France risks winter blackouts as nuclear-power generation stalls | Hacker News Reader

France risks winter blackouts as nuclear-power generation stalls

wsj.com

65 pointsbookofjoe90 comments

I'm kind of missing all information in the article beyond the headline. The whole article is just padding the headline and only says there will be shortfalls in winter, but the current problem is the water not being enough for the reactors. What has that got to do with the situation in a couple weeks when there might have been rain, let alone two seasons from now?

It's mentioned only briefly in this WSJ article, but the problem for this coming winter (and perhaps some years to come) is unexpected stress corrosion cracking recently discovered in multiple French reactors. The affected reactors are the newest currently-operating models, the N4 series [1]. Here's are a few longer articles about the problem:

"Counting the cost of cracking"

https://neimagazine.com/features/featurecounting-the-cost-of...

"Corrosion Problem Shutters Half of France’s Nuclear Reactors"

https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/06/29/corrosion-problem-sh...

"Regulator approves EDF's plan for checking corrosion issues"

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Regulator-approv...

[1] https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurefeedback-on-the-...

Thanks!

Checking the article, I see I indeed read over "Corrosion at a clutch of reactors". That sentence didn't really parse in my head until reading it for the third time: clutch is a quantity, didn't see that use before. Guess I was captivated by the unrelated graphic above and then glanced over this part without noticing that I had missed precisely the information for which I opened the article!

Completely logical that you missed it. Like what appears customary in financial writing, the article has attempted to botch normal writing and has gone completely north on clarity by squeezing massive amounts of important sounding words in sentences which cause a shortfall of meaning. This is exacerbated by a scorching need of readers according to people familiar with the matter.

Well played.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/French-regulator...

Deferred maintenance during Covid and unexpected corrosion issues. The too hot water is just the summer cherry on top.

Plants are down for maintenance (this is the 'corrosion' bit in the NYT articles).

They were already announcing planned reductions (for maintenance) back in winter 2022 (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/power-group-edf-cuts...)

I believe additional issues have popped up since then causing EDF to plan additional maintenance shutdowns.

There is some confusion with different issues, you are right. There are several problems that create a perfect storm:

1. As you said, the water issue is just temporary. This is a non-issue for this winter. 2. The next generation NPP, the EPR, is late and is currently only planned for 2023 3. The current NPPs have been authorised to be used up to 50 years, under the condition of doing fairly important upgrades. This is what is ongoing. And because the decision to push these to 50 years was late, the upgrade schedule is quite tight. 4. This upgrade, and other normal maintenance have been impacted by COVID 5. As someone else said, corrosion was discovered during the maintenance of an NPP. Since the cause of the corrosion could not be explained, the operator decided to shut down all the NPPs with the same design. This is being currently analysed and it looks like the nuclear authority is happy with the proposal. The current work is to develop a reliable system to detect and monitor this corrosion, not a change in the design 6. The main operator is in the process of being fully nationalised and is suffering financially as it was basically asked to bail out its competitors this year due to the energy crisis. 7. The backup to NPPs in France is currently gas. And you may be aware of a small constraint on gas due to some issues with a country located further East. If Russia stops the delivery completely, gas supply could be an issue and therefore we need to plan to reopen coal plants that were closed because they were no longer useful.

France needs to invest heavily into renewables, as it isn't able to replace old nuclear reactors with new ones, especially at the rates renewables offer.

Thanks. I don't get the get connection between the title and the content of the article. It says in the article that nuclear reactors are outputting half of what they should because of the extreme weather. But in the winter, how is that going to be a problem? We don't have heatwaves in the winter... yet.

It's not a given that the water flows that are required to cool the reactors are going to be present in the fall/winter.

It's not usually a waterflow issue, rather water that is too warm to cool the reactor.

This won't be a problem in the winter.

And in the future they'll probably design the reactors to handle the warmer water, or even run without water (lower efficiency, but that's not really an issue for nuclear).

If that's the case, why is the electricity company (per the article) saying they'll have the shortfalls down to a quarter (I take that to mean 75% of normal generation capacity, not 25%) by December? And why is the market not even buying that, what is the logic there (be it correct or not)?

