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Which unfortunately now shuts down because the reactors cannot cope with the heatwaves. Turns out that no river = no cooling = no energy production.
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.
Have you read about the Paks NPP? Not throttled, shut down. They even tried sinking barges in the Danube to raise levels enough to keep it going.
And yet, despite that, France still has some of the cleanest electricity in the world with prices in line with the rest of Europe and exported about 10TWhrs of electricity during July.
I agree that downtime is bad, but I don’t think abandoning nuclear to go all in on solar which has a minimum downtime of 50% or wind which has extended periods of <10% is a solution to that. Given that we need electrification to replace fossil fuels in transport and heating over the next few decades to prevent catastrophic climate change, the only reasonable course IMO is to build out as much as possible of nuclear and renewables.
The problem is that building nuclear is slower and more expensive than just building renewables. It made some sense when labor was cheaper. But it doesn’t anymore.
Yeah we need to electrify transportation, heating, fertiliser and steel production. What you need to consider is that these all have excellent synergies with renewable energy. Making fertiliser from nuclear power never made sense and never will make sense. But with solar power it’s just now barely cheap enough to make sense. There are already plants up and running. And you then get a huge amount of capacity to balancer solar/wind for free as well. The same goes for transportation, steel production and especially heat. We already have heat batteries in production. Both super high temperature ones to replace fossil fuels in industry, and medium temperature ones that can store energy for months to shift energy from summer to winter for district heating systems.
None of this makes economic sense with nuclear (well, EVs make sense still).
I have nothing against nuclear. I love the tech. But it’s simply dead. And no, SMRs is not gonna save it.
Nuclear is not clean energy. Building new reactors makes zero sense given the cost compared to renewables.
Cool map though what’s that website?
And buying fuel roads from Russia, which makes it hard to sanction that part…
Which program is this?
https://app.electricitymaps.com/
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.
Some reactors can even cool down the river ! This is the case for the Civeau reactor for example, the water released is cooler than the water pump from the river.
Source
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.
Yes, unknown. You do not care about when the reactor went online, but when the reactor design was finalized. This happened with CP0 design in 1970, 4 years before the messmer plan.
We knew about climate change in 1970, but we lacked reliable models and computational power to create good predictions at that time. Climate change was an hot scientific debate, not an applied principle in civil engineering design.
The only reactor not part of the messmer plan (1974) that was throttled down is the Chooz B on the Meuse river. In this case it is more of a political issue: under 1998 treaty between Belgium and France, the plant must curtail power if the river flow drop. Not as safety measure, but to preserve downstream flow to Belgium. This was not taken into account in the reactor design. The operation of the plant was restricted retroactively. The Chooz B plant uses evaporative towers to minimize heat discharge.