Moldoteck

Ren don't work just fine in Europe. There are serious challenges https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

It needs nuclear to avoid using gas. Ren will be curtailed anyway. May as well curtail them for nuclear. Germany is a prime example of fossils+ren combo https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

Germany is notorious for that https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

no it's not fully complementary. And that's the main challenge. Countries without nuclear and hydro tackle this with gas/coal

Ore is currently about 2% of the capex of a reactor. And many mines globally have lowered production because it's too cheap. Even if you 10x the price of the ore, it'll still be cheap

global reserves are much higher. Anything above 100ppm can be extracted more or less economically. That's a ton of stuff even without purex/pyroprocessing/fast reactors or seawater

Seawater extraction is already comparable to most expensive land mines looking at China so it's no longer prohibitively expensive. India is moving fast with it's Thorium design https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/first-criticality-fo...

"feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight." - France decarbonized in 90s and to this day no country got similar emissions/kwh in similar timeframe with similar or lower hydro resources.

The hopium lies in exactly the opposite way where ppl hope H2 will become dirt cheap and will be used for firming

It makes sense for Canada. Unless you love using gas for firming of course

it also depends on the rate of consumption. On top of that, the burning aint perfect, you also get amplifiers like monoxide or NOx. It also depends on the type of burned wood - some trees grow faster, others slower. If you burn a tree that grew slowly, it'll be +- zero after a long time

i still hope it'll be candus even if lot of bwrx supply chain is in Canada

I just hope it'll be Candu and not bwrx

"Nuclear generates the same power when demand is minimum as when its maximum." - if you look at French RTE data, that's far from true)

It happens the same as with any other project, even renewables.

It's not an attack on the author. What I've written can be easily verified. The author IS the chief editor of the journal the paper was published in. The author is one of the founding members of DK antinuclear movement. His previous paper was subject to correction due to details that were omitted which skewed the final results. The paper does assume dirt cheap H2 firming which is not bounded to reality in any sense whatsoever. Nuclear ban in DK DID led to it becoming one of the largest coal consumers at that time.

You don't need to ask this stupid question at each post. It'll not change the simple fact that DK and DE have far worse emissions than France and Sweden. It'll not change the fact Germany plans gas expansion for firming renewables.

Maybe I should ask you the question why are you so afraid of nuclear combined with renewables when history proved this pathway gives the best results? I can't think of anything more than blind hate

Removing subsidies? Are you aware that UK increased ren CFDs for latest AR rounds? Are you aware that offshore projects without CFDs are already facing problems? Germany still pays 18bn/y on EEG and the amount is projected to rise due to more frequent payments

Transmission upgrade requirements are far smaller with not so distributed generation. This can be clearly seen in case of Germany vs France. You need vastly more transmission for distributed power put based on fertile weather patterns and even more to reduce curtailment with projects like sudlink

I didn't suggest it to keep current emissions what a nonsense. I've suggested tp expand nuclear in parallel with renewables instead of expanding renewables+gas

Please stop asking this stupid question about being afraid of renewables and storage because that's not the topic of the discussion. German pathway includes gas and the fact you leave this "small" detail makes me think you either don't mind it or you haven't read the proposals of Fraunhofer ISE/Habeck/Reiche

Countries do have armies where ppl sacrifice their lives, Ukraine's war being a proof, so no, I can't imagine a Chernobyl situation being worse in this regard.

Wth are you saying about Fukushima? It would not have been such a catastrophy- Fukushima is a direct proof that even under extreme conditions of tsunami and earthquakes a proper design leads to better results. And situation got much better after that due to adapted regulations

What kind of terrorist sabotage you think of? Don't be ridiculous. And even if it magically happened it would still not be as bad as Chernobyl

It looks more like you are spreading fear mongering trying to portray nuclear more dangerous that it is. The data is clear. We know what can happen with a twrrible design. We know what can happen under extreme conditions.

France is nowhere near being over with nuclear- but this doesn't disprove my argument. What a nonsense are you implying? What do you mean with a forgotten bill? Germany is spending 18bn/y on eeg and 6bn/y on transmission subsidies. And has still much worse emissions.

The statement about pretending to have cheap electricity is total bullshit and you know it, sorry. EDF debt to ebitda ratio is fine. Household prices are lower than Germany despite EEG. Emissions much better since 90s.

