France prepares for possibility of electricity blackouts during winter months
rfi.fr
rfi.fr
What's bad for France here is that nuclear plants basically need to run all the time to be even remotely economical - I read recently the EdF is losing billions and billions this year. Personally I think the situation is a lot worse then what they're admitting. They keep saying all year everything is fine, but then miss deadlines. The futures market was already going really high earlier in the year, but it affected the surrounding countries as well. Recently though it exploded in France only after they again pushed some deadlines back. Even Macron came out recently and said they need to remove roadblocks for renewables and be faster to give permits, which was a pretty big change in rhetoric compared to the usual "we'll build new nuclear plants".
I think the next years are going to be renewables heavy in all of Europe, and people will be surprised how quickly things will change.
So called electricity "providers" can sell electricity to customers without generating electricity in the first place, and also without transporting it. And at the same time, they get money from EDF through ARHEN!
The goal was to allow new providers to enter the market before investing massive amount of money in new power plants.
The idea was the following :
-EDF provides 100TWH at a fixed price, to allow newcomers to enter the electricity market (which was a monopoly) - new companies would then invest in new power plants to reduce long-term costs.
It did not work as expected: new power companies just bought cheap electricity and re-sold it without investing in their own plants.
That worked OK for a few years. But this year, EDF had a perfect storm:
- several nuclear reactors were taken down for a scheduled maintenance - corrosion issues were detected in several other reactors, bringing them down at the same time - the Ukraine war caused a massive increase in fossile electricity prices.
So EDF still had to sell electricity at a low price as defined by the Arenh, but had to import electricity at a higher price to compensate for their unavailable reactors.
This situation is completely absurd: EDF has to import electricity at high market price to sell it to a lower price through the arenh.
We even see some companies benefiting from the Arenh that are suspected of stopping the B2C segment just to resell the electricity on the European market at a higher price.
That’s why EDF is losing billions this year.
Here is an article explaining the Arenh and its flaws in more details (before the war so quite outdated, sorry I couldn’t find more sources in English):
https://www.magnuscmd.com/the-arenh-regulated-access-to-fran...
Macron selling off France's nuclear infrastructure probably doesn't help either.
Does anyone here have historical knowledge of Europe's glory days? Were there more actual scientists and engineers in key positions in Government in the 60s and 70s?
For example in Germany Helmut Schmidt(74-82) had a plan for the future where Germany was to build out a fiber optic grid, which the subsequent Chancellor Kohl scrapped because did not like the influence of public TV services and wanted copper for cable TV to counter it[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ségolène_Royal
[2] https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
You mean the Renaissance? Since then it's been 400 years of brain drain to the US.
The US gained a lot of highly qualified immigration around WWII, when Europe tore itself into shreds. Poles, Italians, Russians, Germans, you name it.
And it is hard to disrupt the advantage of places like California ever since. Once you have top universities and top corporations somewhere, individuals will flock to them instead of trying to create competing hubs elsewhere. Plus the dominance of the English language all but guarantees that English-speaking countries will be the net benefactors of this global movement.
For all their advantages, Germany, Japan et al. still struggle with their parochiality when attracting foreign talent, while the US can do this really, really well. Take the entire roster of top IT people in the US and make a checkmark next to every immigrant or a child of immigrants. Similar lists in Munich, Paris, Tokyo etc. would look very different. Most European countries struggle with the fact that recent immigrants tend to be overrepresented in prisons.
He was a key driver of things like nuclear power, high-speed trains, the Minitel, etc.
There is already plenty of proof around the world that renewables are cheaper than nuclear.
If the money spent on nukes had been spent on renewables and on developing storage we wouldn't have these problems.
This was predictable decades ago.
The reality is that nukes are a political solution to a political problem. It's nice that they sometimes generate energy for a while, but there is no sense in which they've ever been a rational economic choice.
Source: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/03/f34/quadrenn... (page 390)
Additionally the overwhelming majority of that material is foundation and tower. Both of which can be reused by replacing the nacelle.
https://www.thewindpower.net/turbine_en_413_vestas_v112-3000...
https://www.vestas.com/content/dam/vestas-com/global/en/sust...
A V112 has 40% lower materials per TWh (or ~30% for the lower wind configuration) than your report without considering modular foundations which would drop it by another factor of 3 or being able to reuse the foundation and tower at least once which would drop it by another 2.
On the other end you're not considering Uranium mining or enrichment facilities or waste storage or that the metals are all recyclable immediately rather than half of them being LLW or SLIW.
This means that we need to overbuild wind by >200%, to have the necessary power year round.
Solar doesn’t work, since it is basically useless in the northern hemisphere during winter, and it needs a lot of battery storage during the night.
There is also a week in February where there is no wind, which will require green methane production and gas peakers(edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute)
Nuclear can work year round with load following using a design like the Natrium reactor. This design also uses a lot less concrete than traditional NPP’s.
The wind and solar capacity factors are anti-correlated.
There are areas in france where the december average is >2.6kWh/d. At 54kg/kWp a modern panel on a lightweight racking system gets this works out to 1800t/TWh and it's almost all glass you can build the same net wattage now for half the price and then use the money you save to replace in 30 years (or 50 if you take real world degradation rather than predicted). Having to recycle some glass once to decarbonize now ranther than in 20 years is a reasonable tradeoff for halving the costs. The gas plants are dirt cheap and that much solar would easily power enough electrolysis to fill your february gap during the 11 months of the year when it produces far more. The electrolysers will be needed in either case for ammonia, shipping, and SAF.
If we're invoking technology that doesn't exist and costs several times more, just use something that does exist and costs several times more like a CSP plant and an HVDC cable.
Additionally for the vast majority of the world which is in transmission range of somewhere arid, CSP is strictly cheaper than the easy part of a Natrium reactor.
The cheapest form of carbon-free energy really depends on what the objective is: small reductions in a mostly fossil-fuel grid? Or total replacement of fossil fuels? Renewables are great for the former: you can throw up some solar panels or wind turbines and reduce a chunk of fossil fuels use. But once you try to start delivering significant portions of the energy grid through intermittent sources the surplus energy starts to get wasted, and the effectiveness drops.
In mediocre to good areas with something like the PEG racking system solar uses about the same raw material than nuclear already and it's almost all sand. By the time a new nuke came online this will be far less.
Both are recyclable. 12 hour storage adds negligible mass and can easily cover daily variation.
Intermittent power without storage can easily feed dispatchable loads like EV charging, chemical feedstock and heat production. These vastly exceed non-dispatchable electricity and can be used for virtual seasonal storage.
There are only a small handful of areas best served by nuclear, and most of them have hydro or nuclear already.
There's a narrow niche where nuclear is optimal:
Grid electricity between 50% and 80% penetration in the 50% of areas where hybrid CSP + e-fuel backup isn't better. This niche is rapidly shrinking and could easily be gone by the time one is built. More carbon can be removed faster and with fewer resources by throwing renewables at the other 10 or so TW of fossil fuels currently being burnt. Until those resources are committed, new nuclear just delays things.
Except intermittent sources also need storage. They also need long distance transmission lines to bring power from remote areas of generation to places of demand (whereas you can just place nuclear plants next to areas of demand).
This is a common pattern in renewables discussion: laser focus on generation and ignoring the fact that wind and solar have storage and transmission requirements that other energy sources don't have.
> The "$2/GW" nuclear reactors were all built by state run agencies with opaque budgets
Nope, do more research. These were all built in the US with public cost history.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peach_Bottom_Nuclear_Generat...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browns_Ferry_Nuclear_Plant
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Nuclear_Generating_Sta...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuire_Nuclear_Station
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_C._Cook_Nuclear_Plant
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_Point_Nuclear_Generat...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Nuclear_One
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lucie_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Anna_Nuclear_Generatin...
> 12 hour storage adds negligible mass and can easily cover daily variation
12 hours of storage for the world is 30,000 GWh. This is 70-100 times the global battery production output. "Negligible mass" is going to have to see a hundredfold increase in som extraction industries. By comparison, nuclear already produces 20% of the US's electricity hand about a tenth of the world's electricity. A tenfold increase is much more manageable than a hundredfold increase.
> Intermittent power without storage can easily feed dispatchable loads like EV charging, chemical feedstock and heat production. These vastly exceed non-dispatchable electricity and can be used for virtual seasonal storage.
If you're going to tell chemical industries and metallurgy plants that they'll have to cease production for part of the year when renewables are producing lower than average output, then that has to be factored into your costs. If the price of steel and ammonia goes up because they can't run their plants as usual, then that cost is ultimately borne by consumers. You can't just use load shifting as part of the plan and ignore the costs of load shifting. "Virtual seasonal storage" amounts to "tell industries to shut off during winter". And no, heat production is not non-dispatchable unless you're okay with people freezing to death.
