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Italy Reconsiders Nuclear Energy 35 Years After Shutting Down Last Reactor (semafor.com) 173
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni plans to revive Italy's nuclear energy sector, focusing on small modular reactors to be operational within a decade. He said that nuclear energy could constitute at least 11% of the country's electricity mix by 2050. Semafor reports: Italy's energy minister told the Financial Times that the government would introduce legislation to support investment in small modular reactors, which could be operational within 10 years. [...] In Italy, concerns about energy security since Russia's invasion of Ukraine have pushed the government to reconsider nuclear power, Bloomberg wrote. Energy minister Pichetto Fratin told the Financial Times he was confident that Italians' historic "aversion" could be overcome, as nuclear technology now has "different levels of safety and benefits families and businesses." In Italy, safety is also top of mind: The Chernobyl tragedy of 1986 was the trigger for it to cease nuclear production in the first place, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster reignited those concerns. As of April, only 51% of Italians approved of nuclear power, according to polls shared by Il Sole 24 Ore.
The plan to introduce small modular reactors in Italy could add to the country's history of failure in nuclear energy, a former Italian lawmaker and researcher argued in Italian outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano, writing that these reactors are expensive and produce too little energy to justify an investment in them.They could also become obsolete within the next decade, the timeline for the government to introduce them, Italian outlet Domani added, and be overtaken by nuclear fusion reactors, which are more efficient and have "virtually no environmental impact." Italy's main oil company, Eni, has signed a deal with MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion System, with the goal of providing the first operational nuclear fusion plant by 2030.
The plan to introduce small modular reactors in Italy could add to the country's history of failure in nuclear energy, a former Italian lawmaker and researcher argued in Italian outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano, writing that these reactors are expensive and produce too little energy to justify an investment in them.They could also become obsolete within the next decade, the timeline for the government to introduce them, Italian outlet Domani added, and be overtaken by nuclear fusion reactors, which are more efficient and have "virtually no environmental impact." Italy's main oil company, Eni, has signed a deal with MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion System, with the goal of providing the first operational nuclear fusion plant by 2030.
30% nuclear (Score:5, Interesting)
Way back in the day, I proposed a 50-20-20 proportion. 50% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind. This was that daytime power demand tends to be 50% more than night, which would be 20% of total generation - that's solar. 20% wind is that we can handle a 20% drop between load shedding and backup sources, beyond 20% it becomes much more difficult. The remaining 20% would be hydro, geothermal, and other sources like biofuels, mostly for peak generation.
These days, I'd be more like 40-30-20-10. 40% nuclear, 30% solar, 20% wind, 10% other.
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We are already past the point where renewables are producing more than 100% of demand regularly. Anything that can't integrate with that isn't going to be economical.
Re:30% nuclear (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, yes, I kind of dislike pollution.
Nuclear at this point has shown itself to be very reliable. I should note that when I say things like 40% - I'm only being single digit precise, there's a lot of variability out there. I'm also talking about roughly average annual energy production.
That said, I wouldn't worry about keeping solar + PV below 33%, because while, as you say, both ultimately depend on the sun, wind power is on a much more averaged basis - like hydro, it's disconnected, indirect, so you can still get wind power at night (frequently a bit more of it, actually). Why? "Cut sunlight for months on end" on a global basis and we're all dead from freezing. There's still temperature differences when it's "just" cloudy and that is enough to generate wind.
Nuclear being fast reactors - I actually support GenIV, I like the idea of thorium molten salt. It'd be good, but not actually necessary.
I'm just guessing, but I don't think we'll have a production fusion reactor by 2030. We'd have to be building one right now for that to be the case, I think.
On hydro - it used to be 20% of the US's production. It's dropped some, but that's part of why it's only in the trailing mix, even if it's the biggest single component, even possibly the majority. I agree that dependability might be a factor. Plus, clean water shortages.
Re:Economic suicide. (Score:4, Insightful)
It only costs 4x more because we're stupid about it, politically. The chinese aren't finding that the case.
And having it be part of the mix saves all sorts of expenses otherwise.
Unbacked solar and wind is cheap. Backed up properly it's much more expensive even now.
Re:Economic suicide by LCOE. (Score:3, Insightful)
That assessment is 10 years old.
Today, the price of PV and batteries went down so much that nuclear costs 2-3x more than renewables in CN, and renewables undercut Coal in every big country.
And the cost of renewables is still dropping.