---

Edit: a sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32443994 has answered the below question. It's not the water input that is the problem, but the water output temperature for ecological reasons. Original text:

As a less-important aside, I'm also surprised a change in water temperature of like 20°K/C/F makes a noticeable difference on a reactor running afaik at some thousands of degrees. If anyone has a pointer or tldr for that, I'd be curious to learn why.

It's not water at all - usually high water temperatures are just a few days a year.

There's something else going on - I saw mention of corrosion, but I don't really know.

> rather water that is too warm to cool the reactor.

No, it is still cold enough to cool the reactor. They can't use it because the warm water that the plant would release would be too warm w.r.t. ecological regulations.

If for some reason the plant had to work right now, it could still do it, but would damage the downstream ecosystem.

Isn't that what cooling towers are for? An alternative to warm water emissions. I am no expert admittedly.

They are, but not all nuke plant feature cooling towers. The problem here is for those without: they use water as a cooling fluid, but then just pour it back into the river instead of evaporating it. The advantage is that they don't consume/move the water, the inconvenient is that they can't spit out 40C water without hurting the river's ecosystem.

It's not 40C at all! It's only a 2 of 3 degrees more than it started.

Water temperature issues are very rare, and only happen a couple days out of the year.

Are the ecological impacts of warm water seriously worth the increase in fossil fuels from reducing nuclear output? This seems like a nuclear-obstructionist kind of environmental policy.

Ah, couldn't read the article because paywall, but that was my assumption. It's not the first time power plants, especially nuclear ones, have cooling water limitations during summer. Also, as should always be pounted out, gas is mainly used for heating and not electricity in Europe. So WSJ is now putting three, only indirectly linked or not at all related topics together to write an article about a speculative future that might or might not happen. That is some really top notch journalism right there.

https://archive.ph/LoiNQ

archive.ph uses tracking cookies that go to russian domains

France has a lot of reactors not available, also because of various technical problems.

During cold winter days the electricity demand is especially high, since a lot of heating is done with electricity. On some winter days the output of the reactor fleet is not enough - with less available reactors, this gets even more of a problem. Also neighbors might not be able to provide as much electricity as usual , because of the Russian invasion&war in the Ukraine and its consequences.

Oh, you mean just like what they've done in Germany for the past decades?

Yep, that should totally do the trick.

Just make up the volatility of wind with gas, we have this friendly neighbour with plenty to share and it is so cheap.

Or pumping water uphill. Contrary to popular opinion there is no shortage of up: https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...

I love how your article refers to dams as "secure". I don't think there is a form of energy that killed more people directly in accidents. Beyond the fact that some people will object to flooding every valley in the Alps.

> I don't think there is a form of energy that killed more people directly in accidents.

...and yet the UN and the EU are right now riled up because Russia is threatening to bomb a nuclear power plant, but don't even bat an eye when a dam is destroyed.

You are probably being sarcastic, but renewables actually helped Germany replace nuclear and part of fossil fuels for electricity production:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.s... (nuclear is Kernkraft in red, fossil fuels are in the dark colours).

There are approximately 6.5e13 tonnes (65 trillion) of Uranium in the Earth's crust, which smarter people than me have determined could power humanity's needs for more than 4 billion years.

That sounds more "renewable" than Solar, which depends on a Star that is due to burn out in 4 billion years and is conventionally branded as "renewable". Not including the ample amount of fissionable material on the Moon and in the immediate Solar System. So I agree, we need to invest heavily into renewables, specifically the one that is right in front of our face, Nuclear.

Now count the combined energy of the global wind or total solar irradiation.

Further adding cost to the already most expensive energy source to extract trace amounts of fuel is nonsensical.

Except wind and solar are intermittent, and require burning fossil fuels during periods of non production. Thus, wind and solar still contribute to climate change indirectly, due to their dependency on fossil fuels. This will continue to be the case until some massively scalable storage solution is developed, which remains unsolved.

This is off by 6 orders of magnitude?

A crucial part here is that you're interested in recoverable Uranium at a reasonable price level. Assuming < USD260/kg, you'll end up at ~8 million tonnes (depending on what other factors you account for): https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12...

