[gobip]

France is not serious about climate? If you're in a neighbor country of France: congrats, your electricity is much more polluted than France's is.

Énergie Nucléaire was a thing of De Gaulle, but not for these reasons. France needed independence and needed to provide electricity, and the only way was nuclear (at the time).

Given the current situation, I think France didn't do too bad. Only one candidate in France on par with Jancovici tho, Fabien Roussel.

I live in France, never heard of this "Net Zero" you're talking about.

[immmmmm]

I live in Switzerland, 60% of my electricity comes from hydro.

Ok ok, De Gaulle was maybe more concerned about energy independence.

France doesn't do too bad? Any link? As far a i remember only a few African countries do "not too bad", but perhaps you were referring to former colonies as well.

> I live in France, never heard of this "Net Zero" you're talking about.

I then suggest some good climate information channel, Bon Pote is pretty good in French [0]

[0] https://bonpote.com/

edit: my country is terrible too, it is nothing against France in particular!!!

[rini17]

Swiss and Austrians are an exception with the hydro and should stop rubbing it in all the discussions. In Slovakia much of whatever could be dammed already is and still hydro makes only up to 20% of the mix, despite being one of the more hilly countries. Were it not for 70% nuclear, I have no idea how to even go near carbon neutral electricity. Having German electricity prices to pay for renewables is completely impossible.

[immmmmm]

Agreed. I was answering the inaccurate sentence "your electricity is much more polluted than France's is."

[nix23]

>exception with the hydro and should stop rubbing it in all the discussions.

True, and it's not a exception, but geographically "luck", without mountains and the glaciers that comes with them, Switzerland would be as dry as Turkmenistan. It's just a matter of commonsense to use those altitude differences and water....but when all our glaciers are molten away, we for sure have to go back to nuclear-power.

[immmmmm]

agreed. we are doing hydro because of mountains AND lack of coal.

> but when all our glaciers are molten away, we for sure have to go back to nuclear-power.

this is inaccurate. you might want to go read more literature related to ice melting and energy transition.

[nix23]

No snow = no glaciers grow = not water in our alps, it's not that hard to understand:

https://www.thelocal.ch/20170217/swiss-study-snow-to-largely...

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2018/02/no-...

>In an initial phase, climate change will actually cause the runoff to increase, as water stored as ice is released. However, if the glacier becomes too small, it will reach a tipping point, which we call “peak water”.

>Our study highlights the “hot spots” where retreating glaciers will cause water shortages in future.

But hey maybe you know some other mysterious ways water is stored in in mountains.

[stolsvik]

Lakes?

[phicoh]

Ignoring storage, wind and solar are now very cheap. For example, companies now pay to rent pieces of North Sea to place wind parks there.

[pydry]

Pumped water storage also isnt that expensive.

[MagnumOpus]

Pumped water storage is unsurprisingly limited by the same factors as hydro - there aren't that many steep mountains suitable to put lakes on top in most places.

[pydry]

http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

[rini17]

Storage and transmission.

[enqk]

Wind and solar need a lot of resources from mining, which itself uses fossil fuel (for extraction, treatment and transport) and creates a lot of local pollution.

Wind and solar take a lot of space that could be used for agriculture, so they compete with important uses of the soil. (I don't know if it's clear how much offshore is a thing, but I suppose this increases also energy expenditure)

[phicoh]

If we look at CO2, which is far from the only metric, but the easiest to compare, then solar panels make up for their production in a period on months and for wind it is a period of years.

Both solar and wind provide a significant net reduction of CO2 when you take into account their production. Long term, materials in solar and wind can be re-used. So you would need to mine them only once. Currently, mining is just too cheap to effectively recycle all metals.

Wind doesn't takes hardly any space. Wind is not compatible with airfields and residential areas, but that's about it. Wind mixes perfectly fine with argiculture.

Due to you people complaining about wind in their neighborhood, there is now a lot of wind at sea. The good thing about offshore wind is that typically there is more wind at sea. So the construction cost is higher, but the production is higher as well.

For solar it is more an issue of price. Putting solar on a field is cheap. To some extent putting solar on a field is good for nature. An undisturbed area with shadow is quite nice for small plants, insects, etc.

The potential for solar in urban areas is enormous, but often not cheap. For example, existing roofs of large building are not strong enough for lots of solar.

Solar can also be mixed with smaller scale argiculture.

[hardlianotion]

In the UK at least, and in general I think, this is not really true. There is plenty of land that is marginal for arable farming purposes and this is what is targeted for wind farming.

[chess_buster]

You can put solar on the roof and you can farm between the wind turbines, so that's not correct.

[tsimionescu]

Solar on the roof only matters for single family homes, of which you won't find too many in European cities. Solar on the roof of a 12 story apartment building is not going to do much to help the residents.

[enqk]

My comment is missing a "for the same energy output as nuclear" prefix.

[renaudg]

> If you're in a neighbor country of France: congrats, your electricity is much more polluted than France's is.

