9 ms·

We have a independent national authority (ASN ~ Nuclear Safety Authority) which is tasked to assess the security of all nuclear power plants and certifies them

• onli 6y ago
  You have a very focused elite building system in which the big universities creating the future members of the elite are heavily financed and influenced by pro-nuclear organizations. That goes especially for politicans, but includes engineers. The pro-nuclear propaganda repeated by the people that go through this is frightening, many of them are completely brainwashed. In no way can the ASN be really independent, as it is staffed with the people that went through this system.
  • seszett 6y ago
    > the big universities creating the future members of the elite are heavily financed and influenced by pro-nuclear organizations Do you have any source for that? I'd be interested, although I find it difficult to believe since those "big universities", assuming you are talking about ENA and maybe Polytechnique, are public and very largely funded by taxes rather than private organizations.
  • dkural 6y ago
    Can you point to any specific and concrete safety issue? (as opposed to, without any evidence, questioning the integrity of the people trying to reduce CO2 emissions by extending the lifetime of existing nuclear plants).
    • onli 6y ago
      Sure. I will cite Zeit.de, a german newspaper. They write in https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2020-02/atomkraftwerk-fessenheim-reaktor-elsass-frankreich https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2020-02/atomkraftwerk-fe...: > Das 1977 ans Netz gegangene Atomkraftwerk Fesseheim gilt seit Jahrzehnten als Sicherheitsrisiko. Es liegt in einem Erdbebengebiet und ist unzureichend gegen einen Flugzeugabsturz oder einen Anschlag geschützt. Zudem kam es immer wieder zu Pannen. They link to https://www.zeit.de/wissen/2016-03/fessenheim-atomenergie-zwischenfall-elsass-reaktor https://www.zeit.de/wissen/2016-03/fessenheim-atomenergie-zw..., a report about how the ASN lied about how bad an accident in April 2014 was. There definitely were safety issues, the only question is how bad they were.
      • dkural 6y ago
        Thank you!
  • jjoonathan 6y ago
    If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, and had simply kept building at the same rate, our grid would be (near) zero carbon today. Not several decades from now if we hustle our asses off, today. But that's not what happened. The anti-nuclear team won and we collectively made the responsible decision to fill our atmosphere with CO2 instead. Yay?
    • onli 6y ago
      Yes, that's the a common talking point that is false, "Nuclear energy does not produce CO2, or almost none". But you only see that it is false if you look at complete lifecycle analysis of building the plants, running the plants, mining and transporting the uranium, transportintg the waste, dismantling the plant etc. You can try to argue that the US would have less carbon emissions than today - something I'm inclined to believe given how much fossil fuels are used today - but in no way would it be zero.
      • kergonath 6y ago
        Even counting for the whole life cycle, nuclear is a very small greenhouse gas emitter. One plant lasts decades and a very small amount of ore needs to be mined, because uranium is very energy-dense. I think your point is valid, but lacks generality. Almost nothing we do is carbon neutral. Our energy production certainly isn't. Playing devil's advocate, PV and wind turbines also need to be built, transported, installed, disassembled, and disposed of, all of which emits greenhouse gases.
      • melling 6y ago
        Yes but we would have decades of extra time to deal with global warming. Instead, now we’re trying to shame people into flying less, which amounts to 2.5% of emissions a year..
      • orwin 6y ago
        This was done, the whole calculation, again and again, again and again, like this was done for solar pannels and wind turbine. All the data is there, the IPCC even took the time to vulgarize this part because people don't seems to understand, took the highest evaluation wiht post-70s tech (12gCO2/MWh) and there is STILL people that talk about climate and don't even READ the IPCC document. I don't understand why you would talk about something this important and dont read the BASICS. Like those climate denialist who "prove" that low atmosphere CO2 will make everything greener. WE KNOW! At least climate denialist have the excuse that this information is not easily accessible [0][1]. Everything else is written in the vulgarized papers, it a two hour-long read top, just take some time to inform yourself! This is why nothing will never be done and we are hoping for a technological silver bullet, because people rather act like they care about climate than care about climate. I'm angry. [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/TAR-03.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/TAR-03.pdf [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/TAR-04.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/TAR-04.pdf [edit] spacing, swear words.
  • kergonath 6y ago
    So the people you want to oversee the safety of nuclear installations are people who do not know reactor physics or civil engineering? Also, universities are quite far from the political elite in France, none of which actually know about anything related to nuclear power plants. Engineer at the ASN are just that: engineers. They don't take decisions.