And so the time estimate is similarly off. Uranium resources can power humanity's need for ~130, years, extending to 250 years if the entire conventional resource base is exploited. (pg. 113 in the report I linked). With large error margins for Uranium deposits not found yet, but not "factor of millions" error margins.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't invest into nuclear (we definitely should), but it does mean that it's not the panacea it's touted as either.

20 years ago we were told there was 20 years of petrol remaining. It's sadly false.

> 20 years ago we were told there was 20 years of petrol remaining. It's sadly false.

No, we weren't. At least not by anyone credible.

Asteroid mining seems like it would become a necessary endeavor once uranium becomes too expensive to extract on earth. I'd bet big that humanity can figure out profitable asteroid mining within the next 100 years!

> Asteroid mining seems like it would become a necessary endeavor (...)

...or, I don't know, add a wind turbine somewhere?

Huh, you must me lucky enough to live somewhere that the wind always blows and the sun always shines.

> Huh, you must me lucky enough to live somewhere that the wind always blows and the sun always shines.

This blend of puerile argument had been thoroughly refuted for over 30 years. Please find another cliche to parrot.

As long as energy storage is expensive this is a valid argument.

And as we erode our base generation in favor of these intermittent sources it becomes a more serious problem.

No it doesn't. Its totally unnecessary and there are many much cheaper ways to get fertile material.

There is also plenty of thorium easily recoverable. The primary problem is that we need to move on to next generation reactors. Fertile martial availability is really not the problem and will not be for a very long time.

With a thermal breeder design reactors we easily have 1000s of years of material.

And in fact volcanic activity will push new thorium up as well. The idea that we can run out of fertile material is mostly just not relevant.

That is assuming slow nuclear reactors, which is the case for the majority of the current reactors. But with fast reactors, you gain a factor of about 100, so the 200 years turn into 20000 [1]

    The big picture effect is that U238 is usable as fuel instead of just U235. There is over 100x more U238 in nature than U235, so the time that 200 years of uranium can last humanity turns into 20,000.

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/fast-reactor.html

I always wondered if we could just shoot spent fuel into the sun to get rid of the storage problem here on earth

Then you'd enjoy watching videos on YouTube about why shooting things into the Sun is enormously energy intensive even by the standards of putting things in space and sending them around the Solar System.

Boils down to: getting something to fall into the Sun requires stripping the speed of Earth's rotation around the Sun off the vector. This is... expensive.

Well shot it into space then :) since that is less energy intensive it can get lost in the vast emptiness.

We could also get rid of the storage problem by realizing it isn’t a problem to store a relatively tiny amount of solid waste. The irrational fear of it is mind boggling considering the vast quantities of dangerous gases and particulates we vent into the open air that we breathe without a second thought. I’d much rather have all of our energy by products in solid form safely contained and buried deep under the earth.

Or we know we could dedicate 1 football field of space to it and stop thinking about it so much.

> That sounds more "renewable" than Solar, which depends on a Star that is due to burn out in 4 billion years and is conventionally branded as "renewable".

Thinking in more immediate time scales (say, the next 100 years), isn't it also a matter of logistics and qualifications needed to operate various types of powerplants and maintain them, navigating the minefield that is the public opinion and minimizing the risks associated with each form of energy production?

Ergo, nuclear is definitely the future, but right now we should also embrace other forms of energy (sun, wind etc.) while we perfect reactor designs, especially in countries where the conditions aren't ideal for nuclear (for example, harsh nature conditions, or not high enough amount of local specialists, or lower budgets in poorer nations, like mine).

Sun and wind seem more scalable, when you're looking into scaling downwards, especially in the cases of more decentralized power grids. Of course, this probably doesn't apply as much to huge metropolitan areas and cities that probably have populations that are greater than that of my entire country.

So that instead of having blackouts when Russia invades Ukraine, we can have blackouts when there is no wind.

I think we need a new term to communicate this as I don’t think people yet appreciate how replacing base load with intermittent sources will result in bad outcomes.

I personally like the term “Unreliables”.

