It may be particularly smart for this moment in internal French politics, but energy independence is a smart move for any sovereign.
If France finances these new power plants, financing cost goes virtually to zero. So even if actually building the new reactors cost the same (unlikely, I hope they learnt a thing or two over the last 10 years...) they will end up a lot cheaper than Hinkley Point.
Just the latest news that is the same as the last decade of bad news:
> EDF now estimates the total cost of the project at 12.7 billion euros ($14.42 billion). Its expected cost has more than quadrupled from the first estimate made in 2004.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-de...
$15B of lithium ion battery factory would have far far greater carbon impact, dollar for dollar. $1B on early stage startups would similarly be more impactful.
French: https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2019/06/24/epr-...
* https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
Better than being dependent on oil and gas, especially if your current supplier is Russia.
Fun fact; This was the key measure in obamas iran deal. The US would give them the enriched uranium if they shut down their nuclear research.
So, once the security concerns are addressed, you can buy uranium from any country willing to sell it to you and ship it. The number two and number three producers of uranium worldwide are Canada and Australia, both of which France is very friendly with (a submarine kerfuffle with the latter notwithstanding).
Of course, this doesn't mean they control the entire supply chain for needed parts for nuclear-- but if some critical piece broke they wouldn't have no energy immediately, either.
Question is, does Europe really want to depend on journalist/dissident-murdering Russia?
Russia nearly bankrupted itself when it contained the nuclear disaster and even Gorbachev thinks it was Chernobyl that ultimately destroyed the Soviet Union.
Now with this in mind, I wouldnt be surprised considering the sanctions on Russia, if they perhaps make a grab for the uranium in Chernobyl and sell it, to claw back some of the costs they incurred for cleaning up Chernobyl.
Strategically, it was useful for Russian politics to have something as risky as the Chernobyl nuke power station in the Ukraine during the soviet union era, ie different country if anything went wrong nothing to do with us sort of thing.
However thats how it remains until now where the Iranians need uranium after their enrichers were destroyed with Stuxnet, so you have one potential customer there, you also have India & Pakistan, Israel as well as the UK and France who will all be needing a bit more uranium as we get off fossil fuels to reduce greenhouse gases.
The same type of reactor as Chernobyl is still in operation at the Leningrad NPP
Along with three units each in Kursk and Smolensk NPPs. Plus I think a lot of people don't realize some of the other reactor units at Chernobyl continued operating until the last one finally shut down in 2000.
It needed a massive amount of water to pumped around which explains why many nuke power stations are positioned on the coast.
Of course, wiki is wiki, but is no more or less valid or invalid, than other reports when being mindful of bias.
In terms of Chernobyl and radiation leaks, an airburst instead of ground burst would spread more radiation and could parts of the Ukraine become radioactive wasteland to prevent Nato pushing right upto Russia border?
Russia hasnt moved an inch, but NATO has so could NATO end up on the wrong side of history with this one? Wars are always good distractions for domestic failures.
Germany's car industry and Russian Oil wealth is also a partnership I see.
Question is just what is the state of the fuel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel#Plutonium
And what developments have been made here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarov
Reactor grade: more than 19% 240Pu and less than 80% 239Pu
If the irradiation period has been short then the plutonium is weapons-grade (more than 93%).
Chernobyl's life span was cut short, so do we really know what things are like?
Edit.
Lets not forget being a member of NATO means nuclear weapon sharing, so is Russia not justified if it made a grab or made Ukraine a radioactive buffer zone?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
Where does China come into all this with their new missiles after backing Russia?
Edit 2 Nato has become unpopular in Europe since the middle east wars and the ensuing migrant crisis. How do you know there isnt a concertive effort to rein in the Americans who spend the most on their military, not just within EU NATO members but within the wider global community? In other words are the Americans walking into a trap?
And how is this clever since the EDF cannot sell their nuclear power without making losses?
Followed by Namibia, Niger, Russia, Uzbekistan, the US and China.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Uranium_...
All over the place. Uranite is pretty common. E.g. Canada has 200+ locations: https://www.mindat.org/min-4102.html (scroll to the very bottom).
Moreover (source: UNECE): "mining impacts are technically highly dependent on ore grade, as the efforts required to extract a fixed quantity of ore is proportional to the amount of rock to be extracted, therefore inversely proportional to the grade. This is true at the individual mine level, for which such a model could be derived; more importantly, this assumption is valid for open pit and underground mines. Warner and Heath test this relationship and its influence over the full life cycle of the technology, showing that a lowering ore grade may lead to tripling life-cycle GHG emissions by 2050 in case of a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity"
Read: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1530-9290... "Depending on conditions, median life cycle GHG emissions could be 9 to 110 g CO2-eq/kWh by 2050."
In general, whatever a politician's motivation is for any particular bill may or may not be aligned to yours, even though you may both agree on the outcome of that bill. And that's ok.
