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France's Power Prices Jump 22% as Heatwave Trims Nuclear Output (oilprice.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 98 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Call me cynical but I do think an outlet called oil price dot com may not be entirely impartial when they report on this. That is not to say what they wrote here is wrong; I wouldn't know. It just has a touch of pot and kettle about it.

Since the power networks are linked and European countries import and export electricity, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that next to renewables power from gas stepped in to fill the nuclear gap. And the price for natural gas is often linked to a certain other commodity price.

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  • [–] 51 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Several nuclear reactors had to shut down because there was not enough water for cooling.

    In France, Hungary, Romania

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  • [–] 43 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    Reactors in France are shut down not because of lack of water, but as an ecological precaution because the effects of warming up rivers even more is not well known (even if it seems to have not much more impact than the heat wave in itself )

    And even with these reactors shut down, France still exported 5-10GW of power at the time.

    So yeah let's not propagate the anti-nuclear propaganda trying to paint the situation as "nuclear can't handle global warming and will cause blackouts", when in reality it's just us having so much decarbonated electricity that we can afford to produce less as an ecological precaution.

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  • [–] -3 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

    Mate, I can literally walk across the Rhine where I live. Nuclear doesn't work without cooling.

    Nuclear sucks and the fossil fuel industry wants you to think it doesn't.

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  • [–] 2 points 18 hours ago

    Ok, good to know. Now please relate your statement to TFA.

    Also, it’s possible to have nuclear running with very little hot water discharge, you just need to build more cooling towers. Where running water exists, it isn’t seen as necessary.

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  • [–] 2 points 20 hours ago

    Did you just strawman a fact with an anecdote and then completely get your second statement backwards?

    Nuclear plants have to scale down their water output for ecological regulation reasons. Which means they have to restrict their inflow, which means they have to restrict their output capacity.

    Oil industry wants you to think that nuclear there doesn't work, not that it does. Oil and coal have been working against nuclear for an entire generation or more.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago*

    Well, if we’re cherrypicking, Paks plant in Hungary has reduced to 10% capacity because the Danube fell too low to get water in. The plant supplied half of the country’s energy. The military has dynamited the river bed to increase flow to the plant. 145,000 cubic metres of rock is arriving from this evening in a bid to alter the river flow, and two barges may be scuttled on Friday.

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  • [–] 33 points 2 days ago* (1 child)

    From euronews:

    an environmental protection requirement to avoid discharging excessively hot water into rivers already warming because of the heatwave

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  • [–] -5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    That twists it to "protecting nature raises your electricity bill" where it's just that that the plant, when built, did not take into account water levels could drop this low. As if they assumed climate change wouldn't be this influential or something.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    It is not twisting it. It is exactly like that. The problem is not the water level. The nuclear power plant can work in these condition. The hot water discharge would raise the temperature too much on top of existing higher temperatures in the river for the flora and fauna to survive. We are doing this to protect nature. There is no twisting here.

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  • [+] -8 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    To my knowledge, but I did not look this up, these constraints were known at design time. I don't recall these changing. Hence the statement may be true, but pointing at the known constraint after the fact shifts the blame to nature conservation rather than infrastructure and climate change. This at a time where climate change focus is of utmost importance.

    Hence, albeit factually correct, it is disingenuous to give it the focus.

    If these constraints were added in the past 10 years then that could be considered different depending on the reasons for the change.

    What has changed are the water levels and base temperatures. Our environment has changed and the infrastructure has not been adapted to it. Luckily we have other tools for generating electric power ready to be rolled out.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    We are talking 1970. Scientists lacked the numerical models and the computing capacity to make these predictions. To accuse civilian engineers to not take into consideration recent hot topics of environmental science that lacked, at the time, rigorous models is disingenuous.

    The design lifespan for those reactors was 40 years. We are extending those past lifetime because it is cheaper to do even if we need to shut them down more and more often.

    The infrastructure have not adapted because it is cheaper to build a new power plant or to shutdown existing one occasionally then to adapt old existing design.

    I do not understand what is your point here.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (1 child)

    I agree with that to some extent. It was probably not the engineers' task, but as I've read in the past, our models of the seventies were not that far off. They did not plan for it probably because they were asked not to, or perhaps they (like many others) did not want to believe in the doomsday predictions, or perhaps they (like many others) believed it would be solved by science by now. The warnings were there though, we chose to ignore what was coming at us if we did not change our ways.

    My point is that by stating the reactor could work, you imply that there's a trivial solution: stop protecting nature to have nuclear electric energy in France. You could state explicitly that we should or should not. By leaving it open it feels to me like we're pretending nuclear is ready for the climate change ahead of us if only we could get way with that stupid nature. An argument could be had I suppose.

