Slashdot Mirror
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.
Note that Nuclear is not going to shrink, the idea is just that most new capacity will be non nuclear.
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.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Also note that reducing domestic consumption by 50% means that France can sell more electricity with the same installed capacity. It's all about GDP.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Nuclear power is one of the most efficient sources of energy that we use, what is the reason for lowering the dependency on it if the plants are properly maintained? What kind of alternative energy source are they planning on relying on? These are legitimate questions, I'm sincerely confused about this.
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.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
So we are reaching a point where fossil fuels are becoming harder to harvest, climate change is becoming more evident, and people are using more electricity than ever. Instead of researching safer nuclear, which would provide us enough energy to last us millennia even with increasing usage, they are simply turning their backs on the idea, and reaching for what? Solar? Windfarms? I'm as hardcore left as one can get, I support alternative energy, and whatnot, and yet I feel like I'm one of the few rational ones that look at things like verifiable science, statistics, and research to direct my views rather than blind ideology and common opinion.
From what I've read, the only viable alternative that is right now available that can fulfill our needs is primarily nuclear with other alternatives merely supplementing those needs. If I'm wrong I'd like to see some evidence, preferably from less biased sources.
A Republican says hate. HATE! Hate! Hate says the Republican. HATE! YOU REPUBLICANS!!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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!”
There are also things like design efficiency in the rest of the unit as well as in the electric motor itself. How much energy the product uses versus how much of that energy actual is expressed in it's useful function. Placing limits on energy consumption forces better design to make better use of that energy limit, why, because FUCKING GREED. Lazy greedy fuckers will just up the engine energy consumption to make up for poor design but hey its FUCKING CHEAPER that way. Also up the warranty requirements to substantially reduce energy used to produce goods that fail shortly after the 90 fucking day warranty. How about mandated 10 YEAR warranties, a decade of product reliability, it will certainly cost more but the energy used to replace a product 40 fucking times versus one product that lasts a decade will be substantially reduced. Why does it have to be legislated because of psychopathic corporate greed.
So how much energy would be saved with mandated decade long warranties on all applicable products. Boy could you imagine the complaints from psychopathic corporations who would demand the right to produce crap products that would be replaced 40 fucking times in that decade long time period. You want a real look at psychopathic planet destroying greed, look no further than a 90 fucking day warranty.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
If a lot of people switched to central heating the country could probably be more energetically efficient.
Why central? Retro-fitting to old buildings would be unnecessarily expensive. (except perhaps single-storey homes, but they are not common.)
Just replace the electric radiators with split-system reverse-cycle air-conditioners. Modern systems can use a quarter the energy, or less.
And the next time a summer heatwave hits, the French won't be dying en-masse from heat exhaustion.
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?
I live in Australia, we have had drought for many years at one stage prompting our government to change all the water saving ratings making all the best devices 1 star to promote even further water reduction, and restricting water usage to 120L /person /day. We have water free chemical urinals, water saving devices on all faucets and the local council even reduced the mains water pressure.
I have never had to flush the ceramic throne more than once.
Get yourself a better toilet.
your entire post is crap
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.
In Europe, central heating means that you have radiators in every room or underfloor heating or wall heating. And you can regulate it in every room. Central heating means that you have one energy source in the building heating the water for these radiators. Nowadays these systems work with lower temperatures (e.g., 40 C) which is quite efficient. In addition in larger buildings central heating is installed separately in every apartment.
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.
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.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!