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Does Nuclear Get In the Way of Renewable? France and Germany Disagree. (energypost.eu) 236

"France and Germany lead the camps in disagreeing on the future of nuclear in Europe," write two climate policy journalists. On the Energy Post blog they explore why — citing energy experts and politicians.

Germany "ultimately completed its nuclear exit in April 2023," while France "has the highest share of nuclear in the energy mix of any country in the world." [A] major concern is that more nuclear means less renewables, at a time when wind and solar need all the scale they can get... In a joint attempt to provide greater technical clarity on the nuclear power debate, French think tank IDDRI and German Agora Energiewende set out in 2018 to understand how nuclear energy will influence the transformation of energy systems in both countries. They found that if a high share of coal or nuclear based conventional power capacity stays online in both countries, this will likely to delay the time when market prices allow renewable power operators to cover their production costs and run the operations at a profit. They also found that exporting surplus electricity with conventional plants bites into renewable power investments abroad. At the same time, the growing share of renewables would eventually render most conventional plants unprofitable. "In order to avoid stranded assets, it is essential to gradually reduce conventional capacities," the bi-national report concluded...

Xavier Moreno, president of French think tank Ecological Realities and Energy Mix Study Circle (Cereme) and former vice president of French utility company Suez, said the all-renewables approach was complicated by a lack of viable electricity storage technologies. "Technically speaking, it would be necessary to store up to 20 percent to be able to smoothen renewable power supply." Those who believe that this will be possible through a combination of different storage options are chasing "a dream," Moreno argued.

The issue comes up when trading power in Europe's integrated energy market: should gate closure times be based on a decentralised, flexible renewables-based system, or a centralised grid based on nuclear baseloads? Rainer Hinrichs-Rahlwes, European policy expert for the German Renewable Energy Federation lobby group, says "Nuclear power plants and their inflexible output can cause grid congestion, the opposite of what is needed to accommodate large shares of wind and solar in a modern and flexible grid system."

The article notes that France plans to eliminate coal use by 2038, and already has one of the lowest emissions per head of any rich country. But "In mid-2023, 800 French scientists warned against the risks of the country's new nuclear programme, pointing to unresolved questions of radioactive waste management, which remain largely unresolved in most of the EU, including in France. The scientists also warned against risks of accidental contamination or meltdown."

Thanks to Slashdot reader AleRunner for submitting the article.
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Does Nuclear Get In the Way of Renewable? France and Germany Disagree.

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  • by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @12:39PM (#63817146) Homepage Journal

    As long as we can lower our dependency on combustible fossil fuel both are needed.

  • by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @12:52PM (#63817188)
    The goal should be reliable, low-carbon electricity, not renewables for the sake of renewables.
    • Renewables + hydrogen is for the sake of not nuclear, whether the juice is worth the squeeze is a matter of perspective.

    • by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @01:45PM (#63817320)

      The goal should be reliable, low-carbon electricity, not renewables for the sake of renewables.

      Cost matters and most nuclear plants are vastly expensive. You keep hearing that nuclear is now much cheaper but that's due to two slights of hand. Firstly, they make massively over-optimistic projections about running and cleanup costs, pretending that the problems that plagued previous generations of nuclear powers stations won't happen this time round. Secondly they get the state to agree to handle the costs of long term insurance, decommissioning and storage of waste, which doesn't actually end up helping electricity consumers because the money has to come from somewhere.

      There's reasonably a new generation of nuclear plants coming on in large scale in China and to some extent the US. If those end up actually close to their advertised running cost then it's likely that the next generation will be worth investing in. Even now, the massive cost overruns of plants being built in many other locations such as Finland and the UK by more or less the same people show that the nuclear industry continues to lie about what the real costs are.

      • by Shadow of Eternity ( 795165 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @02:00PM (#63817372)

        It's not The Industry(TM) causing that any more than the US Post Office is causing its budget issues. You're seeing the effects of sabotage.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          There has been an agitation and propaganda campaign against nuclear power, financed by Russia and operated through “green” front groups ever since the second world war. France proves that nuclear power works. Until the left parties in Germany needed to take in the greens in a coalition government Germany’s nuclear industry did even better. Germany is now running on brown coal from Poland. There is not enough sunny days per year in Germany to make solar power viable so the money spent on it
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The UK government is fully behind nuclear. They pushed through two new plants, despite objections.

