High Water Temperatures Compound Problems for France's Nuclear Power Operator (barrons.com) 173
"High water temperatures threaten to reduce France's already unusually low nuclear output," Reuters reported last week, "piling more pressure on operator EDF at a time when half its reactors are offline due to maintenance and corrosion issues."
Because river water is used to cool the plants, "reactor production is limited during times of high heat to prevent the hot water re-entering rivers from damaging wildlife."
"Given the relative rarity of intense heat waves and outages due to storms, the climate-related hiccups have a small impact on energy production overall — affecting less than 1 percent of annual output for EDF on average..." reports Wired. (Though EDF "recently told reporters that it expects more cuts in the coming months as water levels continue to fall.") But Reuters points out this all comes at a bad time: EDF has already been forced to cut planned output several times this year because of a host of problems at its reactors — and expects an 18.5 billion euros ($18.6 billion) hit to its 2022 core earnings because of production losses.
Now EDF's debt "is projected to reach 60 billion euros by the end of the year," reported Agence France-Presse on Tuesday, adding that the "highly indebted" utility saw announcements of a take-over bid by France's national government to shareholders (at a cost of 9.7 billion euros ($9.9 billion): EDF's finances have been weighed down by declining output from France's ageing nuclear power stations, which it manages, and the state-imposed policy to sell energy at below cost to consumers in an effort to help them pay their energy bills.... The public tender offer is the simplest way to take back full control of EDF, analysts said, without the need for full legal nationalisation — of which there has been none in France since 1981....
Currently over half of France's 56 nuclear reactors are idle, either for maintenance or corrosion problems linked to ageing.... Nuclear energy currently covers some 70 percent of France's electricity needs.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the story.
Because river water is used to cool the plants, "reactor production is limited during times of high heat to prevent the hot water re-entering rivers from damaging wildlife."
"Given the relative rarity of intense heat waves and outages due to storms, the climate-related hiccups have a small impact on energy production overall — affecting less than 1 percent of annual output for EDF on average..." reports Wired. (Though EDF "recently told reporters that it expects more cuts in the coming months as water levels continue to fall.") But Reuters points out this all comes at a bad time: EDF has already been forced to cut planned output several times this year because of a host of problems at its reactors — and expects an 18.5 billion euros ($18.6 billion) hit to its 2022 core earnings because of production losses.
Now EDF's debt "is projected to reach 60 billion euros by the end of the year," reported Agence France-Presse on Tuesday, adding that the "highly indebted" utility saw announcements of a take-over bid by France's national government to shareholders (at a cost of 9.7 billion euros ($9.9 billion): EDF's finances have been weighed down by declining output from France's ageing nuclear power stations, which it manages, and the state-imposed policy to sell energy at below cost to consumers in an effort to help them pay their energy bills.... The public tender offer is the simplest way to take back full control of EDF, analysts said, without the need for full legal nationalisation — of which there has been none in France since 1981....
Currently over half of France's 56 nuclear reactors are idle, either for maintenance or corrosion problems linked to ageing.... Nuclear energy currently covers some 70 percent of France's electricity needs.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the story.
EDF OpenSouced Solome' and Code Aster (Score:2)
Unpossible (Score:3, Funny)
Unpossible - light water nuclear fission power plants magically make all the problems of generating usable power on a warming Earth go away. Like magic! This report can't be true.
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Yeah. France must have forgotten to renew their "license for "nuclear magic"...
So When Power Is In Greatest Demand... (Score:3, Insightful)
During a heat wave, when power is in greatest demand to run coolers throughout the land, nuclear power plants (in France at least) have to throttle back and reduce their output.
Undercuts the "always available", "always available when needed", and "all nuclear is the only solution" claims of the fanbois.
In reality you want a mixed grid of power source types. Solar does great during heat waves.
Re:So When Power Is In Greatest Demand... (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, the power plants can run just fine in this heat -- if they didn't care about (from TFS) "hot water re-entering rivers from damaging wildlife." The restrictions are probably governmental not technical. I imagine they'll eventually come up with a way to cool the water to more appropriate exit temps before releasing it into the rivers if this becomes a common situation.
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To remove that much heat would be a major industrial process. Unlikely to be economical.
