About 1/2 of nuclear power plants in France are down because of maintenance and/or repairs[1][2]:
> France's nuclear fleet has been hit by unprecedented outages this winter with half of its 56 reactors currently unavailable.
This is happening in a country where most people use electric heating[3] while the temperatures dropped a bit recently (minimal temperatures are mostly below zero centigrade, while max. doesn't go over 10 C)[4]. Moreover the ongoing Russian war doesn't exactly help here.
I have to say that this bears a striking similarity to what stuxnet intended to do and the timing is impeccable with the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Not to invoke the Russian boogeyman. But I wonder.
I'm French, we let it degrade, it wasn't an inevitability, it's just that since a few decades we run the country more like a lean startup (what do I need in 6 months) rather than like a nation (what will I need in 50 years) and obviously this is the exact opposite of what you want when it comes to nuclear
I live in Germany and pay twice as much as what I would pay in France per Kwh, it's been true ever since I moved and is still true today, germany actually is the most expensive in the EU zone [0] [1]. Nuclear is both cheaper and less polluting, but I guess it doesn't matter because one dude on twitter posted a big number chart due to a temporary anomaly. Exchange prices at a specific time can be wacky because exchange prices are much more complex than just the energy sources: https://www.axpo.com/ch/en/about-us/magazine.detail.html/mag...
Ukraine + cold wave over europe + poor maintenance + electricity being bought months in advance + things like these [2] = sometimes you get crazy numbers
Please do not forget that most of the household price difference comes from taxes. This is also said in your own source [1]:
> Taxes and levies make the biggest difference. Their share climbed steadily, from 25.6% in 2011 to 40,3% in 2020. These values vary greatly from one country to another, with rates as high as 66% in Denmark and 53% in Germany.
I.e. in Germany, 90% of the Stromsteuer is used to fund the government pension system. So you cannot really compare the household prices between countries and make conclusions about the efficiency of their electricity policies, because a lot of countries just opt for another scheme of government financing through taxes on stuff such as electricity (or gasoline taxes for example, which is also used to fund pensions in Germany).
>I live in Germany and pay twice as much as what I would pay in France per Kwh
A feat achieved because France front loaded its nuclear capex. The plants they have are paid off but aging and almost at the end of their life while Germany has been ramping up new generation capacity.
Once Germany is close to 100% green energy their electricity prices will go down a lot.
>Nuclear is both cheaper and less polluting, but I guess it doesn't matter because one dude on twitter posted a big number chart due to a temporary anomaly
It's only cheaper if you already built the plants 40 years ago.
This spike is a sign of things to come. Most nuclear plants in France have about 10-15 years of life left and building a whole set of new ones will cost about half a trillion dollars and take... well, about 10-15 years i suppose. Dont think that wont get bundled into your electric billm
Of course, France could set about extending the life of these plants but that would significantly impact safety.
Thanks to nuclear, France is decades ahead of us in Germany
We barely average 50% green electricity today, at 4x carbon cost of France - and that is before we try to transition heating and transport (cars) to electricity
This is simply not true (see my post to the OP about taxes in household prices). If you compare wholesale prices on the exchanges, German electricity is cheaper than Frances [0].
The good thing is that there is an independent Authority which decides if it is safe or not to extend the lives. For once, it is truly acting as supposed, forcing the nuclear operator to make the current maintenance.
I really think that ANRS takes no risk. Almost all pieces of the oldest nuclear plants have been replaced. The pieces that can't are crucial but don't deteriorate fast by nature ; it is quite well monitored.
I'm saying that despite being 100% against the idea of building new nuclear plants.
1/ The nuclear energy has always rising costs when solar costs are plunging incredibly fast.
2/ 5 conventional missiles on each of our 56 nuclear plants and France surrenders. The risk exists but is limited of a Chernobyl-like incidents. But in all cases, the production will be stopped. So France is out of the game in half an hour.
=> France might launch 1 nuclear missile to an unpopulated zone in Russia (for example) as a final warning but there is no point of starting a mutual destruction. The nuclear-bomb deterrence doesn't work in such a scenario. :-/
=> Our nuclear plants are both easy targets and points of systemic failure of our whole Defense.
