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

We need to consume less and better

[aglider]

Less energy and more efficient usage is the key to real environmentally savvy policies.
Renewables and lower prices can lead to higher energy use.

And maybe we'd be less people on the planet. But this is another story.

Re:We need to consume less and better

[phantomfive]

Less energy and more efficient usage is the key to real environmentally savvy policies. Renewables and lower prices can lead to higher energy use.

Higher energy use is by itself a good thing. If we had enough cheap energy, we could transmute lead into gold as much as we wanted. The more energy you have the more cool things you can make happen.

The only problem is when energy production damages the environment. That is what we want to avoid, but don't get confused that the goal is less energy use.

Re:Macron is a “threat to our democracy&rdqu

[ShanghaiBill]

Quite literally: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/27...

Refusing to cave in to the demands of a mob is not a threat to democracy.

It is more accurate to say the mob is the threat. The protesters should take their demands to the voters, rather than rioting in the streets.

Re:France goes dark

[Solandri]

Cognitivie bias develops because a person's experience detects a pattern of things happening. It is a good type of bias, which helps us stay alive because it's correct more often than it's not. There is nothing wrong with going with your gut instincts when you have nothing else to go on.

The problem is sticking to your gut instincts when faced with contradictory evidence.

Re:France goes dark

[Kokuyo]

Important factor being "when you have nothing else to go on" not "in the face of overwhelming data and science" :).

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?

[dunkelfalke]

Mostly because, unlike these fast breeders you are talking about, wind and solar power plants actually do exist in real life.

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

[c6gunner]

It's true; we just need to kill off enough of the world's population, and move the remaining fraction to places where hydro power is plentiful. Problem solved!

Re:France goes dark

[mcvos]

You don't have to conquer Algeria to invest in solar power there. I think exporting solar power to Europe would be an excellent industry for North-African countries.

But France still has plenty of rooftops that haven't yet been covered with solar panels, and France has plenty of coastline for wind turbines.

All in all, this plan sounds pretty much perfect: replace coal as soon as possible, keep nuclear around for now but see if you can replace it in the future. Whether that's feasible by 2033 remains to be seen, but setting it as a goal requires a lot of investment in solar and wind, and that's definitely good.