France's nuclear fleet can't keep capacity factor above 70 in a good year, and the average for Europe is only a bit higher at 75. They have bigger problems to worry about than occasional (for now) heatwaves.
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It isn't that hard, you just make evaporation canals to pre-cool the water before returning it to the river. Of course, that will need to evaporate about 100m^3 of water per minute which might create other issues...
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Evaporation only works when the water is above boiling point. You can't dump 90C water into a river without killing everything living there.
IIRC the limit is something like 2C over ambient for dumped water.
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Evaporation only works when the water is above boiling point.
If that would be true then sweating would not help you to cool your body.
Boiling point only means that evaporation is happening also inside the volume of the fluid (not only on its surface).
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Yeah, sorry, brain fart. So what is the reason why it's the only plant in the world that uses this technique?
I'm guessing space is an issue, if it wasn't combined with the sewage works...
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I guess french decided not to build them since the money loss from an occasional shutdown when it is hot is lower than the investment and maintenance cost of cooling towers.
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Supplying a countries need by 70% is not the same as having a capacity factor of 70%.
Non technical people should simply stop using a CF in an argument, it is basically always > 90% a wrong argument.
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No, it's a capacity factor of 70%. Due to shut-downs for emergencies, failures, maintenance and environmental conditions, even at the best of times French nuclear plants only produce about 70% of their nameplate capacity over a year.
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Might be true.
No idea.
Nevertheless completely irrelevant. Who cares about a CF? Only people who do not know what CF means.
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Well people keep complaining that wind has a low CF so can't be used, but actually offshore it's currently better than French nuclear. More predictable too.
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Well people keep complaining that wind has a low CF so can't be used,
That is why people are wrong.
No power plant operator really is using CFs. It is for running a grid a pointless number.
More predictable too.
Who should wind be more predictable than a plant that can be dispatched?
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Perhaps, but it's still not germane. Just because he hypothetically lectures on the Byzantine Empire, it doesn't automatically disqualify him from having knowledge about nuclear energy or the financial reality of nuclear energy. There's plenty of us around here that aren't in nuclear engineering, but still have high-level knowledge about it.
And where does this particular censorship policy end? Is the new rule that you can only speak on a subject if you professionally do business in that subject's sector?
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And where does this particular censorship policy end?
Criticism is not censorship, although I know it's fashionable to equate the two in order to deflect the former and avoid awkward questions about one's truthfulness.
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So why is that literally the only nuclear plant in the world that uses evaporation?
It's down to cost.
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Great, now go ahead and put the Palo Verde model against an ever-increasing drought across the western US and just try to think of why using evaporative cooling for multiple gigawatts of thermal energy might not be put to use literally anywhere else in the world.
Re: So When Power Is In Greatest Demand... (Score:2)
As always, nuclear power is perfect. It's normies who don't see the beauty in things like cooking fish directly in the river.
Inability to think on the margin (Score:4, Interesting)
This kind of stuff really makes me think these folks can't think on the margin. For example:
OK, got it, hot water could enter the river and damage wildlife. We don't want that to happen.
At the same time, if this reactor derates itself to limit hot water discharge, what replaces that power? Solar? Oil? Gas? Coal? What damage will that do to wildlife? Has anyone sat down beyond saying "this has a bad" and actually done the work to show that it's worse than the plausible alternative.
Re: Inability to think on the margin (Score:2)
Russian gas/oil is what replaces it. Hopefully you are starting to understand why people like Merkel have strong ties to Gazprom and why during the last decade or so EU energy independence has been outlawed. Itâ(TM)s the foxes guarding the hen house.
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They have had hot water discharges in the past, so they know how much damage it does. More importantly, the damage can be directly attributed to the nuclear plant, which means big fines and/or getting sued.
Meanwhile alternative energy sources are getting cleaner all the time as renewables come online. France is well connected so can import from elsewhere.
Since nuclear power claims to be clean, that should mean buying renewable energy to meet their agreed quotas... But of course they have a sweet deal and ma
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I don't understand this, the nuclear plants that are shut down (or reduce output) for safety or environmental reasons don't have to buy anything. Neither does any other kind of power plant -- they can sell power they make or they can not sell the power they don't make.
The import part I understand, which makes sense. I guess my question is, has someone really done the analysis to figure out whether the specific imports that will replace these particular output reductions will do more or less harm?
