Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?
sustainability-times.com
sustainability-times.com
Particularly in the context that most discussions surrounding nuclear fission power generation lead with "modern designs and reactors being so much better", now we are apparently at the point where even running the same reactors close to a century supposedly represents no problem?
Afaik originally the life-span for most reactors of that kind was 40 years, how far past that are we willing to go? And what consequences will there be if, once gain, the "one in a million that would never happen" incident leads to yet another catastrophe?
[0] http://watt-logic.com/2016/11/25/french-nuclear-problem/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-po...
Seven countries are expected to end the use of coal by 2025: Portugal (2021), France (2022), Slovakia (2023), the UK (2024), Ireland (2025) and Italy (2025) (per Europe Beyond Coal)
Politics and entrenched interests will have no choice but to accept market forces. The sun dumps enough power on the Earth in an hour to power all of humanity for a year, and it's mostly free for the taking.
[1] http://ddnews.gov.in/business/pm-modi-dedicate-nation-750-mw...
[2] https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2020/07/new-report-fin...
[3] https://english.elpais.com/economy_and_business/2020-06-29/s...
[4] https://electrek.co/2020/07/14/worlds-longest-subsea-power-c...
[5] https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2019/10/26/australias-...
That number doesn't say much, since the actual output will be a small percentage of that (15-20%).
That struck me as odd, because Denmark is flat as a pancake - it's basically an overgrown sandbank laid down by Norway's fjords. But the article explains that the cable will carry power from Norwegian hydro plants, which for some reason comes via Denmark. There is a direct cable from Norway to the UK, but i suppose this adds some redundancy, which is good. And, as the article notes, allows the UK to export surplus power (from wind?) to Denmark.
On Denmark being flat, here is its highest point - note that in the photo, the highest point isn't visible, because it's behind a barn:
Correct. Quite a bit of offshore wind potential Great Britain.
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2020/06/12/great-britai...
[1] https://openinframap.org/#4.88/56.67/8.34/L,P
By going via Denmark the distance under water is shorter. Also continental Europe, mainly Germany and Benelux slurped the power first, so the infrastructures have already been there. Why not use them as much as possible, i guess? Although recently some direct point-to-point has been built.
Here's a retrospective, ie an attempt at looking at how things have actually played out compared to projections we're often fed, https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/downloads/retrospective-be... (Chapter 5 of pdf is what looks into your question)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source also aggregates information to try answer your question
You can NOT replace nuclear with wind and solar. Because you can't choose when the sun shines and when the wind blows.
Hydro in France is already built-up everywhere it was feasible. There are no more spots to build meaningful hydro power capacity. Too bad since hydro is the only renewable that can really replace the nuclear power plants.
This is a terrible argument. There is always some place on the grid where the wind is blowing and (during the day) the sun is shining.
https://www.energymatters.com.au/renewable-news/baseload-ene...
I recommend 2030.
That's what grid energy storage is for. Traditionally this is often implemented with hydro (sometimes even by pumping water up to a high-altitude reservoir during periods of excess power generation). There are many more exotic methods as well - e.g. the crane that stacks concrete blocks, or the train with concrete that goes up and down the hill.
More recently, grid-scale batteries are being installed at increasing scale (e.g. Tesla's Megapack), and the cost efficiency of that solution seems to be improving rapidly.
In a nutshell, either there's wind everywhere, or not.
It's odd to pretend that renewables are all talk when at the moment I'm writing this France's power grid is 28% renewable[1]. And France still has lots of opportunities to expand, both solar and wind. You'd think with >4000km of coast line there'd be lots of space for offshore wind.
[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR and 60% nuclear, but the point still stands
The coal plant was actually commissioned in the early 2000s, construction started 2007, but finished only recently in May 2020 [0].
It was supposed to replace 3 older ones that already went offline back in 2014. As such it has literally nothing to do with the Fessenheim 2 closing, the article trying to spin it like that is quite misleading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3-SXFtPYe0
This was a [prototype 750 kW (KiloWatt) plant operating at Orkney Islands and near Portugal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelamis_Wave_Energy_Converter) - as a reference, it took wind power plants more than 20 years of enthusiastic development until the installed power reached 500 kW.
It is a shame that this development was shut down (while the design has been reported to be picked up by, guess whom, the Chinese), while being owned by E.ON. But I am sure more developments will follow, as the design is an excellent idea.
I mean, I don't doubt that that's true, but at the same time a single modern wind turbine generates 2-5 MWp, up 8 MWp offshore.
It's disingenuous to point at 28% renewables as if it's a sudden victory of good wind and solar against bad old nuclear.
Particularly when we know that gas power plants will be built to partially replace Fessenheim.
Installed capacity for solar and wind is a parameter that seems pretty meaningless. For example (according to Wikipedia) the Agua Caliente solar project in Arizona (an ideal location), has an effective output of less than 30% of its installed capacity. A PV plant more comparable with France's conditions, the Lauingen Energy Park in Bavaria, has an output of 12% of its installed capacity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Photovoltaic_p...
Grandparent claimed that the bulk of renewable energy produced in France is hydro (and called me disingenuous). I just cited some statistics -- installed capacity as well as current effective output! -- to put his claim into context. Here are some more[1]: Energy production by source in France, 2019, Hydro 55.5 TWh, Wind 34.1 TWh, Solar 11.6 TWh. Obviously anybody is free to assign whatever value one wishes to terms like "bulk of", but those are the numbers.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/768066/electricity-produ...
