adev_

> 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...

> decades of massive help (nationalisations building it, monopoly, gift-loans, debt cancellation...

I start seriously question your intellectual honesty here.

- For the last 2 decades, EDF was privatised and give back to the state an average of 2bn€ per year in dividende [1]. That is currently EDF giving to the state, not the opposite.

- The monopoly situation in France was ended in 2007. The loi NOME in 2010 even offred to the competitor of EDF an access to nuclear energy at fixed low price [2].

Worth to note that when the Energy crisis spiked in 2022, the same 'competitors' sent back their customers to EDF because they massively increased their price and did not want to follow the TRV.

> hydrogen to kick in.

Nobody sane of mind and reasonable take hydrogen and Power2Gas seriously in the energy sector: The law of physics simply play against it.

The general efficient is low (practically around 50%), the electrolizers strongly hate the spike style usage pattern necessary for a coupling with intermittent energy, and no installations of the required scale has even been tried.

The only reason this is still on the table is because it gives the gaz industry a reason to drain public subsidies and some hope to stay relevant.

> France's transition to nuclear power began in 1963 and is now complete.

Thats also wrong.

The Messner plan started in 1974 and France was other 55% of electricity production provided by Nuclear in 1985. It finishes with over 50 reactors in 15 years to cover up more than 70% of the electricity generated [3]

The cost of the plan Messmer was estimated at 100bn€ in 2012 money.

Germany started their energiewende in 2005 and 20 years later and 400Bn€ burned, they still do have a CO2/kwh intensity 4x higher than France in the 80s.

The results are so bad that Germany started to subsidies its own industry to protect them against electricity price increase [4]

Again, the results speak for themselves.

[1]: https://www.senat.fr/rap/r16-335/r16-3354.html

[2]: https://www.cre.fr/electricite/marche-de-gros-de-lelectricit...

[3]: https://www.sirenergies.com/en/article/history-of-nuclear-po...

[4]: https://perspectives.se.com/blog-stream/germany-industrial-e...

> No, it's correct, the total costs of the 2022 bailout was almost 10bn, and that was to get control over a company that had over 50bn in debt.

Bailout of 2022 alone was around 22bn€, which was added on top of it the historical debt.

Revenue of EDF in 2025 is over 100bn€ to put things into perspective.

> Furthermore it was discovered that the plants had neglected maintenance that had to be undertaken rightaway, that had nothing to do with the TRV.

That is also wrong. The immediate maintenance in 2022 was related to "corrosion sous contrainte" which has nothing to do with carelessness. It was mainly the French nuclear regulator (ASN) over-reacting to some non-critical cracks find in some pipes. They have themselves said afterward that the immediate actions were not necessary. The actions were overreactive (from EDF side) and the calendar was very unfortunate.

> So even if the mentioned 5 bn export now was pure profit - which is isn't -

Indeed. Profits in 2025 were currently over 8bn€, so well over 5bn€.

5bn€ just concern the profit made by the exports.

This is not hard to understand: Making a profit by selling valuable nuclear energy during evening peak consumption while buying cheap intermittent solar during low consumption time is an easy game.

People generally do not understand that Nuclear is a CAPEX game, not an OPEX one.

> And they will have to sell their power on markets that will increasingly often have free electricity from solar and wind. How do you pay 1000 educated plant operators when electricity prices are negative?

By selling nuclear electricity at 180€/MWh every night when the sun do not shine.

(This is the average price, every evening peak this month)

Meaning-while, the profitability of solar operators will sink to the ground due to the overcapacity causing negative price during the day as soon as the sun shine. Many of them will die if not state subsidized with public money.

> nuclear power isn't the kind of thing you can try and then walk away from when it turns out to be a bad idea

It is currently the best low-carbon energy around. And will continue to be for the next 2 decades.

The current Co2/kwh emission of France is 27g/kwh.

The comparison with country like Germany (397g/kwh) or state like California (190g/kwh) that spend >100Bn$ on renewable speak for itself.

I can safely bet that in 15y from now, the French grid will still be greener than the German one.

> France had to nationalize EDF due to the exorbitant cost of their nuclear fleet

That's just wrong.

