Biospace wrote: ↑2 Oct 2022, 10:03pm
France is the world capital of nuclear power with ~70% of their energy from their nuclear fleet. EDF runs all 56 of their reactors, and is in charge of all of ours, plus the building of the new EPR.
I'd have thought with so many reactors, their experience and skills would be pretty high? They have huge problems with their nuclear power, EDF has had to be nationalised to stay afloat because of the massive costs.
They lost most of their skills in the same way the uk did, their current fleet was largely built decades ago (hence the recent increasing maintenance outages as, like ours, they're at end of service), the main difference is they just had far more of them, hence spending decades with next to no co2/kWh.
As for being nationalised, don't really see an issue with that, they should have stayed nationalised all along so profits during the long years of generation could be reinvested rather than ending up in shareholder pockets. Nuclear is a very long term form of generation with high capital costs and low (but lasting) rate of return, that's never going to be suited to private investment which would far rather build something with lower investment, higher rate of return and don't care if that something externalises costs and problems (which both FF and solar/wind do).
The environmental footprint of nuclear looks good if you measure it as a simple CO2/kWh figure, but there's a lot of carbon footprint associated with decommissioning and storing nuclear waste. Those genuinely concerned with unnecessary FF use would also insist that a power plant which is a decade late and several billion over budget has a huge effect on carbon emissions.
A fair chunk of the blame of which lies entirely with 'environmentalists' and their messed up rationalisation of risk; France and uk should have been developing replacements far before they eventually did, the co2 cost of that will be significant, as was the cost of Germany switching plants off early.
Most co2/kwh estimates do include both construction and decommissioning, still ends up bettering everything other than hydro and geothermal while most wind and solar co2/kwh completely exclude the costs of storage/interconnects and other things required to make them viable in eliminating FF.
Though as i said, things need to be considered as the whole generation/demand system, not as isolated marginal costs and rates ...
Here's a conclusion from
https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/sussexenergy ... -research/
if countries want to lower emissions as substantially, rapidly and cost-effectively as possible, they should prioritise support for renewables rather than nuclear power. Pursuit of nuclear strategies risks taking up resources that could be used more effectively and suppressing the uptake of renewable energy
... which is sadly what far too much of the academic output on energy, just like this one, doesn't do. They focus on emission reductions here, but from what starting point? Obviously if you're 100% fossil fuel then certainly things that get on the ground quickly are going to reduce emissions the fastest, however returns will diminish as solar/wind generation % increases and effective load factors drop whilst the storage tech remains in the x years off vapourware box (with fusion and driverless cars) and fossil fuels still have to fill the gap.
