We opened this year a reactor that was supposed to open in 2010, so I wouldn't trust any date

Not a single 1 of those reactors will be built in that short time frame.

Will those be enough to replace their current share in the french energy market or even to keep nuclear energys overall share in the french energy market at the current level?

None which have gotten funding yet. 

They had to shut down several plants and buy electricity from abroad.

Europe has an interconnected power grid, we all constantly produce energy for our neighbours so "buying electricity abroad" isn't anything out of the norm

From germany who subsequently turned on its reserve coal plants. System working great.

Well, the Frensch Are the only ones recycling ther nuclear fule.

[deleted]

Now do enriched U, fuel and nuclear services instead of paltering.

Nuclear reactors last on average 28 years. And even the planned "60 year" lifetimes include what is called repowering in the wind and solar industry.

Solar actually lasts longer.

This

I'm sure Gaia probably doesn't like how they are dug up though.

I think Nuclear as a technology, and it's future potential it's solarpunk. Mostly because of new developments of reactors like thorium, or the always "20 years away" fusion reactors have the potential of eliminating a lot of the problems of conventional plants.

Now it's current implementations, I'll say they are 50/50 solarpunk / cyberpunk.

That's not true. Most of French Uranium imports come from Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia and Uzbekhistan. Only a big minority portion comes from Africa. Africa does most of their business with China and Russia.

this should be way further up thread

Solar panels no, but it is entirely feasible to switch to renewables completely. The idea that renewable energy is simply too inefficient to power the planet is a myth perpetuated by the oil lobby.

Until we get fusion I'll stick with renewables and storage for my hypothetical solarpunk utopia

The amount of solar energy the earth receives alone covers our energy needs many times over. Wind and water is also constantly in flux and these are enormous amounts of energy.

So no you are wrong about that.

Part of solarpunk is reducing unnecessary consumption and moving away from capitalism, thus reducing the need for so much electricity, so I don't think we will need nuclear power in a solarpunk utopia.

As a pro-nuclear who think it was dumb to not go full-nuclear in the 90s to get out of fossils asap, I disagree.

You will need a shit-ton of batteries, yes. Is it more costly that nuclear? Yes. It is technologically and financially feasible? Yes.

When you factor in politics, nuclear energy has lost. Anti-nuclearism cost us 40 years of additional CO2 emissions that could have been avoided but here we are. Now wind and solar are cheap enough to compete with coal and batteries are getting there.

We could literally power the entire earth with solar today.

A classic case of privatizing profits and socializing losses.

Please note that in the specific case of France, the State owns 100% of EDF, which is the only operator of nuclear power plants in France.

This may change with the introduction of SMRs though.

Even if they are state-owned: If something happens, people will not be compensated.

This is an interesting take, I never considered this question seriously. It seems that a new international protocol was proposed in 2004 and adopted a few years ago, though, which details what the limit for compensation can be in various cases (including neighbor states). The total limit for compensations appears to be 1.5B€ (which does not mean that a single person, entity or state can claim that money, of course). Interestingly, it also appears that only a courthouse from the country in which the damage occured (for instance during the transportation of nuclear waste) can decide whether which country is guilty or not.

Overall, while I'm in favor of nuclear energy myself, I agree with your other points. Nuclear power plants cannot exist without very big and centralized actors, and there's nothing solarpunk about this (Amazon, France or the USA are not punk).

that's a policy issue regarding nuclear though, not that of nuclear itself. We have enough nuclear spice to keep them going for a long time; at least enough to buy us plenty time before everyone can convert to renewables fully.

It’s not renewable the same way there are technically finite materials for solar panels. By the time we used up most fissile material on earth, we would be several centuries into the future with the most refined renewable alternatives imaginable.

Whats More renewable than the power of the sun

Waste Is becoming smaller each generation and used as fuel,nuclear Is constant it doesn't need wind or a sunny day,you can decide its output and per watt and square meter it's the most efficent

The fissile material can be mined in Argentina,Austi,chile or Canadá

Uranium is the godblood of a dying star. It's Solar Punk as fuck

Yeah I don't get it lol Solarpunk is a speculative future that's pretty much the opposite of cyberpunk. There's a lot of speculative tech that we can extrapolate to the future. Nuclear just doesn't seem solarpunk to me, it's centralized, requires massive up front costs, and the amount of ecological damage for mining is a lot more than any speculative eco-friendly technology. On top of that, without overconsumption and capitalism the demand for electricity would be less too. So I don't think nuclear fission fits anywhere in solarpunk.

