TLDR: High temperatures across France result in warmer surface water bodies, which in turn makes reactors difficult to run at maximum rates, due to reactor cooling issues.
A longer-term problem is that nuclear reactor maintenance costs increase as reactors age, and this leads to more frequent outages for repair work. Eventually complete rebuilds are needed which are extremely expensive.
But at least they work all the time. Whereas solar/wind work... occasionally. And then when they work they generate too much for the grid. The EU energy situation is really in flaming death spiral. With too nany bets on solar/wind power which doesn't really work.
Probably intended that there is not full warranty of output. But for other more traditional sources is the same - and this very submission is about the matter. Traditional energy plants in the North of Italy, suffering droughts, are currently emitting reduced power because less water flow decreases output.
> (or I'm too biased to realize they're just confirming my own views.)
If you genuinely care, this is the real answer.
Lignite is a poor fuel for many reasons, but that handwavey part about solar and lignite being worse than lignite and it's all a big scam that the silly greens are too stupid to notice is just totally wrong.
As is the bit about green collapse he predicts when it is discovered to "not work" in Europe.
It's a very weird argument, since he's admitting it works (sort of) in California and Texas but still has a weirdly negative tone about it and Greens.
Basically, it's just yet another fallback position for people who have been consistently wrong about energy policy for decades and still feel able to poke fun at Greens for being unrealistic, because their audience is so misinformed.
California imports 90% of its natural gas from other states. If that was somehow threatened to be cut off, California would struggle too. It would tell us nothing about renewables, and tell us everything about how your neighbours being dicks to you can be a hassle. Which is actually a selling point for renewables and helps drive Chinese interest, since they don't won't to rely on others for fuel.
They obviously don't work all the time, look at their uptime it is not glorious. But sure they work at night solar and they work with no wind etc... That's why we need a mixed energy panel with heat storage like Finland is starting and energy storage (inertial or gravitational seem to be the best bets these days)
Offshore wind (the main segment for large/powerful wind turbines) generates just fine throughout, including the peak consumption periods. The failures of EU (or should we say German, as the rest of the Union mainly subsidizes its power bills now) energy policy are mainly self inflicted damage of tying to hydrocarbon supply from terror states.
Yes - sometimes there is a lot of wind and then it is... fine.
But actually not since then they generate too much power which can not be used (in the country) and then it is sold cheap. The main problem is it can't be stored for later use.
It is a big problem, low wind periods can last for days, just this Feb-March, UK wind generation stayed under 20% capacity (mostly between 5-10% I believe) for more than 11 days straight [0].
Portugal and Spain lived within their means energy wise, and have enormous renewables and hydro storage capabilities (and while they both burn some fossil gas; they have plans to rapidly finish moving to renewables by the end of the decade; Portugal burns no coal, Spain is phasing it out). France and Germany are in their own special hell because they prioritized politics (nuclear and coal, respectively) over energy security.
Edit: I wrote a reply to a deleted comment, so enumerating the comment and reply here.
> France and Germany are also industrial powerhouses. They require a lot more power and a lot more natural gas specifically for chemical precursors to produce stuff like fertilizer and silicone.
Until suitable alternatives are found, there will always be a minimum amount of fossil gas required for industrial processes. But, BUT, that doesn’t mean you can’t lean into renewables, storage, and transmission to offset as much fossil generation as possible (prioritizing fossil gas for industry, and staying within your fossil gas infrastructure and LNG import constraints).
It is even worse than that. For all the talk about my current country (France) being a nuclear power house, we have actually been buying electricity from Spain and practically every other neighboring country for about 2 decades by now.
which is highly ridiculous because during my stay in Spain around the 2000s I was definitely paying significantly more for electricity than I _ever_ have in France. Someone would really need to explain that to me...
It's not hard to build storage, it's just a bit expensive. The European grid is still quite far from the amount of renewable deployment where storage starts to make financial sense, which is why right now we don't have very much of it.
Generating too much for the grid isn't an actual problem. Modern renewables can shut themselves off quickly. Most serious national plans involve overprovisioning.
You've never seen anyone credible worry about how we'll cope with that terrible excess of cheap power because it's not a problem, merely an opportunity.
You've probably mostly been reading complaints of the operators of non-renewable plants that can't do this and are annoyed they're being asked to do it when renewables are plentiful as it costs then money to do so, even on top of the lost electricity.
I think a better TLDR is: Europe relied on fossil fuels that it can no longer obtain. Blame clean energy nuclear power which the world refused to adopt over the past 30 years.
This was a classic “Pay now or pay later”. Congratulations, it’s 4 decades later and we made the wrong choice and waited for solar, wind, and those batteries.
Almost all of the EU's uranium also has to be imported from non-EU sources, just like fossil fuels. So it's not really better if you want actual energy independence.
Mostly because it's not financially interesting, in the same way that the US did not pump oil on its own territory for the longest time because it wasn't worth it. There are 200 uranium mines in France.
But uranium is much easier to store due to its energy density, and we can rely on better sources for it such as Canada and Australia, and not questionable countries like for oil.
Yes. It is much better if Canada and Australia are left with contaminated tailings ponds, that are full of acidic and radioactive waste. Those countries are definitely nimby.
Tailings ponds exist for all mining. This is why groundwater leakage is a major issue in all mining operations. Regardless if you mine for steel, copper, coal, rare earth minerals, or uranium, operations like those will also bring to surface heavy metals, sulfides and radioactive contents.
Northern Sweden is known for its iron ore mines, and people who live anywhere near those areas are recommended to install radon detectors. The iron from those mines is then used in multiple countries, leaving behind the contaminated water and air in Sweden.
Coal, the current solution, is definitely a much better choice. No residual mess to clean up.
