Slashdot Mirror
France's Oldest Nuclear Plant To Close This Year (phys.org)
mdsolar writes: France is to close down its oldest nuclear power plant, at the center of a row with neighboring Germany and Switzerland, by the end of this year, a green minister said Sunday. "The timeline is one the president has repeated to me several times, it's 2016," said Emmanuelle Cosse, who was named to President Francois Hollande's cabinet last month, referring to the Fessenheim plant. Cosse was speaking to French media after a row sparked Friday when Germany demanded that France close down Fessenheim following reports that a 2014 incident there was worse than earlier portrayed. France's Nuclear Safety Agency said that safety at the plant was "overall satisfactory" but that the government's energy policy "could lead to different choices" regarding the facility, which is near the German and Swiss borders. It said there was "no need" to shut the plant from a nuclear safety point of view. France has promised to cut reliance on nuclear energy from more than 75 percent to 50 percent by shutting 24 reactors by 2025, while stepping up reliance on renewable energy.
I hope they don't replace it with 50 km^2 of solar panels...
Germany and France arguing... what could possibly go wrong? It's not like there's any historical precedent or anything... where, you know, Germany was in the wrong in the past...
hey at least there is no veil, the agenda is right out there in the open for you to add grains of salt to at your own discretion. far preferable and infinitely more honorable than 1000 anonymous and on the payroll sock puppets spreading hatchet jobs.
posting a/c for the enjoyable sniff of irony
Better titles "France's power becomes less reliable, more expensive", " France now so ruled by the rest of Europe it can't even stand up to Switzerland", and "French president to lose next election, nuclear power plants to be brought back online".
https://www.google.de/maps/@47.9078423,7.5711826,14.75z
Distance from Germany is measured rather in meter than kilometer. With prevailing winds from the west.
About the pollution: Currently none that is made public by French authorities. What became public, however, is that a bit ago, they kept under all blankets that the reactor was out of control (control rod control and sensors were down due to water entering the elctronics) and a manual emergency shutdown with borate flooding had to be performed.
It's debatable if it was technically "out of control" as long as they were able to do an emergency shutdown, but it's gross negliance and irresponsible if an emergency shutdown is NOT reported as an incident.
Add this to the bad overall situation after 40 years of operation, microscopic fractures in the reactor vessel and the plant having more "incidents" than 3 year old after a soda spree....
This is a dirty bomb waiting to happen.
bickerdyke
Emmanuelle Cosse wants Fessenheim to be closed. That's for sure.
But she is not in charge of Energy or Industrial department. She's just in charge of the Housing department
15 Anti-nuke FUD submissions this week alone.
Do you not have a job or something?
France's oldest nuclear plant is Brennilis. It ran from 1967 to 1985. It is still not fully decommissioned, this work being more complex and more expensive than foreseen...
And there is also Superphénix, running from 1986 to 1996 and far more complex to dismantle, because of plutonium and sodium.
It will be us in Schleswig-Holstein (North Germany), as we reached 100% renewable (for electricity) last year. And our friends in the north. Denmark are able to reach the same goal in a matter of years. By 2025 we will reach 300% of the electric energy production, which in fact would at least based on calculations cover all the primary energy used in Schleswig-Holstein.
Fessenheim is an old plant which had many accidents in recent years. For example they had to introduce large quantities of Bohr into the reactor cooling to inhibit chain reaction because they were unable to insert the regulator rods. Yes I know Bohr is also used during regular operation. However, in much lower quantities. They also neglected to report all details which would have been necessary for Germany to prepare in case of an accident. Fessenheim is directly at the border to Germany.
To be precise there is a non-zero distance between that reactor and germany, as the reactor isn't built at the shores of the rhine itself, but inside a channel built parralel to the rhine. There is an island around 1km wide between the reactor and germany. But it won't help all the people living in those german cities Speyer (with its great cathedral) Mannheim Mainz Koblenz Bonn (which was the german capital for a long time and now there are still lots of ministries and governmental employees) Cologne (which has over one million residents) Düsseldorf and Duisburg... They all live downstream and will get the radiating shit from fessenheim if there is a leak. Its at least 2 million germans directly affected.
NHK produced a great docu-drama called "88 Hours", about the Fukushima disaster. It's quite eye opening because it gives you a real sense of the challenges that the people on the ground faced, with a lack of power and being unable to monitor what was happening in the reactors due to equipment failure.
To this day, no one knows why reactor 2's containment vessel didn't explode. If it had done they would likely have lost half of eastern Japan, maybe more. What caused the pressure to suddenly drop is still unknown.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So France subsidies nuclear power and meanwhile purchases electricity from Germany?
France made a clear choice decades ago, has stuck with it, enjoys low costs as a result of standardization, and is not about to change. France has no oil and little coal, so the French Greens have never received that fountain of money from the fossil fuel lobby that their counterparts in so many other countries benefit from.
That "reduce nuclear power to 50%" campaign plank of Hollande's will be forgotten about as soon as Le Pen takes office.
So France subsidies nuclear power and meanwhile purchases electricity from Germany?
Not quite. Sometimes France imports from Germany, sometimes it exports. At the moment (14:00 CET, 7/3/2016) France is exporting around 2GW to Germany.
