France bets on more nuclear power in face of Europe energy crisis

https://www.ft.com/content/d06500e2-7fd2-4753-a54b-bc16f1faadd8

96 145 5 years ago

chefkoch7• 5 years ago

In an other article is mentioned that the new reactors will have 300MW capacity, so 6 new reactors will replace 2 old ones that are due to be shut down.

cl0ckt0wer• 5 years ago

Maybe making a bunch of smaller ones is cheaper/faster/safer?

maeln• 5 years ago

Yes it's the plan. The idea is to use small and modular reactor.

https://www.usinenouvelle.com/editorial/pourquoi-les-mini-re...

emn13• 5 years ago

From the article:

"Macron’s proposed six new “mini-reactors” run on technology that is billed to be less powerful but also less complex to produce and run than conventional reactors. Industry analysts say they help to keep France’s industrial competitiveness given that prototypes are already being developed in China, Russia, the US and Japan."

phtrivier• 5 years ago

According to this [1], the strategy is twofold:

* replace the oldest massive plants with EPRs (hoping that the construction of the next ones will be less chaotic than the first two in England and Northen France) to maintain domestic production capacity

* build expertise on small modular reactors for exports and additional capacity where it make sense.

And interesting challenge will be to make SMRs safe enough to sell them to "post-developing" countries without any experience of nuclear-monitoring.

Also, the whole "nuclear is both a long term matter that requires multi-decade planning AND an electoral hot-button in France that is sure to split the country in two unreconcilable block every five years" thing.

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2021/10/07/nucleaire-...

_n_b_4• 5 years ago

France’s oldest operating reactors are in the 900 MWe range, so more like 3. Their newer fleet is 1300 and 1450 (now 1500) MWe, plus the 1600 MWe EPR under construction at Flamanville.

The 300 MWe NuWard really only makes sense as an export product, even if they build a couple in France. Framatome and EDF are working on an EPR-2 that is meant to be more efficient and inexpensive to build, and I hope that means it will be a bit scaled down from the EPR, which is frankly too large for many electric grids, and takes far too long to construct.

yodelshady4• 5 years ago

Makes a sort of sense.

No one in the private sector has much faith that any decade-long giga-reactor project (in the West) will come to fruition, let alone the multiple projects needed to leverage assembly-line economies.

A rejigged submarine reactor already has those economies, and might have a better chance of producing profit within five years.

toyg6• 5 years ago

It should be noted that nuclear is a significant export business for France, their companies routinely bid for contracts to build new plants elsewhere (UK etc). This is probably a significant factor in Macron's steering, considering the hunger for economic growth post-Covid.

_n_b_4• 5 years ago

I commented more below, but you’re exactly right. This is an export product.

shapefrog12• 5 years ago

Basically a model home to show prospective buyers. France also makes a decent amount of money exporting its excess electricity.

An existing nuclear site, with permits, security and likely communitity support is a great place to retire some old and build some new reactors.

reacharavindh3• 5 years ago

Not a snark, but a genuine question - Have we figured out what to do with the spent nuclear fuel yet?

What are the options and how bad/risky are they versus the impending climate change problem?

google234123• 5 years ago

I don’t know, how about in the 1,083,206,916,846 cubic kilometers of earth and rock under our feet that already holds 40 trillion tons of uranium?

Or we could set aside a 1km square plot of uninhabitable desert to store it above ground.

Or we could just spread it around in a few different places like we do today.

_n_b_4• 5 years ago

We’ve known what to do with nuclear waste for a very long time. In the US at least, its more a question of politics and funding.

Basically, we can:

* Bury all of it (deep geological repository, bore holes)

* Reprocess fuel, take out the remaining U and/or built-up Pu, and then dispose of the small amount of fission products remaining

* Keep storing it in casks at plant sites or regionally consolidated ISFSIs (like [1])

All options are feasible; the first seems to be cheaper. Nobody seems to want a geological repository for nuclear waste in their backyard, even if it’s quite safe.

