France shuts oldest reactors, but nuclear power still reigns | Hacker News Reader

France shuts oldest reactors, but nuclear power still reigns

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28 pointsmzs13 comments

Here in NL the tide is slowly turning in favor of adding more nuclear to the mix. It's getting increasingly clear that wind and solar alone are not going to cut it, after the low hanging fruit has been picked. There's simply no space for the required overcapacity if we want to be self sufficient.

Currently, we're getting so much of our base load from coal, it's embarrassing. We'll probably have a mix of wind, rooftop solar, natural gas and nuclear in the future. Dumping excess energy as hydrogen -> methane in our huge natural gas grid.

> Macron infuriated environmental activists by abandoning a 2015 target to reduce nuclear in France's energy mix to just half by 2025.

I'm very much in favor of preserving the environment, but I hate environmental activists.

Bill gates hit the nail on the head when he said that modern climate mis-activism has become a bigger threat to humanity than climate change denial.

Do you have a source handy? Would be curious about the context of this.

This is completely stupid. This small power plant produced as much power in 2019 than 3400 2MW windmills, needing much more land, space and material than the nuclear power plant.

See https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1199938890142044160.html

The anti-nuclear hysteria is truly bizarre. France has been doing an amazing job in terms of emissions targets for a decade now thanks to nuclear, and yet they somehow still decided to roll it off in favour of PV+wind which have no advantages over what they already had.

It seems to be ideology and emotional reaction to "nuclear" overriding logic.

I'm having a hard time finding alternative explanations. Otherwise why would you be so picky in a situation you see as a crisis? To reduce CO2 emissions globally we need every tool in the toolbox and nuclear is one of the best and safest[1] we have.

Maybe rebranding nuclear energy would help. Get rid of that word, replace it with something else.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Yep, the problem is that GreenPeace, the Grünen (in Germany), les Verts (in France) all started up in the 70s by struggling against nuclear power mostly for its military uses, out of sheer pacifism mainly (which is a perfectly reasonable idea).

In Europe, the mythos of "struggle against nuclear power/ military /oppressive state" reached an acme when the poor activist Vital Michalon was killed during protests in Creys-Malville in 1977 ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifestation_%C3%A0_Creys-Mal... ). This basically cast the legend in stone forever.

So "nuclear" became the evil-arch-enemy nemesis, and nothing can be done anymore: that's their religious dogma, with its martyr and saints, and no amount of rational discussion or scientific evidence can help.

I very much doubt that early proponent of fission-powered electricity in France or anywhere else had CO₂ concerns in mind, but countries who made that choice certainly ensured a much less dramatic energetic transition circa now.

That's my problem with anti-nuclear people: the problems of nuclear waste are largely anecdotal for now, it would only become a real concern centuries down the road (and even that's debatable), while CO₂ is rising and that's an immediate, pressing concern.

So building a few nuclear reactors now to curb CO₂ emissions is definitely the way to go if we intend to keep on increasing energy levels (thus not F up the economy too much to combat climate change); whereas favoring windmill and solar too fast too soon is just bad use of our short-term budgets (both in time and money): we'd better for instance invest massively in electric infrastructure to replace all trucks (eventually all vehicules, but again, urgency and magnitude set the order).

I mean, isn't it idealistic and dangerous to say 'no' to nuclear now when our immediate concern is CO₂, greenhouse effect? I'd rather see 2100 with as little temperature increase as possible with a little bit more nuclear waste (that would be of no effect to anyone), than the opposite (because the former paints a non-catastrophic picture, whereas the latter is potentially apocalyptic for some regions and major cities of the globe).

In this specific case however (France, Fessenheim and the other), these were too old reactors and needed shutdown, it was unsafe to keep them going. The last thing we need in this world right now is France failing at nuclear safety.

Actually, this power plant was old, but that was not even a proper argument to close this one. The safety assessments made on it classified it as safe, and representative of the average safety of the other nuclear plants in France. The decision is purely political, and the age is just used as a political symbol, nothing else. Otherwise, France would need to phase out the vast majority of its nuclear power within the next five years, and it would screw up the country.

Meanwhile Ireland is desperately working to get an interconnector between itself and France because it needs France to act as the "battery backup" for all the wind energy Ireland wants to produce in the future. The last time the interconnector between Ireland and UK was broken, Ireland had to shut down a bunch of wind mills until it was brought back up. France and the surrounding countries need those nuclear reactors available in order to experiment with more "green" energy

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/energy-and-resources/eu-...

France has done an incredible job of managing nuclear. Over 75% of their electricity comes from nuclear, and they've never had a single serious incident. What about French culture avoids the problems we've had in the US, Japan and Russia regarding nuclear plant management?

Probably a willingness to do the right thing for the nation when it’s not the most profitable for the company or the self?

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