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Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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