making huge amounts of concrete requires extremely huge carbon emissions.
This is just a bad take. Your average nuclear power plant uses the least amount of construction materials per produced unit of electricity during its lifetime amongst the non-fossil options (nuclear fission, hydropower, solar and wind) - this wouldn't be meaningfully impacted by accounting for fissile material used either.
Furthermore, most of it is concrete which actually contributes to much less emissions per weight when produced compared to metals (steel, aluminium, copper) which wind & particularly solar use a lot of.
Thing is despite a single nuclear plant being big, it is the equivalent of thousands of wind turbines or millions of solar panels.
In the context of emissions per unit of electricity however, these materials become a vanishingly small factor for all non-fossil electricity producers compared to fossil fuel plants.
Source on the environmental impacts of electricity generation
E: Added source
did you calculate how much gram of CO2 that is per kWh actually?
It's like I've always said, "The best time to build a nuclear power plant is fifty years ago."
69 years ago would have been a blast
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.
Unknown temperature extremes? We knew about climate change for much longer. And France's nuclear reactors have an average age of less than 40 years.
Yes, unknown. You do not care about when the reactor went online, but when the reactor design was finalized. This happened with CP0 design in 1970, 4 years before the messmer plan.
We knew about climate change in 1970, but we lacked reliable models and computational power to create good predictions at that time. Climate change was an hot scientific debate, not an applied principle in civil engineering design.
The only reactor not part of the messmer plan (1974) that was throttled down is the Chooz B on the Meuse river. In this case it is more of a political issue: under 1998 treaty between Belgium and France, the plant must curtail power if the river flow drop. Not as safety measure, but to preserve downstream flow to Belgium. This was not taken into account in the reactor design. The operation of the plant was restricted retroactively. The Chooz B plant uses evaporative towers to minimize heat discharge.
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.
Have you read about the Paks NPP? Not throttled, shut down. They even tried sinking barges in the Danube to raise levels enough to keep it going.
And yet, despite that, France still has some of the cleanest electricity in the world with prices in line with the rest of Europe and exported about 10TWhrs of electricity during July.
I agree that downtime is bad, but I don't think abandoning nuclear to go all in on solar which has a minimum downtime of 50% or wind which has extended periods of <10% is a solution to that. Given that we need electrification to replace fossil fuels in transport and heating over the next few decades to prevent catastrophic climate change, the only reasonable course IMO is to build out as much as possible of nuclear and renewables.
The problem is that building nuclear is slower and more expensive than just building renewables. It made some sense when labor was cheaper. But it doesn’t anymore.
Yeah we need to electrify transportation, heating, fertiliser and steel production. What you need to consider is that these all have excellent synergies with renewable energy. Making fertiliser from nuclear power never made sense and never will make sense. But with solar power it’s just now barely cheap enough to make sense. There are already plants up and running. And you then get a huge amount of capacity to balancer solar/wind for free as well. The same goes for transportation, steel production and especially heat. We already have heat batteries in production. Both super high temperature ones to replace fossil fuels in industry, and medium temperature ones that can store energy for months to shift energy from summer to winter for district heating systems.
None of this makes economic sense with nuclear (well, EVs make sense still).
I have nothing against nuclear. I love the tech. But it’s simply dead. And no, SMRs is not gonna save it.
Nuclear is not clean energy. Building new reactors makes zero sense given the cost compared to renewables.
Cool map though what's that website?
That would've required long term planning though and what if in the end it came out that coal isn't so bad at all, huh, what then??? /s
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.
You should read what you link, it's the opposite. They are actually paused to not heat the river up.
To people talking about subsides, that was always the point, to have energy production as a public service. I would structuraly never trust a private company with nuclear (actually I feel like trusting any one no matter the sector is risky)
The biggest nuclear reactor disaster in history was at a government run nuclear power plant. So you probably shouldn't trust the government with nuclear either.
* Sustained through government subsidies to create/maintain their nukes and submarines.
...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.
yeah and until recently they imported all their uranium from states like niger which is why it took till 2023 for niger to kick out the last french troops from its country.
which is interesting because solar became the cheapest form of electricity in 2020 and france let go of niger shortly after that.
How dependent is France on Niger's uranium?
The military coup in Niger has raised concerns about uranium mining in the country by the French group Orano, and the consequences for France's energy independence.
They have to export because you can't just shut down a Nuclear Reactor. So they sell it for cheap to other countries. It would be more expensive for them to shut down a reactor because they produce too much. The other countrys gladly take the cheap energy. But france doesn't really make profit with this, it's just less expensive for them.
You just have to expect it. I wear bug spray.
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.
Oilprice.com sure sounds like an unbiased source.
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?
If we could deal with the waste that we've already got, that would instill some confidence, but the govt has basically shrugged. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nLUAN2Rev1E
Nuclear waste is an already solved problem, we just have to use the solutions. The vast majority (>99%) can be recycled.
OK, if it's solved... Where the hell are those who take the nuclear waste of my country? Where are they??? I'm sure, we'd pay a lot of money... Where are they???
Idk where you live but the problem is likely one (or both) of lobbied politicians kicking the can down the road (cheaper in the short term) and ignorant nimby-ists who've bought the "nuclear energy is evil" narrative pushed by the fossil fuel industry and useful idiots in green movements hook line and sinker.
With more power than it generated?
No, recycling spent fuel into new fuel or even the rather wasteful process of depositing it for long-term storage uses only a fraction of the energy generated by nuclear fission in reactors.
Because it only replaces a environmental disaster with a future one. Still no (practical) way to handle the waste.
Still no (practical) way to handle the waste.
That is false. See my other comment here.
The actual problem is a lack of education amongst the populace combined with a huge surplus of lobbying and a dash of politics.
lowest-carbon
Ok, now do nuclear waste.
Canada developed reactors to run on waste fuel from other reactors.
CANDU 9 IIRC
CANDU 9
very interesting. for those who want to know how it works:
Most commercial reactor designs use normal water as the moderator. Water absorbs some of the neutrons, enough that it is not possible to keep the reaction going in natural uranium. CANDU replaces this "light" water with heavy water. Heavy water's extra neutron decreases its ability to absorb excess neutrons, resulting in a better neutron economy. This allows CANDU to run on unenriched natural uranium, or uranium mixed with a wide variety of other materials such as plutonium and thorium. This was a major goal of the CANDU design; by operating on natural uranium the cost of enrichment is removed. This also presents an advantage in nuclear proliferation terms, as there is no need for enrichment facilities, which might also be used for weapons.
From Wikipedia. So the key is to improve the neutron economy sothat there's more neutrons available; then, these extra neutrons can go on to split extra material, which is thereby consumed.
apparently. "natural uranium" refers to uranium with about 3% U235 content meanwhile the remaining 97% are U238, i think.
edit:
ah i had the numbers somewhat off apparently.
You are talking about input materials for reactor fuel. We are told almost daily about how bad climate change is; why would new fuel inputs be anything notable as nuclear power de-carbonizes the grid?
The entirety of France's nuclear waste since the first plant was put online fits in one Olympic swimming pool. That's 50 years worth of nuclear energy production.
We can handle it.
better yet: pour it into concrete, dump it in the ocean.
it's just not done yet because people are thinking that there might be another use case for nuclear waste in the future.
Remind me again, it slipped my mind: How many of those holes are globally completed and in operation legally, explicitly rated for high-level radioactive waste and NOT explicitly labeled as an intermediate solution?
I didn't check, does it say that waste management is not included?
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.
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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
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