Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in France?

Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by steeve on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:33PM (#23848576)

> has a long history of low-level incidents

If you actually bothered to read the ASN reports, you'd see that it's because it was one of the most transparent plant, hence the higher numbers.

> Rhine valley is seismically active

It is, which is why it was scaled for several times the biggest ever earthquake recorded (1365 IIRC, they derived the scale from models based on the damages it did).

ASN deemed its security "very satisfying", the rest is BS.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by eqvinox on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:35PM (#23848632)

All of your arguments might be correct, and none of them matter to public opinion and politics. Maybe if they were less transparent, there would have been less political pressure from Germany...

And I totally agree this is as dumb as it gets.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by steeve on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:55PM (#23848989)

"none of them matter to public opinion and politics"

You are absolutely right. Which is why others way more qualified than I (climatologists, nuclear engineers) are trying to debunk those fallacious arguments and slowly people seem to realise. I'm doing my part.

The very existence of this article and its present on HN front page is a sign that this is working.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by gmac on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @02:40PM (#23849700)

The fact that we know we can rank French nuclear plants by their transparency level is already seriously screwed up.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by orwin on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @03:27PM (#23850398)

That's not what he said. That's not what the rapport said.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by scohesc on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:21PM (#23848348)

So in other words, Germany (with some the most serious "green tech" laws) is basically forcing France to shut down their plant, even though it's been operating mostly fine and has been actually helping fight climate change for a long time already.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by croes on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:33PM (#23848569)

Mostly fine? https://www.dw.com/en/reports-fessenheim-nuclear-accident-pl... "The reactor had to be shut down by adding boron to the pressure vessel, an unprecedented procedure in Western Europe, according to an expert." By that standard Fukushima ran mostly fine too

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by eqvinox on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:25PM (#23848429)

I have no idea whether it's even possible to find out how the different reasons have factored into the decision; it might as well just have been due to the age or seismic activity and nothing else...

But, in reality, it was probably a mix of all 3 and some more.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by zzzcpan on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:50PM (#23848898)

It's more like a mix of solar and wind energy investors with fossil burning energy investors, both benefit from shutting down nuclear reactors. Solar and wind investors just want to have their huge returns with nothing wasted, as each kWh is pretty expensive, but lacking nuclear power most of the energy generation will still go to burning fossils, who will profit massively from it. Happened in other countries too, like Ukraine, which was recently forced to temporary stop some reactors to benefit those two groups and of course make things worse for the climate.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by kergonath on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @02:41PM (#23849718)

The fundamental reason is electoral calculus. The socialists, and then macronists, needed green votes to get a majority. The safety assessment is perfectly fine.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by _ph_ on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:45PM (#23848810)

Germany would be the main country affected, if there were a major "mishap" at Fessenheim. Basically the whole south of Germany would be impacted with large cities like Stuttgart, Augsburg and of course München.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by foepys on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @03:03PM (#23850064)

People tend to forget that despite the Chernobyl disaster happening in Ukraine, Bavaria advised their citizens to not eat any mushrooms collected in the woods because wind blew radioactive particles across Europe.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by _nalply on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:26PM (#23848439)

Switzerland is worried about Fessenheim, too.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by sleazy_b on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:29PM (#23848485)

A review of the plant’s page on Wikipedia shows that it did indeed have a number of low level incidents. Do you have any sources about those being the true cause of the shutdown?

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by eqvinox on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:40PM (#23848703)

> Do you have any sources about those being the true cause of the shutdown?

I don't, and I'm not sure it's possible to figure out exactly — since it's politically sensitive and possibly involved "back channel pressure" and other shenanigans.

That said, it has been a longstanding topic in German anti-nuclear circles, cf. list of articles (German) on:

https://www.heise.de/tp/thema/AKW-Fessenheim

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by WilTimSon on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:32PM (#23848561)

I feel like, regardless of what the cause is, having numerous low-level incidents means it's not exactly "safe" as the title of the article suggests. Another user has commented that the plant is nearly 100 years old while the reactors are supposed to last only 40 years before being replaced.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by outworlder on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:37PM (#23848649)

Depends what's classified by an "incident". Aviation has "incidents" all the time. And yet we are not grounding planes based on this. We learn about them, and improve.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by makomk on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @02:08PM (#23849201)

The key thing that makes aviation safe is not treating low-level incidents as OK just because they haven't turned into major incidents. One of the major, repeated root causes of catastropic failures in nominally robust, redundant and safe systems, across multiple industries, is the normalization of deviance - the acceptance of safety failings because they haven't lead to a critical disaster yet. The more I hear from nuclear advocates, the more convinced I've become that pro-nuclear advocacy is fundamentally incompatible with the existence of safe nuclear power plants, if that is even possible.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by throwaway43234 on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:50PM (#23848903)

Do you trust the service with the statuspage that is 100% green for all of history or the one that reports the occasional degradation?

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by WilTimSon on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:58PM (#23849028)

Reporting accidents isn't the issue. It's having them on the regular and being past the standard operational period that worries me. Not sure why that's contentious.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by mlyle on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @02:02PM (#23849100)

In an ideal world, you have your threshold for "incident" set low enough that you have a lot of them. Catching more of the distribution of problems let you increase the level of safety.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by throwaway43234 on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @02:09PM (#23849212)

Exactly. This difference between "we're only going to update the status page if a customer comes screaming to us that the service has been unavailable for the past 24 hours and they've received no updates" and "we have automated systems in place to updated the status page if the p95 response time exceeds XXX (among other things)".

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by therealdrag0 on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:25PM (#23848428)

1. Can you provide a source? 2. still a problem that they’re not replacing not with green energy though right?

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by eldenbishop on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:52PM (#23848939)

For what it's worth the original close order was supposed to align with bringing the newer Flamanville 3 1,650 MW plant online which would have been a nearly even swap. Unfortunately that project has gone 5x over budget with numerous time delays. Current guesstimates expected it to come online in 2022. This article seems a little disingenuous.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by eqvinox on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:27PM (#23848465)

Here's a DW (german news org) article illustrating the German annoyance at some particular "low-level" incident:

https://www.dw.com/en/reports-fessenheim-nuclear-accident-pl...

I'm not sure there's an easily accessible list of all incidents and/or way to compare that against other plants :/

Ed.: also, yeah, it'd be cool if this wasn't causing an uptake in coal :(

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by tasogare on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:30PM (#23848513)

Yes, I’ve heard about closing this power plant for... decades. It’s hardly surprising. Moreover, given that Alsace was the most impacted region by the Tchernobyl cloud, it’s not too surprising that there was some local awareness and push to close it.

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Re:Why is the Fessenheim 2 nuclear power plant closing in Fr... by PunchTornado on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @01:25PM (#23848434)

Germany takes like 30% of its energy from coal. They should have kept the reactor running until coal energy is no longer used in Germany.

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