[HN Gopher] France risks winter blackouts as nuclear-power gener...
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France risks winter blackouts as nuclear-power generation stalls
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-08-12 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| mhb wrote:
| How a Massachusetts Power Plant Illustrates America's Fraught
| Shift to Green Energy
|
| https://reason.com/2022/08/12/how-a-massachusetts-power-plan...
| frenchman99 wrote:
| 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.
| Krasnol wrote:
| 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?
| lucb1e wrote:
| > punish the same people who paid for that ignorant course of
| several governments
|
| I don't think this is about punishment, but rather that "Like
| with...renewables?" is not going to be ready in three months.
| They aren't even going to have the reactors ready that are
| already there. Requiring big users to take it down a notch
| might be the only way by which people get their basic needs
| fulfilled like transportation and heating living spaces to
| reasonable degrees. Personally I don't think we will 'eat the
| soup this hot' (things are probably not as bad as fear might
| make them seem now), but only time will tell for sure.
| Krasnol wrote:
| It won't be ready in three months but it will be better
| next year and the subsequent summer and so on. Better every
| year. Unlike with building new reactors where the only
| subsequent events are news about rising costs and later
| completion dates.
|
| I mean seriously. This is not the first time issues with
| the nuclear fleet cause problems. We'd have a normal summer
| without those "special repairs". A normal summer in France
| means: "Rivers too hot. Need to shut down."
|
| Punishing those people who voted a guy who promised to
| REDUCE nuclear and EXPAND renewables and who just didn't,
| doesn't make any sense.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| If you don't have enough electricity, the exact wrong
| solution is to pretend everything is fine and keep consumer
| prices the same, as there will be zero reason for consumers
| to reduce consumption. If prices increase by 2x or 3x you can
| bet users who can will turn off large consumers like
| resistive heaters.
|
| For some reason unrestrained access to cheap electricity is
| treated as an untouchable right, and how dare you raise
| prices in a shortage, you profiteering monster?
| kenabi wrote:
| 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.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| 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.
| legulere wrote:
| 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.
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| 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.
| gerikson wrote:
| It's not a given that the water flows that are required to
| cool the reactors are going to be present in the fall/winter.
| ars wrote:
| It's not usually a waterflow issue, rather water that is
| too warm to cool the reactor.
|
| This won't be a problem in the winter.
|
| And in the future they'll probably design the reactors to
| handle the warmer water, or even run without water (lower
| efficiency, but that's not really an issue for nuclear).
| lucb1e wrote:
| If that's the case, why is the electricity company (per
| the article) saying they'll have the shortfalls down to a
| quarter (I take that to mean 75% of normal generation
| capacity, not 25%) by December? And why is the market not
| even buying that, what is the logic there (be it correct
| or not)?
|
| ---
|
| Edit: a sibling comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32443994 has
| answered the below question. It's not the water input
| that is the problem, but the water output temperature for
| ecological reasons. Original text:
|
| As a less-important aside, I'm also surprised a change in
| water temperature of like 20degK/C/F makes a noticeable
| difference on a reactor running afaik at some thousands
| of degrees. If anyone has a pointer or tldr for that, I'd
| be curious to learn why.
| ars wrote:
| It's not water at all - usually high water temperatures
| are just a few days a year.
|
| There's something else going on - I saw mention of
| corrosion, but I don't really know.
| shakow wrote:
| > rather water that is too warm to cool the reactor.
|
| No, it is still cold enough to cool the reactor. They
| can't use it because the warm water that the plant would
| release would be too warm w.r.t. ecological regulations.
|
| If for some reason the plant had to work right now, it
| could still do it, but would damage the downstream
| ecosystem.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Are the ecological impacts of warm water seriously worth
| the increase in fossil fuels from reducing nuclear
| output? This seems like a nuclear-obstructionist kind of
| environmental policy.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Isn't that what cooling towers are for? An alternative to
| warm water emissions. I am no expert admittedly.
| shakow wrote:
| They are, but not all nuke plant feature cooling towers.