Nuclear electricity costs (LCOE) are increasing year by year.
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I'm sorry but you're confusing two things. By produced KWh, yes PV and wind are cheaper than nuclear, but they don't provide the same service at all. With PV and Wind, you need to factor in the cost to have a stable and continuous source of electricity, which comes naturally with nuclear. Then, all of a sudden, it's not less expensive at all.
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Alas, we don't need a stable and continuous source of electricity. We need one that matches the demand. That doesn't come naturally with nuclear. You need something else as well -- gas peakers in the old days and batteries these days.
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Alas, we don't need a stable and continuous source of electricity. We need one that matches the demand. That doesn't come naturally with nuclear.
France has been doing it for 50 years. It does come with nuclear if your build your plants to do so.
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If you have a steady supply, it is a heck of a lot easier to plan a storage system to store the excess when you produce it, than it is with an intermittent supply.
Nuclear may require a few hours worth of battery storage, Wind and Solar may require weeks worth of storage i.e. nearly two orders of magnitude higher requirement.
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It's actually pretty easy and might actually be cheaper with the way it affects regulations.
Build a great big multi-terajoule container of molten salts. Have the reactor dump the heat into it. Have the turbines pull heat from it to operate.
When demand is low, you heat the tank up. When demand is high, you operate more turbines.
Because it decouples the turbines from the operation of the reactor, it saves a LOT on regulation costs because the turbines no longer need to be nuclear rated.
Re:Economic suicide by LCOE. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, as a matter of fact, it doesn't. Of course you could have any incident that forces you to close down any reactor at any time. And scarcity of water might prove to be a challenge in coming years. That's easily offset bu building your plants close to the sea.
But I find it disingenuous at best to try to compare those downtimes with a solar panel which stops producing every day, and produces less in winter when people need more electricity. It's not the same level of interruptions, come on.
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Oh no, who could have planned the night is coming ?
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There're more options than just building near the ocean. We have a nuclear plant that uses treated sewage water instead, for example. It's also possible to build a plant that is entirely air cooled - all water is in a closed circuit.
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It's funny how there is no private industry in China, it's all just CCP fronts, until it comes to nuclear when it's 100% funded by investors and run by commercial operators who prove it can be done more cheaply than those morons in the West who suck at capitalism.
China's nuclear power programme is, like all civilian nuclear power programmes, subsidised by the military uses. That's why nobody believes countries when they say they just want nuclear power for peaceful uses - it's so expensive, the only way it
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Italy is an earthquake zone. How much does building for that add to the construction costs?
They've had some pretty good disasters over the years; maybe we should be concerned.
Cancer villages (Score:2)
To be safe nuclear power plant
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That's nonsense. If we solved the problems that make nuclear so expensive to build, solar and wind would get cheaper too because they encounter some of the same sorts of problems. As for what the Chinese are finding to be the case, the Chinese economy is still essentially a command economy when it comes to projects like nuclear power plants, which get government backed loans at way below market rate. So, what you're saying is either a statement on your part that capitalism just doesn't work or you're just i
Re: Economic suicide. (Score:2)
"Also nuclear is all at one site and takes up land than scattered wind and solar sites"
That's a bug, not a feature.
You talk about distributing power as if nuclear provided a benefit but in reality it's difficult and expensive specifically because there is so much generation in one place, and that place is reasonably far from things because the government has to insure it, and they don't want to be on the hook rendering a city uninhabitable.
It's also notable that of the two primary competitors to entrenched
SMR pipedream (Score:2, Insightful)
Ten years is a very ambitious timeline. Especially for a country that no longer has an active nuclear industry.
NuScale Power, the most advanced prototype in the US was cancelled after the cost of the project had blown out from US$3.6bn for 720 megawatts in 2020 to US$9.3bn for 462MW last year. Outside of the US, only China and Russia have successfully built operational SMRs (3 at last count).
By the time these SMRs are viable, industries crying out for them will have long died.
SMR is so dumb. (Score:2, Insightful)
SMR is so dumb.
Take a technology that is already economically obsolete, and scale it down so it gets even more expensive.
But yeah, you can rake in a lot of sweet subvention money.
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UAE decided they wanted nuclear power in 2009 and they had an operating nuclear power plant by 2020, and that's a nation that never had nuclear power before.
The UAE paid the South Koreans $30bn to come in and install some reactors. I'm sure the Italians could do the same if they had the cash lying around. Investing in unproven SMR technology as the article describes will come with a whole host of other hurdles.