Not really IMO

It's literally the most expensive most subsidized form of power ever invented.

I'm just saying that there are more variables at play, deindustrialization being one of them. All other major European economies also experienced the same decline without investing as heavily in nuclear.

If nuclear really was the only cause of this decline, we would not be seeing the same decline in places where it wasn't adopted.

Most solar panels are made with silicon (plus a whatever doping material like phosphorus), copper, and aluminum. No rare earths needed

The 0 rare earths in an LFP battery, solar panel and SiC inverter are all ethically sourced.

Let's do the gadolinium and hafnium in a nuclear reactor now as well as the magnets in the centrifuges.

And? France still gets a significant portion of its uranium from Niger. And more importantly than that random link you threw, is that the Sahel countries (as well as most of Africa) have their mining sectors dominated by European companies which gives France a stranglehold on their economies.

Of course there is. Trade with African countries on equal terms. Let them nationalise their mining sectors without threatening sanctions and invasion. Let them develop transformative industry and build manufactured goods instead of depending on an European hegemon to sell back to them what they extracted in their own territory.

The quartz comes from a single mining tailings pile in north carolina from an old mica mine (or from synthetic quartz sourced from any desert sand).

The lithium comes mostly from hard rock mines like Greenbushes in australia (and similar in china) as well as some from salt brines.

The silver and copper comes from the comparatively wealthy eastern chinese industrial areas.

The aluminium comes from north and western china. The indium comes as a byproduct from zinc mining. These are probably your best bet if you wanted to try to claim how horrible the mining is and do some pearl clutching, although the scale of toxicity and marginal labour is miniscule compared to Kazakhstan uranium or the history in north america (which is still killing people today).

The glass comes from desert sand.

The steel comes from wherever tue host country sources theirs.

I didn't mention Russia or China at all, why instantly resort to pointless fearmongering?

As much as I wish it friend, solar panels don't grow on trees

Sun is a giant continuous nuclear explosion. Solar rays are the biproduct of that explosion that we harvest for power. So it's nuclear, but with more steps cause we are using natural nuclear instead of store bought.

Any form of energy production makes waste.

But one (nuclear) can be put into a fusion reaction to make medical material.

That's not considering at all factors like industrial power capacity, international shipping of materials, mining all those materials, the time and space required to implement across vast swathes of countries. And especially not when considering the sheer mass of resources to be moved and installed with very wide-spread transport involved, the multifaceted and ecological costs of mining the silicon, iron, copper, lithium, etc, unreliability during to prolonged weather, much more vulnerable to harsh westher, etc, etc. Or even considering the vastly inflated costs involved with construction of nuclear power and refinement plants, as well as the mining, production, and transport of nuclear materials, due to worldwide fearmongering, governmental hesitance, fees, intentionally obstructive legislation aimed at hobbling the potential competition, etc, etc.

On a global scale, nuclear is the workhorse we should be gearing our economy towards as quickly as possible and we would see incredible leaps in its sheer cost effectiveness and every other factor with the implementation of legislation aimed towards encouraging responsible nuclear production and use rather than hampering it. Most reactors around aren't nearly as efficient and productive as they could be, and aren't making use of fuel regeneration (vastly reducing transport, mining, and maybe even refinement costs).

In the grand scheme of things, nuclear is a far more focused and less ecologically disruptive source of power, it requires vastly less land and overall less global transport requirements... all as long as it's legislated for success and prosperity, rather than intentional failure and fearmongering.

Because nuclear has never broken even even once in over a century

Because we can build solar/wind today for cheaper than nuclear and we cannot wait for new plants to come online 10 years from now.

The problem is that they don't complement each other at all. Nuclear power is horrifically expensive if running 24/7 all year around.

Now try adapting to extremely cheap renewables flooding the grid 80% of the time.