Kicking the climate change can down the road even farther requires a few more additional miracles. Heck, we still don’t see climate change as a major problem:
Uranium fuel is a non issue. It's imported because there are very cheap sources abroad and it's a tiny fraction of nuclear power cost. There are known uranium sources in France, they're just not exploited at the moment because that would be a waste of money. But they're there in case demand rises.
France's Uranium strategic reserves are 3 years. The main supplier is Canada. France has Uranium mines, but they were closed since it was cheaper to import. They still do exist, though.
Taking before pandemic numbers of GDP and population numbers by 2100 from here https://www.populationpyramid.net/population-size-per-countr... , the top 15 of economies will only account for 40% of world population. ~25% coming from India and China as you said.
So 6 billion people living in these "small economy countries" will not appreciate your sentiment.
Supposedly a bunch of routine maintenance was also deferred during the pandemic and has now come due, meaning that more plants are down for maintenance at the same time than normally.
The issue with most construction (and something complex like reactor maintenance) is that by its nature it is close-quarters, team-based work. A situation that you would want to minimize during an epidemic.
France has 56 reactors, of which 29 are currently shutdown.
My understanding is that they are closed for maintenance rather than due to the on-going heatwave.
It has been described as the perfect storm: some reactors have reached the 10yr mark (so extensive maintenance is to be done on these), lockdowns have slowed the progress of regular maintenance (possibly introducing a backlog?), and finally corrosion was found in secondary cooling systems used during emergencies leading to further (12) shutdowns.
This is basically what happens when the entirety of western governments is run by lawyers, teachers, and BA consultants. There is a massive lack of critical infrastructure engineers that should be welcome in government or at least close advisors of the government but no longer are. Note that for all the terrible parts about China they have a lot of engineers in their government, leading to a lot of critical investments in infrastructure.
Yeah all those people with their degrees in constitutional law should be banned from congress! /s
To make a claim that lawyers can't be useful at all at running a country really requires a citation at least... Large associations of people are going to have a lot of different skills so to say that there aren't ~500,000 competent teachers / lawyers / consultants in a population of ~3 billion (claim is about the entire west) seems a bit of a stretch.
There are at least some engineers in China that aren't competent [1] so _just_ because somebody is an engineer doesn't mean you'll have a good outcome.
How much of an influence does constitutional law really have on the government? There is a minor-moderate crisis in US politics at the moment about whether the constitution protects abortion based on a tortured reading of the text, so it doesn't seem like the physical documents are an important factor. I respect all the positions in that debate, but if that is a serious point of contention then there is a real question as to why a constitutional scholar would have any advantage at all in Congress. For anyone.
Not saying they'd necessarily be bad, but a good cross section of community members would be better than a good cross section of the legal fraternity.
> How much of an influence does constitutional law really have on the government?
Well, ideally it would matter a little bit. Kind of like you want a contractor to be well versed in local building codes you'd want a politician to be well versed in the local laws.But considering most of the law isn't actually in the constitution the use of knowing the constitution very well isn't that useful.
> Not saying they'd necessarily be bad, but a good cross section of community members would be better than a good cross section of the legal fraternity.
For an elected congress critters I think there should be a bias towards lawyers and other law-adjacent professions considering they're going to create laws that that field needs to use. However, for appointed officials I think is when the cross section would need to start coming up. I suspect a random teacher is a much better pick for DoE than a loan officer. I think it would be more important that their staff is a cross section of the community than the actual figurehead.
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> There is a minor-moderate crisis in US politics at the moment about whether the constitution protects abortion based on a tortured reading of the text
Quick aside, we got to this point because one party (Democratic) has ran previously on passing laws that would protect abortions and never did while another party (Republicans) have ran previously on passing laws that would restrict it and never did. Which leaves the two branches of government that can weigh in and they both have. Of course they will weigh in how they can and for the Supreme Court that's via Constitutionality.
It's nice that you brought up constitutional law, since Bill Barr, Ted Cruz, and many others were in fact constitutional lawyers.
That's why you have a self made failed coup d'etat in the US. Crazy nutjob granpas that are threatening chemical weapon attacks, collapsing governments in Europe with what seems to be a looming energy and food crisis as well as failing transportation in Canada.
Just the other day the Netherlands decided on a "climate" policy that looks very similar to the policies that caused Sri Lankas food supply to collapse.
I don't know if these people are just incompetent or just domestic terrorists, but either way it's not good. Nobody will care about your constitution when you have neither food or energy. It will just be anger and law enforcement. Already you have clashes in a lot of European cities and more than 5 times as much gun deaths in the US a year than civilians died in the Ukraine war.
Ted Cruz has a Mathematics [1] degree so probably should count him as an engineer. (Engineering is just applied math after all).
There doesn't seem to be much on Bill Barr so I'm not too sure where you've gotten that he's a constitutional lawyer as opposed to any other one [2].
The USA has been "falling apart" for centuries now, just look at its history. Race riots, oil shocks, stagflation, world war 2, pandemic, world 1, civil war, etc. The idea that anything happening now is "novel" is unfounded.
> 5 times as much gun deaths in the US a year than civilians died in the Ukraine war.
Yeah because Ukraine has like a 1/10 the people as the US. If we assume that there should be 1x as many gun deaths as civilians deaths then its actually good that its only 5x. However I'm pretty sure this is just not something you can compare in any meaningful matter.
People do track deaths in the Ukraine war (4889 as of July 4th [3]), Ukraine has a population of roughly 44 million, and its been 130 days (Feb 24 -> July 4) so that's a rate of 31.1 / 100k.
Every US state has a death rate below 31.1 / 100k [4].
---
Perhaps do a little research before making claims as there's a lot of misinformation out there.
HIS MOTHER has undergrad in mathematics. "Engineering is just applied math after all" I guess he's also a theoretical physicist cause that's also just applied math after all.