          And yet they are still insanely expensive. Hinkley C, on an existing nuclear site so the infrastructure costs are lower and all legal issues were quickly resolved, is exceeding £33bn just to build.

          The latest cost cutting measure is that Hinkley C is being allowed to skip installing a fish protection system on its water intake. The system stops fish being killed, but costs money.

          There's no sabotage,

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            There's no question: The west has completely and totally forgotten how to engineer and build nuclear power plants. Anyone in literally any other industry would suggested do anything the way things are done in nuclear would be fired for incompetence and probably suspected of being the competition's paid saboteur.

            "Wait, wait, boss, you're saying you want us to change the design we've half built again?"
            "Yes."
            "That's the fourth goddamn time we've taken this apart and put it back together."
            "But it might po
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by mobby_6kl ( 668092 )

        Cost matters and most nuclear plants are vastly expensive. You keep hearing that nuclear is now much cheaper but that's due to two slights of hand. Firstly, they make massively over-optimistic projections about running and cleanup costs, pretending that the problems that plagued previous generations of nuclear powers stations won't happen this time round. Secondly they get the state to agree to handle the costs of long term insurance, decommissioning and storage of waste, which doesn't actually end up helping electricity consumers because the money has to come from somewhere.

        The reason nuclear got killed is because of opposition from the greens and fossil lobbies, not because it was expensive.

        Now that the industry's been all but destroyed, the complain is that it's expensive. In comparison to what, exactly? Keep burning fossil fuels, like what everyone is doing? Suddenly these externalities aren't counted. Or renewables, which do their own slight by citing marginal costs of installing a MW of capacity and handwaving away how a grid made up of that would actually work. If you do

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I'm the UK it was very cost, not fear of atoms.

          The UK tried to build some new, safer designs. They didn't work properly, they weren't built properly, and decommissioning was incredibly expensive. That's why nuclear fell out of favour in the 70s - it was just too expensive and didn't live up to the promises.

      • The thing is, I rather pay more for nuclear than be subject to arbitrary price increases and abuse by oil supply nations and companies.

      • Nuclear plants are heavily regulated and required to take on long term costs like plant decommissioning and long term waste storage that "renewables" are not factoring into their costs

        It was the same when coal was considered to be less expensive than nuclear, but was allowed to release mercury and uranium into the atmosphere without consequences (not to mention the vast fly ash ponds that occasionally spill into waterways.

        If you take all costs into consideration, energy generation density in particular, nuc [mackinac.org]

      • This is a fallacy. Nuclear accounts for all externalities, no other method yielding base power does.

    • Low carbon is great, but another important and vital aspect is reduced dependency on monopolistic supply. I am talking about not being subject to OPEC arbitrary price increases and terrorism funding.

  • Through some feat of magic--while all the European countries detected the spread of contamination--all the radioactivity released from Chernobyl went around France. The reason likely is the same reason we have Salome Mecha, Code Aster, and Code Saturne: EDF.
  • "inflexible" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nicolaiplum ( 169077 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @01:03PM (#63817206)

    Rainer Hinrichs-Rahlwes has a curious definition of "inflexible". Nuclear power is actually flexible - it is dispatchable, meaning you can turn it on and off when you want. You can't turn on a solar power station at night, or a wind turbine when the wind speed is low. It is not dispatchable, and it is inflexible.

    This is not the first time I've seen a German energy expert in complete reality denial about nuclear power. I have had personal discussions with several German energy experts and their blanket refusal to consider nuclear energy anything other than impossible and non-existent is incredible. They don't live in the real world.

    In practice they would rather sustain or even increase carbon emissions - by burning gas and coal, especially lignite - than use all available zero-carbon energy sources. Debating with these people is no use, as they do not debate rationally. Instead, they must be bypassed.

