[forty]

Funny story I like to tell here when nuclear chat come up: this summer (in France) they had to stop some nuclear plant because of the heat, which was causing the river used to cool the reaction to over heat. Right when people needed plenty of electricity for A/C. At least solar was there and working at it's best when we needed it ^^ (this is just for trolling the "renewable are not there when we need it" discourse ;) )

Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy. But not matter what we do, we should target using less energy, because the only clean energy is the one we don't have to produce. I think that's the thing people miss (volontarily I think) when they answer anti nuclear discourse. Insulating homes and and designing cities so that people don't have to use cars, rather than producing more and more nuclear reactors doesn't seem dumb to me, no matter what's your opinion on nuclear itself.

[p2detar]

Germany and Belgium’s net electricity imports from France for 2024 are 27 TWh, which dwarf anything imported from Germany to France. [0]

If anything, this only showed that renewables and nuclear actually work very well together and relying on just one of both is shortsightedness and bad planing.

0 - https://www.rte-france.com/actualites/france-battu-record-ex...

[forty]

I don't disagree with this point of view. Then the debate remain: should we (France) create more nuclear power plants now, or invest in reducing energy consumption and adding more renewables to the mix.

[StopDisinfo910]

France was a net exporter of electricity all summer so no idea of what you are talking about. Slowing down some nuclear plants due to this kind of external condition is fully expected. They are not stopped by the way just slowed down. Nuclear is modulable.

People barely use A/C in France by the way.

> Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy

Storage is a short term solution. Batteries are ok to manage intra-day variation, two days at most. Long term storage of electricity plainly doesn't exist. Saying some storage solution will somehow at some point solve the issue of intermittency is at best wishful thinking, at worst a dramatic lack of risk management.

Before someone asks how China is doing it, I will answer the question: they are not. Despite China being much larger and thus being able to somehow compensate variation by having more production sites, they are using battery storage for short term variation but have to rely on expensive and polluting small thermal power plants when energy is lacking. It's a stop gap while they build a ton of nuclear power plants.

[forty]

People do use A/C more and more in France for obvious reasons, even in the northern part (it has been the trend in the south already for a while now).

I'm not sure what I said is incompatible with being a net exporter? There was a lot of sun and heat, they had to shutdown some nuclear power plants, but the overall electricy production was doing fine, because they did not have to shutdown all the plants (but how about in a few years with even hotter weather?) and obviously solar was doing well.

And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years. Personally my intuition is that more distributed / local energy and also which doesn't have to rely on a state monopoly is better and more resilient (ask Ukraine) so I'd put my money on storage.

[StopDisinfo910]

> And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years.

Things don’t magically stop at some point. Not in 2030, not in 2050, not even when we reach net zero.

The question now is do we think it’s easier to reach and sustain net zero using a grid composed of renewable which we have no idea how to scale, don’t know how to manage and have no good solution for the inter-seasonal variation or using nuclear for which we already know how to do all that and we just need to scale up construction.

Well, personally, I think the rational answer is clearly obvious.

[forty]

You choose to underline the issues of renewables (which are real) and to ignore the ones of nuclear, some of them I mentioned in my previous message, which indeed makes the choice easy and obvious. Taking into account all the parameters requires more head scratching.