On top of not including the cost of finance, liabity, or upstream supply chain which was provided by state military projects. The first one you linked had repeated safety violations and maintenance issues and has no record if how much they cost to remedy. The quoted price leads here:
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6259203
And is in nominal dollars not 1986 dollars. $763 million 1966 dollars is $7 billion, not $3 billion. Add in the cost of finance and you get $10-14 billion or around $7/watt for an unsafe, inefficient plant with corrupt management. And this was not a greenfield site, it already had work for unit 1.
Do more research.
Every pro nuclear claim turns out to be a lie when examined even with the slightest scrutiny. All of them.
Finance liability is a fancy word for debt: this has nothing to do with construction costs, and everything to do with financing models. You're right, nuclear would be even cheaper if better financing was done. Upstream supply chain is accounted for by the downstream purchase costs. This is like saying wind turbine costs don't include the costs of mining copper for the dynamos. That cost is in included when the wind turbine manufacturer pays for copper coils.
Research on nuclear's cost history overwhelmingly finds that costs are lower when built at scale: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
1. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
> Every pro nuclear claim turns out to be a lie when examined even with the slightest scrutiny. All of them.
Well, you sound like you're engaging with this topic in well-adjusted and unbiased manner!
My source is a primary source from the DOE for that source.
It included every reactor built before 1986 including Palisades which your article lists as $650/kWe, but it has down as $118 million or $1300/kWe in 2022 $ excluding retrofit for subsequent safety standards. With capacity factor that's $1700/kW net for an inefficient and unsafe design before major safety standards were written.
If your downstream product is a byproduct of a military project that was built for a different purpose then you cannot claim it includes costs. If the US military needed a supply of worn out giant bearings, provided wind turbine designs that cost trillions for free, and was selling turbine blades and nacelles at low prices it would also be a subsidy.
Whatever your opinion on finance, it is included in renewable projects which are fully privately funded.
If your hypothesis about construction booms was true, then the price minimum would be either reactors started in 1982 when construction was at its peak, or if you want to claim TMI as a boogeyman, then reactors finished just before it.
More likely it is:
a) an artefact of whatever part of your chain of references didn't catch the bit in the DOE report that says it is in nominal dollars which depresses prices of early reactors by a factor of two, and
b) The fact that nuclear has a strong causal mechanism for negative learning rate. Each new reactor teaches you new things that can go wrong which you then have to retrofit to old reactors. This only appears in the sticker price if they are still under construction.
Taking arkansas one unit 2. It was $577m for 858MW at 80% CF.
Inflation was quite substantial, so we can't answer without knowing what rate it was disbursed and at what interest during construction, but it is between $4500 and $6500 per kW net. Right inline with new reactors once cost of finance is included.
US nuclear costs and always has cost around $10-12/W using modern accounting terminology with a few outliers and a few early plants before the negative learning kicked in. You just taught me this by having me cursorially examine your lie. Thankyou.
Edit: actually it might have gone down a bit with after TMI. As there might be different accounting on later reports.
So $1.7 billion per GW. This is an exceptionally good price for a system of generation that is geographically independent, is non-intermittent, and is energy dense (and so does not have to involve long transmission lines moving electricity from solar fields and wind farms to cities).
The US averages ~500 GW of electricity generation, 25% of which already comes from nuclear or hydro. At a cost of $1.7 billion per GW the remaining 375 GW could be replaced with nuclear for just under $640 billion dollars.
> If your downstream product is a byproduct of a military project that was built for a different purpose then you cannot claim it includes costs. If the US military needed a supply of worn out giant bearings, provided wind turbine designs that cost trillions for free, and was selling turbine blades and nacelles at low prices it would also be a subsidy.
So solar panels' cost has to include all the military and communications satellites that pioneered solar panel tech? Most renewable systems also use electronic computers to some degree. This technology was originally pioneered for military encryption and firing computers. You could apply this kind of broken logic to anything. Military and civilian reactor designs are vastly different: the latter are usually mobile, use highly enriched uranium, and are relatively small.
> If your hypothesis about construction booms was true, then the price minimum would be either reactors started in 1982 when construction was at its peak
Except the construction wasn't at its peak in 1982. Construction was at its peak during the early 1970s, and lurched to a halt after 3 mile island and nuclear panic took hold.
> or if you want to claim TMI as a boogeyman, then reactors finished just before it.
Yes, this is exactly what's happened! Do you not see this big cluster of cheap plants built before 3 mile island and then plants got a lot more expensive afterward? Do you see how when the color shifts to dark brown they get a lot more expensive? The plants built just before 3 mile island were some of the cheapest forms of decarbonized energy we have ever deployed.
I'll draw this in MS paint to make it easier for you: https://i.imgur.com/VD34Zhi.jpeg
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/reactors.html#tab=iso;reg...
>So $1.7 billion per GW. This is an exceptionally good price for a system of generation that is geographically independent, is non-intermittent, and is energy dense (and so does not have to involve long transmission lines moving electricity from solar fields and wind farms to cities).
You're really stretching here. That's a single pilot plant in an industry with a massive negative learning rate without necessary safety features which is the all-time outlier. I had to go out of my way to find it, and it is not the same metric as you're judging renewables on. You've picked the single ripest possoble cherry. It was also the first turnkey plant so it being the cheap directly contradicts your hypothesis.
> So solar panels' cost has to include all the military and communications satellites that pioneered solar panel tech? Most renewable systems also use electronic computers to some degree. This technology was originally pioneered for military encryption and firing computers. You could apply this kind of broken logic to anything. Military and civilian reactor designs are vastly different: the latter are usually mobile, use highly enriched uranium, and are relatively small.
If the PV on Jim Doe's roof was required to power the satellite, and the government sold the polysilicon and sent experts to Jinko to help design the manufacturing facility, and provided the funding then yeah.
> Except the construction wasn't at its peak in 1982. Construction was at its peak during the early 1970s, and lurched to a halt after 3 mile island and nuclear panic took hold.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/reactors.html#tab=iso;reg...
You appear to be struggling with the difference between start and finish. The largest capacity of plants ever finished in the US was '82. The Arkansaw plant I picked as an example was the last one finished before TMI and was wholly consistent with $6/W (or higher including cost of finance) and a negative learning rate since Paliside.
> Do you not see this big cluster of cheap plants built before 3 mile island and then plants got a lot more expensive afterward? I'll draw this in MS paint to make it easier for you: https://i.imgur.com/VD34Zhi.jpeg
I've pointed out a primary source which contradicts the numbers that graph is based on and posited a causal mechanism for the disparity. Refute the primary source, demonstrate that my understanding of their use of the term 'nominal dollars' is wrong, or find another primary source (or the primary source the paper uses).
If I were cherry picking I could pick even cheaper plants. Zion 1 and 2 were built for less, as was Oconee 1 and 2.
> You appear to be struggling with the difference between start and finish. The largest capacity of plants ever finished in the US was '82.
Most of which were delayed after the 3 mile island incident, and correspondingly experienced greater costs. Sure, if you want to get pedantic the peak number of plants under construction at any one time peaked just after three mile island. But that's because so many plants were delayed, and this led to higher costs.
> I've pointed out a primary source which contradicts the numbers that graph is based on and posited a causal mechanism for the disparity. Refute the primary source, demonstrate that my understanding of their use of the term 'nominal dollars' is wrong, or find another primary source (or the primary source the paper uses).
I'm looking over the OSTI report and calculating the inflation adjusted numbers line by line. They match the costs listed in my source. It doesn't look like there's anything to refute: both of our sources show that nuclear plants built during the nuclear boom were some of the cheapest forms of decarbonized energy there is.
I don't have anything refute, because your source agrees with my point. Your own source's data reinforces the claim that nuclear built during the nuclear boom (plants started after 1965 and built before three mile island) were often delivered between 1 and 2 billion dollars (2010 adjusted) per GW of capacity, and some even less than 1 billion.
And again. This doesn't include safety retrofits, and it doesn't include O&M which is higher than new renewables.
Even after retrofit, it was destroyed due to a design and management failure in 1998.
All of those early plants are more expensive than you are saying, they had state controlled funding. They were inefficient, and they were unsafe when they opened.
Additionally they all had abysmal capacity factors in the 70s and 80s, around the 50-60% range so using lifetime CF is incredibly biased towards making them look good.
The cost of retrofits which was almost entirely unrelated to TMI was about 40c/Watt https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/036054... or about 80c per net watt just for the retrofit to meet 1980s standards.
Include all the failed reactors, and stop looking at just the lowest cost ones, include the cost of the free loans, and you're back up around $6/W
For all their supposed lack of safety, nuclear power - including these early and supposedly unsafe designs - safer than most renewables [2]. There's an immense double standard between renewable safety (nobody seems to care about the tens of thousands of people killed by dams) and nuclear power.
1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity#....
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Of course renewables should be capacity weighted. Noone is saying they shouldn't. Capacity weighted new solar in germany is about $3.80/W or new onshore wind is about $3/W. These are both dropping 10-20% YoY. New 4 hour battery is around $2/W. The up front cost is about the same, but the operating costs of NPP exceed what many wind and solar projects are able to bid for. Even if we assume unrealistically short construction times of the 70s for a new Gen III+ reactor the extra 6 years of operation will have the solar park half paid off by the time it opens.