He said? (Score:5, Informative)
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She started her political career as a fascist, or what they describe as a post-fascist, national conservative movement. Basically fascism without the violent oppression and genocide, if such a thing was possible.
She claims to be more "moderate" now, but her views are pretty extreme. Christian ideals, nuclear family, against same-sex marriage, deregulation... Except when it comes to stuff like this, when it's free money for her friends.
Italy has always been a political basketcase (as well as a strong conservative streak, particularly a religious one) but I do long for the days when the worst was Berlusconi and his Bunga Bunga parties.
I believe this will pass, Meloni and her party have been pretty well neutered and have been doing little else but arguing with their coalition between kow-towing to the EU, embarrassing that the Brothers of Italy made anti-EU sentiment a cornerstone of their election campaign. I suspect in the next electio
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How do you enforce a nuclear family model? Make divorce harder, so people can't get out of abusive relationships. Attach stigma to being a single parent or unmarried. Ban contraception and abortion.
Mmm... (Score:2)
BTW, TFA mis-genders prime minister Giorgia Meloni but I guess that's OK with the woke crowd because she's also a fascist (in the literal sense of the word; fascism is still alive & well in Italy).
Fun fact: Italian fascists espouse the kind of isolationism, branded as "self-sufficiency" & "Italy first," that caused famines & economic stagnation during the Francoist regime in Spain. It was only US food aid that prevented the country from complete collapse. It also prevented Spain
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What kept Spain from joining the Nazis in WWII was the need to keep order and rebuild after the civil war of '36 to '39, possibly helped by the personal antipathy between Franco and Hitler. Spain did send a division of volunteers to help fight against the USSR.
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Oh please stop sucking Salvini's cock.
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Italy has been returning to nuclear for 30 years (Score:2)
Italy proposes returning to nuclear every time there's a right-wing government, this is only the last of a long series of announcements in the past 30 years.
Of course, it's all showboating, and getting consultancy money to their friends.
30 more years (Score:3)
"overtaken by nuclear fusion reactors". How foolish do you have to be to plan on tech that is still completely experimental. Fusion isn't completely clean either, it produces little to no fuel waste but the vessel is bombarded with neutrons.
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the wind doesn't blow
that NEVER happens if the area you're looking at is big enough.
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that NEVER happens if the area you're looking at is big enough.
How big is Italy? Is that "big enough" that the wind is always blowing somewhere?
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Now only if there was a reliable way to transmit electrical power over arbitrary lines on maps...
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"Plenty of ocean" does not mean "plenty of hydroelectric". I'm not sure you even understand what hydroelectric power is. Maybe you're thinking wave/tidal. Our grid battery storage globally is under 1/100th of 1% of what what's we would need to level things out for even a day. To call it a rounding error is wildy overstating things and to scale it 10,000x would be a lot more expensive, in Euros and environmentally, than building reactors.
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I was thinking yes, plenty of ocean-front, and also plenty of mountains. Apparently Italy has about 20 gigawatt of hydro already, and could maybe get that up to 50-60 (?).
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Why the hell would they want to use batteries for storage when the Alps are right there? Haul a really big mass up a really deep hole when you have excess generation, and then let that really big mass fall back down the hole turning a generator when you need the energy back.
Or, pumped storage. Make big lined reservoirs with tunneling machines you already have from various highway projects (like the Mont Blanc Tunnel), pump water in during times of excess, drain it back out through a hydro turbine when you
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the wind doesn't blow
that NEVER happens if the area you're looking at is big enough.
Well yes, but when they say "the wind doesn't blow", they don't literally mean no wind, they mean "when the amount of energy being generated by the wind turbines is insufficient to meet the needed amount".
The reality is that there will definitely be times when the load on the grid is more than what wind and solar can provide. Nuclear is a great option to cover that as while it does produce waste, the waste it produces is rather confined and is not really a factor in the global climate change problem.
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Italy is connected to the rest of Europe, they can get energy from where it is available.
By the time they build these reactors the North Sea will be producing massive amounts of cheap energy. People will have to be forced to buy the nuclear power at above market rate, as already happens in some countries.
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Italy is connected to the rest of Europe, they can get energy from where it is available.
And how is it going to get that energy? By magic teleportation?
By the time they build these reactors the North Sea will be producing massive amounts of cheap energy.
How?
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Their grid is connected to neighbouring countries.
