4 ms·

France is currently not building enough reactors to replace those that will need to be shut down due to age in the near future. They would need to build a lot m

France is currently not building enough reactors to replace those that will need to be shut down due to age in the near future. They would need to build a lot more if they wanted to satisfy demand for heating and transportation. I assume they have good reasons not to build more reactors.

Jorge1o1 4y ago
The reasons are political… just like in the United States. HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress in the perception of nuclear energy.
- jlkuester7 4y ago
  > HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress Wait, seriously? That miniseries was not perfect, but I thought it did a pretty good job of pointing out the issues with Chernobyl were largely political and not technical. (Sure the RBMK reactors were flawed, that is a technical issue. But the only reason that escalated into a disaster was due to gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems...)
  - rectang 4y ago
    > gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems... Gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems are inevitable, inherent features of power utilities. If your technology is disastrous without perfect handling, your technology is disastrous.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > your technology is disastrous without perfect handling, your technology is disastrous Did we watch the same miniseries? Chernobyl went beyond gross negligence. To say nothing of perfection. In the reactor design, in its operation and in post-crisis management.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        No, it was absolutely typical gross negligence, with unfortunately outsized consequences. Fukushima was exactly equal negligence, with absolutely expected consequences.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      They didn't need perfect handling, just halfway competent. But since the rest of the world doesn't build reactors of that type, and never built any without even a containment building AFAIK, it's not really applicable to modern nuclear power plant designs.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    Nuclear in inherently vulnerable to politics, mismanagement and attempts at cover-up. As it happened in Fukushima as well as Chernobyl. Because it's centralized, quite isolated from the public eye and with the potential to cause invisible environmental impact.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    The Chernobyl miniseries greatly distorted the impact of the meltdown. They cited the "bridge of death" where everyone supposedly died. In reality there are zero known deaths among people who watched the meltdown from that overpass, and there's even interviews with people who were there. They cited a death estimate of 60,000 when reputable sources estimate 200-1,700 deaths.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      False. Cancer rates downwind are sharply elevated.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        Credible estimates do include increases in cancer, especially thyroid cancer. That is captured in the estimates of ~1,700. The 60,000 estimates shared by Netflix are not regarded as credible.
- pydry 4y ago
  If something cant operate without lavish subsidies it automatically becomes political. E.g. Bill Gates' nuclear startup would be dead in the water without its subsidies. That makes it political.
- Retric 4y ago
  The reasons are economic. France has been heavily subsidizing nuclear for years and can swap to cheaper alternatives for less money. It’s not that nuclear is any worse, it’s just that the alternatives got better.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    Wind and solar got better, but it seems fundamentally problematic to me to suggest that those are the alternatives to nuclear. They're not. Fossil fuel is the alternative to nuclear (and possibly battery supported wind/solar) as the base load. Fossil fuels are fundamentally cheaper because they can more easily avoid paying the cost of their negative externalities than nuclear can. If we could actually internalize the negatives of fossil fuel burning (i.e. by carbon tax) then nuclear might actually be the most economical option for the base load with solar and wind picking up the slack.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Renewables + storage is the alternative to nukes. And, there is simply no contest. Nukes have been left far behind.