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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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...