You're a wonderful example of a menace to discussions, because you didn't even bother reading the first Wikipedia paragraph you quoted properly. Ted Cruz himself studied policy at Princeton and then got a Juris Doctoris from Harvard Law. You know, the same place Obama went to.
Your math is funky by the way, I'm not sure if you're an engineer, but if you were, it would definitely prove that Software Engineering is definitely NOT applied mathematics.
Quite a few are down for maintenance, but every hot summer, the French nuclear capacity is reduced further, due to limited cooling. They could, of course, just boil the rivers.
The conspiracist in me thinks the French state actually finds it very convenient. Just when it needed to announce new reactors to be built it finds the perfect justification. To me it might even had had a heavy hand in setting the threshold of corrosion for these shutdowns.
> which in turn makes reactors difficult to run at maximum rates, due to reactor cooling issues.
It's due to administrative fish protection issues. Cooling a 375°C reactor with 40°C water (or even 60°C) is not a big problem. Keeping water temperatures below fish protection discharge limits set decades ago is harder. In heatwaves, the authorities relax the fish laws.
Fish have become more accustomed to higher temperatures as well through the years so that kind of rule should be continuously re-evaluated and adjusted in a changing climate, as appropriate.
Thats not how biology works. With sweet water, oxygen supply is the killer at high temperatures, and as soon as more than a few fishes die, a cascade reaction is triggered. Yes over centuries, more resilient species might emerge, but short term, life in a body of water can just collectively die. There are very frequent events in the summer, where small lakes completely die, if the point of no return is crossed.
didn't that only apply to open circuit cooling, rather than the closed circuit cooling that you would expect in most reactors ?
> The precise situation depends on the reactor. But in general terms, water is either returned directly, which is known as an open circuit, which can lead to general downstream river temperatures increasing several degrees, or the water is returned after cooling in air-cooling towers, known as a closed circuit, which typically leads to lower rises of downstream river temperatures, of a few tenths of a degree.
A lot (not all) of cooling towers still require water for evaporative cooling. And the restrictions aren't just for temperatures of returned water they're also for the amount of water taken from rivers, during droughts that amount might get reduced quite a lot.
Let me fix that headline: Europe's lack of investment in sustainable energy and nuclear is raising electricity prices, compounded by the dependence on fossil fuels from terrorist states like Russia.
Russia is not a terrorist state. It's a country waging a war. It's not the same. You can find it OK or not OK (I personally don't) but it's not terrorism. Many countries have done that before, France is such a country.
Which even the UN has had to admit Ukraine shares the blame on[1]. Not only that, the Human Rights chief of Ukraine stepped down and subsequently admitted that she invented a lot of human rights violations[2]. It's actually amusing that the UN complained about the Ukrainian shelling of a maternity ward in June with most reports saying that it was Russians doing, with very few correcting this to stating it was in fact the Ukrainians[3].
Here's the Washington Post saying that Ukraine placed their fighters in civilian buildings therefore enabling attacks on civilian infrastructure[4] as early as March 28th
The UN consensus has been very clear. Russia is singularly responsible for the war, and has committed numerous war crimes. Including many, many attacks on positions that are civilian only. And forcing Ukrainians to join the Russian army as canon fodder. And encouraging mass rape. And stealing whatever isn’t nailed down. And storing munitions in an active nuclear power plant. And attacking evacuation corridors they promised to allow.
Ukraine is not perfect, but it’s not even close to comparable.
Your post history has a clear Russian lean to it. So, whatever. I presume it’s pointless to talk.
In that case you might as well classify the US as a terrorist state as well. Continues dronning of innocent people doesn't make it OK when you call it the "war" on terror.
The US drone policy is very aggressive. But it’s multiple orders of magnitude less than the scale of what Russia is trying to do now, which is flagrant genocide.
But we’re not discussing the US so let’s get back to the terrorist state of Russia.
It's not just drones - US leveled cities too, like Raqqa, or started wars based on fabricated evidence that killed more people than current war in Ukraine.
They said Russia is not a terrorist state. I disagree with them. I don’t really give a shit about French war crimes 70 years ago. That’s not a gotcha, it’s just a shitty whataboutism, and not even a particularly relevant one.
Those are immense human tragedies but they’re not the same. Both of these examples have significant debate on whether they were justified. Perhaps you believe they were not.
There is no such debate around the missile strikes on shopping malls far removed from the front, or bombing civilian evacuation routes your promised to permit. Or deporting thousands of children to your country.
And again, whataboutism is not helpful here. The discussion is on Russia.
USA _and_ russia always justify civilian bombings claiming they aimed at military targets first. Do you think USA or russia will ever admit they happily roasted babies alive on purpose ?
The difference is that Russia’s MO is to level cities and kill every single person they can. The US is far from perfect, but this is not what they do. Whataboutism is not relevant here
I would have gone for criminal or mafia state rather than terrorist, but I guess you could argue that openly poisoning political dissidents is designed to elicit terror
It's not only the ongoing war. Russia's leadership seems to be enganged in state terrorism for several decades now. Here's an interesting interview with Catherine Belton a journalist and author who did year long research on that matter:
I call it a terrorist state due to its deliberate attacks on civilians in Vinnitsa, Kramatorsk, Kharkiv, Nikopol, Idlib just in the last week. City centers with no military targets, in some cases very far from the front - the intention is to terrorize Ukraine into submission.
It is a country conducting an illegal war of aggression, which means that any action they take is a war crime, but aside from that when you shell civilians trying to flee through _humanitarian corridors you created_ you are committing acts of terror.
So is shooting cruise missiles at shopping centers.
I won't pretend to be neutral in this matter, nor give a shit about anybody who is, but what russia is doing is very much acts of terrorism.
There is a very easy way to find out who is in the wrong here. Using the statement you probably have seen before: If Ukraine stops fighting, they stop to exist. If Russia stops fighting, there is no more war.
Hate Russia all you want but this energy crisis was entirely "free world" created and didn't start in February this year. Half of these idiots have resigned or are close to resignation due to an energy and food crisis that they have single-handedly created by the "free world" the last decade. They will just resign and live of their pensions while the rest of Europe is slipping into poverty[1].
Let's for a moment consider that Ukraine still makes transit money off of Russian gas. Has threatened Europe with gas cuts for the last two decades on multiple occasions. And even though Russia has been put through unprecedented sanctions, which actually sent prices soaring still supplies Europe with energy even though the west tried to effectively embargo them from the rest of the world.
They are in fact slowly lifting restrictions especially on food supplies[2]. But due to the uncertainty Von der Moron brought into the markets the prices are not due to go back down anytime soon.
> And even though Russia has been put through unprecedented sanctions, which actually sent prices soaring still supplies Europe with energy even though the west tried to effectively embargo them from the rest of the world.
Let's not pretend they are doing this out of loving-kindness: they use this money to fund their invasion of Ukraine.
So this is weird because there seems to be a real groundswell of effort to resort to bothesidesism particularly on topics of China and Russia.
The situation is not "a mess" ethically no. One side (Russia) walked into a country and started blowing up entire cities full of people. Literally Mariupol formerly a city of 431,859 people is a wasteland of rubble with an estimated pop of 100k. Are all those people dead? No, most are displaced but the callous way in which Russia has resorted to the same truly despicable war tactics it used to level Grozny again, here, in a sovereign nation should make us weep.
It feels like the internet is in large part fuelling this truly horrifying miracle of humans trying to "level" the narrative.
Yes we have. Most of that is because we can't identify a good guy, but regardless of that I can see how it changes anything about the justification of _this_ war.
There is a distinct difference between wars based on territorial expansionism and civil wars. When one country invade an other for territorial gain, it is fairly easy to identify an aggressor and a defender. With a civil war you got factions within a country fighting for control.
The start of the conflict tend to be different. In an invasion you got an external force starting the war by sending in troop and initiating the conflict, and you got a clear defined border of conflict that starts out at the border and then fans out. The capital tend to be attacked at a late part of the conflict, unless it is located directly at the border.
In a civil war the war generally breaks out at multiple places from within, usually in the capital where the existing seat of power is located. The conflict border is generally unclear and fighting occur at multiple locations all over.
Invasion also tend to have a history of territorial disputes about where the border between two nations should be drawn. Civil war on the other hands tend to have a history of demographic nature, where different groups within a country are fighting for control of the country.
In terms of public support, especially since world war 2, invasions that has aim of taking territory is generally feared. If they invade Ukraine today in order for Lebensraum, then what is to say that Poland will not be next for the exact same purpose? Which country can ever feel save when a larger nearby country starts to invade others for the purpose of taking territory?
Civil wars on the other hand is a human tragedy, but the factions fighting inside Yemen doesn't have a reason to make Poland the next target. It not so much of a double standard but rather human priority of things that feel threatening to themselves.
Yeah, this energy crisis started during the cold war when we thought that trading with the Soviet Union would prevent war (maybe it has?). It was exacerbated by a delayed transition to renewable power. Putin is currently doing more for the climate than our politicians have done in the last thirty years.
Honestly, not trading with Russia would have been short sighted. EU is founded on integrating the belligerents of WW2 close enough that it would be unthinkable to happen again. The same method, which at least has worked once, was tried with Russia and now 30 years later, or more likely in 2014 with the invasion of Crimea we can conclude that Russia is different in some core way of thinking. Not too different though, looking at how the Baltic states have developed when they got the choice.
The alternative scenario, with a Russia still riding on the tail ends of soviet military might in steep decline not even given a chance in the early 2000s seems like a recipe for an even worse outcome than we have today.
>Half of these idiots have resigned or are close to resignation due to an energy and food crisis that they have single-handedly created by the "free world" the last decade. They will just resign and live of their pensions while the rest of Europe is slipping into poverty.
Such as German foreign minister Heiko Maas, who when Trump at the UN warned four years ago that his country is endangering itself by increasing dependence on Russia, laughed with other German envoys <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJv9QYrlwgepe>. He is now enjoying a quiet retirement in Saarland.
Why don't we (Europeans) use nuclear power in the winter and solar in the summer?
It seems to make perfect sense but I haven't read any plans like this.
Reactors need regular lengthy maintenance and are easy to cool in the winter, while solar panels are cheap and can be placed everywhere but are almost useless during wintertime.
Reactors could even provide heating in the winter while ACs are the perfect consumers of solar energy when the sun is the strongest.
Storing enough heat/electricity for the entire winter on the other hand seems completely futile; there is no technology that can be scaled up enough without sounding like it came straight from Perry Rhodan.
The Chancellor of Germany literally appointed an executive from Greenpeace to her cabinet - demonstrating her political alliance with Germany's "Green Party". Being anti-nuclear power is a foundational principle, dating back 50 years. They will NEVER accept nuclear power. No amount of logic or evidence will persuade them.
Despite both the current energy crisis, and statements from the remaining 3 (of formerly 17) nuclear plants and the nuclear regulatory groups that they can continue to operate these remaining plants safely for years with existing nuclear fuel reserves - the German leadership has reaffirmed that they will close those remaining 3 nuclear plants THIS YEAR. DURING THE CRISIS.
Imagine having a flat-earther during the race to the moon, or a anti-vax president during a pandemic. That is what it's like having an anti-nuclear extremist leadership in an energy crisis. They would literally rather burn coal.
It is a form of entrenched ideology that will never compromise no matter how freezing cold Germans are this coming winter.
