Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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Europe is under an absurd, unprecedented energy crunch at the moment:

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...

> because of massive defects or barely producing due to a lack of cooling water

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.

That's all true, but there is a little bit of hope: One major cause for the current extreme gas prices is the fact that many EU countries are filling up their gas buffers now for the winter. So on top of the gas scarcity, there is also extreme demand at the moment. Some countries have reported that they are (almost) done. This will decrease demand and prices will go down. At least until the winter begins ..

The current gas prices haven't even reflected yet that the Russians have shut down North Stream 1 for good.

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-...

It will reverse as soon as the EU removes the sanctions and opens Nord Stream 2. Right now, the sanctions are pushing up prices, making the Russian government fabulously wealthy. Price caps are even going to make things worse. Ethics don't trump economics 101 nor do they keep grandma from freezing to death, unfortunately.

I think conflict escalation is more likely than Europe conceding to get the fossil gas taps turned back on. The world can’t be held hostage by a madman forever.

Unfortunately, with most of Italian politicians being in the pockets of Putin and massive protests expected across Western Europe, it is very well possible that the sanctions get lifted.

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.

There are mechanisms to prevent that on a large (EU) scale, and US probably will use them if needed. Threats or sweet deals to politicians will keep them in line.

Putin can at any time decide to open North Stream 1 or the existing pipelines (Jamal or Transgas-Soyuz or Transgas-Drushba). It's understandable that Putin doesn't want to pay for the Soyuz and Drushba routes as he'd have to pay transit fees to Ukraine, but there is no excuse for not using Poland-Belarus bound Jamal even if North Stream 1 actually had technical defects. He is using gas as a weapon and extortion lever against Europe, there is no other way to describe it.

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.

What do you want to do? the errors were made in the past. The only way forward is to normalise the relationship instead of further escalating this very dangerous situation.

> The only way forward is to normalise the relationship

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.

> No one thought of "normalising" relations with Nazi Germany's Hitler as my ancestors marched through Europe either.

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.

Spot on. We've seen this before with Hitler, and we are smarter now. It's true the situation is different - Putin has nukes - but we have nukes as well, and there are ways to be tough without escalating to using them. This means we do not have to fold just because Hitler has nukes now. We should be as tough as needed to stop the expansion.

if a peace deal is as easy as some suggest like the one that was prevented by Boris Johnson(guarantee that Ukraine will never be part of NATO etc.) then I do not understand why you would like to escalate the situation even further.

One has also to acknowledge that the economic sanctions and the military support for Ukraine are also very hostile moves.

> 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.

Only way forward is ceasing relationship with such state

> making the Russian government fabulously wealthy

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).

> 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...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream

Why would we open up NS2 if NS1 isn't even being used due to Russian decisions? What would added capacity do when they're not even using the existing links?

It's just pro Kremlin propaganda, it's the only thing you see when looking at Leipzig protest twitter posts

For (effectively) state-owned companies, politics trumps economics 101. Removing sanctions will cause a marginal drop in natural gas price for a few weeks, but no more.

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.

This is so naïve. What makes you think that the Russians will keep North Stream 2 open, given the fact that they are closing North Stream 1 for the EU now?

If they will keep it open at all, it will be only after some heavy concessions on the EU side.

They did quite clearly mention requiring heavy concessions on the EU side as the very first bit of their comment (which I don't agree with). Everything they wrote was centred around if "the EU removes the sanctions".

France is planning on having all reactors back online by winter. I guess the market isn't buying that, though.

Even if it was, CERN aren't going to suck up power and thus raise prices while there's still going to be a supply crunch elsewhere. A huge amount of gas usage for direct heating needs to be displaced with electric in the near term, so it's a good look for CERN to do their part and a good use of government money to not compete with the citizenry.

> French nuclear reactors [...] offline because of massive defects

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=...

> 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.

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...

> Minor? Your link is outdated. EDF was forced to prolong the shutdowns recently [1].

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'm wondering why OP is accumulating down votes. As far as I understand the situation the posting is correct.

HN tends to be fairly pro-nuclear, which is not surprising given that the majority of its users are in the US which doesn't have a lot of the problems Europe has with nuclear - they have more than enough space to build nuclear plants safely away from population centers, earthquake-prone areas or flood-prone coasts or to store the waste.

It seems like the situation has resolved itself, at least the posting is not grey anymore.

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.

For pro-nuclear HN people that want to read about themselves, here's a pretty honest analysis: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2022/08/ROBIN/64951 (in french)

OP is rabid anti-nuclear person with an axe to grind. It gets boring after a while, especially with rabid anti-nuclear people being partially responsible for the current crisis. If it wasn't for them, Europe would be much less dependent on Russia.

You would think the countries with nuclear carriers would park them at home and figure a way to hook them into the grid.

I dont think the reactors on ships are really designed to output like that

It's not huge, but it helps. I've heard it was done after the sunami a decade or so ago.

The entirety of Europe has 1.

That can be done with diesel locomotives [1], but with nuclear carriers? Not sure. For one, only the French and the US have nuclear carriers, with the British additionally running a nuclear submarine fleet.

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#...

I heard they did it after the sunami, so it should be feasible. Yeah, it's not much, but it's something.

> countries with nuclear carriers

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

What's France currently doing with their's?

Last time I heard about it: somewhere in the Mediterranean to support NATO and show something to Putin

So, basically nothing...?

Yep, nothing besides doing its job supporting the organisation preventing a European war escalation as well ad providing intel to Ukraine.

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...

"Yep, nothing besides doing its job supporting the organisation preventing a European war escalation as well ad providing intel to Ukraine."

Source?

Similar things were thought of before for Northern Ireland in the 70s but not implemented because it was impractical in that case. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4132635.stm Wouldnt rule it out entirely especially as a political gesture of doing everything possible when unrest threatens, but not as a very meaningful intervention.

For those curious according to this source https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/ an Aircraft carrier produces about 191 Megawatts an hour

Unfortunately there's really only one county on earth with a substantial aircraft carrier force.

It's actually Megawatt-hours per hour.

Understandably, since they're for a boat and the whole point is to move the boat, that's not actually electricity. They mostly make steam, which is used to turn propellers, which are used to move the boat.

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.

That's 16 MW for all of Europe, which would be provided by the one nuclear carrier in the EU, the French Charles de Gaulle.

That's basically a drop in the ocean, not enough to even consider that "every little thing helps".

I'm guessing someone relying on that for heat this winter would disagree.

16MW shared between 480 million people in Europe is 33mW each. That's enough to power a small LED indicator.

It's not being distributed to the whole of Europe.

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