Experts say world is ‘past peak fossil power’ but warn against uneven development of energy projects
Nuclear power generation is likely to break records in 2025 as more countries invest in reactors to fuel the shift to a low-carbon global economy, while renewable energy is likely to overtake coal as a power source early next year, data has shown.
China, India, Korea and Europe are likely to have new reactors come on stream, while several in Japan are also forecast to return to generation, and French output should increase, according to a report on the state of global electricity markets published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) on Wednesday.
Electricity demand is also expected to increase around the world, fuelled largely by the move to a low-carbon economy. Electric vehicles and heat pumps, as well as many low-carbon industrial processes, require electricity rather than oil and gas.
Fantastic. Let’s sink more money into white elephants rather than investing in stuff that’s actually economical.
Nuclear can be very economical.
No it can’t. Have you looked at any current project? They’re all wildly over budget. And none of those calculations even consider decommissioning or nuclear waste storage. Both are endless money pits that are usually paid for by the public. You cannot even put a price tag on nuclear storage because it’s never been done before and it needs to be operated beyond the horizon of any reasonable accounting practice. We’re effectively saddling future generations with our crap.
And yet, EDF has built the current french nuclear reactor fleet without any subsidies, and made billions of euros of net profit every year for decades, excepted in 2022. It is feasible. Current failures are not inherently tied to the nuclear technology. It’s political.
Plain false. Cigéo will work for 100 years for about 25 billions of euros. That’s dirt cheap. And you now why it’s dirt cheap? Because the entire high level radioactive waste produced by a country like France for 60 years fit in a 16 meters wide cube. And most of it will be re-used in future EPRs.
Wikipedia:
So maybe they’ll start building this thing in five years. OK. And we all know projects like this always come in in time and in budget, right? The problem of nuclear waste storage constantly gets handwaved away by the fanboys but we’re nowhere near any kind of solution.
This cube contains 98% of the radioactivity in all French nuclear waste, produced over 60 years.
Stop pretending it’s some kind of unsolvable problem, nuclear engineers have solved it decades ago, it’s just anti-nuclear folks that oppose all solutions provided.
None of this stuff exists and there is no timeline as when it might be made into reality. Just another pipe dream.
So how are you going to separate out the technetium? Just because something is doable in a lab, doesn’t mean it’s doable on an industrial scale.
Yeah, let’s let the future generations sort it out. At the same time, let’s work at bringing down civilisation. What could go wrong?
No they haven’t. Not at all. You obviously have no clue what you’re talking about.
Yeah yeah yeah, same old bullshit. The reality is that this stuff just doesn’t work economically.
Super-Phénix was a fully-working prototype cancelled by anti-nuclears. It produced and pushed 3TWh in the French national electricity network back in 1996 before being shut down. And there are built and working EPR in the world right, you’re just denying reality at this point.
Technetium is literally extracted from nuclear waste to be used in numerous medical field, such as marking cancerous cells in bodies. You’re throwing random terms trying to find some point here.
See? Another anti-nuclear shill that denies the reality. Most geologists and nuclear scientists have agreed on a solution for years : they’re just so little to bury, it’s so easy to contain, just bury it in an inert ground and it will not move for millions of years.
We’re literally finding millions-years old unprotected fossils of dinosaurs that are almost intact. Nuclear waste will be sealed in containers which are made for this.
We’re finding gigantic pools of gas and liquid that stayed in the same place for millions of years. Nuclear waste will be either solid or liquid, so it is way easier to contain than gas, and sealed in containers.
Even if the containers break for some reason, the solid waste will just no move, and radiation can be stopped by a few centimeters of water. The liquid waste would not move either, but let’s say it moves for some magical reason, then there is only one way it would move : down. There is gravity and pressure, you know.
130 billions of euros for 60 years of french nuclear, everything included. EDF net profit is averaging billions every year. 10 billions of euros in the first semester of 2023 alone. And that’s with ARENH, which forces EDF to sell at loss 25% of its nuclear electricity to its competitors.
Nuclear can be economical and profitable, when you don’t perpetually throw wrenches in the works.
We should rather build more coal plants to fill in what renewables can’t right?
I suppose you’re talking about base load? That tired old myth has been debunked so many times, yet it gets rolled out every single time these discussions come up. Maybe come up with some new “argument”? Oh right, you don’t have any.
Yes, because that’s what I said. I said we need to keep a minimum demand to keep the stations going…
You people are insufferable. When we have battery systems that are efficient enough to store enough power to keep things running when there’s not enough window or solar generation for a period, then it’ll be fine. You know that there are a lot of industries that run 24/7, for instance the infrastructure you’re seeing this message on… That has nothing to do with base load and everything to do with constant power draw…
Why don’t you set yourself up with some solar and wind, but make sure not to use any batteries though, and get off the grid, then you can be a renewables puritan and lord over everyone else like you’re better than them.
Did you even read the article I linked to? Or make any effort at all to get informed? And yes, we’re going to have to build a whole lot of more storage. And grid capacity. And grid management. And load management. All of which are drastically easier, safer and cheaper than building a lot of nuclear plants. Even if it was feasible to do so which it very patently isn’t. Nuclear power doesn’t scale, as Hinkley Point, Olkiluotto etc. have proven beyond a shadow of doubt.
Nuclear is expensive because when particulate pollution kills millions of people every year, nobody cares at all. But when a nuclear accident kills exactly zero people, we get massive levels of hysteria and shut down a dozen nuclear power plants on the other side of the planet.
Imagine the reaction if there was a single nuclear disaster that killed 9 million people. According to greenpeace that’d be 9 chernobyls, but more likely it would be between 100 and 1000 chernobyls. Do you think people might be a bit upset about that? But with fossil fuels that is now happening every single year, and it’s probably just going to get worse. (CO2 emissions are just getting higher every year despite all the growth in renewables) And you get a few news headlines about it and then everyone forgets. Weirdly enough climate change caused by the same fossil fuels gets far more attention, even though those effects are even harder for the average person to understand.
And even with this level of paranoia about nuclear, with the incredible level of security put in with gen 3 reactors that directly contribute to the massive cost and time overruns, we still have these “nuclear is not safe enough” claims flying around.
That’s the dumbest take I’ve ever heard on this topic and that’s saying a lot. And how do you know how many people were killed by the Fukushima triple meltdown that is in no way contained and has displaced tens of thousands of people permanently? The answer is we don’t know because the Japanese government has systematically suppressed any reliable information from coḿing out. Which just goes to show that nuclear power is a danger to democracy on top of all its other drawbacks.
And who ever said the alternative to building nuclear plants is building more fossil fuel generation capacity? That’s just delusional. Nobody is doing that, in fact fossil ist very quickly being replaced by renewable at a pace nuclear could in no realistic scenario get even remotely close to.