3/ There are huge hidden costs: nobody knows how much it will cost to dismantle these plants. Recent studies by pronuclear studies say 275 billions € ; the French public operator has only 90 billions in reserve for it. In truth, nobody knows, we have never done it.
4/ They want to stock the nuclear waste deep underground. Why not, I trust Science - but the process is not reversible and that waste is dangerous for 100,000 years. In case of an unexpected issue, no way to get it out. That's not serious.
5/ Batteries are a field of constant improvement. Very recently, one type has been invented that stores the energy without almost any loss for 12 weeks (it's far from industrialization to the scale where the batteries could compensate for the irregular production of renewables). The hundred of billions needed for new nuclear plants would be a far better use if directed to the huge technological progress needed by renewables energies, hydrogen and batteries.
=> France has rather safe practices on nuclear matters but most countries are not even near to meet this level of safety.
=> Finding solutions that work everywhere without risk is the only way to avoid the global climate dereliction.
=> The pronuclear fanatics in France forget that even if it were the best solution for France, it is certainly not for the world.
=> The very same fanatics yell that we are anti-science ; no, I am pro-science and an ecologist: I have no doubt that we will make the breakthroughs needed to produce all the energy we need and to avoid unnecessary consumption.
Iran has shown that the path from a civilian use of nuclear fission to an atomic bomb is quite fast. Iran has now bomb-grade uranium concentrated at 20% ; they'll have a bomb within 5 years. And Saudi Arabia has bought a nuclear plant to France, as if they didn't have enough petroleum, natural gas and ... a giganormeous potential of solar energy. They will have the bomb as well. Great!
Putin's atrocious and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has shown that peace is not guaranteed for ever in West Europe. Nuclear plants must be be dismantled asap.
The possibility of war closes the debate about nuclear as the best strategical choice for France: it is not.
That being said, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the decision has already been taken, e.g. going full nuclear. This is just a matter where democracy doesn't apply in France.
No conspiracy theory here. It's not the result of lobbying, it's a matter of "raison d'Etat". The French "deep state" has its own sovereignty grounded on the centralization of electric production and the knowledge and technologies required for nuclear bombs (the bombs + the intercontinental missiles). Hence Arianespace for keeping up on the field of ballistic rockets.
My point is to not build new nuclear centrals. France should maintain its current centrals so that no coal is used and as little natural gas as possible.
Recycling solar panels (and other stuff used to produce renewable energies) is a real issue. But I wonder why pronuclear fanatics are so sure that we will find technical solutions to dismantle old nuclear centrals and safety stock tens of thousand tons of nuclear waste... but always point the issues and challenges of renewable energies as totally impossible to get over.
Nuclear energy is not the solution for a sustainable world. So France should invest heavily in research and development on renewables energies to find solutions that scale to the needs of 9+ billions people.
There are plenty of discoveries and breakthroughs to make, patents to deposit so that France can reindustrialize and have an positive industrial balance in 20 years.
At the same time, nuclear fission should be pursued. It will cost tens of billions but that's worth it. The EU ought to keep up with China and the US leading that field. The ITER project is international but is getting behind.
I’m not sure if it is being presented as one? It’s one of a mix of technologies that can offer strategic coverage to specific geographic and industrial use cases.
It's not a simple solution, but a plan for a long-term, robust, self-sustaining world: A good mix of {solar, wind, geothermal, hydro (as storage), biomass, tidal} combined with long-range energy transmission, grid storage, energy efficient buildings, transport, city planning and industrial processes.
Of course let's not close existing plants germany-style while we do it (in the next few decades), but lets not kid ourselves that nuclear fission can power a stable, robust and resilient society that can last thousand of years.
All of those options are available to us right now, they are literally being rolled out as we speak. There is a much bigger question about our ability to build nuclear on the scale required.