Re:American natgas simply cost too much (Score:4, Informative)
This is already showing cracks. Norway and Sweden are now saying "No, thanks" to new projects to siphon off their energy into Germany.
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100 billion Euros? Where did you get that figure from?
In any case it's less then 3 nuclear plants, so still cheaper than the alternative.
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100 billion Euros? Where did you get that figure from?
A 1.4GW interconnect between Norway and UK (North Sea Link) was $2.5B, and you need about 100x of that capacity to fully supply Italy with power from the North Sea.
In any case it's less then 3 nuclear plants, so still cheaper than the alternative.
Russia is building nuclear power plants for $8B for 1GWe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ). China is similar. So just _transmission_ _lines_ are in the same ballpark as nuclear power plants. And this is not considering the truly sky-high cost of adequate wind power.
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Ah, so you think that Italy has no renewable power at all, and no storage, so needs a full 1.4TW connection.
Well, it turns out that Italy does have renewable power of its own. It also has lots of capacity for storage, and grid stabilization tech like the flywheel deployed in Ireland at the site of an old coal plant.
About Russia, I'm not sure we want to build nuclear plants to the same standard that Russia does. It's irrelevant anyway, because it costs around 40 billion Euro in Europe, and we aren't about to
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Ah, so you think that Italy has no renewable power at all, and no storage, so needs a full 1.4TW connection.
Yes. If you want to guarantee the power, then you do need 140GW. Because there _will_ be times when Italy has little to no of its own renewable generation, for extended periods (days).
It also has lots of capacity for storage, and grid stabilization tech like the flywheel deployed in Ireland at the site of an old coal plant.
None of this will help. It provides power for minutes-to-hours, and you need days. Germany is in the same boat.
About Russia, I'm not sure we want to build nuclear plants to the same standard that Russia does.
Why not? Modern Russian nuclear plants are passively safe. Worst case, they melt down, and the molten fuel is caught in the core catcher.
and we aren't about to invite the Russians or Chinese to do it on the cheap for us.
Correct. Europe will just continue to use natural gas from Qatar and Azerbaijan.
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Can you point to a specific date when there was no wind or sun in Italy? At least so little that renewable generation would be negligible. We will ignore their hydro for now.
And also explain why it would all need to come from the North Sea, given there are other sources nearby.
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Can you point to a specific date when there was no wind or sun in Italy?
I don't have data handy for Italy right now, but I can find them. Here's for Germany: https://energy-charts.info/cha... [energy-charts.info] - look at the period from 18-th to 26-th. And this is actual data, not any model or projection. During that time, renewables fell to about 10% of their regular production. The worst case scenario (1-in-100 years) for Germany is a _month_ of this.
And also explain why it would all need to come from the North Sea, given there are other sources nearby.
It might not have to come from the North Sea, but it _has_ to come from a geographically distant area. Because geographically close areas are like
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A 1.4GW interconnect between Norway and UK (North Sea Link) was $2.5B, and you need about 100x of that capacity to fully supply Italy with power from the North Sea.
And you don't think there's any possibility of an economy of scale there? In other words, you think that, to create a 140 GW link (which is likely a lot more than you would need) you would do it by replicating the work of making a 1.4GW link 100 times?
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Yes. If you want to guarantee the power, then you do need 140GW. Because there _will_ be times when Italy has little to no of its own renewable generation, for extended periods (days).
Not sure where you're getting 140 GW. I am not sure what the residential standard is for Italian homes, but let's say it's 24 kW per breaker panel. There are 26 million homes in Italy. So to guarantee the power just for the homes, not even to mention businesses, municipalities, industry, etc. you would need at least 624 GW. When you add in all that other stuff it would probably be around twice that or close to 1.3 TW. Those are the kinds of numbers you have to deal with when you make ridiculous, unrealistic
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Simply scaling it up is not going to work. On the other hand, if you're building connections over the land, you don't need to use just a single pair of condu
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Yes! Nobody has ever transmitted electrical power over arbitrary lines on a map before! It's impossible!
Do you really think that each European country has completely disconnected power grids? Seriously?
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Yes! Nobody has ever transmitted electrical power over arbitrary lines on a map before! It's impossible!
That is correct. Nobody transmitted 100-200GW power flows across huge distances before.
Do you really think that each European country has completely disconnected power grids? Seriously?