| The problem here is for those without: they use water as
| a cooling fluid, but then just pour it back into the
| river instead of evaporating it. The advantage is that
| they don't consume/move the water, the inconvenient is
| that they can't spit out 40C water without hurting the
| river's ecosystem.
| ars wrote:
| It's not 40C at all! It's only a 2 of 3 degrees more than
| it started.
|
| Water temperature issues are very rare, and only happen a
| couple days out of the year.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Ah, couldn't read the article because paywall, but that was
| my assumption. It's not the first time power plants,
| especially nuclear ones, have cooling water limitations
| during summer. Also, as should always be pounted out, gas is
| mainly used for heating and not electricity in Europe. So WSJ
| is now putting three, only indirectly linked or not at all
| related topics together to write an article about a
| speculative future that might or might not happen. That is
| some really top notch journalism right there.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/LoiNQ
| snarfy wrote:
| archive.ph uses tracking cookies that go to russian
| domains
| lispm wrote:
| France has a lot of reactors not available, also because of
| various technical problems.
|
| During cold winter days the electricity demand is especially
| high, since a lot of heating is done with electricity. On
| some winter days the output of the reactor fleet is not
| enough - with less available reactors, this gets even more of
| a problem. Also neighbors might not be able to provide as
| much electricity as usual , because of the Russian
| invasion&war in the Ukraine and its consequences.
| kleene_op wrote:
| Oh, you mean just like what they've done in Germany for the
| past decades?
|
| Yep, that should totally do the trick.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Just make up the volatility of wind with gas, we have this
| friendly neighbour with plenty to share and it is so cheap.
| pydry wrote:
| Or pumping water uphill. Contrary to popular opinion there
| is no shortage of up: https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-
| news/anu-finds-530000-potent...
| cm2187 wrote:
| I love how your article refers to dams as "secure". I
| don't think there is a form of energy that killed more
| people directly in accidents. Beyond the fact that some
| people will object to flooding every valley in the Alps.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _I don 't think there is a form of energy that killed
| more people directly in accidents._
|
| ...and yet the UN and the EU are right now riled up
| because Russia is threatening to bomb a nuclear power
| plant, but don't even bat an eye when a dam is destroyed.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| So that instead of having blackouts when Russia invades
| Ukraine, we can have blackouts when there is no wind.
| bequanna wrote:
| I think we need a new term to communicate this as I don't
| think people yet appreciate how replacing base load with
| intermittent sources will result in bad outcomes.
|
| I personally like the term "Unreliables".
| the_third_wave wrote:
| 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).
|
| [1] https://www.nuclear-power.com/breeder-reactor/
|
| [2]
| https://www.gen-4.org/gif/upload/docs/application/pdf/2017-1...
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Now count the combined energy of the global wind or total
| solar irradiation.
|
| Further adding cost to the already most expensive energy
| source to extract trace amounts of fuel is nonsensical.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Except wind and solar are intermittent, and require burning
| fossil fuels during periods of non production. Thus, wind
| and solar still contribute to climate change indirectly,
| due to their dependency on fossil fuels. This will continue
| to be the case until some massively scalable storage
| solution is developed, which remains unsolved.
| christkv wrote:
| I always wondered if we could just shoot spent fuel into the
| sun to get rid of the storage problem here on earth
| towaway15463 wrote:
| We could also get rid of the storage problem by realizing
| it isn't a problem to store a relatively tiny amount of
| solid waste. The irrational fear of it is mind boggling
| considering the vast quantities of dangerous gases and
| particulates we vent into the open air that we breathe
| without a second thought. I'd much rather have all of our
| energy by products in solid form safely contained and
| buried deep under the earth.
| samatman wrote:
| Then you'd enjoy watching videos on YouTube about why
| shooting things into the Sun is enormously energy intensive
| even by the standards of putting things in space and
| sending them around the Solar System.
|
| Boils down to: getting something to fall into the Sun
| requires stripping the speed of Earth's rotation around the
| Sun off the vector. This is... expensive.
