A little bit of a feeling of the lamps going out all over Europe in this one very big, very unusual lamp's dimming.
So; while we do nothing to reduce energy usage (including turning lamps off), UK energy companies are making some of the biggest profits ever.
The unfortunate thing is that it was basically politically untenable for them not to do this. In the run up to the announcement (basically a u-turn) there was a steady drumbeat of news headlines and articles telling us that they were driving everyone into poverty by not capping energy rates, that it was destroying businesses and no-one could afford it, that the rest of Europe was doing this and only our incompetent leaders were failing to do so because they wanted us to freeze, and so on.
The average home owner probably won't be able to afford a changing their fridge, their washing machine, their tv, etc. It'll be a case of turn off the heating during winter.
The worst problem is that the French nuclear reactors have massive issues - over half their capacity is currently offline because of massive defects or barely producing due to a lack of cooling water [1]. That same drought also impacted Swiss nuclear plants [2] and Italian hydro power [3].
On top of that, the German gas peaker plants that used to be relatively cheap are now, thanks to the Russian invasion, extremely expensive - but since the French don't have an alternative, they pay absurd amounts of essentially government-funded money [4] on the spot markets, enough to make even the expensive gas peakers worth it, which in turn drives up the price for anyone else on the shared European electricity grid.
And to make the situation even worse than it already is, this is not just a spot market crisis. There is no indication at all that the situation in France will clear up any time soon - to the contrary, it will get exponentially worse in winter, as the majority of France uses electric heating - and the drought induced hydro crunch will need many months of constant rainfall to refill all the natural reservoirs before the plants can act at capacity again. This makes long-term electricity futures absurdly expensive as well, and the price hike of these futures hasn't even begun to reach electricity consumers yet.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32605337
[2] https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/suedbaden/a...
[3] https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-scorching-summer-heat...
[4] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2022/07/28/energy...
This is false, and not the reason for the (currently) low load factor of nuclear.
Most reactors are off for maintenance, like they are each year in autumn, in order to be ready for the peak demand that winter is. This year might be slightly worse, but it's not unusual at all.
There is also no lack of cooling water. There is only a law that was set many years ago that can be changed without any impact on the safety of the reactors, and this law is limiting only for a few reactors a few days each year. Very anecdotal.
Anyone still thinking that this will ever reverse until the country is called Eastern Ukraine instead of Russia is in for a very rude awakening. There will be no more gas from Russia and the import capacity for other sources is already booked out.
To make it worse: when the winter is over, the crunch to refill the storage will begin again, and this time with no Russian capacity at all and to make it worse likely without (or with significantly reduced output from) the Dutch gas field in Groningen [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/01/natural-gas-...
We have experience in delivering ourselves as hostages to Putin in exchange for cheap gas - the events following the 2014 invasion of the Krim should be more than enough proof of just how many spineless and corrupt "leaders" Europe has. I have no doubt that there are enough who will cave to the pressure of the streets should the situation escalate.
Seems to be true, yes: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/russias-oil-gas-reven...
Governments seem to be responding to this. This week, Russia is saying it will block all sales to any nation implementing the G7 proposed price cap on Russian gas. (Russia is free to not sell anything if they don't want to, of course).
However, thanks to this invasion, Russia now only has a few years remaining of such significant gas exports left, no matter what: the more time passes the more substitutes for Russian gas are installed, because it is unacceptable to NATO and EU nations for Russia to have the capacity to threaten them with reduced fuel supply.
There's also the question of what fraction of Russian export capacity to Europe would vanish in the hypothetical where the pipelines going though Ukrainian territory were destroyed for whatever reason (I can think of at least three scenarios leading to that).
Jamal is 33 billion m³ a year [1] and Soyuz 26 billion m³ [2], while each of the North Stream pipelines has 55 billion m³ capacity [3] - meaning that even in the case that both Jamal and Soyuz are irreparably destroyed for whatever reason, North Stream has more than enough capacity to take over. And that was the entire point why Ukraine, Austria and Poland were so opposed to the buildout of North Stream - had both been opened, Russia would have been able to completely cut out all the transit countries, leaving them completely at the mercy of Russia and Germany's notoriously Russia-amorous politicians.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamal%E2%80%93Europe_pipeline
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_transmission_syste...
At this point, the European natural gas market is sufficiently skewed by state involvement that "economics 101" is marginally more useful than astrology. Geopolitics 101 is what you should turn to for answers.
The call to open North Stream 2 is nothing more than Kremlin propaganda, and the only ones calling for it here in Germany are more-or-less plain Kremlin fifth column agents.
Besides: opening NS2 would be a symbolic caving before Putin - a signal that even invading a country for annexation gains, a no-no ever since WW2, is not too much of a crime for Europe to look away.
Yes, by removing Russia from Ukraine. No one thought of "normalising" relations with Nazi Germany's Hitler as my ancestors marched through Europe either.
What should we do? Send everything we reasonably can to Ukraine so that they can drive out Russia. And then send some more that they can get rid of Putin once and for all.
Yes they did - France and Britain attempted to appease Hitler for 5 years.
Of course the lesson to learn from that is exactly that appeasement doesn't work. Letting Hitler get away with annexing Czechoslovakia only emboldened him to go further.
Eventually enough has to be enough. I'd rather deal with the pain now than wait until Russia turns its attention to our own borders after it's finished with Ukraine.
One has also to acknowledge that the economic sanctions and the military support for Ukraine are also very hostile moves.