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Even with that line of thinking, France was well past the point of using Nukes for base load power. France had nuclear capacity factors around 70% when America and much of the worlds nuclear power plants where closer to 90%. It physically worked, but dramatically increased production cost per KWH. Assuming they cut back to 30% or even 40% of all electricity being supplied by nuclear that’s still a significantly reduction.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Or perhaps the reasons are economical. Recently nuclear construction projects became a lot more expensive and took a lot longer than initially planned.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    Some of those economical problems are burdened on the nuclear industry because of political problems. For example, because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with. If the political climate lead to burdening fossil fuel burners with costs to reduce their pollution and GHG emissions that directly and indirectly lead to orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear ever has, then nuclear might actually be price competitive. As another example, since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US started in 1975, they have never, not once, approved the construction of a new nuclear site in the US. They've approved expansion of existing sites, but never a new one. In fact, it was a huge deal when the NRC approved the expansion of a site several years ago, for the first time in 30 years, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-license/nrc-approves-first-new-nuclear-plant-in-a-generation-idUSTRE8181T420120209 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-license/nrc-a... How much pain and death is the NRC ultimately responsible for for holding nuclear energy to such a high safety standard that it's been literally impossible to build a new site for almost 50 years? Because all that means, is that we've burned drastically more fossil fuel than necessary over the past 50 years. Shame on the NRC and the US government for using irrational fear to protect the fossil fuel industry at the expense of nuclear energy. And shame on environmentalists for falling for the same trap and failing to think holistically and systemically.
    - logifail 4y ago
      > because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with "The researchers start out with a historic analysis of plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim. The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent—and that's not considering the financing costs of the construction delays [..] while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor [...] In the end, the conclusion is that there are no easy answers to how to make nuclear plant construction more efficient. And, until there are, it will continue to be badly undercut by both renewables and fossil fuel."[0] [0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
- heretogetout 4y ago
  The ascendancy of wind and cheap natural gas probably had a greater effect, considering the miniseries is only a couple years old.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    I suppose now that some of the sources of such gas is being cut, those French nuclear plants will be extremely profitable for a while.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  According to perceptions and advertising about nuclear we should have unlimited power and everything from our cars to our stoves would be running of nuclear. All this should have been possible with just a containers worth of nuclear waste (experts in the 50s,60s seriously said operating a whole country of nuclear would result in maybe a ton of nuclear waste). Nuclear completely undelivered on this promise. Tschernobyl was just the nail in the coffin. On top of that has the nuclear industry been one of the strongest lobbying groups against wind and solar, mainly to protect their investments. I would argue on the whole we would have been much further in terms of renewable energy if it wasn't for the nuclear industry.
BenoitP 4y ago
6 + an additional 8 are being planned at the moment. It is still dependent on legislative elections (starting this weekend), and on the EU energy taxonomy (currently going final rounds in the EU parliament) Both should be sort of ok, fingers crossed. But this is only replacement. If we're serious and want to reduce iron ore with hydrogen for our steel needs, and use the same electrolytic hydrogen for fertilizers, we would need to build about 50 of them. The technology is there, but yes, it is more of a political issue in France as well.
- adrianN 4y ago
