7 ms·

The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess. The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design instead of re

by hedora 3y ago

The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess. The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design instead of re-inventing the entire thing from scratch for each plant. Imagine how much more accessible computers would be if you could just copy the operating system from one "printed" circuit board to another, instead of hand-wiring all the transistors, then hand coding process scheduling and I/O. The French did this totally unprecedented novel thing where they manufacture more than one identical part at a time in a line of assembly stations, and the parts of the plants are interchangeable. I doubt such things transfer to other countries or industries though.

Zigurd 3y ago
The French have discovered that they vastly underestimated end-of-life costs. And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed.
- pyrale 3y ago
  > And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed. I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources. Actual serious sources [1] report funding is being set aside for dismantling, which may be significantly eased by the fact that these reactor are actually going to serve for longer than expected. [1], in french: https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2020-03/20200304-rapport-arret-demantelement-installations-nucleaires-2_0.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2020-03/20200304-rappor...
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    https://energypost.eu/how-much-will-it-really-cost-to-decommission-the-aging-french-nuclear-fleet/ https://energypost.eu/how-much-will-it-really-cost-to-decomm... Whereas Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates that clean-up of UK’s 17 nuclear sites will cost between €109‒250 billion over the next 120 years, France has set aside only €23 billion to decommissioning its 58 reactors. That's about 6X less than Germany, per reactor. When is the last time that kind of project came in under budget?
    - pyrale 3y ago
      The article is from 2017, yet reports number from 2013. In 2017, the total provisioning was 28~Bn€. Also French reactor are still working (and producing returns), as opposed to German reactors. If you focus on dismantling costs, the example of Maine Yankee [1]: is way less dramatic: "In January 2002 Maine Yankee put the total decommissioning cost at $635 million." The number provided for UK reactors is ludicrous compared to existing dismantling costs, and simply factors in 150 years of dry cask storage, whereas France has a deep storage facility on the way. Also the author, Paul Dorfman, is an anti-nuclear proponent, it's not surprising to see this kind of numbers from him. [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dismantling-nuclear/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dismantling-nucle...
      - Zigurd 3y ago
        The numbers are from the respective national nuclear authorities. Also, as of 2019, the ongoing cost of securing spent fuel at Maine Yankee is about $10M per year. At what point does the spent fuel storage there age out and need replacement?
        pyrale 3y ago
        > The numbers are from the respective national nuclear authorities. And, when it comes to France, the author chose to use 4 year-old numbers. > At what point does the spent fuel storage there age out and need replacement? As I said, France doesn't plan to store its spent fuel in dry casks. The current plan is to store it in a deep-storage facility similar to Onkalo.
      - cycomanic 3y ago
        > whereas France has a deep storage facility on the way. That has been "on the way" for how many years exactly? The reality is that after almost > 50 years of nuclear power we have exactly one long-term storage facility world-wide which has been commissioned last year (Finland). And somehow that was hailed as a success. Also what do you think the storage cost for deep storage facilities are?
  - Kon5ole 3y ago
    >>> And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed. >I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources. We know for a fact that France nationalized EDF last year and the debt is at currently 65 bn euros and growing. Since the company has been nationalized, the taxpayers are on the hook. I wouldn't personally go so far as to say they're "screwed" but it's a documented economic fact that nuclear power in France has been sold at a loss, and still is. Note that this debt is already real, whereas the cost of decommissioning and storing waste for hundreds of years is guesswork no matter which source you use. Operations in France are proven not to cover costs even before we get to that!
    - pyrale 3y ago
      The debt doesn't come from unit costs, EDF has been profitable for decades with the current rates.
      - Kon5ole 3y ago
        65 billions in debt and having to be saved by the state means you are not profitable. It doesn't matter where the costs come from in this case, they are not covered by the money EDF has accumulated from selling power, which was the point. This debt is already a reality - and growing with interest rates if nothing else - and we haven't even gotten to the many billions more that have to be invested in the beat-up old plants to keep them running. We also don't know how many billions more that have to be paid to decommission them and for storing the waste. Nobody knows this yet. Nuclear power has always been a strategic choice, with extensive international treaties and special conditions in place to make it a reality despite it not being financially viable in the traditional sense. The costs have been socialised and pushed to future generations, deliberately. Now that several decades have passed, we are the generations that have to start paying.
