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Comment by jkingsbery | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't say what fuel source charging stations will use.

Nuclear will be capped to 50% of France production. Coal will close. Natural gas is comparatively expensive in Europe. Large hydro is almost saturated (no more mountains).

So renewables (wind and solar) will have to grow as a mechanical consequence which is good because will get cheaper and cheaper and a large park of car batteries will give opportunity for large scale demand management and therefore help with the integration of new renewables.

France has long coasts to develop offshore wind, especially if floating offshore wind becomes a thing.

Why wind and solar but not nuclear? Fields and field full of noisy and ugly windmills when nuclear requires far less land. Windmills and solar kill birds at a much larger rate than activists would seem to care about.

>Fields and field full of noisy and ugly windmills when nuclear requires far less land.

Terrestrial wind turbines can be sited in otherwise usable land. Or offshore.

>Windmills and solar kill birds at a much larger rate than activists would seem to care about.

A rate which is many orders of magnitude lower than killed by buildings, cats, coal plants, etc. This becomes a complex discussion when localized, sensitive populations are relevant, but on the whole it isn't a big issue.

France already has enormous nuclear capacity. They won't want to add much more; as it is, they're one of the few places to use nuclear energy for load-following.

Wind turbines and solar don't kill a significant number of birds; this is an old myth recently revived by Trump. In the US, wind turbines kill about 300k birds per year, power lines kill 30 million (mostly through collision), cars kill 200 million, and collision with buildings kills _600 million_.

While there's certainly room to improve on bird-wind turbine interactions, it's just not a major problem, and any resources used would be better spent improving the safety of buildings for birds.

> wind turbines kill about 300k birds per year, power lines kill 30 million (mostly through collision), cars kill 200 million

Statistics like that have to be adjusted "per capita" in some fashion. It's going to difficult to pick the right units for comparison. Maybe the basis could be birds killed per kilowatt-hours or joules worth of electricity generated (windmills), carried (power lines), and consumed (cars).

I think the GP was just trying to make a point that the "what about the birds?" argument against wind power is a convenient talking point/straw man for people who actually don't really care about the welfare of birds, since they face far greater dangers than flying into turbines. Bringing up hundreds of thousands of birds dying in a debate against more wind turbines is more sympathetic than, "I think they're ugly and I don't want them in my yard," which to me is the primary reason people oppose them.

I mean, you could do this, certainly, but is it necessarily useful? The point of the numbers was just to show that turbines are very small compared to other bird hazards. Even if there were 1000 times as many turbines as they are, they'd still kill fewer birds than building collisions, and no-one but ornithologists is really calling for anything to be done about buildings as a hazard to birds.

The whole bird thing is a complete red herring.

Nuclear requires military intervention in Africa though. Mali lies directly next to Niger, where France gets a large amount of their uranium from.

No it doesn't. Uranium is super cheap as a proportion of production costs; it can be bought on the market no problem. Additionally, breeders mean you need even less. With breeders burning otherwise-useless waste, France could probably not have to buy any more uranium for hundreds of years.

Because Hulot stems from the Green Party which sadly is as anti-nuclear in France as it is elsewhere.

If it's France, stats are (75%) it will be nuclear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

They're bringing the amount of power generated through nuclear energy to 50% in the upcoming years. Chances are that in 2040 they'll be way under 50%.

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