This an exceedingly intellectually lazy argument which shows that you're either horribly biased (and never engaged with the reading material properly) or didn't even spend a minute thinking through what you're asking. It's somewhere on the level of "well, why is there snow in New York if global warming is happening HUUUUH?!".
(Not to mention that the French nukes are in process of being started already.)
If almost 40% of french nuclear is offline right now[0][1] then I think it's reasonable to ask questions about reliability.
Could you explain how the position is lazy?
(Note: I'm in favour of nuclear power)
[0] https://twitter.com/BurggrabenH/status/1567971418255532035
[1] Our forecast is for 59% utilisation or 315TWh based on EDF's guidance.
The argument is lazy because it's false equivalence. A power plant failing suddenly is not the same thing as a power plant being taken offline to fix a known issue.
edit: EDF has announced that they will be restarting their nuclear plants by winter. How this plays into the Russian gas shortage is that France also generates a lot of electricity off natural gas. By working to get the nuclear plants running by winter they won't need to run their natural gas generation plants, leaving more gas to be used for industrial purposes & home heating.
That is a lie. A total of 12 reactors are down for unscheduled repairs because of corrosion damage that was found during inspections in October 2021.
Some of the others are down unscheduled because they used river water for cooling, which due to the hot and dry summer threatened the rivers' ecosystem.
It's important to note that the river/lake water does not get sent through the reactor. The distilled water used inside the reactor is closely monitored for it's quality to prevent corrosion. There are heat exchangers between the two systems. The corrosion repair was probably in one or more of the heat exchangers (you don't want leaks between the two systems) or in the outer loop cooling pumps & piping.
Reactors need a reliable source of water for cooling. The ones near me use man-made lakes where they control the water level to assure a good supply of water. Recreational boating and lake-home real estate is a side benefit. If we had a California-level drought where the lake levels could not be maintained, then yes the reactors would have to be shut down. But dropping water levels are something that can be estimated and graphed on a chart. A shutdown in this case is unexpected and yes probably would be considered to be unscheduled.
I'm not sure in France's case where water consumption by the reactor would threaten the ecosystem due to a hot and dry summer. Likely the reverse since the water supply wouldn't be reliable any more. So far as water consumption by the reactors - the majority of the water gets returned to the river. It's warmer when it returns and that can cause algae growth, but it can also make for some good fishing (bass, bluegill, etc). Some reactors have cooling towers that work by evaporation, and that water gets returned to nature as rain.
Of fucking course it does! Otherwise your definition of that "score" is stupid and useless.
Equipment is reliable if it is available when you need it. A technology that has half your reactor fleet down for many months, just as you most need them, is by no stretch of imagination reliable. Claiming otherwise is either delusional or dishonest.
Reactors are hugely expensive to build - but not really all that expensive to run. A power company has loan payments to make regardless if the reactor is running or not, and they're going to want to minimize any downtime.
Here's a source: https://www.reuters.com/world/france-braces-uncertain-winter...
And Wikipedia has something of a timeline, with sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis...
That's a year ago, would you say they scheduled them for this year?
These are fairly big, disconcerting issues that are taking a long time to fix, not minor repairs that are part of routine maintenance: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fixing-edfs-reac...
Wow 40% offline, that's amazingly useless quality, never heard about sth like that.
Sibling comment says "unscheduled repairs because of corrosion damage".
> Those hours don't count against reliability metrics
Says who? If they need maintenance that often, they're unreliable sources.
That "doesn't count" idea sounds like excuses the owners/responsible could come up with, to get away with their incompetence (or what's going on).
It'd been nice if they had worked (apparently better than burning coal and causing climate change)
This is like... highschool level stuff. (Which is also the reason why I have very little will to refute your points, because they seem to be done from either dishonesty or ignorance. Anyone on HN is old enough to understand why anecdotal single sample evidence is not a way to refute statistical phenomena).
That is to say - even if EDF massively, critically fscked up this time, it has little effect to the reliability of nuclear power as a whole. Just like a single exploding windmill in Denmark doesn't change much about reliability of wind power.
> Just like a single exploding windmill in Denmark doesn't change much about reliability of wind power
First off, you realise France has 56 nuclear power stations? I'm wondering where you're getting "single sample" and "single windmill" from
If, over a year, 40% of windmills in Denmark weren't producing power, it would make a hell of a lot of sense to question the reliability of Danish windmills.
I don't know why you pulled out the straw man of saying the person was questioning all of nuclear power, but they had a very reasonable fact-based question.
I'd be very happy to listen to any data or explanations you could bring, but frankly you don't seem to be discussing things in good faith right now.
Reliability is a word and it has a meaning. With that in mind nothing beats renewables because the tech just works and they're so decentralized that a glitch of huge proportions would be needed to make them not work as designed. On the other hand a huge power plant can go out unexpectedly and take a massive part of the grid offline just as unexpectedly. That's unreliable and it's in fact what has happened this year.
