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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

actual answer: it's right on the border to Germany and has a long history of low-level incidents, and the Germans were starting to get seriously pissed off at that.

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.

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> has a long history of low-level incidents

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.

All of your arguments might be correct, and none of them matter to public opinion and politics. Maybe if they were less transparent, there would have been less political pressure from Germany...

And I totally agree this is as dumb as it gets.

"none of them matter to public opinion and politics"

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 fact that we know we can rank French nuclear plants by their transparency level is already seriously screwed up.

That's not what he said. That's not what the rapport said.

So in other words, Germany (with some the most serious "green tech" laws) is basically forcing France to shut down their plant, even though it's been operating mostly fine and has been actually helping fight climate change for a long time already.

Mostly fine? https://www.dw.com/en/reports-fessenheim-nuclear-accident-pl... "The reactor had to be shut down by adding boron to the pressure vessel, an unprecedented procedure in Western Europe, according to an expert." By that standard Fukushima ran mostly fine too

I have no idea whether it's even possible to find out how the different reasons have factored into the decision; it might as well just have been due to the age or seismic activity and nothing else...

But, in reality, it was probably a mix of all 3 and some more.

It's more like a mix of solar and wind energy investors with fossil burning energy investors, both benefit from shutting down nuclear reactors. Solar and wind investors just want to have their huge returns with nothing wasted, as each kWh is pretty expensive, but lacking nuclear power most of the energy generation will still go to burning fossils, who will profit massively from it. Happened in other countries too, like Ukraine, which was recently forced to temporary stop some reactors to benefit those two groups and of course make things worse for the climate.

The fundamental reason is electoral calculus. The socialists, and then macronists, needed green votes to get a majority. The safety assessment is perfectly fine.

Germany would be the main country affected, if there were a major "mishap" at Fessenheim. Basically the whole south of Germany would be impacted with large cities like Stuttgart, Augsburg and of course München.

People tend to forget that despite the Chernobyl disaster happening in Ukraine, Bavaria advised their citizens to not eat any mushrooms collected in the woods because wind blew radioactive particles across Europe.

Switzerland is worried about Fessenheim, too.

A review of the plant’s page on Wikipedia shows that it did indeed have a number of low level incidents. Do you have any sources about those being the true cause of the shutdown?

> Do you have any sources about those being the true cause of the shutdown?

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:

https://www.heise.de/tp/thema/AKW-Fessenheim

I feel like, regardless of what the cause is, having numerous low-level incidents means it's not exactly "safe" as the title of the article suggests. Another user has commented that the plant is nearly 100 years old while the reactors are supposed to last only 40 years before being replaced.

Depends what's classified by an "incident". Aviation has "incidents" all the time. And yet we are not grounding planes based on this. We learn about them, and improve.

The key thing that makes aviation safe is not treating low-level incidents as OK just because they haven't turned into major incidents. One of the major, repeated root causes of catastropic failures in nominally robust, redundant and safe systems, across multiple industries, is the normalization of deviance - the acceptance of safety failings because they haven't lead to a critical disaster yet. The more I hear from nuclear advocates, the more convinced I've become that pro-nuclear advocacy is fundamentally incompatible with the existence of safe nuclear power plants, if that is even possible.

Do you trust the service with the statuspage that is 100% green for all of history or the one that reports the occasional degradation?

Reporting accidents isn't the issue. It's having them on the regular and being past the standard operational period that worries me. Not sure why that's contentious.

In an ideal world, you have your threshold for "incident" set low enough that you have a lot of them. Catching more of the distribution of problems let you increase the level of safety.

Exactly. This difference between "we're only going to update the status page if a customer comes screaming to us that the service has been unavailable for the past 24 hours and they've received no updates" and "we have automated systems in place to updated the status page if the p95 response time exceeds XXX (among other things)".

1. Can you provide a source? 2. still a problem that they’re not replacing not with green energy though right?

For what it's worth the original close order was supposed to align with bringing the newer Flamanville 3 1,650 MW plant online which would have been a nearly even swap. Unfortunately that project has gone 5x over budget with numerous time delays. Current guesstimates expected it to come online in 2022. This article seems a little disingenuous.

Here's a DW (german news org) article illustrating the German annoyance at some particular "low-level" incident:

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 :(

Yes, I’ve heard about closing this power plant for... decades. It’s hardly surprising. Moreover, given that Alsace was the most impacted region by the Tchernobyl cloud, it’s not too surprising that there was some local awareness and push to close it.

Germany takes like 30% of its energy from coal. They should have kept the reactor running until coal energy is no longer used in Germany.

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