Honest question, do you know a serious source I can read about how this rollout is being executed? I am only familiar with European energy policy, and grid storage currently is a pipe dream, more efficient construction is very slowly being rolled out and so far doesn't make a dent in the problem, and the renewable mix being expanded is inevitably intermittent (mostly solar and wind, with the rest being negligible), as hydro is a very small component of the mix so far and in the medium term future. The only question about our ability to build nuclear is cost-efficiency and regulations.
All plants, worldwide over all human history, for 20% of the power production of the entire planet, 100% green, have produced less than one half of one football field of barrels.
We can stop climate change on one field of barrels every 31 years
Thanks to mining byproducts, nuclear produces less and lower level radioactive waste than solar or wind
Zero humans in history have died from nuclear waste
It's just something scared people say to sound like they know something important
In the meantime, a barebones crew operates Chernobyl infrastructure, while the sacrophagus was shelled by Russian troops.
Europes nuclear power Zaporizhzhia plant is surrounded by Russian troops and sustained damage:
> At 11:28pm local time on the 3 March 2022, a column of 10 Russian armored vehicles and two tanks cautiously approached the Power Plant.[18][19][20] The action commenced at 12:48am on the 4 March when Ukraine forces fired anti tank missiles and Russian forces responded with a variety of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades.[19] During approximately two hours of heavy fighting a fire broke out in a training facility outside of the main complex, which was extinguished by 6:20am,[21][22] though other sections surrounding the plant sustained damage.
> and even under these conditions, once again, zero deaths
I agree with your point, but for the record there's apparently been one death due to radiation (and possibly more to come): After the fighting was over, the russian soldiers seem to have camped in the Red Forest (absolutely the most contaminated area after the reactor structure itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Forest ), dug trenches and eaten local animals. And continued doing so for a month.
Most (if not all) nuclear scientists and radiation experts I've seen tslking about this say this is a wrong assumption. Cheryl Rofer, former nuclear scientist, made a napkin calculation and suggested it would need about 57 years of camping in the hottest (= most irradiated) parts of the red forest to acquire ARS (acute radiation syndrome). Even if the digging and kicking up dust there elevated the radioactivity levels, it would take a hell of a lot to get from 57 years to one month. Keep in mind that the most radioactive snd thus dangerous elements also decay the quickest, because of course both properties stem from the same thing, redioactive decay. The more dangerous the quicker it's gone.
Radiation in the red forest is supposedly not terrible _ if you don't disturb the soil _
All the nastier bits are under a layer of "clean" soil and you would have no contact with them ordinarily.
These soldiers actually dug down to the nasty bits and likely breathed some of the dust in.
Between that, and eating wildlife (which acts as a powerful concentrator), I'm not surprised they died. The exposure must have been thousands of times above the already non-insignificant baseline.
This is not a useful metric, except to impress folks that know almost nothing about the field. Even then it is misleading, because the storage requirements are so strenuous that it cannot be assumed to be done well.
> We can stop climate change on one field of barrels every 31 years
Instead, we will have radioactive children in 50 years.
> Zero humans in history have died from nuclear waste
This red cube is the entire amount of nuclear waste produced by France. And you'll never get in contact with any of it. On the other hand do you know what's filtering coal and gas particulates out of the air ? Your lungs every single day of your life
The point of a graph is to illustrate a number that fluctuate and changes over time. Nuclear waste production does not.
We could graph how much money Germany is funding the Russian military by buying gas, coal and oil. We could also graph how much radioactive particels get released into the environment through fossil fuel combustion. However both would just correlate directly with how much fossil fuel they consume which would then follow the graph of CO2 emissions. One line is plenty enough to describe all those things without having to be too explicit about the trade offs being made in Germany compared to France.
> The point of a graph is to illustrate a number that fluctuate and changes over time. Nuclear waste production does not.
I would expect that more nuclear waste is produced when more nuclear energy is produced and less waste when less energy is produced. Isn't that a fluctuation?
Since nuclear plants generally operate at full capacity all the time you won't get changes in how much energy is produced. The linked graphs above are how much the market price is at specific locations, not how much energy get produced.
