7 ms·
France needs to invest heavily into renewables, as it isn't able to replace old nuclear reactors with new ones, especially at the rates renewables offer.
by legulere 4y ago
France needs to invest heavily into renewables, as it isn't able to replace old nuclear reactors with new ones, especially at the rates renewables offer.
- msk-lywenn 4y agoThanks. I don't get the get connection between the title and the content of the article. It says in the article that nuclear reactors are outputting half of what they should because of the extreme weather. But in the winter, how is that going to be a problem? We don't have heatwaves in the winter... yet.
- gerikson 4y agoIt's not a given that the water flows that are required to cool the reactors are going to be present in the fall/winter.
- ars 4y agoIt's not usually a waterflow issue, rather water that is too warm to cool the reactor. This won't be a problem in the winter. And in the future they'll probably design the reactors to handle the warmer water, or even run without water (lower efficiency, but that's not really an issue for nuclear).
- lucb1e 4y agoIf that's the case, why is the electricity company (per the article) saying they'll have the shortfalls down to a quarter (I take that to mean 75% of normal generation capacity, not 25%) by December? And why is the market not even buying that, what is the logic there (be it correct or not)? --- Edit: a sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32443994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32443994 has answered the below question. It's not the water input that is the problem, but the water output temperature for ecological reasons. Original text: As a less-important aside, I'm also surprised a change in water temperature of like 20°K/C/F makes a noticeable difference on a reactor running afaik at some thousands of degrees. If anyone has a pointer or tldr for that, I'd be curious to learn why.
- ars 4y agoIt's not water at all - usually high water temperatures are just a few days a year. There's something else going on - I saw mention of corrosion, but I don't really know.
- shakow 4y ago> rather water that is too warm to cool the reactor. No, it is still cold enough to cool the reactor. They can't use it because the warm water that the plant would release would be too warm w.r.t. ecological regulations. If for some reason the plant had to work right now, it could still do it, but would damage the downstream ecosystem.
- Nasrudith 4y agoIsn't that what cooling towers are for? An alternative to warm water emissions. I am no expert admittedly.
- shakow 4y agoThey are, but not all nuke plant feature cooling towers. The problem here is for those without: they use water as a cooling fluid, but then just pour it back into the river instead of evaporating it. The advantage is that they don't consume/move the water, the inconvenient is that they can't spit out 40C water without hurting the river's ecosystem.
- ars 4y agoIt's not 40C at all! It's only a 2 of 3 degrees more than it started. Water temperature issues are very rare, and only happen a couple days out of the year.
- Manuel_D 4y agoAre the ecological impacts of warm water seriously worth the increase in fossil fuels from reducing nuclear output? This seems like a nuclear-obstructionist kind of environmental policy.
- hef19898 4y agoAh, couldn't read the article because paywall, but that was my assumption. It's not the first time power plants, especially nuclear ones, have cooling water limitations during summer. Also, as should always be pounted out, gas is mainly used for heating and not electricity in Europe. So WSJ is now putting three, only indirectly linked or not at all related topics together to write an article about a speculative future that might or might not happen. That is some really top notch journalism right there.
- lispm 4y agoFrance has a lot of reactors not available, also because of various technical problems. During cold winter days the electricity demand is especially high, since a lot of heating is done with electricity. On some winter days the output of the reactor fleet is not enough - with less available reactors, this gets even more of a problem. Also neighbors might not be able to provide as much electricity as usual , because of the Russian invasion&war in the Ukraine and its consequences.
- kleene_op 4y agoOh, you mean just like what they've done in Germany for the past decades? Yep, that should totally do the trick.
- cm2187 4y agoJust make up the volatility of wind with gas, we have this friendly neighbour with plenty to share and it is so cheap.
- pydry 4y agoOr pumping water uphill. Contrary to popular opinion there is no shortage of up: https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-worldwide https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...
- cm2187 4y agoI love how your article refers to dams as "secure". I don't think there is a form of energy that killed more people directly in accidents. Beyond the fact that some people will object to flooding every valley in the Alps.