Those early designs were safe enough to mostly keep operating thanks to the exorbitantly expensive upgrades. This is an engineering feat, and a testament to the care and excellence of the US NRC, but it came at a cost which you are trying to pretend does not need paying. Gen III+ reactors are far more complex and so cost more on top of the additional costs incurred by not operating in the unique environment of the 60s.
This alone is more expensive than nuclear power built during the nuclear boom.
> New 4 hour battery is around $2/W.
So 12 hours of battery, which is a minimum estimate of what we'll need is $6/W. Also, this price is rising: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/battery-prices-to-rise-for-...
Combined these sources make for $9-10 per watt. Furthermore, they have life spans lasting far less than nuclear power, meaning they'll have to be replaced more frequently. By comparison, your own source found that nuclear was built for $2-3 per watt during the nuclear boom. Again: your own sources contradict you.
Your absolute best argument if I shuffle the goalposts all the way along for you and ignore the guaranteed money, the abandoned plants, the shutdowns that occured under a decade after opening (all of which were paid for on the public dime) the military and govt involvement and the lack of liability is that undoing 37 years of safety and efficiency improvements and reproducing reactor designs with similar capacity to wind and a much higher correlated forced outage rate to a renewable blend sans storage will allow you to come in at only 7% over the cost and only 4-6 years later?
Then even after all that, operating it for two decades will cost more than the total cost of the renewable system.
All this in a country with mediocre wind and worse solar resource than Alberta, Canada. This is your argument?
Estimates you're giving for renewables are excluding the cost of storage, or using fanciful figures of 4 hours worth of storage, as well as excluding costs of transmission and load shifting.
> In the hypothetical where this is in some way related to somethint that could happen now this is $3600/kW vs a renewable blend in germany of $3400/kW. If we take the last few from each manufacturer that opened before 1979 and don't add retrofit costs it's about the same.
No, it doesn't. It comes out to $1600/kW. Average capacity factor of nuclear power is over 90%, not the 50% you claimed earlier. And again, your "renewable blend" omits the cost of storage, which will be immense if we're even able to build storage at the scale required at all.
You don't get to use the price excluding 40 years of reliability and safety upgrades since TMI in one of the strictest nuclear regulatory regimes with tens of billions of tax money spent on the public share of enforcement, and the performance including those upgrades. A Ford Pinto isn't a 2022 Lambourghini.
The prices are costs pre-tmi. The 58% is the lifetime capacity pre-tmi. If you want to use 92%, then find and source the cost of retrofits and interruptions between 1979 and 2022, as well as the cost of replacing all the plants that closed early and the cost of abandoned plants.
At 58% capacity factor with ~20% forced outage rates you are going to have many, long, correlated outages. The renewable blend isn't as reliable as the modern fleet, but the 1979 fleet needs more storage, more backup, and more transmission to distribute the overprovision to where it is needed.
If you don't want to prevent more TMI incidents by adding all the stuff that happened after, you're also going to have to throw in a billion every 20 years or so to pay for cleanup and replacing the lost generation capacity.
Alsk keep in mind that on the list of reactor prices from 1968 to 1979, the prices went up the entire time. Your learning rate is negative even in the Nuclear boom. This alone is enough to disprove your assertion that the cost difference is due to lesser construction.
So, it adds less than 200 million dollars per GW of storage. This is not large. It's also misleading to portray retrofitting plants as an expense that new nuclear builds would require: it's a lot harder and more expensive to do a retrofit than it is to incorporate these changes in the initial construction.
And again, three mile island was contained. Secondary storage worked. If these retrofits are expensive, they were evidently not necessary.
> At 58% capacity factor with ~20% forced outage rates you are going to have many, long, correlated outages.
Good thing nuclear power averages a capacity factor of over 90%! By comparison what's the capacity factor for solar and wind? 25% depending on geography.
> Alsk [sic] keep in mind that on the list of reactor prices from 1968 to 1979, the prices went up the entire time. Your learning rate is negative even in the Nuclear boom.
And again, you skew the timelines to fit your narrative. The nuclear boom started in 1965, and saw large price decreases from plants starting construction before then. That's the price drops brought about by the nuclear boom. Reactors continued to be cheap until three mile occurred and reactors that had started construction in the mid 70s had to deal with a whole ton of nuclear obstructionism. That's why price increases among reactors that started construction in the mid 1970s and later. Restrict the query to reactors completed before three mile island and there's no increase in cost. The chart I posted handily put those in a different color, but this is apparently not obvious enough for you.
$200 in 1983 is 600 in 2022. So why are you claiming that it's the reason the plants finished in the 80s and 90s were more expensive then? A much cheaper version of a quarter of an insignificant amount can't double the price. There must be a different explanation like a negative learning rate.
> And again, three mile island was contained. Secondary storage worked. If these retrofits are expensive, they were evidently not necessary.
It still wiped out the plant and cost billions to clean up. And these are all changes related to the countless minor incidents like fires and pipe burst *before* TMI. The changes due to TMI before 1985 were not counted and were smaller. 40% of these modifications were initiated by the utilities to improve reliability and weren't even due to regulation. This was the cost of improving the early extremely simple reactors to the same safety and reliability standards as TMI.
> Good thing nuclear power averages a capacity factor of over 90%! By comparison what's the capacity factor for solar and wind? 25% depending on geography.
Not the machines you are saying to build. If you want to build a machine with 1/3rd of the material, a quarter of the regulation, a sixth of the labour many fewer redundancies, and less QA? You get one that performs like it. More regulation and more expensive designs and another 40 years of upgrades improved the reliability.
The nuclear industry learnt by doing, and what they learnt is if you half ass things your reactor catches fire or starts leaking and needs repairs like Browns Ferry or Rancho Seco or any if the N4 reactors in France which were built and operated at similarly slapdash rates.
> Restrict the query to reactors completed before three mile island and there's no increase in cost. The chart I posted handily put those in a different color, but this is apparently not obvious enough for you.
In the primary source from the DOE, the prices increase. Same with the Phung paper. The retrofit costs I included are precisely and only the ones unrelated to TMI. Excluding a small fraction of FOAK plants, they went up in price the entire time for plants that opened from 1969 to 1979. Every year they got bigger and more cimplex and added more redundancies because that was what was needed to keep them running more than half the time.
Every year the very first commercial plants were running, more problems were found that needed monkey patching and required adding complexity to subsequent and in progress designs. This necessarily can't have started before the first plant of each manufacturer was running.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Which you keep citing parts of or citing directly shows costs increasing 23% year on year after the opening of the first large commercial reactor. This increase then slowed after TMI according to that paper. The only cost decreases were demo reactors, and small turnkey reactors most of which were shut down not very long after. The countries where costs did not escalate all had far worse reliability than the US program after the 80s. You get what you pay for.
In 2022 dollars the overnight cost for reactors coming online just prior to TMI is over $3000/kW for capacity factors that didn't exceed 58% until many more upgrades and repairs had been made over the course of years or decades.
Here is a simple model in the arctic for a renewable mix of 100MW with higher capacity than those plants at an all in cost that is lower than the overnight cost in your fantasy scenario. It uses a capacity factor about 2% lower than the median for new wind and a solar panel angle that is off optimal by 20 degrees for the latitude.
https://model.energy/?results=fae43ac72e2df9c13526b6989d63c0...
Selling the power that system made for just the O&M costs of the cheapest US reactors today for 20 years would pay for another one.
Renewables in reality are vastly superior to your fantasy nuclear reactor.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
Cost exploded after three mile island, your idea that cost increases slowed after is the complete opposite. Can you really not see how the brown data points shoot up?
> for capacity factors that didn't exceed 58% until many more upgrades and repairs had been made over the course of years or decades.
Are you going to keep cherry picking one plan? Nuclear's average capacity factor is over 90% https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
I looked into your claim that earlier plants had lower capacity factors. This is true for demonstration plants in the 50s and early 60s, but not the 800+ MW production facilities that were built during the nuclear boom.
I am and always have been talking only about the bright red dots. I'm indulging in your fantasy and demonstrating that the result of it is the opposite of what you claim. Yet again, the first large commercial reactor that didn't shutdown after a handful of years was San Onofre opening in 1968. This is the start point.
Every year in which nuclear reactors were being operated commercially, costs increased due to the discovery of a the ways it's really hard. Reactors which were under construction after 1968 and completed before 1979 were more expensive every year at a rate of 23% as per your own source. Your red cluster is an increasing function of time. The growth rate (as in ratio of costs from year to year) actually slowed after TMI. This is the conclusion of the paper this image is from.
The top end of the line representing reactors started just before TMI. The reactors you claim are the cheapest of all time. When adjusted for 2022 dollars. Cost over $3000/kW.
