New testing conducted at France's oldest PV system have shown that its solar modules can still provide performance values in line with what the manufacturers promised.
Uranium price has being multiplied by 7 in 2007, and France’s electricity, which were 70-80% nuclear at the time, didn’t see any increase in price. Uranium price is definitely not driving electricity price, because nuclear use so little resources and fuel, that’s one of its main appeal.
And 60+ years of french nuclear produced a 15 meters-wide cube of high level waste. This is what it looks like . Does that looks like some unsolvable issue to you?
What’s more, because of their low load factor and intermittency, they require oversized capacity, storage devices and redundancy, further increasing their footprint.
at the same or cheaper cost
Only if you don’t account for oversizing the capacity, the storage and redundancy induced by the wide adoption of solar and wind power.
No, because until we solve the storage issues with electricity. You need a reliable baseline power source in the grid. Solar has 0% cost effectiveness at night.
Nuclear is 100 times more environmentally friendly than coal. Even with the long term waste storage issues.
This has not being solved. There’s not a single country in this world that has managed to not rely on hydro, nuclear, fossils or importations for electricity generation.
Please provide those “studies and researches” that backup your claim, because a simple calculation shows that the world’s largest WWTP, Hongrin-Leman (100GWh in capacity and 480MW in power, over a 90km² basin) contains just 10% of the capacity needed and only 0.7% of the power required for a country like France to last a winter night (~70GW during ~14h of night).
So we’d need “only” 10 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of capacity, but 142 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of power. In other words, we’d need to flood at best 8.5x the surface area of Paris, and at worst the entire surface area of the Île de France department, home to 12 million inhabitants. And that’s just for one night without wind (which happens very regularly), assuming we rely on solar and wind power.
Then we need to find enough water and enough energy to pump it to fill the STEP completely in 10 hours of daylight, otherwise we’ll have a blackout the following night.
Wind and solar power cannot form the basis of a country’s energy production, because they are intermittent energies, and the storage needed to smooth out production is titanic. These energies rely on hydroelectricity, nuclear power and fossil fuels to be viable on a national scale.
We’ve basically solved the storage issues through about eighty different methods that have various applicability in different situations. They just need to be scaled up at this point.
It’s actually better. No traditional power plant can match demand exactly, and large amounts of power are wasted as a result. A wind+solar+storage solution can match demand very close. This means we don’t need to replace every GWh of coal and gas with a GWh of renewable. The lack of wasted power takes off a pretty big chunk.
No traditional power plant can match demand exactly, and large amounts of power are wasted as a result
Absolutely false. Power consumption is very stable and previsible, plants can react in minutes, and the surproduction is small enough to be stored or exported.
The French electricity system operator, RTE, provides all the information on this subject:
I brush it off because nuclear has exactly the same problem. Worse, actually. We know what happens when you build solar, wind, and storage: on average, things get built on time and in budget. We also know what happens when we build nuclear: it doubles its schedule and budget and makes companies go bankrupt. One is way easier to scale up than the other.
If all the paperwork was done and signed off today, there wouldn’t be a single GW of new nuclear produced in the US before 2030. Even optimistic schedules are running up against that limit.
React to demand in minutes? Cute. Because most energy storage works by being pulled by demand directly rather than reacting to it, things change almost instantly.
This is critical because it means we don’t have to replace a GW of fossil fuel generation with a GW of renewables. The difference between demand and supply all but disappears. You don’t have that for nuclear, though, because it doesn’t react that way. In fact, it’s preferred if they only provide baseload that never changes.
I brush it off because nuclear has exactly the same problem. Worse, actually. We know what happens when you build solar, wind, and storage: on average, things get built on time and in budget. We also know what happens when we build nuclear: it doubles its schedule and budget and makes companies go bankrupt. One is way easier to scale up than the other.
No, just no.
We know what happens when we build nuclear:
We invest 140 billion.
We build more than two reactors a year for 25 years.
By building up skills and an industry with projects, you can even put 1 plant and 4 reactors in the same place in less than 7 years from a vacant lot (Blayais power plant) .
We decarbonize almost all of its electricity in two decades.
It runs smoothly for more than 50 years.
You don’t rely on fossils and the dictatorships that sit on it anymore.
We become the biggest electricity exporter of Europe for decades, and the biggest of the world most of those years too
It’s called France.
We also know what happens when we want to do without nuclear when we don’t have hydro-electricity:
We invest two trillion of euros.
25 years later we have 60% renewables, but we’re still burning coal and gas.
so we are still one of the most polluting electricity in Europe
We’re always at least six years away to get out of coal.
We don’t have a date to get out of the gas because we have no idea how we’re going to build enough electricity storage to make renewable to work
Can you tell me how much green countries do you see which does not rely on hydro and/or nuclear?
The answer is: >!not. A. Single. One. Even after trillions of euros invested in it worldwide, not one country managed to reduce their electricity carbon print without nuclear or hydro.!<
If all the paperwork was done and signed off today, there wouldn’t be a single GW of new nuclear produced in the US before 2030. Even optimistic schedules are running up against that limit.
Why this arbitrary date? In five and a half years, there would be no power plant, but if you launch 15 1GW projects in parallel, maybe it will take 15 years to build because of legal recourse as well as a shortage of engineers/technicians because people have been told for 30 years that nuclear is Satan and we want to stop. But after 15 years you have 15GW of nuclear.
But how long before we find a solution for storage? How much will it cost? Is it even possible to store so much energy with our space constraints and physical resources?
The debates and even this thread are filled with “we could totally go 100% renewables with political will and investments”. No you could not, that’s called wishful thinking. In reality you can’t force your way through technological innovation by throwing money and gathering political will, or else we would skip renewables and go straight to nuclear fusion.
On thing that money and political will can help with, on the other hand, is to speed up and reducing costs to build nuclear. But somehow, you act like nuclear is inherently too slow to build, before an arbitrary date that you forget conveniently when we’re talking about renewable storage. It’s called hypocrisy and double standards.
React to demand in minutes? Cute. Because most energy storage works by being pulled by demand directly rather than reacting to it, things change almost instantly.
I just proved that your theory is wrong by bringing up empirical data gathered over a whole country, why do you keep insisting?
The great thing about nuclear power is that the real cost only comes after the power has been generated. How do you store the spent fuel cells and what do you do with the reactor when it can’t be used anymore. Just before that happens you spin the plant into its own company. When that company goes bankrupt the state needs to cover the cost, as it isn’t an option to just leave it out in the open.
Here’s all of Switzerland’s high level nuclear waste for the last 45 years. It solid pellets. You could fit the entire world’s US’ waste on a football field.
It’s not the greatest challenge mankind have faced.
Also want to point out, most of that is container, not spent fuel. The safety standards are so ridiculously high that they basically guarantee zero risk.
More people (per plant) are exposed to elevated levels of radiation due to coal power, and that’s not even including the health risk of all the other shit they release
According to Our World In Data (which claims to use the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy from 2023 as a data source), that waste is from producing around 70 TWh each year:
That only covers around a third of Switzerland’s energy consumption over those years. Furthermore, Switzerland is a small mountainous country with decent access to hydropower (making up around a third of its needs over the same years). They are not necessarily representative of the waste that would accumulate from a more agressive switch from fossil fuels to nuclear across the world (which is what we’re talking about, if I’m not mistaken).
France is about 10 times larger in surface area and according to the same source, consumed/produced over 1,000 TWh of nuclear energy each year:
And officially has still has no place to put the high-energy waste (source - in french), leaving it up to the plant’s owners to deal with it. There is an official project to come up with a “deep” geological storage facility, but no political will seems musterable to make that plan materialize beyond endless promises.
I should mention that I’m not super anti-nuclear, and I would certainly rather we focus on eliminating coal and oil power plants (and ideally natural gas ones as well) before we start dismantling existing nuclear reactors that are still in functioning order.
That being said, there are other problems with nuclear moving forwards besides waste management. The main one that worries me is the use of water for the cooling circuits, pumped from rivers or the sea. Not only do open cooling circuits have adverse affects on their surrounding ecosystems, as the planet gets warmer and the temperature swings during the hotter seasons become more pronounced, the power plants will become less efficient. The water going in will be at a higher temperature than it is today, and thus will absorb less energy from the nuclear reaction itself.
Overall, I don’t trust our current collective responsibility as a species to manage our current forms of nuclear production. Russia sent its own troops into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to dig trenches in contaminated soil last year, and they allegedly recognized last week that the Zaporizhzhia power plant is now “unsafe to restart” because of the military activity in the region.
The world has not experienced generalized warfare with nuclear power plants dotting the countryside; WW2 ended around a decade before the first nuclear power plants were up and running in the USSR, the UK, and the USA.
Not to mention how few European countries have access to uranium on their own soil/territory. Of course, most of the rare earth metals used in photoelectric panels and windmills aren’t found there either, but as least with “renewables” they are used once to make the machinery, not as literal fuel that is indefinitely consumed to produce power.
I don’t know enough about thorium-based reactors nor molten salt-based reactors to go to bat for them instead, but they seem like a more promising way for nuclear to remain relevant.
