I'm kind of missing all information in the article beyond the headline. The whole article is just padding the headline and only says there will be shortfalls in winter, but the current problem is the water not being enough for the reactors. What has that got to do with the situation in a couple weeks when there might have been rain, let alone two seasons from now?
It's mentioned only briefly in this WSJ article, but the problem for this coming winter (and perhaps some years to come) is unexpected stress corrosion cracking recently discovered in multiple French reactors. The affected reactors are the newest currently-operating models, the N4 series [1]. Here's are a few longer articles about the problem:
There is some confusion with different issues, you are right. There are several problems that create a perfect storm:
1. As you said, the water issue is just temporary. This is a non-issue for this winter.
2. The next generation NPP, the EPR, is late and is currently only planned for 2023
3. The current NPPs have been authorised to be used up to 50 years, under the condition of doing fairly important upgrades. This is what is ongoing. And because the decision to push these to 50 years was late, the upgrade schedule is quite tight.
4. This upgrade, and other normal maintenance have been impacted by COVID
5. As someone else said, corrosion was discovered during the maintenance of an NPP. Since the cause of the corrosion could not be explained, the operator decided to shut down all the NPPs with the same design. This is being currently analysed and it looks like the nuclear authority is happy with the proposal. The current work is to develop a reliable system to detect and monitor this corrosion, not a change in the design
6. The main operator is in the process of being fully nationalised and is suffering financially as it was basically asked to bail out its competitors this year due to the energy crisis.
7. The backup to NPPs in France is currently gas. And you may be aware of a small constraint on gas due to some issues with a country located further East. If Russia stops the delivery completely, gas supply could be an issue and therefore we need to plan to reopen coal plants that were closed because they were no longer useful.
France needs to invest heavily into renewables, as it isn't able to replace old nuclear reactors with new ones, especially at the rates renewables offer.
There are approximately 6.5e13 tonnes (65 trillion) of Uranium in the Earth's crust, which smarter people than me have determined could power humanity's needs for more than 4 billion years.
That sounds more "renewable" than Solar, which depends on a Star that is due to burn out in 4 billion years and is conventionally branded as "renewable". Not including the ample amount of fissionable material on the Moon and in the immediate Solar System. So I agree, we need to invest heavily into renewables, specifically the one that is right in front of our face, Nuclear.
Thanks. I don't get the get connection between the title and the content of the article. It says in the article that nuclear reactors are outputting half of what they should because of the extreme weather. But in the winter, how is that going to be a problem? We don't have heatwaves in the winter... yet.
France needs to invest - and has already done so - in the development of fast breeder reactors [1] which are used to create ("breed") fissionable fuel from non-fissionable material in spent fuel rods. They already developed such reactors (Rhapsodie, Phenix and Superphenix [2]) but currently they do not have a functioning FBR to rework spent fuel rods. Using fast breeder reactors the 60 GTEP (Gigaton equivalent energy from petroleum products) in available fissionable Uranium can be turned into ~7000 GTEP of fissionable fuel. As a comparison, this is 9 times as much energy as is available from coal (420 GTEP), oil (189 GTEP) and gas (160 GTEP) combined (source: [2], page 6).
France did a good job building nuclear reactor with existing technology and refining them.
However they have done a really, really poor job in developing and rolling out next generation technology.
If they had continued to build and evolve the technology they would not only not have the problems they have now.
Unfortunately government lead efforts are not always very innovative and the French population got infect by some of the same anti-nuclear sentiment as other places.
Even the most pro-nuclear scenario the French came up (N03) includes 50% of renewable. And we are talking about one of the most nuclearized country in the world.
Nuclear is a great ally but not a silver bullet. They need to ramp up the production of renewable energy immediately.
This article is in French and is thus inaccessible for many on HN. It sounds like it's assuming that there's going to be vast amounts of storage to accommodate renewables intermittency - at least if "stocker" and "dèstocker" refer to storage.
This is very wishful thinking. Storage at anywhere near relevant scales is not achievable with existing storage mechanisms. This is often the case for most plans that call for a significant portion of energy coming from renewables. Intermittency would otherwise require a carbon-free source to provide energy during periods of non-production. Unfortunately for intermittent sources, peak demand coincides with periods of non production in the evening. If you build enough nuclear plants to fulfill this period of non-production, then you have enough nuclear plants to fulfill demand for the rest of the day and thus the intermittent sources are redundant.
If someone does eventually invent a storage system that's nearly free and can scale to terawatt hours then renewables are great. But until then, they do not provide a path to decarbonization.
What makes you conclude that, because they're not choosing it, it must be not a silver bullet? What are the actual reasons behind this? I see some stats in french on page 17, not sure if it also mentions reasons somewhere. (E.g. germany is also not choosing it, but for the stupid reason of the public being riled up (mislead) about its risks by various parties for decades, so now it's not politically acceptable anymore to leave nuclear running while phasing out coal, let alone build more nuclear. In such a case, I would not use "oh germany is not choosing it, must be bad then" as a reason to conclude "nuclear is not a silver bullet".)
There is no reason why nuclear can not provide all energy needed.