92% is the capacity for US plants after decades of operation including the costs incurred by TMI and chernobyl and fukuhsima. It also includes survivorship bias as the reactors which were destroyed or were too unreliable and shut down early are excluded. World average EAF according to IAEA is 79%. You want a cut rate nuclear program, you get the performance of a cut rate nuclear program. France and South Korea are barely better than the early US program. Japan was much worse. The only outlier with a large sample where reports are even approaching reality is China, and the prices China reports for every major project are a tiny fraction of what anyone else does.
The Phung paper has a list of plants and capacity factors up until 1985. The average is 58% and many are far below. Every reactor that wasn't cancelled or closed and didn't have an accident which destroyed an integral part of it has had substantial upgrades and repairs since then.
If we were being honest, then of the 16 reactors finished between 1976 and 1979, we'd include the price of the 3 that failed or were closed decades early in the accounting as well as their cleanup and decomissioning prices, but I'm letting you have that one along with all the other unaccounted subsidies.
Scale it up a bit and you can do it seasonally.
You are correct. They also need storage like nuclear for non-dispatchable loads in areas without good hydro or CSP resource.
For the remainder your battery production figures are off by at least a factor of two. China delivered 280GWh in H1 2022 at the peak of a market crunch in an industry that is growing at 50% YoY. There's no compelling reason to think the 5TWh/yr of factories under construction won't be completed on time as the renewable industry has been consistently over-delivering for a decade.
Your scaling for nuclear is new capacity. Which is around 5GW/yr right now. It has to increase tenfold to match the last year of new renewable generation, or fifteenfold to match the new capacity weighted installation.
> (whereas you can just place nuclear plants next to areas of demand).
Incorrect. Seismic activity, ground, water, temperature, security and many other concerns limit siting severely.
> If the price of steel and ammonia goes up because they can't run their plants as usual, then that cost is ultimately borne by consumers. You can't just use load shifting as part of the plan and ignore the costs of load shifting. "Virtual seasonal storage" amounts to "tell industries to shut off during winter". And no, heat production is not non-dispatchable unless you're okay with people freezing to death.
Hydrogen or ammonia continue to exist after you make them. Simply overprovision your $300/kW electrolyser slightly and use chemical energy as your buffer. This has the added advantage of being an emergency or low CF backup at minimal extra cost.
Really? Show me all the storage facilities France built when they have >80% of their electricity coming from nuclear power? It'll be challenging for you to do so, since no such storage facilities were built. Nuclear power can be modulated. Plants try not to do this since they want to run at 100% as much as they can to make money, but there is no storage requirement for nuclear power.
> Incorrect. Seismic activity, ground, water, temperature, security and many other concerns limit siting severely.
All of which has been solved already. Seismically active areas have nuclear plants both in the US and around the world. Water is a non-issue since places with large energy use tend to be cities, which are populated by humans which also need water. Nuclear plants can also use wastewater or seawater (like the Palo Verde plant), it doesn't have to be potable water.
> Hydrogen or ammonia continue to exist after you make them. Simply overprovision your $300/kW electrolyser slightly and use chemical energy as your buffer. This has the added advantage of being an emergency or low CF backup at minimal extra cost.
Then show me the price history of commercial ammonia grid storage operators. Well, first you'll have to wait for such a facility to come online because none are operational. Proponents of intermittent sources keep hoping that some silver bullet will make storage nearly-free, since it's the only way to make wind and solar viable as primary sources of energy. But thus far, no silver bullet has come and it's unclear if it ever will.
Unlike nuclear which has historical precedence of being built at scale and cheaply. If we had kept building nuclear plant at the same rate as we did in the 60s and 70s we'd have a completely decarbonized grid by now. We have no such historical precedence building grid storage.
It's called Europe. To make their nuclear less unaffordable they use other countries as seasonal and diurnal storage.
> Unlike nuclear which has historical precedence of being built at scale and cheaply
Where? Show a single privately run Gen III or later commercial plant funded without government enforced monopoly, free loans, or direct funding that comes in at an affordable price.
> Unlike nuclear which has historical precedence of being built at scale and cheaply. If we had kept building nuclear plant at the same rate as we did in the 60s and 70s we'd have a completely decarbonized grid by now. We have no such historical precedence building grid storage.
No, there'd be no viable Uranium in the ground after about 1980.
Then there's hybrid PV-CSP which is available in about half of the world and is dispatchable. I guess you're probably right in that nuclear doesn't compete because hybrid CSP is vastly cheaper even in FOAK form and dispatchable power is superior.
Reducing output doesn't reduce costs, it increases them. This is the opposite of dispatchable.
If you can only pay for your reactor by coercing people into buying daytime electricity for 20c/kWh rather than buying a solar panel that will pay for itself in 3 years then it's not dispatchable.
> Ramping is slow and can't be done beyond 20% very often or you destroy your fuel and control rods
20% is all that's necessary to accommodate most load variations: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
Dispatchable generation ramps in tens of seconds and you don't pay $90-200/MWh for it when you're not using it.
And it's still not dispatchable if not using it costs you anyway.
No? This just plain wrong. A dispatchable source is a dispatchable source, regardless of any associated costs. And with nuclear there isn't even any direct cost with running the plant at a reduced capacity. There's only the opportunity cost of lost electricity sales, which would happen anyway because there isn't enough demand.
If there's 100 GW of peak demand and 80 GW of minimum demand, building 100 GW of nuclear plants and reducing output during periods of non-consumption does not have any increase of costs.
The only way to sell it for $150/MWh is to underprovision or to build storage or to find dispatchable loads. Just like renewables.
> Then when they take a look at the new price, they go buy a battery
You're making the same error a lot of renewable activists do: assuming that household electricity use is all there is. How do you power the turbopumps that make our sewage and plumbing systems? How about our telecommunications systems? We'll just deal with cell phones shutting off after dark?
Energy storage requirements are staggering. The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity every day. Storage requirements are at least 12 hours for diurnal storage, and several days for seasonal storage. Just going out and buying a hundred terawatt hours worth of batteries is a lot easier said than done.
Then you might want to just stop and think about how you might go about storing energy if you have a pump and a reservoir on a hill or a water tower. Just ponder that one for a few seconds.
Unless it's night time. Or cloudy. Or during the winter when the incidence of the sun reduces solar output. Again, this is why any plan that involves cutting power to mines, smelters, etc. needs to factor in the costs of shutting down these industries when renewables fail to produce energy.
> Then you might want to just stop and think about how you might go about storing energy if you have a pump and a reservoir on a hill or a water tower. Just ponder that one for a few seconds.
Right, except we just have to have a lake on a hill handy. Some places have it. Most do not.
Why don't we just use hydroelectricity for all of our power needs? Ditch nuclear, and ditch solar and wind. Just build dams. Problem solved.
So they'll buy your night time energy for the few hours a day when the wind farm they contracted with for less than your O&M costs isn't producing. Still doesn't help the nuclear operator pay the bills for the other 22 hours. Unless you're suggesting we ban people from supplying their own energy or making contracts with fully privately funded wind generators? Sounds pretty un-free to me.
> Why don't we just use hydroelectricity for all of our power needs? Ditch nuclear, and ditch solar and wind. Just build dams. Problem solved
You cited a need to store energy for moving water from a reservoir to where it is needed. Storing the amount of water you need to store but raise it up a little bit is a fairly well understood problem.
Look at the countries that produce all or nearly all their electricity from renewables. It's dominated by hydroelectricity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...
And since it's a well understood problem we can just build it everywhere, in arbitrary quantities.
And you need a reservoir down below to receive the water as it passes through turbines otherwise you're waiting for rainfall to fill that upper reservoir up naturally.
The geographic conditions to make pumped hydro are far more constrained than you seem to think. Most water reservoirs for municipal water supplies don't have the elevation drop to be used for generation and they don't have the lower reservoir to capture and feed water back into the upper reservoir.
I feel like we still have some problems with dam building, because they keep failing. We struggle to get the building material (in particular, sand). Concrete is pretty awful in terms of CO2. Dams of all sizes cause problematic changes to the rivers they're on, and block flows of fish and other animals. Smaller low head weirs and dams kill humans.
Lots of time, money, and effort is going into removing smaller dams and low head weirs.
They most definitely are NOT. Microsoft is building a gas turbine to power a data center in Ireland though, because data centers NEED POWER AT ALL TIMES!
What an incredible insight.
Meanwhile in things related to what I said:
https://www.riotinto.com/news/stories/First-solar-plant
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/hywind-tampen-floa...
https://www.microgridknowledge.com/google-news-feed/article/...
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/microgrids-mining-...
And countless others so frequent they don't make the news. It's an absolute no brainer because solar is about the same price at any scale but fossil fuel micro generation is really expensive.
To add to everything you said, the Covid crisis also impacted maintenance, delaying repairs by about a year (source: I've got surprisingly many friends/colleagues coming from the CEA, the French Atomic Commission)
Also, EDF lost a lot of knowledge and manpower during past decades, (most? at least many of) people working on nuclear plants are now sub-contractors, that impacted stability.
You’re absolutely right ! I forgot to mention that
Language us a powerful factor in population dynamics (see Canada with English and French) and in Europe you'd be dealing with major language roots.
