Hacker News Reader

Comment by MikeCapone | Hacker News Reader

And we're shutting down nuclear power plants? How about we do what France did in the 70s-80s and solve this problem once and for all.

View on HN

Or build more wind and solar. Already Des Moines gets 80% of its power from wind, and the state is building more all the time. CA is doing some solar steps, but it is taking a lot longer (on a much larger population, so I'm not sure how their progress compares). Most states are not doing much. Europe is also making some steps, but they could do more.

The key to all this is starting ASAP and building constantly. Iowa has been building wind turbines at a rate of about 2/day (a bit over 500 per year) for many years now.

Wind & solar are great for what they are, but they aren't dispatchable, and we're better using battery capacity for EVs rather than the grid.

More than half of the French nuclear power plants are shut down due to maintenance right now, cf. https://m.dw.com/en/french-nuclear-plants-break-a-sweat-over...

And they have problems with excessive heat in the summer, because they cannot be properly cooled when water temperatures rise.

Doesn't look like a future solution but more of an future problem to me.

> And they have problems with excessive heat in the summer, because they cannot be properly cooled when water temperatures rise.

Incorrect, the can still be cooled but rivers must be kept below 28 degrees [1]. Because apparently the fish in this one stretch of river are more important than global climate change. Perhaps the takeaway is that we should reconsider the acceptable impact on local environment given the impact on global environment. Similar deal with America lithium mines held up behind environmental review.

1. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threa...

Incorrect.

It is not only the temperature. Did you miss the extreme lack of rainfall in much of Western Europe in the summer, including in France?

(Low river levels to affect French nuclear power generation) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-idUSKC...

Which is part of why they get too warm, there is less water in them so the impact of the plants is higher.

More generally, "France drought: Parched towns left short of drinking water": https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62436468

"France's Going Through Its Most Severe Drought Ever, PM Says" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-05/france-s-...

You are hand-waving away quite a few environmental issues too.

Low river flow means more of the water goes into the heat exchanger, and leads to higher temperatures. It's still ultimately due to of heating the river, it's not that there's insufficient water to actually cool the reactor, just that there's insufficient water to cool the reactor while keeping river temperatures below 28 degrees. Say there's usually 100 cubic meters per second of flow, and the heat exchanger requires 10 cubic meters per second. If flow reduces to 30 cubic meters per second that's going to raise the temperature of the river but the plant can still be cooled if the people in charge decided reducing emissions is more important than heating a stretch of river.

Whatever environmental issues caused by heating a river is tiny comparison to global warming. If say I'm handwaving environmental issues, yet you neglect to specify what I'm overlooking. If you have reasons to think that heating a river is more important than averting climate catastrophe, I'm all ears.

And lastly, plenty of nuclear power plants are cooled by ocean water, or by wastewater [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

You realise there's more to GHG than just electricity generation, right?

I mean it's a big, low hanging fruit because renewables are so cheap now, but even after getting that done we have transport and agriculture and land use chemical feedstocks and old leaking mines and wells and on and on. Plenty to do.

Though if you take care of car based transport (replace with EVs and/or electric trains), and electric you have done the vast majority. The rest of just a long trail of small things that don't really add up to much together.

Thats only about a third of emissions:

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

i stand corrected.

though with we make electric cheap enough most of the others are easy to switch, and that is already happening.

That's why we're also electrifying transportation, should push for heat pumps in buildings, etc, but yeah, there's a lot to do. Not dealing with electricity doesn't help the rest, though.

What did they do in the 1970s? Care to share more about it for people like me who do not know what exactly happened?

All I could find was this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_France but this shows improvements beginning at 1990s and later.

massive construction of NPPs, with the last big share of works taking place in the 90s. the large majority of them are still in use today. average NPP age in France is ~30 years.

this is what allows France to produce electricity at ~50-100 grams of CO2 eq. per kWh, a performance that is only rivaled by countries with also nuclear- and/or hydro-heavy grids. for comparison, Germany sits between ~200-600 gCO2eq./kWh (last year's average). Germany's grid is renewable-heavy, but also intermittent, relying on the use of GHG-intensive backups (coal, gas). [1]

[1] ENTSOE data aggregated by @BotElectricity, https://twitter.com/BotElectricity/status/134536262422201548...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com