7-10 years is a death sentence if we need to transition in the next 15 years, by 2035. Especially since we don't know which design to build, and our current nuclear fleet is rapidly aging out.
The nuclear industry will be lucky if its able to pull off enough construction to replace reactors that age out. There's no chance of nuclear becoming a backbone of our new grid, when we would need to produce 400GW of new nuclear. The napkin math does not work out.
However, renewables and storage are scaling their production at just barely a high enough rate, if we continue on the same exponential growth curves we have been on for the next decade.
Hopefully production will scale even faster, now that solar is the cheapest form of new energy.
> 7-10 years is a death sentence if we need to transition in the next 15 years, by 2035
France has no need to transition when it comes to electricity. We're already almost as low emission as possible so there is no urgency. What we need is a medium term plan, because the plants may start being decommissioned in around 10 years (unless ASN give them the right to run for ten more years, which isn't completely impossible: in the US, some plants from the same technology (PWR) is allowed to run until 70 years!).
And btw, solar in France makes zero sense except in the Mediterranean region, the weather is just not good enough…
France should take advantage of their extremely low CO2 electricity grid and start to electrify other sectors. Like EV's, and heat pumps for domestic heating. And yes, all this would mean an increase in electricity consumption so the electricity production capacity would need to increase as well. So in that sense, restarting nuclear construction makes sense, both to replace existing capacity and to increase the total capacity. And yes, probably makes sense to add a modest amount of wind and solar as well, as long as that can be done without adding fossil fuel backup plants.
From your perspective, when the sun isn't shinning, you just don't get paid. But from the grid perspective, when you don't produce electricity somebody else has to do it! And since the sun isn't shining that much, the grid owner has to have another power supplier most of the time (or batteries).
I guess I would call the decommissioning of 75% of generation facilities a transition. If you can build more nuclear, more power to you. But until I hear more details, the current attempts are not looking good, nobody has been talking about serious EDF plans other than the EPR (would like to hear about something if it missed it!), and if nothing is being talked about, it seems that any construction would not start for a minimum of 5-10 years, with who knows how long of a build phase.
I thought the whole issue with wind and solar is that the storage issue isn't yet solved. Nuclear on the other hand is 70 year old technology that is proven to be capable of being the majority energy source of a nation.
France is at 75% nuclear; we can get to 75% renewables without storage.
And storage is quickly getting solved. California has gone from almost nothing to more than a GW of storage in a year, and is adding more GW at the moment. Even the "free market" in Texas is choosing to add many GW of storage, even more GW of solar and wind, and almost no new natural gas. And in the US, the majority of new solar projects include storage now, because for a long time there has been more DC production power than ability to convert it to AC, and a few hours of storage makes financial sense because storage has gotten so cheap. As it gets cheaper, there will be bigger an bigger amounts of storage added to every renewables project, on site.
Meanwhile we can't build nuclear in Western countries anymore. France can't, the US can't, the UK is likely going to fail.
The problem in the nuclear industry is that they are stuck on getting even first of a kind plants out. The idea of scaling up to hundreds of GW in the next few years is a pipe dream for the us and Europe. Maybe China will be able to build their 150 planned reactors, but even if they do they will be building far far more renewables than that.
The production capacity of modern Western economies is very well suited to wind, solar, and storage. It is absolutely awful at massive construction projects, like nuclear. Construction productivity has barely changed at all since the 1970s, while other fields' productivity has soared. We should take advantage of that.
And this ain't even talking about the new types of super cheap long duration storage that have high energy/power ratios. There's iron batteries in both traditional solid forms and in flow forms. Noe that the market need is becoming apparent, there are new chemistries being developed all the time that are suitable for stationary storage but not as well suited for cars and other mobile applications. Which is fantastic, as we can then reserve all that quickly growing production capacity for transport.
The nuclear industry will be lucky if its able to pull off enough construction to replace reactors that age out. There's no chance of nuclear becoming a backbone of our new grid, when we would need to produce 400GW of new nuclear. The napkin math does not work out.
However, renewables and storage are scaling their production at just barely a high enough rate, if we continue on the same exponential growth curves we have been on for the next decade.
Hopefully production will scale even faster, now that solar is the cheapest form of new energy.