English obviously, but also French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Polish and so on. I don't see much cohesion with so many languages, and no current country to give up language primacy.
Using language to create an us-versus-them situation is easy, and I don't see this happy union-of-equals easily subscribing to a federated state concept.
There is a small spark of European identify slowly forming amongst younger generations, but it will take decades before anything like a federal union would even be feasable.
Not to mention the economic power difference is huge.
I really don't want Europe to look like India in any way, administratively, politically and logistically speaking. Not to mention the countless tensions you can feel accross the country when you travel there. It seems like a ticking social bomb when I go there, and we don't have the class system to shut up lower classes and women that keeps the uniquality stable.
Those mammoth states are only interesting for people with power ambitions, as this last war demonstrates.
The next decades will be fascinating to observe in that regard.
Do not underestimate them. But many ppl noticed already that nowadays this is not the best way to organize and that they are just there to suck resources.
But they will try with all kind of tricks to keep control, unfortunately.
In the modern high technology world, both (1) and (2) require increasingly higher investments to sustain advantage which favours bigger states. Small states have to work very hard on carrots on (2) in particular to avoid being trampled. Tax friendly small jurisdictions largely survive at the whim & fancy of the elites of the bigger countries whose private interests they serve. Tourism focused small countries face the same pressures of serving the elites of bigger countries and in fact were trampled during covid lockdowns. Small countries that can't make (2) work stay poor.
The Ukraine conflict effectively demonstrates the point. Previously, Ukraine failed at (1) in the provinces which had high ethnic Russian populations and (2) by giving up nuclear weapons and giving up Crimea without a war which enabled the invasion.
Even though it turns out Russia seems to have badly miscalculated it's ability to win, the war has dragged so long in spite of causing major global economic disruptions because no one else feels able to intervene due to the high technology Nuclear ICBM threat.
If people understand that power calls power, that too centralized power is evil and that the world is not as dangerous as they pretend (in the sense that safety is more due to conventions and culture than on surveillance everywhere) then they will start to refuse it because they will understand the threat is the state itself when it grows so much. This is my current perception but was not so like 20 years ago or 25.
I know many ppl that do not believe anymore in tax systems as an effective vehicle to solve most problems but see it more of a problem where some ppl are doing their business from.
France nuclear was only exporting during low demand periods primarily nights and weekends, France needed to import during peak demand. Other countries benefited from lower demand for fuel, but needed to have excess capacity to support Frances peak demand.
Please don't look at short term effects when trying to judge the energy transition. France might restart a coal plant because of issues with its nuclear plants. Germany restarts some coal plants to deal with the gas shortage and to export electricity to France. But this is short term. It is simply not possible to build new plants within one year to deal with the political changes.
The long term trends are stable. With the transition to electric vehicles (https://cleantechnica.com/2022/12/02/europe-electric-car-sal... ) fuel consumption should also soon start to fall in significant ways. Norway is already there with a decrease of 6.6% YoY (https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/olje-og-gass/statis... ), the rest of Europe is probably trailing by about 5 years.
Of course everything should be faster and yes, the USA have to find their own way. It's not like even Spain and Sweden can have a similar approach to migrating to renewable energy.
Maybe, but hopefully not or then global outage must be expected when sun/wind goes down... Random energy production is no subsidy
The problem is France, *not* nuclear, hopefully people understands this: (among) strictest quarantine in the world, no work for many months, social unrest and protests, bad planing ... there would be a lot to say to each of these points, but they all are responsible to the current situation we are seeing with NPP still in maintenance.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5b08507d-ae4b-47d1-afb7-ae851f98d...
I miss politicians who had a vision that didn't stop at the end of their term.
We even had to restart a coal power plant last week...
The public in the past have invested for the public interests. After the private have do not profiting from old State made investments leaving anything else falling apart. When they reach a certain level of mess they going out, leaving the State arrange the mess and handle the rage, waiting to came back once a new wave of investments will repair the mess.
Unfortunately people seems to ignore that, allowing such model to prosper.
Why are most of our public services struggling ? Because over time, they've been handed out to private companies. Unemployment office ? Partly privatized. Tax collection from employers ? Privatized. Healthcare ? Partly privatized, and the beast is being starved so they can privatize it more.
There has not been a single, memorable outcome of a public service being privatized in France and it getting better.
EDF is struggling because the state kept intervening and asking them to shut down future nuclear plants. You can't have specialists if they are retiring and the state destroyed any career prospects due to planning they would shut down plants...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
> EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[6] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[7] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.[8][2]
That's ten years late at 578% the projected cost.
Should be plenty. The Swedish paid off nuclear plants operate around €25/MWh. Lazard similarly puts the range for paid-off nuclear plants at $24-$33/MWh.
It's simply mismanagement of a golden goose.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Team didn’t deliver? Mismanaged the team. Team failed to deliver because they didn’t do any work? Mismanaged the hiring process. Massive wild fire? Mismanaged forests. Asteroid wipes out all life on Earth? Mismanaged the planetary defense systems. Andor escapes from Narkina 5? Mismanaged imperial prison complex.
If your nuclear plant costs more than $33/MWh to operate then you are doing something wrong and stop trying to blame "the green movement", "privatization" or whatever.
Because I’m pretty sure it’s going to be different from France to America to poland
There, from a source extremely positively biased towards nuclear.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Putting the 2012 €23/MWh to €26/MW in an inflation calculator gives €26/MWh to €29/MWh.
Also EDF has been trying to build the EPR in England, Finland and France, and it costed much more to build than budgeted. And someone has to pay the difference. And it seems that this someone is us :) (French tax payers and consumers)
My view is that it is a subsidy for the naval nuclear reactors and weapons programs in UK and France that they choose to pay from a national security perspective. The French and UK public simply gets to eat the costs with barely any say in the matter.
In 2017 this angle was up in the news in the UK. Take the responses as you like.
> The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists.
> In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”.
> [...]
> This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”.
> Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”.
> [...]
> At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”.
> Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
> Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me.
> Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme)
Privatization in your case is crony capitalism combined with state power to manipulate markets in favor of certain actors. The key enabler in this scheme is government power corrupted by money.
The commonality in all the different areas that are failing -- power, healthcare, homelessness, etc.. --- are the regulatory systems that are grossly distorted by corrupted government interventions.
The main problem with governments and their services today is that there is no real feedback loop and systems without feedback are doomed to fail. You can vote liberal or conservative and nothing changes because they are two wings of the same bird.
I think that's more accurate then the "not TRUE capitalism"/no true Scotsman interpretation.
In this case, we have decided to limit the value of oil a pariah state which attacked a neighbor can sell at. Pretty simple, imo.
As not market pricing? Markets work to find the most efficient economic solution, or at least local maxima. But everything isn’t economics. National security, for instance. So we take economic pain in exchange for national security outcomes. Domestic energy markets are different from international ones.
I'm increasingly convinced that we should strive towards an impure market socialist system because control of large corporations that are more powerful than some countries really doesn't belong in private hands.
And I say impure because some amount of private ownership to capture entrepreneurial spirits is a good idea. But Fortune 500 companies aren't about entrepreneurial spirits.
Lets say the benefits of privatisation are 10% cheaper widgets or power stations, a politician will aim for 30%. Goodbye future.
What does this mean > "After the private have do not profiting from old State made investments leaving anything else falling apart. When they reach a certain level of mess they going out, leaving the State arrange the mess and handle the rage"
That’s cargo cult economics: someone said competition was good so we’re going to have all the appearances of it without giving up on our large publicly-funded infrastructure. Because at the end of the day we need electricity and all these rent seekers are only good at extracting value from existing installations. Utterly disgusting.
France was proud of the nuclear energy. It had plenty of cheap and carbon-free electricity (it was once exported to all the neighbouring countries) It was a way to be independent energy wise, as more countries can export nuclear fuel than oil. It was building power plants, and processing nuclear waste from other countries
And it made plenty of engineers busy ! France used to be a country led by engineers.
Although it has evolved positively over the last three years, nuclear energy remains controversial in public opinion [0,1], and many ecologist and left-wing movements have militated against nuclear power for the last 30 years. Whether or not it had an impact on the country policy toward nuclear power would require a more in-depth and complete archive work, but just remember that Emmanuel Macron was advocating toward reducing the share of nuclear power when he was elected for the first time in 2017 [2] (he has now changed)
[0] https://www.ifop.com/publication/lopinion-des-francais-sur-l...
[1] https://www.lesechos.fr/politique-societe/societe/sondage-ex...
I'm really not sure what you want? of course for everything there is an anti movement, but france is definitly not anti-nuclear, neither are most of its people.
The environmentalists (well, most of them anyway; there always were some who saw that the alternative to nuclear was coal and oil, not sunshine and rainbows) were always against because they were mostly hippies doubtful of any state-run project and somehow nuclear bombs.
> France used to be a country led by engineers.
And teachers and doctors. But we’ve got the politicians we vote for.