You seem to think that European grid can handle arbitrary energy flows. It can not. If you try to power the whole Italy with power from Sweden and Norway, it'll cause a blackout, once the interconnects trip. Upgrading the grid to be able to handle that kind of load requires literally hundreds of billions.
An example of a similar event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That is correct. Nobody transmitted 100-200GW power flows across huge distances before.
No-one has really needed to. Generally, if a location needs that much power, it has significant local generation already. The areas that don't have much local generation also don't need that much electrical power. Do you know how many countries actually use that much electrical power on average? China, the US, India, Russia, and Japan. Those are the countries with average usage over 100 GW. Sure, there may be others that need more at certain times, but those are pretty few and far between.
It's pretty clear
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Well yes, but when they say "the wind doesn't blow", they don't literally mean no wind, they mean "when the amount of energy being generated by the wind turbines is insufficient to meet the needed amount".
Sounds to me like what they're actually doing is providing a continuously moving set of goalposts whose conditions can never be satisfied. Of course, those conditions could never be satisfied by nuclear power either, but people making this argument don't want you to think about that. Consider that the residential standard in the US now is 200 amp service and there are about 144 million homes in the US. 200 amp service is up to about 48 kilowatts. Times 144 million, that's 6.9 terawatts. The US only has abou
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It takes too long to spin up a Nuclear reactor to provide just that excess power required. It's a horrible solution looking for a non-existent problem.
Thankfully engineers aren't that short-sighted. You wouldn't literally have a nuclear reactor shut down waiting to kick on when there's a need like a backup generator - the grid would be designed so that a certain percentage of the needs would always be covered by nuclear, so the reactors are ALWAYS online and providing power, and their output can be scaled up or down as needed since the output of the solar and wind options is highly variable.
That variability is the problem. When you have something with t
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Actually the ramp rate of newer reactors is excellent.
The EPR can increase power at 5% per minute. In 10 minutes from 50% to full power.
Similar rates are achieved by the AP1000 and the APR1400 from Korea. This is faster than the rates achieved by gas combined cycle turbines.
The reality is that if you accept that you have need nuclear, you should maximise the use of these resources and accept that the power generated from intermittent sources is inherently less valuable, and only useful for “controlled
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So instead run the nuclear in the optimal fuel cycle (e.g. the rods pulled far enough to generate criticality and raise it enough to create xenon equilibrium) and keep it there until the fuel is poisoned enough that refueling is necessary. The wind power is much easier to vary by feathering the vanes and shutting down rotation, and they do it all the time already.
Why are we choosing between wind and nuclear, when coal and oil are still a thing? Let's deal with that first.
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HVDC lines are generally point-to-point. That means there are contracts in place for that power export. Not only does the wind have to be blowing somewhere, but you have
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That's why a European supergrid is in the works. People have thought about it.
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Mitigating climate change absolutely requires nuclear power to cover baseline load and times the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine...
... and batteries don't exist.
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Baseload is, by definition, there all the time. It's entirely not what is needed to cover the times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Nuclear provides reliable, somewhat controllable and expensive power, so completely the wrong fit for what you are talking about.
Having some nuclear would make a grid easier to manage perhaps, but whether it is a good use of money is another question, when you could over build wind -- Italy has quite a lot of that and has not yet built much to exploit it,
Re: American natgas simply cost too much (Score:2)
Only expensive because it's LNG. If there was a long-term necessity, we'd build a pipeline.
Re: American natgas simply cost too much (Score:4, Funny)
Sure, a pipeline across the Atlantic. I can propose a name for it: "Pipedream".
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Only expensive because it's LNG. If there was a long-term necessity, we'd build a pipeline.
Alternatively, frack the shale deposits in Europe. They exist, including in Italy. That's gotta be cheaper than a 2,000 mile ocean pipeline.
I'm fine if Italy goes the SMR route instead. I hope SMRs turn out to be as safe and economical as their proponents assert. There's only one way to find out and that's by making a good faith effort to deploy them without them having to fight ideological opposition tooth and nail.
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I hope SMRs turn out to be as safe and economical as their proponents assert.
I am pretty sure that is completely impossible. There are ideal sizes for fission reactors where you get the most bang for your buck, figuratively speaking, and SMR-size is not it. The principles of mass production that will supposedly make them cheap do not trump the efficiencies of scale that make larger reactors more efficient. SMRs, while full possible and useful in niche applications like remote weather stations or in space are not going to solve the problem of nuclear power being too expensive. These
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"But isn't nuclear power too slow to react to changing electrical demand to be anything more than a small contributor to the total energy demand?"
