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The linked video of Real Engineering has some major factual errors and omissions. I made a comment where I mentioned some in a neutral tone together with sources. He deleted it, which does not leave a good impression on me.
Here some examples:
The CO₂ per kWh is given as 42 for France. It should be around 100. The number Real Engineering uses is likely from RTE France, however they estimate as follows “For energy sources that are not mentioned [including nuclear], their contribution to CO2 emissions is considered equal to 0 t CO2 eq / MWh”. But there are significant CO₂ Emissions from Nuclear which are generated by the high amount of building materials needed for safety and operational costs. Currently estimated to be around 66g CO₂ per kWh .
It is mentioned that Germany imports energy from France, leaving the impression this is a one way dependency because Germany shut down its nuclear power. In reality the grid is interconnected and energy is constantly moved across borders in both directions. In fact if you look at the numbers France actually imports more from Germany then it exports to it!
Due to the heat in the recent summers and due to necessary repairs on faulty reactors France has switched from being energy exporter to energy importer.
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To be fair, power consumption in Germany has been down since April too. So the renewable percentage increased but absolute numbers were similar/lower. There are a number of explanations, and they probably all apply to some degree, mostly:
- summer holidays
- increased on-site energy generation which is not counted
- corporations are leaving Germany for China/the US/wherever (the favorite theory of the political right)
Hasn’t France gone back to being a net exporter since winter 2022?
Yes this seems to be true for now. However keep in mind, that the hot months are just beginning and have a high impact on the energy production of France.
Here are charts I found. They are a bit difficult to read: Basically the width of the connection on a country determines the amount of energy they sent over the connection. So the connection from France to Switzerland which is much broader on the FR side says France exports more than it imports from Switzerland. For Spains the reverse is true as the connection is broader on the ES side.
To see the impact of hot months compare the charts for May and July-September of last year.
I think France will in average stay a net exporter for the next years, but in the trend they will shift to more importing as many of their nuclear reactors need maintenance or replacement and all of them are affected by climate change. The trend may of course change again due to changes in politics.
That is true.[Édith: apparently not!‽]However, import/export stats usually just show where energy is cheapest. Of course it’s cheaper to use French excess nuclear energy than start a German gas/coal plant. Germany has more than enough (fossil) capacity on its own, however.
The 2022 situation in France is an outlier in this regard obviously, because it temporarily reduced French generation capacity below their needs. Also outliers: Countries like Italy and Hungary that never had enough generation capacity in the first place and do need to import rather than importing to reduce cost.
High river temperatures to limit French nuclear power production
Looks like nuclear won’t save us from global warming because it can’t save itself from it.
I thought that if it came to an emergency they could keep the reactors running, only the exhaust water would be too hot and river wildlife would die around the vents.
On a longer-term basis they could switch to cooling towers that use evaporative cooling. Then they don’t have the rivers too hot problem.
I thought that if it came to an emergency they could keep the reactors running, only the exhaust water would be too hot and river wildlife would die around the vents.
France has already upped the maximum temperature legally allowed two or so years ago. And while short term that is a solution, the fact is that us humans need working ecosystems to survive. It’s not just fishers being impacted, ecosystems are connected and we’re cutting into them at record pace anyway.
Rivers are going to get a lot or do the global warming than they will do to those nuclear reactors if you leave those reactors off for long enough
So instead of running hot, the river runs dry?
Any thermal electricity plant uses an insane amount of water. For every kWh of electricity generated, about 1.5-2 kWh need to be cooled away.
A pure air cooling system is theoretically possible, but it drastically reduces the plants efficency, as the energy you can recoup at the turbine is directly dependant on the temperature difference between the hot and the cold side.
So in any way thermal plants are never going to be an option that is favourable to build now, over building renewables, except for a small degree of net stability that can be provided by already existing plants.
Just so people get the dimensions: somewhere over half(!) of French potable water is used to cool nuclear plants. The dimensions are similar when it comes to coal plants in Germany (but at least Germany plans to exit coal).
France gets a significant portion of its river water from glaciers in the Alps, e.g. that’s 20% of the Rhône water. Those glaciers will not survive the next 15 years.
By then I’m guessing many nuclear plants will have been taken offline, since they’re already pretty old
Some of the power plants are also falling apart because of “stress corrosion” first considered small but relevant but as it turns out bigger than they wanted to admit at first and they have to rethink the way to repair them: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-nuclear-watchdog-says-corrosion-crack-flagged-by-edf-penly-1-reactor-2023-03-07/
They try to speed up building more power plants at a time when we know that many other power plants have needed up to 12 years more time to be built than estimated with exploding cost and all they could come up with in their newest law was to allow parking lots to be built early:
the first pair of new reactors is supposed to come into service by 2035
For a comparison: “Nuclear reactor Olkiluoto 3 has gone online in Finland some 12 years behind schedule and on a massively inflated budget. The 1.6 gigawatt (GW) reactor, built by the French-led Areva-Siemens consortium, had originally been due to open in 2009.”
That’s 2 new reactors 12 years from now (or even 24 years from now), while their current power plants are falling apart and this is the earliest possible estimate, which will most likely not be met. So when they are built, they will not be actually adding to the power produced but just replace the oldest nuklear power plants still running.
This could be funny if it weren’t such a waste of time and money while our time and money to steer us away from doom is running out.
The way things are getting hot, one might just dispense with the primary reactor housing and the fuel and leave the water circulating in the environment to then power the turbines
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We need to fight them back and it is easy, because nuklear power plants everywhere are failing. New ones take up to 12 years more to built with exploding cost and older ones are either running out of cooling water or fall apart and need to be offline for repairs. Not to mention one being in the midst of a war and under constant threat.