BTW, you can infer from this that France doesn't think nuclear is going to power the world. If it did, breeders would be necessary, as there's not enough cheap enough uranium to do it with burner reactors. But they don't think there's enough of a market for them to be worth continuing to develop.
It was not really a fiasco; it was shut down before being really productive. Sure, there were some wrinkles, but it was a one-off, not the 10th in a fleet so this sort of kinks are expected. It was an experimental reactor, the design was not supposed to be directly useable as a commercial reactor.
Nevertheless, it had a whole scientific life ahead, some experiments would have been useful for nuclear fusion as well. There aren't many reactors able to produce fast neutrons with that spectrum. Regardless of the state of SFRs, closing it was a purely political decision, the consequence of horse trading between the socialists and the environmentalists without considering any engineering or scientific aspect.
> BTW, you can infer from this that France doesn't think nuclear is going to power the world.
France does not really think anything. There is no master plan, all the decisions are done in a certain context without really any long term thinking. What you see is an industry that has lost its political support. Now that some of the stupidity of the whole mess is dawning on some politicians there is a bit of flailing around, but do not mistake that for some kind of strategy.
> If it did, breeders would be necessary, as there's not enough cheap enough uranium to do it with burner reactors.
That is not entirely true. There are thermal reactors that can work with unenriched uranium, it's just that PWRs are not the most fuel-efficient design.
In any case, no, nobody serious is advocating for using only nuclear. It is just one tool in the toolbox, and there are better sources for some uses.
That's not a rebuttal at all. The problem isn't enrichment, the problem is there's not enough cheap uranium ore. If the world's primary energy demand (18 TW) were provided by burner reactors, the estimated global uranium resource (at cost sufficient to not seriously affect economics of burner reactors) would be exhausted in perhaps five years.
This is so tight that nuclear w. burner reactors cannot provide more than a small fraction of the world's energy. Renewables would have to do almost all of it. In that scenario, there's little reason to use nuclear at all, as nuclear and renewables do not mix well on the grid or elsewhere.
It's not supposed to be one. It's just that there is more nuances to this than 'thermal reactors are going to run out of fuel in 10 years' and 'fast reactors are going to solve the uranium supply'. PWRs and reactors that depend on enriched uranium use much more uranium ore than those that can burn natural uranium, and not all of them are breeders.
> he problem isn't enrichment, the problem is there's not enough cheap uranium ore.
Which is directly related to enrichment, because to enrich uranium you need one order of magnitude more ore than for unenriched fuel and we end up throwing away a lot of perfectly fine nuclides. Then there is the issue of reprocessing, because you are also throwing away a lot of perfectly fine nuclides if you cannot re-use spent fuel, because you need to reach certain enrichment levels. That is something doable even in PWRs.
> If the world's primary energy demand (18 TW) were provided by burner reactors, the estimated global uranium resource (at cost sufficient to not seriously affect economics of burner reactors) would be exhausted in perhaps five years.
I don't understand why you think this is not related to the type of reactor. Different designs have different fuel efficiencies, so a given amount of raw materials would go further with more efficient designs. Just like condensing furnaces allow to use less gas for a given heat output.
> This is so tight that nuclear w. burner reactors cannot provide more than a small fraction of the world's energy.
That is under very conservative assumptions about the types of reactors and state of ore deposits. Realistically, it's about 100 years, and that's likely overestimating needs because nuclear cannot do everything.
> Renewables would have to do almost all of it. In that scenario, there's little reason to use nuclear at all, as nuclear and renewables do not mix well on the grid or elsewhere.
There is nothing specific preventing nuclear and renewables to be used on the same grid.
This has little to do with enrichment, and more to do with the better neutron economy of heavy water as a moderator. CANDU reactors have moved to use enriched fuel due to superior economics. CANDU reactors are still economically inferior to LWRs, though.
In any case, the difference is negligible to the point being made: that burner reactors cannot power the world for very long before the uranium runs out. CANDU reactors still leave the vast majority of the 238U unfissioned.
> Which is directly related to enrichment, because to enrich uranium you need one order of magnitude more ore than for unenriched fuel and we end up throwing away a lot of perfectly fine nuclides.
To first order, burner reactors are burning 235U. It doesn't matter if this 235U has been concentrated or not. The 238U that enrichment tosses out can't be used in burner reactors in any case.
(This is not entirely correct, since some 238U is converted to Pu even in burner reactors. But only a small part of it can be, since the breeding ratio is well below 1, enriched fuel or not.)
> I don't understand why you think this is not related to the type of reactor.
Because it's not. Burner reactors, by definition, run out of fissionables before they've converted most of the 238U to plutonium.
> Realistically, it's about 100 years
This must be assuming a much larger uranium resource.
> There is nothing specific preventing nuclear and renewables to be used on the same grid.
Yes there is. They are both inflexible sources, and compete with each other to be supported by sources of flexibility (dispatchable demand, dispatchable generation from e-fuels, storage, hydro). In general, when you look at optimal solutions to providing power for the grid, the optimal solution is either all renewables or all or mostly nuclear. There's no middle ground. Putting it another way: if it makes sense to have a grid that 10% nuclear and 90% renewable, it would make even more sense to have more nuclear. Nuclear either goes big or it goes home.
Any grid with both has the nuclear plant very expensively acheiving nothing whenever there is a surplus of renewables.
This is about 6-8 hours a day without storage or dispatch. When you can match the EAF of the nuclear plant by overprovisioning slightly and adding a few hours storage at lower cost, there's no way for the plant to be economical as a suppliment, because it can't match the $0 of the otherwise curtailed renewable energy.
They might have a viable niche generating heat + electricity for some uses though.
> That is under very conservative assumptions about the types of reactors and state of ore deposits. Realistically, it's about 100 years, and that's likely overestimating needs because nuclear cannot do everything.
An APR like AP1000 or EPR gets 60MWd thermal per kg at 3.5%. Assuming 0 tails essay (economical enrichment leaves behind about 1/4th to 1/3rd of U235) this is roughly 300GJ electric per kg of Natural Uranium. Roughly in line with a CANDU. Reprocessing repeatedly until all the nuclides are fertile rather than fissile adds <20%, or (using technology that exists) <15% with a single round of SNF.
In the most optimistic scenario. For the ~10 million tonnes of reasonably assured resource assuming no increase in energy use and 8 of 18TW can be reduced or provided with waste heat somehow this lasts around ten years.
Ah, the good ol' French anti-nuclear policy: I remember when French intelligence blew up a ship belonging to a pro-nuclear lobby group. Wait, that was the Rainbow Warrior[0], which belonged to Greenpeace, en route to demonstrations against French nuclear tests
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
Perhaps as a thought experiment, but in practice the two are very much linked. I'll ask you the same question I asked sibling comment: can you name a country that is pro-nuclear weapons, but against nuclear power generation?
Also, sinking protestor's ship goes beyond testing weapons, and is strong proof that France is pro-nuclear (weapons|energy)
France has been historically pro-nuclear for weapons, for dissuasion (after WW2) and for energy (no gas/oil/coal), But it changed on the energy side in the last 15 years. Not sure why the sentiment changed over time. Likely poor communication and education.
Protestors (Rainbow Warrior) were protesting against the last nuclear tests (weapons) in the Pacific ocean in 1985. It had nothing to do with nuclear energy production in France.
So yes France have had an anti-nuclear policy in the past 15 years leading to today where half of the 56 nuclear reactors are stopped. France needs to become pro-nuclear again, restart the current reactors ASAP, and start building more nuclear power plants to replace the aging ones.
On the military side, Those nuclear weapons are for dissuasion. There are no more live tests (all simulation).
Australia is exactly the same.
In 10 years there were 7 different Prime Minsters.
The leaders spend all their time bickering about who is in charge instead of actually doing anything.
In Australia they're calling it an "Energy Crisis", which is a complete lie.
Australia has a leadership crisis that has resulted in a crisis of basically everything else.
I find it insane that a country with as much natural resources, plus unlimited sunshine and space for wind farms has such high energy prices.
It’s also why I’m not sold on electric cars. I’d hate to suddenly be unable to charge it. If someone is really serious about CO2 emissions we need to transform the economy to be reliant on electricity not oil, and the only way to do that is drive the price down close to zero.
Especially worrying for me is the push to get everything on electricity. Only to then do rolling blackouts, or turn things off selectively so energy providers can fleece end users with price hikes.
Alas everyone is only interested in the next 4 years so there is little vision.
Have you ever wondered why they're called pumps when you go to the gas station?
They're electric pumps. All the diesel or petroleum you're imagining you can use instead because you were "not sold on electric cars" isn't going anywhere if the electricity is off.
Admittedly they could change the laws around this. I would love to be able to use a car as my battery as well when I need power overnight.
The short term concerns you bring up are valid but at the same time to expect to shift from an oil based world to an electricity based world seamlessly is asking a lot.
And yet in a country with as much sun and coastline as Australia, electricity prices are set to double in the coming months.
Why? Profits.
