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submitted 2 days ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world

Summary

France’s Flamanville 3 nuclear reactor, its most powerful at 1,600 MW, was connected to the grid on December 21 after 17 years of construction plagued by delays and budget overruns.

The European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), designed to boost nuclear energy post-Chernobyl, is 12 years behind schedule and cost €13.2 billion, quadruple initial estimates.

President Macron hailed the launch as a key step for low-carbon energy and energy security.

Nuclear power, which supplies 60% of France’s electricity, is central to Macron’s plan for a “nuclear renaissance.”

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[-] oce@jlai.lu 131 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

For additional context, one of the reason for the delay and cost increase was the absurdly complex design due to French and German companies trying to collaborate on a new design as Germany was turning anti-nuclear, which culminated with Germany deciding to stop nuclear energy after the Fukushima Daiichi event.
Another big reason is the knowledge loss due to almost one generation without any reactor built in between.

[-] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 41 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Now do Georgia's Vogtle reactors 3 and 4, which came in at 34 billion for 2 x 1200mw plants, 21 billion over the original 14 billion estimate, and took over 14 years to build, 8 years behind schedule.

Im glad these powerplants finally got built. They will help, but nuclear is just not reasonable anymore. Its a slow, expensive tech, especially when we are making such leaps and bonds with solar/battery.

[-] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It's slow expensive tech because we don't invest in it.

Every technology is slow and expensive when you have nearly an entire generational gap in knowledge and experience.

You'll know that I'm not saying solar and wind are not cheaper, they all exist in a different capacity and fill in the gaps they best fit.

[-] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

We have invested decades and billions into reactor tech. The DOE just announced another 900 million for SMR, on top of previous billion dollar grants. So far, every SMR company has failed to make any progress. The DOE even certified one for use and it still can't get it done.

Meanwhile, solar/battery research is getting funding from tons of sources, government and corporate, and exploding forward in every direction. Solar arrays are being deployed all over the world at insane rates, propelled mostly by just how inexpensive, safe, effective and easy it is to deploy. Its because of solar/battery that we may even hit some of the 2030 "pie in the sky" climates goals that were set across the world.

Its pretty clear which of the two techs we should be spending time on.

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[-] oce@jlai.lu 37 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Even if wind and solar make huge progress, they will likely never be as efficient regarding raw materials efficiency and land use. Land use is the main contributor to biodiversity loss.

I don't think peremptory opinions about technologies are going to help. We should use what ever technology is the most reasonable and sustainable for each specific location.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

There is no particular reason solar "needs" to use any new land at all, given that we can just put it on the roofs we already have.

And the fact that we do dedicate land to it instead of only doing rooftop just goes to show that land use isn't anywhere near as important a problem as you insinuate.

Your comment is pure FUD.

[-] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 49 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Total land used for all power to be supplied by solar would be a hilariously tiny percentage of land, so this just reads like a solar version of "its killing birds" to me.

Agrivoltaics also side steps this non issue, as interlacing solar panels into farm land increases yields for many crops while making efficent use of space that's already spoiled any biodiversity. Can you do that with a nuclear reactor?

[-] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago

Nuclear could take over existing coal plants which would allow use of otherwise unusable land that's been polluted by coal. It would require regulatory changes though, as the coal plant is already irradiated beyond allowed levels for nuclear.

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[-] Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Something to note about this chart is that ground-mount silicon solar PV isn't considered for sharing land use with activities such as farming in comparison to how onshore wind is (i.e. agrivoltaics).

NREL in the US estimates that there are currently ~10.1 GW of agrivoltaics projects spread across ~62,400 acres (or ~7 m^2 / MW).

Even this being said, I think brownfield or existing structures for new PV is the way of the future for solar PV. There is so much real estate that could be used and has the potential to offset grid demand growth while providing greater reliability for consumers. You'll need the big players to help with industrial loads, but even then, the growth of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) has the potential to balance loads at the same scale as the big players for the prosumer market.

Edit: I'll also make mention of floatovoltaics, or the installation of solar PV on bodies of water, either natural or artificial. This is a burgeoning side of the industry, but this is another area that could present net zero or even negative land use per unit of energy.