    • by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @01:17PM (#63817240) Journal

      That may have referred to the economics. The huge capital costs of a nuclear plant make it very expensive to turn it off or down for even an hour longer than you have to for maintenance. When it's off, you're paying construction loans with no income. They're run as close to capacity as humanly possible.

      • I have studied the economics, and in all cases I see nuclear being more profitable than the next best option, natural gas.

        The only problem is that it requires a very long-term investment to do so, longer than any private business would be willing to commit to.

      • by e3m4n ( 947977 )
        Only when your reactor runs in the gigawatt : terrawatt output range. A bunch of 250MW reactors in a distributed fashion is more resilient solution allowing one reactor to go offline for maintenance without threatening the entire grid. Centralized processing, computing, or anything else is just dumb. How do you think the internet itself came to be. DARPA wanted a decentralized communication network that can route around outages. Its time to plan power the same way.
    • By inflexible they mean the ability to ramp up and down quickly. Nuclear power can do this, but the commercial plants don't operate this way for some reason.

      I can see two economic reasons for this, first you need all the cash flow you can get to pay off the whopping great construction loan, second refueling needs to be planned well in advance and the first question is when to do it. If you're load following then exactly when it's going to be time to refuel is a little nebulous.

      The technical reason it might

      • Re:"inflexible" (Score:5, Informative)

        by sonlas ( 10282912 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @01:41PM (#63817312)

        By inflexible they mean the ability to ramp up and down quickly. Nuclear power can do this, but the commercial plants don't operate this way for some reason.

        False assumption.

        France have been operating its nuclear plants in load-following mode [world-nuclear.org] for the last 50 years now (jump to the "Load-following with PWR nuclear plants" section).

        TL;DR summary: reactors can reduce their power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes when their fuel cycle is higher than 65%. Then they play a more moderate role until the fuel cycle reaches 90%, after which they just operate at a steady state until the next refuel (which is just around the corner when the fuel cycle is at 90% anyway). If, like France, you have 50+ reactors running at the same time, then it is just fairly simple planning to make sure you always have half your reactors that can effectively reduce or increase their power in less than 30 mins.
        This actually allows France to also adjust their nuclear plants power to accomodate changes in renewable inputs to the grid.

      • Nuclear plant can load follow through two standard mechanisms.
        They can change the reactivity of the core generally between about 100%-60% however this is only possible when the reactor is newly fuelled, as the fuel is almost spent you can't load follow quickly because it takes longer to ramp.
        Secondly you can bypass the turbines, steam generators pump steam straight to the condensers. You're still burning fuel however you aren't generating power. You want to do this at times when the prices is negative.

        But t

    • Political Reality (Score:4, Interesting)

      by YuppieScum ( 1096 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @01:36PM (#63817292) Journal

      "They don't live in the real world."

      That's a little unfair (though only a little).

      The politics of Germany are such, due to the power and influence of their Green Party - who are vehemently anti-nuclear, having their roots in the pan-European CND movements of the 60s & 70s - that the policy-makers have to jump through hoops to come up with plausible-sounding arguments against nuclear power, instead of admitting to an ideological objection.

      France, on the other hand, has an independent nuclear weapon stockpile, so is ideologically committed to nuclear power.

      Any arguments by them, for or against, are very much moot.

      • by jsonn ( 792303 )
        Funny, it was actually the conservative party that rolled back its rollback of the shutdown of nuclear energy. If you look at the details, it's a minority in Germany that is screaming for nuclear power. That very same minority that has been blocking both renewable energy and building new transmission lines. That very same minority that now finds itself short on the supply side and being threatened by massively increased prices as the rest of the country no longer wants to pay for their attitude.

        The situat

    • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      Nuclear power is inflexible in that it takes hours to go from idle to full power.

      What renewables need is more electric cars equipped with V2G, and a smart grid to charge them when the sun is shining and then use them as temporary grid storage when the sun is setting and nuclear is ramping up.

