Hacker News Reader

Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Yup. Big Nuclear fleet. Most of France's base load is just a bunch of fission reactors, very high efficiency, very low CO2 emissions. Germans are scared of them, decided to just burn lots of coal instead.

The UK imports a bunch of this cheap nuclear electricity from France, we have a 2GW bi-directional line. In principle that line could sell power from our gas turbines in mid-winter if France needs the extra power to keep things running, but most of the time it imports French nuclear power because it's much cheaper than our gas. Our own nuclear fleet is too small for our base needs (6-7GW of nukes compared to ~18-20GW base)

View on HN

However, the direction in France seems to be to replace part of nuclear with renewable. But building wind and solar power (hydro is already maximized to my knowledge) means the nuclear plants have to reduce their power output when there is wind and sun, so basically they are used to save uranium. But uranium is cheap, what is not is building the actual plant. So it just increases nuclear price per MWh since they have to produce less over time to make room for wind/solar power.

So basically by building renewable we are reducing nuclear power's viability on the grid. Since there does not seem to be viable storage option (if there was we'd be building that instead of gas power plants everywhere), running only on renewable is not possible. So I really don't see the point in using renewables as we do when electricity is already low-carbon.

And we don't burn just any coal. Of course it's brown coal, the worst kind of coal when it comes to pollution.

But that's the price we pay for rapidly switching off all our nuclear plants and heavily subsidizing low efficiency inland wind farms.

That's the result of too much ideology in energy politics.

Germans are scared of them, decided to just burn lots of coal instead.

I think it's less about being scared and more about the eye-watering cost of storing waste responsibly.

Germans are scared because there are reactors which have been overdue for years now and because of of accidents and underreporting that happens and threatens them. No sane person would blame them. This is no backwater terrain in some former soviet republic. This is the middle of Europe.

Luckily, they'll finally be decommissioned now as France turns towards renewables: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-france-nuclear-reactors-macron...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com