[cygx]

Even before the most recent maintenance period, there were problems: In 2019, French regulators had to ask industry to cut consumption by 1.5GW to keep the grid stable as utility frequency was dropping significantly [1]. That issue comes up basically every other winter, but so far, we've avoided catastrophic results.

[1] https://www.cre.fr/actualites/RTE-fait-appel-aux-industriels...

[troupo]

They asked to cut consumption because of nuclear power plants or because insufficient supply of electricity?

[cygx]

Insufficient supply in winter times due to electric heating, mostly. Nuclear power plants are relevant insofar that they (in particular the older generation of power plants) are bad at providing energy on-demand. So while everyone worries about Germany and the issues associated with variable availability of solar and wind power, there are also documented cases where Germany had to fire up its coal plants to meet nuclear posterchild France's electricity demands.

I used to read German online magazine Telepolis regularly. They've got a writer who advocates for renewable energy, hence I used to come across related articles every now and then.

[troupo]

> Nuclear power plants are relevant insofar that they (in particular the older generation of power plants) are bad at providing energy on-demand.

This is, of course, an easily verifiable lie.

During winter nuclear power plants already work at near 100% capacity. They can't give you more than 100%, other sources cannot meet demand, and somehow you blame nuclear.

[cygx]

> This is, of course, an easily verifiable lie.

It's not a lie, you just failed to get the point:

Assume, for the sake of the argument, that you have a power plant that always works at 100% capacity and cannot be shut off. To provide energy security, you would have to budget capacity to account for highest possible demand. But if you do so, you will over-produce electricity most of the time, and there are economic incentives against doing so.

> somehow you blame nuclear

I don't blame nuclear energy production, I blame an over-reliance on nuclear energy production.

[troupo]

Okay, you keep approaching this with a abias, false assumptions and false premises.

This is the last I'm going to say on the matter:

1. "Nuclear power plants ... are bad at providing energy on-demand."

This is a lie. All nuclear plants, at least in Europe, are required to increase and decrease their power output on demand.

"according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute." [1]

Daily. Between 50% and 100% of its rated power.

The lie that nuclear power cannot provide energy on demand is a lie that people keep perpetuating.

2. "for the sake of the argument... a power plant that always works at 100% capacity... I blame an over-reliance on nuclear energy production."

If your power plants always work at 100% capacity, it's a failure of planning, not of the plants.

It's amazing that you brought up Germany in one of the comments. It just goes to show how biases make a person completely blind/oblivious.

Germany has shut down its nuclear power plants. Now it needs to burn ungodly amounts of fossil fuels and import ungodly amounts of electricity every time there's a windless night [2]. Because they decided that renewables are enough, are over-relying on them, and made no plans for when they are not enough.

This is colloquially known as "fuck around and find out". Aka "you can't attribute the failure in general planning to the performance of a single actor".

Yes, France relies on nuclear power. And yet, they have done fuck all: they have neglected maintenance of their nuclear plants for decades, they didn't plan for increased electricity demand etc. Much like Germany with shutting down their plants: they never calculated the actual electricity needs etc.

But people like you keep saying things like "nuclear is bad at providing energy on demand" etc.

[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

[2] On the week when they celebrated shutting down their last reactor, there was a night when they had 0% solar production, and 0.2% wind production, both of which could be covered by just a single reactor from theos they had shut down.