Which unfortunately now shuts down because the reactors cannot cope with the heatwaves. Turns out that no river = no cooling = no energy production.
False,
Reactor production is throttled down to preserve the river environment, not because they cannot cool themselves. Only 18% reduction on the worst event.
Dismissing the biggest low carbon energy producer because 1970 engineers did not account for the unknown temperature extremes 20 years after the predicted lifespan of the reactor is silly.
Unknown temperature extremes? We knew about climate change for much longer. And France’s nuclear reactors have an average age of less than 40 years.
Turns out, even when you have to throttle them down slightly due to drought, having a large amount of available nuclear power, like France and Sweden do, means you emit an awful lot less carbon.
Unfortunately, thanks to the anti-nuclear lobby, we are in a situation where the current reactors will have to be shutdown before the new ones are available to take their place.
If we could deal with the waste that we’ve already got, that would instill some confidence, but the govt has basically shrugged. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nLUAN2Rev1E
Nuclear waste is an already solved problem, we just have to use the solutions. The vast majority (>99%) can be recycled.
We should have been deploying nuclear much earlier and then augment with renewables. Once energy storage technology matured more you could phase out nuclear plants.
That would’ve required long term planning though and what if in the end it came out that coal isn’t so bad at all, huh, what then??? /s
And it turned out that beautiful clean coal is just that!
While they did well environmental to produce this and even from a cost to consumer, there are many hidden costs to the power produced which will test France in the coming years as their fleet of reactors and the coming debt-to-gdp crisis means the tens of billions required to overhaul it might be tough to subsidize.
It’s like I’ve always said, “The best time to build a nuclear power plant is fifty years ago.”
The second best time is forty nine years ago