And finally
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I don't understand this, the nuclear plants that are shut down (or reduce output) for safety or environmental reasons don't have to buy anything.
They will still have to buy power. Just because a plant isn't generating doesn't mean there are no activities going on there such as maintenance and monitoring. You'd sort of hope those were very much ongoing.
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EDF, the owners and operators of the plant, are contracted to supply power. When they can't supply it themselves, they could buy it elsewhere and sell it for the special price they got as part of the subsidies to build the nuclear plants in the first place.
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Has anyone sat down beyond saying "this has a bad" and actually done the work to show that it's worse than the plausible alternative.
No. Because the fishers at the rivers, the hotel owners, the restaurants, will go to strike. Do demonstrations in majour cities and the capital (that is Paris btw.) then they mobilize the farmers (which often have ties to the fishers, or are related family), and use the tractors to block gasoline stations along the high ways.
Seems you do not know what "endanger wild life mean
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I meant the plausible alternatives on the short term corresponding to the specific derating of the plant in question.
Is the claim (and seriously, I don't know if this is true or false) that when these plants reduce their output that solar and wind will take up that slack?
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Obviously durning a heat wave that makes river water so warm that the nukes can not use them, solar power will tke up that slack. A no brainer, or not?
Any more completely stupid questions.
During a heat wave you have extra strong coastal winds, because of the thermic up winds over land pulling in wind from the sea. France has a west coast (among others) to the Atlantic: there is ALWAYS wind No idea what you people learn in school.
Re: Inability to think on the margin (Score:2)
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Germany is also investing into multiple sources. :P
No idea why you call that foolish
Re: Inability to think on the margin (Score:2)
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No it is not.
But I enjoy you being so stupid ignorant about Germany but complaining about Germany's energy landscape all the time, dumbass.
Re: Inability to think on the margin (Score:2)
Re: Inability to think on the margin (Score:2)
Not just nuclear, this affects all thermal power (Score:2)
This isn't just a nuclear problem, it's the same problem you get with any thermal powerplant used outside it's planned operating conditions. You have to dump the heat to get efficient turbines, which is why coal and gas powerplants do the same thing. In winter you can use it for district heating but in summer you need to find a heat dump.
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Nuclear is often river-cooled in France because they try to do it cheap (still excessively expensive).
Re: Not just nuclear, this affects all thermal pow (Score:2)
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And yet, nuclear remains some of the lowest cost, cleanest energy going. Only geothermal, and hydro beat it.
In terms of marginal cost, wind and PV also has it beats, although that's not the whole story.
From Lazard 2020 (https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020) (tech, min, max $/MWh):
Offshore wind missing and hydro missing for some reason.
If we ignore storage requirements,
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And yet, nuclear remains some of the lowest cost, cleanest energy going.
Only geothermal, and hydro beat it.
Only if you burned away your brain with drugs. In actual reality, nuclear is excessively expensive, unreliable, bad quality because it reacts slow but can SCRAM at anytime, etc. There is a reason EDF is very deep in debt. And then there is the unsolved waste problem and the accident risk.
Ice (Score:2)
Nuscale, natrium and moltex (Score:2)
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These SMRs are able to run using air cooled towers.
Today? No, because the towers aren't there.
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Geocooling has limitations. You have to dig out a lot of piping to make it work, and the amount of heat you can sink into the earth is limited by volume. It's quite clever when it works, and it's generally low-maintenance, but that really should have been considered before the facility was built.
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Why can't they dump excess heat into the earth. ...
Literally sounds like global warming. :-)
Re:Geothermal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't they dump excess heat into the earth.
Most of the time, to dump heat, you need a medium which is cooler than your heat. You can use a heat pump (essentially a refrigerator) to cool one thing (e.g. your food, or the reactor cooling water) and dump the heat into a hotter medium (e.g. the air in your kitchen or the earth further down) but that costs lots of energy which is not good when your main aim is to produce energy for other people. TBH, though, a nuclear reactor isn't like a home with a heat pump which can heat up ground in the summer and can then cool it down in the winter. The nuclear plant is continually creating heat and in huge quantities. The amount of ground you would need to heat and the temperature you would have to heat it up to in order to have enough heat be escaping for it to be sustainable would be huge.