Nice, a Perry Rhodan reference on HN, didn't expect that one :)
I also wonder the same. In my layman opinion, the most sensible approach would be moving some of the new nuclear projects to Germany. This would then free up resources in France to invest in renewable power. This could help solve the current problems in Germany (high CO2 output) as well as France (inflexible grid)
This has the following advantages:
* Renewable energy from wind and solar, are the cheapest forms of energy right now, full stop. Decarbonizing our economy is currently constrained by capital expense. So any other form of energy production needs a really good technical reason to get preferred over the cheap forms of energy.
* Corollary from that: Please note that everybody who claims that renewables destabilize the grid by introducing peaks is mostly full of shit. It is absolutely trivial to turn both wind turbines and solar alternators off almost immediately. Why do we try to avoid that? Because having all that bound capital standing around doing nothing lowers ROI (and for example Germany guarantees that the operators will get their lost revenue replaced.) This is literally the only reason. Everyone who claims that renewables at the current stage of the transition will threaten black-outs due to overproduction is spreading misinformation.
When we get over ~80% of renewable production, we need new solutions, e.g. to provide fine-grained synchronization for the grid, which is currently done en passant via the rotational inertia of the turbines in thermal plants.
* France has a good position to support renewables very cost-efficiently. Lots of valuable Atlantic coast with wind, both on-shore and with a huge economic zone offshire, a neighbour (Spain/Portugal) with high amounts of wind and solar even in winter months, which is just waiting to be piped into central Europe. But there is no political will because nuclear is so comfortable and you don't have to fight NIMBYs thousands of times for each wind turbine or solar park
* As articles like this one show, France has already hit a constraint with nuclear plants: Cooling water. This constraint is quite scary, as access to surface cooling water will only get worse as climate change progesses. Scaling up nuclear even more would require spreading the load over more shoulders, e.g. by using rivers in Germany. Note that the lignite plants in Germany are cooled using ground water which is collected by pumping ground water to keep the associated open-pit mines free of flooding (with high ecological impact, still maybe a solution for France?)
* Contrary to what nuclear proponents on HN mostly claim, nuclear power is inflexible, and already putting a strain on the French grid. Electricity generation (spot) prices since April are almost always equal or higher in France than in Germany due to lack of transmission capacity between these countries (to verify this, use services like Electricity Maps or Energy Charts which graph the cost of electricity in real time over the last 24h, data is available via ENTSOE-E). Building more renewables would alleviate these problems, but is actually not so easy or economically feasible with the current mostly nuclear grid.
* Contrary to what nuclear opponents on HN mostly claim, base load is still useful to some degree, which is why Germany still burns coal and has biofuel reactors specifically to provide base load. Moving nuclear generation capacities to Germany would reduce carbon output during nights, especially summer nights low on wind, and free up biogas to be used for peaker operation.
Why doesn't France reduce its dependence on nuclear power, allowing economic incentives for cheaper solar and wind power? Mostly politics. Shutting down the nuclear power plants is even more expensive than letting them run until their EOL, which is a tough sell. Also NIMBYs hate wind turbines a lot, and by the decentralized nature of wind, fighting them is harder than the NIMBYs against nuclear plants.
> * Renewable energy from wind and solar, are the cheapest forms of energy right now, full stop
Until it does not work thanks to intermittency, then it turns into the most expensive form of electricity. Or is there a reason why Germans have the most expensive electricity in whole EU?
The current price of electricity is determined by the price point of installations that are already built, which has absolutely nothing to do with the price of installations that will be built now and from now on.
Also you need to learn the difference between Capex and Opex.
Because nuclear power plants are stupid expensive to build.
The electricity sales prices is dominated by paying back the multi-billion dollar loan which funded the construction. Running a nuclear plant half of the time means doubling the electricity price - and it is already by far the most expensive method of producing electricity.
If you build nuclear power plants, you basically have to run them at 100% capacity 100% of the time to be even remotely close to being economically viable.
"The fault seems common to a whole series of France’s reactors. The shutdowns affect four of the largest N4 reactors of 1,500 megawatts, five 1,300-MW, reactors of similar design, and three 900-MW units. This, on top of a series of outages at 18 other reactors for repairs, updating, or regular safety checks, has left France with the lowest nuclear output in decades."
This is something a lot of people miss with the nuclear back-and-forth. A hyper-dense heat source is great for environment and fuel usage, but the steam infrastructure to effectively exploit it is costly and requires a lot of upkeep. The only way to really solve it is throw material science at the problem
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[ 0.69 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadhttps://qz.com/1348969/europes-heatwave-is-forcing-nuclear-p...
A longer-term problem is that nuclear reactor maintenance costs increase as reactors age, and this leads to more frequent outages for repair work. Eventually complete rebuilds are needed which are extremely expensive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD0sq5GN7xc
Zeihan is a bit US-centric overall, but his energy talks are sound (or I'm too biased to realize they're just confirming my own views.)
If you genuinely care, this is the real answer.
Lignite is a poor fuel for many reasons, but that handwavey part about solar and lignite being worse than lignite and it's all a big scam that the silly greens are too stupid to notice is just totally wrong.
As is the bit about green collapse he predicts when it is discovered to "not work" in Europe.
It's a very weird argument, since he's admitting it works (sort of) in California and Texas but still has a weirdly negative tone about it and Greens.
Basically, it's just yet another fallback position for people who have been consistently wrong about energy policy for decades and still feel able to poke fun at Greens for being unrealistic, because their audience is so misinformed.
California imports 90% of its natural gas from other states. If that was somehow threatened to be cut off, California would struggle too. It would tell us nothing about renewables, and tell us everything about how your neighbours being dicks to you can be a hassle. Which is actually a selling point for renewables and helps drive Chinese interest, since they don't won't to rely on others for fuel.