[1] https://holtecinternational.com/products-and-services/hi-sto...

ThePhysicist3• 5 years ago

In Germany, nuclear waste from one of the first storage sites that was deemed "safe" in the 60s already needs to be recovered at great cost[1]. Sticking a few million tons of nuclear waste into the ground and hoping it will never come into contact with ground water is not a great plan IMHO. That stuff has the potential to render drinking water reserves unusable for millenia, so no wonder no one wants that in their own backyard. And storing it above ground seems quite difficult too judging by the issues in Fukushima and Chernobyl. Even Tepco couldn't come up with a better solution for some of the waste than "Let's drain it into the ocean where it'll be diluted".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

TomGullen• 5 years ago

Burying it seems to make sense and I know it’s done a lot - but is there any risk it would be crushed and leak? I mean a once in a 10,000 year event. And if it does leak, what would the consequences be?

reacharavindh3• 5 years ago

If burying it and hoping that we figure it out in the future is our best option, I’d say we haven’t figured out the problem just yet. I was hoping that I was out of the tech loop and that there was some new way of storing them “safely” for a few years until they are no harm anymore.

Consideriour examples of Fukushima, Chernobyl and such, why do we keep thinking we would do better in the future with this problem. If anything humanity is not to be trusted with making decisions for the greater good (just look at how all first world countries hoarded COVID vaccines in a protectionist, short sighted way).

sofixa6• 5 years ago

Regarding your last point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

cycomanic2• 5 years ago

Regarding 1. so far several of the bury all of it projects have had significant issues (water ingress etc.) Things are definitely not as straight forward as you make it out to be.

Reprocessing will produce lots of low to moderately radioactive waste which also has to be stored.

And the 3rd solution is not really a long time solution, nobody can confirm the safety for a 100 years let alone several 1000.

ryathal• 5 years ago

You forgot option 4. drop it into the subduction zone in the ocean.

This and your first option aren't super popular in part because the waste itself isn't exactly waste and has valuable parts that could be extracted and no one wants to make that too hard to recover later.

enaaem2• 5 years ago

Global warming effects are global, non-linear and there are still many unknowns, which makes it more riskier. Nuclear waste is only local and the harm is much better known. Also nuclear energy is anti-fragile (more disasters means saver plants).

The risks of nuclear energy is far more favourable than global warming. Because of potential catastrophic outcomes of climate change I think we need to diversify our bets and include nuclear energy in our portfolio.

reacharavindh3• 5 years ago

I agree that we need to diversify our power bets. However, it is prudent to evaluate our options and if necessary push one option over the other if we know the other has severe problems kicked into the future. For example, we incentivise Solar + Wind a lot more than we do already if the safety risk from Nuclear waste is too high.

vixen992• 5 years ago

As NASA explains, evidence for warming is via globally averaged parameters but some locations are getting cooler and some are getting warmer. Thus 'global warming effects' are not in fact global.

Maakuth2• 5 years ago

Geological disposal is about to go into production in Finland: https://www.posiva.fi/en/index/finaldisposal/geologicalfinal...

yodelshady4• 5 years ago

Reprocessing has been mostly blocked by the US due to proliferation concerns, but it reduces the problem enormously, since you then have new fuel plus some very nasty waste that decays on more human-friendly timescales.

For reference, the amount of the very nasty waste produced by a lifetime's electricity demand for an average European citizen (so you probably want to multiply by 2 or 3 for future usage), immobilised in glass, is about the size of a hockey puck. A very deadly hockey puck mind, a kill-you-from-twenty-paces hockey puck, but a solid hockey puck.

You know what we haven't figured out? How to even re-concentrate the several tonnes of dispersed waste product fossil fuels put into the atmosphere for the same number of kWh, not as an accident but as part of normal operations, and that's currently wreaking havoc everywhere.