    • makomk 6y ago
      It's just like every other example of regulatory capture, really - the people who're qualified to assess the safety of nuclear power plants are those who have training in reactor physics and engineering, which is of course the same pool of people that plant operators draw from when building and operating their plants, so you end up with a revolving door effect where the nominally independent regulator is incredibly close to the industry it's regulating and has few ties with other stakeholders like, say, everyone living in the surrounding region.
      • mratsim 6y ago
        It's much better to have experts assessing other experts than laymen (say politics or judges) assessing experts (like what happens with privacy/piracy laws).
      • therealdrag0 6y ago
        Is there an alternative?
      • kergonath 6y ago
        ASN is an independent authority. Do you have any proof otherwise? I am yet to see any of these engineers becoming millionaires. Besides, they don’t make decisions, as the Fessenheim example demonstrates. The people making decisions are politicians who have no clue and just follow gut feeling and electoral arithmetic. Not many of them come from engineering schools, much less universities.
  • orwin 6y ago
    This is one convenient lie. I will just criticize the "pro-nuclear propaganda" bit and ignore the other anti-elite stuff about the engineering schools, after all "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." What is called in France ENR (new renewable energies, basically solar and wind power) are backed by gaz companies, and now even French oil companies (Total) have a hand in the game. Areva (Now Oreno i think), the biggest company ever in the nuclear industry recently had a 6 billion turnover (around 2016 i think since this was the time i took interest on this particular subject). For scale, Gazprom, heavily invested in wind turbin in Denmark and Germany, had a 130 Billion turnover around the same time. I did not check Total cause frankly, i'm tired of spending energy against this "argument". Who do you think is putting more money on the table? Also (because this anti-engineer stuff is frankly broking me), if you don't believe the ASN and the people working there, then you should vote or manifest to replace the ASN and its sisters organisations that are taking care of the electrical network, bridge and tunnels in France. Surely they weren't considered amongst the best in the world for a long time, barely more than 50 years! And if you think the UNSCEAR rapports (like the one on the effect of Fukushima) are lying, well then don't be picky and choose to reject all scientific products of this corrupt organisation that use the same compilation method, like the IPCC. And if you or your familly have cancer and have to go under radiation, refuse every doctor that wrote on the subject whose paper where used by the UNSCEAR scientist.
    • onli 6y ago
      Hey, that's unnecessary. I admit that my comment was written in haste and is not properly backed up and can't be properly backed up, not like that. It's a melange of several points, not well distilled. But the essence goes like: 1. France has a very powerful elite system and one specific route to get there (I'm not saying the engineering schools are that way). That's not controversial, that's just how it is. 2. This leads to a specific orthodoxy, symptomatic could be the centralism that leads to a strong centralization of power in Paris. 3. At the same time there is a very strong pro-nuclear sentiment that gets instilled into engineering students (conflicting and in context with a recent strong popularity of ecology), whatever mechanism specifically is responsible for that. 4. And France has (and even more so: had) a pro-nuclear government, linked to the enterprises running the power plants. I'm not saying the engineers are incapable or specifically corrupt and to distrust your doctor, thanks you very much for the cancer thing, but that in this situation it is reasonable to have some distrust for security assessments of nuclear power plants in France.
  • xwolfi 6y ago
    Yes but after decades of being horribly manipulated, what happened ? We have electricity, not so much accidents and the know how so China, Russia and the US arent the only people who can make large scale nuclear infrastructure. What an horror they put us through, are engineering elite.
• shipstern 6y ago
  That might be, but Germany and Switzerland assessed the safety to be suboptimal. "In 2007, the same year a Swiss study found that seismic risks in the Alsace region had been underestimated during construction, the ASN denounced a “lack of rigour” in EDF’s operation of the plant."
  • Grue3 6y ago
    Why should France care about what they think? Germany could try not importing French carbon neutral nuclear energy if they hate it so much.
    • funcDropShadow 6y ago
      Well, in the winter France needs all that --- mostly carbon neutral --- energy for their eletrical heating systems in homes, and in warm summers of this century the river become so warm, that often nuclear power plants have to be throttled down. Luckily, we have alot of wind in the winter and alot of sun in the summer.
    • yagurastation 6y ago
      Have a look at the map.
• p4bl0 6y ago
  You have to conceed that the independence of the ASN is at least debatable.
  • steeve 6y ago
    Why?