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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.
The EU is a shrine to bureaucracy. I guess after more than a thousand years of war, and you pile the weather on top of that, people are just to tired to resist.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
not difficult since the EU have already legislated maximum wattage ratings for vacuum cleaners, kettles, space heaters, boilers, immersion heaters and shower units.
Which makes not a lick of sense since you just end up using the appliance for longer to get the same fuckin' result. Carbon footprint remains the same.
These would be the same tools who mandated the use of CCFL lights which contain mercury and white phosphorous, over incandescants which contain a chemically inert gas and a chemically inert filament inside a chemically inert container.
Don't forget the low flow toilet you have to flush three times.
The main reason is cost. Nuclear power can't compete on price with neither fossil fuels nor renewable energy like solar or wind. So basically every french nuclear power station is a hole into which the consumers are shoveling money into.
You simply can't build or operate a nuclear reactor power station anywhere in the world that can compete on market prices.
For France, the ever more connected EU electricity grid means an ever increasing pressure on the energy sector to be able to compete on EU electricity prices. The long term prospects for nuclear energy to ever be able to compete on prices looks bleak, even if fossil fuel prices rises significantly.
In the meantime much more nimble energy technologies like solar and wind continues to make significant progress in cost and efficiency. And unlike nuclear power plants, they can quickly deploy the newest technology in the field.
So it really makes a lot of sense for France to lower its reliance on nuclear power and start to invest more in renewable energy resources.
Then why does France have some of the lowest energy prices in the developed EU and why are they exporting energy to Britain?
I mean it's not proof that France's electricity generation is fundamentally cheaper, or that Nuclear power has anything to do with it, but I can't find any evidence to back up your claims.
I stole this Sig
Approximately 96% of "spent" fuel rod is fissile material. The reason it's considered "spent" is mechanics of the process which make it less economic to use at that point.
In much of the world, a mix of anti-nuclear lobby and anti-proliferation lobby declare this 96% spent fuel "waste". In France, they recycle it into fuel.
It's pulled out, enriched back to normal levels and put back into the reactor. Remaining 3-4% are the generated impurities. The portion of this that is "high grade" is actually fairly easy to deal with - you just let it sit and break itself down. The more radioactive it is, the shorter half life it has and the faster it destroys itself. It's the low grade stuff that is problematic, as you can't just wait for it to break itself up, you need to actually store it somewhere. That's what most of the nuclear waste storage brouhaha is about.
Poland yells at Germany that coal is profitable any more because of all the wind energy surplus in East Germany which has to go somewhere. So I think they will not build more coal plants. If they would replace their only Soviet style plant with newer ones, then that would reduce CO2 massively.
Germany needs overcapacity because wind and solar have pretty crappy capacity factors.
Year on year Germany exports to Danemark, Luxembourg, Holland, Poland, Austria and Switzerland, and imports from France, the Czech republic and Sweden. (Yes, Germany does export more than it imports).
In 2014 Germany exported 77.1 TWh, for which it earned 4591 million dollars.
France exported 37 TWh, for which it earned 3234 million dollars.
France is getting paid 46% more per Watt because it's selling when people need it's electricity, not when it's forced to because it has overproduction.
(Sources: http://www.worldstopexports.com/electricity-exports-country/3315 and
https://www.energy-charts.de/exchange.htm)
Watch this Heartland Institute video