France's most powerful nuclear reactor connected to grid after 17-year build

Even if wind and solar make huge progress, they will likely never be as efficient regarding raw materials efficiency and land use. Land use is the main contributor to biodiversity loss.

I don't think peremptory opinions about technologies are going to help. We should use what ever technology is the most reasonable and sustainable for each specific location.

It's slow expensive tech because we don't invest in it.

Every technology is slow and expensive when you have nearly an entire generational gap in knowledge and experience.

You'll know that I'm not saying solar and wind are not cheaper, they all exist in a different capacity and fill in the gaps they best fit.

Nuclear reactors have always been subsidized by the military. Solar and wind are so much cheaper than anything that came before.

Solar is not sustainable. Maybe one day but today's panels will all have to be replaced in a few decades. For now it's a way to bridge the needed to go fully nuclear.

had money not been saved

This just serves as a lesson to the "failsafe technology" crowd: That also involves failsafe humans. Those, to the best of my knowledge, have yet to be invented.

Oh and relatedly some German reactor ran for decades without a backup power generator. It was there, present, physically, that is, but noone bothered to check whether it actually worked. Merkel justified her flip-flop on the nuclear exit (shortly before Fukushima, she delayed the exit that SPD+Greens had decided on) by saying, more or less, "If the Japanese can't do it we can't do it either" but if she had been paying attention, it should've been clear that we couldn't do it. That became clear when the first SPD+Green coalition moved responisibity for nuclear safety from the ministry for economy to that for the environment, run by a Green, and they made a breakfast out of all that shoddy work that the operators had done. Oh the containment vessel is riveted... figures they put the rivets in the wrong way. Shut it down, have fun re-doing every single one of them before starting it up again.

Thus, my conclusion: The only people you can trust to run nuclear reactors safely are people who don't want nuclear reactors to exist in the first place.

It's totally logical even aside from the economics. The consequences are too great, which is why nuclear plants are uninsurable. You think this French plant and Vogtle were expensive? Imagine if they had to be insured like everything else in our society. But they can't, because no insurance company is large enough. By default the public ends up footing that cost to the tune of trillions.

Bro, THE FUCKING BACKUP DIESEL GENERATORS FOR THE PLANT WERE BELOW SEA LEVEL.

Make it make sense. If those generators had been above sea level, well probably above 100-year tsunami levels, we likely would not have seen the plant catastrophically fail.

Probably not anymore, I think they do very good as just being buyers of it and outsourcing its issues to their neighbors.

Did the anti nuclear people inflate the cost fourfold, too?

Politics are part of the system though. But if strategic supply of oil, gas, coal from undemocratic regimes was simply off the table, constitutionally forbidden and all that, I think nuclear energy would suddenly become more competitive. Because the financing of such groups would suffer.

Also any project that takes longer than the initial estimate will be overbudget, not only because you are paying local workers for longer (fairly good for the economy) but simply because inflation has happened more since the project started.

... but we make decisions about economic viability on that basis??

My state has been building a new interstate highway in segments for the last 1.5 decades and for the segment nearest me the main construction contract was awarded to a major french company. The french company thought the project was an upfront full payout, but the state had it set up as a piecemeal payment system based on hitting specific objectives. Upon finding this out the company halted all work and abandoned the job until the state took over the project 18 months later.

This reminds me of that.

The most unimaginably, but historically stupid thing was "green" activists protesting against nuclear power and for coal and gas.

And yes, nuclear power is very efficient. What makes it most efficient is the ability to very quickly regulate output, the improved logistics, and smaller reliance on beheading, culture-erasing, genocidal, revisionist savages getting everywhere.

That said, now that solar and wind are cheaper, conservative politicians are finally pushing for nuclear, because 17 more years of building at 4 times the budget means more fossil fuels in the meantime compared with spending those government funds on solar and wind.

Certain groups (funded by dirty energy companies) have pushed an idea that nuclear isn't Safe

Nuclear isn't safe. You should still not pick mushrooms in parts of germany because it isn't. It's an inherently dangerous technology, which you can only try to mitigate.

Nuclear has been strategically handicapped though because they know it'd destroy their business if it's able to compete on a level playing field.

