Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

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France fleet is not obsolete. They can survive for another 40 year easy. Sadly the French 2nd generation pissed away all the great work the first generation did and neglected the fleet they had. They are treating the fleet lie the giving tree.

Ironically because the French were so blessed with so many reactors, they were one of the few nations that didn't use their reactors very well. The Germans were actually better at using their reactors.

The French since the 90s are just as anti-nuclear as everybody else and they have done everything to destroy the amazing fleet they have, and only now realize how incredibly fucking stupid that was. They even forced the utility to collect money from the nuclear fleet and invest in solar. And they forced the utility to sell of nuclear base load at bargain bin prices and then force them to buy that power back at high prices.

And its amazing how anti-nuclear people can look down on France when literally every day they produce green cheap energy for all their people. And they have been saving CO2 for 40+ years, and that is worth more then any CO2 we are saving now.

Almost every other country should envy the French position.

Yet, in just a few years all the French reactors will be mothballed because they cost several times as much to operate as buying off the grid.

Except that will not happen and no French govenrment will be so fucking stupid.

Nuclear is providing cheap long term stable power supply and if they stop forcing their nuclear fleet to support solar and fossil (literally things the French government forced them to do) and do proper maintenance French will have cheap carbon free energy for the next 50+ years.

Funny how nuclear is so expensive and yet somehow people in France and places that nuclear reactors have mostly cheap power while Germany is spending absurd money prevent their population from feeling an even worse hurt from the policy they have inflicted on them.

In total the Germany population over the 50 years has paid way more for energy and getting way worse outcomes. That's a simple fact.

Just the cost for the measure Germany has to take now to buffer from this whole Russia fuckup would have been enough to pay for a whole fleet of nuclear reactors for Germany. Instead they are gone spend another 15+ years using coal and gas and then have to manage an incredibly unstable complex grid while having to replace all those wind plants they put up in the next 20-30 years.

And the French reactors will still be running and still provide stable carbon free power for a low price.

I love how it's simultaneously cheap, but selling a small portion of the energy for the price they claim it costs is a completely unfair burden that is "supporting solar and fossil".

"It can be cheap! All you need is free loans, a liability cap less than the cost of one reactor, money from the military, exemption from any democratic process as to where they go, underfunding decomissioning, cheaping out on materials, never doing maintenance, charging more than the claimed cost, operating at a massive loss, creating a debt you foist on the public, build up billions of unpaid maintenance costs, and then not selling it for cheap! Oh, and you still need to overprovision and build backup."

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