France needs to invest - and has already done so - in the development of fast breeder reactors [1] which are used to create ("breed") fissionable fuel from non-fissionable material in spent fuel rods. They already developed such reactors (Rhapsodie, Phenix and Superphenix [2]) but currently they do not have a functioning FBR to rework spent fuel rods. Using fast breeder reactors the 60 GTEP (Gigaton equivalent energy from petroleum products) in available fissionable Uranium can be turned into ~7000 GTEP of fissionable fuel. As a comparison, this is 9 times as much energy as is available from coal (420 GTEP), oil (189 GTEP) and gas (160 GTEP) combined (source: [2], page 6).

[1] https://www.nuclear-power.com/breeder-reactor/

[2] https://www.gen-4.org/gif/upload/docs/application/pdf/2017-1...

They can follow the example of the Germans. How's that been working out?

France did a good job building nuclear reactor with existing technology and refining them.

However they have done a really, really poor job in developing and rolling out next generation technology.

If they had continued to build and evolve the technology they would not only not have the problems they have now.

Unfortunately government lead efforts are not always very innovative and the French population got infect by some of the same anti-nuclear sentiment as other places.

https://archive.ph/LoiNQ

Even the most pro-nuclear scenario the French came up (N03) includes 50% of renewable. And we are talking about one of the most nuclearized country in the world.

Nuclear is a great ally but not a silver bullet. They need to ramp up the production of renewable energy immediately.

https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2021-10/Futurs-Ene... page 17

What's an ENR?

What makes you conclude that, because they're not choosing it, it must be not a silver bullet? What are the actual reasons behind this? I see some stats in french on page 17, not sure if it also mentions reasons somewhere. (E.g. germany is also not choosing it, but for the stupid reason of the public being riled up (mislead) about its risks by various parties for decades, so now it's not politically acceptable anymore to leave nuclear running while phasing out coal, let alone build more nuclear. In such a case, I would not use "oh germany is not choosing it, must be bad then" as a reason to conclude "nuclear is not a silver bullet".)

I replaced ENR by renewable.

> because they're not choosing it

That report does not take a stance. It is listing different possible scenarios to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

The document I linked is a summary, but it is better explained in the full report. The TL;DR is that 100% nuclear is nowhere to be achievable in a reasonable timescale despite France being one of the most knowledgable country on nuclear energy. Cost and time are the main problems. The bottom of page 27 shows how even the most aggressive scenario fall short. I remember the CEO of Orano himself saying that they wouldn't be able to make it.

Don't get me wrong though. I think it would be stupid for France to give up on its nuclear park. The pro-nuclear scenarios looks way simpler to achieve than the full renewable ones. But if we look at the big picture, renewables are not optional, nuclear however might be. So maybe let's spend a little bit more time talking about how France is not doing nearly enough on the renewable side, whatever your opinion is on nuclear.

Solar panels requires a dependency on China which doesn't seem too smart.

China is the largest but far from the only solar-manufacturing country.

Solar manufacturing in Italy:

https://www.enelgreenpower.com/who-we-are/innovation/3SUN-fa...

Solar manufacturing in the USA:

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/08/17/228223...

In Singapore:

https://usa.recgroup.com/news/rec-group-kicks-mass-productio...

In Germany:

https://www.pv-tech.org/meyer-burger-optimising-production-e...

In Turkey:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/19/turkish-pv-manufactur...

In India:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/24/indias-solar-module-m...

Soon, in France:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/13/french-hjt-solar-plan...

I’d like to see the pie chart comparison of production. My guess is China looks like PacMan on it.

Cool, now show production volumes and chips and boards country of origin.

The documents you linked doesn't says what you say. The risk table nicely show it: all renewable are red. Yes, 100% nuclear is not achievable without risk, but with less risk than the 50% renewable you are proning.

Page 26: > The study concludes, without any ambiguity, that a sustained development of electrical renewable energies is essential in France to respect its climate commitments.

Which defacto exclude a 100% nuclear mix.

I am not proning anything. To be honest, I would have been happy if the report said that 100% nuclear is the best way to go. I have no problem with the tech.

Are you talking about the risk table p43? That table shows that n2 and n03 are probably more achievable than the other scenarios but nowhere that table proves that more nuclear than n03 would be achievable in the timeframe allocated. I would love an exact quote or reference on that.

There is no reason why nuclear can not provide all energy needed.

Just because this french document doesn't make a scenario like that doesn't mean its not possible.

France did a great job deploying nuclear, but they have overall done a really bad job at developing next generation nuclear.