Comparing installed capacity without discussing average load factor is also utterly meaningless.
The plant that is being closed was certified by the ASN. The 40y lifespan was the MINIMUM certified lifespan of the power plant. It could very well run for another 40y. These kinds of equipment are modernised every 10 years during the shudowns. The power plant itself is NOT the one that was built 40y ago.
In no way can the ASN be really independent, as it is staffed with the people that went through this system.
Do you have any source for that? I'd be interested, although I find it difficult to believe since those "big universities", assuming you are talking about ENA and maybe Polytechnique, are public and very largely funded by taxes rather than private organizations.
> Das 1977 ans Netz gegangene Atomkraftwerk Fesseheim gilt seit Jahrzehnten als Sicherheitsrisiko. Es liegt in einem Erdbebengebiet und ist unzureichend gegen einen Flugzeugabsturz oder einen Anschlag geschützt. Zudem kam es immer wieder zu Pannen.
They link to https://www.zeit.de/wissen/2016-03/fessenheim-atomenergie-zw..., a report about how the ASN lied about how bad an accident in April 2014 was.
There definitely were safety issues, the only question is how bad they were.
But that's not what happened. The anti-nuclear team won and we collectively made the responsible decision to fill our atmosphere with CO2 instead. Yay?
You can try to argue that the US would have less carbon emissions than today - something I'm inclined to believe given how much fossil fuels are used today - but in no way would it be zero.
I think your point is valid, but lacks generality. Almost nothing we do is carbon neutral. Our energy production certainly isn't. Playing devil's advocate, PV and wind turbines also need to be built, transported, installed, disassembled, and disposed of, all of which emits greenhouse gases.
Instead, now we’re trying to shame people into flying less, which amounts to 2.5% of emissions a year..
All the data is there, the IPCC even took the time to vulgarize this part because people don't seems to understand, took the highest evaluation wiht post-70s tech (12gCO2/MWh) and there is STILL people that talk about climate and don't even READ the IPCC document. I don't understand why you would talk about something this important and dont read the BASICS.
Like those climate denialist who "prove" that low atmosphere CO2 will make everything greener. WE KNOW! At least climate denialist have the excuse that this information is not easily accessible [0][1]. Everything else is written in the vulgarized papers, it a two hour-long read top, just take some time to inform yourself!
This is why nothing will never be done and we are hoping for a technological silver bullet, because people rather act like they care about climate than care about climate.
I'm angry.
[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/TAR-03.pdf [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/TAR-04.pdf
[edit] spacing, swear words.
Tech gCO2/kWh
Coal 920
Gas 490
Solar-Util 48
Solar-Roof 41
Solar-Conc 27
Geothermal 38
Hydro 24
Wind-Offshore 12
Nuclear 12 <---
Wind-Onshore 11
But you are right, I shouldn't have made it sound as if no one produced such numbers.
The valid criticism from many including the green party in Germany is, the shutdown of coal plant could go faster. But it already started.
[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/germany-co2-emis... [2]: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/japan-co2-emissi... [3]: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/us-co2-emissions... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#/media...
At any rate - it's a truly miniscule amount of carbon anyway, when amortized over the plant's lifespan. If all of our power came from nuclear, we would not be worrying about greenhouse emissions from the concrete in their construction.
It also did not help that the 70s ended with the Three-Mile Island disaster and serious construction flaws being found at Trojan. Then in the 80s Chernobyl blasted nuclear fallout into the atmosphere which certainly didn't help nuclear's image.
I wouldn't say the "Anti-nuclear team" won, nuclear industry shot itself in the foot with a very cavalier and lax safety attitude, and leaving behind many scary ecological disasters in its wake.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Coal particulates, acidic gasses, and CO2 are awful. Natural gas CO2 is awful. I hardly need to elaborate, yet this is the alternative we chose.
It's not just coal that has problems, though: hydroelectric power has an appalling history of accidents leading to enormous death and destruction, yet it maintains a sterling reputation in environmental groups, at least compared to nuclear. Why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure (sort by fatalities, look for Banqiao Dam at 170000)
Wind and solar installations illustrate why it's important to count per unit of energy produced. They commit the "sin" of low density. With wind, you construct a gigantic edifice of concrete, steel, and fiberglass, likely in a remote location or even out at sea, and at the end of the day you can power a couple neighborhoods, some of the time. In a nuclear power plant, you construct a gigantic edifice of concrete and steel and you can power a couple of cities, all of the time. You have a handful of experts in a concrete bunker, compared to, say, residential solar with an army of contractors running around every roof in a city every few years. Slips and falls won't get a HBO miniseries, but they ruin lives just the same.
At scale, it all must be accounted for. It has been, but the results don't line up with public perception and as a consequence we collectively made a terrible mistake.
Pointing out that other stuff is "just as bad as nuclear" is not helping the argument for nuclear.
Yucca Mountain was bulldozed by the anti-nuclear faction. Hooray?
> Is Hanford a disaster or not?
Unquestionably.
> Pointing out that other stuff is "just as bad as nuclear" is not helping the argument for nuclear.
That's generally how decision-making works: you weigh the tradeoffs and make the best choice.
Well, that's how it's supposed to work, I suppose. If you refuse, well, nature just punishes you accordingly. In this case, we get an atmosphere full of CO2. Hooray?
You weigh the tradeoffs and make the least bad choice. We've decided as a society that we cannot live without electricity. No method of generating that electricity is without negative implications. (yet?)
> Unquestionably.