        pyrale 3y ago
        > It doesn't matter where the costs come from in this case, they are not covered by the money EDF has accumulated from selling power, which was the point. That by itself isn't an issue. Plenty of companies take on debt to invest, for instance. My company intends to take €40bn of new debt in the next decade or so, and our investors don't see it as an issue. That's why unit costs are important, that's what dictates whether the activity is reasonable, and how much debt can be supported by it. > We also don't know how many billions more that have to be paid to decommission them and for storing the waste. Nobody knows this yet. Plants have been decomissioned in the past already. Because of that, we have pretty reasonable estimates of how much dismantling costs. If you have specific points about why past dismantled structures are different from future ones, feel free to expose them. Otherwise, the "we don't know" discourse is basically FUD.
- FredPret 3y ago
  Even if they did, having sold the power for less than it cost would've stimulated investment in the economy that can pay for that now.
pyrale 3y ago
> The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess. As a french Engineer, I can confirm this. For work inquiries, please reach me at pyrale@oversized.ego > The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design In fact, we don't keep building them. The last N4 reactor was delivered in 2003. Since then, aside from the failed joint-venture with Germany that is the EPR, France essentially delivered nothing. That's not really an engineering issue so much as a political one. Also France didn't "keep building the same reactor", and didn't build "obsolete" reactors. From the initial reactors (the CP generation) to the N4, the buildings got larger, late reactors produced 60% more energy than the original ones, and significant safety improvements were made. Safety changes were also backported on previous installations. In fact, the major reason why Framatome freed itself from the Westinghouse license is that it provided significant independent contribution to the original design.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Isn't the Hualong One (both of them!) derived from French designs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
  - pyrale 3y ago
    Yes, some of the older generations also got exported around. There's one in South Africa too IIRC, based on CP1 reactors.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Why does it seem we can’t build complicated things like we used to? The same seems to be true here in the US as well.
  - khuey 3y ago
    Mostly because we prioritize other things over actually getting stuff built for a reasonable budget.
  - pyrale 3y ago
adrianN 3y ago
It is my understanding that the French massively subsidize nuclear power because they essentially run it as a job program to keep nuclear engineers employed so that they can build nuclear bombs.
- pyrale 3y ago
  France produced military nuclear fuel in separate facilities, with separate engineers. Also, France stopped producing military-grade radioactive fuel since 1996, when the Pierrelatte military factory closed [1]. [1], in french: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_militaire_de_Pierrelatte https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_militaire_de_Pierrelatte
antonvs 3y ago
According to https://www.ad.nl/economie/duur-en-gevaarlijk-elke-kerncentrale-maakt-tijdens-leven-5-miljard-euro-verlies~a91ca77d5/ https://www.ad.nl/economie/duur-en-gevaarlijk-elke-kerncentr... (translated with Google): > "The leading German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin investigated whether new nuclear power plants can indeed contribute to a clean(er) economy. The answer is negative: all 674 nuclear power plants that were built worldwide between 1951 and 2017 were built with substantial government subsidies. Without such support they would never have come about."
- thatguy0900 3y ago
  Of all the things the government can and does subsidize, cheap electricity seems like a pretty good one, especially if it's clean. I suppose that does lead to sillyness like bitcoin farms though.
  - antonvs 3y ago
    It's not an argument against government subsidies, it's just looking at the economic viability of nuclear power relative to other options.
    - Keyframe 3y ago
      Right. Does it account for positive / negative economic impact of (lack of) pollution?
      - antonvs 3y ago
        The goal, alluded to in the quote I provided, is to compare it to cleaner alternatives. The article I linked ends as follows: > "For all these reasons, nuclear energy, even though nuclear power is emission-free, is not a relevant solution for profitable, climate-friendly and sustainable energy in the future." According to the researchers, nuclear energy as a solution for climate protection is "an old narrative that is still as inaccurate as in the 1970s."
- 3y ago
Panino 3y ago
> The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design Wikipedia has a list of nuclear reactors in France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran... According to the list, most power plants came online in the 1980s, so it doesn't sound like they "keep building" more of them. The most recent ones, Civaux and Chooz-B, came online in 2000. Flamanville appears to be incorrectly stated as having came online in 2020. Clicking the link, you see that its 2 reactors came online in 1986 and 1987, and as for the third one -- "as of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial introduction date to the end of 2022. In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023, and again in December 2022, delaying fuel loading to early 2024." All of the nuclear reactors in France were built by previous generations. As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the need for created energy.) However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables. And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents making widespread demonstrably false statements. My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc. I think nuclear proponents who say that nuclear is so cheap and so easy should prove it by building their own nuclear reactors and make tons of money. Go ahead, just do it. Stop talking and do it.
