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Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

It's weird of the article gives plenty of direct citations from nuclear operators, while at the same time acting like French 40+ year old fission tech doesn't have any issues [0] or sustainability problems, and how the French could dare to shut down one of their first reactors.

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/

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We have a independent national authority (ASN ~ Nuclear Safety Authority) which is tasked to assess the security of all nuclear power plants and certifies them for periods of 10y.

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.

You have a very focused elite building system in which the big universities creating the future members of the elite are heavily financed and influenced by pro-nuclear organizations. That goes especially for politicans, but includes engineers. The pro-nuclear propaganda repeated by the people that go through this is frightening, many of them are completely brainwashed.

In no way can the ASN be really independent, as it is staffed with the people that went through this system.

> the big universities creating the future members of the elite are heavily financed and influenced by pro-nuclear organizations

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.

Can you point to any specific and concrete safety issue? (as opposed to, without any evidence, questioning the integrity of the people trying to reduce CO2 emissions by extending the lifetime of existing nuclear plants).

Sure. I will cite Zeit.de, a german newspaper. They write in https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2020-02/atomkraftwerk-fe...:

> 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.

Thank you!

If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, and had simply kept building at the same rate, our grid would be (near) zero carbon today. Not several decades from now if we hustle our asses off, today.

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?

Yes, that's the a common talking point that is false, "Nuclear energy does not produce CO2, or almost none". But you only see that it is false if you look at complete lifecycle analysis of building the plants, running the plants, mining and transporting the uranium, transportintg the waste, dismantling the plant etc.

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.

Even counting for the whole life cycle, nuclear is a very small greenhouse gas emitter. One plant lasts decades and a very small amount of ore needs to be mined, because uranium is very energy-dense.

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.

Yes but we would have decades of extra time to deal with global warming.

Instead, now we’re trying to shame people into flying less, which amounts to 2.5% of emissions a year..

This was done, the whole calculation, again and again, again and again, like this was done for solar pannels and wind turbine.

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.

Did you even glance at the numbers?

    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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...

It's my understanding that these numbers are not undisputed. Even https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1530-9290... lets enough opportunity to have that calculation be changed, though there does not seem to be any doubt that the emissions are minimal compared to fossil fuels. But that's not a point I made.

But you are right, I shouldn't have made it sound as if no one produced such numbers.

That's not all you did.

Even if it is a full order of magnitude larger, it still compares quite favourably to fossil fuels.

Right, that's part of what I was citing. But the people vehemently opposing nuclear power plants, like me, are generally also opposing fossil fuels. So that doesn't change anything.

Maybe you do, but most people "vehemently opposing nuclear power plants" only pay some lip service to fossil fuels. I've yet to see an anti-nuclear activist declaring that Germany and Japan have nothing to be proud of, considering their carbon footprint. Granted I didn't search very hard, but every anti-nuclear opinion piece I've come across praises how "Germany and Japan showed" that it's possible to shut down nuclear power. The staggering environmental cost of fossil fuels is at best left in a footnote.

This criticism of the Energiewende is a core point of the program of the german green party, combined with the plan to end coal power as soon as possible.

Nevertheless, Germany's per capita CO2 emission per year is 9.44 tons [1], Japan's is 9.70 tons [2] and the US's is 15.52 tons [3] in 2016. Sorry, I couldn't find a more recent source. All that despite, Germany is shutting down nuclear and it has already reduced its usage of brown coal (Braunkohle) and stone coal (Steinkohle) in the last 10 years [4]. So, please explain how the US with higher relience on nuclear is faring better?

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...

Seems to be begging the question a bit. If 100% of energy came from nuclear, then maintaining it (and all other activities) would be 0-emissions. Construction work and transportation can surely be done electrically.

But producing and using cement would still emit CO2. That is part of the chemical reaction when it is mixed at a building site.

True. But in the long term, beyond the course of the cement's lifespan, that carbon will eventually be re-absorbed. Strictly speaking, therefore, cement is carbon-neutral.

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.

This would be great if CO2 was the only waste product of a nuclear plant, but it's not. You not only needed to keep building plants, but also designate proper waste storage sites, which are still up in the air to this day, and some sites like Hanford are utter ecological disasters.

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.

Why do people always forget that coal plants spew radiation into the environment?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

There's a significant difference between diffuse radioactivity and the sort of waste nuclear plants put out, though. In both impact on humans, and mitigation.

Right - diffuse radioactivity is harder to contain or clean up.

Less necessary to do so, though.

Well, no - not if the linear no threshold theory of radiation dosages is correct. If it is, then that diffuse radiation leads to cancer just as surely as acute radiation exposure.

