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The question is more like: “How dependent is France on uranium which is a finite resource?”
“The demand for uranium continues to increase, but the supply is not keeping up. Current uranium reserves are expected to be depleted by the end of the century, and new sources of uranium are hard to find. As a result, uranium prices have been steadily rising, with some estimates predicting a doubling of prices by 2030. This is causing a global uranium squeeze, where the demand for the resource is outstripping the supply.”
France: Let’s build more nuclear plants, also do not invest into renewable energy, also since we are used to wars for oil, why not having wars for uranium in the future too?
Well, “By the end of the century” is almost 80 years away, that is significantly longer than any normal nuclear power plant lasts.
Also it is very difficult to know which exact price someone pays for uranium because they normal dont buy on the spot market, but via long lasting contracts.
So from my point of view we don’t have sufficient information for a proper estimation of the situation.
The end of the century at current rates of use which means about 77 years. At just 10% increased use annually that would double roughly every 7 years which means it won’t last nearly that long.
The real key factor is as the cost of uranium continues to go up and suffers potential shortages and supply issues the cost of installing solar and wind continues to drop - they got planning permission for a solar farm near me about a year ago and it’s already half way through having pannels installed, the speed they can do it is only going to keep increasing especially as more automated tools get developed. Then there’s the almost certainty of a breakthrough in chemistry reaching market which significant reduces cost and increases the range of locations suitable which would again drastically lower price per kWh while the price of running nukes continues to rise and they’re locked into decades of economic loss or they’ll choose to close them and all that investment and effort will be for nothing.
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Solar ans wind power will never ever be a good baseline energy production méthod. It’s complementary.
No, it is a perfekt baseline energy production method. France is buying our renewable energy, because it can’t produce enough with its broken nuclear power plants and the ones not producing full because of the drought. The numbers do not lie.
Also, what I see in that graph is that your grid’s baseline isn’t renewables, but fossil fuels. That’s shameful.
Is that why you’re reopening coal plants?
You have heard of the war in Ukraine, right?
Yes, and if you hadn’t closed your nuclear plants you wouldn’t have needed to rely on carbon-emitting russian gas-burning power plants.
Renewables are great. But like anything else, they’re not suitable for all use cases. And where they’re not suitable you have to use greenhouse gas emitting power plants. Wouldn’t it be much preferable if those were instead NPPs?
People arguing against nuclear power are arguing for oil/gas/coal, whether they know it or not.
Ah yes, 4th generation nuclear reactors will save us, as will fusion reactors. We could make stuff work with existing technology, but that’s somehow not good enough. The whole future plans section of the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor reads like the technological challenges of these type of reactors are not as solved as you state it in your post.
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Well, you can potentially design them in a way, that you can control the energy output more easily. However, then they will be even less economical than they are now. If you run at lower output, you waste more fuel.
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@MattMastodon @Sodis Only about 40% of demand can be directly met from volatiles (wind and solar), i. e. no intermediate storage. The rest has to come from »backup« or »storage« or however you call it.
Current storage tech is still almost 100% pumped hydro. Batteries have not made a real dent there yet. But pumped hydro is not enough by far, even potentially, and batteries have a long way to go to be even as scalable as pumped hydro.
So, backup. The only clean, scalable backup is nuclear.
@MattMastodon @Sodis Careful about labels. »Renewables« often includes biomass (which is just fast-track fossil tbh) and hydro (which is not so volatile). I’m talking about wind and solar specifically (volatiles).
40% is roughly the mean capacity factor of a good mix of volatiles. This is what you can directly feed to the user from the windmill/panel, without storage. You can expand a bit by massive overbuilding, but you can’t overbuild your way out of no wind at night.
Free and cheap?!?
You are one deluded individual. Go do your research. Also, nuclear never had subsidies, only wind/solar did.
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@Sodis @MattMastodon Nuclear power plants can quite easily do load following. It happens regularly e. g. in France. However, since it has the lowest running costs, other sources are usually cut first as far as possible.
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@MattMastodon @AlexisFR @Wirrvogel
The optimum imho is:
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The bulk of the generation from wind and solar, and nuclear for 15% - 20% base load. Also some Geothermal where cheap but it’s potential is small.
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Grids improved to cover local and intermediate renewable generation, and extended to facilitate import/export.
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Variable electricity pricing for demand shifting.