It doesn't have to be. Ships get in and out of harbor on nuclear power all the time. "Ramp rate up or down of X% per minute" needs to be in the design specs.
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To be fair I trust European countries more since they don't have quite as much inherent distrust and absolute hatred of government as a
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The other thing about ships is that they are surrounded by water for cooling. The only commercial SMR designs anywhere near prototype stage are from NuScale, and they need a large cooling pool. So actually the savings from the modular, serial production are likely to be offset by the fact that you need the pool, and maintenance for the pool, and have to work around the pool when refuelling etc. Oh, and you have to refuel more often than current commercial reactors.
More expensive. (Score:3)
>> switched to Nuclear because it IS cheaper
Wrong.
It WAS cheaper. Probably only on paper.
Today, that assumption is long gone.
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Running naval ships from diesel-- the alternative to nuclear-- opens them to an attack vector: disrupt the supply line of diesel fuel, and the ships have to head for a port.
So, no, aircraft carriers and other nuclear-navy vessels are nuclear not because it's cheaper, but because it allows them to be independent of the supply line.
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They are not independent as the planes and support vessels still need Diesel/Kerosine.
Supply lines are important for everything, of course. But an aircraft carrier would take ten thousand of tons of diesel. A fighter might take one ton of jet fuel.
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The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) could be shut down and restarted on demand. On that note, it produced a lot of tritium, something fusion reactors also have to deal with. Since it decays in 100 years (not thousands) it is considered a clean source of nuclear power. So yeah, not completely clean, but 100 years to background radiation clean, not 100s of thousands.
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A nuclear generating unit is optimized for a certain level of output, because it is a complex system - from the reactor to the electric output subsystem.
The NPP I used to know well had several reactors with different thermal power output - ~600MW (/3 electric), ~1200MW and 3GW. Managing demand was fairly simple - a unit close to the power surplus/deficit in the national grid could be put offline/online as needed, with some small lag.
Then, because of pressure from competing interests and the "greens" they sp
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The use of dissolved boron in the coolant for reactivity control of civilian power plants is more likely the source of the slow response.
Steam generators in nuclear plants are similar to fire tube boilers in that the heat source is inside the tubes and the water to be boiled is in the big tank outside. That does give a surge volume of water ready to flash into steam on demand. A water tube boiler doesn't have that.
Once the turbines are warmed up they don't care how fast they turn. In any case The generator
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That is why the requirement for rapid power changes needs to be in the design specs. And the ship reactors are still pressurized water reactors. The S5W reactor I babysat would be quite content with bigger generators in place of the propulsion turbines.
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France has nuclear reactors that can load balance quite well. You just don't do it much because there isn't really savings towards doing so. The fuel cost of nuclear is only marginally higher than power sources that don't have fuel at all. The maintenance costs are pretty much the same as well. Operational is the same. Etc...
The latest ideas for nuclear power, genIV stuff, is to take a page from thermal solar solutions and heat up a big tank of molten salt. That way, when power demand is low, you heat
Howto Giant Uranium Powered Money Burner. (Score:2, Informative)
>> France has nuclear reactors that can load balance quite well. You just don't do it much because there isn't really savings towards doing so.
Nope.
The reason France does not want to load balance with nuclear reactors is because it's uneconomical.
Each nuclear kWh already cost 3-4x more than renewables, and running it half the time basically doubles that cost again, and makes it a giant uranium powered money burner.
Yeah it's technically feasible on a slooooooow timescale.
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You're agreeing with me while telling me that I'm incorrect, you realize? All you did was phrase what I said from the opposite ange.
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... because they are running out of options and running out of excuses.
There was the Italian porn star turned politician, who had a slogan:
DOWN WITH NUCLEAR ENERGY, UP WITH SEXUAL ENERGY!!!
Re: Of course they are considering nuclear energy (Score:2)
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Why? Italians were at the forefront of all nuclear development (I'm sure you've heard of Fermi, but he wasn't alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]), they had a credible nuclear weapons development program (more here [wikipedia.org]), and the scientific and technological capacity is there today, from theoretical - INFN [infn.it] is a well-respected name in nuclear research - to engineering.
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And that's why nuclear proliferation is a real concern. The current Prime Minister is a far right populist. She used to be a member of a neo-fascist party, who rebranded their politics as "national conservatism", basically fascist ideology but supposedly less violent.
