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Nuclear is working in France. People taking a very current issue and blowing it out of proportion. Nuclear has provide CO2 free clean energy to people in Franc

Nuclear is working in France. People taking a very current issue and blowing it out of proportion. Nuclear has provide CO2 free clean energy to people in France for 40 years. While Germany blew incredibly dirty stuff into the air in addition to CO2. And France has more often been exporting clean nuclear power rather then exporting coal power like Germany. And CO2 saved in 1980 is far more important then CO2 saved now. The world should be thankful for French nuclear. And French citizens should be thankful that the worst pollution from coal is coal ash that wind is bringing over from Germany. Now lets get to the current issues. The issues with French nuclear is the same reason for many issues with nuclear in other places. Nuclear has been under political attack, and laws past in the last couple years are responsible for some of the issues they have now. The deferred maintenance because the trend at the time was that these reactors are legacy, and renewables would take over. They wanted to reduce the energy share of nuclear for the same dumb reasons. The water issue is actually a problem, but temporary one. Also, France had amazing next generation reactors, like Superphoenix, that were killed by the Left and Greens in the past. Had they spend the last 20 years build those reactors rather then trying to kill nuclear and build the same old PWRs, they would be in a amazing position now. And nuclear is working just fine in a number of European countries. In fact, most countries with very clean grids have a large nuclear component.

srrr 4y ago
Some data: Per capita CO2 emissions in France are half than in Germany: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=DEU~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=DEU~F... (ps: I am an opponent of nuclear energy. But facts are facts.)
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Germany is a bigger manufacturer. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locations=DE-FR-GB-US&start=1990 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locat... Once you adjust for GDP they're both doing well and Germany has caught up with France (added UK and US for context).
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    France sadly stopped improving and stopped building at the pace they did before and had to fall back on gas. The Left in France has been fighting nuclear for 30 years and made progress in that when nuclear was really down after 2011. Germany on the other hand could have easily overtaken France had they mass produced nuclear. Germany as an engineering nation would have been good at this. And unlike with solar, they would be huge in the global world market as well.
  - srrr 4y ago
    I don't find the argument "richer countries can emit more CO2" to be helpful. The richer the country the more money is available to act responsible. Even in your GDP adjusted data France is 37% lower than Germany (0.14/0.09). In a global comparison both countries are doing fine, but not good enough: https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/ .
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      The point isnt that rich countries can emit more CO2, the point is that we want poor countries to become much richer, but not emit immense amounts of CO2. Some people claim this isn't possible. For them only carbon pollution is a true measure of societal wealth. They really like to emphasise that if poor people emitted CO2 like America, then the planet would die, and if America emitted less CO2 then they'd be as poor as some starving refugee in Somalia, hinting darkly that maybe we should kill those poor people, or at least keep them poor, to maintain our standard of living. But the stats show you can be richer and emit less GHG, often those two things help each other. Some people claim it's all just trickery because the rich countries buy stuff made in the developing countries, but there's stats that show this is also declining similarly. Various nations are proving that it is possible and the whole world has signed up to work together on it, so it might just be okay. Germany and France are both doing okay, and the retirement of nuclear in Germany, which gets talked about so much, is not visible at all. When they had more nuclear, they had more CO2 per GDP. Note nuclear is low carbon power, I'm not saying that it's not, but there's a million other lefty-green things that Germany (and France and even the UK and US) are doing to solve the problem and we should acknowledge that reality rather than say "if you don't use nuclear you don't even believe there's a problem".

srrr 4y ago

Some data: Per capita CO2 emissions in France are half than in Germany: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=DEU~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=DEU~F... (ps: I am an opponent of nuclear energy. But facts are facts.)

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Germany is a bigger manufacturer. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locations=DE-FR-GB-US&start=1990 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locat... Once you adjust for GDP they're both doing well and Germany has caught up with France (added UK and US for context).
- panick21_ 4y ago
  France sadly stopped improving and stopped building at the pace they did before and had to fall back on gas. The Left in France has been fighting nuclear for 30 years and made progress in that when nuclear was really down after 2011. Germany on the other hand could have easily overtaken France had they mass produced nuclear. Germany as an engineering nation would have been good at this. And unlike with solar, they would be huge in the global world market as well.
- srrr 4y ago
  I don't find the argument "richer countries can emit more CO2" to be helpful. The richer the country the more money is available to act responsible. Even in your GDP adjusted data France is 37% lower than Germany (0.14/0.09). In a global comparison both countries are doing fine, but not good enough: https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/ https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/ .
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    The point isnt that rich countries can emit more CO2, the point is that we want poor countries to become much richer, but not emit immense amounts of CO2. Some people claim this isn't possible. For them only carbon pollution is a true measure of societal wealth. They really like to emphasise that if poor people emitted CO2 like America, then the planet would die, and if America emitted less CO2 then they'd be as poor as some starving refugee in Somalia, hinting darkly that maybe we should kill those poor people, or at least keep them poor, to maintain our standard of living. But the stats show you can be richer and emit less GHG, often those two things help each other. Some people claim it's all just trickery because the rich countries buy stuff made in the developing countries, but there's stats that show this is also declining similarly. Various nations are proving that it is possible and the whole world has signed up to work together on it, so it might just be okay. Germany and France are both doing okay, and the retirement of nuclear in Germany, which gets talked about so much, is not visible at all. When they had more nuclear, they had more CO2 per GDP. Note nuclear is low carbon power, I'm not saying that it's not, but there's a million other lefty-green things that Germany (and France and even the UK and US) are doing to solve the problem and we should acknowledge that reality rather than say "if you don't use nuclear you don't even believe there's a problem".