Indeed. It is a good start but shame we aren't doing more.
If they will keep it open at all, it will be only after some heavy concessions on the EU side.
There's no "massive defects" involved, it's a combination of 1. regular refueling maintenance which happens every summer; 2. some maintenance being delayed due to COVID-19 that was finally able to be scheduled this year; 3. a minor corrosion issue [1] being found with the welds in one of the newer plants, leading the power plant operator to stop all similar plants for safety reasons to be manually inspected.
> barely producing due to a lack of cooling water
There's plenty of cooling water, it's just warmer than usual upstream of some of the plants, and the plants have rules about not rejecting water above a certain temperature to the river in order to protect wildlife. These rules can be waived and in fact have been waived several times this summer and previous summers to continue producing at higher load -- it sucks for the fishes that get +1°C, but we're basically making a choice between warming up the rivers or warming up the planet with more CO2 emissions. This is indeed the same situation as in Beznau (CH, the article you linked), but absolutely not comparable to the problems with hydro in Italy that are actually due to lack of water. You can't waive a lack of water.
> no indication at all that the situation in France will clear up any time soon
(1) and (2) are absolutely going to clear up by winter. https://nuclear-monitor.fr/ shows the planned maintenance end dates. Just by the end of the month EDF is planning to have 11-12GW back online [2] (though their maintenance end dates tend to slip up by a few days in general). That leaves the 12 reactors (out of 56) impacted by (3). I suspect that if it actually comes to blackouts, (3) might also clear out, if we decide that the minor safety risk of the welding issues is less bad than the people actually dying due to lack of power. Unfortunately anything involving nuclear safety makes people freak out and require 100% reliability, even when it's absolutely irrational to do so and causes more human deaths.
[1] https://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/20... [2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FbeQue0XkAAraJu?format=png&name=...
Minor? Your link is outdated. EDF was forced to prolong the shutdowns recently [1].
> (1) and (2) are absolutely going to clear up by winter.
It will, but the drought is likely to reappear next summer, which is why not just the spot electricity market is bananas but also the futures market. Additionally, there is the very real potential of further issues cropping up - the French plants are almost all extremely old [2]
> Unfortunately anything involving nuclear safety makes people freak out and require 100% reliability, even when it's absolutely irrational to do so and causes more human deaths.
Well, the problem with nuclear is that even a tiny fuck up has the potential to irradiate a large region for decades. We still can't eat game or shrooms in Bavaria without checking them for radiation levels, and that over 35 years after Chernobyl.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220825-france-prolongs-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran...
Your link doesn't say anything about the severity of the issue, just the number of reactors it impacts (12, which is the same number I indicated).
> It will, but the drought is likely to reappear next summer
Sure, by then the welding issues are hopefully finally addressed (the plan is to have the maintenance done by January, but I strongly suspect this will slip by a few months) and then it's only the regular refueling which has been happening in summer for almost 50 years.
> which is why not just the spot electricity market is bananas but also the futures market
Well, no, that's due to a lack of electricity production capacity. Issues with the french nuclear fleet are part of that problem, but they're not all of that problem.
> even a tiny fuck up has the potential to irradiate a large region for decades
Absolutely not. Tiny fuckups happen all the time and have no consequence. Major fuckups happen once in a while and also have no consequence (TMI, for example). Huge fuckups have happened twice in the past 40 years, and only once with major irradiation consequences (Fukushima Daiichi has roughly no exclusion zone left at this point 11 years after the accident, the last town has been reopened earlier this year). The nuclear industry has learned from all these fuckups, from the tiniest ones to the catastrophic ones, and something like the issue at Chornobyl just cannot happen in France.
I think that being pro-nuclear actually can make sense until there is enough renewable capacity installed. Its IMHO better than firing coal and generating more CO2. Also we already have nuclear waste, so we are already in a unfavorable situation and producing some more is probably the better tradeoff than ruining our climate. In my opinion, the safety of these power plants is, however, the biggest pain point that is not solved and will likely never be.
We still should work towards renewables so nuclear power can become a thing of the past.
Besides, even the largest US carriers of the Nimitz class barely reaches 200 MW of power (and the majority of it goes directly to the propellers via steam turbines, not via intermediate electrical systems). Your typical actual power plant however goes into the ~1000 MW/1GW and above region.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/that-time-a-canadian-town-derailed-a-die...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier#...
That's basically a drop in the ocean, not enough to even consider that "every little thing helps".
So France, with a single one.. and I'm sure it has better things to do
Unless you want them to surface their super stealthy and secret nuclear submarines that are in charge of nuclear dissuasion
Send an email to Macron though, I'm sure he'd like to hear about HN experts who want to use an air-carrier that develops less than 10% of the least powerful land based nuclear plant to power the grid...
Source?
Unfortunately there's really only one county on earth with a substantial aircraft carrier force.
They do make some electricity, well, by domestic standards it's a lot of electricity, but in terms of a country's need for electricity it's a drop in the bucket. The Ford is probably capable of making 125MW of electricity (details are classified) and is the only carrier of its type in service for a year or two yet. Older US carriers have smaller, less capable reactors and are less equipped to generate electricity from the steam.
How much is 125MW? Well, roughly this, one random mid-size wind farm: https://www.scottishpowerrenewables.com/pages/black_law.aspx
Admittedly you decide when you get 125MW from your aircraft carrier, whereas the wind blows when it likes - and the carrier is portable, sort of, but that's just not very much juice and it's the only one of its kind in the world.