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Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see that South Korea has such strong nuclear research facilities. Taiwan lost a lot of nuclear researchers in the past decades. Some of it due to US lobby work and some of it due to stupid governmental policies in the recent past. Japan which is also quite strong in nuclear seems to be trying to sell part of their nuclear industry, a move which turned out disastrously for the french.

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> a move which turned out disastrously for the french.

Any more to add?

IIUC, France has one of the highest percentages of nuclear energy of any country in the world.

Is this supposed to be bad?

More than half of their reactors are currently out of commission. And Macron was one of the people responsible for signing off on the deal that sold off their turbine development to GE due to pressure of the DOJ. They were talking about buying "it" back. Although I don't know what the scope or timeline of the buyback is. I also remember that contrary to previous promises GE started dismantling one of those factories.

Undergoing maintenance and scheduled to be back online in the next couple of months.

It does seem like there's a deeper problem if over half the reactors are shut down for maintenance at the same time.

IIUC - the reason so many are down is because of heat and low rivers.

This won't be a problem in the Winter when they're most needed.

This is a bit of a myth. The heat wave and water levels was a problem, but most of it was maintenance issues unrelated to that. It was more a problem of mismanagement, and the fact that Macron went into office promising to shut down the fleet, making operators start to cut down on maintenance. He has now reversed course after realising that depending on Russian gas is bad. All wind/solar in Europe works by balancing it against natural gas or hydro, but the amount of hydro is fixed so expanding the wind/solar fleet increases the demand for gas. Hence why the renewable poster child Germany is in so deep shit right now.

French reactors are all the same design (derived from one licensed from Westinghouse). That's how they got the economies of scale and were able to ramp up so quickly. Unfortunately, that also means a flaw is reproduced in all of them. To compound this, the replacements were not started quickly enough so the current reactors are reaching the end of their design life, and because there was not a program to continuously build bew reactirsm the industrial skills base atrophied as qualified workers like welders retired. And the trifecta is France is experiencing its worst drought in recorded history, so some of the plants that get cooling from river water had to shut down due to low water levels. Even the mighty Rhine is a mere rivulet at the moment.

maintenance was late because of covid and then they discovered corrosion issues in 6 plants.

I'm pretty sure summer months are the moment where electricity consumption is at its lowest point throughout the year, so that's make sense

My understanding is that they've decided to push the maintenance to this summer to ensure they're available for the coming winter.

They got too much of a monoculture - flaws in one design meant a bunch of reactors came up for corrosion repairs earlier than expected all at once.

IIUC, turbines are not really the bottleneck for nuclear power plants.

Sure, they are necessary.

But if France's existence depended on it - I imagine this is a problem they could solve relatively easily.

On the flip side, Germany is not going to magically generate 80% of their electricity from Nuclear Energy anytime soon. Nor the US or Japan or South Korea for that matter...

> > a move which turned out disastrously for the french.

> Any more to add?

The Battle of Waterloo?

Reliance on the Maginot Line?

The Maginot Line held.

Germans in Czech tanks went around the end of it, through Belgium.

Yes, so they were reliant on it. When they couldn't make use of if they were swiftly beaten.

Which was the whole point of the Maginot line, to channel the German advance through Belgium where a defensive line was to be established, so it was a success. Everything else - reconnaissance, defence of a forrest thought impenetrable to mass formations, coordination, adaptability to the changing environment (the Germans pouring through the supposedly impenetrable forrest), officer competency, coordination between army and air force, and coordination with the British, were massive failures.

The Line was a necessary component of a defense. It just needed more, that was not done.

Without Czech armor, the invasion might have failed. Predicting the Germans would have the full resources of Czechoslovakia would require more prescience than we should demand.

The Battle of Waterloo was clumsily handled (particularly compared to what would have been expected from Napoleon), but it is hard to describe it as "a move", as they were forced into it, and can hardly be said to have turned out "disastrously for the French" (if anything, "for Napoleon"). In that context, better example of a move that turned out disastrously for the French would be the Russian Campaign of 1812.

I think this has to do with the cooperation deals French company EDF signed with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

What is bad about that?

South Korea also wasted recent years trying to shut down nuclear reactors and painting the nuclear industry as evil anti-environmental cabals. It's infuriating that Korea's politics is governed by either conservatives (who think environmental regulations should bend over for industries) or liberals (who think it's "eco-friendly" to shut down nuclear, when 44% of the electricity is coming from freaking coal).

The previous administration completely neutered its world class nuclear industry and built Chinese solar panels all over the mountain side causing landslides and environmental issues.

These are just some of the wonderful things the President Moon has accomplished.

Maybe I'm biased, but I really don't think "Chinese solar panels causing landslides" is a genuine concern for Korea's energy policy. That sounds like half a level above "Windmills kill birds!"

There had been indeed a short period (about a year or two) where solar panels did cause environmental issues due to the unbalanced incentives. But the government then quickly adjusted incentives so it is no longer a concern.

This issue is not that simple to be framed as "painting the nuclear industry as evil anti-environmental cabals", like usual conservative propaganda. How many nuclear reactor actually has been shut down in last 5 years? Wait, zero? Yeah, the plan is shutting down reactors after its design life rather than blindly extending it more and more, which is the status quo.

Nuclear fission definitely has lots of advantages, but it comes with lots of geopolitical and operational challenges especially if you want to use it for decades, or so called "sustainability". One of the critical factor of "escaping from nuclear fission" was the fact that S Korea is not going to have permanent nuclear waste sites anytime soon; everyone have been talking about that over 30 years and no political party even dare to build the one because in S Korea, every single political issue eventually converges to a matter of real estate. And you know what? The capacity of the existing temporary storage for most plants will be exhausted within 5~10 years.

Now we're talking about the so-called "sustainability"; it's not about environment or whatever liberal propaganda but the dire facts that S Korea will be forced to shut down nuclear reactors unless it finds other ways around. The previous administration couldn't come up with a good solution so decided not to build more reactors. Oh yeah, they didn't even dare to shut down those reactors to earn a little bit more time. It's not even a propaganda, but just a mediocre compromise. Its territory is not big enough to construct just a single waste site.

Oh, then why don't we reprocess the waste? And now we're talking about geopolitical aspects. The US-Korea atomic energy agreement severely constrains what S Korea can do with the waste. Unlike many first world countries, it doesn't have the reprocessing technology and unlikely have the one unless it begins enjoying political tensions with the US.

Nuclear waste is just a tip of iceberg; you're going to find an arbitrary many number of operational and economical challenges on Nuclear fission reactor. And I also want to mention general public reception on nuclear energy, "I trust nuclear energy, but not its operators". Yeah, Korean nuclear industry is well corrupted to its root and it deserves its own reputation. In the era of climate crisis, going to nuclear fission seems no-brainer, but the devil is in the detail.

If they can unload those turkeys, good for them, bad for whoever gets taken in. If they can't, they are no worse off than today.

What do South Korea, Taiwan and Japan have in common? Hint: it starts with C.

Which is why all three have/had such strong nuclear expertise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency

Can you spell that out?

They are near / wary of China? That is why they have nuclear expertise?

So is China

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