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Comment by boyadjian | Hacker News Reader

For me, what emerges from this story is the lack of anticipation on the part of the French government. For years, nuclear power was discredited because it was not environmentally friendly, so we shut down power plants, and now we have to refabricate them? All this makes no sense. Moreover, the production of a nuclear power plant is very long, how are we going to do it in the meantime?

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Wasn't many of the reactors shut down in Europe in need of being decommissioned anyway? You shouldn't run a nuclear reactor forever and ever, and most of the reactors in Europe are quite old.

I know there are cases of decommissioning too early, or even a reactor that was fully built but not even started operation (I think Tom Scott had a video on that?), but I don't think that's the common case.

They were in "need" of decommissioning because necessary repairs had been intentionally stalled to the point of making them politically untenable.

many nuclear reactors in a lot of countries also have very low yields compared to modern reactors. (for instance, most nuclear reactors in the netherlands have been disbanded because they provided little power)

Nuclear has been in a holding pattern for years in France while they waited to see if the EPR unit being built at Flamanville 3 would work out.

There was also a scandal a few years ago when the state-owned nuclear construction company Areva acquired Le Creusot Forge. It turned out that there had been a decades long coverup of weaknesses in the steel forged there for nuclears plants, and falsification of documents.

I completely fail to understand why some think France didn't try to build new reactors for decades. This is not true! We tried , however it is a running disaster.

The problem here isn't "political will".

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

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