- opo 3y ago
  >As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the need for created energy.) I think many of the people who aren't anti-nuclear, would agree with all that. >However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables. I rarely see that here. What I tend to see are people who don't like the idea of nuclear power making misleading or false statements about nuclear power. (Like in the original message of this thread where the claim is made "After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor.") >My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc. This statement is true in one small sense and misleading in another. You are likely providing excess power during a sunny day in the summer and less power than you are using when it rains and you are providing no power at other times (like at 2:00 AM.). While at the end of the year you might produce more kilowatts than you in total used, that isn't going to help your neighbors when it is raining. The only issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created and consequently has to be heavily subsidized by your neighbors who don't have rooftop solar.
devonkim 3y ago
You'd be better using South Korea as an example rather than France these days. To add more context, South Korea is an incredibly, incredibly corrupt country that sends its exiting president to prison to the extent that I joke that we need a special prison just for presidents. Yet there are basically no nuclear accidents at the kind of scale that we saw from Japan. 100% speculating but it's almost as if the nuclear power plants are used as a deterrent and part of the national security apparatus perhaps similar to the logic that Ukraine may have had in the past. The anti-nuclear crusade in the West is a bit worrisome given that if we had been better at dealing with nuclear as a whole there would be less coal and gas power plants all over the West now. As much as I can sympathize with the concerns about nuclear power related supply chain issues and risks of meltdowns + radiation almost all the problems I've seen in nuclear across countries and cultures don't come down to technical issues as much as structural ones due 90%+ to politics causing massive over-regulation of nuclear to become unviable both financially and politically. This seems silly because I strongly believe such efforts should be directed at the much greater, immediate, far more supportable threat to humanity's IMO of fossil fuels. Of course we kind of depend upon them now but given the problems we had from the 1980s into the 2000s with fossil fuels all the way to now the kind of resources we could have spent on renewables may have had better results simply stepping away from lobbying constantly against nuclear power and letting engineers do their best work in all areas of energy research. Seriously, almost all the "but nuclear costs too much" arguments are a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad faith where people pile on more and more requirements like it's a really bad DoD project when it's much more complicated honestly. US DoD has operated tons and tons of nuclear reactors, for example, quite successfully with a pretty darn good safety record last I saw despite all sorts of other failures within the US Jobs Program - they're used in submarines!
cycomanic 3y ago
Except for the fact that french nuclear power is highly subsidized (partly by military budgets, partly other subsidies, partly by grossly underfunding for storage and decommissioning costs, which they are required to put funds aside for), is breaking at the seams last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance (picked up by "intermittent solar and wind").
- Zealotux 3y ago
  Every time the fact nuclear power is subsidized is being brought up, I can't help but think of how much energy, in general, is highly subsidized, like other fossils and renewables. What makes it special in the case of nuclear?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Moving a technology down an experience curve is a positive externality. Technologies with good experience curves (like renewables) justify subsidy because of this. Nuclear, unfortunately, has not shown good experience effects.
- pyrale 3y ago
  > last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance Oh, so low? I heard it was 102%, and we had to activate the hamster wheels in order to make up for the deficit? Hint: Nuclear isn't even 80% of France's nuclear production when every reactor is up.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    Yes and for some time 100% of France's nuclear reactors were down, either due to maintenance or heat.
    - pyrale 3y ago
      This simply never happened. It's a matter of public record [1], it shouldn't be hard to check your numbers and see that they're wrong... [1]: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/122922-french-nuclear-output-to-start-2023-at-record-low-amid-long-term-outages-fuel-savings-stops https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
pfdietz 3y ago
The French breeder program was such a "success" that it's been mothballed. They've put the work on a shelf and terminated any follow on reactor. This tells me the French don't believe nuclear will power the world any time soon. If they believed that, they'd understand breeders would be needed, and would be working on them.