Just because this french document doesn't make a scenario like that doesn't mean its not possible.
France did a great job deploying nuclear, but they have overall done a really bad job at developing next generation nuclear.
I would like to read the document you linked below and understand by what logic they exclude 100 nuclear.
How is it possible that they manged to build a nuclear reactor in 5 years in the 80s and can't do so now. France doesn't need that much more energy in 2050. If they just repeated what they did in the 70-90s in the next 20 years they clearly reach it.
It really don't see any rational argument why this shouldn't be possible. Maybe its not possible continuing to do more or less what they want. But a determined government effort, bringing the technologies online that they have to to make it work should be considered.
Given modern technology, shouldn't they not be at least 2-4x more efficient at building new capacity then they were in the 80s?
Edit:
Looking at the document, why would France need +350GW of energy production. That seems totally over the top given population trends.
Edit 2:
Looking further:
> 14 EPR et plusieurs SMR entre 2035 et 2050
That seems a small number. If they have a working design that they can start building in say 2030. IF you put the necessary education system in place to educated people, you should be able to build way more in 15 years. If you split the teams while on-boarding new people you can start many reactors every year.
We French need to start thinking about sobriety. Setting progressive water and energy prices to encourage people to be more efficient in their use would also be helpful. Lots can be done. How about the government and parliament finally get it done instead of pointing fingers. I'm ready to restrain myself in lots of ways if it's in the general interest, even if it makes my life a bit worse on some aspects.
Holy moly. This is dark. So you want to punish the same people who paid for that ignorant course of several governments by subsidising the state regulated energy price and the companies providing that energy and which are constantly bankrupt? Like, punish them again? How cruel,
How about diversifying your energy generation? Like with...renewables?
Where do you see that mentioned? When I ctrl+f for 'hour' I only see "€900 a megawatt-hour" and "equivalent to about $1,850, a megawatt-hour", but no MWh/h or hour per hour or something.
with the advent of a stable thorium breeder reactor, a less problematic method of utilizing the nuclear reaction to not produce weaponizable elements, india is managing to kick everyones butts.
now ask yourself why nowhere else seems to be bothering with this cleaner, cheaper, faster to implement solution that takes up less space to produce the power, and has a significantly shorter half-life for waste (sub 50y).
it's win-win, and yet it's essentially persona non-grata in the energy world.
India is not kicking everybodies ass. Indias nuclear industry suffers from the same problems many of their advanced technology developments suffer.
India focused on thorium fuel pellets, but what makes a reactor good is using molten salt as fuel and coolant, and India wasted a huge amount of effort redeveloping PWR technology from the 70s.
And breeding with static fuels is also far less useful because to separate those out of the fixed fuel pellets is very hard.
Those are the exact reason why M. Weinberg started developing liquid fueled reactors.
So what we really need to develop is liquid molten salt fueled or at least molten salt cooled reactor. Those can be fast burners, fast breeders or thermal breeders. Thorium is really only useful if you are doing a thermal breeder, if you don't then uranium is actually better.
There's no significant advantage of Thorium from a fuel standpoint. Breeder reactors also essentially give you the possibility of producing nuclear weapons so quite the political and ethical threshold to pass before they would exist in every neighborhood.
[+] [-] lucb1e|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philipkglass|3 years ago|reply
"Counting the cost of cracking"
https://neimagazine.com/features/featurecounting-the-cost-of...
"Corrosion Problem Shutters Half of France’s Nuclear Reactors"
https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/06/29/corrosion-problem-sh...
"Regulator approves EDF's plan for checking corrosion issues"
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Regulator-approv...
[1] https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurefeedback-on-the-...
[+] [-] Gwypaas|3 years ago|reply
Deferred maintenance during Covid and unexpected corrosion issues. The too hot water is just the summer cherry on top.
[+] [-] icegreentea2|3 years ago|reply
They were already announcing planned reductions (for maintenance) back in winter 2022 (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/power-group-edf-cuts...)
I believe additional issues have popped up since then causing EDF to plan additional maintenance shutdowns.
[+] [-] marsokod|3 years ago|reply
1. As you said, the water issue is just temporary. This is a non-issue for this winter. 2. The next generation NPP, the EPR, is late and is currently only planned for 2023 3. The current NPPs have been authorised to be used up to 50 years, under the condition of doing fairly important upgrades. This is what is ongoing. And because the decision to push these to 50 years was late, the upgrade schedule is quite tight. 4. This upgrade, and other normal maintenance have been impacted by COVID 5. As someone else said, corrosion was discovered during the maintenance of an NPP. Since the cause of the corrosion could not be explained, the operator decided to shut down all the NPPs with the same design. This is being currently analysed and it looks like the nuclear authority is happy with the proposal. The current work is to develop a reliable system to detect and monitor this corrosion, not a change in the design 6. The main operator is in the process of being fully nationalised and is suffering financially as it was basically asked to bail out its competitors this year due to the energy crisis. 7. The backup to NPPs in France is currently gas. And you may be aware of a small constraint on gas due to some issues with a country located further East. If Russia stops the delivery completely, gas supply could be an issue and therefore we need to plan to reopen coal plants that were closed because they were no longer useful.
