AlmightySnoo š¢š®š±šŗš¦Good neighborship
OsrsNeedsF2PWell yea, countries keep buying nuclear from France because itās clean, cheap, and they donāt want to suffer the political backlash from the science lacking environmentalists which come forward when they talk about building nuclear on their own land
France has been importing more electricity than exporting in 2022 because their nuclear reactors canāt perform in the heat resulting from climate change. And this is more likely to happen again as each year becomes hotter.
Iām not sure where this fetishism for Franceās nuclear energy is coming from.
- France has been a net exporter for 40 years straight before that, as well as being the top exporter most of that time in Europe.
- Also theyāre back to Top 1 right now.
- Last yearās gap in electricity production was not due to heat (only a few reactors were slowed down for a few hours, and weāre talking about less than 0.5% loss due to these shutdowns over the year).
Besides, itās not a technical limitation on nuclear power, itās an ecological measure.
The hole in production was due to a corrosion problem detected in several reactors, which occurred at the same time as maintenance work in other reactors that were behind schedule because of COVID. This would have had no impact if nuclear power had not been left virtually abandoned for 30 years because of the anti-nuclear movement.
Itās the classic story: anti-nukes shoot nuclear power in the foot, then claim that nuclear power doesnāt work, despite reality.
Genuinely curious hereā¦ what about the concerns of nuclear waste? My understanding of it is based on the Simpsons so ELI5 how modern tech resolves the waste issues?
This is a complex issue, not just because storing radioactive material is complex, but because the āwasteā are not a uniform single material. Some have a decaying process of 300 years (90% of the waste, actually), some have a much longer one.
In the beginning of the nuclear era, some wastes wereā¦ dumped in the ocean (itās as bad as it sounds). This is fortunately no longer the normal practice. Some dedicated storage sites are used to store them depending on their lifetime.
The latest solution is geologic storage (some caves were found with waste from naturally occurring fission, eons ago, radioactivity never escaped, so letās justā¦ do that?). A site was identified in Finland with a hope it can store them for 100,000 years (of course, we donāt have any reference that would last that longā¦). And the good thing is the storage is āreversibleā for the first 100 years (if we change our mind/find better, we can still retrieve the waste during the first 100 years).
Finally, and that will resonate with @[email protected] comment: France had a 4th generation prototype reactor called SuperPhenix. Particularity of a 4th gen reactor is it can use some wastes to produce more energy. SuperPhenix being a prototype, it suffered from many issues through its lifetime. But at the end, it had a 90% uptime, and though it wasnāt generating a lot of power (that was never the goal, remember: developmentā¦), some reports were recommending to keep it up so that it could have processed part of the existing nuclear waste.
To appeal to the ecologists party allied to the socialist Prime Minister at that time, SuperPhenix was definitely shutdown in 1997. And now, the same ecologists use the nuclear wastes issue as a big reason to push back any plan on nuclear power.