Not that it's really hidden, but this article is biased toward pro nuclear point of few and carefully not mention when we (France) had to import electricity from other European countries right when the prices were super high due to Russia's war to Ukraine because half of our reactors were shut down because of technical issues...
A cheaper alternative could have been solar for example. I don't mind keeping our nuclear capacity (it's certainly better than coal) while we switch to renewable and find good (eco friendly) and cheap storage but I don't really see it as a good target for producing the majority of our energy given the downsides.
On this, another funny story that pro nuclear also don't mention: this summer when it was very hot (and electricity demand for AC was high) they had to shut down several reactors because the cooling river would have been over heated too much. People criticize renewable for not being available all the time (which is indeed a problem without storage) but here thankfully solar saved the day by being available when it was needed.
Last thing that people tend to forget when they criticize ecologists views on nuclear: part of many ecologist program is to make it so that we use less energy. Heating and cooling poorly insulated housing is wasteful and stupid. Having everyone having their own transportation mean rather than having collective and energy efficient transportation system or having housing too far from commodities such that people can't walk or bike to them is also wasteful. And AI... Bref, let's fix that then maybe we won't need that much nuclear power in the end.
Why not just replace the CEO of the electricity company with someone who has less political connections, and accept that the primary function of EDF is not accounting, but making electricity work, and pick someone who is either an engineer or just has a little bit more experience with planning instead?
France has cheap electricity because of the nuclear buildout, in other words: because engineers saved 50% on the price, not because an MBA saved 0.1% on the price.
It's not like it took much planning to avoid that outcome, it just wasn't done. But I'm sure this saved EDF 5 bucks and the costs were carried by everyone else.
Yes, that's one of the issue with nuclear, it appears cheap because the cost are/will be carried by someone else. After all why take into account the waste management in many years or the price of dismantling old reactors into account when we have electricity now and we won't have to handle all that ourselves ^^
The issue in this case was management not properly planning (ie. don't repair all your plants at the same time), and doesn't have anything to do with nuclear versus any other source of power. If you disconnect all your generators at the same time, it will go down, no matter the technology.
Is their somewhere a (honest!) exploration/essay on why there are so few nuclear power plants being build?
Like South Korea is building some, and China (but they invest way more in renewables).
All other countries are either building 0, building less then retire, or on the process of building very little but taking ages.
If nuclear fission is "cheap, abundant and carbon-free", why has nobody put their money where their mouth is?
>France built 40 nuclear reactors in a decade. Here’s how they did it, and how the world can follow their lead today.
Today France takes more than a decade to build a single reactor (Flamanville 3) and the debts incurred nationalizing EDF, are now causing serious concerns about the whole nation defaulting. As clean and safe as nuclear power might be, I think the world will be fine not following that example.
Flammanville is a prototype, and much of the talent that was used to mass-produce reactors is long gone to time. The dumb thing now that Flammanville is finished would be to not follow up on it.
What's causing "serious concerns about the whole nation defaulting" is billionaires not paying enough taxes, not taking back 15% of what was ours in the first place...
What do you mean by that? Deep geological storage seems to work pretty well, and the 'size' of the problem is so small that even if we were to 100x it it would still be minuscule when compared to e.g. coal ash runoff, which includes fun things like arsenic and mercury and is currently 'disposed' of by stuffing it in landfills or even uncovered open-air pools.
> Deep geological storage seems to work pretty well
Not well enough - the crystalline parts of earth's crust are still too porous to reliably keep it contained. It would - in the long term - leak like radon gas.
And what about the mid to low radioactive waste? Also let's not forget France does not have any long term storage facility for their highly radioactive waste yet. Why if it is so easy have they not managed?
Nuclear-level containment on geological timescales is potentially impossible.
Its not like you can put it into a dump and its "gone" like household trash. Radioactivity is ionizing, so it corrodes all materials and cannot be physically contained. The earth's crust is to porous (i mentioned the radon problem in another post) to keep it underground.
A partial solution is to build reactors that can use that waste. Thorium reactors can do that and have the advantage that you can't make a bomb from it and that it is easier to control.
You're saying a flatly mistaken thing in absolutist terms from pure fucking igonrance, as if you knew what you were talking about, at that. There are many ways to store nuclear waste very safely, just as there are many ways to store all kinds of dangerous things safely and do all kinds of dangerous things we need to do as a civilization, safely. As for the size of the "problem" growing. Go look at how much space even all the world's known HL nuclear waste combined requires, and how slowly that space (hint: it's tiny, as in, fits-into-a-college-sports-auditorium with room to spare for a quick basketball game tiny) grows year over year, or would grow even if we exponentially increased our use of nuclear.
People such as yourself, just blandly stating plain nonsense with certainty are cause for many problems in the world, and for nuclear energy, they're as common as fruit flies, buzzing around any serious debate.