France made a record year last year, with 320TWh of nuclear power produced for a total of 434 TWh of electricity, while being the top exporter of electricity of Europe.
I don’t know how they got to 1000TWh of nuclear a year, I suspect weed.
In Germany, we’ve got a location with 47,000 cubic meters: https://www.bge.de/en/asse/
That requires some pretty tall stacking on that football field. Or I guess, you’re saying if you’d unpack it all and compress it?
Also, we really should be getting the nuclear waste out of said location, since there’s a known risk of contamination. But even that challenge is too great for us, apparently.
Mainly, because we don’t have any locations that are considered safe for permanent storage. It’s cool that Switzerland has figured it out. And that some hypothetical football field exists. But it doesn’t exist in Germany, and I’m pretty sure, Switzerland doesn’t want our nuclear waste either.
I mean, can you blame them? Why would anyone want toxic waste in their backyard? Not to mention that the search is mainly conducted by companies, which have a vested interest in not making all the issues transparent.
Having said that, I am not aware of the ‘scientists’ coming up with good suggestions either. Gorleben got hemmed and hawed around for the longest time, but its selection process was non-scientific from the start.
It’s genuinely not easy to find a location where anyone would be willing to claim that it will remain unaffected by geodynamic processes for millions of years. And we don’t have a big desert or some other unpopulated area where you could chuck it without political opposition, when it’s not 110% safe to do so.
Why would anyone want toxic waste in their backyard?
It’s not toxic, nor is it in their backyard.
Not to mention that the search is mainly conducted by companies, which have a vested interest in not making all the issues transparent.
What issues?
It’s genuinely not easy to find a location where anyone would be willing to claim that it will remain unaffected by geodynamic processes for millions of years.
Read your link: 47 000m³ of low and intermediate radioactive waste.
Low radioactive waste is objects (paper, clothing, etc…) which contain a small amount of short-lived radioactivity, and it mostly comes from the medical fields, not nuclear plants, so even if you phase out of nuclear, you’ll have to deal with it anyway.
This waste makes up for the vast majority (94% in UK for example) of the nuclear waste produced, and you can just leave it that way a few years, then dispose of it as any other waste.
Intermediate radioactivity waste is irradiated components of nuclear power plants. They are in solid form and do not require any special arrangement to store them as they do not heat up. This includes shorts and long-lived waste and represents only a small part of the volume of radioactive waste produced (4% in UK).
So you’re mostly dealing with your medical nuclear waste right here, and you can thank your anti-nuclear folks for blocking most of your infrastructure construction projects to store this kind of waste.
Wow, imagine where we’d be if Oil and Gas hadn’t convinced almost everyone that solar was never going to work well.
Imagine where we’d be if leftists embraced nuclear power instead of killing it off everywhere they could.
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You think if we take away 50 years of burning fossil fuels we’d be in “the same situation as we’re in now”?? Wtf are you smoking?
Uranium price has being multiplied by 7 in 2007, and France’s electricity, which were 70-80% nuclear at the time, didn’t see any increase in price. Uranium price is definitely not driving electricity price, because nuclear use so little resources and fuel, that’s one of its main appeal.
And 60+ years of french nuclear produced a 15 meters-wide cube of high level waste. This is what it looks like . Does that looks like some unsolvable issue to you?
deleted by creator
That’s false, solar and wind power consume considerably more resources than nuclear and therefore produce considerably more waste than nuclear power.
What’s more, because of their low load factor and intermittency, they require oversized capacity, storage devices and redundancy, further increasing their footprint.
Only if you don’t account for oversizing the capacity, the storage and redundancy induced by the wide adoption of solar and wind power.
No, because until we solve the storage issues with electricity. You need a reliable baseline power source in the grid. Solar has 0% cost effectiveness at night. Nuclear is 100 times more environmentally friendly than coal. Even with the long term waste storage issues.
deleted by creator
This has not being solved. There’s not a single country in this world that has managed to not rely on hydro, nuclear, fossils or importations for electricity generation.
deleted by creator
Please provide those “studies and researches” that backup your claim, because a simple calculation shows that the world’s largest WWTP, Hongrin-Leman (100GWh in capacity and 480MW in power, over a 90km² basin) contains just 10% of the capacity needed and only 0.7% of the power required for a country like France to last a winter night (~70GW during ~14h of night).
So we’d need “only” 10 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of capacity, but 142 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of power. In other words, we’d need to flood at best 8.5x the surface area of Paris, and at worst the entire surface area of the Île de France department, home to 12 million inhabitants. And that’s just for one night without wind (which happens very regularly), assuming we rely on solar and wind power.