I would like to read the document you linked below and understand by what logic they exclude 100 nuclear.

How is it possible that they manged to build a nuclear reactor in 5 years in the 80s and can't do so now. France doesn't need that much more energy in 2050. If they just repeated what they did in the 70-90s in the next 20 years they clearly reach it.

It really don't see any rational argument why this shouldn't be possible. Maybe its not possible continuing to do more or less what they want. But a determined government effort, bringing the technologies online that they have to to make it work should be considered.

Given modern technology, shouldn't they not be at least 2-4x more efficient at building new capacity then they were in the 80s?

Edit:

Looking at the document, why would France need +350GW of energy production. That seems totally over the top given population trends.

Edit 2:

Looking further:

> 14 EPR et plusieurs SMR entre 2035 et 2050

That seems a small number. If they have a working design that they can start building in say 2030. IF you put the necessary education system in place to educated people, you should be able to build way more in 15 years. If you split the teams while on-boarding new people you can start many reactors every year.

The increased electricity production would be needed to shift fossil usage in industry to electricity.

That accounts for some of that, but more then 3x seems to much.

> Just because this french document doesn't make a scenario like that doesn't mean its not possible.

I am re-quoting what I wrote below because they clearly state that it is not possible if they want to respect the deadlines.

Page 26: > The study concludes, without any ambiguity, that a sustained development of electrical renewable energies is essential in France to respect its climate commitments.

Which defacto exclude a 100% nuclear mix. (According to the report, maybe the report is wrong)

> How is it possible that they managed to build a nuclear reactor in 5 years in the 80s and can't do so now.

> Given modern technology, shouldn't they not be at least 2-4x more efficient at building new capacity then they were in the 80s?

I know right? I have a hard time wrapping my head around it too. In theory that's how it should be.

But in practice, it doesn't seem to be the case. Most projects end up being giant clusterfuck with years of delays and billions in over cost. And we keep seeing the same story repeating over and over. There is lack of qualified people and expertise got lost (the famous welders). We can probably train new people but can we do it in a sufficient timeframe and quantity?

There is also the problem of the massive amount of upfront capital to mobilize. Three bad EPR projects almost bankrupted the french nuclear industry. And we could also dive into the massive amount of corruption that goes with those large sums. Ohio being the last one of a long trend.

For the big plants, it seems that the costs and time to build have not fallen: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

France has not done great job with their advanced nuclear unfortunately. To be fair there were many headwinds. So I assume they are just really pessimistic about its potential. They shouldn't be, because they have the nuclear industry and education to make it happen. Its just a matter of will and imagination

They killed their sodium reactor project:

https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclearpower-astrid-i...

One of the problem with GenIV is that every country wants to develop it and then use that reactor to consume the waste of the GenIII reactors. The problem is that this makes it doubly difficult and expensive. Essentially making GenIV pay for the 'sins' of GenIII. The problem with this is that given climate change, what should matter is building the most economical possible reactor, nuclear waste is not they primary problem they should try to fix.

Overall, I am not really a fan of Sodium reactors but the French had them working and not just a initial prototype, but a fully operational reactor that produced grid energy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix

Unfortunately the anti-nuclear people of course were extremely threatened by these and tried to prevented them any way the could. And managed to do so. People protested and threw molotov cocktails. A crazy swiss guy literally shot at the reactor with a rocket-propelled grenade (and this hurts me as a swiss person).

> A 1998 "Inquiry commission on Superphenix and fast neutrons reactor sector" [3] reported that "decision to close Superphénix was included in Jospin's program ... in the agreement between Socialist Party and Green Party". Also the same report says "despite many difficulties, the technical results are meaningful". In the explanation of vote at the end of the report, commission members says "give up on Superphenix has been a big error" and "Superphenix has to die because is a symbol".

France could easily have built 10-30 more of these designs in the 90s and 2000s. By now this would be far cheaper then building EPR and it would be safer. The whole project cost 9.1 billion euro and that was a first of its kind reactor with many issues, that seems to me a very acceptable price for such a ground breaking project.

What is beyond sad is that its the Green Party (and generally leftist parties) all over the world that is anti-nuclear. And the right usually happy to go with the cheaper fossil fuel option. So for a long time nuclear just didn't have a home.