It doesn't even have a unified government, and until that changes all kinds of expensive self-harming nonsense is inevitable.
Countries are a tribal indulgence - which is becoming increasingly unaffordable.
These cycles happen in just about everything. A perfect example is business security. Nearly every time there's a breach, it's the same pattern: "We take security seriously"....except we kind of put it on the back burner for the past years.
It’s not the same system that worked yesterday that is suddenly collapsing on itself.
It’s a series of hostile political decisions against it made to actively induce a collapsing.
We could very easily fix it by applying old recipes that worked well yesterday but nobody (with the power to) wants to fix it.
There are urgency services that are literally closing due to lack of personal, right now. Even in major cities. An the government is now considering to open a reflection on reintegrating thousands of people that were laid off (not fired but no longer paid) as they didn’t consent to be vaccinated.
So yes, there are some levers government can turn to instantly make situation a bit less terrible. But this will not be enough to make situation sound. No one want to go to work for miserable wages in awful conditions that are promised to be degraded constantly for what decades of data allows to forecast. And you don’t form new doctors, nurses and so on over the course of a night, not even speaking about what makes a group of trained individuals becoming an efficient team.
And health workers don't want them back in.
And they voted, like the rest of the EU, the ban of ICE and hybrid vehicles sales by 2035.
2023, risks of blackouts.
2035: every single car sold is going to be 100% EV.
And the switch to EVs is already happening, which is already putting a shitload of stress on the network. If 0% of the vehicles in France were EVs, there would be absolutely zero blackout this winter.
I'm not saying we should not switch to EVs. What I'm saying is we're simply not ready at all.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/swiss-government-may-ban-...
The first one would be the emergency phase and would have three degrees of restrictions that will entail reducing shop operating hours, turning off heating systems in nightclubs, and reducing temperature in buildings to no more than 20 degrees celsius. The restrictions on electric vehicle usage for non-essential travel is in the third escalation level of the emergency phase.
Then they will simply push the deadline out.
But far better to have an aggressive timeline for the market to coalesce around.
We should build more reactors.
It causes uncertainty and removes willingness in private business and citizens to lead the change. More and more will start considering it may be better to wait and move only when the risk is low.
Switzerland is considering banning EVs. Even if they don't, your car is banned if you can't charge it...
This is different from an oil supply issue. It's your government telling you to buy an EV than the same government (not a foreign one) denying you electricity out of stupidity.
Edit: Switzerland isn't banning EVs, more appropriate to say it's considering restricting EVs
The first wave of "people scrambling to fill their cars" was caused by union strikes at French refineries in October, leading to supply shortages at the pumps.
The second wave was caused by people scrambling to fill up their cars at a lower price per litre, before the government "subsidy" on fuel was reduced in mid-November. Whatever one might think of people who will sit in a traffic queue for several hours to save €10 at the pump, it has nothing to do with an energy crisis.
In my opinion, the current energy crisis in France is more damning for the vehicle electrification plans than what you mentioned for gas cars.
One thing is the government telling you to buy EVs and then totally failing to deliver the "E" of the equation.
Another thing is an event caused by third-parties.
Point is: it doesn't look good for the EV industry. Saying the oil industry is ugly doesn't help.
Yeah, that's not happening. It wouldn't even happen without the whole energy hoopla going on today, even less so as it is now.
>What I'm saying is we're simply not ready at all.
This is one of those feel-good goals that get moved decade by decade. It's not meant to be taken seriously...
It will just help push some subsidies and sell some more EVs, but nothing will be 100% EV or even 50% EV in 2035.
This is not the case for most of the EU.
I do agree that things can change in ten years.
Making the same errors we made in France are not a mandatory thing. What is happening right now is not because nuclear was the wrong choice, but because we stopped investing in it during decades and so we are now stuck with this corrosion issue everywhere because all our power plants aged in parallel and so, issues relative to aging happens in parallel.
It’s a sad state because this corrosion issue is said to be easily solvable … as long as you don’t have dozens of reactors to fix in parallel before the winter.
sure, in abstract, but we're talking of the EU in 12 years.
I think the discussion is not meaningful anyway: the stop to ICE vehicles sales in 2035 does not mean the whole continent will stop having them.
My mom's neighbor drives a 20 year old FIAT Panda.
And having a country with big sales is nowhere close to the same thing as supporting a 350 market with anywhere near replacement rates of its cars - which beside lacking infrastructure, it also needs capacities, battery resources etc, that are not there at this level.
Yes, because we need to make things better. And doing so will be difficult, it will be uncomfortable, it will be expensive and it will be very hard work.
And it will be worthwhile, so we should keep striving to get there.
Data source for this? I don't remotely believe you.
The average car (EV or ICE) drives for ~40km/day, meaning EVs don't need to charge every single day. Also, most EVs charge at night. They are not the problem.
Also, France has approx. 200,000 EVs, out of ~38M of vehicles [0]. A rounding error.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/455887/passenger-cars-re...
[1] https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
As half of the the nuclear power plants are down, they have to rely on gas. And gas has become difficult to import.
France feels both the liberalisation of the electricity production : Private operators promised to produce cheaper and cleaner power back in the 2000s. But they didn't. Virtually all of them used a scheme (the Arenh system) to get public electricity in bulk, sold to them at a loss and at a fixed price, so that they could compete with the public company on retail prices. Then the government was still in their privatization bubble, lobbies told them everything was fine, and they began to stop to maintain and to phase out public nuclear power plants.
And now we no longer have electricity.
The backup would be electricity made with natural gas. But you need to save that natural gas now. Russia froze the export of natural gas. And other companies know that gas is in short supply, so prices skyrocket.
So yeah, we have to turn everything off at night.
i'm just saying there are 2 issues nowadays :
peak production issue
and how to keep producing electricity in the next year, as gas is difficult to source, and the tank might eventually run out.
The government is just making a single campaign to simplify the PR ! In the same ads, they ask citizens to both reduce energy consumption (eg lower heating to 18°C), and to delay intensive usage out of peak hours (eg use you washing machine or the space heater during the day and not in the evening)
You also need to think that France is not alone. If they can save during the night, this is extra power which can be exported to Germany where the base production relies on coal and gas. This way, Germany uses less gas during the night and can export more during the day to help France.
We are fully interconnected, we need to look beyond "just our country".
Nuclear power plants used to make up for the steady base consumption. Natural gas power plants used to be the last ones to be solicited. They were just used to adjust to the marginal needs, not to produce most of the power.
> High Commissioner for Atomic Energy from 2012 to 2018 pointed out, in front of the deputies, "the scientific and technical lack of culture of our political class", according to him "at the heart of the problem" in French energy policy.
> The propensity to consider that the technologies under development – hydrogen as an energy vector, smart-grids – can be, in a climate emergency, technologies to be deployed massively, in the moment, testifies to a profound ignorance of development deadlines.
> Conversely, the procrastination on all decisions concerning nuclear power and the policy of announcements while waiting for concrete decisions to start construction show a staggering ignorance of the intrinsic inertia of heavy industries and the need for a stable long-term vision to maintain the industrial tool at the right level
What decay from the excellence of a country that once picked presidents from the Poincare family.
A few years ago during maintenance ops they discovered stress beyond tolerance on heavy steel pieces in some reactors that led to a change in regulation requiring new ways to measure carbon content in those pieces. From what I gathered basically the rule mentioned where measurements would be made to determine carbon content, and of course manufacturers didn't measure anywhere else themselves.
Now the problem is that some of these are >100 tons parts in irradiated zones, it's not as easy as just going in with a carbon meter and taking readings. These have been built decades ago, some in other countries, so the know-how is somewhat lost. Plus they're under heavy industrial secret protection.
From what I gather, EDF is now coming up with simulations based on their understanding of the manufacturing process to prove they're up to code and restart the plants.
And the liberal take has been: This is fine as long as they're paying their bills.
Blackouts are a solution to consumption surges. We are not seeing surges right now so there is no reason to restrict anyone. We can’t store electricity after all. In case of a surge, the commercial sector is the first being hit, long before houses. Plus the issue is mostly heating, lights consume next to nothing.
France electricity is mostly clean by the way.
> Restaurants and bars can just heat the outside terrace air. etc...
That’s been illegal for more than a year.
That's equally of not more true of renewables like solar and batteries that require large amounts of rare metals.
(Good luck finding one that supports your position).
FWIW: yes, mining is bad. But uranium is unbelievably energy-dense and the amounts are ridiculously small compared to any other source of energy. All things considered, nuclear causes fewer emissions per MWh than most solar panels (which are not radioactive but still need heaps of metals and semiconductors). Also, there is no contest with coal, oil, and gas, which is the thing that is actually used when you don’t have nuclear energy available.
Here you go. But really, if you had done a simple search of something like "france uranium africa" you would likely have found this yourself. If you only ever search for things supporting your position, but not the opposite position, you are prone to being in a bubble, never seeing contradicting information.