Then we need to find enough water and enough energy to pump it to fill the STEP completely in 10 hours of daylight, otherwise we’ll have a blackout the following night.
Wind and solar power cannot form the basis of a country’s energy production, because they are intermittent energies, and the storage needed to smooth out production is titanic. These energies rely on hydroelectricity, nuclear power and fossil fuels to be viable on a national scale.
deleted by creator
We’ve basically solved the storage issues through about eighty different methods that have various applicability in different situations. They just need to be scaled up at this point.
It’s actually better. No traditional power plant can match demand exactly, and large amounts of power are wasted as a result. A wind+solar+storage solution can match demand very close. This means we don’t need to replace every GWh of coal and gas with a GWh of renewable. The lack of wasted power takes off a pretty big chunk.
“We totally can go to Mars, we have engines, they just need to be scaled up at this point”
Scaling up is almost the entirety of the problem that needs to be solved, you can’t just brush it aside like this.
Check my comment that shows the scale of the problem
Absolutely false. Power consumption is very stable and previsible, plants can react in minutes, and the surproduction is small enough to be stored or exported.
The French electricity system operator, RTE, provides all the information on this subject:
Real-time consumption and production by region
Real-time forecasting and consumption
I brush it off because nuclear has exactly the same problem. Worse, actually. We know what happens when you build solar, wind, and storage: on average, things get built on time and in budget. We also know what happens when we build nuclear: it doubles its schedule and budget and makes companies go bankrupt. One is way easier to scale up than the other.
If all the paperwork was done and signed off today, there wouldn’t be a single GW of new nuclear produced in the US before 2030. Even optimistic schedules are running up against that limit.
React to demand in minutes? Cute. Because most energy storage works by being pulled by demand directly rather than reacting to it, things change almost instantly.
This is critical because it means we don’t have to replace a GW of fossil fuel generation with a GW of renewables. The difference between demand and supply all but disappears. You don’t have that for nuclear, though, because it doesn’t react that way. In fact, it’s preferred if they only provide baseload that never changes.
No, just no.
We know what happens when we build nuclear:
It’s called France.
We also know what happens when we want to do without nuclear when we don’t have hydro-electricity:
It’s called Germany.
Take this [map] (https://app.electricitymaps.com/map)
Can you tell me how much green countries do you see which does not rely on hydro and/or nuclear?
The answer is: >!not. A. Single. One. Even after trillions of euros invested in it worldwide, not one country managed to reduce their electricity carbon print without nuclear or hydro.!<
Why this arbitrary date? In five and a half years, there would be no power plant, but if you launch 15 1GW projects in parallel, maybe it will take 15 years to build because of legal recourse as well as a shortage of engineers/technicians because people have been told for 30 years that nuclear is Satan and we want to stop. But after 15 years you have 15GW of nuclear.
But how long before we find a solution for storage? How much will it cost? Is it even possible to store so much energy with our space constraints and physical resources?
The debates and even this thread are filled with “we could totally go 100% renewables with political will and investments”. No you could not, that’s called wishful thinking. In reality you can’t force your way through technological innovation by throwing money and gathering political will, or else we would skip renewables and go straight to nuclear fusion.
On thing that money and political will can help with, on the other hand, is to speed up and reducing costs to build nuclear. But somehow, you act like nuclear is inherently too slow to build, before an arbitrary date that you forget conveniently when we’re talking about renewable storage. It’s called hypocrisy and double standards.
I just proved that your theory is wrong by bringing up empirical data gathered over a whole country, why do you keep insisting?
Imagine where we’d be if people didn’t automatically think nuclear power=Homer Simpson
The great thing about nuclear power is that the real cost only comes after the power has been generated. How do you store the spent fuel cells and what do you do with the reactor when it can’t be used anymore. Just before that happens you spin the plant into its own company. When that company goes bankrupt the state needs to cover the cost, as it isn’t an option to just leave it out in the open.
Privatise profit communalism cost.
world’sUS’ waste on a football field.It’s not the greatest challenge mankind have faced.
Also want to point out, most of that is container, not spent fuel. The safety standards are so ridiculously high that they basically guarantee zero risk.
More people (per plant) are exposed to elevated levels of radiation due to coal power, and that’s not even including the health risk of all the other shit they release
According to Our World In Data (which claims to use the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy from 2023 as a data source), that waste is from producing around 70 TWh each year:
That only covers around a third of Switzerland’s energy consumption over those years. Furthermore, Switzerland is a small mountainous country with decent access to hydropower (making up around a third of its needs over the same years). They are not necessarily representative of the waste that would accumulate from a more agressive switch from fossil fuels to nuclear across the world (which is what we’re talking about, if I’m not mistaken).