- arinlen 4y ago> I don't think there is a form of energy that killed more people directly in accidents. ...and yet the UN and the EU are right now riled up because Russia is threatening to bomb a nuclear power plant, but don't even bat an eye when a dam is destroyed.
- legulere 4y agoYou are probably being sarcastic, but renewables actually helped Germany replace nuclear and part of fossil fuels for electricity production: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.svg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.s... (nuclear is Kernkraft in red, fossil fuels are in the dark colours).
- oceanplexian 4y agoThere are approximately 6.5e13 tonnes (65 trillion) of Uranium in the Earth's crust, which smarter people than me have determined could power humanity's needs for more than 4 billion years. That sounds more "renewable" than Solar, which depends on a Star that is due to burn out in 4 billion years and is conventionally branded as "renewable". Not including the ample amount of fissionable material on the Moon and in the immediate Solar System. So I agree, we need to invest heavily into renewables, specifically the one that is right in front of our face, Nuclear.
- Gwypaas 4y agoNow count the combined energy of the global wind or total solar irradiation. Further adding cost to the already most expensive energy source to extract trace amounts of fuel is nonsensical.
- Manuel_D 4y agoExcept wind and solar are intermittent, and require burning fossil fuels during periods of non production. Thus, wind and solar still contribute to climate change indirectly, due to their dependency on fossil fuels. This will continue to be the case until some massively scalable storage solution is developed, which remains unsolved.
- groby_b 4y agoThis is off by 6 orders of magnitude? A crucial part here is that you're interested in recoverable Uranium at a reasonable price level. Assuming < USD260/kg, you'll end up at ~8 million tonnes (depending on what other factors you account for): https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12/7555_uranium_-_resources_production_and_demand_2020__web.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12... And so the time estimate is similarly off. Uranium resources can power humanity's need for ~130, years, extending to 250 years if the entire conventional resource base is exploited. (pg. 113 in the report I linked). With large error margins for Uranium deposits not found yet, but not "factor of millions" error margins. That doesn't mean we shouldn't invest into nuclear (we definitely should), but it does mean that it's not the panacea it's touted as either.
- NewEntryHN 4y agoSo that instead of having blackouts when Russia invades Ukraine, we can have blackouts when there is no wind.
- bequanna 4y agoI think we need a new term to communicate this as I don’t think people yet appreciate how replacing base load with intermittent sources will result in bad outcomes. I personally like the term “Unreliables”.
- the_third_wave 4y agoFrance needs to invest - and has already done so - in the development of fast breeder reactors [1] which are used to create ("breed") fissionable fuel from non-fissionable material in spent fuel rods. They already developed such reactors (Rhapsodie, Phenix and Superphenix [2]) but currently they do not have a functioning FBR to rework spent fuel rods. Using fast breeder reactors the 60 GTEP (Gigaton equivalent energy from petroleum products) in available fissionable Uranium can be turned into ~7000 GTEP of fissionable fuel. As a comparison, this is 9 times as much energy as is available from coal (420 GTEP), oil (189 GTEP) and gas (160 GTEP) combined (source: [2], page 6). [1] https://www.nuclear-power.com/breeder-reactor/ https://www.nuclear-power.com/breeder-reactor/ [2] https://www.gen-4.org/gif/upload/docs/application/pdf/2017-12/gifiv_webinar_phenix_superphenix_final_guidez.pdf https://www.gen-4.org/gif/upload/docs/application/pdf/2017-1...
- willcipriano 4y agoThey can follow the example of the Germans. How's that been working out?
- panick21_ 4y agoFrance did a good job building nuclear reactor with existing technology and refining them. However they have done a really, really poor job in developing and rolling out next generation technology. If they had continued to build and evolve the technology they would not only not have the problems they have now. Unfortunately government lead efforts are not always very innovative and the French population got infect by some of the same anti-nuclear sentiment as other places.