by hedora 3y ago

Zigurd 3y ago

The French have discovered that they vastly underestimated end-of-life costs. And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed.

pyrale 3y ago
> And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed. I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources. Actual serious sources [1] report funding is being set aside for dismantling, which may be significantly eased by the fact that these reactor are actually going to serve for longer than expected. [1], in french: https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2020-03/20200304-rapport-arret-demantelement-installations-nucleaires-2_0.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2020-03/20200304-rappor...
- Zigurd 3y ago
  https://energypost.eu/how-much-will-it-really-cost-to-decommission-the-aging-french-nuclear-fleet/ https://energypost.eu/how-much-will-it-really-cost-to-decomm... Whereas Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates that clean-up of UK’s 17 nuclear sites will cost between €109‒250 billion over the next 120 years, France has set aside only €23 billion to decommissioning its 58 reactors. That's about 6X less than Germany, per reactor. When is the last time that kind of project came in under budget?
  - pyrale 3y ago
    The article is from 2017, yet reports number from 2013. In 2017, the total provisioning was 28~Bn€. Also French reactor are still working (and producing returns), as opposed to German reactors. If you focus on dismantling costs, the example of Maine Yankee [1]: is way less dramatic: "In January 2002 Maine Yankee put the total decommissioning cost at $635 million." The number provided for UK reactors is ludicrous compared to existing dismantling costs, and simply factors in 150 years of dry cask storage, whereas France has a deep storage facility on the way. Also the author, Paul Dorfman, is an anti-nuclear proponent, it's not surprising to see this kind of numbers from him. [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dismantling-nuclear/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dismantling-nucle...
    - Zigurd 3y ago
      The numbers are from the respective national nuclear authorities. Also, as of 2019, the ongoing cost of securing spent fuel at Maine Yankee is about $10M per year. At what point does the spent fuel storage there age out and need replacement?
      - pyrale 3y ago
        > The numbers are from the respective national nuclear authorities. And, when it comes to France, the author chose to use 4 year-old numbers. > At what point does the spent fuel storage there age out and need replacement? As I said, France doesn't plan to store its spent fuel in dry casks. The current plan is to store it in a deep-storage facility similar to Onkalo.
    - cycomanic 3y ago
      > whereas France has a deep storage facility on the way. That has been "on the way" for how many years exactly? The reality is that after almost > 50 years of nuclear power we have exactly one long-term storage facility world-wide which has been commissioned last year (Finland). And somehow that was hailed as a success. Also what do you think the storage cost for deep storage facilities are?
- Kon5ole 3y ago
  >>> And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed. >I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources. We know for a fact that France nationalized EDF last year and the debt is at currently 65 bn euros and growing. Since the company has been nationalized, the taxpayers are on the hook. I wouldn't personally go so far as to say they're "screwed" but it's a documented economic fact that nuclear power in France has been sold at a loss, and still is. Note that this debt is already real, whereas the cost of decommissioning and storing waste for hundreds of years is guesswork no matter which source you use. Operations in France are proven not to cover costs even before we get to that!
  - pyrale 3y ago
    The debt doesn't come from unit costs, EDF has been profitable for decades with the current rates.
    - Kon5ole 3y ago
      65 billions in debt and having to be saved by the state means you are not profitable. It doesn't matter where the costs come from in this case, they are not covered by the money EDF has accumulated from selling power, which was the point. This debt is already a reality - and growing with interest rates if nothing else - and we haven't even gotten to the many billions more that have to be invested in the beat-up old plants to keep them running. We also don't know how many billions more that have to be paid to decommission them and for storing the waste. Nobody knows this yet. Nuclear power has always been a strategic choice, with extensive international treaties and special conditions in place to make it a reality despite it not being financially viable in the traditional sense. The costs have been socialised and pushed to future generations, deliberately. Now that several decades have passed, we are the generations that have to start paying.
      - pyrale 3y ago
        > It doesn't matter where the costs come from in this case, they are not covered by the money EDF has accumulated from selling power, which was the point. That by itself isn't an issue. Plenty of companies take on debt to invest, for instance. My company intends to take €40bn of new debt in the next decade or so, and our investors don't see it as an issue. That's why unit costs are important, that's what dictates whether the activity is reasonable, and how much debt can be supported by it. > We also don't know how many billions more that have to be paid to decommission them and for storing the waste. Nobody knows this yet. Plants have been decomissioned in the past already. Because of that, we have pretty reasonable estimates of how much dismantling costs. If you have specific points about why past dismantled structures are different from future ones, feel free to expose them. Otherwise, the "we don't know" discourse is basically FUD.
FredPret 3y ago
Even if they did, having sold the power for less than it cost would've stimulated investment in the economy that can pay for that now.