Hanford is a disaster... But just Hanford. Upstream and downstream are both fine. It's a few dozen square miles of contamination that affects people more than it does nature. (Look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone)
Compare to something like ocean acidification, caused by burning coal and oil, which is killing all the coral reefs, worldwide.
WIPP also had a leak issue with cost estimates of up to $1.4 billion to fix.
There are also dozens of sites orphaned and essentially the problem for the DOE to figure out. The cost of nuclear waste has been heavily socialized. The problem won't be going away anytime soon.
In addition, what is the result of 3 mile island? The word disaster comes with a lot of baggage that I would debate doesn't apply, it was an accident without any fatalities. But... it was a set of lessons and they have been applied throughout the industry. That is forgotten. It did have a huge impact to the industry and was a disaster as far as perception goes. Chernobyl was a case of lets turn this reactor to 11 and disable the safeties. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Fukushima should be remembered. It was when we knew better and ignored expert advice. This seems to be the theme of the 21st century though. But even with Fukushima, it took one of the largest earth quakes ever, causing a very very large tsunami, and then it was still working.... but because the experts where ignored and the wall was shorter than it should have been and, most importantly, the generators were not on higher ground it lost power and was able to melt down. Even with that though, only one person has died, and two had radiation burns, plus there is several km by several km of land that cannot be used right now. The sad part is that this was the focus and not the thousands displaced by the tsunami.
Solar and Window are doing great, they should be used as much as they can be. Hydro is largely tapped out and small systems are not as effective compared to their impact; even with the fact that rivers form lakes and move on their own. So that leaves sources like nuclear, tidal, and a few others related to the earths energy(whether kinetic or heat) Nuclear has the benefit of having the smallest footprint too.
Just because someone doesn't kill someone driving recklessly does not excuse their behavior, nor does it mean they won't kill someone next time.
The rest of your post seems to be hand waving away serious safety concerns. Chernobyl and Fukishima involved the people who were in charge of the plant making poor decisions. They both played stupid games, and they were not the sole recipient of the stupid prize. Neither of these events were cakewalks for the people affected by them, or the people fighting to prevent an even greater disaster. Dumping ocean water on damaged reactor cores is not standard operating procedure. Lots of uncharted territory in both. It was not sad that a major nuclear meltdown was one of the main focuses of the disaster. Your downplaying of these events is not reassuring. This is why nuclear has a bad image. Very shitty things have happened due to human negligence and they're just hand waved away, as if they won't happen again, but they do happen again, and both of these examples could have been much much worse.
>To call it waste is even debatable.
Are you volunteering your basement to store it in? Even if it can be reprocessed at some point, ya gotta store it somewhere until then, and that day may never actually come.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German... [3] Jarvis, Stephen; Deschenes, Olivier; Jha, Akshaya (December 2019). "The Private and External Costs of Germany's Nuclear Phase-Out" (PDF). National Bureau of Economic Research. Cambridge, MA: w26598. doi:10.3386/w26598.
>So where is the real disaster?
It was Fukushima, which resulted in more loss of trust for nuclear energy. It seems you're more angry at the media for covering a nuclear meltdown, than you are at the operators rolling the dice and making huge errors in their management of the plant. The lame stream media didn't cause the plant to meltdown, that was TEPCOs own hubris and blind ignorance.
It was a chain of failures that started years ago and we ignored the people telling us otherwise. But even then, it took a lot to put it in a situation like this.
As for my basement, no thanks. That's just stupid. People are so scared about things that cannot hurt them that they just say no instead of saying do it correctly without cutting corners. Verify it is done correctly. Nuclear waste storage isn't a bunch of green barrels hastily piled up with green ooze making Ninja Turtles. It's engineered concrete vessels that can survive without leaking during transport accidents. And then the tolerances have been increased. Then they are put deep down into the earth below the water table, several km below the surface, in geologically stable areas. Even then, they plan for failures and how to mitigate them. Layers of protection. These are the consultations going on in Canada right now, and people freaking over it. In the mean time it has been above group in vessels for decades next to the great lakes.
Meltdowns don't have the potential to kill? How did you know Fukushima was "no big deal" while it was happening? You didn't. No one knew. It also displaced 154,000 people. I guess that's not newsworthy though.
There was actually plenty of coverage of the earthquake and tsunami, which were immediate uncontrollable natural disasters. No one is lobbying for more earthquakes and tsunamis. Fukushima took months to get under control, and was a preventable man-made disaster.
>But even then, it took a lot to put it in a situation like this.
No it didn't. It took a predicted major earthquake to occur. The earthquake could likely have been weaker and still resulted in a similar outcome.
>things that cannot hurt them that they just say no instead of saying do it correctly without cutting corners
Why does something that "cannot hurt them" need so much engineering to prevent it from hurting them? This looks like doublespeak.
Nuclear power and storage could be done correctly, but it just hasn't been done correctly often enough, making people skeptical of it. It is also extremely costly to engineer these solutions.
That is complicated to assess, how do you account for the indirect and long-term fatalities or illnesses? E.g. here in Germany's south east (bavaria), every hunted boar is still tested whether it contains safe levels of radioactivity. Chernobyl was 34 years ago, but it still is a problem for food safety several thousands of kilometers away from the place of the accident.
In the Harrisburg accident, the core had a melt-down, and molten uranium was forming layers at the bottom of the vessel. Water had been being cracked into oxygen and hydrogen by the intense heat. This process was stopped little time before the vessel would have blown up from overpressure. It would also have been possible that the layering of Uranium in the vessel would have become super-critical with the result of the reactor literally exploding. And this would definitively have had consequences comparable to Chernobyl.