Just to give a little context: in Germany, which the OP was about, just the search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste started in 1999 with the formation of a working group of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety [1]. It is expected that the result of the search process will not be available until the year 2046 [2].
Maybe it's not quite as easy as the layman thinks, especially considering that Germany has a lot less space then, say, the US.
... and this research is done by people like my partner, who is currently writing their thesis about that. I could cite their previous publications here but that would dox me.
Led by the same party who when not in power cried loudly about how important it is to keep nuclear running, but in the 16 years it was in power before, when there would've actually been time to change things, didn't actually do anything except a small flip-flop once that cost the state billions in damages to the energy companies. It's just deeply unserious. They'll talk about how we should be open to nuclear, cut funding for renewables, give some money to some startups or consultancy firms and nothing will actually be built.
One of the best things Germany ever did. We already have produced enough poison for a million years. Renewables and perhaps nuclear fusion is the future.
Radiation poisoning. Fossil fuels fall into the same category. The alternative is not nuclear vs. fossil. We should focus entirely on renewable energies. Of course Germany is now in a transition period, and there are a lot of conservative politicians who have been shying away from the high investments required for a fast transition. I think the main problem here is that the fossil-nuclear advocates shift the main problems to future generations (climate change, long-term storage of nuclear waste), the general public (large subsidies, minimal security standards, no or unsufficient insurance of power plants against desasters) or other countries (placing nuclear plants or waste deposits at the border, relaying on other countries for long term storing of nuclear waste). Together with extremely optimistic estimates, this makes their energy costs appear low on paper, when in reality the overall costs are immense. In contrast, there do not appear to be many cost elements of renewable energy installations that can be concealed or embellished. The reserve funds for their demolition are perhaps the only exception. But these only account for a small part of the costs at any rate.
And nuclear could have drastically reduced that production of "poison" by the way. Arguments about how much we've contaminated with X are sort of immaterial to arguments in favor of a different thing with its own much more specific (and useful) dynamics.
It's a bit absurd, what you say, like arguing that it's good to stop using a stove in your apartment and just eat food raw, because one of your neighbors already did enough bad because they burned their entire house down while trying to make a bonfire with piles of coal in their yard.
Using renewables makes a lot of sense, but the sun doesn't shine all the time, you can't control the wind or the rain, and batteries don't have unlimited capacity. You still need something that starts producing electricity at a flip of a switch. Fusion might do that in the future, but until then, you'll be burning coal or something like gas (which you don't have locally) because the alternative isn't perfect?
Geothermal energy is constantly available. Offshore wind parks can provide a stable basic supply. Energy storage and grids that connect distant places can mitigate local variability a lot.
I would not advocate against having some fossil emergency backups. I think the planet can cope with a few percent of that. If this were our only concern, then we would have basically solved the problem.
Yes learning from China is banking on renewables. Their nuclear build out is behind schedule and the ambitions are being reduced because it makes so much more sense to build renewables.
China added 277GWh of solar (45% increase) and 80 GW of wind (+18%) in 2024 compared to 3.9 GW of nuclear (+3%).
While the percentage of nuclear power of overall electricity generation was increasing between 2012 and 2020 it is falling again. The national plan was for 200 GW of generation capacity from nuclear by 2035, that less than what was added from solar alone in 2024 and unlikely to happen (approved projects would add another 60 GW to the current 60 GW total in the next 5 years, but it is not clear if they will be build).
France had their construction boom earlier, so they're ahead of the curve. The article suggests that the secret of cheap reactor construction is mostly economies of scale: if one reactor is too expensive, buy fifty instead.
China has been reducing approvals for new reactors in recent years, to the point where the share of nuclear electricity generation is actually going down. Maybe 40 years down the line, they'll want to build just one more reactor to deal with increased demand and discover that the supply chain has atrophied so the project becomes an expensive boondoggle.
Not that it's really hidden, but this article is biased toward pro nuclear point of few and carefully not mention when we (France) had to import electricity from other European countries right when the prices were super high due to Russia's war to Ukraine because half of our reactors were shut down because of technical issues...
Wouldn’t the outcome be similar to if France had used a lot of Gas generation instead of having those temporarily-shut down reactors?
A cheaper alternative could have been solar for example. I don't mind keeping our nuclear capacity (it's certainly better than coal) while we switch to renewable and find good (eco friendly) and cheap storage but I don't really see it as a good target for producing the majority of our energy given the downsides.
On this, another funny story that pro nuclear also don't mention: this summer when it was very hot (and electricity demand for AC was high) they had to shut down several reactors because the cooling river would have been over heated too much. People criticize renewable for not being available all the time (which is indeed a problem without storage) but here thankfully solar saved the day by being available when it was needed.