| groby_b wrote:
| This is off by 6 orders of magnitude?
|
| A crucial part here is that you're interested in
| _recoverable_ Uranium at a reasonable price level. Assuming
| < USD260/kg, you'll end up at ~8 million tonnes (depending on
| what other factors you account for): https://www.oecd-
| nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12...
|
| And so the time estimate is similarly off. Uranium resources
| can power humanity's need for ~130, years, extending to 250
| years if the entire conventional resource base is exploited.
| (pg. 113 in the report I linked). With large error margins
| for Uranium deposits not found yet, but not "factor of
| millions" error margins.
|
| That doesn't mean we shouldn't invest into nuclear (we
| definitely should), but it does mean that it's not the
| panacea it's touted as either.
| deevolution wrote:
| Asteroid mining seems like it would become a necessary
| endeavor once uranium becomes too expensive to extract on
| earth. I'd bet big that humanity can figure out profitable
| asteroid mining within the next 100 years!
| arinlen wrote:
| > _Asteroid mining seems like it would become a necessary
| endeavor (...)_
|
| ...or, I don 't know, add a wind turbine somewhere?
| bequanna wrote:
| Huh, you must me lucky enough to live somewhere that the
| wind always blows and the sun always shines.
| Kuinox wrote:
| 20 years ago we were told there was 20 years of petrol
| remaining. It's sadly false.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > 20 years ago we were told there was 20 years of petrol
| remaining. It's sadly false.
|
| No, we weren't. At least not by anyone credible.
| willcipriano wrote:
| They can follow the example of the Germans. How's that been
| working out?
| lucb1e wrote:
| 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?
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Plants are down for maintenance (this is the 'corrosion' bit in
| the NYT articles).
|
| 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.
| philipkglass wrote:
| 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:
|
| "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-...
| lucb1e wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Checking the article, I see I indeed read over "Corrosion at
| a clutch of reactors". That sentence didn't really parse in
| my head until reading it for the third time: clutch is a
| quantity, didn't see that use before. Guess I was captivated
| by the unrelated graphic above and then glanced over this
| part without noticing that I had missed precisely the
| information for which I opened the article!
| huijzer wrote:
| Completely logical that you missed it. Like what appears
| customary in financial writing, the article has attempted
| to botch normal writing and has gone completely north on
| clarity by squeezing massive amounts of important sounding
| words in sentences which cause a shortfall of meaning. This
| is exacerbated by a scorching need of readers according to
| people familiar with the matter.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I see what you did there ;)
| Gwypaas wrote:
| https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/French-regulator...
|
| Deferred maintenance during Covid and unexpected corrosion
| issues. The too hot water is just the summer cherry on top.
| jonatron wrote:
| If only there was a way to express gigawatt-hours per hour in a
| simpler way.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Where do you see that mentioned? When I ctrl+f for 'hour' I
| only see "EUR900 a megawatt-hour" and "equivalent to about
| $1,850, a megawatt-hour", but no MWh/h or hour per hour or
| something.
| jonatron wrote:
| You can't ctrl+f on images because they're images. https://ar
| chive.ph/LoiNQ/902d6a73d02ba7a74370c060fb24e99c7f0...
| wahern wrote:
| Actually, this works in Safari with its new "Live Text"
| feature. https://www.apple.com/safari
|
| I just confirmed that searching for "hour" will highlight
| that term in the image in addition to any regular text.[1]
| Though, I first had to click on the image, which is
| apparently what triggers the OCR; after that searching
| found the term even if I changed or released the input
| focus.
|
| This is my first time using this feature (your post
| reminded me that I had recently read about it), and my
| first time using Safari since I don't know when, so there
| may be more caveats to the behavior I'm not aware of.
|
| [1] I used the archive.ph version of the full article. Live
| Text didn't seem to work when viewing the image in
| isolation via your link above.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Ah! Right, yeah that unit is unfortunate.