I was already aware. How does pointing this out solve nuclear waste storage issues?

Coal was the alternative we chose, so it set the standard to beat.

How does this solve nuclear waste storage? It has nothing to do with the challenges of storing nuclear waste.

Coal wasn't chosen after nuclear was abandoned. Coal was used for centuries before. And the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is not only from the last 30-40 years. It started to rise significantly with the spreading of the industrial revolution.

Nuclear safety and waste are among the most serious of issues, but it is disturbingly common and dishonest to present them without comparison to the safety and waste problems of the alternatives and without optimizing for safety per kilowatt.

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.

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

No it's not dishonest. Where are the storage facilities? Is Hanford a disaster or not? Were there fundamental quality and safety issues in the 70s(and before) around nuclear facilities?

Pointing out that other stuff is "just as bad as nuclear" is not helping the argument for nuclear.

> Where are the storage facilities?

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?

Yucca Mountain was controverse at best. you know a storage facility needs to withstands over thousands years. It's basically impossible to plan for that with our limited living years.

>That's generally how decision-making works: you weigh the tradeoffs and make the best choice.

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?)

> > Is Hanford a disaster or not?

> 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.

Hanford is just $6 - $10 billion per year, with cost estimates up to $667 billion total over its "lifespan", but we know some of the nuclear waste will be with us for thousands of years, so this number will only get bigger. There is no end in sight.

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.

How many people have died because of that lax safety attitude? Less than any other power source. To call it waste is even debatable as it is still usable for energy production, it just costs too much right now. In the future, this may change. Low level and high level nuclear waste are not the same and the high level waste, as done in some countries at cost, could be reprocessed for fuel.

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.

>How many people have died because of that lax safety attitude?

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.

The tsunami killed 15,899 people with 6,157 injured and 2,529 people missing and in 2015, 228,863 were still living away from their homes [1]. But that story was completely overshadowed by the Fukishima melt down that killed 1 person because anti-nuclear stories are media catnip. It also led Germany to commit fully to the shutdown of it's nuclear plants and a 2019 article found that the increase in air pollution will kill 1100 people a year and an increase in C02 of 36.2 megatons per year. So where is the real disaster?

[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.

Again, your dismal of the seriousness of a nuclear meltdown is not helping your argument.

>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.

The things that actually kill people should get more attention, yes.

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.

> The things that actually kill people should get more attention, yes.

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.

> How many people have died because of that lax safety attitude?

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 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.

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.

My understand is that with the Fukushima Daiichi incident, we knew this was a possibility. Managers thought they could manage the risk, because there was a likelihood that it would not flood during their watch. I don't know how organize to get around that behavior though

I've never heard of a tsunami on that side of the Atlantic. At least none are listed there, regarding the french Atlantic coast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis_in_Europe

Does it matter if the one french reactor at the shore of the Atlantic wasn't safe against tsunamis?

The trouble at Hanford is not because of nuclear power, but from making nuclear weapons. There is a big difference. For one, you don’t need plutonium for nuclear power.

It is a site where nuclear waste has been heavily mishandled. It is an example of how not to handle nuclear waste, and why handling it effectively is difficult and can be very costly. The source of the waste does not matter all that much. If you do not deal with nuclear waste properly, you'll end up with more Hanfords.

The reason that we stopped building nuclear wasn't because of anti-nuclear forces, but because of terrible mismanagement of builds in the US, mismanagement that didn't happen elsewhere in the world.

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, since we have no good permanent waste storage facility, with a great deal of waste generated being stored in the generation sites themselves, we'd be absolutely glowing with nuclear waste.

So the people you want to oversee the safety of nuclear installations are people who do not know reactor physics or civil engineering?

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.

It's just like every other example of regulatory capture, really - the people who're qualified to assess the safety of nuclear power plants are those who have training in reactor physics and engineering, which is of course the same pool of people that plant operators draw from when building and operating their plants, so you end up with a revolving door effect where the nominally independent regulator is incredibly close to the industry it's regulating and has few ties with other stakeholders like, say, everyone living in the surrounding region.

It's much better to have experts assessing other experts than laymen (say politics or judges) assessing experts (like what happens with privacy/piracy laws).

Is there an alternative?

ASN is an independent authority. Do you have any proof otherwise? I am yet to see any of these engineers becoming millionaires.

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.

This is one convenient lie.

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.

Hey, that's unnecessary. I admit that my comment was written in haste and is not properly backed up and can't be properly backed up, not like that. It's a melange of several points, not well distilled. But the essence goes like:

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.

