France To Invest One Billion Euros In Nuclear Power

An anonymous reader writes "France will invest one billion euros in future nuclear power development while boosting research into security, President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Monday." The Guardian has a more detailed article. It's not a huge investment, but it is nice to see continued commitment to Generation IV reactors by at least one Western country.

Comments

They will make a fortune

[houstonbofh]

They will make a fortune selling power to all those countries "phasing out" nuclear power with no plan to replace it but the underpants gnomes.

Re:They will make a fortune

[MachineShedFred]

Yep. Spend a billion Euro now, get a nice return on that from Germany and Italy, because they can't meet energy demands.

Re:They will make a fortune

[EdZ]

A good combination would then to build your new plants near high-altitude lakes. Not only can you pump water up into the lakes to store energy during lulls (and let it flow out through turbine generators during peaks), you can use them as a gravity-fed water source in case of off-site-and-on-site power failure scenarios.The turbines could also act as additional on-site power generators, giving you even more redundancy (off-site grid power, on-site diesel, on-site battery, on-site water turbine, on-site gravity-feed).

Re:They will make a fortune

[PopeRatzo]

They will make a fortune selling power

First they'll have to make a nuclear plant that turns a profit without public subsidies.

Remember "Safe, clean and too cheap to meter"? That was forty years ago. We still haven't even come close.