[0] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind...
Swing by https://app.electricitymap.org for the detailed capacity and generation info.
Edit: I wrote a reply to a deleted comment, so enumerating the comment and reply here.
> France and Germany are also industrial powerhouses. They require a lot more power and a lot more natural gas specifically for chemical precursors to produce stuff like fertilizer and silicone.
Until suitable alternatives are found, there will always be a minimum amount of fossil gas required for industrial processes. But, BUT, that doesn’t mean you can’t lean into renewables, storage, and transmission to offset as much fossil generation as possible (prioritizing fossil gas for industry, and staying within your fossil gas infrastructure and LNG import constraints).
which is highly ridiculous because during my stay in Spain around the 2000s I was definitely paying significantly more for electricity than I _ever_ have in France. Someone would really need to explain that to me...
You've never seen anyone credible worry about how we'll cope with that terrible excess of cheap power because it's not a problem, merely an opportunity.
You've probably mostly been reading complaints of the operators of non-renewable plants that can't do this and are annoyed they're being asked to do it when renewables are plentiful as it costs then money to do so, even on top of the lost electricity.
Yeah, tell that to people who's devices and houses you have burnt down because voltage in the outlet was not 230V but 300V.
This was a classic “Pay now or pay later”. Congratulations, it’s 4 decades later and we made the wrong choice and waited for solar, wind, and those batteries.
https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
It appears that we still need to resort to coal instead of renewables:
https://globalnews.ca/news/8993093/german-europe-coal-energy...
Northern Sweden is known for its iron ore mines, and people who live anywhere near those areas are recommended to install radon detectors. The iron from those mines is then used in multiple countries, leaving behind the contaminated water and air in Sweden.
Kicking the climate change can down the road even farther requires a few more additional miracles. Heck, we still don’t see climate change as a major problem:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/us/politics/climate-chang...
Compared to the same for LNG?
Are you pro building nuclear plats in every region on earth?
Should developing countries build their own nuclear industry or be dependent on foreign powers for their basic electricity?
Someone is trying to waste everyone’s time by saying “you want nuclear energy everywhere?!”
Small countries are a rounding error for global emissions.
If the world’s 10 or 15 largest economies…
Not if they are allowed to develop too. Are they not allowed to develop to western living and energy use standards per capita?
Here’s a hint. China and India combined have 2.5 billion people
So 6 billion people living in these "small economy countries" will not appreciate your sentiment.
My understanding is that they are closed for maintenance rather than due to the on-going heatwave.
It has been described as the perfect storm: some reactors have reached the 10yr mark (so extensive maintenance is to be done on these), lockdowns have slowed the progress of regular maintenance (possibly introducing a backlog?), and finally corrosion was found in secondary cooling systems used during emergencies leading to further (12) shutdowns.
To make a claim that lawyers can't be useful at all at running a country really requires a citation at least... Large associations of people are going to have a lot of different skills so to say that there aren't ~500,000 competent teachers / lawyers / consultants in a population of ~3 billion (claim is about the entire west) seems a bit of a stretch.
There are at least some engineers in China that aren't competent [1] so _just_ because somebody is an engineer doesn't mean you'll have a good outcome.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096810346/survivor-found-alm...
Not saying they'd necessarily be bad, but a good cross section of community members would be better than a good cross section of the legal fraternity.
Well, ideally it would matter a little bit. Kind of like you want a contractor to be well versed in local building codes you'd want a politician to be well versed in the local laws.But considering most of the law isn't actually in the constitution the use of knowing the constitution very well isn't that useful.
> Not saying they'd necessarily be bad, but a good cross section of community members would be better than a good cross section of the legal fraternity.
For an elected congress critters I think there should be a bias towards lawyers and other law-adjacent professions considering they're going to create laws that that field needs to use. However, for appointed officials I think is when the cross section would need to start coming up. I suspect a random teacher is a much better pick for DoE than a loan officer. I think it would be more important that their staff is a cross section of the community than the actual figurehead.
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> There is a minor-moderate crisis in US politics at the moment about whether the constitution protects abortion based on a tortured reading of the text
Quick aside, we got to this point because one party (Democratic) has ran previously on passing laws that would protect abortions and never did while another party (Republicans) have ran previously on passing laws that would restrict it and never did. Which leaves the two branches of government that can weigh in and they both have. Of course they will weigh in how they can and for the Supreme Court that's via Constitutionality.
That's why you have a self made failed coup d'etat in the US. Crazy nutjob granpas that are threatening chemical weapon attacks, collapsing governments in Europe with what seems to be a looming energy and food crisis as well as failing transportation in Canada. Just the other day the Netherlands decided on a "climate" policy that looks very similar to the policies that caused Sri Lankas food supply to collapse.
I don't know if these people are just incompetent or just domestic terrorists, but either way it's not good. Nobody will care about your constitution when you have neither food or energy. It will just be anger and law enforcement. Already you have clashes in a lot of European cities and more than 5 times as much gun deaths in the US a year than civilians died in the Ukraine war.
The USA has been "falling apart" for centuries now, just look at its history. Race riots, oil shocks, stagflation, world war 2, pandemic, world 1, civil war, etc. The idea that anything happening now is "novel" is unfounded.
> 5 times as much gun deaths in the US a year than civilians died in the Ukraine war.
Yeah because Ukraine has like a 1/10 the people as the US. If we assume that there should be 1x as many gun deaths as civilians deaths then its actually good that its only 5x. However I'm pretty sure this is just not something you can compare in any meaningful matter.
People do track deaths in the Ukraine war (4889 as of July 4th [3]), Ukraine has a population of roughly 44 million, and its been 130 days (Feb 24 -> July 4) so that's a rate of 31.1 / 100k. Every US state has a death rate below 31.1 / 100k [4].
