5 ms·

On the long-term, the French option of just running a low-carbon grid remains the obvious solution.

by maelito 22d ago

HexPhantom 22d ago
Sure, but I don't think the two ideas are really in conflict. A low-carbon grid should absolutely be the end goal, but even a mostly clean grid has hours that are cleaner than others
- jarvist 22d ago
  These approaches always measure the wrong thing though - the average carbon cost of electricity. What you need to know is the marginal carbon cost, which will be much less variable as almost all dispatchable generation is fossil. So yes, you should avoiding adding load when there is a severe supply crunch and the marginal power is generated by gas peaker plants (often gas turbine based), and use power when renewable generation is otherwise being curtailed, but most of the time the grid is firmly in the middle regime with a fairly average marginal cost.
- _bent 22d ago
  They are in conflict, because you can spend the same Euro only once. You could build a lot of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines for the cost of one nuclear plant
  - mono442 22d ago
    Money doesn't work like that.
Archelaos 22d ago
Yep. Poisoning the planet with nuclear wast for a million years. 40,000 generations of our children will be happy and thankful.
- vikramkr 22d ago
  I mean yeah. Nuclear waste is much safer than fossil fuel waste - deaths caused, radioactivity, etc
- leonidasrup 22d ago
  Germany is currently operating the world biggest permanent storage for dangerous waste UTD Herfa-Neurode. Contains at least 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans, 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. Nuclear waste is currently excluded, but I think it would not make a difference, especially because after about 400 years most dangerous fission products (Caesium-137, Strontium-90, and Iodine-131) decay away and only Plutonium and minor actinides stays. Mercury, arsenic, dioxins and furans stay forever. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/radioactive_waste/activity_decline https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/radioactive_waste/acti... We learned quite lot about underground migration of plutonium over millennia because we studied the remnants of the natural nuclear fission reactor which nature run about approximately 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto... "Plutonium has moved less than ten feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago contained in the sedimentary rocks that kept them from being dissolved or spread by groundwater." http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/voigt2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/voigt2/
the_why_of_y 22d ago
Spending 19 billion € over 18 years to build 1.65GW Flamanville 3 is not quite obvious to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanville_3_(France) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi... Edit: compare this with China: they added 315 GW of Solar capacity in a single year (2025; see page 34 of the PDF). https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capacity-statistics-2026 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci... (You can't compare nameplate capacity directly, but it can be safely assumed that 2 orders of magnitude more is ... actually more)
- leonidasrup 22d ago
  French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years. Don't forget that even in France, president Hollande promised in 2014 to the voters to slash nuclear's contribution of power generation by 2025. https://spectrum.ieee.org/renewables-up-nuclear-down-in-french-energy-plan https://spectrum.ieee.org/renewables-up-nuclear-down-in-fren... It was only when Russia started invasion in 2022, that the politicians in France started to change their opinion. If you want build a nuclear power plant you go to nuclear supplier with uninterrupted experience in building nuclear power plants, like South Korea, China or Russia. The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant https://www.powermag.com/uaes-first-reactor-gets-go-ahead/ https://www.powermag.com/uaes-first-reactor-gets-go-ahead/
  - otherme123 22d ago
    > French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years. Because today it makes no economic sense. Supply chain for horse carts is also very atrophied. >The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn. Still very expensive. Flamanville is an extreme when things go really bad, but 175 MWe for 1 bn is also very high. 1 bn buys ~1 GW of solar, ~1 GW of onshore wind, or ~3 GW of battery capacity. You should only build new nuclear either to get a better mix in the grid (up to 5% is the nuclear lobby recommendation), or because you have no sun and no wind.
boshomi 22d ago
Not really. Nuclear power requires massive subsidies. In Germany, the "De Height" wind farm was completed in August. Sixty-four 15-MW turbines generate about 4 TWh of electricity annually, which is sold entirely on the open market without any EEG funding. The market for baseload electricity has disappeared in Germany, as renewables push the residual load to zero or below for almost the entire year: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&legendItems=myi&interval=year https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l... The base load is an imaginary line passing through the troughs of the residual load curve.
- djantje 22d ago
  Yes, but then when the wind doesn't blow, you miss upto 960MW of capacity, you can choose how to fill that; solar, coal, gas, waterpower, diesel, nuclear. And the question is, are those wind turbines without subsidy? Here in the Netherlands some big energy users like Aldel already have stopped, those big users are also good in up and down scaling energy usage on demand, and also those products have to come from somewhere else now, so in the end the question is about energy and availability. Some (or a lot of) subsidies can be justified.
  - leonidasrup 22d ago
    > when the wind doesn't blow During day hours and with clear weather it's solar. Currently at night in Germany it's: imports from other countries + coal power plants + gas power plants + little bit of hydro/biomass. The plan for coming decade is to replace coal power plants with new subsidized gas power plants. https://table.media/en/europe/news/gas-fired-power-plants-eu-commission-approves-up-to-eur35-billion-in-funding https://table.media/en/europe/news/gas-fired-power-plants-eu...
    - well_ackshually 22d ago
      So, relying on others to fix your mess + catastrophic emissions + catastrophic but less so emissions + something pretty much at full capacity.
    - 22d ago
ZeroGravitas 22d ago
France has been offering lower prices at night to make the most of their nuclear since the 1960s. Australia used similar tech to make the most of baseload coal overnight since the 1950s. It's just a good idea, and should be used to get cheaper cleaner power in grids today too.
- otherme123 22d ago
  It is not even an "idea". Is the consequence of nuclear power being so difficult to modulate to consumption. You give it for free by night, hoping that at least some people consumes, because the country is sleeping. Solar energy aligns so much better, peaking its production when the consumption is high, going to zero when the consumption gets low, except for the diner time. In Spain we get really low prices (sometimes near 0) in the middle of the day, you don't have to plan or incentivize night consumption.

