France produces 75% of their electricity with 56 nuclear power plants, which - if the above is broadly correct - you would be able to replace with 7000 of these wind mills. That's a lot, but on the other hand, Germany has already installed 20k wind turbines so far, so it seems within reach. Obviously you still need to think about matching supply and demand, but I'm surprised by how feasible this appears.
In addition to electricity, nuclear power plants also produce a lot of heat, which can be used for district heating purposes (called co-generation), as is done frequently in northern and eastern Europe. Heating is the dominant component of the final energy consumption, accounting for close to half of all energy use. This is apparent when driving around in an electric car - keeping the cabin warm easily accounts for ~30% of the consumption. Wind turbines obviously produce no surplus heat to extract
https://www.climateforesight.eu/energy/nuclear-power-feeling...
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/632988813/hot-weather-spells-...
Thermal power stations face a panoply of potential malfunctions, regardless of their heat source. They are very, very complex.
Is that the case though? To my knowledge nuclear reactor heat is only used to produce electricity and kill biodiversity in rivers so far.
Also, nuclear reactors are built far away from populous area for obvious security concerns. Are there adequate mechanisms for transporting heat over long distances? That's already a problem for electricity, which incurs huge losses (heat dissipation).
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Haiyang-begins-c...
For net heating climates, my understanding is that this form of heating can be much more efficient than alternatives like electric heating.
> my understanding is that this form of heating can be much more efficient than alternatives like electric heating.
It makes sense that mutualizing efforts to produce heat is gonna have a better yield/efficiency. I'm just sure nuclear energy is a disaster (at least all known and planned implementations so far) and i'm not sure whether using that excess heat in this manner is efficient. I'm very sure, though, that it's considerably better than rejecting very hot water into natural streams where it destroys ecosystems.
Really? Look at Pickering nuclear power station for example. Highly populated area all around it.
In any case, in that model, heating housing using nuclear sites heat makes perfect sense.
Sadly, not everything is so green here, like it may sound.
They're supposed to prove the supremacy of french engineering companies with the new EPR design, however all it's shown so far is the many inadequacies of any institution we've known so far to respect basic security/operating principles.
There are many, many EPR-related scandals to explore if you speak french, and even more scandals relative to french engineering companies if you're curious like Lafarge, Areva, Bouygues..