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by esarbe 848 days ago
France is having massive problems operating their reactors and had to shut them down in summer the last few years.

It's also most expensive.

2 comments

> had to shut them down in summer the last few years

Yep. It's sad-funny — they had to shut down reactors because the cooling water was getting too hot. To be fair this seems to be environmental regulations and not the reactors themselves, but then again the water is from rivers and at some point you really grill the river.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Heatwave-forces-...

There's no cheaper stable source of electricity then existing nuclear power plant.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...

The only thing more expensive than nuclear — in these stats at least — is small-scale solar installations.

Btw, this widespread (but wrong) belief that nuclear is cheap stems from the fact that a lot of countries heavily subsidized their nuclear industry in order to gain know-how and/or materials for atomic weapon production. It's not even cost-covering at current energy prices without those subsidies.

The _existing_ is the important part.
Unfortunately, you cannot build an existing plant. You have to build a new one.
Funniest thing I've read this year so far, thanks ;D
You can do a lot of other stupid things, for example consider it EOL after very short time, like 40 years and close it though.
Nuclear power is just too expensive. Look at France - the have 80% or so nuclear and all of their power companies run at a loss and have to be subsidized. Meanwhile in Germany wind and solar make a pretty good complement and are cheaper, even with storage included, which is mostly provided by Switzerland and Austria.

It's just not worth the hassle.

Just need half a century of first construction and then amortizing the loans to get an existing paid off nuclear plant.
You need 0 years to construct an already existing plant, and would pay those loans either way.
Of course, the issue is what you do when the said plant is EOL or you need more capacity. Can't expand capacity using existing plants.
Everything is cheaper than nuclear, at this point.