This is stuff which isn't well-known outside of expert circles. During my studies, I read about it in an article in a journal of the nuclear power industry... this must have been between 1991 and 1995, I think.
Another huge problem which Fukoshima exposed is that not only the active reactor core must be subject to cooling at all times, in order to be safe, but also cooling basins for spent fuel with remaining radioactivity. And they should also be inside safe containments (that is, protected from airplane crashes, and so on). I think that no reactor built in the West before 2009 has adequate protections against that type of problem.
And to add, in France there is at least one reactor which is built directly at the shore of the Atlantic. It is probably not safe against major Tsunamis.
The general problem is that nuclear is a very high risk, low probability technology. Protecting against that risk costs lots of money, which makes it uncompetitive. The financial pressures in corporations lead again and again to the result that safety measures are skipped. And in addition, it is inhumanely hard to predict and plan to cope with all possible risks.
Does it matter if the one french reactor at the shore of the Atlantic wasn't safe against tsunamis?
Rates of builds were declining before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and those were the events that turned the public against nuclear.
There was a great 1985 article about this in Forbes, which I highly recommend:
https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...
Ideally we wouldn't have wasted those decades, but we must go forward with the greatest speed with the best tech we have now.
Also, universities are quite far from the political elite in France, none of which actually know about anything related to nuclear power plants. Engineer at the ASN are just that: engineers. They don't take decisions.
Besides, they don’t make decisions, as the Fessenheim example demonstrates. The people making decisions are politicians who have no clue and just follow gut feeling and electoral arithmetic. Not many of them come from engineering schools, much less universities.
I will just criticize the "pro-nuclear propaganda" bit and ignore the other anti-elite stuff about the engineering schools, after all "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
What is called in France ENR (new renewable energies, basically solar and wind power) are backed by gaz companies, and now even French oil companies (Total) have a hand in the game. Areva (Now Oreno i think), the biggest company ever in the nuclear industry recently had a 6 billion turnover (around 2016 i think since this was the time i took interest on this particular subject). For scale, Gazprom, heavily invested in wind turbin in Denmark and Germany, had a 130 Billion turnover around the same time. I did not check Total cause frankly, i'm tired of spending energy against this "argument". Who do you think is putting more money on the table?
Also (because this anti-engineer stuff is frankly broking me), if you don't believe the ASN and the people working there, then you should vote or manifest to replace the ASN and its sisters organisations that are taking care of the electrical network, bridge and tunnels in France. Surely they weren't considered amongst the best in the world for a long time, barely more than 50 years!
And if you think the UNSCEAR rapports (like the one on the effect of Fukushima) are lying, well then don't be picky and choose to reject all scientific products of this corrupt organisation that use the same compilation method, like the IPCC. And if you or your familly have cancer and have to go under radiation, refuse every doctor that wrote on the subject whose paper where used by the UNSCEAR scientist.
1. France has a very powerful elite system and one specific route to get there (I'm not saying the engineering schools are that way). That's not controversial, that's just how it is.
2. This leads to a specific orthodoxy, symptomatic could be the centralism that leads to a strong centralization of power in Paris.
3. At the same time there is a very strong pro-nuclear sentiment that gets instilled into engineering students (conflicting and in context with a recent strong popularity of ecology), whatever mechanism specifically is responsible for that.
4. And France has (and even more so: had) a pro-nuclear government, linked to the enterprises running the power plants.
I'm not saying the engineers are incapable or specifically corrupt and to distrust your doctor, thanks you very much for the cancer thing, but that in this situation it is reasonable to have some distrust for security assessments of nuclear power plants in France.
2. Most nuclear engineer are from Grenoble/Saint-etienne or Lyon. Some are from polytech (so Paris) but this is rare.
3. If you say so. It might conflict with greepeace's vision of ecology, but not with the IPCC's and for multiple reasons, i think i would rather follow scientists than ideologists. I also stopped donating to greenpeace around 2015 so i might be biased.
4. Way more complex than that, but true.
I think you should read ASN documentation before evaluating them as untrustworthy. I can find a lot of untrustworthy pro-nuclear sources. Those are not ran by engineers. Also nuclear power is a distraction until we fixed our real ecological issue, as are renewable power sources.
I don't care if we stop nuclear power in 2080 if we successfully limit the average warming to 2°C (hint: hope for a silver bullet).
I'm ready do donate everything i have (not that much) to any anti-nuclear association that explain to me how to effectively reduce our CO2 emission by 4% a year until 2050 (compounds are hard but this is the number i got) while focusing on replacing nuclear plant by solar panels and wind turbines. Really. Covid will be between 2 and 9% for 2020 [0] so i'm waiting for solutions for the following years.
Wait! i have multiples solutions. Give every french household using oil or gas a heatpump. Forbid new individual cars sold in France to weight more than a metric ton. Put a carbon tax (start with a small amount 10k€/ton) on transportation instead of a 20% VAT. Not on car gas, on the product directly. This will kill most plane fret, but honestly? i don't care. Forbid plane if the trip can be made in less than 4 hour by train (i think they recently did this, good).
But closing a nuclear plant to replace it by gas (and coal, even if temporary) is easier. Gazprom and Total really have more hitting power.
I think those are reasonable measures.
> But closing a nuclear plant to replace it by gas (and coal, even if temporary) is easier.