I don't care how much Germany added in renewables after phaseout. I care that Germany shut down nuclear before coal and gas and is planning gas expansion to firm renewables

Germany should not have closed nuclear in general, not because of russian war. Closing nuclear before fossils is a terrible mistake in itself

No you can't. Hydro is already mostly tapped with few exceptions.

Solar requires more materials per kwh even compared to nuclear. But even if it didn't - since hydro potential isn't sufficient - gas is required for firming. This was also mentioned by axpo

No it didn't replace 2/3 of coal. Coal demand dropped as consumption dropped and Germany became net importer down from exporting 60+TWh/y

The claim of what Germany did for humanity was more beneficial is such a farce considering it's emissions

Your claim about repository somewhat implies that since there isn't a repository there will not he one which is bullshit. Humanity has tons of repositories for handling dangerous substances, herfa Neurode being a good example. Onkalo will soon get final permit. Fosmark is under construction. You are making this sound like some world ending problem

As said. Most of sellafield problems are from weapons testing era which both created waste of various kind ehich was not stored accordingly. This has nothing to do with commercial operation of commercial plants where final waste "type" is more or less the same, just like how it should be isolated.

In what forms were subsidies given then? Because per Bundestag there were no operational subsidies.

No, they don't compete for the same slice of the market, that's silly

Nuclear is more flexible than coal and on par with some gas plants. BWR's are even faster. Your second link about french modulation proves that. Or you can check directly on RTE website

EDF is crying because ren get CFD's and curtailment payments while EDF does not.

The paper you posted is so funny. The author is also the chief editor of the journal the paper was published. He is also one of the founders of DK antinuclear movement which resulted in DK becoming one of the largest coal consumers at that time. His previous paper was subject to correction due to favorably "omitted details". His current paper still assumes for some reason dirt cheap hydrogen firming for renewables. Shall we check the cost of pure H2 firming per Lazard?

Not only DK has worse emissions than France - it also managed to piss off Norway and Sweden https://montelnews.com/news/0138d712-3afd-4590-883e-4b9221fd...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-pauses-plans-...

It's not just restart. It's investing money to restart. The north area still has coal and gas plants so restarting nuclear still makes sense. That's how it'll help.

Also. Why get less decarbonization by wasting money and opportunity on new built nuclear power when we still need to decarbonize construction, agriculture, shipping, showroom, industry? - in this case let's spend zero money on ren deployment too. Electrification will bring much greater results due to efficiency gains even if the grid is powered in it's current form. Such arguments are silly.

Germany does in fact seem to have tons of money. It spent on EEG alone so far double the cost of entire french nuclear fleet. In the meantime it got highest household prices in EU after Ireland. From this year govt decided to funnel additional 6bn/y on transmission. I'm not even talking about tons of fossils subsidies

So a scenario where humans will not do anything to stop a fire? Sorry that's not realistic. Chernobyl's fire was stopped because of human intervention, otherwise it would have taken longer. And again - such thing can't happen in western units.

Yes, in Fukushima it would have been much better, even if there was fuel rod fire, due to... better plant design...

Fukushima costs are blown out because Japanes govt wanted it this way. Just like JP govt forced long term evacuation even if the doses both during and after event were not life threatening.

"Seriously, why are we doing things like this when we have cheaper, faster and safer options? Why are we not instead going for the options?" - like what? Renewables firmed by gas and coal like in Germany? You are aware it spent on it's transition so far much more than France spent on nuclear while achieving worse results, while killing thousands from coal pollution in the meantime? So Germany spent more, achieved much less in much longer time. And on top it plans further gas expansion to firm renewables. This is not a cheaper/faster/safer way. It's the exact opposite in all directions.

"It will require so much batteries" Yes. So let's get started, we can build as many batteries as we need 10 times over. "Synth fuels are inefficient", yes, but that doesn't matter when the electricity is close to free." - electricity for synth will not be free and bess will eat into it's economics. Synth fuel infra isn't cheap either. Using H2 for firming is a pipedream pushed by fossil industry to justify expanding gas infrastructure.

It has to be nuclear + renewables. That's the difference - we already know it works good looking at Sweden and France. Others that tried to follow pipedreams ended up worse

Those are part of EDF financials. Again, EDF already did Great Carenage for over half of reactors. And it didn't have CFD's for that - only own budget. And it was despite stupid ARENH law that got replaced this year.