---
Perhaps do a little research before making claims as there's a lot of misinformation out there.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barr [3]: https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2022/07/ukraine-civilian-casua... [4]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality...
You're a wonderful example of a menace to discussions, because you didn't even bother reading the first Wikipedia paragraph you quoted properly. Ted Cruz himself studied policy at Princeton and then got a Juris Doctoris from Harvard Law. You know, the same place Obama went to.
Your math is funky by the way, I'm not sure if you're an engineer, but if you were, it would definitely prove that Software Engineering is definitely NOT applied mathematics.
And the top of the French civil service is jam packed with engineers
“The dictatorship of the technocratic elites” is a common taking point of the populist parties here
The conspiracist in me thinks the French state actually finds it very convenient. Just when it needed to announce new reactors to be built it finds the perfect justification. To me it might even had had a heavy hand in setting the threshold of corrosion for these shutdowns.
It's due to administrative fish protection issues. Cooling a 375°C reactor with 40°C water (or even 60°C) is not a big problem. Keeping water temperatures below fish protection discharge limits set decades ago is harder. In heatwaves, the authorities relax the fish laws.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Heatwave-forces-...
As other commenters say, the big issue right now has to do with outages for checking a corrosion issue.
> The precise situation depends on the reactor. But in general terms, water is either returned directly, which is known as an open circuit, which can lead to general downstream river temperatures increasing several degrees, or the water is returned after cooling in air-cooling towers, known as a closed circuit, which typically leads to lower rises of downstream river temperatures, of a few tenths of a degree.
> terrorist states like Russia
The word terrorist has become meaningless. It's dead. You can stop kicking it.
Here's the Washington Post saying that Ukraine placed their fighters in civilian buildings therefore enabling attacks on civilian infrastructure[4] as early as March 28th
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/un-says-ukraine-bears-share-041554667...
[2] https://www.ibtimes.sg/lyudmila-denisova-disgraced-ombudswom...
[3] https://blog.tagesschau.de/2022/06/16/fehler-in-der-tagessch...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/28/ukraine-kyiv...
Ukraine is not perfect, but it’s not even close to comparable.
Your post history has a clear Russian lean to it. So, whatever. I presume it’s pointless to talk.
The US drone policy is very aggressive. But it’s multiple orders of magnitude less than the scale of what Russia is trying to do now, which is flagrant genocide.
But we’re not discussing the US so let’s get back to the terrorist state of Russia.
p.s. exposing hypocrisy isn't whataboutism.
There is no such debate around the missile strikes on shopping malls far removed from the front, or bombing civilian evacuation routes your promised to permit. Or deporting thousands of children to your country.
And again, whataboutism is not helpful here. The discussion is on Russia.
https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2022-07/catherine-belton-vlad...
Even if only half of the claims is true it's IMO quite justified to call Russia a terrorist state.
You could also conclude that France was just such a terrorist state.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2021/04/26/how...
So is shooting cruise missiles at shopping centers.
I won't pretend to be neutral in this matter, nor give a shit about anybody who is, but what russia is doing is very much acts of terrorism.
Let's for a moment consider that Ukraine still makes transit money off of Russian gas. Has threatened Europe with gas cuts for the last two decades on multiple occasions. And even though Russia has been put through unprecedented sanctions, which actually sent prices soaring still supplies Europe with energy even though the west tried to effectively embargo them from the rest of the world.
They are in fact slowly lifting restrictions especially on food supplies[2]. But due to the uncertainty Von der Moron brought into the markets the prices are not due to go back down anytime soon.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-12/what-if-m...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/eu-soften-sanctions-r...
Let's not pretend they are doing this out of loving-kindness: they use this money to fund their invasion of Ukraine.
The situation is a mess, and painting Russia and russians as having no interest but war, does not make it less messy.
The situation is not "a mess" ethically no. One side (Russia) walked into a country and started blowing up entire cities full of people. Literally Mariupol formerly a city of 431,859 people is a wasteland of rubble with an estimated pop of 100k. Are all those people dead? No, most are displaced but the callous way in which Russia has resorted to the same truly despicable war tactics it used to level Grozny again, here, in a sovereign nation should make us weep.
It feels like the internet is in large part fuelling this truly horrifying miracle of humans trying to "level" the narrative.
Definitely. But the double standards is maddening. The Western public has ignored much much larger and more recent conflicts.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1078972
The start of the conflict tend to be different. In an invasion you got an external force starting the war by sending in troop and initiating the conflict, and you got a clear defined border of conflict that starts out at the border and then fans out. The capital tend to be attacked at a late part of the conflict, unless it is located directly at the border.
In a civil war the war generally breaks out at multiple places from within, usually in the capital where the existing seat of power is located. The conflict border is generally unclear and fighting occur at multiple locations all over.
Invasion also tend to have a history of territorial disputes about where the border between two nations should be drawn. Civil war on the other hands tend to have a history of demographic nature, where different groups within a country are fighting for control of the country.
In terms of public support, especially since world war 2, invasions that has aim of taking territory is generally feared. If they invade Ukraine today in order for Lebensraum, then what is to say that Poland will not be next for the exact same purpose? Which country can ever feel save when a larger nearby country starts to invade others for the purpose of taking territory?
Civil wars on the other hand is a human tragedy, but the factions fighting inside Yemen doesn't have a reason to make Poland the next target. It not so much of a double standard but rather human priority of things that feel threatening to themselves.
There's a rule I'm sure Putin never saw himself fulfilling!
The alternative scenario, with a Russia still riding on the tail ends of soviet military might in steep decline not even given a chance in the early 2000s seems like a recipe for an even worse outcome than we have today.
Cutting off countries is something they didn't do during previous wars.
They are doing it now.