    • In theory you can adjust nuclear output based on demand, but there are good reasons that's rarely done in practice. First, the adjustments are very slow. Once you decrease output, it takes about 36 hours to increase it again. You can't turn it up at night and back down during the day, any more than you can for solar. Varying the power also creates stress on the reactor which shortens its life span. Given how expensive reactors are, no one wants to do that. And varying the power also lowers the overall

    • Let's burn brown coal.

  • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @01:11PM (#63817230)
    We have reached the point where nearly anything that reduces the release of carbon into the atmosphere is a good thing. We’re blasting past the 1.5C threshold so fast that it might as well have never existed at all, and we’re sitting here debating about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin like 13th century philosophers?

    Nuclear is, for all practical intents and purposes, a renewable source of energy. The anti-nuclear idiots should be used as reactor shielding. Wind and solar are great too. At this point, anti-renewable idiots can all shove their heads up their own asses.

    Some places will focus on solar/wind, some places will go nuclear. Different regions will need to coordinate somehow. FFS get on with the business of decarbonizing cause the world is clearly barreling towards a climate disaster.

    We’ve spent the last 4 decades ignoring and denying the science on this issue. Future generations are going to study this whole sorry mess as an object lesson in what happens when humanity willfully ignores science.
    • They could just as easily blame the implementation of uncoordinated small fixes over the past 50 years like reducing particulates as bringing the whole house of cards down. You just don't know now.

    • by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @01:49PM (#63817334)
      Even dumber when you consider Germany is just paying a premium for French nuclear power for the PWH of electricity they import every year. Which leads to more nuclear plants next door funded by German rate-payers. Germany consumes the full output of 2-3 of France's nuclear plants. Overall it is not the worst arrangement to have France specializing in Europe as a source of nuclear power, but the arguments for this situation coming out of Germany are just plain ridiculous. Germans are effectively pro-nuclear, they would just rather pay the higher spot-price to have the production in another country while pretending like they do not actually consume electricity from nuclear plants.
      • by Uecker ( 1842596 )

        It would be dump if it were like this. But power trade statistics for Germany show net profits. It also exports more to France than it imports and at similar prices.

      • by jsonn ( 792303 )
        This is bullshit and you know it. Let's face it, France is dumping its excess nuclear energy into the European grid most of the time for cheap. The majority doesn't go to Germany, but Italy. France is also importing a lot of energy as it is much more efficient than trying to do more load following outside the predictable day time curve.
        • Excess. That's a good thing. Why do you think Italy and Germany have issues?

          • by jsonn ( 792303 )
            No, excess is not a good thing. The grid has to be balanced between consumers and producers. If you can't use all the produced energy, producers will be cut off, hard. Solar panels don't really care. Wind turbines can be moved out of the wind or the generator essentially put into a neutral gear very fast. Any thermal energy plant will start heating up if it can't dump the energy somewhere. Nuclear power plants are base load plants for a reason - they don't like being unexpectedly cut off at all.
    • I wouldn't exactly call nuclear a renewable source of energy, but it is one that is at least far cleaner than almost any others save solar and wind, and even there, with the way these things are produced, it may be debated.

      But it for sure is at the very least the second best option for our power needs behind renewables (solar/wind/hydro/youknowthedrill). Yes, we need to dump the waste somewhere, but even for that, a technical solution exists. We only need to finally crack the political NIMBY problem behind

    • by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      Agree 1000 percent. If these new rapid spin-ups of major hurricanes as the cyclone enters gulf waters has taught me anything its that there is tremendous untapped thermal energy in the gulf waters thst needs to be tapped for its energy if anything, for the safety of gulf coast cities. We sould be deploying a lot of OTEC power plants and finding a way to transport the energy reclaimed, even if its as inefficient as hydrogen electrolysis. Its carbon-free, its clearly ripe for taking, and its a safety imperati
  • by sonlas ( 10282912 ) on Saturday September 02, 2023 @01:28PM (#63817260)

    In 2022, France produced more renewable energy for its final consumption than Germany (20.7% vs 20.4%) [twitter.com]. All that while Germany used coal for 30% of its electricity, while in France coal was used for 0.6%.

    Go figure.

