France’s nuclear fleet gives it one of the world’s lowest-carbon electricity grids

4 days ago by VioletTea to c/technology

France generates two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power, making it the country’s dominant power source.
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Ozymandias1688 38 points 4 days ago

Which unfortunately now shuts down because the reactors cannot cope with the heatwaves. Turns out that no river = no cooling = no energy production.

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Womble 32 points 4 days ago

image

Turns out, even when you have to throttle them down slightly due to drought, having a large amount of available nuclear power, like France and Sweden do, means you emit an awful lot less carbon.

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Ozymandias1688 14 points 4 days ago

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.

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Womble 16 points 4 days ago

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.

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skyfex 17 points 4 days ago

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.

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ctrl_alt_esc -2 points 4 days ago

Nuclear is not clean energy. Building new reactors makes zero sense given the cost compared to renewables.

Cool map though what's that website?

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lemmydividebyzero 4 points 4 days ago

And buying fuel roads from Russia, which makes it hard to sanction that part...

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