Even worse France stopped all progress, had they continued on pace from 1980-2000 they would be in an amazing position right now, but nuclear output is essentially flat since then.

I prefer molten salt cooled designs over sodium cooled. Some interesting current examples are:

- Stable Molten Salt Reactor by Moltex Energy (basically a sodium reactor but replace sodium with a liquid coolant salt, and fill the assemblies with fuel salt)

- KP-FHR Kairos Power (a liquid fluoride salt cooled pebble reactor)

- IMSR by Terrestrial Energy (liquid salt cooled and fueled fast burner)

In my opinion advanced industrial countries like France, Germany or Europe in General could easily take any of these designs and build up to 100% nuclear by 2050. All of these are small enough that you can make large parts of them in a factory.

This article is in French and is thus inaccessible for many on HN. It sounds like it's assuming that there's going to be vast amounts of storage to accommodate renewables intermittency - at least if "stocker" and "dèstocker" refer to storage.

This is very wishful thinking. Storage at anywhere near relevant scales is not achievable with existing storage mechanisms. This is often the case for most plans that call for a significant portion of energy coming from renewables. Intermittency would otherwise require a carbon-free source to provide energy during periods of non-production. Unfortunately for intermittent sources, peak demand coincides with periods of non production in the evening. If you build enough nuclear plants to fulfill this period of non-production, then you have enough nuclear plants to fulfill demand for the rest of the day and thus the intermittent sources are redundant.

If someone does eventually invent a storage system that's nearly free and can scale to terawatt hours then renewables are great. But until then, they do not provide a path to decarbonization.

We French need to start thinking about sobriety. Setting progressive water and energy prices to encourage people to be more efficient in their use would also be helpful. Lots can be done. How about the government and parliament finally get it done instead of pointing fingers. I'm ready to restrain myself in lots of ways if it's in the general interest, even if it makes my life a bit worse on some aspects.

Holy moly. This is dark. So you want to punish the same people who paid for that ignorant course of several governments by subsidising the state regulated energy price and the companies providing that energy and which are constantly bankrupt? Like, punish them again? How cruel,

How about diversifying your energy generation? Like with...renewables?

> punish the same people who paid for that ignorant course of several governments

I don't think this is about punishment, but rather that "Like with...renewables?" is not going to be ready in three months. They aren't even going to have the reactors ready that are already there. Requiring big users to take it down a notch might be the only way by which people get their basic needs fulfilled like transportation and heating living spaces to reasonable degrees. Personally I don't think we will 'eat the soup this hot' (things are probably not as bad as fear might make them seem now), but only time will tell for sure.

It won't be ready in three months but it will be better next year and the subsequent summer and so on. Better every year. Unlike with building new reactors where the only subsequent events are news about rising costs and later completion dates.

I mean seriously. This is not the first time issues with the nuclear fleet cause problems. We'd have a normal summer without those "special repairs". A normal summer in France means: "Rivers too hot. Need to shut down."

Punishing those people who voted a guy who promised to REDUCE nuclear and EXPAND renewables and who just didn't, doesn't make any sense.

If you don’t have enough electricity, the exact wrong solution is to pretend everything is fine and keep consumer prices the same, as there will be zero reason for consumers to reduce consumption. If prices increase by 2x or 3x you can bet users who can will turn off large consumers like resistive heaters.

For some reason unrestrained access to cheap electricity is treated as an untouchable right, and how dare you raise prices in a shortage, you profiteering monster?

Are you even aware that France has a price set by the government and that the French taxpayer has been subsidising nuclear power all the time already?

How about you punish somebody else for a change?

If only there was a way to express gigawatt-hours per hour in a simpler way.

Where do you see that mentioned? When I ctrl+f for 'hour' I only see "€900 a megawatt-hour" and "equivalent to about $1,850, a megawatt-hour", but no MWh/h or hour per hour or something.

You can't ctrl+f on images because they're images. https://archive.ph/LoiNQ/902d6a73d02ba7a74370c060fb24e99c7f0...

Ah! Right, yeah that unit is unfortunate.

