Since when is a group of stationary power plants called a "fleet"?
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The statement made in the title is not the point being made by the chart.
How about a chart showing the level of carbon emissions per MW generated in France compared to those in other countries in Europe and the OCDE instead of one showing the fraction of nuclear generation in a country's total?!
Because I'm pretty sure there are countries in Europe with little or even NO nuclear generation at all which come better on a CO2 emissions chart than France and the CO2 average emissions in most of Europe are far closer to France's than the big gap in "amount of nuclear generation as a fraction of total" that's shown in that chart.
And this is before we even talk about pollutants in general rather than CO2 and nothing else: the French nuclear power plants are mostly the kind that produces highly radioactive waste which remains dnagerous for over 10,000 years and ends up buried.
In fact thinking about this is making me realize that France's bet on nuclear is making it be slower than the rest in the transition to renewables which all in all are a less polluting power generation technology than nuclear (even if nuclear waste is a tiny fraction of pollution per MW than even gas power plants).
Well it also gives it a completely non-functional electrical grid because half of their nuclear power plants are shut down because of the hot weather.
Not half. "About 15%" of nuclear power plants were shut down due to water sources that were too warm for environmentally safe discharge.
But that's still a significant percentage.
Yeah I was memeing a bit. Their power grid is also completely fine because it's part of the European grid that is supplied by all sorts of electricity sources that can compensate for those nuclear plants.
France exported 10TWh during July at the peak of the heatwave, their nuclear powerplants were feeding into other countries grids even during these partial shutdowns.
Yeah I was memeing a bit
spreading disinformation, Lügenpresse
It shows the importance of diversifying energy production. In Quebec it's all hydro, but sometimes the weather means the reservoirs can get low over the years. It affects production in a serious way and can take time to build up again.
Wind and solar are also affected by weather patterns in their own ways. Maybe less so or at least maybe different factors. Hedging and balancing grid production is going to be a new challenge.
Fossil fuels did have the advantage of being pretty easy to ramp up or down, whenever, for whatever reason. Some countries might want to keep around older but very efficient fossil fuel plants as backups for these kinds of events. That or waste incineration for example.
Or we could ramp up renewable production in addition to nuclear and continue to diversify
All renewables are subject to some kind of weather impacts. A challenge with the grid is adapting to spikes in demand like if it's really cold or hot one day in particular. You cant turn up the sun or wind on demand.
We've been having brown outs in Canada for the first time ever in the last few years. Its crazy to imagine since our electricity is so abundant. Same with France struggling with this heat wave.
Modern Nuclear can load follow, its not as precise as peaker plants but its not too far off. Another cool thing with modern nuclear is you don't have to directly spin the turbines some modern plants are designed to shunt thermal production to thermal batteries (large pile of salt in a tube) which can be more finely throttled allowing the exact amount of power the grid needs at any given moment to be met. They just have to throttle the reactor to keep the Salt boiling. https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-reactor-demonstration-projects
Completely false, at peak heat interruptions power generation is shuttered by 15%
it's just another part of the eternal war between the french and jellyfish.
https://www.sciencealert.com/swarming-jellyfish-just-shut-down-a-nuclear-reactor-for-the-second-time
Not much CO2, just mountains of dangerous waste for future generations to take care of. Besides the mountain of debt of course.
Truckloads of dangerous waste (a few lorries’ worth a year per plant), which is only dangerous if you stand close to it in the next 10,000 years or so, something that can be mitigated by how one stores it. (Keeping it under water attenuates much of the radiation, for example.) Or, alternatively, it can be reprocessed to make more reactor fuel.
So it’s less than ideal, though one has to measure the quantity of waste and the risks against the certainty of health costs of fossil fuels (which are visible in cancer statistics even when everything is working perfectly).
Would you like to source that? ALL of the High Level nuclear Waste from the planet can be fit into a 21m cube
https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-all-the-nuclear-waste-in-the-world/
Medium level waste and low level waste can be deposited in normal surface landfills. LLW is normaly considered non radioactive in 50 years MLW 200. Fun fact there are entire cities that are more naturally radioactive than what we consider MLW. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6709356/
I'd like to make an edit here later on and specify the reason that we do not put it into a 21 m cube is because it would go super critical.
This is rather disengenous given I have seen actual waste storage and it takes up way more space. All of it is not shoved in a perfect cube. It tends to be containers withing container withing containers that all are in a facitlity.
JFC I made a pre-emptive edit an hour before you spawned and explained exactly why that is that we dont jam it all into a super cube. It would fit in that cube though. However we like our waste non supercritical so we chop that big cube into many thousand smaller cubes then tipple wrap them in glass concrete and steel.
Another great way to look at this is all gold ever mined could be put into a 22m cube, however it is spread through the planet in billions of individual pieces of jewelry, coins, computers, etc.
yeah maybe something with federation but I just see a part saying you are hoping to edit in future.
mountains?
Nuclear-energy haters in shambles.
Maybe that's because their power stations don't work in the heat and Germany is providing them with electricity generated by renewables, I dunno.
Forgotten is the decade Germany was buying nuclear energy from France because it couldn't generate enough of its own and renewables couldn't carry even a tiny bit of the load.
If only i could re-coal why Germany has such a high carbon intensity for its electricity production...
We should have been deploying nuclear much earlier and then augment with renewables. Once energy storage technology matured more you could phase out nuclear plants.
That would've required long term planning though and what if in the end it came out that coal isn't so bad at all, huh, what then??? /s
It's like I've always said, "The best time to build a nuclear power plant is fifty years ago."
