France To Close Four Coal-Fired Power Plants By 2022, 14 Nuclear Reactors By 2035 (cleantechnica.com)

Socguy shares a report from CleanTechnica: French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech on Tuesday in which he announced a raft of new energy policies, including a promise to close the country's remaining four coal-fired power plants by 2022 and 14 of the country's 900 MW first-generation nuclear reactors by 2035. "The generation capacity will be replaced with wind and solar," adds Slashdot reader Socguy. The closure of the 14 nuclear reactors will reduce nuclear's contribution to the energy mix from its current level of 75% to 50% by 2035.

"I would have liked to be able to do it as early as 2025, as provided for by the Energy Transition Law," Macron added, "but it turned out, after pragmatic expertise, that this figure brandished as a political totem was in fact unattainable. We therefore decided to maintain this 50% cap, but by postponing the deadline to 2035."

Comments

Re:France goes dark

[Tuidjy]

Oh, but I do have something to go on. I speak both French and Bullshit fluently, and thus am able to translate what Macron said. Yes, from the English summary, why do you ask?

" would have liked to be able to do it as early as 2025, as provided for by the Energy Transition Law," Macron added, "but it turned out, after pragmatic expertise, that this figure brandished as a political totem was in fact unattainable. We therefore decided to maintain this 50% cap, but by postponing the deadline to 2035."

My translation:

We will close the coal plants. We will start building wind and solar, realize that it is not enough to cover the coal plants' output, and quietly 'reschedule' the closing of any nuclear plants. The next government will probably revoke the totally random 50% cap, continue closing old reactors, and replacing them with newer, safer, more powerful ones, as we have been doing for ages.

But fear not! I am green, I am looking to the future, I am relevant!

Vive la France!

Why are wind and solar better?

[jez9999]

Could someone explain to me why wind and solar are better than *MODERN* nuclear plants, particularly fast breeder reactors, that output very little waste and are relatively safe? Nuclear plants don't vary with the sun and wind and so have no need for expensive/complex energy storage solutions to go along with them. Is the replacement of nuclear purely down to the green lobby not liking the word "nuclear" or is there any justification that has a scientific basis?

Re:Why are wind and solar better?

[Freischutz]

Could someone explain to me why wind and solar are better than *MODERN* nuclear plants, particularly fast breeder reactors, that output very little waste and are relatively safe? Nuclear plants don't vary with the sun and wind and so have no need for expensive/complex energy storage solutions to go along with them. Is the replacement of nuclear purely down to the green lobby not liking the word "nuclear" or is there any justification that has a scientific basis?

Because renewables are cheaper. From what I've seen there also seem to be reliability issues with these breeder reactors and 'reliability issues' and 'nuclear' in the same sentence tend to be a downer when trying to sell nuclear to the public. On top of that, and according to the International Panel on Fissile Materials: "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialise them have been steadily cut back in most countries". Thus a number of countries have abandoned breeder reactor development programs, In Europe this is because renewables are simply cheaper and easier to develop, manage and operate. For those wanting to know more here is an article from the "Bulletin of the Nuclear Scientists":

https://www.princeton.edu/sgs/...

The bit at the end kind of sums sodium reactors up: "In 1956, U.S. Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover summarized his experience with a sodium cooled reactor that powered early U.S. nucear usbarines by saying that such reactors are "expensive to build, complex to operate, succeptible to prologned shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time conusming to repair." More than 50 years later , this summary remains apt.

Re:France goes dark

[Freischutz]

Which means i have heard of this declaration elsewhere and in other contexts. In short, nobody in the energy sector takes it seriously. France in not Germany and their administration is a more efficient counterweight in face of the public opinion. And nobody there wants to end up like Germany in regard to energy.

One part of the hydroelectric power being in fact nuke electricity pumped in reversible hydro plants.

You seem to be taking a swipe at Germany and their renewables policy in favour of your preference for nuclear. However, it does not in any way add to your argument that renewables are crap and nuclear is king to say that this water is being pumped into the reservoir by nuclear energy because pumped hydro is just another way of saying 'energy storage'. It is completely irrelevant to the pumped hydro energy storage facility operator whether the energy for pumping is excess energy from nuclear plants or excess energy from renewables since the whole point of building the pumped hydro facility in the first place was to store excess energy for later use regardless of where it comes from. Fun fact: Germany has similar pumped hydro facilities it uses to store excess energy from wind and solar plants.