France has one of the cheapest electricity price in Europe thanks to nuclear plants. The reactors were checked if they respect to new regulations from the post-Fukushima era.
> The discovery of widespread carbon segregation problems in critical nuclear plant components has crippled the French power industry—20 of the country’s 58 reactors are currently offline and under heavy scrutiny. France’s nuclear safety chairman said more anomalies “will likely be found,” as the extent of the contagion is still being uncovered.
> Generally the prices in France are kept low, because the tax payer pays for the expensive nuclear industry monopoly.
And also because the decommissioning costs are not factored in at all. Currently EDF is pushing to extend the operating life of old reactors to 60 years, and to postpone their decommissioning to 2100. They want to just leave them there in the meanwhile. The trouble is that they simply don't know how to do the decommissioning, and it proves incredibly more expensive than thought. The fund that was set up to pay for it is undersized by a large factor.
Right. They will see that it is much more expensive than the tiny fund they have prepared for it. Germany, with way less nuclear power plants, has more money in its decommissioning fund than France.
Generally: The political system in France makes it impossible to demand market prices for electricity. It's all centralized and monopolistic. EDF is the large state owned electricity producer. It has around 80% market share.
Imagine now a steep electricity price rise. This would be highly unpopular and the french president would not be re-elected.
Incredibly strict safety regulations are being applied to nuclear plants, because the public is a lot more worried about that. But someone who falls off a ladder installing a solar panel can die just as dead as someone who gets exposed to radiation, and megawatt for megawatt there are a lot more of the former than the latter.
Even without stats to back it up, I'd say that this sounds correct. I love solar, but there are so many instances like this in society. For example, the war against terror (in the US and I guess various other western countries). You're far more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist, than a terrorist who happens to come from an Islamic religion. Yet the spending on this war against terror is almost limitless.
Imagine if 'TWAT' had been ignored, and the same money had been spent on obesity, or poverty. In fact, the US could have given all 45 million Americans, who live below the poverty line, 20k each.
Actually, put that way, it makes 'TWAT' pretty cheap, especially when compared to the GFC.
If someone falls off a ladder, life goes on for the rest of us.
If nuclear power plants have an accident like in Fukushima. then tens of thousands have lost their home for decades or forever and ten thousand workers will fight for three decades to clean up the mess under the worst possible circumstances with costs going into the hundred billion dollars.
In middle Europe easily a few million people can be affected.
> If nuclear power plants have an accident like in Fukushima. then tens of thousands have lost their home for decades or forever and ten thousand workers will fight for three decades to clean up the mess under the worst possible circumstances with costs going into the hundred billion dollars.
Sure. But again, compare the area of land rendered uninhabitable - and the homes and lives lost - per megawatt generated. If you consider "renewables" as a whole then the area rendered uninhabitable by hydroelectric dams - even assuming they function perfectly - is much larger than for nuclear disasters. If you consider solar plus actually existing battery technology then you need to talk about the area blighted by rare earth mining etc. (Yes uranium mining is also pretty harmful, but again we need to talk about impact per megawatt). If you're considering solar on its own then you're never going to be able to provide reliable baseline power.
Nobody builds one where I live. But there are several nuclear power plants. But most of them are now history. They are not in some remote areas, but near populated areas with millions of people.
> If you're considering solar on its own then you're never going to be able to provide reliable baseline power.
Why would I 'consider solar on its own' as baseline power? These arguments were brought up twenty years ago and were boring then. Even though there are solar power plants which store heat.
The biggest achievement of the Energiewende is that it has broken up the big electricity monopolies of the nuclear- and fossil-based electricity companies. It has enabled two decades of exciting research into new technologies and enabled distributed energy production by much smaller players. It's a paradigm shift like it was from few Mainframe computers to the distributed nature of the modern Internet.
> Nobody builds one where I live. But there are several nuclear power plants. But most of them are now history. They are not in some remote areas, but near populated areas with millions of people.
This is a failure of planning (or possibly of international diplomacy in the case of e.g. Japan). In terms of the engineering constraints, nuclear plants are a lot easier to build far away from people than any of the alternatives: they don't have to be built on particular parts of rivers, or in a sunny or windy area, or a gas pipeline or an endless supply of mile-long coal trains. (They probably do have to be on some kind of rail line just because fuel transport is excessively regulated).
> Why would I 'consider solar on its own' as baseline power? These arguments were brought up twenty years ago and were boring then.
It may be boring, but the issues are still real. Baseline power is a requirement, and the only proven ways to provide it are carbon-based, hydro, or nuclear.
> Even though there are solar power plants which store heat.
There was only ever one in full-scale production, and it's now closed, AIUI. There are various experimental efforts.
You need to revisit your facts. Solar plants with storage are currently in operation [1] [2]. They have been producing 370GWh per year. This is tiny compared to a mid-sized nuclear power plant, but the technology is there and is easy to scale up without hazards.
You will agree then that a 10kW residential solar installation on a roof is "experimental" and "not in full-scale production".
What about the 1 million residential solar installations done in 2016? Is that "experimental"? When you add 20 100MW plants, you reach the scale of a nuclear plant. That is precisely the beauty of solar. That it can grow incrementally without high capital costs (unlike borrowing $4bn and a huge insurance at once with nuclear).
Still carbon-based. Burning x tonnes of hydrocarbons is still burning x tonnes of hydrocarbons even if the carbon was only recently captured from the atmosphere - it's basically no different from burning coal and running a sequestration process in parallel. Carbon is fungible.
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21711087-electricit-d...