Such as German foreign minister Heiko Maas, who when Trump at the UN warned four years ago that his country is endangering itself by increasing dependence on Russia, laughed with other German envoys <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJv9QYrlwgepe>. He is now enjoying a quiet retirement in Saarland.
Reactors need regular lengthy maintenance and are easy to cool in the winter, while solar panels are cheap and can be placed everywhere but are almost useless during wintertime. Reactors could even provide heating in the winter while ACs are the perfect consumers of solar energy when the sun is the strongest.
Storing enough heat/electricity for the entire winter on the other hand seems completely futile; there is no technology that can be scaled up enough without sounding like it came straight from Perry Rhodan.
Despite both the current energy crisis, and statements from the remaining 3 (of formerly 17) nuclear plants and the nuclear regulatory groups that they can continue to operate these remaining plants safely for years with existing nuclear fuel reserves - the German leadership has reaffirmed that they will close those remaining 3 nuclear plants THIS YEAR. DURING THE CRISIS.
Imagine having a flat-earther during the race to the moon, or a anti-vax president during a pandemic. That is what it's like having an anti-nuclear extremist leadership in an energy crisis. They would literally rather burn coal.
It is a form of entrenched ideology that will never compromise no matter how freezing cold Germans are this coming winter.
…? Is Olaf Scholz not a man?
I also wonder the same. In my layman opinion, the most sensible approach would be moving some of the new nuclear projects to Germany. This would then free up resources in France to invest in renewable power. This could help solve the current problems in Germany (high CO2 output) as well as France (inflexible grid)
This has the following advantages:
* Renewable energy from wind and solar, are the cheapest forms of energy right now, full stop. Decarbonizing our economy is currently constrained by capital expense. So any other form of energy production needs a really good technical reason to get preferred over the cheap forms of energy.
* Corollary from that: Please note that everybody who claims that renewables destabilize the grid by introducing peaks is mostly full of shit. It is absolutely trivial to turn both wind turbines and solar alternators off almost immediately. Why do we try to avoid that? Because having all that bound capital standing around doing nothing lowers ROI (and for example Germany guarantees that the operators will get their lost revenue replaced.) This is literally the only reason. Everyone who claims that renewables at the current stage of the transition will threaten black-outs due to overproduction is spreading misinformation. When we get over ~80% of renewable production, we need new solutions, e.g. to provide fine-grained synchronization for the grid, which is currently done en passant via the rotational inertia of the turbines in thermal plants.
* France has a good position to support renewables very cost-efficiently. Lots of valuable Atlantic coast with wind, both on-shore and with a huge economic zone offshire, a neighbour (Spain/Portugal) with high amounts of wind and solar even in winter months, which is just waiting to be piped into central Europe. But there is no political will because nuclear is so comfortable and you don't have to fight NIMBYs thousands of times for each wind turbine or solar park
* As articles like this one show, France has already hit a constraint with nuclear plants: Cooling water. This constraint is quite scary, as access to surface cooling water will only get worse as climate change progesses. Scaling up nuclear even more would require spreading the load over more shoulders, e.g. by using rivers in Germany. Note that the lignite plants in Germany are cooled using ground water which is collected by pumping ground water to keep the associated open-pit mines free of flooding (with high ecological impact, still maybe a solution for France?)
* Contrary to what nuclear proponents on HN mostly claim, nuclear power is inflexible, and already putting a strain on the French grid. Electricity generation (spot) prices since April are almost always equal or higher in France than in Germany due to lack of transmission capacity between these countries (to verify this, use services like Electricity Maps or Energy Charts which graph the cost of electricity in real time over the last 24h, data is available via ENTSOE-E). Building more renewables would alleviate these problems, but is actually not so easy or economically feasible with the current mostly nuclear grid.
* Contrary to what nuclear opponents on HN mostly claim, base load is still useful to some degree, which is why Germany still burns coal and has biofuel reactors specifically to provide base load. Moving nuclear generation capacities to Germany would reduce carbon output during nights, especially summer nights low on wind, and free up biogas to be used for peaker operation.
Why doesn't France reduce its dependence on nuclear power, allowing economic incentives for cheaper solar and wind power? Mostly politics. Shutting down the nuclear power plants is even more expensive than letting them run until their EOL, which is a tough sell. Also NIMBYs hate wind turbines a lot, and by the decentralized nature of wind, fighting them is harder than the NIMBYs against nuclear plants.
Why doesn't Germany build more nuclear...
Until it does not work thanks to intermittency, then it turns into the most expensive form of electricity. Or is there a reason why Germans have the most expensive electricity in whole EU?
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/th...
According to that, Germany has the second highest, just behind Denmark, which has even lower production costs but even higher taxes.
And both are almost exactly at the EU/European average for production cost.
Also you need to learn the difference between Capex and Opex.
The electricity sales prices is dominated by paying back the multi-billion dollar loan which funded the construction. Running a nuclear plant half of the time means doubling the electricity price - and it is already by far the most expensive method of producing electricity.
If you build nuclear power plants, you basically have to run them at 100% capacity 100% of the time to be even remotely close to being economically viable.
- delayed maintenance due to covid
- usual reduction of output due to heat and water temperature limits
- and the big one: worse than expected corrosion on some pipes
https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/06/29/corrosion-problem-sh...
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/French-regulator-giv...
"The fault seems common to a whole series of France’s reactors. The shutdowns affect four of the largest N4 reactors of 1,500 megawatts, five 1,300-MW, reactors of similar design, and three 900-MW units. This, on top of a series of outages at 18 other reactors for repairs, updating, or regular safety checks, has left France with the lowest nuclear output in decades."
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...
"All of these events require EDF to adjust its French nuclear output estimate for 2022 to 280-300TWh"
For reference nuclear produced 442 TWh in 2011 in France
Capacity factor will be 55-60% at best in 2022 for nuclear.