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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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[–] 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 1 day 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 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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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