1. ASN inspectors reports are not edited by their president or directors (commissaires). The whole structure is based on engineers. Inspectors are strictly engineers.

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.

[0]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0797-x

> Wait! i have multiples solutions. ...

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.

You are missing the last step. The same people that oppose nuclear and coal energy oppose updating the power grid such that all the wind turbines, already installed, can all be used at the same time. This is the most ridiculous part of the climate activists in Germany, imho.

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.

> The same people that oppose nuclear and coal energy oppose updating the power grid such that all the wind turbines, already installed

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.

Yes but after decades of being horribly manipulated, what happened ?

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.

That might be, but Germany and Switzerland assessed the safety to be suboptimal.

"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."

Why should France care about what they think? Germany could try not importing French carbon neutral nuclear energy if they hate it so much.

Well, in the winter France needs all that --- mostly carbon neutral --- energy for their eletrical heating systems in homes, and in warm summers of this century the river become so warm, that often nuclear power plants have to be throttled down. Luckily, we have alot of wind in the winter and alot of sun in the summer.

Have a look at the map.

You have to conceed that the independence of the ASN is at least debatable.

Why?

> Afaik originally the life-span for most reactors of that kind was 40 years

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.

> Afaik originally the life-span for most reactors of that kind was 40 years

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?

I'm not quite willing to accept the US' ideas on science and safety as entirely unassailable at the moment.

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.

In the US upgrades of old plants in the US have gone wrong. e.g. see the San Onofre upgrade

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

There are multiple differences why it’s not the same in France. The biggest one being that in the US, a plant as to confirm to its design security specifications, whereas it France, it has to conform to the security specifications of when it is inspected.

How can anyone call nuclear power "safe"? Have we discovered a way to actually deal with the nuclear waste yet?

Just as much as we have discovered one to actually deal with the hydrocarbon burning waste.

One is captured, packaged, and stashed away; the other is poured into the air in high volumes, continuously fueling a runaway scenario.

Yes.

Fessenheim nearly got out of control in 2016 when water flooded electrical equipment racks. Control of of the reactor rods was interrupted, core temperature was rising uncontrollably. Letting the control rods fall into the core via gravity didn't work anymore either. They had to emergency flood the core with Boron, which luckily worked, the first time this has happened in a western european power reactor.

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.

Hmm, wikipedia (and the ASN used as source) seems to describe this incident a bit differently. I didn't see anything about core temperature rising uncontrollably, it's slightly inaccurate to say that control of the rods themselves was interrupted (only a positioning indicator; they could've emergency shut down the reactor with the rods if they needed to; not sure why you say the control rod failsafe didn't work), and the "emergency flood" of boron which "luckily worked" was standard operating procedure. Do you have a better source?

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

I've just added a more detailed source to Wikipedia (also from ASN), but it doesn't contain any new facts. A cursory google search didn't yield anything reliable confirming the parent's version.

Sources on the "via gravity didn't work anymore" please.

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.

We can't be sure, but based on the french independent nuclear authority, this does not look to be accurate. Just the dramatized version of a German anti-nuclear group:

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!

Thanks for the clarification, quite possible my source of information was biased.

OK, there are several misconceptions here.

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).

It's moving slow, but France does have planning working through how to manage nuclear going forward. Replacment with renewables as studied by the French gov't seems not only promising but cost effective.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-po...

These stories are always very nice and the plants cost effective, but are they true? Pakistan had a 100MW solar powerplant built for them. It actually ended up producing 18MW and required extensive amounts of water to clean the dust off of the panels.[0] I'm sure they were also told that renewables are cheap and will be great, but somehow everyone missed this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaid-e-Azam_Solar_Park

There will be failures on the way to a fully renewable powered grid. India just turned up a 750MW facility successfully [1]. 70% of Texas coal plants are at risk of decommissioning as early as 2022 due to the amount of solar generation in the pipeline [2]. Spain is years ahead of schedule in coal decommissioning due to low cost renewables and pumped hydro storage capabilities being developed [3]. The UK is rapidly developing HVDC undersea cables to import clean hydro from Denmark and Norway [4]. Australia has over 130GW of renewables projects in the development pipeline (5x greater than the continent's entire fossil generation capacity) [5].

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-...

"India just turned up a 750MW facility successfully"

That number doesn't say much, since the actual output will be a small percentage of that (15-20%).

It's low carbon generation getting built that otherwise would've been gas or coal. India only has about 7GW of nuclear generation capacity (with ~5GW in development), but has a target of 100GW of solar by 2022 (which between cheap labor and cheap hardware, is entirely feasible). Ground mount utility scale solar is very cheap per MWh, and very fast to deploy (years, not decades).