On the long-term, the French option of just running a low-carbon grid remains the obvious solution.

by maelito 22d ago

On the long-term, the French option of just running a low-carbon grid remains the obvious solution.

Sure, but I don't think the two ideas are really in conflict. A low-carbon grid should absolutely be the end goal, but even a mostly clean grid has hours that are cleaner than others

jarvist 22d ago
These approaches always measure the wrong thing though - the average carbon cost of electricity. What you need to know is the marginal carbon cost, which will be much less variable as almost all dispatchable generation is fossil. So yes, you should avoiding adding load when there is a severe supply crunch and the marginal power is generated by gas peaker plants (often gas turbine based), and use power when renewable generation is otherwise being curtailed, but most of the time the grid is firmly in the middle regime with a fairly average marginal cost.
_bent 22d ago
They are in conflict, because you can spend the same Euro only once. You could build a lot of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines for the cost of one nuclear plant
- mono442 22d ago
  Money doesn't work like that.

Archelaos 22d ago

Yep. Poisoning the planet with nuclear wast for a million years. 40,000 generations of our children will be happy and thankful.

vikramkr 22d ago
I mean yeah. Nuclear waste is much safer than fossil fuel waste - deaths caused, radioactivity, etc
leonidasrup 22d ago
Germany is currently operating the world biggest permanent storage for dangerous waste UTD Herfa-Neurode. Contains at least 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans, 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. Nuclear waste is currently excluded, but I think it would not make a difference, especially because after about 400 years most dangerous fission products (Caesium-137, Strontium-90, and Iodine-131) decay away and only Plutonium and minor actinides stays. Mercury, arsenic, dioxins and furans stay forever. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/radioactive_waste/activity_decline https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/radioactive_waste/acti... We learned quite lot about underground migration of plutonium over millennia because we studied the remnants of the natural nuclear fission reactor which nature run about approximately 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto... "Plutonium has moved less than ten feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago contained in the sedimentary rocks that kept them from being dissolved or spread by groundwater." http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/voigt2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/voigt2/

