Comment by Moldoteck
5 hours ago
"France is part of the EU power grid and flexibility comes from that not from nuclear power plants." - blatant lie. You can see in generation data they are flexing a lot in the summer. https://www.services-rte.com/en/view-data-published-by-rte/g...
"And their power plants were in trouble in the last hot summer" - blatant lie. Cooling was fine, it's env protection law to avoid damaging the fauna(read - to not boil fish). Yet, it affects about 0.02% of annual generation and valid almost exclusively to NPP without cooling towers. Yet in those exact periods EDF was net exporting about 14GW to neighbors, again, data is public. French nukes can handle ppl's AC's just well, probably EDF even hopes for that to modulate their npp less and get more $
Why people always spread such nonsense without even checking the facts? Like https://www.vie-publique.fr/files/rapport/pdf/288726.pdf
"And didn’t we learn from the internet that centralization is a bad thing? Nuclear power plants are exactly that." France has a combination of centralized and decentralized power - npp's are distributed around the country but each can generate a lot of power. Even more distribution and you start paying a ton for transmission lines and maintenance. That's the reason Germany started subsidizing them from this year, with about 6bn/y. Full decentralization is not a feature and you still can't achieve it since transmission system is centralized, prime example being recent cascade blackout in Spain.
"Imagine a grid where every consumer is also a producer who can satisfy their energy needs at least partially for themselves even without the grid. Try to blackout that." - that'll mean having to need a fully parallel grid for firming. Besides, a lot of home solar are grid followers - if there's a blackout, it'll shut down too unless you have a special invertor+bess which many dont have (yet)
"And that was before drone wars were a thing." - a drone would do nothing to a NPP. Even an airplane impact can be tolerated depending how new is the NPP.
> Cooling was fine, it's env protection law to avoid damaging the fauna(read - to not boil fish)
You do understand what the point of environmental protection is?
If you kill the flora and fauna you are not environment friendly.
Yes, i understand it very well
The problem is you framed it as
1- not being able to cool reactors physically, which is false
2- being a major deal, when it affects only 0.2% of generation per year, during a period when EDF is net exporting about 14GW to the neighbors
3- being an unfixable issue, which is again false. The problem exista for reactors without cooling towers. EDF can fix it by building them. But there's no financial incentive here. Where would EDF sell extra power when export is already maximized in that same timeframe and market prices in summer are low?