The European energy market price is determined by changes in supply (wind and solar being the main contributors for fluctuations, followed by water supplies), demand for energy, and prices for fossil fuel. If gas prices goes up, the price for energy on the market goes up. If cheap wind is flooding the market, prices goes down. As can be read by the graphs, since the European energy market is connected those changes occur simultanious in both Germany and France. However, there is an additional transport cost and thus prices can be a bit different. The negative energy prices also seems to effect those more closely to the plants with excess energy, rather than transporting the excess energy across the European continent.
The actually cost at any specific location is then determined by the energy market price (see above) and transport distance between the energy production point and energy consumption point.
A graph over nuclear waste would have no correlation with the market price. At most one would see a slightly more volatile market price when nuclear energy production is low, and a slightly more stable market price when the production is high, but one would need to have a pretty fancy graphical design in order to confer that knowledge in a graph.
> A graph over nuclear waste would have no correlation with the market price. At most one would see a slightly more volatile market price when nuclear energy production is low, and a slightly more stable market price when the production is high, but one would need to have a pretty fancy graphical design in order to confer that knowledge in a graph.
Does the market price correlate really better with CO2 emissions? Does the price drop between 21 Dec and 31 Dec from ~430/515 €/MWh to ~12/23 €/MWh mean that CO2 emissions of energy production dropped by 95% at the same time?
Does nuclear relieves this pressure?
Doubt so, as France buys a fair part of its uranium to Kazakhstan, which will very probably stop to supply if Putin says just a word.
You are right to a degree. In reality gas and oil get put into reserves which acts as buffers for the actually consumption of the fossil fuels. During periods of good wind/solar weather, the buffers start to fill up, and when demand for fossil fuel energy rises the buffers get emptied.
There is however the ability to increase/decrease imports when needed by adding more transport trucks or reduce the flow in the pipe lines.
A graph over CO2 emissions is thus more useful in this context since they follow the actually consumption of gas/oil/coal, and has a direct connection with the market price for which the above graphs represent.
well germany uses less gas for energy, but more for heating and overall way way more coal. of course france has less co2 emissions. coal is even worse than gas which favors france by a big margin.
in a best of case scenario we would not use either of coal,gas,nuclear oil or any other fossil technology, but we are far from it, but i'm pretty sure europe is closer than most other countries/states/etc.
To put some numbers on the table, in 2018 (I could not find more recent data) the values of CO2 emissions in metric tons per capita were as follows:[1]
France 5.0
Germany 9.1
For comparison:
India 1.9
EU 8.6
China 8.0
Japan 9.4
Russia 12.1
United States 16.1
Canada 16.1
Australia 16.8
Having a squiz at the first page of results on that question, seems like it’s a per capita thing of being a large country with few people. Also, “including exports”, which means all the coal etc and thing they export to China etc is being counted. I don’t want to say it’s an accounting trick but it feels like an accounting trick. 7% of global fossil fuel exports counted against 0.3% of the worlds population (8bill vs 27mill). Is it also counted against the importing country when they use it? Because that feels like double counting.
Interestingly, it looks like Italy is the real culprit here. France can import enough but still exports significantly to Italy (directly and indirectly via Switzerland). If you look at Northern Italy's mix [1], the explanation is simple. They are so reliant on Gas, that importing at any price is cheaper. So all neighbors of Italy (especially France and Switzerland( suffer from high prices as well.
The only solution is to increase transmission capacity, but that's not easy with NIMBY challenges.
What would Germany’s energy prices be if they’d transitioned away from cheap Russian natgas starting back in 2014? What will they be if Russia shuts down exports tomorrow?
Obviously not? Just because France doesn't buy natural gas themselves, they import so much electricity based on natural gas from its neighbors. So they are defacto dependent on natural gas as they can't supply electricity enough with nuclear and are thus in such much much worse energy political situation as prices will continue to surge.
This is what I found "In 2020, France exported a total of nearly 78 terawatt hours of electricity. Meanwhile, electricity imports to France amounted to nearly 35 terawatt hours in total that year."
nuclear is only useful for base load you cant shutdown a reactor in hours, thats why france imports a lot of gas (the same goes for germany, its the fastest way to scale energy, burn more gas, its even easier than with coal.)
