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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

This is complete baloney and revisionist history. I followed that topic at the time pretty in depth. It took months and months and delay upon delay to get the plants back up and running. The spot prices in France at times in 2022 went over 1500 euros per MWh. If it was just "an overreaction" there would've been tremendous political pressure to just put the plants back online. The government and EDF are intertwined to the point any talk of new construction etc. always goes through Macron.

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> I followed that topic at the time pretty in depth

You apparently did not. because you are the revisionnist here.

CSC (corrosion sous contrainte) is a well documented topic with accessible reports from the ASN (the french nuclear agency) [1], the court des comptes (French accounting court) and EDF itself.

The source of the problem is a phenomena that affect mainly the N4 (1400MW) series of the French reactor. It has been detected in 2021, so before the 2022.

Some pipe in some specific part of the circuit (secondary circuit) presented some unexpected cracks under inspection in one specific reactor.

And EDF chose the stop all the potentially affected reactor and disassembly all the potentially affected pipe to scan them with X ray and triple check that the corrosion phenomena is not widespread.

Where they over-reacted, is that they also disassembled the different serie 900Mw reactor 'just in case', at the worst time.... meaning right before Vladmir Putin attacked Ukrain.

> If it was just "an overreaction" there would've been tremendous political pressure to just put the plants back online

Sure. They should have just emergency duck tape the pipe without following any safety protocol, in a nuclear installation, just to please some politicians and because Putin dreamed of cold war again #sarcasm.

You seem to have very little clue of about the nuclear industry internals and its associated safety processes.... It of course took time.

The only thing you are correct on is that, indeed, it took longer than expected and caused delays.

[1]: https://recherche-expertise.asnr.fr/avis-rapports-corrosion-... [2]: https://www.ccomptes.fr/fr/documents/68958 [3]: https://www.ladrome.fr/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/cli-csc.pd...

You said the problems were overblown, not me. I don't think they were overblown, so I am not sure you should be lecturing me on duct tape and nuclear plants. The EDF had scheduled a quarter of the fleet for maintenance and then at the peak of the crisis pulled another quarter offline unplanned. This simply wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been necessary, the government wouldn't have allowed it at the time. The problem was not known in 2021, but at the time when they were built. Here is an interview from 1979 (!) with the president of the EDF at the time Marcel Boiteux, who said that this will happen, but it's not a big deal because it will happen after the plants had reached their EOL in 30 years [1]. Additionally there was a government commission or something like that in the early 2010s that basically concluded "we can't afford to build new ones, let's kick the can down the road and try to fix what we have now". And then 10 years later the biggest energy crisis since the 70s comes along, the very reason they were built and you end up relying on the weather forecast and German coal plants. A few years pass again and some people are talking themselves again into this technology being anything except useless.

[1] https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/president-edf-risque-fis...

> with the president of the EDF at the time Marcel Boiteux, who said that this will happen, but it's not a big deal because it will happen after the plants had reached their EOL in 30 years.

That's not what he said. He said this is the scenario in case of full cycle up and down every day. Which is obviously not how a central is operated.

Consensus today is that nuclear powerplant can live for around 60-80y without issues if the maintenance is done properly. The US park is getting there.

> This simply wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been necessary, the government wouldn't have allowed it at the time.

The government has no word to say over an ASN decision, specially when Nuclear safety is at stake.

It is France we are talking about, not the USSR.

Again, it is commonly admitted today, after the facts, that it was over-reacting. Thats said: It is bad economically as it cost EDF few billions. But it is exactly what you want to see for safety: Better overreacting than having an incident.

> A few years pass again and some people are talking themselves again into this technology being anything except useless.

So. You are taking one single year failure as a representative example of a technology that has given cheap, abundant and low carbon electricity for the entire Europeean continent for 3 decades ?

Do you have not the impression of being of slightly bad faith here ?

You can pretend to be meticulous about it but the president of the EDF doesn't go on TV to speak to the general public to say 30 years if he meant something else. He would've said 80 years because it just sounds better. Sorry, it's pretty obvious that stress corrosion was a known issue, so there were no surprises.

It's France, not USSR. Is this why the EDF was involved in rescuing Areva from bankruptcy -- a sound business decision? Is this why the government is giving basically interest free loans to the EDF that will be repaid starting from maybe in 15 years? If you really believe that you are delusional. It's all just backroom wheeling and dealing. There is a good saying "don't get high on your own supply". The delusion of order in the western world will be its end, especially now considering it's crumbling before our eyes. Clinging to this idea is not healthy.

Abundant and low carbon, all nice things, but it's not why they were built. They were built for energy independence, and at this task it failed at the exact point in time when it was supposed to shine. Speaking of which, being built for one purpose doesn't necessarily make it useful for another purpose. It was built at a time when things like carbon emissions, climate change and overall sustainability were not a topic. Since sustainability is a topic today, it requires obviously different considerations. My only gripe with the German shutdown is that they didn't force the operators to pay for the decommissioning and waste disposal in full. That would've ended any debate about how realistic and useful this technology is because the companies would've been insolvent.

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