Andrew_nenakhov• 5 years ago

I'm delighted to see that at least somewhere people are sane enough not to phase out nuclear energy. (I'm looking at you, Germany)

karlkloss2• 5 years ago

That's because Angela Merkel is a physicist. Unlike other politicians around the world, she actually knows the risks.

Fckd• 5 years ago

how come she does'nt know the impact buring coal has on the environmnet?

yodelshady4• 5 years ago

Ukraine, the site of the probably the worst nuclear accident in history and a prime food producer, is suffering enormously from desertification due to burning fossil fuels.

If that's her calculation, she needs to redo it.

shapefrog12• 5 years ago

Which is why she is pro nuclear. The physicist in her reversed that position when it was a choice of being elected or being kicked out of office.

Physicists like power as much if not more than politicians.

shapefrog12• 5 years ago

But they have that beautiful clean coal.

vixen992• 5 years ago

And that wonderful reliance on Russia.

rndgermandude9• 5 years ago

Before you continue to so giddily bash Germany, I would consider that the US in 2020 generated 60.3% of electrical energy from fossil fuels (19.3% of the total from "clean" coal, 40.3% was "clean" natural gas), 19.7% from nuclear, 19.8% from renewables[1].

Germany in 2020 had a mix of 36.0% from fossil fuels (24.3% of the total from "clean" coal, 11.7% from "clean" gas), 12.6% from nuclear, and 51.4% renewables[2].

Sure, I am not happy that Germany continues to burn so much fossil fuel either, but suggesting that Germany is particularly bad because it doesn't do as much nuclear is just not based in reality.

PS: In absolute numbers, the US produced 774 TWh of electrical energy using coal in 2020, Germany produced 118 TWh. That's 2.35 TWh per million people for the US, 1.41 TWh per million people in Germany. Or expressed yet differently, the US produced 1.67x the energy from coal per capita than Germany.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

[2] https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

joachim4• 5 years ago

The Green party in France is as divided on this question as in Germany. The current impulse is led by the current center-right government. Germany, with the same kind of government, decided to go all in for gaz (mainly from Russia).

rndgermandude9• 5 years ago

Natural gas (from Russia mostly, as you point out) was "only" 11.7% of the electric energy production in Germany in 2020.

rswskg• 5 years ago

But they've got an interconnector! With..somewhere.

Maakuth2• 5 years ago

http://archive.today/Kt8on gets you past the paywall

mem0r1• 5 years ago

Excellent news, hopefully other European countries will follow that example. Especially Germany should immediately rethink and stop phasing out their remaining operational nuclear power plants.

dsq• 5 years ago

Nuclear power has some issues which need to be addressed on the political and social level as well as the technological. Waste disposal, proliferation, safety. However, looking forward, it is hard to see any competition as a robust, always available, all weather, conpact, baseline power source. This is especially true if climate change degrades solar and wind farm performance by disrupting weather patterns.

i_am_proteus3• 5 years ago

France reprocesses spent fuel, already has the bomb, and has one of the best safety records of any operator, with no serious accidents.

Nuclear is more expensive comparing watts to watts, but Europe is learning the hard way that, without useful storage (the situation today), more than one watt nominal renewable generating capacity is necessary to reliably replace one watt from a thermal plant.

toyg6• 5 years ago

one of the best safety records of any operator, with no serious accidents.

Yeah, they make sure to do the dirty stuff on Pacific atolls, far from prying eyes.

mr_grumpy_pants• 5 years ago

Over the decades that the French (and other European nations) have been using said nuclear power, how have they been dealing with waste disposal, proliferation and safety? I do not ever recall the French having a safety problem.

pfdietz6• 5 years ago

None of those are the real issues with nuclear. The real issue is that it's too expensive. And no, it's not too expensive because of unnecessary regulations.