France is by far the leader when it comes to the fraction of electricity produced by nuclear reactors; however it never ever could phase out fossil fuels, nor could or can do it at a realistic cost.
It is the same, or even worse in Spain. We are entering an age of energy poverty where average people need to think twice before turning appliances on. It's crazy to think about that in a top 10-15 economy.
EU needs to detach energy prices from gas prices ASAP. Countries like Spain are actively penalized for creating energy from renewable sources.
im interestes to hear more about the French Republic paying some.of the cost. do consumers just see a reduced rate on their bills, or is it clear that the state paid some of their bill? is thhe state blanketly paying out the same amount per use for everyone & every company, subsidizing by use, or are there limits or preconditions that apply?
Electricity providers can choose their prices but EDF, which is the only state owned provider, must have at least one offering with prices fixed by the law.
Usually, this offering is overpriced but nowadays, it’s the cheapest way to get electricity.
So EDF, as a company, is currently, technically, taking the loss. But the French state is the main shareholder of EDF and can inject capital with public money into EDF if needed.
Other electricity providers are just loosing customers. But in France, electricity providers are not electricity producers, they are just intermediates between the consumer and the producer, so they can die and I don’t care. At least, EDF is state owned, main producer, main provider and the means of production (nuclear plants) have all been paid by public money.
nuclear vs wind energy maybe. just look at it. which do you think is 30x cheaper?
the more interesting question is why the oil and water-energy exporter Norway got so much more expensive domestic energy prizes since it joined the European energy market.
I know it is tiring to see this comment. But, the cost of nuclear power quoted everywhere does NOT include the cost of safely handling the waste from it for hundreds of years right?
Until it is included it is like Saudi Arabia claiming that oil is the best thing in the world because it costs €1/barrel because they only need to factor the cost of digging for it.
Nuclear power strike prices usually do include much of the long term costs, and money has to be committed into a trust (or some similar scheme) as part of getting approval in the first place.
And it would be more like Saudi Arabia claiming that oil only costs $100 per barrel because they don't need to pay for pollution remediation, healthcare costs, spill cleanup and their share of all climate change effects from the time they sold the oil until the time that oil's effects have been removed from the system. Which they don't.
> Nuclear power strike prices usually do include much of the long term costs
In theory yes, but given that they aren't able to predict correctly the cost of building a nuclear station, I don't see why we should trust them on predicting the real cost of dismantling them..
It's very easy to accurately predict the building costs of a nuclear reactor.
The overruns you're talking about come from politicians showing up halfway through the project and changing the rules to show their voters that they are involved
In France the new nuclear reactors have been plagued by hardware issue, delays..
So no, it isn't 'easy' to predict the building costs, it's easy only when you're replicating an already existing reactor and only if it was built recently!
The third project, in China (Taishan-1 & -2) was officially 5 years late and 60% overcosts (and very probably not break even for the builder). After 1 year one of the 2 reactors was stopped mid-2021 after an incident.
The fourth project, in the U.-K. (Hinkley-Point C), started in 2018 and already announced overcosts and late delivery.
The Fukushima cleanup, unique in history and resulting from radically unlikely natural disasters, cost less than half what the fuel it replaced that decade would have
This is without considering the cost of climate change or all those prevented deaths
The hard truth is: even a predictable cause can trigger a disaster. And many aren't predictable.
Fukushima is by many criteria a "lucky" case, as many reactors were properly shutdown when the wave came, operators reacted globally adequately...
The question isn't "is a disaster possible?" but "when, and of which magnitude?".
This patently insufficient ability to foresee also sheds a light towards the "we know that dangerous nuclear waste will not be a problem for anyone during the next 100000 years or so".
Renewables can do the trick without all those threats.
In France the 'nuclear success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") stating that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewable sources must replace it.
Moreover those victims are past ones, and a new major nuclear disaster may cause many victims while solar-panels induced major disasters aren't even possible.