I assume you'd be less angry if you were aware that I oppose that as well. I think it's in general opposed by the people wanting nuclear energy to end.
Talking mostly about Germany here. The process basically was 1) Have a strong agreement that nuclear energy is bad, fueled by its insecurity, costs and the waste it produces. This is driven by grassroots movements and green parties. 2) Conservative politicians say "Okay, then we replace them with coal. Oh, and we cut the subventions for renewable energies." 3) The same people that organized the successful protest against the nuclear plants now organize protests against the coal plants.
No one is happy about that process. The only good thing that came out of it is the higher usage of renewable energies. And that because of that the coal plants now are unprofitable. But that is partly despite what the conservative politicians wanted. They even blocked the building of new wind turbines because they look bad. Exactly the contrary of what had to happen the last two years.
Yes, Germany has already more renewable energy sources than it can use, due to protests against building new power lines. From north to south and west to east. When I drive to my in-laws, I come along at least a hundred large wind turbines, often in rows of ten or more. Usually, half of them is turned off because, the grid cannot take more energy.
At the German energy exchange, the price of electrical energy already dropped below zero several times, because of that.
That's not correct. The Nord-Süd-Trasse for example was blocked by the CSU, which is a classic nuclear/coal-proponent. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink.
We have electricity, not so much accidents and the know how so China, Russia and the US arent the only people who can make large scale nuclear infrastructure.
What an horror they put us through, are engineering elite.
"In 2007, the same year a Swiss study found that seismic risks in the Alsace region had been underestimated during construction, the ASN denounced a “lack of rigour” in EDF’s operation of the plant."
It is not. That number was made so that EDF would get a proper return of investment. Some plants based on the same design have been granted lifespan to 60 years in the US.
> how far past that are we willing to go?
As long as its safe. Why throw away something that works, is safe and reliable on the counts that some folks put out a number?
Nor, for that matter, should the most lenient regulation always dictate other countries'. That could just result in endless ping-pong of extensions, and it make lobbying so much easier if you only needed to convince one country and then shame all others into following.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...
One is captured, packaged, and stashed away; the other is poured into the air in high volumes, continuously fueling a runaway scenario.
That's a lie, or at least an unprecise statement, mostly shared by the anti-nuclear who are looking for a reason to close reactors.
In France, reactors were designed to work for 40 without any major checkup ; and after 40 years, without any decommission deadline planned in advance, as long the "visite décennale" (in-depth inspection every 10 years) does not discover any major issue. So a reactor can totally work for 60, 70, 80, or even more.
1) It's not one of the first French reactors by a long shot. It's actually a licensed American design.
2) More modern designs being better does not mean that previous ones are unusable, particularly when they've been built and are just sitting there. Stupid car analogy: a better car being sold with better crash test ratings does not mean you're going to die if you drive last year's model.
3) Life-span is a licensing issue. Lifetime extensions are common for reactors and designs without issues, which Fessenheim did not have. The fact that it's not automatic means that there is an in-depth study of the state of the reactor before the extension being approved. Reactors with the exact same design in the US have been extended to 80 years.
4) Your source is rubbish (and for reasons that stray far away from the topic so I'll leave it at that).
They assigned the incident level 1, the lowest one, in order to cover it up.
France has huge power demands in cold weather due to badly isolated houses heated with electricity. The power grid is already unstable, France cannot afford to loose much generator power, as they have nothing to replace it with - very few renewables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fessenheim_Nuclear_Power_Plant...
Official report says it wasn't tried and remained a last line of defense. http://www.french-nuclear-safety.fr/Media/Files/Technical-no...
Also it was 2014, not 2016.
https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2016/03/04/un-inciden...
It is in French, but it is saying that nothing was out of control and out of ordinary small issues. The temperature was a little bit out of the normal during the operations but that is quite common. And they used Boron because it was the adequate procedure in this case but again not out of ordinary. They decided to not use the control rodes that were not operating 'automaticaly' because of the disruption of the flooded system. But manual control was still available if they wanted to. And at the same time, like in a space shuttle, every electric control circuits are mirrored for safety. So the control room A was affected by the flooding but the control room B and the B circuits were ok, unaffected and operational as designed!
Fusion is still way off but solar/wind have proven to be quite the generators, with grid-scale storage or some other way to utilize the energy surplus it could probably disrupt the electricity sector quite a bit.
Those are actually emerging research fields, while nuclear fission is pretty much dated and new designs depend on materials we haven't even discovered yet.
In that context this insistence on fission reactors reminds me quite a bit about the definition of insanity; Trying the same thing over and over expecting different results, like the world is just some kind of management sim.
Meanwhile Germany is actually trying to innovate outside the box; It's been big on hydrogen research and application for a while, by now there is even a whole roadmap to utilize hydrogen as a future energy resource [0].
Which could utilize large parts of the already existing natural gas pipeline network [1], there's also pilot projects for repurposing old coal plants into thermal storage to retain more of the solar/wind electricity [2].
Yet news like that never make any waves, it's always "Why did Merkel shut down all reactors?", when she never decided the phase-out (That was ratified under Red/Green back in 2002) nor did she actually shut down any reactors, but rather keeps trying to extend their running times.
[0] https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/ueber-fraunhofer...
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/gas-grid-operators-say-...
[2] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/germany-thermal...
> It’s worth noting that, as Fessenheim closes, Germany is commissioning a new coal-fired power plant, in Datteln
Exactly. Why are so many people ignoring what happens in step 2?
When nuclear is shut down, it gets replaced with something worse. Often coal!