Dumping excess heat into cool water is much much cheaper than building a load of deep pipes and then a massive refrigerator system to make them work. Alternatives like shallow pipes won't work because a) you won't get sufficient volume to dump heat into and b) you'll then be subject to problems like hot weather, even more than with water.
This whole story is, once again, a serious proof of the main risks of nuclear development. Nuclear power is mainly pushed by military lobbies (who want the fissile materials) and reactor manufacturers (who like the huge government contracts with all of the risks covered by the tax payer). If the same money that is being dumped into nuclear power was put into expanding wind, solar, transmission and pumped hydro storage we could have ten times the capacity available and, since the system could be very widely distributed, it wouldn't have these common failure modes that take out so much of the electricity production at the same time.
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The other problem that prevents us using heat pumps is that if they break down there is very little thermal mass to soak up the heat, and no simple way of pumping more coolant in.
For safety reasons you really need to be able to bring the rector down to a safe temperate using just cooling you can apply without power, e.g. with a diesel powered water pump drawing from a local river that can supply at least 3x as much water as you will need in the worst case.
Re:Geothermal? (Score:4, Insightful)
If the same money that is being dumped into nuclear power was put into expanding wind, solar,
You need 500x as much land per unit of power generated with solar vs nuclear.
In some countries that's fine, in others you're going to be clearing land (affecting the environment) or decreasing farmland availability (during a worldwide food shortage).
Solar and wind don't solve all problems. Nuclear doesn't either, but it's a tool in the toolbox that is sometimes suitable sometimes not, but should not be excluded for ideological reasons.
Re:Nuclear mainly mainly green now (Score:5, Insightful)
that desire a lot of reliable, CO-2 Free power not reliant on environmental conditions
Ironically, posted in a thread that is about nuclear power being unreliable because of environmental conditions.
The problem given is an easy one to solve, have the water emitted simply flow over a larger surface for a longer distance before entering a stream
The only practical way to lose heat that way is to allow more evaporation, which consumes the water. (Might as well build a cooling tower instead.) Maybe not a good idea in this new era of mega droughts.
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The only practical way to lose heat that way is to allow more evaporation, which consumes the water. (Might as well build a cooling tower instead.) Maybe not a good idea in this new era of mega droughts.
There's plenty of practical ways to lose heat, that's not the problem. The problem is the targeted operating conditions in for the design of this generation of nuclear plants. When they were designed, there was always likely to be an adequate supply of water in the river as a heat dump. Now there isn't so they need to refit them to dump the same amount of heat over a wider area to broaden the acceptable operating conditions. It's not insoluble, just takes time and money, something EDF is short on right now
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All good points, but also dodges the essential question: when spending >$10B on building a nuclear reactor, how much more are you willing to spend on all that other shit, and will you ever actually reach the point that you get a positive return on investment before you have to spend billions more decommissioning the thing? Or, are you actually legally able to build the rest of what you're talking about (e.g. fuel reprocessing) without getting your balls smashed by government regulators, constant civil
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Why can't they dump excess heat into the earth
Obvious reason being that they are not built that way and adding that ability is not a click on a button and drag the addon until it goes from red to green. Having a geothermal sink would require an extensive geological survey. The site would need to be a sufficient distance from the reactor in case building the sink posed a geological risk to the reactor. You would need all of the logistical hardware required to move the fluid there and back again. And a couple dozen other six to eight figure cost item
Re:Geothermal? (Score:4, Informative)
A quick back-of-napkin estimate is that you would need about 5,000 km of heat rejection pipe to cool a typical 1GW reactor with ground-source cooling, roughly 30 km^2.
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Depends on what you're referring to by "geothermal"
If you mean geothermal as in ground source heat pumps, which operate to maybe a 100-150 or so feet (30-45m) in depth, that's not going to work very well because you need to reject literally gigawatts of thermal power. It won't take long before the ground is too warm to act as a sink anymore. For consideration, a typical domestic geothermal system would use one ~150ft borehole per 12,000 BTU (3500 W) as a rule of thumb.A 1 GW electric nuclear powerplant at 5
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Why can't they dump excess heat into the earth. The same principle as geo thermal heating except use it as a sink.
Then the power density vaunted by shills like MacMann would go completely down the drain. You want to get rid of ten gigawatts of heat? Conductively? At a roughly 300K temperature point? By pumping it into the ground? Good luck!
