It boggles my mind that France and South Korea had such great success with nuclear but nobody else was able to replicate that success.
It can't be magic or works of God that won that success, so what's the real story?
It can't be magic or works of God that won that success, so what's the real story?
The reason is that France has invested a lot of public money in nuclear energy. The state has taken the investment risks, over a very long period of time (decades) for the public good.
Nuclear energy is not really viable with private investment, because the return over investment time and the cost of money is too high. States can borrow sub-0% loans. Private power companies just can't.
And France invested at a time where there was a consensus between politicians, to invest in the future. Now politicians hardly invest for their elected time.
Now we reached a point were, during public bidding, solar and wind are cheaper per kWh than Hinkley C (that was already three years ago). If the CO2 certificates would just be more restricted, solar and wind would easily outbid coal as well. Last time I checked, which was a couple of years ago, in Germany CO2 certificates ahd the effect that they largely pushed out everything except coal and renewables from the market. Renewables had a marginal cost of zero, so they always got demand. And with CO2 certificates plenty, coal plants ended up the next cheapest power source with dirt cheap fuel. Cleaner and more flexible solutions were thus more often than not priced out, like gas and nuclear.
I hate nuclear, because when an accident happens it always carries the risk of being disastrous. But right now, i would make sense to keep alle xisting nuclear plant running and close down coal and oil plants. Sure, we have the risk of an accident, and we have the added nuclear waste to worry about. but we already ahve a lot of waste, adding some more doesn't change that much. And we would buy ourselves time to solve energy storage coming from renewables. And use flexible as plants to cover unexpected peak demand. Not sure if we will ever see that level of long term thinking anytime soon, so.
That metric is very misleading. Solar and wind are cheaper than most other sources because their fuel cost is zero.
There are a slew of other costs that are not borne by the solar and wind generators but which are borne by consumers namely balancing costs, standby generation costs, ancillary services and so on.
Once you add in all these costs, renewables suddenly aren't as cheap as the media would have you believe. Don't get me wrong - they are an important step towards decarbonising electricity generation but they aren't the final step.
The final step would be transmission interconnections on a continental scale, large amounts of hydro where possible and nuclear where hydro isn't possible and little to no coal and gas.
To my understanding, the intermittency/baseload problem is a much larger problem than people give it credit for. And I don't think it is safe to assume that we will eventually "solve energy storage", any more than we can count on eventually developing commercially viable fusion or any other still-pie-in-the-sky technologies.
Perhaps we will, but dangerous to count on.
Basically, if France's neighbors tried to replicate France's success, they'd immediately run into the problem that they'd have to compete with France in the same power market. If building more nuclear reactors made economic sense in that market, France would (perhaps) already have done it.
I don't know how true that is, but it at least makes sense.
Belgium has 2 nuclear power plants. In 2016, these covered about 51% of domestic power consumption.
Those power plants are owned and operated by Engie-Electrabel which is a subsidiary to Engie, a french multinational providing utilities services.
Engie-Electrabel covers about 50% of the Belgian market. The second largest producer/supplier on the Belgian market is Luminus (20% market share). The main shareholder of Luminus is Electricité de France (70% stake). Fun fact, EDF Luminus has a 10% stake in Engie-Electrabel's Belgian nuclear power plants. Most of their production is gas based.
Those 2 nuclear plants are coming up on 50 years of age. Their operational lifespan was 40 years. Talks about a phase out have been going on since 1999. So, what went wrong?
Back in 2003, at the end of their legislature, the then-government passed legislation that put a stop on building new plants and asserted a phaseout between 2021-2025. Even though an energy commission back then already noted the high reliance of Belgian consumption on nuclear. It was assumed that subsequent governments would revert that decision.
That didn't happen.
Why? Because between 2003 and now, Belgium has had a string of political crises severely stifling decision making processes. The "energy transition" has been postponed over those past 20 years for political reasons.
Belgium is now at a moment in time where those plants ought to be shut down, but without any proper alternatives to curb power consumption. Meanwhile, the costs for consumers has risen sharply over the past decade: 0.35 EUR / kWh.
Those costs are expected to rise in the future. Past policies regarding subsidizing renewables such as solar panels through tax incentives turned out to negatively impact the budget deficit. Moreover, the existing, outdated grid isn't updated to deal with modern power consumption. As a result, Belgium has ended up in a bind where recently owners of solar panels were barred from putting their surplus production on the grid, and the massive costs of subsidizing will need to be recouped. The already massively accrued costs to the public even before an energy transition can happen in earnest, pretty much render the debate moot.
Needless to say, Belgium is looking towards a future where it will probably be forced to reside to building new gas powered plants for the time being, and steep consumer prices for power.
The real story is that neither France, nor South Korea has any natural gas, coal, or oil reserves.
It seems that when you have no other independent means of generating electricity, you magically become rather good at building and operating nuclear reactors.
If the coal and oil reserves of the United States disappeared tomorrow, it too would acquire that superpower - and our politicians would miraculously discover a way to get both reactors, and waste disposal sites built.
Nowadays there's virtually zero nuclear projects that are economically competitive, including in France.
France runs a lot of totally outdated reactors, because there is not enough money available to replace them. Even extending the lifetimes costs a lot of money, which had better be invested in a future decentralized market-oriented energy landscape.
We don't replace them because there is no political will to do so, and the green party has successfully put fear-mongering campaigns against nuclear energy.
> Even extending the lifetimes costs a lot of money, which had better be invested in a future decentralized market-oriented
And yet France electricity cost is half the price of what you have in Germany, where you will find the "decentralized energy revolution".
There is no money for it and France does not know how to do it --- see the exploding problems, costs and time overrun of the EPR.
> And yet France electricity cost is half the price of what you have in Germany, where you will find the "decentralized energy revolution".
The French tax payer pays. In Germany the electricity costs are higher for private consumers and cheaper for industrial consumers.
France reactors are not outdated but functional and updated for post Fukushima security standard following an independent authority audit, and initially envisaged for 40 years, but determined fit for 50 years, the same reactors are found to be suited for 100 years in the USA.
The point is there is no needs to close and rebuild what is working, and as the lasted IEA NEA report showed the cheapest electricity is from lifetime extension of current nuclear, by wide margins, not renewable, in France.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_51110/projected-costs-of-ge...
I keep seeing this argument, and every time I do, I think "who cares?" Why do we care if it's economically viable? We're facing catastrophic planetary change. Act now, worry about the economics later. Take a fraction of the military budget and build a bunch of state-owned nuclear power plants. Why does the market even need to enter into it at all?
I keep beating this dead horse, but if you want to make nuclear economically viable, there's an incredibly easy solution: make the price of fossil fuels incorporate the cost of their externalities. When gas is $30/gallon, nuclear won't seem so bad. We should have been taxing them to all hell 20 years ago, but what better time than now? Why are we letting supply and demand determine such a crucial matter?
Sure, it will just not make an impact. Just more problems. Invest the money where the it scales to a solution.