Last thing that people tend to forget when they criticize ecologists views on nuclear: part of many ecologist program is to make it so that we use less energy. Heating and cooling poorly insulated housing is wasteful and stupid. Having everyone having their own transportation mean rather than having collective and energy efficient transportation system or having housing too far from commodities such that people can't walk or bike to them is also wasteful. And AI... Bref, let's fix that then maybe we won't need that much nuclear power in the end.
Why not just replace the CEO of the electricity company with someone who has less political connections, and accept that the primary function of EDF is not accounting, but making electricity work, and pick someone who is either an engineer or just has a little bit more experience with planning instead?
France has cheap electricity because of the nuclear buildout, in other words: because engineers saved 50% on the price, not because an MBA saved 0.1% on the price.
It's not like it took much planning to avoid that outcome, it just wasn't done. But I'm sure this saved EDF 5 bucks and the costs were carried by everyone else.
Yes, that's one of the issue with nuclear, it appears cheap because the cost are/will be carried by someone else. After all why take into account the waste management in many years or the price of dismantling old reactors into account when we have electricity now and we won't have to handle all that ourselves ^^
The issue in this case was management not properly planning (ie. don't repair all your plants at the same time), and doesn't have anything to do with nuclear versus any other source of power. If you disconnect all your generators at the same time, it will go down, no matter the technology.
Is their somewhere a (honest!) exploration/essay on why there are so few nuclear power plants being build? Like South Korea is building some, and China (but they invest way more in renewables). All other countries are either building 0, building less then retire, or on the process of building very little but taking ages.
If nuclear fission is "cheap, abundant and carbon-free", why has nobody put their money where their mouth is?
The UAE just brought some new nuclear online (with a lot of help from the South Koreans): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ar...
>France built 40 nuclear reactors in a decade. Here’s how they did it, and how the world can follow their lead today.
Today France takes more than a decade to build a single reactor (Flamanville 3) and the debts incurred nationalizing EDF, are now causing serious concerns about the whole nation defaulting. As clean and safe as nuclear power might be, I think the world will be fine not following that example.
Flammanville is a prototype, and much of the talent that was used to mass-produce reactors is long gone to time. The dumb thing now that Flammanville is finished would be to not follow up on it.
Perhaps you should read beyond the first sentence.
What's causing "serious concerns about the whole nation defaulting" is billionaires not paying enough taxes, not taking back 15% of what was ours in the first place...
And interesting, this is in stark contract to France's biggest neighbor: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-shuts-down-its-last-nuclear-po...
However, the opposition to nuclear is currently being reevaluated by the German government.
I still get annoyed when I think of this tweet by French Green party Senator Melanie Vogel after Germany shut down its last reactor: https://x.com/Melanie_Vogel_/status/1647352302171308036
> Sex is good but have you tried having your country shutting down its last nuclear power plants in 30 mn?
It's so absolutely horribly short sighted.
We have the ecologists we deserve... and boy do we not deserve anything nice... Afaik this is one of the least terrible of them we have...
There is no reasonably safe solution for storing the active waste. Continuing with nuclear power will increase the size of the problem.
What do you mean by that? Deep geological storage seems to work pretty well, and the 'size' of the problem is so small that even if we were to 100x it it would still be minuscule when compared to e.g. coal ash runoff, which includes fun things like arsenic and mercury and is currently 'disposed' of by stuffing it in landfills or even uncovered open-air pools.
> Deep geological storage seems to work pretty well
Not well enough - the crystalline parts of earth's crust are still too porous to reliably keep it contained. It would - in the long term - leak like radon gas.
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Storing all of the highly active radioactive waste that France produced over a year takes about 47 40-foot shipping containers.
Small feeder shops can contain a few hundred containers. Actual container shops contain thousands.
47 does not seem like much?
And what about the mid to low radioactive waste? Also let's not forget France does not have any long term storage facility for their highly radioactive waste yet. Why if it is so easy have they not managed?
Nuclear-level containment on geological timescales is potentially impossible.
Its not like you can put it into a dump and its "gone" like household trash. Radioactivity is ionizing, so it corrodes all materials and cannot be physically contained. The earth's crust is to porous (i mentioned the radon problem in another post) to keep it underground.
A partial solution is to build reactors that can use that waste. Thorium reactors can do that and have the advantage that you can't make a bomb from it and that it is easier to control.
You're saying a flatly mistaken thing in absolutist terms from pure fucking igonrance, as if you knew what you were talking about, at that. There are many ways to store nuclear waste very safely, just as there are many ways to store all kinds of dangerous things safely and do all kinds of dangerous things we need to do as a civilization, safely. As for the size of the "problem" growing. Go look at how much space even all the world's known HL nuclear waste combined requires, and how slowly that space (hint: it's tiny, as in, fits-into-a-college-sports-auditorium with room to spare for a quick basketball game tiny) grows year over year, or would grow even if we exponentially increased our use of nuclear.