pyrale 3y ago

> The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess. As a french Engineer, I can confirm this. For work inquiries, please reach me at pyrale@oversized.ego > The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design In fact, we don't keep building them. The last N4 reactor was delivered in 2003. Since then, aside from the failed joint-venture with Germany that is the EPR, France essentially delivered nothing. That's not really an engineering issue so much as a political one. Also France didn't "keep building the same reactor", and didn't build "obsolete" reactors. From the initial reactors (the CP generation) to the N4, the buildings got larger, late reactors produced 60% more energy than the original ones, and significant safety improvements were made. Safety changes were also backported on previous installations. In fact, the major reason why Framatome freed itself from the Westinghouse license is that it provided significant independent contribution to the original design.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Isn't the Hualong One (both of them!) derived from French designs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
- pyrale 3y ago
  Yes, some of the older generations also got exported around. There's one in South Africa too IIRC, based on CP1 reactors.
throwaway5959 3y ago
Why does it seem we can’t build complicated things like we used to? The same seems to be true here in the US as well.
- khuey 3y ago
  Mostly because we prioritize other things over actually getting stuff built for a reasonable budget.
- pyrale 3y ago

adrianN 3y ago

It is my understanding that the French massively subsidize nuclear power because they essentially run it as a job program to keep nuclear engineers employed so that they can build nuclear bombs.

pyrale 3y ago
France produced military nuclear fuel in separate facilities, with separate engineers. Also, France stopped producing military-grade radioactive fuel since 1996, when the Pierrelatte military factory closed [1]. [1], in french: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_militaire_de_Pierrelatte https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_militaire_de_Pierrelatte

antonvs 3y ago

According to https://www.ad.nl/economie/duur-en-gevaarlijk-elke-kerncentrale-maakt-tijdens-leven-5-miljard-euro-verlies~a91ca77d5/ https://www.ad.nl/economie/duur-en-gevaarlijk-elke-kerncentr... (translated with Google): > "The leading German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin investigated whether new nuclear power plants can indeed contribute to a clean(er) economy. The answer is negative: all 674 nuclear power plants that were built worldwide between 1951 and 2017 were built with substantial government subsidies. Without such support they would never have come about."

thatguy0900 3y ago
Of all the things the government can and does subsidize, cheap electricity seems like a pretty good one, especially if it's clean. I suppose that does lead to sillyness like bitcoin farms though.
- antonvs 3y ago
  It's not an argument against government subsidies, it's just looking at the economic viability of nuclear power relative to other options.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    Right. Does it account for positive / negative economic impact of (lack of) pollution?
    - antonvs 3y ago
      The goal, alluded to in the quote I provided, is to compare it to cleaner alternatives. The article I linked ends as follows: > "For all these reasons, nuclear energy, even though nuclear power is emission-free, is not a relevant solution for profitable, climate-friendly and sustainable energy in the future." According to the researchers, nuclear energy as a solution for climate protection is "an old narrative that is still as inaccurate as in the 1970s."
3y ago

Panino 3y ago

> The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design Wikipedia has a list of nuclear reactors in France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran... According to the list, most power plants came online in the 1980s, so it doesn't sound like they "keep building" more of them. The most recent ones, Civaux and Chooz-B, came online in 2000. Flamanville appears to be incorrectly stated as having came online in 2020. Clicking the link, you see that its 2 reactors came online in 1986 and 1987, and as for the third one -- "as of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial introduction date to the end of 2022. In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023, and again in December 2022, delaying fuel loading to early 2024." All of the nuclear reactors in France were built by previous generations. As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the need for created energy.) However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables. And I only really see fossil fuel and nuclear proponents making widespread demonstrably false statements. My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc. I think nuclear proponents who say that nuclear is so cheap and so easy should prove it by building their own nuclear reactors and make tons of money. Go ahead, just do it. Stop talking and do it.