Of course they are, that's how they work. 6 of them came online in last two weeks. But that's not what you were honestly implying there, is it?
> Reliability is a word and it has a meaning. With that in mind nothing beats renewables because the tech just works and they're so decentralized that a glitch of huge proportions would be needed to make them not work as designed. On the other hand a huge power plant can go out unexpectedly and take a massive part of the grid offline just as unexpectedly. That's unreliable and it's in fact what has happened this year.
Whatever meaning "reliability" has (especially in practical terms of you getting your power), it's really not what you wrote in the other sentences. Especially it's not a word that means "ignoring drawbacks of whichever option I like."
> To deliver 315TWh, EDF needs to bring back significant capacity, i.e. solve some of its corrosion issues. Can it?
> We will see. EDF has a way to over-promise and under-deliver over the years. So this "major, not minor" - make no mistake.
> 32/n
The tweet also contains a list of 8 reactors that were supposed to be back earlier but got "delayed". So we can pretend that there's no problem or danger of further delays, but that's just wishful thinking. The market certainly doesn't buy it, the futures prices for France were 2x any other country in Europe for early next year last time I checked.
Reliability is in fact a word that has nothing to do with drawbacks of something else. The only thing that matters is, is it delivering on what it said it would do. The issue is you're interpreting what I said based on your assumptions. The word you are maybe thinking of for renewables output is not reliability, but predictability. But even here you'd be wrong since their output can be predicted pretty accurately based on weather forecasts. So they are both reliable and predictable. Nuclear is neither as it was made quite clear this year (and clear in other ways in decades before). You could call renewables variable, since their output, well, varies. But it does so in a predictable and reliable way.
The point is (and I think it’s a scandal) that EDF is forced, by law, to resell its nuclear electricity to its competitors at an under the market price.
EDF is also required to offer an electricity plan with a law fixed price. Which is a good thing because historically, it allowed end users not to suffer from market price fluctuations.
Now what is happening is that all those fake competitors that did resell EDF electricity cheaper than EDF offerings, took their margin for more than a decade and are now asking their customer to unsubscribe and to go back to the EDF fixed-by-law offer.
* [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-p...
I do not know what the intersection is with the set of reactors that had to be shut down. One must understand that EDF is under immense pressure as an underfunded public provider, as it is forced to comply with price regulations (out of its own pockets as the government owes it a lot of money that curiously fails to be paid back), provides electricity at a discount to other European countries - someone has to compensate for Germany's plant closures - and private providers - which do not produce anyhting, they buy power at a discount from EDF then resell it to French people at a markup et voilà. EDF is also bound by law to buy solar energy produced by homes for a higher price than they end up selling it later on.
Basically my argument is that this might have less to do with the reliability of nuclear energy and more with how the EU, the govt and private parties rip EDF off while leaving it with no option as to what to do with its aging nuclear park.
The problem with renewable energies in Germany is that we do not have (or can't get?) enough water power plants. Solar energy doesn't really work at all, because energy is also needed at night and wind energy is also not very reliable. To compensate for this you need even more wind turbines. The assumption here seems to be that these are really better for the climate, but I don't see that either if you have to use that much resources to build these to compensate for miniscule amounts of basic electricity load.
> My guess is that renewables will continue to be a huge winner, especially in this crisis.
Winner of what? In Germany we have thousands of thousands of wind turbines and still we are sliding into an energy crisis. Sure, some days they probably could produce 100% of the electricity demand, but some days they barely produce any electricity. The idea was to compensate with gas power plants ...
We'd have a lot more cheaper power and a lot less Government subsidies.
That speaks nothing to the 'reliability of keeping plants online' that you are referring to. even if the reliability referred to by the author was claiming they are easy to keep online, that doesn't except France from the need of keeping good maintenance of the plants.
Now the 2nd part on your claim about renewables. most claims in output and gains in renewables include hydro electric (which is kind of weird since the super green crowd villainised hydro electric ), which is a great solution but unfortunately most of the best opportunities for hydro electric have already been exploited. wind and solar makes sense in certain situations, but in most it doesnt.
renewables should be part of the planning as much as possible, but they are not in a position to help Europe in its current situation. Germany's decision to shut down nuclear power plants just after fukushima because it was the social media hip thing to do at the time, has been a disastrous decision.
I agree about one thing, and that it really is a perfect storm of issues, and that the winter will be very rough. I hope it brings a needed change in a lot of ways.
The part about renewables requiring trillions in investment to replace nuclear I didn't get at all - they're the cheapest possible solution. New nuclear that is needed would be even worse. If he thinks they're expensive, don't know what else is there. My guess is that renewables will continue to be a huge winner, especially in this crisis. Even Macron came out a couple days ago and said France needs to build more renewable capacity and ease regulations and remove road blocks. That was a huge shock for me.