Sorry but that statement is absolutely true, even of Switzerland.

As I write, France's consumption-based carbon intensity is 92g, Switzerland is 130 (importing 2.36GW of dirty electricity from Germany, 1.44GW from France)

https://app.electricitymap.org/map

[bvrlt]

> I live in Switzerland, 60% of my electricity comes from hydro.

Hydro isn't the panacea. It's destroying ecosystems. Climate change is a problem but the biodiversity collapse another one.

https://eu.patagonia.com/fr/en/stories/telling-the-dam-truth...

[immmmmm]

i agree a 100% sir!

i was just replying to a comment saying that nuclear is cleaner

[mhroth]

I live in Switzerland too. That hydro comes from water pumped uphill at night by cheap French nuclear power. (/s. Mostly.)

[immmmmm]

what the **** ** are you saying. not even 10% of hydro can pump in CH.

[lm28469]

> I live in Switzerland, 60% of my electricity comes from hydro.

Switzerland in an anomaly on virtually every metrics you can come by.

[immmmmm]

yes! and we are the worst on many other metrics!! for instance one of the biggest marketplace for worldwide oil. take any of the worst polluting company, most have their headquarters here.

[nopcode]

Reminds me of those smug Norwegians subsidising EVs with the profits of oil exports.

We’re all a bit jealous of course.

[popol12]

And whose country's electricity is pumping water up Switzerland's reversible dams during the night ?

[nix23]

I don't understand the down-votes you get..it's mostly Frances nuclear-power.

But little correction: During the Night IN Wintertime

[immmmmm]

My country's energetic policy is catastrophic. Don't get me wrong.

Saying that France is great is brutally inaccurate tho.

[phicoh]

For the energy transition, it is not enough to look at the way electrictity is currently generated. All use of fossil fuel needs to go, transport, industry etc.

A rough estimate is that the production of electricity needs to double.

I'm curious how France is going to double the production of electricty. The current plans for new nuclear power don't seem enough to increase capacity and retire old plants at the same time.

[loup-vaillant]

Well, now France is not being serious about climate, and has not been since at least 10 years, when we had Hollande on the throne. We've had talks about closing down nuke plants that are still in working order, the next one is taking forever, and we still have many people who want to shut it all down in the very name of the environment (overall, the French people are woefully misinformed about the pros and cons of nuclear energy).

I think it is getting better, though. Environmentalists are slowly waking up to the fact that nuclear energy is not nearly as bad as we make it out to be, even compared to windmills & solar panels, which requires many more times the ground surface and/or concrete.

Oh, and we got a recent report from our national energy company (or something close), that laid out several plans to reduce our CO2 emissions, and most contingencies involved both nuclear and renewable, including the "nuke max" scenario. We'll definitely need renewables, but it's pretty clear shutting down nuclear plants is one of the riskiest plans — hopefully our politicians will wake up to that.

[immmmmm]

Yeah things are getting better. The IPCC report was discussed for one 1 day in French medias.

> Oh, and we got a recent report from our national energy company (or something close), that laid out several plans to reduce our CO2 emissions, and most contingencies involved both nuclear and renewable, including the "nuke max" scenario. We'll definitely need renewables, but it's pretty clear shutting down nuclear plants is one of the riskiest plans — hopefully our politicians will wake up to that.

Great. Hope they don't forget what scientists say: we must use much less energy.

[Reason077]

> "windmills & solar panels, which requires many more times the ground surface and/or concrete"

There is no scenario where a comparable wind or solar farm requires more concrete than a nuclear plant. Not even close. A modern nuclear plant requires hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of concrete (ie: over a million tonnes), as well as hundreds of thousands of tonnes of steel.

Yes, a solar farm may require more land surface area, but it can be very quickly and easily deconstructed and removed when no longer required. Where as decommissioning a nuclear plant can cost tens of billions of Euros, and can take 60 years or more to complete.

[loup-vaillant]

Yes, a modern nuclear plant requires tons & tons of concrete. Yes, it costs tons & tons of money. It also gives you gigantic amounts of energy, and you can adjust its output. Windmill and solar panels only produce energy when there's wind or sun, so their actual energy output is much lower than their peak power output, and you can't decide to turn them on or off at will like you can with a nuke plant to adjust it to the energy needs of the country.

You want to be renewable only? Then you need to install several times the power output you need, and enough energy storage to have your energy at will: dams, batteries… This is going to cost a lot.

Also, shutting down a nuke plant takes about a minute, then you need very little water to keep it cool. Completely dismantling it takes much longer of course, but it takes so little surface compared to its energy output that you might as well just leave it there to rot.

[Reason077]

> "overall, the French people are woefully misinformed about the pros and cons of nuclear energy"

Not as bad as the Germans. The decision to build new nuclear plants is one thing, but to close down perfectly good and safe existing nuclear in the name of the environment is madness.

Especially when the alternative to those nuclear plants is to burn more lignite coal and build new pipelines to import more Russian natural gas.