Also, not all French electricity is nuclear, at this moment it's 73% nuke, 13% hydro, 8% gas and 3% coal.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
It will be us in Schleswig-Holstein (North Germany), as we reached 100% renewable (for electricity) last year. And our friends in the north. Denmark are able to reach the same goal in a matter of years. By 2025 we will reach 300% of the electric energy production, which in fact would at least based on calculations cover all the primary energy used in Schleswig-Holstein.
Great, why don't you disconnect from the rest of the grid and use only renewables? Of maybe did you depend on coal plants to make your 'renewables' feasible?
Germany marched on Paris in WW I, you insensitive clod.
It's why they constructed the Maginot Line in the 1930's: "Never Again".
Renewables are much much less expensive than nuclear power. That is why France is ending plans to replace it's fleet and opting for a phase out. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
That was a perfect /. submission. An AI that could pass the Turning Test by being indistinguishable from a jingoistic blabber mouth.
Turns out, 100% renewable energy is cheaper for France. https://100.org/100-goes-globa...
Turns out switching to 100% renewable energy is cheaper for France. https://100.org/100-goes-globa...
>France has promised to cut reliance on nuclear energy from more than 75 percent to 50 percent by shutting 24 reactors by 2025, while stepping up reliance on renewable energy.
By the standard definition of the word, nuclear power is renewable power. So France is in fact not stepping up reliance on renewable energy, but rather spending a ton of cash to shift from one form of it to another (a more dangerous version if you compare death tolls--nuclear power is the winner by far!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_proposed_as_renewable_energy
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Of course, mdsolar would disagree, but that's because he's slashdot's laughable idiot poster and we should all ignore him. You know you're doing bad when an AC beats you at logic, mdsolar.
Before we need to remix the solar core, we have another issue, the Sun will grow in luminosity until the water vapor feedback boils the oceans in about 2 billion years. So, a bit of shade or an orbit shift back into the habitable zone would be the first thing to work on. The Kuiper belt likely has enough angular momentum to achieve the orbit shift. But adjusting planetary resonances might make it a big job. We need to consider conservation of angular momentum in the sense of not wasting the resource in addition to the usual meaning.
Dumbest thing about that movie, aside from Jane Fonda, is the fact that the antipode for San Onofre is in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'm a bit confused by the article...are they saying there is a row of multiple nuclear facilities between France, Germany and Switzerland...and one of them is unsafe and to be shut down?
Just seems an awkward way to say that....?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The plant is about 500m from the border. The border fence of the plant pretty much IS the border.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Bullshit. Fessenheim is much close to Switzerland than to Strassbourg. I was in Strassbourg yesterday, in Basel today and I live 7 km from Fessenheim.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I think they meant "row" as in "noisy acrimonious quarrel" as opposed to "a number of people or things in a more or less straight line".
Interesting...I've never heard of row used in that manner.
I know you can row a boat, and have things lined up in a row.....but never heard "row" as a quarrel?!?
Is this some kind of new slang maybe?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Is this some kind of new slang maybe?
No, not new, and not really slang, but more commonly used in the UK than US. Pronounced to rhyme with "ow" (as in, "that hurts!"). Meaning "noisy dispute or quarrel."
Why should we do that? This would disconnect this part form the rest of Europe. We would not be able to store energy in Scandinavia. Maybe you should lookup the concept of a grid and why we do not want to isolate small areas. This is especially true for renewable energy which production varies over the year and day. Therefore, they building a gas engine powered plant in Kiel in combination with a electrode heating unit for the district heating. The latter is used when we have an electricity surplus which often happens in winter and provide additional electricity when there is not enough wind. Anyway, you most likely do not case about that, because you want nuclear plants. They are the only solution. Amen.
As the industry rots away, there just aren't positive stories around. Military propulsion advances and may soon solve another logistics problem extending nuclear power to aviation. http://science.slashdot.org/st... But the news on civilian power generation is all bad.
Guess the SOX ain't happening.
It was a rhetorical question, obviously, because we all know renewables need conventional sources to counter their transmittance. I fully understand the need for the integrated grid, but it seems that the role of the grid and the conventional sources gets overlooked when folks start cheering about having 100% renewable power. In fact, they were using power from non-renewable sources on a regular basis. Nuclear has nothing at all to do with that point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is renewable energy, man...
This is the problem with government run energy. An accident can embarrass the politicians so there will be a cover up.
Almost half the superfund sites in the US are government caused. Typically by the military. They were dumping all kinds of toxic stuff on the ground for decades and never told a soul because they were the government, they weren't accountable to anyone but their superiors that told them to do it.
Ok, thanks..interesting.
Perhaps we need to have a UK to US translation service on Slashdot, when UK'ers or other foreigners post stories.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And the private sector is no better. After all an accident will send the share price down and the shareholders won't like that. Do you think that if BP could have gotten away with not reporting the oil spill in the gulf they would not have tried? They certainly tried to downplay the extent of it for as long as possible.
Many of the superfund sites in the US that are related to nuclear energy are from the government because they were created at a time when the government was the only real player in nuclear energy.
What about that nuclear power plant upstream of New York that's currently leaking tons of contaminated water? Isn't that privately run?
bickerdyke
According to dictionary.com, Origin 1740-50; when Washington was a boy.
It was actually "some kind of new slang" in late 18th century, if the OED is to be believed. Meaning that today, it shouldn't surprise you anymore.
Ezekiel 23:20