People such as yourself, just blandly stating plain nonsense with certainty are cause for many problems in the world, and for nuclear energy, they're as common as fruit flies, buzzing around any serious debate.
Just to give a little context: in Germany, which the OP was about, just the search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste started in 1999 with the formation of a working group of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety [1]. It is expected that the result of the search process will not be available until the year 2046 [2].
Maybe it's not quite as easy as the layman thinks, especially considering that Germany has a lot less space then, say, the US.
--
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150217045132/http://www.bfs.de...
[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/endlager-atommuell-1.569...
... and this research is done by people like my partner, who is currently writing their thesis about that. I could cite their previous publications here but that would dox me.
[dead]
Led by the same party who when not in power cried loudly about how important it is to keep nuclear running, but in the 16 years it was in power before, when there would've actually been time to change things, didn't actually do anything except a small flip-flop once that cost the state billions in damages to the energy companies. It's just deeply unserious. They'll talk about how we should be open to nuclear, cut funding for renewables, give some money to some startups or consultancy firms and nothing will actually be built.
France biggest neighbour is Spain...
Not by head count which I would say is the more relevant metric than area when we're talking about a country's energy supply.
One of the best things Germany ever did. We already have produced enough poison for a million years. Renewables and perhaps nuclear fusion is the future.
Can you expand? What is “poison” referring to? Surely, burning coal as Germany’s current pace can’t be seen as a success, can it?
Radiation poisoning. Fossil fuels fall into the same category. The alternative is not nuclear vs. fossil. We should focus entirely on renewable energies. Of course Germany is now in a transition period, and there are a lot of conservative politicians who have been shying away from the high investments required for a fast transition. I think the main problem here is that the fossil-nuclear advocates shift the main problems to future generations (climate change, long-term storage of nuclear waste), the general public (large subsidies, minimal security standards, no or unsufficient insurance of power plants against desasters) or other countries (placing nuclear plants or waste deposits at the border, relaying on other countries for long term storing of nuclear waste). Together with extremely optimistic estimates, this makes their energy costs appear low on paper, when in reality the overall costs are immense. In contrast, there do not appear to be many cost elements of renewable energy installations that can be concealed or embellished. The reserve funds for their demolition are perhaps the only exception. But these only account for a small part of the costs at any rate.
And nuclear could have drastically reduced that production of "poison" by the way. Arguments about how much we've contaminated with X are sort of immaterial to arguments in favor of a different thing with its own much more specific (and useful) dynamics.
It's a bit absurd, what you say, like arguing that it's good to stop using a stove in your apartment and just eat food raw, because one of your neighbors already did enough bad because they burned their entire house down while trying to make a bonfire with piles of coal in their yard.
I am not saying that. I am saying that you should use renewable energy to operate your (energy efficient) stove. The technology is here.
Using renewables makes a lot of sense, but the sun doesn't shine all the time, you can't control the wind or the rain, and batteries don't have unlimited capacity. You still need something that starts producing electricity at a flip of a switch. Fusion might do that in the future, but until then, you'll be burning coal or something like gas (which you don't have locally) because the alternative isn't perfect?
Geothermal energy is constantly available. Offshore wind parks can provide a stable basic supply. Energy storage and grids that connect distant places can mitigate local variability a lot.
I would not advocate against having some fossil emergency backups. I think the planet can cope with a few percent of that. If this were our only concern, then we would have basically solved the problem.
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Why do we need to look 50 years back when China is doing the same right now? Maybe we should start learning from them?
Yes learning from China is banking on renewables. Their nuclear build out is behind schedule and the ambitions are being reduced because it makes so much more sense to build renewables.
China added 277GWh of solar (45% increase) and 80 GW of wind (+18%) in 2024 compared to 3.9 GW of nuclear (+3%).
While the percentage of nuclear power of overall electricity generation was increasing between 2012 and 2020 it is falling again. The national plan was for 200 GW of generation capacity from nuclear by 2035, that less than what was added from solar alone in 2024 and unlikely to happen (approved projects would add another 60 GW to the current 60 GW total in the next 5 years, but it is not clear if they will be build).
Sources https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/chin...
https://energyandcleanair.org/analysis-clean-energy-contribu...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
The article describes how France helped China reach that point. I did not know that.
France had their construction boom earlier, so they're ahead of the curve. The article suggests that the secret of cheap reactor construction is mostly economies of scale: if one reactor is too expensive, buy fifty instead.
China has been reducing approvals for new reactors in recent years, to the point where the share of nuclear electricity generation is actually going down. Maybe 40 years down the line, they'll want to build just one more reactor to deal with increased demand and discover that the supply chain has atrophied so the project becomes an expensive boondoggle.