Pretty much the only reason why geothermal power works is because you take a little bit of heat here and a little bit of heat there.
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MadMann is busy building his own nuclear reactor in his basement.
Since he has installed the cobalt based neutron amplifier, no one has seen him.
But we are all certain he is fine and enjoys the light tickling showers of particles going through his body.
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Presumably he meant drop the water temp using a massive underground piping system prior to entering the reactor. Which while not necessarily a bad idea would take a significant amount of time and major effort to install if you wanted it to actually be useful at scale.
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Your "citation" is complete fucking garbage written by a nuclear fanboy. Here's the proof: "nuclear technology has evolved from being conventional gigantic power plants, which cost over US$50 billion, to small portable sized nuclear energy reactors that are extremely secure and quick to implement. The portable nuclear reactors you find today are factory assembled, easily deployable and are completely secure and safe."
This is a complete lie. The proposed next generation of reactors would fit this description
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But nobody has built even a single prototype of the alleged next generation of SMRs.
Do the nuclear reactors on submarines and ships not count, or are those a different type of small reactor?
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The reactors used on subs and carriers are a substantially different kind of reactor from the SMRs being proposed. They are not commercially viable, and safe only with a highly trained crew.
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They do not count, as they are designed to run on highly-enriched Uranium (weapons proliferation concerns), and the "refueling" usually consists of cutting a hole in the side of the boat and replacing the entire sealed reactor with a completely new reactor. They are designed for long fuel lifespans in order to keep the boat at sea, rather than in the yard.
Most people aren't worried about the weapons proliferation concerns of military reactors, since the boats that those reactors power usually have many act
Re:nuclear fanboys with modpoints (Score:4, Funny)
I'd pay for a breakdown of the slashdot logs to see who owns which sock puppet accounts.
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I'd love to know their motivations. Does the nuclear industry consider Slashdot a site worth trying to control the narrative on? I find it hard to believe that they do this stuff for free, just because they are nuclear fans.
Maybe their pension is tied up in nuclear investments...
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I hope this post as a joke but in case it is not, nope the various actors of the nuclear industry do not consider slashdot an important target. Mostly nobody does. Their communication is small, designed by engineers for engineers and they have half the personnel Greenpeace has. It is a quite small industry in the grand scheme of things. Compared to the fossil fuel ones, which are the ones pushing for wind and solar but particularly wind.
And if you think organized evil companies target the insignificant plac
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Well how many accounts do you own?
One. This is my second one, but I only opened it because I forgot the password to the first one.
You can tell because there is a time gap between his posts where he switches accounts and immediately starts modding down replies. My guess is you do the same.
You guess wrong again. I am also marked unwilling to moderate on this, my only account.
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They do give mods to new accounts just not to those with terrible karma like all of your sock puppets.
I make sure every time you create a new one it is at -1 as fast as possible. You openly admit you are here to ruin the site, so you gave up any right to moderate.
Fuck you, dumb fucking troll.
Re: nuclear fanboys with modpoints (Score:2)
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Hm, you are camouflaging your other accounts pretty well!
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Which comments get modded depends on which group got control of the story first. The crazy leftists or the the right wing extremists. It's not just one side.
Slashdot certainly has not removed general moderation. There was a time recently when no moderation was happening, but lately moderation is normal. I've had mod points twice in the last week. If I use them they give them to me more frequently. Mod points are given more frequently if you have good karma. I only have one account. I'm a bit surprised y
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OMG there's an hour long gap between posts! Same account confirmed, because there's no way that two different people on the Internet can agree on something - it has to be sock puppetry!
Even after all this time, the Internet's capacity to deliver mass stupidity is unparalleled in human history.
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Anyone who actually wanted to switch accounts wouldn't go through the process of logging out, logging back in, finding the comment they want to reply to, and then replying, then logging back out, and logging back in as their original account, and then getting back in the discussion to where they were before, then continuing on.
They would just have two sandboxed browsers, or use incognito / private mode to keep session tokens separate. No time gap, and far less hassle.
Thus, your entire premise is flawed. Y
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He doesn't post as much as he used to
... and the signal-to-noise ratio is greatly improved as a consequence.
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Depends, since EDF is pretty much a government operation the company losses are essentially just defecit spending from the government and they can also defecit spend to do the repairs and upkeep.
