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

[brgj]

What about the quote from TFA:

"During the parliamentary debate, some opposition lawmakers criticized the legislation. They said it would be unrealistic to close more than 20 of 58 reactors now in operation in the next 10 years."

Doesn't this imply that they are anticipating that nuclear will in fact shrink?

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.

Why?

[brgj]

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.

Re:Why?

[Peter H.S.]

The electricity prices are still low in France thanks to government regulation, but they are scheduled to rise significantly over the next years. The prices have been artificially held low so that the French nuclear energy sector (EDF etc.) have been bleeding money and raking up debt like there is no tomorrow, while taxpayers have footed the rest of the bill.

So the French nuclear sector are also effectively subsidizing their nuclear power by making French tax payers pay the bill. Yes, they still have low electricity prices, but that is only because they pay more taxes on their wages to keep the electricity prices artificially low. This can't go on.

The move to reduce dependency on nuclear power is made because France is moving away from subsidized prices, so the consumers will pay more in line with what it actually cost to produce the energy directly instead of hiding the costs in higher taxes or forcing the utility companies to sell at too low prices.

The problem for the nuclear sector is that it is unable to compete on market prices. So if you want a more competitive and less regulated energy market in France, you have to reduce the reliance on nuclear power.

Re:Legislate 50% less consumption? Good fucking lu

[ihtoit]

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.

Re:Legislate 50% less consumption? Good fucking lu

[Irate Engineer]

A Republican says hate. HATE! Hate! Hate says the Republican. HATE! YOU REPUBLICANS!!

Re:Legislate 50% less consumption? Good fucking lu

[fustakrakich]

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.

Re:Legislate 50% less consumption? Good fucking lu

[rtb61]

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.

Re:What are they going to replace with?

[quenda]

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.

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:Legislate 50% less consumption? Good fucking lu

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:he needs a "better" body, by your standards

[FranTaylor]

your entire post is crap

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.