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)