[+] [-] legulere|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oceanplexian|3 years ago|reply
That sounds more "renewable" than Solar, which depends on a Star that is due to burn out in 4 billion years and is conventionally branded as "renewable". Not including the ample amount of fissionable material on the Moon and in the immediate Solar System. So I agree, we need to invest heavily into renewables, specifically the one that is right in front of our face, Nuclear.
[+] [-] msk-lywenn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kleene_op|3 years ago|reply
Yep, that should totally do the trick.
[+] [-] the_third_wave|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.nuclear-power.com/breeder-reactor/
[2] https://www.gen-4.org/gif/upload/docs/application/pdf/2017-1...
[+] [-] panick21_|3 years ago|reply
However they have done a really, really poor job in developing and rolling out next generation technology.
If they had continued to build and evolve the technology they would not only not have the problems they have now.
Unfortunately government lead efforts are not always very innovative and the French population got infect by some of the same anti-nuclear sentiment as other places.
[+] [-] NewEntryHN|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willcipriano|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bookofjoe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] it_citizen|3 years ago|reply
Nuclear is a great ally but not a silver bullet. They need to ramp up the production of renewable energy immediately.
https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2021-10/Futurs-Ene... page 17
[+] [-] Manuel_D|3 years ago|reply
This is very wishful thinking. Storage at anywhere near relevant scales is not achievable with existing storage mechanisms. This is often the case for most plans that call for a significant portion of energy coming from renewables. Intermittency would otherwise require a carbon-free source to provide energy during periods of non-production. Unfortunately for intermittent sources, peak demand coincides with periods of non production in the evening. If you build enough nuclear plants to fulfill this period of non-production, then you have enough nuclear plants to fulfill demand for the rest of the day and thus the intermittent sources are redundant.
If someone does eventually invent a storage system that's nearly free and can scale to terawatt hours then renewables are great. But until then, they do not provide a path to decarbonization.
[+] [-] lucb1e|3 years ago|reply
What makes you conclude that, because they're not choosing it, it must be not a silver bullet? What are the actual reasons behind this? I see some stats in french on page 17, not sure if it also mentions reasons somewhere. (E.g. germany is also not choosing it, but for the stupid reason of the public being riled up (mislead) about its risks by various parties for decades, so now it's not politically acceptable anymore to leave nuclear running while phasing out coal, let alone build more nuclear. In such a case, I would not use "oh germany is not choosing it, must be bad then" as a reason to conclude "nuclear is not a silver bullet".)
[+] [-] panick21_|3 years ago|reply
Just because this french document doesn't make a scenario like that doesn't mean its not possible.
France did a great job deploying nuclear, but they have overall done a really bad job at developing next generation nuclear.
I would like to read the document you linked below and understand by what logic they exclude 100 nuclear.
How is it possible that they manged to build a nuclear reactor in 5 years in the 80s and can't do so now. France doesn't need that much more energy in 2050. If they just repeated what they did in the 70-90s in the next 20 years they clearly reach it.
It really don't see any rational argument why this shouldn't be possible. Maybe its not possible continuing to do more or less what they want. But a determined government effort, bringing the technologies online that they have to to make it work should be considered.
Given modern technology, shouldn't they not be at least 2-4x more efficient at building new capacity then they were in the 80s?
Edit:
Looking at the document, why would France need +350GW of energy production. That seems totally over the top given population trends.
Edit 2:
Looking further:
> 14 EPR et plusieurs SMR entre 2035 et 2050
That seems a small number. If they have a working design that they can start building in say 2030. IF you put the necessary education system in place to educated people, you should be able to build way more in 15 years. If you split the teams while on-boarding new people you can start many reactors every year.
[+] [-] frenchman99|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Krasnol|3 years ago|reply
How about diversifying your energy generation? Like with...renewables?
[+] [-] jonatron|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdavis6890|3 years ago|reply
Probably expressed as an expected average, rather than peak (or both).
[+] [-] kenabi|3 years ago|reply
now ask yourself why nowhere else seems to be bothering with this cleaner, cheaper, faster to implement solution that takes up less space to produce the power, and has a significantly shorter half-life for waste (sub 50y).
it's win-win, and yet it's essentially persona non-grata in the energy world.
[+] [-] panick21_|3 years ago|reply
India focused on thorium fuel pellets, but what makes a reactor good is using molten salt as fuel and coolant, and India wasted a huge amount of effort redeveloping PWR technology from the 70s.
And breeding with static fuels is also far less useful because to separate those out of the fixed fuel pellets is very hard.
Those are the exact reason why M. Weinberg started developing liquid fueled reactors.
So what we really need to develop is liquid molten salt fueled or at least molten salt cooled reactor. Those can be fast burners, fast breeders or thermal breeders. Thorium is really only useful if you are doing a thermal breeder, if you don't then uranium is actually better.
[+] [-] Gwypaas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhb|3 years ago|reply
https://reason.com/2022/08/12/how-a-massachusetts-power-plan...