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onlyrealcuzzo

> 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?

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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...

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

What is bad about that?

> > 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.

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