opo 3y ago
>As an aside, I'm pro- wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and nuclear. (I'm also very pro-smart-design which obviates the need for created energy.) I think many of the people who aren't anti-nuclear, would agree with all that. >However I only really see nuclear proponents (and those of fossil fuels) attacking renewables. I rarely see that here. What I tend to see are people who don't like the idea of nuclear power making misleading or false statements about nuclear power. (Like in the original message of this thread where the claim is made "After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor.") >My rooftop solar is producing a big yearly surplus, supplying my neighbors with energy for their AC etc. This statement is true in one small sense and misleading in another. You are likely providing excess power during a sunny day in the summer and less power than you are using when it rains and you are providing no power at other times (like at 2:00 AM.). While at the end of the year you might produce more kilowatts than you in total used, that isn't going to help your neighbors when it is raining. The only issue with consumer roof-top solar is that it is the most expensive form of power ever created and consequently has to be heavily subsidized by your neighbors who don't have rooftop solar.

devonkim 3y ago

You'd be better using South Korea as an example rather than France these days. To add more context, South Korea is an incredibly, incredibly corrupt country that sends its exiting president to prison to the extent that I joke that we need a special prison just for presidents. Yet there are basically no nuclear accidents at the kind of scale that we saw from Japan. 100% speculating but it's almost as if the nuclear power plants are used as a deterrent and part of the national security apparatus perhaps similar to the logic that Ukraine may have had in the past. The anti-nuclear crusade in the West is a bit worrisome given that if we had been better at dealing with nuclear as a whole there would be less coal and gas power plants all over the West now. As much as I can sympathize with the concerns about nuclear power related supply chain issues and risks of meltdowns + radiation almost all the problems I've seen in nuclear across countries and cultures don't come down to technical issues as much as structural ones due 90%+ to politics causing massive over-regulation of nuclear to become unviable both financially and politically. This seems silly because I strongly believe such efforts should be directed at the much greater, immediate, far more supportable threat to humanity's IMO of fossil fuels. Of course we kind of depend upon them now but given the problems we had from the 1980s into the 2000s with fossil fuels all the way to now the kind of resources we could have spent on renewables may have had better results simply stepping away from lobbying constantly against nuclear power and letting engineers do their best work in all areas of energy research. Seriously, almost all the "but nuclear costs too much" arguments are a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad faith where people pile on more and more requirements like it's a really bad DoD project when it's much more complicated honestly. US DoD has operated tons and tons of nuclear reactors, for example, quite successfully with a pretty darn good safety record last I saw despite all sorts of other failures within the US Jobs Program - they're used in submarines!

cycomanic 3y ago

Except for the fact that french nuclear power is highly subsidized (partly by military budgets, partly other subsidies, partly by grossly underfunding for storage and decommissioning costs, which they are required to put funds aside for), is breaking at the seams last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance (picked up by "intermittent solar and wind").

Zealotux 3y ago
Every time the fact nuclear power is subsidized is being brought up, I can't help but think of how much energy, in general, is highly subsidized, like other fossils and renewables. What makes it special in the case of nuclear?
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Moving a technology down an experience curve is a positive externality. Technologies with good experience curves (like renewables) justify subsidy because of this. Nuclear, unfortunately, has not shown good experience effects.
pyrale 3y ago
> last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance Oh, so low? I heard it was 102%, and we had to activate the hamster wheels in order to make up for the deficit? Hint: Nuclear isn't even 80% of France's nuclear production when every reactor is up.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  Yes and for some time 100% of France's nuclear reactors were down, either due to maintenance or heat.
  - pyrale 3y ago
    This simply never happened. It's a matter of public record [1], it shouldn't be hard to check your numbers and see that they're wrong... [1]: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/122922-french-nuclear-output-to-start-2023-at-record-low-amid-long-term-outages-fuel-savings-stops https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...

pfdietz 3y ago

The French breeder program was such a "success" that it's been mothballed. They've put the work on a shelf and terminated any follow on reactor. This tells me the French don't believe nuclear will power the world any time soon. If they believed that, they'd understand breeders would be needed, and would be working on them.