the_why_of_y 22d ago

Spending 19 billion € over 18 years to build 1.65GW Flamanville 3 is not quite obvious to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanville_3_(France) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi... Edit: compare this with China: they added 315 GW of Solar capacity in a single year (2025; see page 34 of the PDF). https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capacity-statistics-2026 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci... (You can't compare nameplate capacity directly, but it can be safely assumed that 2 orders of magnitude more is ... actually more)

leonidasrup 22d ago
French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years. Don't forget that even in France, president Hollande promised in 2014 to the voters to slash nuclear's contribution of power generation by 2025. https://spectrum.ieee.org/renewables-up-nuclear-down-in-french-energy-plan https://spectrum.ieee.org/renewables-up-nuclear-down-in-fren... It was only when Russia started invasion in 2022, that the politicians in France started to change their opinion. If you want build a nuclear power plant you go to nuclear supplier with uninterrupted experience in building nuclear power plants, like South Korea, China or Russia. The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant https://www.powermag.com/uaes-first-reactor-gets-go-ahead/ https://www.powermag.com/uaes-first-reactor-gets-go-ahead/
- otherme123 22d ago
  > French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years. Because today it makes no economic sense. Supply chain for horse carts is also very atrophied. >The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn. Still very expensive. Flamanville is an extreme when things go really bad, but 175 MWe for 1 bn is also very high. 1 bn buys ~1 GW of solar, ~1 GW of onshore wind, or ~3 GW of battery capacity. You should only build new nuclear either to get a better mix in the grid (up to 5% is the nuclear lobby recommendation), or because you have no sun and no wind.

boshomi 22d ago

Not really. Nuclear power requires massive subsidies. In Germany, the "De Height" wind farm was completed in August. Sixty-four 15-MW turbines generate about 4 TWh of electricity annually, which is sold entirely on the open market without any EEG funding. The market for baseload electricity has disappeared in Germany, as renewables push the residual load to zero or below for almost the entire year: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&legendItems=myi&interval=year https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l... The base load is an imaginary line passing through the troughs of the residual load curve.

djantje 22d ago
Yes, but then when the wind doesn't blow, you miss upto 960MW of capacity, you can choose how to fill that; solar, coal, gas, waterpower, diesel, nuclear. And the question is, are those wind turbines without subsidy? Here in the Netherlands some big energy users like Aldel already have stopped, those big users are also good in up and down scaling energy usage on demand, and also those products have to come from somewhere else now, so in the end the question is about energy and availability. Some (or a lot of) subsidies can be justified.
- leonidasrup 22d ago
  > when the wind doesn't blow During day hours and with clear weather it's solar. Currently at night in Germany it's: imports from other countries + coal power plants + gas power plants + little bit of hydro/biomass. The plan for coming decade is to replace coal power plants with new subsidized gas power plants. https://table.media/en/europe/news/gas-fired-power-plants-eu-commission-approves-up-to-eur35-billion-in-funding https://table.media/en/europe/news/gas-fired-power-plants-eu...
  - well_ackshually 22d ago
    So, relying on others to fix your mess + catastrophic emissions + catastrophic but less so emissions + something pretty much at full capacity.
  - 22d ago

ZeroGravitas 22d ago

France has been offering lower prices at night to make the most of their nuclear since the 1960s. Australia used similar tech to make the most of baseload coal overnight since the 1950s. It's just a good idea, and should be used to get cheaper cleaner power in grids today too.

otherme123 22d ago
It is not even an "idea". Is the consequence of nuclear power being so difficult to modulate to consumption. You give it for free by night, hoping that at least some people consumes, because the country is sleeping. Solar energy aligns so much better, peaking its production when the consumption is high, going to zero when the consumption gets low, except for the diner time. In Spain we get really low prices (sometimes near 0) in the middle of the day, you don't have to plan or incentivize night consumption.