France To Reduce Reliance On Nuclear Power

AmiMoJo writes: French lawmakers have approved a bill to reduce the country's reliance on nuclear power from 75% to 50% by 2025. The policy was one of President Francois Hollande's campaign pledges. The legislation also includes a target of reducing the country's greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030, compared to the level in 1990. The new law aims to eventually halve France's energy consumption by 2050 from the 2012 level. The ambitious goal came in the lead-up to the COP 21 climate change conference in Paris later this year. France will chair the meeting.

Comments

Not downsizing nuclear

[manu0601]

Note that Nuclear is not going to shrink, the idea is just that most new capacity will be non nuclear.

Re:Not downsizing nuclear

[AmiMoJo]

TFA says that they are considering closing 20 of 53 reactors by 2025. They are very much shrinking it.

France is a Major Exporter of Electricity

[Irate Engineer]

France is one of the world's biggest energy exporters, selling electricity to most of Western Europe. They aren't going to build too many more nuclear plants, but they sure as hell aren't going to be tearing down the ones the have already. They are going to run them as hard as they can as they add capacity with wind, solar, and hydro.

Yes, nuclear will be a smaller fraction of the portfolio, but total nuclear generation isn't going away any time soon. The wording of Hollande's "promise" was crafted to sound good to the anti-nuke crowd, but the folks in the power sector who can actually do fractional arithmetic know what the actual intent is.

Re:cue the nuclear fanbois

[Areyoukiddingme]

The peer reviewed science shows that Nuclear power provides no net energetic return and is not viable in its current form.

From your own link:

The energy payback time of the currently operating nuclear energy systems, measured over the full cradle-to-grave period, is about 9 full-load years at the current world average uranium ore grade. The average operating lifetime in 2011 of the world operating nuclear fleet was about 21 full-load years.

So what are you on about?

Re:What are they going to replace with?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

You should do that. Because 1kJ of of electricity is *not* the same as 1kJ of heat. A heat pump, pumps heat from outside into the house and for 1kJ of electricity you can easily pump 4kJ of heat from outside cold to inside hot giving a total of 5kJ of heat. ie 5x better.

So you really should study your basic thermodynamics and entropy because you don't know it. You want to look at a carnot efficiency and heat engines/refrigeration.