Exactly, Macron has a very long history of changing of advice, sometimes after just a few days. In 2017 he campaigned to stop most nuclear plants in France (which are really old anyway) [0]. I think here those statements were more to sooth the "CGT" and the big companies in the field after the government last statements on EDF. [1]
He was the guy who dismantle Alstom to GE's and EDF's profits, then made Alstom buy what it just sold. It's hard to see any consistent strategy in any of his actions, except from a political point of view. He probably don't care of anything on any subject, it's just a matter of having the best posture to win elections.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-energy-strike-idUS...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/power-group-edfs-sha...
Only over the course of many decades do they net reduce carbon emissions, at the cost of much higher carbon emissions during the construction phase. Right now we need to be implementing the fastest carbon reductions possible and this does the exact opposite; for the next fifteen years, these plants will be a massive carbon emissions increase, and then it will take many years of operation to "pay that back." By then it will be far too late.
Nuclear is one of the most expensive electricity generating technologies and it has only gotten more expensive, while solar, wind, and battery technologies are following expected plunging cost paths. Nuclear power plants are difficult to site geologically, difficult to site grid-wise (because the only way they are economical is through massive scale, and you can't just drop 5, 10, or more gigawatts onto the grid just anywhere), there is no need for base load which is the only thing nuke can provide (either in terms of capability, or economically), they don't like fussy climates/extreme weather (and if they use natural bodies of water, are vulnerable to invasive species, increasingly a problem around the world), they have very deep and exacting supply chains when countries have experienced significant supply chain problems for numerous different reasons, and you can't just snap your fingers and have qualified staff to run the plant. They require significant socio-political stability (functioning education, security, accountable political leadership_, and generate material that is extremely dangerous to life for generations, and have the potential to render entire geographical regions uninhabitable, again for generations.
Guess what has none of these problems? Solar. Wind. Hydro. Energy storage.
Nuclear power also doesn't solve the fundamental problems: the environmental impact of staggeringly large militaries, the amount of 'disposable' packaging used in almost everything, the cross-planet shipping of consumer goods most of which are, frankly, useless, heavy use of low occupancy vehicle travel, poor building efficiency, and proof-of-work cryptocurrency schemes.
Right. Because all of those grow naturally in the wild and do not require fiberglass, concrete, various metals, digging for ore, diesel for transport, and on and on and on...
Nuclear takes a decade to even start operating and by some estimates is worse than natural gas in carbon footprint. Uranium refinement and waste fuel processing take up a massive amount of resources.
https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-...
Solar pays back its carbon footprint within months, whereas nuclear may very well have a footprint much larger than natural gas.
Look around. Do you see any utilities or investors building nuclear plants? No? Meanwhile wind and solar deployments are skyrocketing, both grid and small scale.
Do you think maybe the people running power grids and investing in power plants know a little bit more about this than HNers like yourself do?
Look at what power companies, investors, grid operators, and most countries are putting money into. Not nuclear. If you think it's just because the public finds it unpalatable, well, the public finds a lot of things unpalatable and that doesn't stop industry and investors from doing whatever they want.
Solar and wind deployment in the US is growing massively as the price of solar panels and wind turbines plunge, especially solar. Battery storage is also plunging in price and rapidly maturing into grid-scale solutions like flow batteries.
Nuclear hasn't gotten cheaper over many, many decades and it provides a kind of power we don't need - base load. In many countries there's an excess of renewable power on many days.
Solar is highly distributed which helps decentralize the grid and localize power generation, lowering losses. It's a lot more efficient for your EV to get power from your neighbor's rooftop panels than from a power plant hundreds of miles away.
So, it seems to me that while many grids are switching to renewables, they are still far away from matching Nuclear's emissions.
Finally, if we're accounting for the cost decommissioning old nuclear stations and long-term storage of nuclear fuel, we should also account for the externalities of fossil fuel power, such as health consequences of pollution, the existential risk from global warming, and turmoil due to geopolitical tensions.
This may help lowering the reliance of France on Russia but its energy production will still be reliant on other countries, as 100% of the required fuel (uranium) is imported.
Uranium producing countries include Australia and Canada, who are a bit less crazy with their international politics and military movements.
No it doesn't. It's about a third.
The total at the end of 2021 was about 8500 million cubic metre, divided as follows: Norway 3000, Russia 2300, LNG 2200, Algeria 640.
https://www.bruegel.org/publications/datasets/european-natur...
Of course, that's why it says first reactor will go live in 2035, not in a day
There's was no future where power got built without the stunt, so... It's still a move closer to extra energy production. Even though it's a political one.
French citizens have never been put in a position to vote between a pronuclear candidate and an antinuclear one.
Well, of course, there are ecologists on the first round of the vote, but on the second rounds, both candidates are always pronuclear. Of course, they all started ten years to include electoral promises to balance the energy mix with more renewables but none delivered: France has recently been recognized as being at the worst country in the European Union with only 19% of renewables in our mix - despite having signed to reach 23% this year.
The left is deeply divided on the matter ; in fact, the left is divided on all ecological issues: agriculture, industry, energy ... The right is pro-big-polluting agriculture in the name of our commercial deficit (we export a.lot), anti-regulation of industry on ecological grounds because our industry is weak (which is true but not a reason), and pronuclear in the name of sovereignty - on the energy issue but also for military reasons. The fact that the nuclear energy enables France to emit far less CO2 is just a welcome argument. But if we had petrol like Norway, it would be "drill, baby, drill !".