"German electricity was nearly 10 times dirtier than France's in 2016... Germany's overall emissions increased in 2016 as a result of the country closing one of its nuclear plants and replacing it with coal and natural gas" [1]
"It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity"[2]
Nuclear energy is also far safer than most other sources, about the same as renewables.
"Nuclear and renewable sources are similarly safe: in the range of 0.005 to 0.07 deaths per TWh. Both nuclear and renewable energy sources have death rates hundreds of times lower than coal and oil, and are tens to hundreds of times safer than gas."[3]
1. https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/2/11/german-...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...
Your first article is provided by a pro nuclear propaganda association. It's almost certainly also false. And ignores conveniently how much more unrecycable nuclear waste France was producing in 2016, waste we can not store safely.
All unsafe waste is by definition recyclable because its viability as fuel is what makes it unsafe.
If it is unviable as recycled fuel then it is quite safely storable and is no more dangerous than the tons of toxic chemicals we store regularly from manufacturing and mining byproducts.
- Actinides (neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium, leftover uranium). Most of these materials are fissile or can be bred into fissile materials. Fuel recycling processes reclaim and reuse these elements.
- Fission products. These are the lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart. Some of the components that are most important from a waste management perspective are strontium 90 and cesium 137.
Fission products cannot be used as nuclear fuel. The fission products of greatest concern are also much more toxic than ordinary chemical wastes.
The LD50 for arsenic in rats is 15 milligrams per kilogram: https://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Tab...
The LD50 for strontium 90 in hamsters (90 day survival) is 2 millicuries per kilogram: http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895
Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/196800...), in mass terms that's 14 micrograms per kilogram for the LD50. Gram for gram, strontium 90 is about 1000 times as acutely deadly as arsenic, or three times as acutely deadly as the nerve gas sarin. There are few industrial chemicals that have toxicity comparable to or greater than nerve gas, and they (like spent nuclear fuel) have special regulations and require special handling.
Yeah so nuclear waste is recycled in large part. See Mox. But I agree, I wish we'd use FNRs too. Too bad the Green party shut down the first reactor (SuperPhenix) in the 90s.
"waste we can not store safely."
Did you do your homework? See CIGEO.
I have not seen them refuted on HN. I would be interested to see a refutation - and if a refutation is posted every time, it should be easy for you to find.
But if you are honestly interested, read the greenpeace criticism of these studies to understand how the statistic might be false and how it can be disputed, https://wayback.archive-it.org/9650/20200415093014/http://p3.... Sure, it's easy to ignore that by looking at where it's coming from, but that goes both ways.
Everyone has their vested interests and pre-conceived biases I suppose.
The implication that this is what happened in Germany is misinformation. None of the energy production of retired nuclear plants in Germany was replaced by coal. Renewable energy replaced the vast majority of it over the last 10 years, and coal use is down by 50% in that period.
https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...
It's true that in the first 3 years after the decision to speed-up the closure of nuclear in Germany in 2011, coal use increased. But more recently it went down drastically and was replaced mostly by wind and solar on a yearly basis.
Here is similar data but not just Germany (using the data from the 2020 BP statistical review):
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/ogrisel/energy_charts/bl...
The debate is not renewables vs nuclear. It's nuclear vs fossil .
Datteln 4 is going online because the government has already approved it, and is afraid that it will get sued if it turns around and rescinds the approval.
It would be really enjoyable to see how they would solve that while still keeping an functional energy grid (buying fossil generated power from neighbors during bad weather would be cheating), and the scientific progress from such attempt would benefit the world greatly.
France still has a lot of nuclear plants left (and of course hardly any coal at all). The one discussed in the article was the smallest one in any case according to this overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran....
Interestingly, this overview excludes solar and wind. Especially solar would be popular in the sense that there are loads of small domestic deployments and comparatively small plants that collectively add up to a lot of production with more coming online all the time. Most of the country gets a decent amount of sun throughout the year and like pretty much anywhere else, the French have been deploying loads of solar panels on their roofs. Also they've been growing their wind deployment in the order of about 1GW/year in recent years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_France
Basically, what the article conveniently also overlooks is that France actually exports more energy than it imports: it produces more than it consumes. The numbers in this article are a bit out of date but paint a clear picture of imports decreasing year over year until 2015 and actually being smaller than exports in any case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France. I did not find any more recent number but I have no reason to assume that this trend turned around in the last 6 years (the opposite actually).
Mostly imports and exports are driven by capacity and energy cost. Nuclear is not exactly known to be cheap, so exporting over capacity with tiny margins (or at a loss) in a market increasingly dominated by new, clean, cheap energy sources is less attractive than shutting down what was probably a plant with a comparatively high operational overhead. I'm guessing more plants will follow in the next years for exactly the same reason.
1. The only body qualified to asses the safety of a nuclear power plant is the french nuclear safety agency, Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN)
2. ASN deemed its security "very satisfying" [1]
3. The usual fallacious arguments have been debunked time and time again (seismic fault, various upgrades, more incidents than other plants etc...)
4. Read the actual report on Fessenheim from ASN [1]
The actual answer from the article:
The answer to why Fessenheim is closing is sadly one of politics. It goes back to 2012 when then President of France, Francois Hollande, made a deal to guarantee the support of the Greens (les Verts). Hollande promised France would reduce its reliance on nuclear to 50% instead of 75% of all electricity.
Part of the deal was to close Fessenheim.