    • Not just coal. Lignite. The WORST kind of coal you could possibly use.

      But nuke is evil, don't use nuke! Remember Fukushima, it could happen in Bavaria too... wait, what sea is remotely close to it again?

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 )
      Nice, but linking a tweet is not what we call a 'reliable source' citation.
      • Maybe taking into account that the tweet is from the actual energy minister in France would help.

        And if you don't like that, it can give you pointers to find the same facts from other reliable [umweltbundesamt.de] sources [euractiv.com].

  • What does that even mean? They "need" all the scale they can get? There is plenty of room for growth of wind and solar, even if France does double down on nuclear. It's a big, big world.

    Every source of energy production has its own down sides. It's better to dilute those negative impacts by deploying many kinds of "green" energy production, rather than focusing on one single option.

    • Intermittent energy generation is only suitable for dispatchable loads. ie loads which are not time critical. Think pumped Hydro off peak water heating or chlorinating your swimming pool.
      The only way to make it work to form a large part of the grid capacity is to back it with a second dispatchable power generation system. To date only gas has been deployed at scale to make this model work and gas is a dirty CO2 generating source of power. For every MW of renewables deployed 1.2MW of gas generation has been

      • I don't see how scale helps here. If you scale up wind and solar, you still have a dip of about 50% from peak to trough. For Texas, ERCOT has some nice real-time graphs that show this: https://www.ercot.com/ [ercot.com]

        It's not scale that is needed, it's alternative power generation methods, or storage.

  • Fossil fuel is.

    Nuclear can coexist with renewable energies because they both contribute to a lower CO2 balance. I am quite positive that renewable is the better choice, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

    Make it the enemy of bad.

  • Baseload most certainly does exist and nuclear and river run hydro are perfect for it. Wind and solar are terrible given our current pricing models for electricity of supply meeting demand. When the wind blows the hardest in Ontario, Ohio and Pennsylvania, due to government guarantees, we actually end up with more power than we need and the spot price goes negative. Even with negative costs of electricity no one can profitably build storage. So for every mega watt of wind or solar we end up building n
  • 1. Increase the amount of energy you produce and do so without fossil fuels.
    2. Not have enough energy for basic needs and industry and suffer a severe decline in your economy.

    Because using fossil fuels is not going to be an option very quickly.

  • In mid-2023, 800 French scientists warned against the risks of the country's new nuclear programme, pointing to unresolved questions of radioactive waste management, which remain largely unresolved in most of the EU

    Nuclear waste management is NOT an unsolved problem. France is one of the few countries that recycles nuclear waste, and even without it, it is not a big problem because there is not that much of it and it is easy to contain. Nuclear power is not without problems (no energy production is) but waste is not a real one.

    So who are these "scientists". Probably not scientists who know about the subject and express their professional opinion. It is more like using their status as scientists to give more weight to

  • What matters is how fast can we stop emitting GHG and slow down/stop AGW.
    Nuclear is CLEAN energy. Sadly, the same GD far lefties that stopped new nuclear reactor production in the 70s/80s are the ones DIRECTLY responsible for pushing the west to emit loads more GHG than what we should have. Why? Because had they been educated and not been a bunch of Luddites, the west would NOT have built the number of Coal/Nat gas plants that we have built. Instead, all of the west's electricity's emissions would all be
  • The question and real issue has always been crooked politicians.
    Nuclear is not and never has been "in the way" of other alleged solutions.
    A few years after leaving college I got over blaming the 'rich powerful corporations' because I finally realized that without a cesspool full of crooked politicians the corporations have little sway over national policy.

    As long a politicians can get bribes (they like to call them contributions) from competing $$ rich corporations then the politicians will make sure the

  • Wind and Solar are only suitable for dispatchable loads or discretionary loads. For example if you have a big hot water system and power is super cheap you can heat the water, when power is expensive you can switch it off.
    It's not suitable for meeting constant loads such as powering a grid 24x7, for that you need something that is not intermittent. Nuclear fits this role.

    The problem for Wind and Solar is that the cost of nuclear is almost all in the construction cost, they have very low running costs, so th

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