The result is vastly reduced need for storage, probably batteries used intelligently in a hierarchy of grid and home, compared to the naïve “just build wind and solar and batteries.”
Then add in:
- A 90% transition from personal cars to free green public transport (#FGPT), taxis, e-bikes, bicycles, and walking.
This all needs no new technology (although for nuclear there are several advances not yet used at scale: molten salt, small, modular, U238, thorium), it needs a fraction of the rare earths, and delivers a huge in reduction steel production courtesy of car recycling.
#Energy #Renewables #ClimateCrisis #Climate #Nuclear
[P.S. Dams damage eco-systems so I’m not in favour of more hydro generation, and pumped hydro storage needs the spare water too.
Biomass not “net zero” and obviously not “zero” which we actually need. It’s just more carbon burning plus extra pollution from the agriculture and other products of combustion. It increases land use, and at present the industry is full of corruption with trees being burned sometimes alongside shredded car tyres… and subsidised!]
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@Pampa @AlexisFR @Wirrvogel @Ardubal @Sodis
So
One #nuclear power station will buy about a million #electric cars. Most #EVs have a 300km range but most days go <30km.
So the mean available #energy capacity of all these cars would run the #UK for 24 hours using #V2G (Vehicle to grid)
This could be a massive #car share scheme with a couple of EVs on every street
All the energy could come from #wind or #solar and the #battery fills the gaps when there is no wind
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nuclear uses lots of energy to build. Even windmills use fibreglass.
It may be more expensive to build, but not because it’s more energy intensive. Especially when you look at capacity. It is by far the most efficient source, requiring much less material and energy per generation capacity.
That’s a big claim, and having watched a #nuclear power station being built I struggle to agree. Especially if you look at full life cycle from mining uranium to disposal.
Also most of the work with a #windmill is establishing the site. Once done repairs and upgrades are cheap.
And #renewables are quick. Chuck a spare at it and you’ll have useful energy in a few months. The main problem in the UK is government obstructing them.
And they’re still being built.
I’m challenging the claim about energy use, not cost. Uranium mining is a rounding error in this regard.
What you’re missing from seeing a power station being built is how much energy it produces. Being conservative, a single reactor generates as much energy as around 1000 wind turbines. And that’s without taking into account the full life cycle, which can probably 3-4x that number.
The energy density numbers of nuclear power are such completely different orders of magnitude to other energy sources that people usually have trouble understanding them in real world terms.
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It can’t be scales up and down following need.
Yes, it runs at full power most of the time. That’s what being a “baseline energy source” means.
I wonder how long until all those people always glorifying atomic energie come here…
Usually this community is full of them even in threads only talking about renewables.
This is one of the main problems with atomic energy that we haven’t got any idea how to solve - Germany got pretty much all of their uranium from Russia - France from an unstable country like Niger - it’s just not something you can extract easily in countries that care about their citizens so it’ll always come from a shitty place.
I wonder how the Venn diagram looks between those people that defend atomic everywhere and the people telling you all about how bad electric cars are because of their batteries…
it’s just not something you can extract easily in countries that care about their citizens so it’ll always come from a shitty place
First two countries for known reserves are Australia and Canada, together they hold around 40% of all the uranium reserves of the planet. Uranium could also be extracted from seawater, obviously at a much higher price.
It’s just that it’s easier to extract it where exploitation rights for land is cheap. But that’s unfortunately also true for many materials we need for renewables
Yeah but even though we’re using the cheapest Uranium possible atomic power is STILL much more expensive than renewables - I wonder how insane the prices would be if you only took Uranium from good sources.
Also those costs almost never include the cost of securing the waste for thousands of years since you can’t just leave the waste laying around out of fear of dirty bombs.
Sure it looks decent in a vacuum but with all the factors playing into it from Uranium being a limited resource that costs a lot to the waste-management it’s just much more expensive than just spending the money you’d need to buy one plant on renewables and energy-storages that are also ready to go a lot faster…
the price of atomic energy is like 10% coupled to the price of uranium. the equipment, the salaries, the security measures, all those things are so much more expensive compared to the fuel.
people rarely grasp what 4 magnitudes of energy density increase mean.
yeah but how much more is Uranium if it’s mined in Canada compared to the one from Niger or Russia?
sure it’s not the main cost-driver but it’s not irrelevant either.