    As a side-note: It did make me wonder if you could work with complete evaporation. Not dumping any water back. That would also be horrible for nature but I don't know if anything in the system has to run at less than 100C.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 child)

    Nuclear is certainly ready for climate change ahead. Nuclear is one of the tool to use to solve climate change. There is no doubt from the technical prospective. 1970 nuclear is still a tool, given they continue to extend the usable lifespan of the plan. This is not a technology problem: Palo Verde nuclear power plant works in the desert, by evaporating sewage water. This is not a problem at all for power plants near the sea.

    I will be explicit: we should use nuclear to fight climate change, we should not destroy local environment to cheap out on building more carbon free power generation.

    Nuclear produce tons on stable carbon free electricity. This stabilize electrical grid. Without it, we have to use something else to compensate renewable instability. Hydropower (if you are lucky), batteries (still expensive but becoming more and more viable) or fossil fuel plants.

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  • [–] 1 point 23 hours ago (1 child)

    I love the argument you make here. I disagree, but it's a direct, hard and positive set of statements.

    Nuclear takes a decade to build, it concentrates power to a large actor, and we have issues with handling waste (including closing down the plantO. The risks are huge when in a war zone (see Ukraine) and when things go bad they go bad for many. Further, nuclear can't rapidly scale up or down so it's not great at handling fluctuations in demand, similar but less extreme than wind and solar without batteries.

    Progress has been made. With each step we think it's now really safe. But a few decades later it turns out we still had a bit more to learn. In the seventies they were telling us it was safe too.

    Ever since there was a glimmer of hope that costly reactors could get built again there has been a weird amount of positive posts about how great nuclear is. I don't think we know how to store anything for 1000 years because we have not had the necessary structures in place for so long yet and thus we are de facto finding that out.

    Batteries are not cheap. But solar and wind are! I think, based on what I've read, that that is a great path forward. It is safe, and it puts power in the hands of the people. No need to buy uranium from the next slowly corrupting regime. No need to get threatened by a company that they'll ahut the plant down. You have read other things and believe nuclear is the right way. No CO2, safe, good power delivery, limited space use. Neither of us is calling the shots on these decisions.

    I guess one will clearly be better than the other based on geography and available workforce.

    If we can continue to choose the least impactful and most distributed and cheapest long-term (including plant cleanup, windmill recycling, solar panel recycling, nuclear waste storage, battery recycling) then we're on a good path. I hope we can do that whilst subsidizing research on all these fronts.

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  • [–] 0 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

    You say lot of things that are correct and some that are not:

    • nuclear is not good at following fast changes in demand (battery are the best technology for that) but are very good at following the grid load. Nuclear fleet in France can cycle down to 30% daily. And they do that when needed.
    • nuclear is safe in the same way that airplanes are safe: very few incidents with lot of consequences, but still very few incidents. Nuclear is one of the safest form of energy, and new design are even safer then the already safe old designs that are currently running. Given the current alternative to nuclear with similar characteristics (dispatchable steam turbine with cheap fuel) is coal, which is responsible for millions of dead, we need to keep nuclear efficient and competitive to save lives.
    • renewables, batteries and nuclear are complementary technologies that works well together. In places with lot of wind and hydropower the need for nuclear is vastly reduced. Not all places can enjoy the same conditions, and nuclear saves lives
    • the reason why we do not put the necessary effort in finding a solution for nuclear waste is that nuclear waste is very little, so, as all human do, we procrastinate as this is not really a problem.

    We need to invest in renewable technologies, batteries technology, and nuclear technology. We want all of them to succeed in decarbonizing the grid, as those technologies insists on different industrial bottlenecks on their deployment. China knows this, and is building nuclear reactors at rate never seen before, while doing the same for solar, wind and batteries. Renewable will be the bulk of energy production because they are cheap. Nuclear role is not the same as renewable. Nuclear is to provide dependable baseload when wind and solar do not produce enough. Nuclear, renewable and batteries together are cheaper and faster to deploy then any other combination, so it is good to continue investing in all of them.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago

    It's not twisting anything, it's verifiable fact. Water temperatures in rivers in the current heatwaves we've had in Europe that are more than 10 degrees celsius above mean average temperatures has meant that the temperatures in rivers and lakes are already reaching levels that are causing severe issues to the wildlife and plants within them. Dumping millions of litres of hot water from power stations into them just makes a critical situation worse.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    I believe there is something of the kind, that the price of electricity just matches the highest production price, since you cannot differentiate which electricity comes from where in a grid. Si even if you have cheap renewable/nuclear energy, costs may rise if you have to use 'traditionnal' power plants. Im not sure of the details, i just heard the mechanism being explained once or twice.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago*

    It is called marginal pricing the wholesale electricity market uses which determines the spot price of electricity. It is based on the most expensive form of generation, typically gas, needed to meet demand regardless of how little is required. So here in the UK if 99% is generated by low cost renewable and only 1% is generated by expensive gas it all gets priced at the rate for the gas. Absolute madness when you live in a nation like the UK where all electricity retailers are getting their power from one national network operator.

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