  France has over fifty nuclear plants, most of them older than 40 years. You probably want to replace most of them in the next twenty years or so. Since building one can easily take a decade or two from planning to power output, you would want to have a couple of dozen in the planning stage right now if you expect to continue producing the same amount of power. Since only about a third of France's primary power consumption is satisfied by nuclear, realistically they'd need to drastically increase the number of reactors in the next decades to reach climate goals.
lelag 4y ago
That's in large part due to the work of the german-influenced green movement which did manage to get France to stop building reactors for 30 years or so. In the meantime, the french nuclear industry lost the competency to build new one as demonstrated by the struggling EPR project in Normandy. But at least the many older reactors have been producing low-carbon power since then... Germany's electricity production has emitted about 8 times more CO2 emission than France over the last 30 years: I blame the german political ecologists for being directly responsible for a massive amount of our current ecological woes by demonising the nuclear industry and limiting it's spread across the world for the last 30 years. It's really a sad story to be so misguided to end up contributing to destroy the one thing you wanted to save...
- logifail 4y ago
  > In the meantime, the french nuclear industry lost the competency to build new one as demonstrated by the struggling EPR project in Normandy. If the French (of all people) can no longer get it together to build new reactors even remotely on time and on budget, then maybe we just need to be honest and give up on the "build lots of new nuclear plants, quickly" as a credible medium-term component of a plan to deal with climate change. "France's Flamanville 3 reactor will cost 300 million euros more than forecast and fuel loading is being pushed back by up to six months, EDF (EDF.PA) said on Wednesday, in the latest setback for a project already running more than a decade late. EDF now estimates the total cost of the project at 12.7 billion euros ($14.42 billion). Its expected cost has more than quadrupled from the first estimate made in 2004."[0] [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-delay-higher-costs-flamanville-3-reactor-2022-01-12/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-de...
  - lelag 4y ago
    It's very possible that you are right, that it's too late, that we can't redevelop enough nuclear capacity in time, that we are doomed to see the world burn. That won't prevent me from blaming the anti-nuclear crowd that put us in that situation in the first place. Yes, nuclear is expensive, yes it can be messy but it was our best shot to produce abundant amount of low carbon power. All this talk about switching to wind and solar power omit the inconfortable fact that the current low prices for those technologies are low because we are using fossil fuel to make them. When you have to make advanced renewable tech with only renewable energy, you will see that it's no longer possible to make it economically either.
phh 4y ago
Even though there are political reasons, the biggest reason is... we had enough reactors for our own usage. We built them so fast, that even if we had cross-partisan will to keep forever using nuclear, we'd still have 30-40 years of gap without making any new reactor. And after a generation of engineers, we need to make reactors again and we're basically doing it from scratch again. There are other reasons: people's fear of nuclear became quite real (either because of greenpeace, or local green political parties). There's also a bit of hubris I think, rather than making some "easy" "usual" reactor model, we decided to do our brand new own, which has its own cost: If Flamanville's EPR had succeeded, we would likely have made more reactors and we would already be producing >100% of nuclear power
- adrianN 4y ago
  Only a third of France's primary power consumption comes from nuclear. That's a long way to go to carbon neutrality.
  - rswskg 4y ago
    Not including transport? That's awful.
    - phh 4y ago
      One third is including transport and heating.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    In other words, France needs to hurry up and double if not triple their nuclear capacity, so they can switch to electric cars and heating. Somewhere to the north-east of Strasbourg would be ideal, not only for the abundant water supply, but also because the location is ideal for export to places in Europe that have not invested enough in stable sources of energy, lately. And if France plans to import power when the wind is blowing in those countries, the grid capacity out of that area will be needed anyway.
    - 4y ago