Also: an installed solar-panel is very cheap in maintenance - and most of the running costs of are heavily influenced by inflation, too It just doesn’t make sense to push for building more atomic reactors - keeping the ones already there running IS making sense but building new ones that may start producing energy in 10 years AND are massively expensive is just not a reasonable investment
solar alone is never going to cover your needs. the moment you add the cost of battery storage, nuclear is definitely cheaper. yes, even new construction. for now. when the cost of batteries go down to 1/10th of what it’s today, this might change of course.
yeah but how much more is Uranium if it’s mined in Canada compared to the one from Niger or Russia?
Consider the cost from fuel is not mainly for uranium ore, but for fuel manufacturing and processing. Like taking the ore and transformer them in pellets fuel.
May uranium ore double in price the increase of cost for nuclear would be less than 0,005€/kWh
start producing energy in 10 years AND are massively expensive is just not a reasonable investment
How can Japan build a reactor in 36 month but we can’t? How can other countries finance favouribly nuclear power (nuclear is the energy source that most of all the others suffer discount rated) but we can’t?
Nuclear gave France one of the cheapest electricity price in Europe, but we don’t want to retry because we don’t feel we can achieve it?
Side note, solar panels have problems too as their carbon footprint could be 3 times higher than expected
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You mean the company the french state squished for profit for 2 decades and that during the pandemic has been forced to subsidized electricity prices for everyone?
Usually this community is full of them even in threads only talking about renewables.
I think you have to mention Germany and energy in the title to summon them.
This is one of the main problems with atomic energy that we haven’t got any idea how to use
Doesn’t this apply to almost any form of power generation? Fossil fuels and raw materials for nuclear fuels are often imported from undemocratic or unstable countries. As are many of the raw materials required for renewable power generation and storage.
Using this as an argument againt nuclear power is as intellectually dishonest as the people using it as an argument against electric cars.
Or people citing rain forest balsa wood in wind turbine blades as their greatest concern while being totally fine with lignite coal.
I wonder how long until all those people always glorifying atomic energie come here…
You mean the realists who want to eliminate carbon emissions with more than wishful thinking? Or the people trying to educate against decades of the oil and gas corporations’ anti-nuclear propaganda and fearmongering?
Ah yes nuclear energy only takes 20 years to build a new reactor. Ah the most expensive form of energy generation let’s invest in that.
Ah yes, much better to keep building new coal or gas plants instead. “Fuck the planet, we’re trying to save a dime.”
Good strawman where did I say build coal or gas instead? How are you saving the planet when 1 reactor takes 20 years?
Because that’s what’s happening. Countries are building and reopening fossil fuel plants.
In 20 years that reactor can make up for thousands of tons a year of CO2. That’s the same argument people have been using for 60 years, and here we are now. That it takes time is no excuse not to start.
Which country? Country’s are investing in renewables you know the energy source that’s cheaper and quicker to deploy than nuclear.
Nuclear is bad for your grid it’s not flexible. Look at Germany since they stopped using nuclear they where able to use way more solar and wind which previously had to be turned off because nuclear is not flexible.
Which country?
Well, Germany, since you mention them. In their anti-nuclear hysteria, they’re having to reopen fossil fuel plants after relying on russian natural gas for years. Germany is phasing out nuclear and it’s proven a disaster politically and economically. But more importantly, a disaster for the environment.
Nuclear is bad for your grid it’s not flexible.
No, that is exactly wrong and shows how little you understand about the power grid. Nuclear is useful exactly because of that, as it provides stable and predictable power, complementing renewables, and making up for what they can’t. They go hand in hand if you’re serious about decarbonising the grid, which Germany has proven they’re not.
Nuclear is therefore competing with coal, gas, and oil in the power grid. Which is why we’ve been disinformed for decades by the fossil fuel megacorp’s antinuclear propaganda. The slower we take up nuclear, the longer they can keep selling countries their dirty fuels.
Canada’s Uranium City is coming back baby.
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What the fuck are you talking about ?
A few days ago someone said France was planning an attack to Niger after the coup. I’m not defending the coup but that’s how colonialism used to work: I conquered you, your sources (uranium) are mine. And nobody ever thought about using it locally for elecricy production.
Ecowas said that they would intervene, now they backed down. I have never heard the intention of Frances military to go in
France, the former colonial power, did not specify whether its backing would entail military support for an ECOWAS intervention in Niger
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