Germany is about to spend over 600bn for grid expansion till 2045 and EEG subsidies for the next 10 years will too, be about 200bn (if not cancelled by govt which is unlikely unless AFD is elected)

France downscaled ren deployment plans while pushing for 6 new EPR2's + another 8 if there aren't major delays.

So not only France needs to spend/subsidize less in this period - it'll also still have cleaner grid and lower household prices than Germany in parallel

The fact coal generation went down is irrelevant. Coal got down because domestic consumption dropped and Germany switched from net exporting 60TWh/y to being either neutral or net importer in last year.

Since the goal of energy transition is first and foremost decarbonization, if you close a low carbon source while keeping higher carbon sources, you can say that the worst polluter replaced the closed source

The structure of my comment is privileging coal because it has the worst emissions in the context of the ultimate decarbonization goal (among other nasty enviromental impacts from it). That's why it's coal that replaced nuclear and not renewables nor gas.

I stand corrected. VEBA was state owned at that time. On the other hand RWE was 50/50 private-municipality owned in the same period.

Still, no CFDs were given to them. So it's not about state reducing subsidies. Nor was it about environment regulations.

The high costs of recent western projects are more related to depleted supply chain and poor designs of the plants. We'll get a chance soon to observe how Canada and Korea will build in Europe. Both have much better supply chain and both want to build (Czechia- apr and Romania -candu). If both will have the same cost blows as flamanville then it's clearly related to EU itself. If not- then the problem was EDF incompetence specifically here and Westinghouse incompetence in US

I'm not afraid of renewables. I encourage building them. I do also realize, that if sufficient nuclear isn't built, gas will be used for firming (or coal in case of China). That's literally what's happening in Germany. Denmark managed to avoid it by relying on nordics which already got pissed and by burning literal wood from America and marking it as renewable.

Lazard doesn't (or at least didn't) estimate the plants to work for 60y either considering all gen 3 are licensed for this period. Lazard also has interesting numbers about LCOE of ren+cheap gas firming. Would be interesting to see the added cost of transmission, considering Germany spends 10x more than France per year on it

I'm complaining that Germany also plans gas expansion into _future_ instead of either refurbing some of existing units for cheap or build new nuclear. Germany doesn't need to wait for it to come online. It needs to keep building ren while building nuclear and erase all fossils infrastructure entirely. No stupid parallel gas/coal firming. Nor cheap green hydrogen pipedreams. France doesn't have parallel gas network so it's possible and should be done.

It pretty much was compared to modern plants. What happened there can't physically happen in western gen2 plants and even more so in gen3 units. Chernobyl is de facto the worst thing that could have happened unless we start using some wild imagination. Fukushima is a proof that a better design (albeit far from stellar) will result in orders of magnitude less damage/danger despite extreme tsunami and earthquakes

Sellafield problems are due to weapons testing era.

Asse is an experimental facility without plans to extract the waste if experiment fails. Still, no public was or will be harmed since it's mostly LLW, 75% for medical and research sectors. It has nothing to do with proper deep geological repository like Onkalo. It costed 1bn to build and will cost 4bn to operate for a century with periodical topups. That's dirt cheap considering amount of power from nuclear in that period.

Nobody was affected by recent Chernobyl strikes. The tragedy there is of another kind- damaged outer dome which is expensive and equipment that was prepared to start corium cleanup was damaged, postponing the process.

Security efforts are not that expensive if compared to amount of power

China is still one of the worst global polluters and is expanding coal to use it to firm renewables. It also expands nuclear but nowhere near at the rate of France during Messmer or swedish BWR expansion. Synth fuel is nothing more than an expensive pipedream.

the next movement would be blocking LTE/5G during courses. No social media = dumb phone

bc you may want to have time in the build, but to some, this is just magic. They don't think about potential consequences of using such instruments

It's an admission that the plant can operate for a long time

"do realize that across such a lifespan essentially the entire nuclear plant except the pressure vessel and outer shell is replaced?" - so you are saying that EDF replaced/will replace all the components except PV of it's plants to reach 60-80y? This sounds ridiculous. Maintenance isn't free but is part of opex of a plant which for existing ones is rather low.