After moving into a place where electricity is metered for the first time (beyond student living places where you just pay a flat rate as part of the rent), I started looking into what devices use how much. The '-hour' unit is so confusing, also when converting ordinary Watts to whatever-hours, you need to use a conversion factor of 60×60=3600 to get anywhere. Not intuitive at all. Had we just used Joules (kJ and MJ mainly, where 1 Joule = using 1 Watt for 1 second), then by using a 1 kW device (e.g. microwave) for 100 seconds you can instantly tell that 100 kJ is the amount of energy used. On a yearly a bill of 9'000 MJ, you can instantly grasp the relative size of 100 kJ = 0.1 MJ, maybe you do this daily so 365×0.1 = 36.5 MJ. I am terrible at mental math but this much I can do. Alas.

At least, that's how I think it all works, it's not like I ever got to practice this outside of Factorio (consumption/generation is all in Watts and storage in Joules).

Much of a muchness - 1kw for 1 minute is 1 kilowatt-minute or 1/60th of a kilowatt-hour. It’s just a matter of perspective.

The 60x60 multipliers are making it sound more complicated than it really is.

Actually, this works in Safari with its new "Live Text" feature. https://www.apple.com/safari

I just confirmed that searching for "hour" will highlight that term in the image in addition to any regular text.[1] Though, I first had to click on the image, which is apparently what triggers the OCR; after that searching found the term even if I changed or released the input focus.

This is my first time using this feature (your post reminded me that I had recently read about it), and my first time using Safari since I don't know when, so there may be more caveats to the behavior I'm not aware of.

[1] I used the archive.ph version of the full article. Live Text didn't seem to work when viewing the image in isolation via your link above.

Like gigawatts?

Probably expressed as an expected average, rather than peak (or both).

with the advent of a stable thorium breeder reactor, a less problematic method of utilizing the nuclear reaction to not produce weaponizable elements, india is managing to kick everyones butts.

now ask yourself why nowhere else seems to be bothering with this cleaner, cheaper, faster to implement solution that takes up less space to produce the power, and has a significantly shorter half-life for waste (sub 50y).

it's win-win, and yet it's essentially persona non-grata in the energy world.

There's no significant advantage of Thorium from a fuel standpoint. Breeder reactors also essentially give you the possibility of producing nuclear weapons so quite the political and ethical threshold to pass before they would exist in every neighborhood.

Thorium can make a thermal breed work, that is its main advantage. If you are doing a fast burner or a fast breeder uranium is generally better.

I think proliferation concerns are overhyped as a practical issue. The idea is not for everybody to have a breeder reactor in your house. Reactors scale well, its is far better to simple put a reactor next to every current coal plant and reuse the same grid.

If breeder reactors are going to stave of climate change then they need to exist globally. Take "every neighborhood" to mean Venezuela, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and your favorite African dictatorship.

That is the proliferation concern.

There are proliferation resistant design that can have quite good economics. You don't need breeders everywhere.

Additionally, a Thorium breeder will produce U-233 but it will be contaminated with U-232 making it a really unpractical material for nuclear bombs. And no nation has used it for that reason.

In addition other elements produced make it absolutely trivial to measure and track. These nations could sign agreements of IEAE supervision and should anything happen the operator country can basically destroy the reactor with the push of a button.

Reactors can also be off-shore, considering that 100s of millions of people in places like Indoneasia live on the coast.

All in all, nations that really want nuclear reactors will mostly likely obtain it threw traditional means.

India is not kicking everybodies ass. Indias nuclear industry suffers from the same problems many of their advanced technology developments suffer.

India focused on thorium fuel pellets, but what makes a reactor good is using molten salt as fuel and coolant, and India wasted a huge amount of effort redeveloping PWR technology from the 70s.

And breeding with static fuels is also far less useful because to separate those out of the fixed fuel pellets is very hard.

Those are the exact reason why M. Weinberg started developing liquid fueled reactors.

So what we really need to develop is liquid molten salt fueled or at least molten salt cooled reactor. Those can be fast burners, fast breeders or thermal breeders. Thorium is really only useful if you are doing a thermal breeder, if you don't then uranium is actually better.

How a Massachusetts Power Plant Illustrates America's Fraught Shift to Green Energy

https://reason.com/2022/08/12/how-a-massachusetts-power-plan...

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