EDF nuclear fleet is highly profitable with around 92TWh exported in 2025 and more than 5 Billions of benefits for the country and the company.

https://www.sfen.org/rgn/le-nucleaire-en-chiffres-923-twh-de...

The reason EDF had to be nationalized is because the government used the company as a "price shield" to protect consumer against energy price rise on the European market in 2022 with a mechanism named TRV (Tarif Régulé vente). That digged up EDF dept tremendously.

> Spain plans to deprecate their remaining nuclear for renewables for similar reasons

Span deprecated their nuclear government because their current Socialist government is aligned with Ecologists that are, like everywhere in Europe, antinuclear.

Additionally, the lack of spinning generator in Spain is currently partially what caused the Blackout in Spain in 2025 due to a lack of inertia in the system.

> EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says

This is over 25 years and will prolong-ate the lifetime of the 56 reactors by 20 more years. These produce 70% of the country need in electricity.

In comparison, the German energiewende cost 400 billions for 37% of electricity of 2025 produced by solar and wind. With production medium that will need to be entirely renewed in 20 years.

> California will achieve a low carbon generation profile for far cheaper than it cost France (refer to the Lazard LCOE

That is also wrong.

Because LCOE calculation does not take into consideration the price of the grid consolidating necessary for renewable nor the necessity of backup generation in case of dunkleflaute.

> Vehicles already on the roundabout must yield to cars entering it.

Yeah but that's theory and theory only.

I would say that 99.9% of anything that look like a roundabout is a "normal roundabout" where the priority is for people in the center, not for the ones entering. This is currently the same than the rest of Europe.

Place de l'étoile is an exception, not a rule and the total number of roundabout like that in the country can probably be counted on one hand.

> I long thought their strong Gaullist stance on sovereignty was a bit silly in today's world

There is very good reasons why De Gaulle was always a bit doubtful about American military protection and why post-war France put a strong emphasis on military sovereignty.

That has nothing to do with any French stubbornness or a so called French anti-American feeling.

The main reason is that De Gaulle experienced the fact American leadership can be untrustworthy first hand.

When he was the leader of the exiled French force during the 40s, Churchill supported him.

Meaningwhile Roosevelt refused to give him any support and actively acted to make him replaced by a puppet, General Giraud. Mainly because it was better aligned with American interests to setup a puppet state in France on the longer term.

The situation changed only later when it became pretty obvious that Giraud was antisemite, an openly nazi collaborationist and a pretty poor politician.

Only then, America started to support De Gaulle officially. Initially only indirectly through the relation between De Gaulle and Eisenhower.

One of the greatest figure of computing in history and an example of humility as a human.

Thank you for your work on ALGOL, you were multiple decade ahead of your time.

Rest in peace.

Then we disagree.

> (and btw it's not just time that matters here)

My remark is still valid. Even considering memory space and cognitive complexity.

> even function calls are not always zero-cost. For multiple reasons, some of which differ across compilers more than others

Divergence about the support of inlining in compiler implementation have nothing to do with the debate here. Some idiosyncrasy about C++ argument passing and lifetime might causes a cost in some specific scenario, still that is specific to C++.

It still does invalid the concept of zero runtime cost for abstraction.

As much as people like to dismiss it, Stepanov was right all along.

> Nobody is concluding you shouldn't write functions either.

Then, you will be surprised to learn that some 'devs' actually recommend exactly this and write guideline that minimize the number of function written. They tend to be from the same crowd that the one was describing before.

Let me clarify something here (And my apologies if this looked a bit aggressive).

There is always a cost to abstraction, and that can take different form. In C++, it is often build time (and/or complexity). And Chandler, in his talk, is perfectly right about that.

But that does not change the validity of the C++ concept 'zero cost abstraction at *runtime*'. It is possible to get proper language abstractions while not sacrificing runtime performances.

I did get sharp on his comment because this talk is constantly posted by a specific C crowd that profoundly hate any form of abstraction and use it as a totem to justify terrible development practices.

If your language support zero cost abstraction and genericity, by the sake of god, use it... most of the time the impact in term compilation time is worth the benefits.

unique_ptr is a beautiful example of that btw.

