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Is it? France generates over 70% of it's electricity from nuclear energy, at costs cheaper than most of its neighbors. Building up massive hydrogen storage and
by manfredo 7y ago
Is it? France generates over 70% of it's electricity from nuclear energy, at costs cheaper than most of its neighbors. Building up massive hydrogen storage and generation infrastructure is likely more expensive than building nuclear plants. The high overhead cost of nuclear is what makes it difficult to fund, the operating costs are minimal.
- pfdietz 7y agoFrance's costs are opaque. They didn't separate military and civilian programs, and the information is now not available. In any case, going forward, France's cost for new reactors are as exorbitant as in the US, if not worse. The new reactor at Flamanville has been a disaster.
- manfredo 7y agoI found a source claiming that the total cost of their nuclearization program was 400 billion Francs (at 1993 inflation): https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... At an exchange rate of 1 franc (1993) to 1 usd (1993) and 1 usd (1993) to 1.77 usd (2019), this yields a cost of 120 billion dollars. Not bad to decarbonize the electricity supply of a country with a GDP more than 1/8 that of the US. The nature of construction nuclear plants (and many other engineering products) is that that serial production is cheaper than the first several models, since the cost of development needs to be recouped. There are only 2 EPRs in operation and 4 in construction. By comparison, during the Messemer plan, 30 reactors of the same 900 MW design and 20 reactors of the 1300 MW design were constructed. This isn't counting reactors exported to different countries. Of course first 6 EPRs are going to be more expensive per unit as compared to serial runs in the dozens.