Germany's electricity production has emitted about 8 times more CO2 emission than France over the last 30 years: I blame the german political ecologists for being directly responsible for a massive amount of our current ecological woes by demonising the nuclear industry and limiting it's spread across the world for the last 30 years.
It's really a sad story to be so misguided to end up contributing to destroy the one thing you wanted to save...
If the French (of all people) can no longer get it together to build new reactors even remotely on time and on budget, then maybe we just need to be honest and give up on the "build lots of new nuclear plants, quickly" as a credible medium-term component of a plan to deal with climate change.
"France's Flamanville 3 reactor will cost 300 million euros more than forecast and fuel loading is being pushed back by up to six months, EDF (EDF.PA) said on Wednesday, in the latest setback for a project already running more than a decade late.
EDF now estimates the total cost of the project at 12.7 billion euros ($14.42 billion). Its expected cost has more than quadrupled from the first estimate made in 2004."[0]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-de...
That won't prevent me from blaming the anti-nuclear crowd that put us in that situation in the first place.
Yes, nuclear is expensive, yes it can be messy but it was our best shot to produce abundant amount of low carbon power. All this talk about switching to wind and solar power omit the inconfortable fact that the current low prices for those technologies are low because we are using fossil fuel to make them.
When you have to make advanced renewable tech with only renewable energy, you will see that it's no longer possible to make it economically either.
When you need falsehoods to make your case, you have no case.
I admit that I don't myself know much, but I can tell you that you need at least:
- A modern metallurgy industry using coal to make steal
- Possibly a chemical industry to make composite material
- A logistic industry to move components around the world using petrol (all the solar and wind renewable production is based in china)
- Cement to build your fondation (using gas)
Remove all this and try to build it locally and see how much they cost you...
Nuclear reactors also require steel (and a chemical industry and cement) but fortunately that doesn't require coal:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/19/green-steel-...
The point is that those that claim that we can replace fossils fuel entirely by wind and solar based on the current price of wind and solar production produced by an industry doped with fossil fuels at every stage are deluding themselves.
everything is built with the current fossil fuel powered industry. cement, steel, uranium mining and enrichment all is subsidized by the fossil fuel doped industry. Same with wind and solar.
The fact that nuclear power costs more than fossil fuel power is really a reflection that its whole supply chain is consuming more fossil fuel energy than its producing. it is not the magical bullet you think it is.
furthermore, as certain installations of solar and wind are actually producing power cheaper than fossil fuels, its contributing to a trajectory where the % fossil fuels in industry can actually diminish.
We built them so fast, that even if we had cross-partisan will to keep forever using nuclear, we'd still have 30-40 years of gap without making any new reactor. And after a generation of engineers, we need to make reactors again and we're basically doing it from scratch again.
There are other reasons: people's fear of nuclear became quite real (either because of greenpeace, or local green political parties). There's also a bit of hubris I think, rather than making some "easy" "usual" reactor model, we decided to do our brand new own, which has its own cost: If Flamanville's EPR had succeeded, we would likely have made more reactors and we would already be producing >100% of nuclear power
Somewhere to the north-east of Strasbourg would be ideal, not only for the abundant water supply, but also because the location is ideal for export to places in Europe that have not invested enough in stable sources of energy, lately. And if France plans to import power when the wind is blowing in those countries, the grid capacity out of that area will be needed anyway.
The rest of the world will be building out renewables, and getting much more power for each euro than France will. France will have more expensive power than everyone else in exact proportion to their nuke construction.
Ultimately, the French will buy their power from outside, because the nukes will be unable to deliver at a matching price, and the plants will be mothballed. French taxpayers will be the poorer.
My prediction is the opposite, that nuclear will remain cheaper than wind in northern temperate climates for another generation.
I suppose time will tell.
HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress in the perception of nuclear energy.
For example, because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with. If the political climate lead to burdening fossil fuel burners with costs to reduce their pollution and GHG emissions that directly and indirectly lead to orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear ever has, then nuclear might actually be price competitive.
As another example, since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US started in 1975, they have never, not once, approved the construction of a new nuclear site in the US. They've approved expansion of existing sites, but never a new one. In fact, it was a huge deal when the NRC approved the expansion of a site several years ago, for the first time in 30 years, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-license/nrc-a...
How much pain and death is the NRC ultimately responsible for for holding nuclear energy to such a high safety standard that it's been literally impossible to build a new site for almost 50 years? Because all that means, is that we've burned drastically more fossil fuel than necessary over the past 50 years.
Shame on the NRC and the US government for using irrational fear to protect the fossil fuel industry at the expense of nuclear energy. And shame on environmentalists for falling for the same trap and failing to think holistically and systemically.
"The researchers start out with a historic analysis of plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim. The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent—and that's not considering the financing costs of the construction delays [..] while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor [...] In the end, the conclusion is that there are no easy answers to how to make nuclear plant construction more efficient. And, until there are, it will continue to be badly undercut by both renewables and fossil fuel."[0]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
Really, actual cost is much more than reported cost, because disaster insurance and decommissioning are always omitted from cost accounting.
Wait, seriously? That miniseries was not perfect, but I thought it did a pretty good job of pointing out the issues with Chernobyl were largely political and not technical. (Sure the RBMK reactors were flawed, that is a technical issue. But the only reason that escalated into a disaster was due to gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems...)
Gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems are inevitable, inherent features of power utilities. If your technology is disastrous without perfect handling, your technology is disastrous.
Did we watch the same miniseries? Chernobyl went beyond gross negligence. To say nothing of perfection. In the reactor design, in its operation and in post-crisis management.
But since the rest of the world doesn't build reactors of that type, and never built any without even a containment building AFAIK, it's not really applicable to modern nuclear power plant designs.
Because it's centralized, quite isolated from the public eye and with the potential to cause invisible environmental impact.
E.g. Bill Gates' nuclear startup would be dead in the water without its subsidies. That makes it political.
It’s not that nuclear is any worse, it’s just that the alternatives got better.
Fossil fuel is the alternative to nuclear (and possibly battery supported wind/solar) as the base load. Fossil fuels are fundamentally cheaper because they can more easily avoid paying the cost of their negative externalities than nuclear can. If we could actually internalize the negatives of fossil fuel burning (i.e. by carbon tax) then nuclear might actually be the most economical option for the base load with solar and wind picking up the slack.
France had nuclear capacity factors around 70% when America and much of the worlds nuclear power plants where closer to 90%. It physically worked, but dramatically increased production cost per KWH.
Assuming they cut back to 30% or even 40% of all electricity being supplied by nuclear that’s still a significantly reduction.
Nuclear completely undelivered on this promise. Tschernobyl was just the nail in the coffin.
On top of that has the nuclear industry been one of the strongest lobbying groups against wind and solar, mainly to protect their investments. I would argue on the whole we would have been much further in terms of renewable energy if it wasn't for the nuclear industry.
Both should be sort of ok, fingers crossed.
But this is only replacement. If we're serious and want to reduce iron ore with hydrogen for our steel needs, and use the same electrolytic hydrogen for fertilizers, we would need to build about 50 of them.
The technology is there, but yes, it is more of a political issue in France as well.