The nuclear energy has nothing to do historically in France with ecology and the climate issue will reinforce that totally nondemocratic decision taken by the General De Gaulle in the name of our Grandeur. A policy that our technostructure follows without any true democratic supervision. Check and balances exist only on safety matters, but absolutely none of the French energy mix.
Nowadays it has become a political subject of course. But it's really just theater and will stay so for quite a while. The public opinion had been leaning on the right more and more for the last 20 years. When elected, self-called Socialists acted clearly on a center-right: really more like Manchin than Biden (in a daring transposition of very different political landscapes).
Funny detail: the French scientists had stalled in the research of the atomic bomb. That was a problem for the US in the context of the Cold War. So the US told the British to tip us in the right direction. That direction had already been deeply worked on but dismissed by the French scientists.
That was very discrete, not even officially recognized by some secret treaty. A prominent English nuclear scientist had a good friend among the French team. He visited him for lunch a Sunday. They talked physics. The UK has already its bomb, so the French noticed when his friend wondered aloud if that path come be "another way" to reach fission. But the British moved on another subject immediately. Friends don't need many words.
To thank the US, France later helped Israel - a lot - to build their own atomic bomb faster.
Then France made a 180º turn in its foreign policy and sided with the Arab countries on the Israël/Palestine issue. When Arafat and his troops were besieged in Beyruth by Tsahal, France evacuated them to Tunisia.
> Well, of course, there are ecologists on the first round of the vote, but on the second rounds, both candidates are always pronuclear.
Well, since nuclear power is such an important part of the Greens political platform (for better or for worse), you might argue that the fact all second-round candidates have been pro-nuclear sor far _is_ the result of the population voting on the topic.
And the fact that it happens _before_ the elections is, on the contrary, a way to trigger the debate.
The process to build plants take years - if the population is strongly opposed to, they can vote Macron out, elect Jadot or Melenchon, and the process will be canceled.
(The sad thing about French democracy is that the Presidential Election is virtually the only moment to have all debates)
Other countries (Germany, Belgium, etc...) decided _not_ to use nuclear energy without asking there population any more directly.
Populations are not asked explicitly about plenty of very dangerous industries (I leave near Toulouse, yet I still have to see "Get out of fertilizers !" stickers on cars following AZF explosion.)
Is this the kind of topic where the rules of representative democracy is to "let the elected governement govern" ?
Or is there a right way to get the opinion of a country, knowing that, in those matters, the population that vote will not be the population that deals ?
I have no idea what would happen if we had a referendum about nuclear energy, as they had in Italy and Switerzland.
I'm also no so sure what I would vote for !
Every time I ponder those questions, I open this [1] or [2], and I wonder: who's ready to switch off their lights first ?
[1] https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ... [2] https://app.electricitymap.org/map
What about the fallout from the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior? It was my understanding that nuclear technology was a source of national pride at the time, which emboldened the French government. Public support for nuclear power seems much less enthusiastic these days. Still, I'm curious if there was ever an election where candidates' positions on the event were at issue.
One of the challenges that moves to get away from nuclear generation have caused is the prospect of hurting the French industrial base more than it's already been undermined by offshoring.
(The other concern is keeping an independent nuclear arsenal, which is completely coupled to having reactors.)
That isn’t to say either model is better, just that you can’t look at wholesale prices and see the underlying economic realities. Time is running out on early German subsides where France still needs to pay for decommissioning.
France has a great track record with nuclear and I hope they can continue to leverage that excellence. Doing so cost effectively is more difficult especially when adding ever more inexpensive wind/solar generation to the EU grid.
A nuclear power plant that comes online in 5 years and operates for another 40-50 is going to be part of an extremely different grid in 25-55 years from now. That’s why private investors are so hesitant, but governments have more flexibility.
It could be that subsidized grid storage is a more cost effective solution, but that’s also limited by manufacturing capacity.
The article says 6 facilities, of which just one is expected to be operational in 15 years. I think this is the reason nobody except France is pushing nuclear. Starting today, by the time your first nuclear plant comes online, you will have been forced to deploy an alternative making it redundant. People make the case for nuclear being cost effective today, but I don't see any predictions about it being cost effective in 15+ years either.
The delay is because these power plants are supposed to replace existing power plants that will be taken offline in 13+ years. What’s notable is they aren’t 1:1 replacements so they are going to end up with a lower percentage of nuclear power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media...
PS: I reference the a 5 year delay because that’s roughly when you’re spending real money. France could easily back out of this plan in ~7 years having spent less than 1% of what it would cost to actually build a reactor.
If only we had the ability to plan energy policy decades ahead, because we know how long each powerplant will last, and when it will need to be replaced! If only we had energy consumption and CO2 emissions predictions going forwards and backward almost a century!
Macron wants to show he is being pragmatic. Nuclear energy allows to reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing the economy. It's particularly smart in this moment of tension with Russia, as Europe depends a lot on Russian energy.
But whether this happens or not remains to be seen.