not this again…
sure nuclear WAS fine, french power plants are getting old, can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves and regularly have major accidents. source (german)
in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.
also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct
Don’t forget they have been basically stealing the required Uranium from African Sahel countries like Niger for decades.
Kazakhstan: 30%
Niger: 25%
Canada: 20%
Australia: 15%
Russia: 10%
And France is blocking importing solar energy from Spain. Also France has to do some shenanigans in Africa to secure their uranium supply.
Sure nuclear is far better than fossil fuels in terms of global warming, but it has similar geopolitical problems to the oil industry. It makes sense to go to solar and wind, but there’s a nuclear industry that’s doing the same kinds of things the oil industry does to block it.
deleted by creator
french power plants are getting old
Most of them still have 30+ years of life in them
can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves
Not this again… French nuclear plants has not being stopped because they can’t handle heatwaves, that’s plain bullshit, but because of ecological precaution, which on top of that, seems to be useless
and regularly have major accidents
Also plain bullshit
That explains a lot of you take your sources from anti-nuclear organizations
in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.
It’s not the age of wind and solar. We’re still in the age of coal (35% of electricity) and gas (22,5%). If we talk about energy at whole, it’s even worse : 30% is petrol, coal 26% and gas 23%. If you think that solar and wind will stay cheap when everybody will compete for the large amounts of metal and other sources needed to build them, and when we will run out of petrol to mine and produce them all, you’re lying to yourself. Nuclear in comparison require very little resource to build and to operate them.
And that’s without taking into account a basic fact: we don’t have enough room to build enough STEPs and we don’t have enough resources to build enough batteries to run entire countries on solar and wind. Looking at costs in 2026 is just meaningless when we’re actually talking about science fiction.
also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct
Another bullshit: EDF has been making billions of benefits out of nuclear every year for decades (except in 2022). They even made 10+ billions of euros of net benefits the last 3 years.
And EDF is subsidizing France, not the contrary: the State forced EDF to take a huge part of the cost of the Bouclier Tarifaire, and EDF paid billions of euros of dividends to the State as well
i’m just trying to be brief: the amount of space for golfing far exceeds what is currently being used for wind and solar combined. Space is not an issue and not a real concern. Every free roof can handle solar panels, it is essentially unused space and it bothers no one.
Also what’s wrong with using an activist site as a source if their information is factual?
then the heatwave thingy: those “precautions” will happen several times. Rivers are getting so dry that european countries now lifted the sunday-driving ban for trucks because shipping isn’t reliable.
In summers we produce so much electricity that the price per kwh goes negative atp and we actually have to turn off power plants remotely (which is easy to set up, i do this for a living) - if we build enough infrastructure to have overproduction in winters and enough storage we’re set.
idk why people get so defensive and emotional over nuclear if there’s just cleaner and cheaper options on hand
sure nuclear WAS fine, french power plants are getting old, can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves and regularly have major accidents.
Plus: Building nuclear power plants requires huge amounts of concrete. And making huge amounts of concrete requires extremely huge carbon emissions.
did you calculate how much gram of CO2 that is per kWh actually?
Which unfortunately now shuts down because the reactors cannot cope with the heatwaves. Turns out that no river = no cooling = no energy production.
False,
Reactor production is throttled down to preserve the river environment, not because they cannot cool themselves. Only 18% reduction on the worst event.
Dismissing the biggest low carbon energy producer because 1970 engineers did not account for the unknown temperature extremes 20 years after the predicted lifespan of the reactor is silly.
yeah and until recently they imported all their uranium from states like niger which is why it took till 2023 for niger to kick out the last french troops from its country.
which is interesting because solar became the cheapest form of electricity in 2020 and france let go of niger shortly after that.
How dependent is France on Niger’s uranium?
The military coup in Niger has raised concerns about uranium mining in the country by the French group Orano, and the consequences for France’s energy independence.
You mean the same nuclear power plants they need to shut down every other week because the river water they use as cooling intake is too warm to actually cool them down? They’re pretty useless nowadays.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/france-nuclear-reactors-shut-record-heatwave
You should read what you link, it’s the opposite. They are actually paused to not heat the river up.
…That they have to shut down all the time because of droughts. And they basically need to rebuild half of it, because the maintenance cost is so high, it is constantly pushed into the future.
Few emissions? Yeah. Good? Nope.
Still massive exporter of electricity. I wonder how much coal and gas would burn in Europe if French npp weren’t there.
They have to export because you can’t just shut down a Nuclear Reactor. So they sell it for cheap to other countries. It would be more expensive for them to shut down a reactor because they produce too much. The other countrys gladly take the cheap energy. But france doesn’t really make profit with this, it’s just less expensive for them.
Lots of people shilling for Big Oil in this comment section
You just have to expect it. I wear bug spray.
Yeah, everyone support your local mom and pops nuclear power plant. Best if they run on 100% home grown uranium
Ourworldindata is one of the biggest nuclear shills there is. I see a lot people shilling for real renewables in the comments here.
Too bad this also slows down their renewable energy projects, which would make it cheaper. But Nuclear Reactors + renewables is a bad combination. Nuclear Reactors can’t be adjusted to renewable energy, because you can’t just shut them down when the renewables producing lots of cheap energy. Nuclear Plants always have to keep running, which is also expensive.
France is already doing just that
As I said, Nuclear Plants are slowing down their expansion of renewables. No idea why people downvote me.
Unfortunately, thanks to the anti-nuclear lobby, we are in a situation where the current reactors will have to be shutdown before the new ones are available to take their place.
Yeah, the famous french anti-nuclear lobby. Those guys who control the french government with its nuclear weapons, who has also recently built a nuclear reactor. That government totally is controlled by the anti-nuclear lobby.
Or … maybe France tried upgrading its aging nuclear reactors with the new reactor in Flamanville, which went spectacular over budget? And debt ridden EdF simply has not the funds to build over 50 new reactors at 13 billion each?
