France is also in the middle of experiencing a huge amount of maintenance costs due to many of their reactors coming up to critical age milestones. But it's often hidden under the massive layers of obfuscation due to being masked under the total French energy budget.
Partially true. In geographies like New England that aren’t very sunny or windy nuclear makes more economic sense, and in all geographies as a hedge against long bouts of unusual weather.
You need your baseload to come from a steady, highly available, weather independent source. Nuclear is basically this only carbon free solution ticking the boxes.
For that last 20%, building more grid connections towards the equator is again still cheaper than nuclear.
It is likely better to use gas peaker plants for rare times without renewables and extract the CO2 later when sun is shining.
https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fuele...
All the money wasted on nuclear can then be put towards electrification of emissions sources which are vastly more important than that last 0.5% of emissions (which will further increase the flexibility as it does so).
I guess you don't realize that much of New England's power already comes from renewables. Remember they get hydro power from Quebec. Maine gets 2/3 of its power from renewables.
Which leads to my second point: your power generation doesn't need to be right next to you.
And in any case, off shore wind is plentiful, and New England isn't the Arctic, it still gets plenty of sun year round.
https://sponsored.bostonglobe.com/future-forward/the-gradual...
EDF already went bankrupt like, last week.
Even despite all of this France is expecting the % of electricity sourced from nuclear power to decline - new plants aren't being built fast enough to replace those aging out.
Because the costs thet sell at are capped, regardless of what it costs them to generate (and those costs exploded in some areas due to the war and the common European power market), which was the right choice to protect consumers from energy poverty.
57% and trending rather sharply downward.
You're also thinking of Uruguay for that CO2 thing, or maybe Sweden.
my dream is to have the main reactors give a lot of the power and then have smaller reactors that use those waste products to turn them into shorter half-lived materials. if i recall correctly liquid salt thorium was something that was trying to do that and it also had the feature that it failed safe instead of a meltdown.
The problem is, we can see and measure it. If anything went wrong, it’d be clear who messed up, so it requires actual time and effort to do it right. That’s yucky. People like it more when the waste is invisible and airborne, for the wind and their children to deal with instead of them. This provides a better level of blame dispersion.
As they say, out of sight out of mind.
The total amount (from the beginning of France's nuclear energy production 50+y ago) of highly radioactive, non-reusable waste fits in a cube not bigger than the Eiffel tower, and the goal is to bury that in geological storage, but dumb politics are opposing this (for dumb reasons that were debunked a thousand times).