Jorge1o1 4y ago

The reasons are political… just like in the United States. HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress in the perception of nuclear energy.

jlkuester7 4y ago
> HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress Wait, seriously? That miniseries was not perfect, but I thought it did a pretty good job of pointing out the issues with Chernobyl were largely political and not technical. (Sure the RBMK reactors were flawed, that is a technical issue. But the only reason that escalated into a disaster was due to gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems...)
- rectang 4y ago
  > gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems... Gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems are inevitable, inherent features of power utilities. If your technology is disastrous without perfect handling, your technology is disastrous.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > your technology is disastrous without perfect handling, your technology is disastrous Did we watch the same miniseries? Chernobyl went beyond gross negligence. To say nothing of perfection. In the reactor design, in its operation and in post-crisis management.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      No, it was absolutely typical gross negligence, with unfortunately outsized consequences. Fukushima was exactly equal negligence, with absolutely expected consequences.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    They didn't need perfect handling, just halfway competent. But since the rest of the world doesn't build reactors of that type, and never built any without even a containment building AFAIK, it's not really applicable to modern nuclear power plant designs.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Nuclear in inherently vulnerable to politics, mismanagement and attempts at cover-up. As it happened in Fukushima as well as Chernobyl. Because it's centralized, quite isolated from the public eye and with the potential to cause invisible environmental impact.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  The Chernobyl miniseries greatly distorted the impact of the meltdown. They cited the "bridge of death" where everyone supposedly died. In reality there are zero known deaths among people who watched the meltdown from that overpass, and there's even interviews with people who were there. They cited a death estimate of 60,000 when reputable sources estimate 200-1,700 deaths.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    False. Cancer rates downwind are sharply elevated.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Credible estimates do include increases in cancer, especially thyroid cancer. That is captured in the estimates of ~1,700. The 60,000 estimates shared by Netflix are not regarded as credible.
pydry 4y ago
If something cant operate without lavish subsidies it automatically becomes political. E.g. Bill Gates' nuclear startup would be dead in the water without its subsidies. That makes it political.
Retric 4y ago
The reasons are economic. France has been heavily subsidizing nuclear for years and can swap to cheaper alternatives for less money. It’s not that nuclear is any worse, it’s just that the alternatives got better.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Wind and solar got better, but it seems fundamentally problematic to me to suggest that those are the alternatives to nuclear. They're not. Fossil fuel is the alternative to nuclear (and possibly battery supported wind/solar) as the base load. Fossil fuels are fundamentally cheaper because they can more easily avoid paying the cost of their negative externalities than nuclear can. If we could actually internalize the negatives of fossil fuel burning (i.e. by carbon tax) then nuclear might actually be the most economical option for the base load with solar and wind picking up the slack.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Renewables + storage is the alternative to nukes. And, there is simply no contest. Nukes have been left far behind.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Even with that line of thinking, France was well past the point of using Nukes for base load power. France had nuclear capacity factors around 70% when America and much of the worlds nuclear power plants where closer to 90%. It physically worked, but dramatically increased production cost per KWH. Assuming they cut back to 30% or even 40% of all electricity being supplied by nuclear that’s still a significantly reduction.
adrianN 4y ago
Or perhaps the reasons are economical. Recently nuclear construction projects became a lot more expensive and took a lot longer than initially planned.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Some of those economical problems are burdened on the nuclear industry because of political problems. For example, because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with. If the political climate lead to burdening fossil fuel burners with costs to reduce their pollution and GHG emissions that directly and indirectly lead to orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear ever has, then nuclear might actually be price competitive. As another example, since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US started in 1975, they have never, not once, approved the construction of a new nuclear site in the US. They've approved expansion of existing sites, but never a new one. In fact, it was a huge deal when the NRC approved the expansion of a site several years ago, for the first time in 30 years, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-license/nrc-approves-first-new-nuclear-plant-in-a-generation-idUSTRE8181T420120209 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-license/nrc-a... How much pain and death is the NRC ultimately responsible for for holding nuclear energy to such a high safety standard that it's been literally impossible to build a new site for almost 50 years? Because all that means, is that we've burned drastically more fossil fuel than necessary over the past 50 years. Shame on the NRC and the US government for using irrational fear to protect the fossil fuel industry at the expense of nuclear energy. And shame on environmentalists for falling for the same trap and failing to think holistically and systemically.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with "The researchers start out with a historic analysis of plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim. The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent—and that's not considering the financing costs of the construction delays [..] while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor [...] In the end, the conclusion is that there are no easy answers to how to make nuclear plant construction more efficient. And, until there are, it will continue to be badly undercut by both renewables and fossil fuel."[0] [0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
heretogetout 4y ago
The ascendancy of wind and cheap natural gas probably had a greater effect, considering the miniseries is only a couple years old.
- trashtester 4y ago
  I suppose now that some of the sources of such gas is being cut, those French nuclear plants will be extremely profitable for a while.
cycomanic 4y ago
According to perceptions and advertising about nuclear we should have unlimited power and everything from our cars to our stoves would be running of nuclear. All this should have been possible with just a containers worth of nuclear waste (experts in the 50s,60s seriously said operating a whole country of nuclear would result in maybe a ton of nuclear waste). Nuclear completely undelivered on this promise. Tschernobyl was just the nail in the coffin. On top of that has the nuclear industry been one of the strongest lobbying groups against wind and solar, mainly to protect their investments. I would argue on the whole we would have been much further in terms of renewable energy if it wasn't for the nuclear industry.

