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

[ArsenneLupin]

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.

... which will work fine until those countries have built enough windmills, dams and solar arrays to no longer depend on France.

... and then France will have a problem: indeed, it buys as much electricity from abroad than it sells there. Nukes can only supply base load, and for peak France mostly relies on buying back from other countries (who are constructing storage facilities as we speak).

If the French aren't careful, they might be in a world of hurt twenty years from now...

Re:They will make a fortune

[MachineShedFred]

Except that France has a reprocessing facility that dwarfs other countries' capacity to get useable fuel out of the "waste."

Nice job not knowing any facts though, and spewing the same non-issues like a good parrot.

Re:They will make a fortune

[demonbug]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.

It isn't practical to rapidly change the load on nuke reactors, because it takes a significant amount of time to ramp up and down power output. Also, it basically costs the same to run whether you are at 10% capacity or 100% capacity, so it makes sense to run them as near to full capacity as possible. Contrast that with something like a gas-fired powerplant, where you can ramp generation quickly and you are pretty much only paying for the gas you are burning.

Of course, France announced at the same time as this announcement that they will be going ahead with something like 1.5 billion euros funding renewable resources over the same period, so it isn't like they are putting all their eggs in the nuclear basket - just not abandoning it entirely as others are doing.

Re:They will make a fortune

[vlm]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.

The term you don't know to google for is "xenon poisoning" or the "iodine pit"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit

Using the most non-technical terms I can, the "ashes" from the "fire" choke it from cranking up for a couple hours when you change the power level.

Naval reactors work around it by including massive extra reactivity, meaning you have to be really freaking careful when running them. The average Homer Simpson is probably ... unprepared for their rather spirited performance. The other problem is, for the sake of argument, building a naval reactor 5 times bigger than it "needs" to be is affordable. Really, it is! But building a nuke 5 times bigger than "necessary" for a base load plant will make the brains of the bean counters in finance go prompt-critical.

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

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The trouble with nukes(true to a lesser extent of coal and oil, not true of gas turbine, not true of hydro(though some different constraints apply)) is that they do not take kindly to rapid adjustments in output power. Even when SCRAMed, they take a while to cool down, and they are sufficiently expensive(both absolutely and in terms of the ratio between capital costs + fixed costs of operation vs. variable and fuel costs) that if you aren't running them at full output except when servicing them, you are shoveling money away.

Because of that, you try to set them up so that you have nuclear capacity less than or equal to the lowest continuous(base) load on your grid, and run it at full power all the time. Then, during times of heavier usage, you fire up the cheap, fast-responding; but comparatively expensive per unit fuel gas units, or increase the flow rate at the hydro plants, or whatever.

If it came to it, you could build nukes to match your peak load; but (since you can't scale them up and down fast enough to match demand) you would have to generate continuously near peak, and then figure out something to do with the excess during off-peak. That isn't an impossible problem(if you have the geography for it, you can used pumped hydro or pressurized gas storage as relatively inefficient; but not hopeless, 'batteries', or you can try to align the demands of certain power-heavy industries toward off-peak times, or try to reduce the peak/base swing by increasing adoption of thermal storage systems in building climate control and other measures, or, worst case, just burning the excess in some huge resistors); but it isn't ideal.

Nuclear can scale as high as you wish to build it, it just can't adjust output very fast, so you either run it higher than needed in off-peak, or run it at baseload levels all the time.

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.

Re:Current score

[Goose In Orbit]

That line-up looks awfully familiar...

This is good news

[Animats]

At least someone isn't giving up.

Still, the lessons of Fukushima Daiichi are serious. There are a sizable number of reactors out there which will melt down if they lose cooling pump power. (The reactors and the pumps at Fukushima survived the earthquake and tsunami. Cooling continued until the battery bank ran down, then stopped. All the damage shown in photos is from later hydrogen explosions.) That's unacceptable. There has to be backup passive cooling.

All plants should have catalytic hydrogen recombiners to prevent hydrogen explosions. There's no excuse for not having those. That should have been fixed after TMI, decades ago.

Long term storage of used fuel rods on site has got to stop. After initial cooling, those need to go to dry cask storage.

The really tough issue is evacuation zones. Indian Point in New York has 19 million people within 50 miles.

Re:Yea, it is always nice to see ..

[Nethemas the Great]

Hey it works great in SimCity! Industry and nuclear plants should always be located on the edge of the map. You halve the pollution, halve the risk.