Since the loss of money is basically offset by the lower electricity bills its essentially a form of economic stimulus. Question is if the increased spending power given to consumers creates enough economic activity to offset EDFs losses and does France recoup revenues from that activity in increased taxes.
I would
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France is switching to renewables, just like Germany is.
Since 20 years.
They probably build under the Macron directive 5 or 6 new reactors, while they phase out 20 older ones.
Also, what the /. crowd finds hard to grasp: France embedded in a continent wide synchronized grid, just like Germany. They simply can buy power from everywhere.
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And who is going to have power to sell them if the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing?
Each country connected to the grid will try to satisfy their own demand first, and sell surplus. If they're all moving to the same forms of energy generation - especially those with highly variable outputs, they'll all have surpluses or deficits at the same time. Energy supplies need to be diversified and nuclear is a big part of that.
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At night there is no sun. ... do you grasp that simple concept?
And at night no one needs power
France is a huge country: no wind in France is impossible.
No idea why you nitpickers always ask the same stupid questions and can not accept the idea that the grid operators perfectly well know what they are doing.
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Power use might be *less* at night, but people do still need power at night, especially during the winter in areas where heating is required. If it's hot, then cooling might be needed at night instead otherwise it's difficult to sleep.
Lighting is obviously needed at night, and people with electric cars will generally charge them overnight as they need to drive them during the day.
And there doesn't need to be no wind, just significantly less of it so that the power generated cannot keep up with demand. As yo
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I suggest to simply start studying the topic.
Then you lose your angst about another country doing wrong decisions regarding electricity.
If you plaster the west coast of France with wind power: they can supply all of Europe and all of north Africa 3 to 5 times over.
Sorry, you idiots have simply no clue.
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So you are advocating that we should build more nuclear, which takes decades and tens of billions of dollars, loses money because the cost of generation is higher than other sources that are faster to deploy, and still has serious issues with a changing climate (you know, what TFA is all about), and still has no viable solution for dealing with spent fuel; instead of installing more renewables that have different, solvable issues that don't take decades and tens of billions of dollars to deploy?
Also, why wo
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>They simply can buy power from everywhere.
Yeah, until everyone decides to do that, and no one is MAKING enough power to cover all of Europe's power demands. But hey, why look ahead when you can just bury your head in the sand and say "It's good enough for now, that means it will always be good enough".
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Europe is not USA or India.
Get a clue.
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Thanks to their hydroelectric dams, France has already a lot of renewables in their mix. But without shouting it on the roof tops they are going towards more fossil fuel usage. It has already started. They have reopened ONE coal plant.
The problem is the long under-investment in nuclear plants, the closing of a well working plant by the left and the NIMBY phenomenon that prevents building more hydroelectric dams on available waterways. They have an interesting tidal wave plant but i haven't heard further pro
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And nobody plans on doing "like Germany". Nobody outside Germany considers the German grid as a success.
Because laymen like you have no idea. Obviously it is an success. From 80% fossil fuels down to below 40% in roughly 30 years: great success. And that while the demand on power has doubled.
I know it is popular inside Germany but not elsewhere.
That is not Germany's problem. What would we care if you think our grid is like this or like that? Our grid is superb, and as far as we can tell: the best in the w
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French, and for that matter German, nuclear plants do not generate weapon grade Uranium.
What makes weapons possible: is what is used in such plants: they burn it.
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A direct lie for the French reactors: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/a... [lemonde.fr]
Also, the 2-4 new reactors the French are planning long-term are for maintaining their nuclear arsenal, power-generation is secondary and does not matter in the greater scheme of things.
Do you somehow think lying more often makes your claim less of a lie?
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What is a direct lie?
Do you somehow think lying more often makes your claim less of a lie?
I never lie. Get a dictionary and look up the word.
Perhaps I would lie to a police officer when I get caught speeding and he asks me: "are you in a hurry?".
What is it that Americans don't know what the word lie means? Is that not your native language? English?
Also, the 2-4 new reactors the French are planning long-term are for maintaining their nuclear arsenal,
No idea about that. But fact is: they do not produce "enric
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So, you think Macon is lying when he says the civilian reactors are needed for maintaining the french nuclear arsenal? Suuure.
I for fuck sake d not k ow what Macron said in the article you linked
So I'm not a liar, and he is not a liar.