There is plenty of zero cost abstractions in C++ (and Rust to some extend).

This talk just point that unique_ptr is not one of them due to the side effect of C++ move semantics being non destructive.

People that do not understand that should honestly stop to use it as an argument in favor of "there is no zero cost abstractions".

> "low-latency links", says the article. I wonder if they consider 500 ms ping to be low, or if they want to replace Geostationary with Low Earth Orbit.

Directional laser beams are orders of magnitude to jam compared to radio wave. That alone makes it of big interest for military applications, even with 500 ms latency.

There is several known cases where jamming caused the loss of costly military drones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

Laser comms could prevent that entirely.

> One of the bedrocks of a startup economy is that the rule of law applies equally to the powerful and to the less powerful.

That has nothing to do with startup and economy. Equality in front of the law is one of the most basic property of any decent democracy.

It is even the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

> I have been happy with Botan

Botan is under rated.

It is nowhere as optimized as OpenSSL but its APIs are one order of magnitude better to use.

The team behind also demonstrated a pretty serious handling of non-trivial issues like timing attacks.

> As a westerner you should always be OK, but this is a country with no rule of law.

Let's be clear: I am not discussing nor defend China internal policies here. I honestly do not care and I am not pro China.

I am pointing a single fact: As a EU researcher, it is easier now to go to China than to go the US for conferences and collaboration. And we do feel more welcome there.

That single fact alone should terrify any US politician with a brain.

> Then, some topics becoming political taboo where the unorthodox opinion would get you fired and canceled

This is garbage.

What you describe might be the case in some social-sciences circles but never has been the case in most STEMs fields.

If you have a (sensical) unorthodox idea that displease a research director, 10 other research directors will be very happy to dig up this exact idea in a slightly different context.

This is how sciences progress.

The damage is done.

Scientific collaborations are built on trust, not on an election mandate. And the trust is undeniably damaged.

Which funding agency will accept to bring money to the table if the other partner is likely to run home and abandoned everything on the next election 2y later ?

This was already a problem with long term collaboration with NASA and the back and forth of Congress funding, Trump just extended the same issue to all other STEMs fields.

> I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!

Yeah. Also lets not forget:

- Citizens from most EU countries can now enter China visa free. No ESTA and no other administrative crap. Generally no problem to enter and leave the country as long as you respect the law there.

- The Chinese authority are very cooperative when it is about granting some visting Visa to researchers. Most Chinese research centers and Universities have a some kind of direct link to an office that can bypass some of the procedures.

The situation is way easier than it was 10y ago.

> what do you think the mid-term (next ~decade) looks like if the US is somehow able to flush the toilet and do a complete 180 from a policy and administration perspective?

I honestly do not know.

Academia works with networking between peers and moves where the money is.

In Academia, the relation between researchers and the 'names' in the domain matters a lot. But the money stream matters even more.

When relations are created, I do not see them 'ending' just because US decided to play the good guys again and open the money stream again.

It will help to restore some links yes, but will probably not cut any ties created with other countries.

You are not going to find much because China is not yet part officially of Horizons (South Korea and Japan are but not China).

Most of these collaborations happens under the hood and are peer-to-peer and project based.

I can speak for the fields that I am close to:

- For Astrophysics, China already provide both hardware and computing resources to some projects. Conferences in China are in common and exchange are frequents. Rumors of collaborations on Space and scientific satellites are also on the way.

- For nuclear physics, China is actively participating in several software stack used for nuclear fusion. There is also mutual collaborations on some nuclear fusion reactors and they regularly host conferences where EU researchers are invited. They progressed tremendously compared to 10y ago.

- For particle physics, China was historically playing alone and was planning to create and operate their own particle collider similar to the LHC in size. This is not on the table anymore. There is a deeper collaborations with several EU institutes including CERN, they also voiced their interest in the FCC project.

- For Neurosciences, their labs has permissions to execute wet experiments on animals that are forbidden on most EU territories and that I will not describe. A lot of data are shared both way between China and several EU labs. Many neurosciences related conferences have emerged in China, exchanges are much more common that they were.

