[nosianu]

See France and its maintenance issues with not just one but many of their power plants, accumulated over decades and now greatly contributing to the European energy problems. (https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/10/13/frances-nuclear-...)

Some issues I see are accountants, management, laziness, "somebody else's problem", etc. Those are businesses and they will try all the well-known ways to save money. Which the politicians will also encourage, because nuclear power will need to be justified continuously (like all other forms).

There also are water issues, not just river temperature (France, this summer), we also had a lot of European rivers with barely enough or not enough for most of the normal uses of those rivers this summer - and predictions are we'll have more such extremes. So, ensuring water supplies will be adequate at all times will become harder too, and much more expensive.

Not to mention that Russia - Rosatom - will again play a big role in Western European energy when it comes to nuclear. (https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2022/russias-multi-mill...)

Air plane and human space flight accidents are extremely rare but they still occur despite all the rules and regulations and the training and the many levels of precautions, but nuclear has to be even better.

[panick21_]

And France having maintenance issues is in large part because of the anti-nuclear campaign that increasingly started to attempt to move away from nuclear. For a while even in France they basically just wanted to run the reactors out and switch to renewables.

So the politics goes like this, cause maintenance delay, condemn nuclear for maintenance delay. Seriously, these delays are being handled in a reasonable time-frames and most of the reactors will be back when they are really needed.

Consider that with the age of these reactors, wind-farms would have to be mostly rebuilt to a larger degree.

Also, if we actually made progress on technology then we could have had moved on to air-cooled designs but sadly we can't have nice things.

[belorn]

> Not to mention that Russia - Rosatom - will again play a big role in Western European energy when it comes to nuclear.

Good thing that 1), nuclear fuel storage in europe tend to have almost decade long stockpiles, 2), there are plenty of alternative to Rosatom to buy nuclear fuel from, 3), nuclear fuel is fairly easy to import compared to massive amount of natural gas.

Sweden is only a stone throw away and they have nuclear fuel production that they sell as exports. They also acquired the design and patents to produce nuclear fuel that fit power plants from Rosatom. Those 20% of fuel that Russia sell is a solvable problem, but as with anything it would cost money, investments and a bit of time to ramp up production.