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Comment by Krasnol | Hacker News Reader

France just had to turn off 3 of their rotting reactors[0] and they lowered their estimates for this year to 295-315 TWh[1]. They're desperate, it's election year and they failed to come up with a diversified energy plan for the future. Luckily the recent taxonomy decision may help to avoid sharp tax rises to finance this backward and hilariously expensive[2] strategy but those EU funds won't run forever. Expensive times coming up for the French taxpayers.

[0] https://then24.com/2022/02/08/three-nuclear-reactors-shut-do...

[1] https://www.edf.fr/sites/default/files/epresspack/2447/5c9aa...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-de...

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Ahah, it's always expensive time for the french taxpayer -- always have been! They even have recursive layer of taxes, where you pay taxes on amounts that have... already been removed from your revenue as... taxes.

That's not what recursion means. There are income taxes on your whole income (- a base provision for living expenses), and you can deduct certain things ( like donations to nonprofits) from the taxable income.

I know what recursion means thank you so much. If you get $100 income, get a 20% tax on that, and then get another 20% tax on... not $80 but on the /previous/ $100, you are paying recursive taxes. Thats what the old "CSG" was (replaced by something else but in the same 'spirit'), in france. You are being taxed on amount you already been taxed on.

Yes, all taxes ( i include social charges and stuff like healthcare, retirement, etc. payments) are counted based on your total income - some provisions.

totaling 8 now .. but in the end will need another one really going down bad to stop all the sudden pro-nuclear movement here in Europe, which I can imagine only must have some astroturfing behind.

But til then, blow more money into insurable and as much green as coal and gas power plants :(

(And that calculations done by real experts didn't even include all the other uneconomic issues from getting that stuff from somewhere til storing the waste - but yeah I know, all these waste will be taken by those new shiny molten reactors that have no problem at all on paper and will eat all the waste - both things just so far from reality in practice, which almost does not exist even).

The common stance and knowledge here at HN about all this is consternating :(

> But til then, blow more money into insurable and as much green as coal and gas power plants :(

Nuclear plants don't emit CO2, unlike coal and gas plants.

But they do generate (human-)life-threatening nuclear wastes that last 100k years. That dwarfs even the longest human civilization like Egypt[0]. 100k ago, humankind was barely appearing. Plastic in comparison takes around 450 years to be disaggregated through exo-human processes[1].

How to deal properly with these wastes is still a vigorous debate generator[2]. The thing is, with our current theoretical knowledge and practical expertise, we don’t have solutions that scale at the industrial level at which nuclear wastes are produced. Not in a way that we can say "and thus mankind will be completely free of dealing with this issue in the next 100k year".

[0] https://pintsofhistory.com/2011/08/08/the-unbelievable-durat... and you might have a look at https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-hist... [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/chart-of-the-day-this... [2] https://www.challenges.fr/top-news/l-asn-pointe-un-risque-d-...

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