I don't think that's fair.

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 French reactors were taken offline for scheduled maintenance and repairs. Those hours don't count against reliability metrics because the plants weren't expected to be operating.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7BlzKHfxPk

> The French reactors were taken offline for scheduled maintenance and repairs. Those hours don't count against reliability metrics because the plants weren't expected to be operating.

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.

An unscheduled outage does have a spectrum to it - on the low/bad end there's a reactor scram. No one wants that. But there's also this case, where corrosion was found that needed to be repaired sometime "soon". Scheduling that work almost a year in the future does not count against their reliability score.

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.

> Scheduling that work almost a year in the future does not count against their reliability score.

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.

Yes, imaging shutting down 40% of the roads in France, and saying: "We have a reliable road network because we announced this a year in advance"

If there truly were unscheduled repairs then it seems odd that the parent, who's an active HN user since 2012, would throw away their credibility by spreading blatant falsehoods.

I believe that Brazzy meant that the news report I linked to was lying. And that might be true. But I don't believe so because the incentives are there for EDF to get those reactors running as quickly as they can - while a reactor is idle it's not earning any money.

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.

That is a really bizarre way of approaching the issue.

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...

>found during inspections in October 2021

That's a year ago, would you say they scheduled them for this year?

Perhaps, but I very much would not say that "Those hours don't count against reliability metrics because the plants weren't expected to be operating."

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...

> The French reactors were taken offline for scheduled maintenance and repairs.

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)

Thank you.

For starters: to compare reliability (which is a statistic), you need to first look at more than a single anecdotal time sample.

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.

Ok, this is ridiculous, given your position, I'm not going to spend long on this but:

> 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.

If you're arguing that the French nuclear run by EDF is unreliable, while the German nuclear power was reliable I'll grant that, but that wasn't what I took from your comment. (It's possible I misinterpreted)

The reading material is essentially an entire twitter thread saying "nuclear is the beginning and the end of the answer and everyone who is against it is not thinking right. Anti-nuclear sentiment is rampant and the problem". I found it profoundly uninteresting so if you feel I should have gotten something else from it, perhaps you can enlighten me with what that was.

They're in the process of being started for months now. It's even mentioned in the tweets that EdF has a poor track record of keeping their word. How much I would know if I would only read the material properly.

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.

>They're in the process of being started for months now

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."

I am not implying anything at all, I am stating it explicitly, as is the author on Twitter. Here's a quote:

> 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.

Erm, EDF. I'm in favour of nuclear, but EDF/Hinckley Point are how not to do it (I think the only residential consumers they have left have failed to do any sort of shopping around/don't care about the cost - very possibly different for business/vested interests).

That’s not the whole story. EDF is a very competent company which have everything needed to provide cheap electricity to the whole country while making money.

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.

Eh, EDF charges more money directly than other suppliers (as a direct residential consumer, it was only a couple of years back I discovered how much more expensive they are). Plus as for making money, they are heavilty debt-laden and need the Frech government to bail them out[0].

* [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-p...