[mech7654]

To be fair the french have had some massive problems with their fleet recently. There were issues discovered where (IIRC) a supplier that made pressure vessels used steel that was not of sufficient quality and covered it up for decades, only to be discovered recently- this required major downtime and expense. Other issues have resulted in lots of nuclear plant downtime in france as well recently.

[notyourwork]

Stuff like this should yield criminal charges.

[anonuser123456]

In France it does.

[_a_a_a_]

I heard almost exactly the same thing about Japanese reactors, are you sure you're remembering right, that it is definitely the French because it seems a bit of a coincidence

[MezzoDelCammin]

Nope, he's got that right. It's been a pretty major recurring story in the news in France through this autumn. I haven't really followed through the details, but the idea was that several reactors were down for a planned overhaul/maintenance for something like this (material defects) through the summer. As the delays ("nuclear projects are never on time") piled up story was "will they make it in time for winter". Pretty nail biting actually, specially if You add up to it the halt on Russian gas

[polotics]

The details: one tube on a safety backup system, so with a 0.1% chance of needing to be used, was shown to have the potential to corrode under strain ("corrosion sous contrainte") this led to all plants using that kind of tube being shut down for months because of extreme care. The irony being that this extreme care is keeping things extremely safe, but somehow in the news it comes out as "nuclear is unsafe". The reality is there are many chemicals plants with much more damaging issues, but much less regulations, and significant accidents over the yeras, often not as bad as Bhopal, but still toxic to neighbours, that somehow don't get to newsworthy...

[ben_w]

While I personally share the opinion that the standard that nuclear is held to is higher than it needs to be — on the basis of the old "deaths per TWh" chart — this standard leads to them being both expensive to build and run, and also to it being shut down for months making it unreliable.

I've noticed by trying that one cannot simply win a political argument by waving the banner of utilitarian ethics. (I'm hoping fusion can circumvent this, if anyone can even commercialise it; we shall see). Likewise, best to compare with other power plants rather than other industrial accidents, and not just because what happened in Bohpal (and its less newsworthy cousins) should not have happened.

[_a_a_a_]

> share the opinion that the standard that nuclear is held to is higher than it needs to be — on the basis of the old "deaths per TWh" chart

And if you ignore possible deaths from Chernobyl, how about the purely financial cost?

[ben_w]

Current $/MWh prices are high enough that, given current LiIon prices (and that LiIon is what we get even if we don't put in any effort to get cheaper alternatives given its widespread usage), I recommend people stop trying to make it happen and put their efforts elsewhere.

But my claim is, if Chernobyl hadn't Chernobyled, the $/MWh price would probably be lower.

I'm not making a specific claim that it would be cheap enough, though; I don't have enough relevant background to guess the magnitude.