And the question for what the funk he wants those reactors never arose in the discussion.
You are so stupid it is beyond believe, you do not even know what the word liar means.
Point of our grand parent was: thy want to make Uranium 235 for Uranium based nukes, in a reactor that
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I think that a politician is either being misquoted, or is himself misquoting people that actually have a fucking clue.
You don't make weapons-grade material with reactors that you plan on using to create electricity, unless you want unreliable and very expensive electricity production. Making bombs requires pulling the fuel load well before it's spent which means greatly added cost and downtime because it takes weeks to reload fuel assemblies and get the thing started again; and efficiently making electric
Re: Geothermal? (Score:4, Informative)
You don't know nearly as much about this as you think you do.
You don't create weapons-grade Uranium in a reactor. You enrich natural uranium by turning it into a gas (UF6) and passing it through a centrifuge cascade to remove U238 from the far less common U235, and then return it to a solid which you can machine into bomb bits.
You can create weapons-grade Plutonium in a reactor, but if you do your reactor will not be reliable for electricity generation because your fuel cycles have to be short (6 months instead of 2+ years) and these things aren't exactly refuelled quickly - it takes weeks. The reactor fuel isn't left in the reactor long enough to be cost-effective, because if you did leave it in there you would get too much Plutonium-240 and Plutonium-241 in the spent fuel, which cannot be separated from the Plutonium-239 you actually want in >97% purity. Which means your weapon will make a big localized radioactive mess, but it won't make a mushroom cloud or the desired explosive yield. Plus, extracting the plutonium requires running the fuel assemblies through some amazingly toxic and messy chemical procedures to extract the plutonium from all the other amazingly radioactive and horrible transuranic shit left over combined with a caustic chemical soup which will try to eat any containment you put it in, which you then have to store for a number of years that is functionally indistinguishable from "forever."
No commercial for-profit entity ever designed a commercial power reactor to create weapons-grade material because it wouldn't ever generate a profit, even if they could sell the created plutonium. This is why governments had to create special facilities, and special reactor designs to get it done, and it costs billions of dollars just to maintain.
Re: (Score:2)
But most of the plants were designed in order to create weapons grade uranium first and then power as a by-product.
It is the French nuclear plants we are talking about. As a matter of fact, when the Messmer plan was made, the French army was against it because it planned to build boiling water reactors instead of graphite-gas ones. The graphite-gas were more suitable to build weapon grade material.
The goal was well to produce energy en masse to reduce oil imports as a reaction to the 1973 oil crisis.
Re: (Score:2)
If you're going to make a claim such as:
Notably there is no clear scientific evidence that slightly warmer water affects wildlife at all, it gets mixed in a matter of minutes with colder water anyway.
... you should damn well back it up with some kind of evidence. For example, I'll counter your complete horseshit claim with this Stanford University [stanford.edu] published paper that claims otherwise:
Multiple issues occur concurrently when heated water is released to an aquatic ecosystem. The most immediate change is a decrease in dissolved oxygen levels and rise in pH. Warm water cannot hold as much dissolved oxygen as cold water, and organic matter decomposes faster in warmer temperatures. The increase in decomposed aqueous nutrient concentrations causes eutrophication, most commonly realized as algae blooms, which block sunlight for underlying aquatic plants. The abundance of algae is an easy food source for aerobic microbes that soar in population and further deplete the dissolved oxygen. Low oxygen levels create hypoxic dead zones that cannot support most aquatic organisms.
And that author backs their claims with these two footnotes:
[5] J. P. P. Jebakumar, G. Nandhagopal, and B. R. Babu, "Impact of Coastal Power Plant Cooling System on Planktonic Diversity of a Polluted Creek System," Mar. Pollut. Bull. 133, 378 (2018).
[6] J. G. Eaton and R. M. Scheller, "Effects of Climate Warming on Fish Thermal Habitat in Streams of the United States," Limnol. Oceanogr. 41, 1109 (1996).
Any other bald-faced lies you want to spread? No clear scientific evidence, indeed. Except for the papers that you can find in about 5 seconds on Google, that come with their own research notes pointing to other scientifi
Re: (Score:2)
Have anything to add to this?
Your comment was anonymous and scored at zero and he might legitimately not have seen it. I'm repeating it for you just to make sure.