[adrianN]

France is currently not building enough reactors to replace those that will need to be shut down due to age in the near future. They would need to build a lot more if they wanted to satisfy demand for heating and transportation. I assume they have good reasons not to build more reactors.

[lelag]

That's in large part due to the work of the german-influenced green movement which did manage to get France to stop building reactors for 30 years or so. In the meantime, the french nuclear industry lost the competency to build new one as demonstrated by the struggling EPR project in Normandy. But at least the many older reactors have been producing low-carbon power since then...

Germany's electricity production has emitted about 8 times more CO2 emission than France over the last 30 years: I blame the german political ecologists for being directly responsible for a massive amount of our current ecological woes by demonising the nuclear industry and limiting it's spread across the world for the last 30 years.

It's really a sad story to be so misguided to end up contributing to destroy the one thing you wanted to save...

[logifail]

> In the meantime, the french nuclear industry lost the competency to build new one as demonstrated by the struggling EPR project in Normandy.

If the French (of all people) can no longer get it together to build new reactors even remotely on time and on budget, then maybe we just need to be honest and give up on the "build lots of new nuclear plants, quickly" as a credible medium-term component of a plan to deal with climate change.

"France's Flamanville 3 reactor will cost 300 million euros more than forecast and fuel loading is being pushed back by up to six months, EDF (EDF.PA) said on Wednesday, in the latest setback for a project already running more than a decade late.

EDF now estimates the total cost of the project at 12.7 billion euros ($14.42 billion). Its expected cost has more than quadrupled from the first estimate made in 2004."[0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-de...

[lelag]

It's very possible that you are right, that it's too late, that we can't redevelop enough nuclear capacity in time, that we are doomed to see the world burn.

That won't prevent me from blaming the anti-nuclear crowd that put us in that situation in the first place.

Yes, nuclear is expensive, yes it can be messy but it was our best shot to produce abundant amount of low carbon power. All this talk about switching to wind and solar power omit the inconfortable fact that the current low prices for those technologies are low because we are using fossil fuel to make them.

When you have to make advanced renewable tech with only renewable energy, you will see that it's no longer possible to make it economically either.

[ncmncm]

We are not doomed to see the world burn. We know what to do: just build renewables. It is dishonest to claim that using carbon to build them is a problem. The more we build, the less carbon is used on them.

When you need falsehoods to make your case, you have no case.

[lelag]

Falsehood ? What do you know about building windmills ?

I admit that I don't myself know much, but I can tell you that you need at least:

- A modern metallurgy industry using coal to make steal

- Possibly a chemical industry to make composite material

- A logistic industry to move components around the world using petrol (all the solar and wind renewable production is based in china)

- Cement to build your fondation (using gas)

Remove all this and try to build it locally and see how much they cost you...

[dane-pgp]

> A modern metallurgy industry using coal to make steal

Nuclear reactors also require steel (and a chemical industry and cement) but fortunately that doesn't require coal:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/19/green-steel-...

[kwere]

Koreans and Russians (political refugees) have still the skills to build reactors at time and "costs"

[phh]

Even though there are political reasons, the biggest reason is... we had enough reactors for our own usage.

We built them so fast, that even if we had cross-partisan will to keep forever using nuclear, we'd still have 30-40 years of gap without making any new reactor. And after a generation of engineers, we need to make reactors again and we're basically doing it from scratch again.

There are other reasons: people's fear of nuclear became quite real (either because of greenpeace, or local green political parties). There's also a bit of hubris I think, rather than making some "easy" "usual" reactor model, we decided to do our brand new own, which has its own cost: If Flamanville's EPR had succeeded, we would likely have made more reactors and we would already be producing >100% of nuclear power

[adrianN]

Only a third of France's primary power consumption comes from nuclear. That's a long way to go to carbon neutrality.

[trashtester]

In other words, France needs to hurry up and double if not triple their nuclear capacity, so they can switch to electric cars and heating.