BenoitP 4y ago

6 + an additional 8 are being planned at the moment. It is still dependent on legislative elections (starting this weekend), and on the EU energy taxonomy (currently going final rounds in the EU parliament) Both should be sort of ok, fingers crossed. But this is only replacement. If we're serious and want to reduce iron ore with hydrogen for our steel needs, and use the same electrolytic hydrogen for fertilizers, we would need to build about 50 of them. The technology is there, but yes, it is more of a political issue in France as well.

adrianN 4y ago
France has over fifty nuclear plants, most of them older than 40 years. You probably want to replace most of them in the next twenty years or so. Since building one can easily take a decade or two from planning to power output, you would want to have a couple of dozen in the planning stage right now if you expect to continue producing the same amount of power. Since only about a third of France's primary power consumption is satisfied by nuclear, realistically they'd need to drastically increase the number of reactors in the next decades to reach climate goals.

lelag 4y ago

That's in large part due to the work of the german-influenced green movement which did manage to get France to stop building reactors for 30 years or so. In the meantime, the french nuclear industry lost the competency to build new one as demonstrated by the struggling EPR project in Normandy. But at least the many older reactors have been producing low-carbon power since then... Germany's electricity production has emitted about 8 times more CO2 emission than France over the last 30 years: I blame the german political ecologists for being directly responsible for a massive amount of our current ecological woes by demonising the nuclear industry and limiting it's spread across the world for the last 30 years. It's really a sad story to be so misguided to end up contributing to destroy the one thing you wanted to save...

logifail 4y ago
> In the meantime, the french nuclear industry lost the competency to build new one as demonstrated by the struggling EPR project in Normandy. If the French (of all people) can no longer get it together to build new reactors even remotely on time and on budget, then maybe we just need to be honest and give up on the "build lots of new nuclear plants, quickly" as a credible medium-term component of a plan to deal with climate change. "France's Flamanville 3 reactor will cost 300 million euros more than forecast and fuel loading is being pushed back by up to six months, EDF (EDF.PA) said on Wednesday, in the latest setback for a project already running more than a decade late. EDF now estimates the total cost of the project at 12.7 billion euros ($14.42 billion). Its expected cost has more than quadrupled from the first estimate made in 2004."[0] [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-delay-higher-costs-flamanville-3-reactor-2022-01-12/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-de...
- lelag 4y ago
  It's very possible that you are right, that it's too late, that we can't redevelop enough nuclear capacity in time, that we are doomed to see the world burn. That won't prevent me from blaming the anti-nuclear crowd that put us in that situation in the first place. Yes, nuclear is expensive, yes it can be messy but it was our best shot to produce abundant amount of low carbon power. All this talk about switching to wind and solar power omit the inconfortable fact that the current low prices for those technologies are low because we are using fossil fuel to make them. When you have to make advanced renewable tech with only renewable energy, you will see that it's no longer possible to make it economically either.

phh 4y ago

Even though there are political reasons, the biggest reason is... we had enough reactors for our own usage. We built them so fast, that even if we had cross-partisan will to keep forever using nuclear, we'd still have 30-40 years of gap without making any new reactor. And after a generation of engineers, we need to make reactors again and we're basically doing it from scratch again. There are other reasons: people's fear of nuclear became quite real (either because of greenpeace, or local green political parties). There's also a bit of hubris I think, rather than making some "easy" "usual" reactor model, we decided to do our brand new own, which has its own cost: If Flamanville's EPR had succeeded, we would likely have made more reactors and we would already be producing >100% of nuclear power

adrianN 4y ago
Only a third of France's primary power consumption comes from nuclear. That's a long way to go to carbon neutrality.
- rswskg 4y ago
  Not including transport? That's awful.
  - phh 4y ago
    One third is including transport and heating.
- trashtester 4y ago
  In other words, France needs to hurry up and double if not triple their nuclear capacity, so they can switch to electric cars and heating. Somewhere to the north-east of Strasbourg would be ideal, not only for the abundant water supply, but also because the location is ideal for export to places in Europe that have not invested enough in stable sources of energy, lately. And if France plans to import power when the wind is blowing in those countries, the grid capacity out of that area will be needed anyway.
  - 4y ago