Every nuclear disaster is unique yet nobody is willing to bet on any of them being the last. Fukushima was also unique in that it caused coal usage to skyrocket in Japan - a problem Germany is not currently suffering from.
To me, the way to prove that something ISNT safe is to shout loudly about how safe it is and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong.
This is what the nuclear industry does and the government backs them.
No nuclear disaster in history has added up to a bad single bus accident.
.
> and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong. \n This is what the nuclear industry does
This is, of course, the exact opposite of true. Nuclear power is the only kind of power expected to carry full disaster insurance (not even dams, which have death counts in the six digits.)
No, nuclear isn't fully insured, in any nation (there are funds, providing for damages up to a low-caped total amount).
Power-producing dams failures are very rare and preventable, and albeit they are way more numerous and old than nuclear reactors the history path is clear:
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
I'm not interested in holding a discussion with someone who denies the Banqiao dam burst deaths, and wants to take unsourced blog statistics by a single dude over the World Health Organization and the United Nations
I am not interested in someone who says "here's a list of numbers, the United Nations must be wrong, the causes are a matter of polemics."
Polemics are generic archetypal verbal attacks. The United Nation's health statistics do not get interpreted in terms of verbal attacks.
You make vague references to "Russian academicians" and claim they said things, but don't provide evidence. The Russian academics still haven't admitted Kyshtym happened.
There is a point at which if someone listens to clowns but not the world's authorities, they and everything they believe should just be discarded without further commentary
The science is clear: arguing with an anti-vaxxer or a flat earther just drives them further into their delusion. The common sense is also clear: the regular person does not get satisfaction, but rather more frustration, at the end. The current position of psychology is that the reason anti-vaxxers exist is that they have genuinely mis-identified their addiction to argument as being seen as knowledgeable, and that even when legitimate experts show up with evidence, their unwillingness to budge convinces them that they're even righter. They really think this makes them look good.
Psychology currently frames this as the result of severe self doubt, as "you need to argue with me so that I can show myself that I could win."
Of course I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who denies basic facts, and refers vaguely to evidence they haven't provided. Nobody should. That's how you get flat earthers.
Deniers don't deserve argument, and trying to talk to them like normal people hurts them mentally.
It's an island nation, and we're calling a tsunami "radically unlikely"? Given the time frames involved in cleaning up an event like what happened in Fukushima, once every 100 years is not very unlikely.
Digging miles into the ground with a 4 story mechanized oil rig is much more complicated than putting some dirt into a barrel and walking past it with a Geiger counter monthly, buddy
A bit less than nuclear energy if there's a good mix of pumped storage + wind + solar.
It all gets built way quicker too. No 15 year lead times setting up solar panel farms can be done in 6 months. Pumped storage projects can be done in a couple of years. Each small scale quick and cheap project takes a chunk out of our reliance on natgas.
People way underestimate just how fantastically expensive nuclear power is and how unviable it is without lavish subsidies that other renewables dont need.
It'll keep getting built in countries with nuclear arsenals though coz it can share some of those costs. Thats ultimately why we get barraged with so much pro nuclear power propaganda. It aint about reliability, it's about the military industrial complex foisting costs off on to rate and taxpayers.
Obviously when Iran does this we are made aware of how awful and wrong it is but it's greenwashed under the carpet 100% of the rest of the time.
The wholesale electricity price in the EU is calculated the same everywhere as far as I know. It's the cost for the most expensive energy source that was needed to meet demand.
> France's nuclear fleet has been hit by unprecedented outages this winter with half of its 56 reactors currently unavailable.
This is happening in a country where most people use electric heating[3] while the temperatures dropped a bit recently (minimal temperatures are mostly below zero centigrade, while max. doesn't go over 10 C)[4]. Moreover the ongoing Russian war doesn't exactly help here.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/edf-extend-civaux-nuc... [2] https://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/market-insigh... [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1086485/types-heater-hou... [4] https://www.weatheronline.co.uk/weather/maps/forecastmaps?LA...