It doesn't take much for a country to get a leader that the rest of us wouldn't trust with nuclear weapons. It happened already in the US, and might happen again next year. Then you have Putin and Kim Jong-Un. Xi seems reasonably stable, but he
Re: (Score:2)
Some famous names in Italian engineering: apart from its prestigious automotive makers (Ferrari, Lamborghini), Italy makes space rockets (Vega-C by Avio), fighter jets (Panavia Tornado), fixed-wing aricraft (ATR), helicopters (Leonardo including Finmeccanican, Alenia, AgustaWestland), high speed trains (AnsaldoBreda, now Hitachi Rail Italy), very large ships (Fincantieri), semiconductors (STMicroelectronics).
Re:Economically Obsolete. (Score:4, Insightful)
Turns out having electricity when you actually need it is priceless.
Which is why Germany is importing the equivalent of two nuclear plants output from France, every day, from 4pm to 6am. While also burning coal/lignite and gas, which makes them emit 8-9 times more CO2eq/kWh than France. For the last 50 years.
Re: (Score:2)
In summertime France imports solar electricity from Germany, because nuclear plants shutdown in summer when cooling does not work.
No. They import some electricity from Germany because Germany is offloading it at negative prices during the day. Why not take advantage of that? It would be economically foolish not to.
In Europe, where air conditioning is not as prevalent as in the US, electricity demand is at its lowest during the summer—about half of what it is in winter. This means that, if necessary, France has enough nuclear power plants to meet its needs.
Moreover, the cooling argument you mentioned is incorrect. There are two m
Re: (Score:2)
No idea where you get your "news about Germany" from. I am German. I am not aware that we are building a single Gas plant at all.
If you are German, you should really pay attention to what your country is actually doing [euractiv.com].
Within the year, Berlin hopes to tender five gigawatts (GW) of new gas power plants for immediate construction, abandoning plans for a fully hydrogen-ready fleet. This would be followed by another five GW of plants that must run on hydrogen, but only from the eighth year of their operation. Two GW of old gas plants should be retrofitted.
Re: (Score:2)
>> nukes and PV complement each other, and need each other.
There's a full continent with 0 nuke and plenty of solar that proves this wrong.
Solar needs wind and hydro. No nuke.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a full continent with 0 nuke and plenty of solar that proves this wrong.
Oh, really? Please share your insights with some data.
Zero nuclear is already done. (Score:2)
it's called "Australia"
It has exactly Zero nuclear electricity. Zil. None.
It has 35 GW of solar production.
Australian grid works, all day and all night.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you for real? Australia makes so much use of coal that their carbon intensity is higher than that of Germany: 500-700g CO2eq/kWh.
When the OP said nuclear and solar/wind nicely complement each other, it was in the context of low carbon energy sources... Solar/wind need a non-intermittent baseload energy source. Are you suggesting it should be coal? I wasn't aware there were still climate change deniers around here.
Re: (Score:3)
Unlikely.
Germany has not a peek usage at that time.
No need to suppose anything. You can check the actual data [rte-france.com]. There is a calendar on the top left if you want to check the past days/months.
Bottom line only trolls care what country is importing or exporting in electricity to other countries.
Yet, you care when France imported electricity from Germany in 2022 (the time when there were the so-called cooling issues in France's nuclear plants). I simply explained what really happened back then, and what is happening now due to the failed Germany Energiewende.
Re: (Score:2)
Solar and wind power are relatively cheap, but can have as capacity factors of 10-20% (offshore wind 50%) while nuclear over 80-90%. And there are many other aspects one should consider when comparing.
Re: (Score:2)
Interconnect is not about more sensible neighbours, it is about different neighbours.
The UK is building interconnect to the Scandinavian countries because they have lots of hydro which is highly dispatchable, but limited in total capacity. The UK has lots of wind power, which is cheap to expand capacity, but is intermittent. Both sides are building batteries because it's good on the domestic front, but also means that the interconnect has to deal only with average demand not peak.
We are also building interc
Re:That's a really dumb idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually this is a really dumb comment.
Theres a reactor being cooled by the waters of the Persian gulf. This water is significantly hotter than the Mediterranean is projected to become in the next 80 years.
Solar only collects power during the day. To turn intermittent power into reliable power you need storage plus fossil backup. It’s lower carbon, not zero carbon. Nuclear actually does decarbonise economies
Check out https://nowtricity.com and watch as the sun goes down. Germany fail, Nuclear France wins hands down.