> The UK is rapidly developing HVDC undersea cables to import clean hydro from Denmark and Norway

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B8lleh%C3%B8j

> And, as the article notes, allows the UK to export surplus power (from wind?) to Denmark.

Correct. Quite a bit of offshore wind potential Great Britain.

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2020/06/12/great-britai...

For some reason could be explained by looking at

[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.

I have a feeling the civil projects in Pakistan have a different success rate than maybe other places. And even apart from that one sample is not really conclusive of anything.

There will be unsuccessful projects, which while we should learn from them, shouldn't be the anecdotes to condemn a technology

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

The Lazard reports mentioned in your second link are a nice read. They look forward at estimated lifetime costs of power that might be projects started today.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/

This article is misleading.

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.

> Because you can't choose when the sun shines and when the wind blows.

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.

That's far from guaranteed. It's very possible to have little wind over a large area, larger than France even, during the night.

And the same for solar. There are several hours every day when the sun is shining nowhere on (Metropolitan) France.

Especially during the night :)

Do you have any actual numbers to back these claims up?

Yes, at Europe scale: https://youtu.be/1aCHN6dytVY in French

This has been demonstrated to be false, unfortunately. See https://youtu.be/1aCHN6dytVY (in french though)

At least with studies on the Australian grid, it seems like the need for "baseload" sources is myth fueled mostly by resistance to upgrading to renewable sources.

https://www.energymatters.com.au/renewable-news/baseload-ene...

There's a lot of "could" and "will need to change" there, don't see hard facts proving a myth.

That seems good, as then we can set a date when fossil fueled power plans should be banned and only renewable sources will be allowed.

I recommend 2030.

> You can NOT replace nuclear with wind and solar. Because you can't choose when the sun shines and when the wind blows.

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.

If you run the numbers, you’ll see that we are several orders of magnitude away from having anything close to the scale of energy storage needed unfortunately

Extending the grid transport capacity, allows you to transport the energy from the place where is currently blowing to the place where it is neaded. That, reduces the need to store power.

This has been demonstrated to be false at the Europe scale, unfortunately. See https://youtu.be/1aCHN6dytVY (in french though)

In a nutshell, either there's wind everywhere, or not.

What are the consequences of the inevitable natural gas or coal power plant that will replace it? There's always a lot of talk about renewables, yet it seems that we still end up with a fossil fuel based powerplant. It's not like France is building new nuclear plants to replace the ones that are shutting down.

> There's always a lot of talk about renewables

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

In this case, we're taking offline an amount of nuclear power that exceeds the entire photovoltaic contribution to the French grid, and replacing it with power from a combined cycle plant in Germany. In turn, Germany is commissioning a new coal power plant, in part because of the increased French demand for electricity.

> In turn, Germany is commissioning a new coal power plant, in part because of the increased French demand for electricity.

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.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Datteln

Commissioning means "putting into service" in this context (to me, at least).

And then, there is wave power, which is essentially wind energy decoupled from its origin in time and space, has(had) extremely encouraging working prototypes, like the Pelamis design:

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.

Altough avaible energy is indeed abundant, it is quite a challenge to extract it at scale. The issue with this kind of system is that they usually rely on complex mechanical systems that usually don't play well in offshore conditions and are maintenance nightmares. Some new concept are trying to get rid of mechanical parts using electro active polymer, but that still requires years of development...

> as a reference, it took wind power plants more than 20 years of enthusiastic development until the installed power reached 500 kW.

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.

The bulk of French renewable is hydro, which is not going to grow, and has been there for ages. It's actually a very good complement to nuclear plants.

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.

Current renewable generation is two thirds hydro, one third solar and wind. France's installed capacity for solar plus wind already exceeds hydro. With plenty of room for more.

> installed capacity for solar plus wind

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...

I never claimed that installed capacity equals effective output, that's obviously not true. I don't think the figures are meaningless, either, but whatever --

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...

We were not talking about installed capacity, though.

Comparing installed capacity without discussing average load factor is also utterly meaningless.

How convenient that I also included the current production (at the time of writing) in my comment, right? Btw now it's 4.6 GW wind+solar vs 6.6 GW hydro.

I am sure you realise that it's not incompatible, right?

Nuclear power is like Aboetion: a complex issue with major implications that has turned into A religion on both sides. You can't have a sensible discussion without being written off. The middle is shelled by both sides.

Tbh Fission was always considered a stop-gap technology until we could master fusion.

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...

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