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Comment by delroth | Hacker News Reader

They absolutely do. Looking at November, https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/cross-border-electrici... will show you that Nov 19th was peak import with about 8GW net import at peak. On that day the French NPPs were on average producing 30GW of electricity out of a 55GW peak demand.

When looking at electricity imports/exports it's also important to remember that France is a pretty big interconnect between the UK, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany. A bunch of electricity might be imported in France just to resell it to Italy, which is notoriously lacking in electricity production.

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I am confused. You say yourself, that in November they needed to import 8GW. Which was necessary because the nuclear power plants didn't produce enough electricity. It was even worse in summer, where they were not only dealing with reactors down for repairs but also reactors with reduced power/shut down due to lack of cooling water.

So yes, France has a huge nuclear peak capacity, as they built a lot of reactors up to the 80ies. But basically none still then which means that they are increasingly fighting with keeping the old reactors running. Perhaps I was a bit short in my first post here, but they don't really have a strategy to deal with the situation. They would need to replace at least 50 power plants over the next 20 years to have a really good perspective, but no such plans in sight.

justin66: > Somehow France manages to get most of its electricity from nuclear reactors.

you: > Well, thats a good point: they don't.

The data I linked to you absolutely proves that they do, nuclear is the majority of electricity production in France even in its current production crisis state.

You are moving the goalposts in your reply, and I'm not interested in engaging any further given your dishonesty.

Thanks.

As far as I can tell France understood their role in holding things together in the absence of cheap Russian energy, hence the push to get as much as possible back online by December. I assume they also understand they need a longer term solution since their reactors are pretty old.

This is all orthogonal to the original topic, that it's not the EU and the EU commission who are responsible for Germany's massive failures regarding nuclear (any more than they are responsible for France's successes regarding nuclear).

First of all: please stay polite and don't accuse people of dishonesty.

Second: yes, the nuclear production is more than 50% of their electricity production. In that sense you are right. But the problem is what I wrote: it fell behind the required production capacity badly. France was no longer able to completely power its own grid for months. And the bad state of their reactors - they don't get any younger - will make this an increasingly larger challenge.

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