To people talking about subsides, that was always the point, to have energy production as a public service. I would structuraly never trust a private company with nuclear (actually I feel like trusting any one no matter the sector is risky)
Lots of people shilling for Big Oil in this comment section
Still massive exporter of electricity. I wonder how much coal and gas would burn in Europe if French npp weren't there.
not this again...
sure nuclear WAS fine, french power plants are getting old, can't handle oncoming increasing heatwaves and regularly have major accidents. source (german)
in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.
also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct
Don't forget they have been basically stealing the required Uranium from African Sahel countries like Niger for decades.
And France is blocking importing solar energy from Spain. Also France has to do some shenanigans in Africa to secure their uranium supply.
Sure nuclear is far better than fossil fuels in terms of global warming, but it has similar geopolitical problems to the oil industry. It makes sense to go to solar and wind, but there's a nuclear industry that's doing the same kinds of things the oil industry does to block it.
french power plants are getting old
Most of them still have 30+ years of life in them
can't handle oncoming increasing heatwaves
Not this again... French nuclear plants has not being stopped because they can't handle heatwaves, that's plain bullshit, but because of ecological precaution, which on top of that, seems to be useless
and regularly have major accidents
Also plain bullshit
That explains a lot of you take your sources from anti-nuclear organizations
in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.
It's not the age of wind and solar. We're still in the age of coal (35% of electricity) and gas (22,5%). If we talk about energy at whole, it's even worse : 30% is petrol, coal 26% and gas 23%. If you think that solar and wind will stay cheap when everybody will compete for the large amounts of metal and other sources needed to build them, and when we will run out of petrol to mine and produce them all, you're lying to yourself. Nuclear in comparison require very little resource to build and to operate them.
And that's without taking into account a basic fact: we don't have enough room to build enough STEPs and we don't have enough resources to build enough batteries to run entire countries on solar and wind. Looking at costs in 2026 is just meaningless when we're actually talking about science fiction.
also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct
Another bullshit: EDF has been making billions of benefits out of nuclear every year for decades (except in 2022). They even made 10+ billions of euros of net benefits the last 3 years.
And EDF is subsidizing France, not the contrary: the State forced EDF to take a huge part of the cost of the Bouclier Tarifaire, and EDF paid billions of euros of dividends to the State as well
i'm just trying to be brief: the amount of space for golfing far exceeds what is currently being used for wind and solar combined. Space is not an issue and not a real concern. Every free roof can handle solar panels, it is essentially unused space and it bothers no one.
Also what's wrong with using an activist site as a source if their information is factual?
then the heatwave thingy: those "precautions" will happen several times. Rivers are getting so dry that european countries now lifted the sunday-driving ban for trucks because shipping isn't reliable.
In summers we produce so much electricity that the price per kwh goes negative atp and we actually have to turn off power plants remotely (which is easy to set up, i do this for a living) - if we build enough infrastructure to have overproduction in winters and enough storage we're set.
idk why people get so defensive and emotional over nuclear if there's just cleaner and cheaper options on hand
Is this the anti-nuclear talking point now?
After decades of, "we cannot do it," it's now, "we should have done it before, it's not a good idea anymore"
Fuck right off
* Sustained through government subsidies to create/maintain their nukes and submarines.
...That they have to shut down all the time because of droughts. And they basically need to rebuild half of it, because the maintenance cost is so high, it is constantly pushed into the future.
Few emissions? Yeah. Good? Nope.
You mean the same nuclear power plants they need to shut down every other week because the river water they use as cooling intake is too warm to actually cool them down? They're pretty useless nowadays.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/france-nuclear-reactors-shut-record-heatwave
id suggest Fiji, New Zealand, New Guinea, Cambodia and many dozen other countries will have much lower emissions. in their Navy.
Unfortunately, thanks to the anti-nuclear lobby, we are in a situation where the current reactors will have to be shutdown before the new ones are available to take their place.
If we could deal with the waste that we've already got, that would instill some confidence, but the govt has basically shrugged. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nLUAN2Rev1E
Nuclear waste is an already solved problem, we just have to use the solutions. The vast majority (>99%) can be recycled.
OK, if it's solved... Where the hell are those who take the nuclear waste of my country? Where are they??? I'm sure, we'd pay a lot of money... Where are they???
Idk where you live but the problem is likely one (or both) of lobbied politicians kicking the can down the road (cheaper in the short term) and ignorant nimby-ists who've bought the "nuclear energy is evil" narrative pushed by the fossil fuel industry and useful idiots in green movements hook line and sinker.
With more power than it generated?
Because it only replaces a environmental disaster with a future one. Still no (practical) way to handle the waste.
Buddy, French reactors have been breeders for decades. They re-use the spent fuel.
Still no (practical) way to handle the waste.
That is false. See my other comment here.
The actual problem is a lack of education amongst the populace combined with a huge surplus of lobbying and a dash of politics.
Send it to the rain forest
Turns out humans are worse than radiation
lowest-carbon
Ok, now do nuclear waste.
Relatively tiny amounts that can be stored safely
Its still better than the output of coal which ironically enough output more radioactivity than nuclear powerplants
Canada developed reactors to run on waste fuel from other reactors.
CANDU 9 IIRC
You are talking about input materials for reactor fuel. We are told almost daily about how bad climate change is; why would new fuel inputs be anything notable as nuclear power de-carbonizes the grid?
Nuclear waste is a solved problem.
Dig a deep hole, put the waste in the hole, and backfill the hole.
Done.
While they did well environmental to produce this and even from a cost to consumer, there are many hidden costs to the power produced which will test France in the coming years as their fleet of reactors and the coming debt-to-gdp crisis means the tens of billions required to overhaul it might be tough to subsidize.
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