Somewhere to the north-east of Strasbourg would be ideal, not only for the abundant water supply, but also because the location is ideal for export to places in Europe that have not invested enough in stable sources of energy, lately. And if France plans to import power when the wind is blowing in those countries, the grid capacity out of that area will be needed anyway.

[ncmncm]

The more nukes they build, the farther behind the rest of the world they will get.

The rest of the world will be building out renewables, and getting much more power for each euro than France will. France will have more expensive power than everyone else in exact proportion to their nuke construction.

Ultimately, the French will buy their power from outside, because the nukes will be unable to deliver at a matching price, and the plants will be mothballed. French taxpayers will be the poorer.

[trashtester]

> Ultimately, the French will buy their power from outside.

My prediction is the opposite, that nuclear will remain cheaper than wind in northern temperate climates for another generation.

I suppose time will tell.

[ncmncm]

Nukes are already more expensive. Renewables cost is still in free-fall.

[rswskg]

Not including transport? That's awful.

[phh]

One third is including transport and heating.

[Jorge1o1]

The reasons are political… just like in the United States.

HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress in the perception of nuclear energy.

[jlkuester7]

> HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress

Wait, seriously? That miniseries was not perfect, but I thought it did a pretty good job of pointing out the issues with Chernobyl were largely political and not technical. (Sure the RBMK reactors were flawed, that is a technical issue. But the only reason that escalated into a disaster was due to gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems...)

[rectang]

> gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems...

Gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems are inevitable, inherent features of power utilities. If your technology is disastrous without perfect handling, your technology is disastrous.

[JumpCrisscross]

> your technology is disastrous without perfect handling, your technology is disastrous

Did we watch the same miniseries? Chernobyl went beyond gross negligence. To say nothing of perfection. In the reactor design, in its operation and in post-crisis management.

[ncmncm]

No, it was absolutely typical gross negligence, with unfortunately outsized consequences. Fukushima was exactly equal negligence, with absolutely expected consequences.

[rootusrootus]

They didn't need perfect handling, just halfway competent.

But since the rest of the world doesn't build reactors of that type, and never built any without even a containment building AFAIK, it's not really applicable to modern nuclear power plant designs.

[Manuel_D]

The Chernobyl miniseries greatly distorted the impact of the meltdown. They cited the "bridge of death" where everyone supposedly died. In reality there are zero known deaths among people who watched the meltdown from that overpass, and there's even interviews with people who were there. They cited a death estimate of 60,000 when reputable sources estimate 200-1,700 deaths.

[ncmncm]

False. Cancer rates downwind are sharply elevated.

[Manuel_D]

Credible estimates do include increases in cancer, especially thyroid cancer. That is captured in the estimates of ~1,700. The 60,000 estimates shared by Netflix are not regarded as credible.

[goodpoint]

Nuclear in inherently vulnerable to politics, mismanagement and attempts at cover-up. As it happened in Fukushima as well as Chernobyl.

Because it's centralized, quite isolated from the public eye and with the potential to cause invisible environmental impact.

[heretogetout]

The ascendancy of wind and cheap natural gas probably had a greater effect, considering the miniseries is only a couple years old.

[trashtester]

I suppose now that some of the sources of such gas is being cut, those French nuclear plants will be extremely profitable for a while.

[adrianN]

Or perhaps the reasons are economical. Recently nuclear construction projects became a lot more expensive and took a lot longer than initially planned.

[anonporridge]

Some of those economical problems are burdened on the nuclear industry because of political problems.

For example, because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with. If the political climate lead to burdening fossil fuel burners with costs to reduce their pollution and GHG emissions that directly and indirectly lead to orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear ever has, then nuclear might actually be price competitive.

As another example, since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US started in 1975, they have never, not once, approved the construction of a new nuclear site in the US. They've approved expansion of existing sites, but never a new one. In fact, it was a huge deal when the NRC approved the expansion of a site several years ago, for the first time in 30 years, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-license/nrc-a...