That's not what they announced, the day before an area code will be revealed, and all electricity will be cut (including schools, public utility and telephone towers)
> That’s been illegal for more than a year
There is an exception if terrace area is "covered". Guess what everyone installed in the past year?
If they do large scale blackouts it’s that they can’t manage the load without cutting normal customers so obviously it’s going to hit everyone.
It is really ridiculously selfish how people act here. As if one couldn't see, that they did not properly fit their mask to the back of their noses in so many cases, if they wear a mask at all. Or those people, who continuously lift their mask when breathing out ... How much must one not understand?
In absolute terms I wouldn't say that Germany is very compliant. Maybe 50% compliant in public transport, if I count the people who really wear FFP2 masks properly, as is the rule. There are even signs there and frequent announcements, that you must wear an FFP2 mask in public transport.
Compared with other countries I see, that people in Japan and South Korea have more insight and behave less selfish, more caring about the person next to them than they do in Germany. But that is merely a media impression I got from some news reports and interviews of people on the streets, which might have been highly selective. So comparatively Germany might be above average of compliance with the law, but I don't think Germany is on a very high level in that regard.
But unfortunately, this is not really enforceable because non-compliance is not illegal afaik.
I bet that a lot of it it's subsidized in good old French tradition.
Stores, including malls, are mandated to shut down lights and screens after hours. Christmas lights and the Eiffel tower shut down at 22:00. Restaurants and bars have been forbidden from heating up terraces for more than a year.
I assume the part of the bars which is after the green (“update”) dashed line is previsional.
It shows that more reactors should be restarting in the next few days although several (most notably all 4 N4 still) will remain offline over winter. And Cattenom 1 and 3 are apparently not planned to restart before late feb / early march.
There’s also an overview dashboard which is just… sad: https://energygraph.info/d/q7IpAJHVz/overview?orgId=1&refres...
The Russian reaction to the eastward expansion of NATO right up to Russia's borders has been foreseen and warned about since the 90s, including by top level US officials such as George Kennan and William Burns and by informed & insightful commentators such as John Mearsheimer. [1,2]
The Russian government made very clear protests in December of 2021 (the last in a long line of such protests) that they felt existentially threatened and would have to act.
> and the associated general energy crisis in Europe
Many people also warned about how stupid the sanctions that Europe imposed on Russia were, with the very high risk that they would harm European states (and their peoples) much more than Russia itself. One person I remember making such warnings in advance or concurrently was Philip Pilkington in UnHerd. [3,4,5]
[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/many-predicted-nato-expansio...
[2] https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-w...
[3] https://unherd.com/thepost/sanctions-wont-hurt-russia/
[4] https://unherd.com/thepost/oil-and-gas-sanctions-hurt-the-we...
[5] https://unherd.com/thepost/gas-embargoes-will-hurt-europe-mu...
No, Russian propaganda will variably claim NATO, Nazis and Jews are responsible, depending on what bigger fool they are trying to address. Well, one bit!
1. George Kennan - "best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War" [1]
2. William Burns - United States Deputy Secretary of State (2011-2014), Director of the Central Intelligence Agency since 2021 [2]
(In parenthesis, I will also note the very silly but oft-repeated mistake of conflating Putin with Russia in the comment above. Russia does not act on the whims or personal ambitions of Putin; indeed, Putin stays in power largely by responding to the needs and desires of the Russian people, and the pressure inside Russia for him to act against the existential threat building on the Russian/Ukrainian border has been very strong and he has faced criticism for not acting earlier.)
The explanation about dictator's desire for power(now also life) is more simple than geopolitics and cultural suppression.
And about the needs of the Russian people: I don't remember Russians having a debate about starting a full scale war. Maybe Putin thinks its what they need but if there was a real debate we can safely assume people would prioritize having in-house toilets and a million other things that are suddenly became not so important.
Without these two things we most likely wouldn't have blackouts
>What had not been foreseen was the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the associated general energy crisis in Europe...
>Can't forsee covid though, nor the war in Ukraine...
No-one in the corridors of power in the EU or UK, apparently.
The whole conflict is just the other party calling bluff. But both the West and Russia have invested so much neither is going to settle. So they up the stakes and get dragged downwards. The only thing left is to complain that “it’s unfair the the US is profiting”.
But we need electricity and industry.
A.) that many things cannot be easily foreseen which includes record draughts and the Ukraine conflict.
B.) It makes sense to have a diversified energy mix where no single source is used predominantly.
I don't know. These record draughts are directly tied to climate change and I have known since the 90's that the Pentagon and the UN knew climate change would bring wars, population displacement et resources problems. I think that's where we are.
It’s also chicken-decisions coming home to roost: maintenance delays due to covid, poor maintenance conditions leading to strikes, and training of new maintenance staff had apparently been slashed because an expected shift to renewables means you apparently don’t need to train staff to maintain 50+ nuclear plants expected to run for decades more.
Due to the response to Covid, not due to Covid itself.
The main international cooperation seems to be for the nuclear fusion with ITER. "ITER has already been described as the most expensive science experiment of all time,[24] the most complicated engineering project in human history,[25] and one of the most ambitious human collaborations since the development of the International Space Station (€100 billion or $150 billion budget) and the Large Hadron Collider (€7.5 billion budget)".
I wonder where this will lead.
I assume that once larger parts of the population start feeling the effects of these energy shortages, some dynamics might change.
At the moment, most do not seem to take much notice or care, not that I blame them. Life can be stressful enough as it is.
The main issue seems to be absolutely atrocious timing of nuclear reactor maintenance. (which is just bad luck).
> I assume that once larger parts of the population start feeling the effects of these energy shortages, some dynamics might change.
I sure as hell hope that the dynamic will increase in providing ukraine with the weapons required to end of the war far more quickly. From a geopolitical standpoint, making sure russia does not win this war or end it in a stalemate is absolutely vital for European stability.
Also, it could lead to further defence integration in europe. (this has already been fast tracked once the war started).
Of course that's highly unrealistic. There is very little chance of a peaceful settlement between today's Russia and today's Ukraine (what Ukraine wants - its territorial integrity and probably reparations and war crimes investigations, is simply incompatible with the very nature of Putin's regime and situation), thus there's very little chance for Russian gas to flow as it did before any time soon. Hopefully by the time it's again possible it would have been replaced by alternatives.
That's very realistic, actually. We just need Germany to send the man.
(Yes, I read the article. Yes, I realize this is temporary for France.)
It doesn't help that most areas with jobs in the Anglo world are very expensive lots to build new housing. When the lot itself is so expensive, local governments will be loathe to mandate too much by code and make housing even less accessible. If France is better at reigning costs in, they should work on bringing their building codes up to lower energy standards.
I know little about France except I thought they were well regarded by pro-nuclear folks for building a standardized system of duplicate nuclear power plants around the country that all used the same model/parts/system. I guess that didn't work out.
BTW it's only 18 months until the Olympics at Paris 2024 and unless someone is going to drop a bunker-buster on baby-hitler-wannabe, his war on Ukraine is still going to be happening
The article speaks of "ongoing or delayed maintenance, or corrosion problems" as the next reason for the problems.
A few are having their once in a decade maintenance check
Some are waiting for maintenance which were delayed due to covid
We didn't train enough maintenance workers because everyone was talking about shifting out of nuclear in favor of renewable (we're using American contractors now afaik)
So mostly bad decisions and poor management, it's a political issue more than anything else, it worked fine since the 70s to more or less a decade ago
The lack of power suggests it would have been worth a significant bonus for them to work, if it was money they wanted.
Since WWII, the train company SNCF has been on strike -every- year. Except during covid because there was no train to be on strike from. Good luck getting a train for christmas, it's canceled. Same thing here. It's a crucial moment? It's very important for the french people? Go on a strike and ruin everything.
I live in France and I have no sympathy for these strikes. At least the Yellow Vests were striking on a Saturday. Everybody were pissed, but only on Saturdays!
The public, who is abetter, have managed to push some excuses to avoid finger point any private friend and so reveal the mess all at once.
[1] https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/inves...
All of these... but no political will because "nuclear bad, renewables good".
All the while EDF is being nationalized. Should more money have been spent in even deeper pits?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
If we want electricity in a world without less fossil fuels, I'd say yes.
EDIT: renewable can't be the only solution. They are cheap only because they are built on top of existing nuclear/fossil solutions.
* It has to make money, instead of being a utility that the state provides, so decisions have to be taken in accord with all shareholders.
* When it does make these decision, well, politicians have been selling off EDF piece by piece on the right, and sacrificing it to get votes from the green party on the left.
All in all, incompetent fucks with a 5 year foresight running it like a pawn on a chessboard, happily sacrificing it to get a meager advantage.
Meanwhile, in Germany, pushing renewable energies is frowned upon and people are saying "look to France, they're doing nuclear, THAT would save us, too".
(Even more) Strange times ahead.
Is it now? I thought the Germans had run a blind faith nuclear decommisioning program for well over a decade.
There has to be better oversight into what our tax payer money is going towards and for me personally, this is a prime example of where it’s not going in the right place?