Nuclear can only work because it is heavily subsidized. If it had to compete on a level playing field, not a single plant would ever have been built in history, as they are uninsurable on the free market and no investor would touch them with a stick without huge government guarantees.

It's the most expensive form of power generation there is, and in 2024 with renewables as good as they are it is just plain unnecessary to sink resources into this dead end.

Except that's all been tried and promised before. The concept of SMRs is nothing new. It's been tried again and again, every few years since the 1970s. It's never panned out, and the promised savings from mass production of small reactors never materializes.

Yeah, that's the whole joke.

The difference here was that STUK (the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear safety org) isn’t a backwater shop like the French kinda assumed. It’s a world-class setup that consults around the world.

They caught so many mistakes that the project went ridiculously over time and budget. The French crew had kids born and go to school in Finland before it was over - it was supposed to be a few years of expat experience 😆

They have a lot of them and they work perfectly well, who are you buying it from? The USA? Germany?

But they planned on replacing it with natural gas. Not to mention that it was supposed to be Russian gas. Sweden pays for the shitty decisions in Berlin.

Jigga what?

The U-235 fuel cycle produces way more plutionium than the U-238 cycle, though.

EDIT: Aw, fuck, I typed it wrong. U-238 produces more plutonium than U-235. My criticism still stands.

It's not unproven. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium#%3A~%3Atext=Reactors+able+to+use+thorium%2Coperational+service+at+some+point.

If the premisse is to avoid possibly every death, photovoltaic on the ground, e.g. on fields (not on houses) would probably be the least deadly solution.

It's not necessarily an either-or situation, but when it comes to allocating public budgets, one can certainly come at the cost of the other.

This is generally what people talk about when advocating focus on renewables over nuclear.

I personally have no problem with privately funded and insured nuclear - if you're able to swing that, then all the power in the world to you. The issue at hand is that nuclear fundamentally fails here - it's too expensive to build and insure (not to mention the energy it produces being more expensive than its alternatives), hence public funding and insurance is essentially a prerequisite.

Baseload is by definition not on-demand, baseload is always there.

This is true, and at the same time not really an issue any more at the rate that energy storage systems are progressing. Similarly to how solar and wind have absolutely plummeted in price, so is the case with energy storage systems s well. As of now, the LCOE of solar + storage is at half the price of nuclear (source) and trending cheaper. Nuclear is trending more expensive. Add on a construction time of 17 years for plants and any nuclear plant is basically economically dead on arrival.

That's what I wrote in my 2nd sentence. That does not justify building more of them, because the baseline is already handled by the existing power plants.

And how does this justify paying a lot more tax payer money to build the NPP instead of renewables?

France does not only focus on renewables BTW. They have NPPs that already handle the baseline. And building more of them is just not useful at all, when there is a better alternative...

Come one... If it's really about minimizing death, just build photovoltaik on the ground. But that's not the priority of humanity anyways.

No, we already have it and do not plan increasing our nuclear arsenal.

You kind of missed the point of my post. I don't want to get rid of nuclear. I just don't want to build new NPPs, when there is a far cheaper alternative.

BTW: How many people have died because of photovoltaic that is constructed on the ground on large fields? Probably 0... If you want to minimize death, this is the way to go.

Yeah or put another way: All that nuclear waste we occasionally talk about burying under a mountain has something like more than 90% of its energy left.

It's based on what can actually be used.

The world's present measured resources of uranium (6.1 Mt) in the cost category less than three times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium

(Note this is a *pro-*nuclear power organization.)

New technology may change that. We were once told that the oil in the Canadian tar sands was not economical enough to extract and now they're extracting it. The paper also discusses the possibility of thorium as a fuel source, although it has yet to see commercial viability.

As-is, and with current reactors, we don't have much we can use. Relying on new technology to change that could be a poor gamble.

Uneducated take.

Therein lies the problem.

It is if your intention is to not introduce carbon into the atmosphere over the 60 year life's lifespan to 90 year lifespan of the power plant

Looks like there was an end to it.

Going over budget and missing deadlines is normal for large infrastructure projects.

If anything, seeing people's shock at this should reveal how little they know about development.

And yet their electricity is still cheaper than Germany's ...