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.
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.
Further adding cost to the already most expensive energy source to extract trace amounts of fuel is nonsensical.
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.
No, we weren't. At least not by anyone credible.
...or, I don't know, add a wind turbine somewhere?
This blend of puerile argument had been thoroughly refuted for over 30 years. Please find another cliche to parrot.
And as we erode our base generation in favor of these intermittent sources it becomes a more serious problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
There's something else going on - I saw mention of corrosion, but I don't really know.
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.
Water temperature issues are very rare, and only happen a couple days out of the year.
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.
Yep, that should totally do the trick.
...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.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.s... (nuclear is Kernkraft in red, fossil fuels are in the dark colours).
[1] https://www.nuclear-power.com/breeder-reactor/
[2] https://www.gen-4.org/gif/upload/docs/application/pdf/2017-1...
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.
I personally like the term “Unreliables”.