[-] Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

Something to note about your link to solar fences is that one of the cons mentioned is that panels can't produce power for half of the day because they'll be facing away from the sun.

Bifacial panels exist and can collect energy from both faces of the module. We in the utility-scale space use these all the time. You'd want these over monofacial panels for fence applications

Yes. Bifacial seems like the obvious choice. And the fence should be NS orientation not EW.

[-] Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

If you're trying to maximize energy collection then yes you'll want to face the fence rows NS.

But there are also some benefits for making use of vertical bifacial panels oriented EW. You get a bimodal energy plot: one in the morning and one in the evening when the sun's direct rays shine near horizontal (something NS panels can't collect).

I'd actually be interested in reading the literature on mixing these types of panel orientations to see what the resulting production yields would look like, and if stakeholders like utilities would find any benefit in them to help better manage grid demand in those peripheral times of the day.

[-] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago

I'd actually be interested in reading the literature on mixing these types of panel orientations to see what the resulting production yields would look like.

Solar fencing produces 3% more yield and 30% more revenue than rooftop.

[-] Saleh@feddit.org 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This is a poor argument. You just did what you explicitly should not do with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results.

The ISO 14044 specifically requires life cycle assessment to include all relevant impact categories. In particular in comparative analysis it is crucial to not single out any one category, but look at the impact on the endpoints, e.g. ecosystems or human health.

https://www.h2.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Einrichtungen/Hochschulbibliothek/Downloaddateien/DIN_EN_ISO_14044.pdf

See page 37 onwards.

Here is the full LCA study, that you drew only one category from

https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20March%202022.pdf

Look at the Endpoint indicators, like "Lifecycle impact on ecosystems, per MWh, in pointes", "Life cycle impacts on ecosystems, no climate change,per MWh, in pointes", "Life cycle impacts on human health,per MWh, in pointes" etc.

Nuclear power does fare well in these categories, but often only marginally different to Wind Power and Solar Power. It certainly does not offset the cost difference, when you also have to include the opportunity costs of running coal or gas plants longer.

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[-] Rhaedas@fedia.io 25 points 2 days ago

with Germany deciding to stop nuclear energy after the Fukushima Daiichi event.

Hey, you don't know where the next tsunami will happen. Have to be proactive.

The real irony being that all Japanese reactors shut down due to the quake as designed, and the tsunami wouldn't have been a factor had money not been saved by shortcutting backup generator protection from flooding in a FLOOD ZONE.

[-] Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 21 hours ago

Bro, THE FUCKING BACKUP DIESEL GENERATORS FOR THE PLANT WERE BELOW SEA LEVEL.

Make it make sense. If those generators had been above sea level, well probably above 100-year tsunami levels, we likely would not have seen the plant catastrophically fail.

[-] Rhaedas@fedia.io 3 points 21 hours ago

That was part of the problem. Built where it was cheaper, ignoring literal ancient markers saying not to live there because of the past. But they would have still not failed, had they been designed for the potential of being submerged. Again, they were not because that would cost more for a long range risk. It all falls into bad planning and profit, not in any way because it was a nuclear plant.

[-] zqps@sh.itjust.works 1 points 17 hours ago

bad planning and profit are of course words never uttered in connection with German infrastructure projects.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

had money not been saved

This just serves as a lesson to the "failsafe technology" crowd: That also involves failsafe humans. Those, to the best of my knowledge, have yet to be invented.

Oh and relatedly some German reactor ran for decades without a backup power generator. It was there, present, physically, that is, but noone bothered to check whether it actually worked. Merkel justified her flip-flop on the nuclear exit (shortly before Fukushima, she delayed the exit that SPD+Greens had decided on) by saying, more or less, "If the Japanese can't do it we can't do it either" but if she had been paying attention, it should've been clear that we couldn't do it. That became clear when the first SPD+Green coalition moved responisibity for nuclear safety from the ministry for economy to that for the environment, run by a Green, and they made a breakfast out of all that shoddy work that the operators had done. Oh the containment vessel is riveted... figures they put the rivets in the wrong way. Shut it down, have fun re-doing every single one of them before starting it up again.

Thus, my conclusion: The only people you can trust to run nuclear reactors safely are people who don't want nuclear reactors to exist in the first place.

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this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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