Technology

french power plants are getting old

Most of them still have 30+ years of life in them

can't handle oncoming increasing heatwaves

Not this again... French nuclear plants has not being stopped because they can't handle heatwaves, that's plain bullshit, but because of ecological precaution, which on top of that, seems to be useless

and regularly have major accidents

Also plain bullshit

source(german)

That explains a lot of you take your sources from anti-nuclear organizations

in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.

It's not the age of wind and solar. We're still in the age of coal (35% of electricity) and gas (22,5%). If we talk about energy at whole, it's even worse : 30% is petrol, coal 26% and gas 23%. If you think that solar and wind will stay cheap when everybody will compete for the large amounts of metal and other sources needed to build them, and when we will run out of petrol to mine and produce them all, you're lying to yourself. Nuclear in comparison require very little resource to build and to operate them.

And that's without taking into account a basic fact: we don't have enough room to build enough STEPs and we don't have enough resources to build enough batteries to run entire countries on solar and wind. Looking at costs in 2026 is just meaningless when we're actually talking about science fiction.

also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct

Another bullshit: EDF has been making billions of benefits out of nuclear every year for decades (except in 2022). They even made 10+ billions of euros of net benefits the last 3 years.

And EDF is subsidizing France, not the contrary: the State forced EDF to take a huge part of the cost of the Bouclier Tarifaire, and EDF paid billions of euros of dividends to the State as well

Don't forget they have been basically stealing the required Uranium from African Sahel countries like Niger for decades.

And France is blocking importing solar energy from Spain. Also France has to do some shenanigans in Africa to secure their uranium supply.

Sure nuclear is far better than fossil fuels in terms of global warming, but it has similar geopolitical problems to the oil industry. It makes sense to go to solar and wind, but there's a nuclear industry that's doing the same kinds of things the oil industry does to block it.

Is this the anti-nuclear talking point now?

After decades of, "we cannot do it," it's now, "we should have done it before, it's not a good idea anymore"

Fuck right off

The second best time is forty nine years ago

Turns out, even when you have to throttle them down slightly due to drought, having a large amount of available nuclear power, like France and Sweden do, means you emit an awful lot less carbon.

False,

Reactor production is throttled down to preserve the river environment, not because they cannot cool themselves. Only 18% reduction on the worst event.

Dismissing the biggest low carbon energy producer because 1970 engineers did not account for the unknown temperature extremes 20 years after the predicted lifespan of the reactor is silly.

Yeah, everyone support your local mom and pops nuclear power plant. Best if they run on 100% home grown uranium

You just have to expect it. I wear bug spray.

That would've required long term planning though and what if in the end it came out that coal isn't so bad at all, huh, what then??? /s

You should read what you link, it's the opposite. They are actually paused to not heat the river up.

They have to export because you can't just shut down a Nuclear Reactor. So they sell it for cheap to other countries. It would be more expensive for them to shut down a reactor because they produce too much. The other countrys gladly take the cheap energy. But france doesn't really make profit with this, it's just less expensive for them.