1. https://www.asn.fr/L-ASN/L-ASN-en-region/Grand-Est/Installat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out
An immediate effect of this decision was to increase Germany’s reliance on fossil fuels, including “brown coal” which is strip-mined in an extraordinarily environmentally-destructive process. Another effect was to increase the German grid’s reliance on nuclear power generated in France.
Average are misleading.
Solar (photovoltaic) has its maximum around noon, when there is high demand.
The irony is that in summer, it has happened in several warm years now that nuclear power plants in France had to shut down - they are cooled by rivers and when the water level becomes too low, they need to shut off to maintain safety and avoid ecological damage. These are the times when Germany exports most electricity to France.
I think it's exactly the opposite: see [1]. It's a increasingly big problem as more renewable sources are deployed. The peak demand happens at mid-evening and morning hours while, as you said, peak production from renewables is around noon. A possible solution is energy storage but, as far as I now, it's not yet common and not always available depending on the location and type of plant.
Some German articles on the topic:
2012: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Warten-auf-den-Blackout-in-...
2017: https://www.heise.de/tp/news/Atom-Frankreich-versucht-Blacko...
2019: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Alle-Jahre-wieder-Frankreic...
I learned a term recently called "base load supply". Essentially, something like a nuclear plant is hard to ramp/up down with changing grid demands, but it great at steady-state operation and can run like that for years. This takes care of the minimum load placed on the grid which is fairly predictable.
Nuclear strengths' play an important role in an "all of the above" approach.
See https://twitter.com/TristanKamin/status/1247460245460443138?...
Nuclear wants to be constant-- both because ramping isn't super fast and because you want to recover large capital costs. Renewables ... produce varying amounts pseudo-periodically and unpredictably, which is even worse. Neither matches conventionally to demand.
The only way around this is technologies that store (hydroelectric, batteries, power-to-gas-to-power, solar thermal) or burning fossil fuels to supplement. Overprovisioning is also necessary: it takes a lot less storage / peaker plants / etc to meet 99th percentile demand with 150% of required generation capacity than 101%.
Renewables and nuclear do complement each other a little bit in reducing volatility.
This is not necessarily the case for all nuclear power plant, it has to be designed for that.
But nuclear power plants have a huge capital cost, so you really don't want them to operate for half of the day at 40% or they're even more expensive for the power generated.
And going below a minimum output power means a long time to get power back, which is why in North America power prices sometimes go negative (don't want to shut down).
This is untrue, we regularly modulate nuclear plants from 10 to 100% in a space of hours
Also, the grid needs much faster reaction than modulating demand over hours. If a large generator fails (which sometimes happens to nuclear plants) you need 1GW in a few seconds.
It's also the oldest nuclear power plant France was still running.
Oh and also the Rhine valley is seismically active, even if only at a low level.
But, in reality, it was probably a mix of all 3 and some more.
https://www.dw.com/en/reports-fessenheim-nuclear-accident-pl...
I'm not sure there's an easily accessible list of all incidents and/or way to compare that against other plants :/
Ed.: also, yeah, it'd be cool if this wasn't causing an uptake in coal :(
I don't, and I'm not sure it's possible to figure out exactly — since it's politically sensitive and possibly involved "back channel pressure" and other shenanigans.
That said, it has been a longstanding topic in German anti-nuclear circles, cf. list of articles (German) on:
If you actually bothered to read the ASN reports, you'd see that it's because it was one of the most transparent plant, hence the higher numbers.
> Rhine valley is seismically active
It is, which is why it was scaled for several times the biggest ever earthquake recorded (1365 IIRC, they derived the scale from models based on the damages it did).
ASN deemed its security "very satisfying", the rest is BS.
And I totally agree this is as dumb as it gets.
You are absolutely right. Which is why others way more qualified than I (climatologists, nuclear engineers) are trying to debunk those fallacious arguments and slowly people seem to realise. I'm doing my part.
The very existence of this article and its present on HN front page is a sign that this is working.
The original political deal was putting online the EPR then closing Fessenheim, partly to avoid going over the legal limit for nuclear power capacity set by "PPE" law in France.
According to wikipedia [1] Flamanville EPR construction started in 2007 with budget of 3.3 billions EUR and completion date of 2012.
Current estimates are 19.1 billions EUR and end of 2022 for completion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Yes there are some promising reactors that produce less waste, and breeder reactors that can burn waste. But those are mired in political problems unrelated to the tech itself. I think that the crux of the issue is that human fallibility approaches 100% on decades-long timescales, so some reactor somewhere will be melting down roughly every decade from this point forward. Personally that level of risk just isn't acceptable to me. That's why I'm against the construction of new reactors.
All that said, I would not have voted to retire this reactor at this time. I also find it sad that little or none of the cost of operating it will make its way to renewable energy. So even in progressive France, noble goals like sustainable non-polluting energy generation continue to face artificial hurdles created by attempts at shortsighted political gain.
Pessimistically, I suppose.
But I don't understand how someone can take this position and simultaneously feel like climate change has any hope whatsoever of being addressed.
Then it has not been reversed by the current ruling party.
https://beyond-coal.eu/coal-exit-tracker/
France has one of the lowest number of coal plants compared to other European countries. The links on the left of the page let you filter the map into different data sets.
Uranium is so abundant, it does not give anyone any power in negotiations. But fossil fuel has to be imported. Natural gas, for example, flows only through pipes.
There's enough uranium in France - it's just not cheap uranium and open pit mines in Africa are more economical.
Additionally, France never had to even prospect for uranium ore, as incidentally many of their former colonies had plenty of potential for cheap open pit mining using cheap local workers....