- For HPC and A.I, this is by far the most active and pushed research domain actually. Alibaba, Tencent and others are even proposing computing resources for free on some projects in exchange of conference attendance in China and collaborations. There is not much collaboration on hardware (due to embargos and NDAs) but a lot of collaborations on software.

European researcher here.

There is an other thing that should make America worry.

Research grants have been cut everywhere in the US. That cuts deep and terminated many scientific collaborations between USA and the EU Horizons projects in many STEMs research fields.

That created a void.... and sciences is like nature: it hates void (and the lack of money...)

My perception in the domain is that the resulting void is been fulfilled everywhere by new collaborations with China. Because China has the money, the infrastructures, the will to progress and a shit ton of smart engineers/PhDs.

There is today 10x more conferences in China... more exchange with China... more common projects with China than 10y ago.

So congratulations to the Trump team: your anti-intellectualism is actually directly fueling new technologies and research breakthroughs to the country you consider 'your enemy'.

> There are studies showing that regulating adolescent social media use is better than a ban for example.

Not in disagreement. I believe that the ban is not even strictly applicable.

It will just lead to the redirection to a new platform that avoid the restrictions or any jurisdiction, which is worst.

The complete lack of will to tackle the problem by the main Mega networks (Meta, X, Tiktok, Snapchat, Telegram and even Youtube) is currently the main issues here.

For instance, enforcing a "report" to the consummer weekly with the effective time spend on scrolling to promote awareness and help to prevent addiction would already be a first good move. None of them implemented that effectively.

> It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol

The comparison is wrong.

It would be more "It is like if children were forbidden to be in a smoker room, just because they are not the one consuming".

Yes they should be forbidden, because they do not need to smoke themselves to feel the negative effects.

Even without "porn", "murdering/violence" or other controversial content that can be found on social medias, just the negative effects of doomscrolling on the brain are harmful enough.

Their is plenty of studies that describe the effect it has on attention span, memory and cognitive capacity of kids.

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=14350...

And lets face it: Over the last 10y, any attempt to regulate the platforms responsible of that failed miserably.

> Even during president Obama. the US spied on Merkel's mobile phone.

There is a huge gap between spying on someone phone and calling openly to invade a territory.

Every country spies on each other for various reasons (industrial, geopolitics) even between allies.

But I think we can agree that an ally by definition is not suppose to ring your door bell and say he wants to take your land against your will.

> Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.

Currently, healthcare coverage tend to be better in several European countries when you are jobless... because the system try to compensate the fact you do not have income anymore.

Don't get me wrong, their is many 'flaws' in several European healthcare systems and it is far from perfect. but it tends to be more "human" and less "for profit".

> auto start/stop systems

Most start stop systems will disable themselves when the heater of the car is turned ON and the car engine not hot enough yet.

As a cyclist (or motorbike owner), it is pretty usual in city to have >50% cars with engines ON at traffic light in cities when temperature are low.

> At large companies, I've rarely found a reason to speak out on a project.

That's true. And it is currently one of the main reason why startups are so efficient compared to MegaCorps.

In small companies, it takes few engineers voicing out ' this is bullshit ' to stop a disaster.

In large corps, it takes 2y, 10M USD and a team in burnout to reach the same result.

And the main reason is the usual source of all sins: *Politics*.

> The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise

If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.

The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.

That has zero relation to any European legalism.

> Is it? You just add "restrict" where needed?

Yes. That is the main solution and it is not a good one.

1- `restrict` need to be used carefully. Putting it everywhere in large codebase can lead to pretty tricky bugs if aliasing does occurs under the hood.

1- Restrict is not an official keyword in C++. C++ always has refused to standardize it because it plays terribly with almost any object model.

Aliasing is no joke and currently the only reason why some arithmetic intensive code-bases still prefer Fortran even nowadays.

While it is possible to remove most aliasing performance issues in a C or C++ codebase, it is a pain to do it properly.

The legend says that after few generations, the bears developped a taste for high quality pasta.

They also refuse to eat in the trash bins of anybody that drink Cappuccino after 01:00pm in a sign of integration.