Jensson• 5 years ago

Environmentalists thinks it is too expensive to save the environment so they argue we should burn coal? I doubt that.

wiz21c• 5 years ago

France has heavily invested in nuclear power in the last 60 years. And nuclear in France is extremely costly (budget overruns, etc). So they desperately need someone with money to be able to go on with nuclear energy...

(but well, I much prefer more (safe, not the old junk plant 40km from where I live) nuclear power than inhaling the particles emitted by burned coal).

lopis• 5 years ago

Of course they do. They have a tight grip on most fuel mines from their previous colonies, where they exploit workers and the countries economy to keep energy prices low. [1]

I think nuclear can be part of a healthy energy diet, but not at the expense of less privileged countries.

[1] https://www.mo.be/en/opinie/france-destroys-north-niger-will...

bettysdiagnose5• 5 years ago

That's not necessarily why though is it. You've elevated it unilaterally and without justification to the Singular Cause, with a nice use of "of course" to really hammer it home. It's poor form.

Bayart• 5 years ago

Uranium procurement is diversified and more comes from Kazakhstan and Canada than Niger.

It's fine confronting Areva, but pretending French energy policy is derivative of an African agenda is uninformed at best.

fguerraz3• 5 years ago

I recommend you read (in French, sorry) "L'homme qui en savait beaucoup trop" by Marc Eichinger.

Gwypaas2• 5 years ago

Does anyone have real source or more information regarding the cost of the steam side of a nuclear power plant? Combined Cycle Gas has taken over due to the easy mechanical energy from the Brayton cycle reducing the size of the steam side but it would be nice to see the some actual data on the costs instead of Hacker News level certainty of "The number I typically hear is that it's $1-2W to build"

For example this top comment from "Activists who embrace nuclear power (newyorker.com)" talks about it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213984

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, and environments opposition. There are plenty of climate hawks that support nuclear too. It's all excessive costs.

They briefly mention the cooling retrofits for Diablo Canyon in San Lui Obispo, but they don't mention that they bids from Bechtel to simply build a modern cooling system were all billions of dollars of expense. Just the cooling system is more expensive than alternatives.

And this is a trend we will see in the future. For primary generation of electrons, steam based thermodynamic cycles are pretty much obsolete. The number I typically hear is that it's $1-2W to build, say, a cooling system for coal steam. A nuclear plants cooling is pretty much identical. Solar and wind are going to undercut that cost very soon.

So the name of the game is now storage. Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal.

The best estimate of what the cheapest possible future grid looks like is: solar/wind capacity at 4x of total demand (thermal generators are roughly at 2x on the current grid), with 3-4 days of storage. This translates to world with abundant energy, at certain times, that's generated at zero marginal cost. There are still lots of transmission costs however. The future of energy is all about spatial and temporal arbitrage of renewable electrons.

GlennS• 5 years ago

Seconded, that's a really interesting comment and I'd love to here more about it.

Factorium• 5 years ago

Not as much of an issue in Europe, where the waste heat can be used for district heating, where there is plenty of water, and generally lower temperatures.

tlocke7• 5 years ago

The fact is that nuclear is extremely expensive, and only gets built where there's huge government subsidy. The subsidy that renewables get pales in comparison to nuclear subsidy. Take the UK for example. Here we have a relatively free market in electricity generation. It's been possible for decades for a private company to build a nuclear power station, but nobody has. The only ones planned or built have enormous subsidies where the government has run roughshod over the free market. Nuclear just doesn't make economic sense.

bettysdiagnose5• 5 years ago

Nuclear energy is only relatively expensive because we don't price the cost of global warming, environmental degradation and air pollution into fossil fuels at all. It's a market failure, but not of nuclear energy.

tlocke7• 5 years ago

Nuclear may or may not beat coal, but the competition is with renewables. Nuclear is far, far more expensive than renewables.

chefkoch7• 5 years ago

With renewables already cheaper than nuclear wouldn't that only make renewables more cheaper that fossile fuels.

