720
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.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Nuclear plants are mostly concrete and steel.

???

You realize the above is true for basically any building, right? That that's a crazy metric to judge any maintenance effort by? Total weight of the building and then everything in it?

Do datacenters not have replaceable parts because they are mainly concrete and steel? Sure, they may have 10,000 servers that all need to be fixed and replaced constantly but since a datacenter is mostly concrete and steel, it doesn't matter because it's not much by total mass of the datacenter? Same goes for airports, factories, on and on.

I guess if you plonk thousands of maintenance heavy devices into a large enough building then weigh the whole structure, the percentage of the structure that has to be serviced goes down, making overall (by weight) maintenance go down. Airplanes need to be fixed? They weigh basically nothing compared to airports, so "tada!" no they dont!

Skipping over your bizarre metric, solar cell recycling is hitting 95%. That is again, something that isn't relevant with modern panels for 30-50+ years, as they will still be producing 70-80% of their rated power at that time. That's easily enough power to just leave them in use.

[-] Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

Lol and the commenter above you is forgetting about the aluminum of the PV module's frame, as well as stainless steel used for the racking. Those things are super easy to recycle.

[-] TheBlackLounge@lemm.ee -4 points 1 day ago

Ehh, concrete is very polluting, and nuclear plants need a lot of it. It's not gonna get recycled either. I thought this was obvious. Dunno how you thought that was a dunk.

But we can keep building them. It'll always be expensive, but we don't need much rare material.

I was hoping I'd see cobalt etc in your link, but still not then... For solar cells we need that 5% to be mined over and over. 50 years is nothing if you're talking about renewables. Might as well not care about sustainability at all if you're not talking another 5000 years.

[-] Enkrod@feddit.org 1 points 18 hours ago

Cobalt is more abundant in the earths crust than thorium or uranium by an order of magnitude.

[-] TheBlackLounge@lemm.ee 1 points 17 hours ago

And we need several orders of magnitude more of it per Wh. We'll run out of sand to make cement to build reactors before we run out of uranium.

this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
720 points (99.0% liked)

World News

39376 readers
1954 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS