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

The second best time is forty nine years ago

true, then you'd need decommission it and rebuild it about now.

The biggest nuclear reactor disaster in history was at a government run nuclear power plant. So you probably shouldn't trust the government with nuclear either.

You just have to expect it. I wear bug spray.

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

source(german)

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

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

You should read what you link, it's the opposite. They are actually paused to not heat the river up.

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

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.

I didn't check, does it say that waste management is not included?

Oilprice.com sure sounds like an unbiased source.

Almost any group of things is sometimes called a fleet.

But yeah, "nuclear fleet" almost always means something else.

Collective nouns be super random.

My guess is that each piece of generating equipment can be called into action like a ship at sea.

Not half. "About 15%" of nuclear power plants were shut down due to water sources that were too warm for environmentally safe discharge.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/heatwave-expected-limit-15-frances-nuclear-fleet-friday-2026-08-13/

But that's still a significant percentage.

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.

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

Totally the fault of France.

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.

mountains?

I think you misspelled Russian bots (look into how much their economy is tied to energy sales)