For reference, just a few hundred kilometres east of their border, East Germany was the third largest uranium producer in the world and there's no geological reason why France should be devoid of it.
> Additionally, France never had to even prospect for uranium ore
But this is false. (There is no english link sorry for that). https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/UraMin
Context! They never had to prospect in France - I thought hat was clear, but apparently it wasn't. Sorry for the confusion.
Edit: after reading the article I'm more confused - that's not even a French company - it's Canadian...
This Canadian company got bought by Areva.
Peak-oil is a bitch and we're going to run these nuclear plants until the metal in the cores and foundations start to show cracks visible to the naked eye.
Because Uranium has 1.000.000x the power content per weight more than gasoline and 1.000.000.000x more than batteries!
That said fission costs a lot of dead trees to build, so we're going to have to stick to the plants we already have.
Building new nuclear plants will not be possible no matter how much money you print.
I predict the french will do the same once the KWh price jumps around a little too much to be ignored.
Electric cars are a joke, they take hours to charge and once everyone has them; charging will be impossible!
Instead we should focus on Raspberry Pi 4 and electric bikes!
Edit: If you look here you'll see that most WH plants put into service ~75 have been closed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors
The only other interesting tidbit here is that Saudi-Arabia is planning 4 reactors!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/world/europe/la...
Unfortunately, that really happened[1]. Commission as in started running, not as in started constructing, which they did in 2007. The usual argument is that a modern coal power plant replaces older ones and more efficient/less polluting. Obviously, it's all very controversial.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/climate-activists-protest-germanys-new...
Which is, of course, bullocks even if it's true, because the alternative exists to shut down the older coal fired power plants and replace them with something that isn't coal at all. Like nuclear, or solar. Even natural gas would be better than coal.
Corruption? Stupidity? At any rate, the article is right.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
The answer being that it was originally commissioned decades ago, construction started 2007 and was supposed to be finished in 2011, its purpose is to replace three older blocks from the 60s which were put offline in 2014 [0].
Putting 3 old blocks offline to replace them with one modern block looks like a rather good progress.
Tho, those small steps just doen't sit well with the current popular narrative of "Let's end all fossil fuel use instantly and replace it with fission reactors everywhere!". As if changes and projects like that wouldn't take decades to retool whole industries and infrastructure.
See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-nuclear-protest/pr...
My guess is bury it somewhere else.
> The Nuclear Safety Authority has confirmed that the rock has not moved for several million years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Underground_...
Also, I'm not in the field, i just like to inform myself before having an opinon. Too many times there is lies spread about nuclear facilities.
Most of it is stored underground (FAR underground) in special regions where we know that the geological makeup is highly stable
New power plants which statisfies western standards like UK Hinkley are a cost nightmare. Further it essentially funds new nuclear weapons: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
Sure there is some slim chance that old western or new Chernobyl style reactors would offer dead cheap ecological energy eventually (moving all complementary processes like getting the ore or building holes to dump the radioactive waste to electric). Also this offers the chance to create a huge wild life refugee in even more central Europe eventually (sure why should we care about people losing their homeland): https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
I live nearby the plant (within its 30km radius) and we had reports on Fessenheim incidents every other week or so.
>The answer to why Fessenheim is closing is sadly one of politics.
This is some outright BS from the author here. Fessenheim is built next to the Rhein-river but below its own water-level. If the dam would breach because of an earthquake or flood, the whole nuclear plant would be under water. Does Fukushima ring a bell, what happened there? Exactly that!
Several examinations also found the inbounds of Fessenheim to be poorly protected from flood. They even have their own security measures and fallback circuits not properly secured against flooding. Only a water leakage would cause some serious issues not to mention a dam breach.
So with the combo of old tech, often interrupted uptime and shitty protection against floo, there are simply too many good reasons to close down the whole thing.
The owner/operator of the facility, EDF, envisaged a 40 year life for all 2nd generation reactors. That would have meant the reactor would have been shut down 2 years ago.
It's in a flood zone and a 2011 commission found that it didn't have necessary redundant cooling in place should the canals around it fail.
It's in a seismically active area.
It's on a river over an aquifer so any leakage will have severe consequences.
It has to be shut down during heat waves because the excess heat it dumps into the neighboring river will kill wildlife.
In the last decade it has had a number of small incidents.
It has served it's purpose for longer than it's expected lifespan and it's being shutdown safely before a catastrophe happens.
The SOP of Capitalism to do it until something bad happens doesn't mesh with Nuclear power.
For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2)
(1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.1 GW installed, 68.7% capacity factor
(2) https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
Almost every article seems to come around to saying "and nuclear power would be great", even when it starts with some solar power invention.
But you can also see that this is not just that, there is also scientifics who work on responsible sourcing of rare earth, sustainable agricultural tech. This is probably once agian a science-based newspaper that will never work. I've learn that if you want people to care about climate change, just don't talk about nuclear energy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23662241
Could Fessenheim 2 be leaking nuclear particles?
That doesn't justify burning coal, however, there are many renewable energy sources that do not produce pollution or toxic waste that is hazardous for ten thousand years.
That isn't true, most renewable energy sources, eg, solar panels [0], produce waste that will be toxic waste that will be hazardous for tens of thousands of years. Lead and cadmium don't even decay in practical terms, even after 10s of thousands of years.
Maybe for hydro what you say is true.
[0] https://www.cfact.org/2019/09/15/the-solar-panel-toxic-waste...