|
| After moving into a place where electricity is metered for
| the first time (beyond student living places where you just
| pay a flat rate as part of the rent), I started looking
| into what devices use how much. The '-hour' unit is so
| confusing, also when converting ordinary Watts to whatever-
| hours, you need to use a conversion factor of 60x60=3600 to
| get anywhere. Not intuitive at all. Had we just used Joules
| (kJ and MJ mainly, where 1 Joule = using 1 Watt for 1
| second), then by using a 1 kW device (e.g. microwave) for
| 100 seconds you can instantly tell that 100 kJ is the
| amount of energy used. On a yearly a bill of 9'000 MJ, you
| can instantly grasp the relative size of 100 kJ = 0.1 MJ,
| maybe you do this daily so 365x0.1 = 36.5 MJ. I am terrible
| at mental math but this much I can do. Alas.
|
| At least, that's how I think it all works, it's not like I
| ever got to practice this outside of Factorio
| (consumption/generation is all in Watts and storage in
| Joules).
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Much of a muchness - 1kw for 1 minute is 1 kilowatt-
| minute or 1/60th of a kilowatt-hour. It's just a matter
| of perspective.
|
| The 60x60 multipliers are making it sound more
| complicated than it really is.
| it_citizen wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2021-10/Futurs-Ene...
| page 17
| lucb1e wrote:
| What's an ENR?
|
| 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".)
| it_citizen wrote:
| I replaced ENR by renewable.
|
| > because they're not choosing it
|
| That report does not take a stance. It is listing different
| possible scenarios to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
|
| The document I linked is a summary, but it is better
| explained in the full report. The TL;DR is that 100% nuclear
| is nowhere to be achievable in a reasonable timescale despite
| France being one of the most knowledgable country on nuclear
| energy. Cost and time are the main problems. The bottom of
| page 27 shows how even the most aggressive scenario fall
| short. I remember the CEO of Orano himself saying that they
| wouldn't be able to make it.
|
| Don't get me wrong though. I think it would be stupid for
| France to give up on its nuclear park. The pro-nuclear
| scenarios looks way simpler to achieve than the full
| renewable ones. But if we look at the big picture, renewables
| are not optional, nuclear however might be. So maybe let's
| spend a little bit more time talking about how France is not
| doing nearly enough on the renewable side, whatever your
| opinion is on nuclear.
| Kuinox wrote:
| The documents you linked doesn't says what you say. The
| risk table nicely show it: all renewable are red. Yes, 100%
| nuclear is not achievable without risk, but with less risk
| than the 50% renewable you are proning.
| it_citizen wrote:
| Page 26: > The study concludes, without any ambiguity,
| that a sustained development of electrical renewable
| energies is essential in France to respect its climate
| commitments.
|
| Which defacto exclude a 100% nuclear mix.
|
| I am not proning anything. To be honest, I would have
| been happy if the report said that 100% nuclear is the
| best way to go. I have no problem with the tech.
|
| Are you talking about the risk table p43? That table
| shows that n2 and n03 are probably more achievable than
| the other scenarios but nowhere that table proves that
| more nuclear than n03 would be achievable in the
| timeframe allocated. I would love an exact quote or
| reference on that.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Solar panels requires a dependency on China which doesn't
| seem too smart.
| philipkglass wrote:
| China is the largest but far from the only solar-
| manufacturing country.
|
| Solar manufacturing in Italy:
|
| https://www.enelgreenpower.com/who-we-
| are/innovation/3SUN-fa...
|
| Solar manufacturing in the USA:
|
| https://www.globenewswire.com/news-
| release/2021/08/17/228223...
|
| In Singapore:
|
| https://usa.recgroup.com/news/rec-group-kicks-mass-
| productio...
|
| In Germany:
|
| https://www.pv-tech.org/meyer-burger-optimising-
| production-e...
|
| In Turkey:
|
| https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/19/turkish-pv-
| manufactur...
|
| In India:
|
| https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/24/indias-solar-
| module-m...
|
| Soon, in France:
|
| https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/13/french-hjt-solar-
| plan...
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/LoiNQ
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