sofixa6• 5 years ago

Nuclear is expensive yes, not least because all decomissioning and cleanup costs are included in the price, which can't be said of any other power generation method. It also has an incredibly long lifespan ( decades, there are literally nuclear power plants constructed in the 1950s still operating today), and private companies tend to think much more short term than that. So yes, government subsidies are needed

chefkoch7• 5 years ago

Nuclear is expensive yes, not least because all decomissioning and cleanup costs are included in the price,

Where do you live that these costs are included in the price?

detritus• 5 years ago

In the UK, Rolls Royce is leading an industrial consortium to change that dynamic: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-on-t...

yodelshady4• 5 years ago

That the same UK that almost constantly pulls in 2 GW of French nuclear, 16 GW of gas, and - if the cable to France breaks - coal at > £ 200 MWh, in a totally unremarkable September, not counting the gas used for heating which lead to several energy companies going bust because of a wind shortfall?

Incidentally, look up the radionuclide emissions of a coal (or even heavy oil) plant, such as the one used when the wind stopped blowing. They're literally only allowed because the radionuclide standards applied to fission aren't applied to coal.

fguerraz3• 5 years ago

And we all know how it's going to work from a financial point of view in Emmanuel Macon's world:

The projects will be funded with public debt (either directly or by providing state-backed loans that not be paid back for the most part), the profits will be private, and if a company fails, we will save their arse with public money again. Decommissioning and the long terms effects will also be left to the imagination of the reader, I mean, for taxpayers to pay.

Don't get me wrong here, this is not a rant against nuclear power, which is the least bad source of energy we have at the moment, this is a rant about France's neo-liberal tunnel vision that even the USA has been steering away from in the past decade.

sofixa6• 5 years ago

What? EDF, the company that operates the nuclear power plants and sells the electricity, is majority state owned. Full cleanup and decomissioning costs are always included upfront in new nuclear projects, and are a part of the electricity price calculated for the plant.

fguerraz3• 5 years ago

Ever heard of project Hercules? It basically consist of chopping off EDF in bite-size pieces to satisfy the appetites of the European commission on competition and the free market.

To some extent that has already been done, with the "old" fully state-owned EDF having been chopped into Enedis and EDF, and this will continue.

Stating that "Full clean-up and decommissioning costs are always included upfront in new nuclear projects" is problematic considering that it has never been done, and the cost of storing by-products is made extraordinarily opaque with a combination of private actors (Orano for example) that are ridden with corruption issues. Also, it is just completely wrong that the cost of electricity takes all this into account.

Let's say that there is a lot of debate around the issue :)

cycomanic2• 5 years ago

Regarding the full cleanup and decommissioning costs essentially they are significantly underfunding the costs https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear-idUKKCN0VP...

bigbaguette• 5 years ago

It's been a few years the government wanted to decouple the debt laden infrastructure and the retail parts (Hercule plan). Keep the former state-owned so that it can front the upcoming heavy investments and sell the retail activities to the private sector.

fredestine2• 5 years ago

good. at least one decision that france won't regret. I wonder if we will also see Japan reap the fruits of going for hydrogen vs the electric zealots of automobile. my bet is yes they will and pretty soon 5-10years.

fredestine2• 5 years ago

let's not forget that it is a bet that will never play for the wealth of the french citizen. While most of the country is relying on nuclear energy and produce more than enough energy, the cost for a french person is around 50% more than American. Because electricity prices are European-based... once again the proof that european nations are only sovereign to the extent of what Germany decides.

drumhead• 5 years ago

French Nuclear energy has bailed out Europe when then the wind isnt blowing more often than not. They generate about 45GW on average from nuclear and its constant and pretty reliable. A big chunk of that, maybe 10-15 GW is for export, primarily to the UK, Germany and Italy. The fuel is relatively cheap so they can run their reactors flat out and sell at any price. Its also one of the reasons why they have one of the lowest carbon emmission rates for a major economy in the world.

France bets on more nuclear power in face of Europe energy crisis

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