How much pain and death is the NRC ultimately responsible for for holding nuclear energy to such a high safety standard that it's been literally impossible to build a new site for almost 50 years? Because all that means, is that we've burned drastically more fossil fuel than necessary over the past 50 years.

Shame on the NRC and the US government for using irrational fear to protect the fossil fuel industry at the expense of nuclear energy. And shame on environmentalists for falling for the same trap and failing to think holistically and systemically.

[logifail]

> because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with

"The researchers start out with a historic analysis of plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim. The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent—and that's not considering the financing costs of the construction delays [..] while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor [...] In the end, the conclusion is that there are no easy answers to how to make nuclear plant construction more efficient. And, until there are, it will continue to be badly undercut by both renewables and fossil fuel."[0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

[ncmncm]

The cost overruns are inherent in the process. Actual cost is actual cost.

Really, actual cost is much more than reported cost, because disaster insurance and decommissioning are always omitted from cost accounting.

[kwere]

scale matter expecially with brand new designs and constructions teams/tecnologies

[Retric]

The reasons are economic. France has been heavily subsidizing nuclear for years and can swap to cheaper alternatives for less money.

It’s not that nuclear is any worse, it’s just that the alternatives got better.

[anonporridge]

Wind and solar got better, but it seems fundamentally problematic to me to suggest that those are the alternatives to nuclear. They're not.

Fossil fuel is the alternative to nuclear (and possibly battery supported wind/solar) as the base load. Fossil fuels are fundamentally cheaper because they can more easily avoid paying the cost of their negative externalities than nuclear can. If we could actually internalize the negatives of fossil fuel burning (i.e. by carbon tax) then nuclear might actually be the most economical option for the base load with solar and wind picking up the slack.

[Retric]

Even with that line of thinking, France was well past the point of using Nukes for base load power.

France had nuclear capacity factors around 70% when America and much of the worlds nuclear power plants where closer to 90%. It physically worked, but dramatically increased production cost per KWH.

Assuming they cut back to 30% or even 40% of all electricity being supplied by nuclear that’s still a significantly reduction.

[ncmncm]

Renewables + storage is the alternative to nukes. And, there is simply no contest. Nukes have been left far behind.

[cycomanic]

According to perceptions and advertising about nuclear we should have unlimited power and everything from our cars to our stoves would be running of nuclear. All this should have been possible with just a containers worth of nuclear waste (experts in the 50s,60s seriously said operating a whole country of nuclear would result in maybe a ton of nuclear waste).

Nuclear completely undelivered on this promise. Tschernobyl was just the nail in the coffin.

On top of that has the nuclear industry been one of the strongest lobbying groups against wind and solar, mainly to protect their investments. I would argue on the whole we would have been much further in terms of renewable energy if it wasn't for the nuclear industry.

[pydry]

If something cant operate without lavish subsidies it automatically becomes political.

E.g. Bill Gates' nuclear startup would be dead in the water without its subsidies. That makes it political.

[BenoitP]

6 + an additional 8 are being planned at the moment. It is still dependent on legislative elections (starting this weekend), and on the EU energy taxonomy (currently going final rounds in the EU parliament)

Both should be sort of ok, fingers crossed.

But this is only replacement. If we're serious and want to reduce iron ore with hydrogen for our steel needs, and use the same electrolytic hydrogen for fertilizers, we would need to build about 50 of them.

The technology is there, but yes, it is more of a political issue in France as well.

[adrianN]

France has over fifty nuclear plants, most of them older than 40 years. You probably want to replace most of them in the next twenty years or so. Since building one can easily take a decade or two from planning to power output, you would want to have a couple of dozen in the planning stage right now if you expect to continue producing the same amount of power. Since only about a third of France's primary power consumption is satisfied by nuclear, realistically they'd need to drastically increase the number of reactors in the next decades to reach climate goals.