France is about 10 times larger in surface area and according to the same source, consumed/produced over 1,000 TWh of nuclear energy each year:
And officially has still has no place to put the high-energy waste (source - in french), leaving it up to the plant’s owners to deal with it. There is an official project to come up with a “deep” geological storage facility, but no political will seems musterable to make that plan materialize beyond endless promises.
I should mention that I’m not super anti-nuclear, and I would certainly rather we focus on eliminating coal and oil power plants (and ideally natural gas ones as well) before we start dismantling existing nuclear reactors that are still in functioning order.
That being said, there are other problems with nuclear moving forwards besides waste management. The main one that worries me is the use of water for the cooling circuits, pumped from rivers or the sea. Not only do open cooling circuits have adverse affects on their surrounding ecosystems, as the planet gets warmer and the temperature swings during the hotter seasons become more pronounced, the power plants will become less efficient. The water going in will be at a higher temperature than it is today, and thus will absorb less energy from the nuclear reaction itself.
Overall, I don’t trust our current collective responsibility as a species to manage our current forms of nuclear production. Russia sent its own troops into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to dig trenches in contaminated soil last year, and they allegedly recognized last week that the Zaporizhzhia power plant is now “unsafe to restart” because of the military activity in the region.
The world has not experienced generalized warfare with nuclear power plants dotting the countryside; WW2 ended around a decade before the first nuclear power plants were up and running in the USSR, the UK, and the USA.
Not to mention how few European countries have access to uranium on their own soil/territory. Of course, most of the rare earth metals used in photoelectric panels and windmills aren’t found there either, but as least with “renewables” they are used once to make the machinery, not as literal fuel that is indefinitely consumed to produce power.
I don’t know enough about thorium-based reactors nor molten salt-based reactors to go to bat for them instead, but they seem like a more promising way for nuclear to remain relevant.
France made a record year last year, with 320TWh of nuclear power produced for a total of 434 TWh of electricity, while being the top exporter of electricity of Europe.
I don’t know how they got to 1000TWh of nuclear a year, I suspect weed.
In Germany, we’ve got a location with 47,000 cubic meters: https://www.bge.de/en/asse/
That requires some pretty tall stacking on that football field. Or I guess, you’re saying if you’d unpack it all and compress it?
Also, we really should be getting the nuclear waste out of said location, since there’s a known risk of contamination. But even that challenge is too great for us, apparently.
Mainly, because we don’t have any locations that are considered safe for permanent storage. It’s cool that Switzerland has figured it out. And that some hypothetical football field exists. But it doesn’t exist in Germany, and I’m pretty sure, Switzerland doesn’t want our nuclear waste either.
I’m gonna hazard a guess that the “consideration” was not from actual scientists but rather activist homeowner groups in every potential site.
NIMBYism and nuclear, name a more iconic duo
I mean, can you blame them? Why would anyone want toxic waste in their backyard? Not to mention that the search is mainly conducted by companies, which have a vested interest in not making all the issues transparent.
Having said that, I am not aware of the ‘scientists’ coming up with good suggestions either. Gorleben got hemmed and hawed around for the longest time, but its selection process was non-scientific from the start.
It’s genuinely not easy to find a location where anyone would be willing to claim that it will remain unaffected by geodynamic processes for millions of years. And we don’t have a big desert or some other unpopulated area where you could chuck it without political opposition, when it’s not 110% safe to do so.
Yes. I do it a lot.
It’s not toxic, nor is it in their backyard.
What issues?
Good thing we don’t need to.
It is toxic and they wrote “NIMBY”, which means “not in my backyard”, which is what I used figuratively here.
Depends on the location. In Asse, there is water entering into the caverns, for example.
You should inform the BGE about it. They’ll be glad to hear all their challenges are solved.
Read your link: 47 000m³ of low and intermediate radioactive waste.
Low radioactive waste is objects (paper, clothing, etc…) which contain a small amount of short-lived radioactivity, and it mostly comes from the medical fields, not nuclear plants, so even if you phase out of nuclear, you’ll have to deal with it anyway.
This waste makes up for the vast majority (94% in UK for example) of the nuclear waste produced, and you can just leave it that way a few years, then dispose of it as any other waste.
Intermediate radioactivity waste is irradiated components of nuclear power plants. They are in solid form and do not require any special arrangement to store them as they do not heat up. This includes shorts and long-lived waste and represents only a small part of the volume of radioactive waste produced (4% in UK).
So you’re mostly dealing with your medical nuclear waste right here, and you can thank your anti-nuclear folks for blocking most of your infrastructure construction projects to store this kind of waste.