So you're not responding on the Xenon poisoning and power variation, I guess you stand corrected.
> France has low retail electricity rates because the government massively subsidized nuclear power. That doesn’t mean cheap electricity, that means hiding the costs for electricity.
No. The impact of nuclear electricity on public finances is a clear net positive over the lifetime of the park. And for the past 10 years, nuclear has actually been anti-subsidized by the political will to boost RE and competition in the french electricity sector (see ARENH if you're interested).
> Also, it doesn’t use 70% nuclear power, it currently exports ~20% of the nuclear power it generates and imports almost exclusively non nuclear energy. Net result it’s customers actually use about 55-60% nuclear power
This makes no sense. You can't just discount export from nuclear and count import as non-nuclear…
First of all, most of our biggest neighbours also have nuclear electricity (UK, Belgium, Germany) so we are definitely also importing nuclear (well, when it makes sense to actually export nuclear, see the next point).
Second, most of the time when we export we're actually producing electricity from other means than nuclear (gas, wind, hydro) why would you count only nuclear as being exported? If you want to draw an accurate line, you'd need to count the electricity at the marginal price as the one being exported and most of the time it's not nuclear.
Third, what about the past few days? We've artificially reduced nuclear production to import wind, because the weather leads to a massive overproduction of wind power in Europe. It's not that nuclear couldn't have produced this energy right, just that we had to turn it down to protect the grid from a collapse. Yet in your calculations you are somehow counting it as a liability for nuclear.
I agree with the statement that “between 40 and 100% is straightforward and needs no specific design changes” it’s not wrong. But to be clear a minimum of 40% is nowhere near enough if someone wanted to go close to 100% nuclear. He then mentioned one of several such changes needed in France which does go outside that range and again I agree with what was said. He even mentioned that France regularly goes below 40% output, but below 10% has much more serious issues. Again nothing I disagree with.
I am not sure how you think it’s a refutation of my point?
> You can’t just discount export from nuclear and count import as non-nuclear
I didn’t. They do export some non nuclear generation, but the majority is nuclear which you can verify by looking at the generation during times of export. ~20% nuclear is just what the actual number is. Similarly, they import almost zero nuclear power simply based on when generation occurs and when new power is brought online by the countries involved.
> No
Feel free to dig into hard numbers such construction costs, liability for accidents, and funds set aside to pay for decommissioning and where they came from etc. You obviously feel strongly about this so I can only assume you have exact numbers and a nice economic breakdown.
It takes some doing including digging into Areva‘s finances before and after it’s restructuring (bailout) etc.
> It takes some doing including digging into Areva‘s finances before and after it’s restructuring (bailout) etc.
Why the hell would you dig in Areva's finance on that topic? Look at EDF's finance instead for the past 40 years instead, because that's where the money is. Area's situation is a project management and strategic failure, but they aren't relevant to the discussion because they aren't electricity producers.
> I am not sure how you think it’s a refutation of my point?
Well, you argued that:
> They do export some non nuclear generation, but the majority is nuclear which you can verify by looking at the generation during times of export.
RTE's[1] disagrees with you … I don't know where you get your ideas from but they simply don't align with facts.
> That’s why nuclear isn’t load following in practice.
and
> The more expensive bit relates to both design changes to deal with reactor poisoning
Which I refuted: nuclear is indeed load following, and you don't need to make design changes to make it so.
This is a complex point so I want to address it separately:
> Yet in your calculations you are somehow counting it as a liability for nuclear.
It’s a liability to people operating nuclear power plants as they generally get paid by the market for generating power. When a grid adds solar or wind the wholesale price of electricity drops while those power plants costs stay the same. If it hypothetically costs you 10c/kWh of capacity averaged over the lifetime of the power plant your paying that money independently of how much you’re operating it. Workers showed up, equipment aged, and interest on your loan was due etc. Now actually generating electricity adds some small extra cost for the fuel etc so shutting down may actually save you money when the wholesale price falls low enough, but your losing money either way. The specifics do get complicated as a grid operator may have signed various contracts, but as the marginal costs for wind and solar are much lower than nuclear oversupply fucks nuclear in a pure market.
Of course in France the government subsidizes the industry, so it’s not at the mercy of pure market forces. However, someone is still stuck with the bill even if it’s future taxpayers as seen with recent bailouts. The obvious question then shows up of what exactly the mix of Nuclear vs Wind and Solar should on a carbon free grid. As a pure economic question the cheapest option is to have some large scale energy storage. Unfortunately, once that’s on the table the capacity for steady state operation suddenly becomes vastly less useful. Which is the long way around to what I have been saying where nuclear can’t follow the grid and be economically viable close to 100%.
> It’s a liability to people operating nuclear power plants as they generally get paid by the market for generating power. When a grid adds solar or wind the wholesale price of electricity drops while those power plants costs stay the same. If it hypothetically costs you 10c/kWh of capacity averaged over the lifetime of the power plant your paying that money independently of how much you’re operating it. Workers showed up, equipment aged, and interest on your loan was due etc. Now actually generating electricity adds some small extra cost for the fuel etc so shutting down may actually save you money when the wholesale price falls low enough, but your losing money either way. The specifics do get complicated as a grid operator may have signed various contracts, but as the marginal costs for wind and solar are much lower than nuclear oversupply fucks nuclear in a pure market.
This is true, but here we're going back to square one [1]: wind and solar are only cheap because we don't count the externalities. Each time you build a wind farm, you hurt the viability of other electricity sources but at the same time, so you raise the price of all electricity on the market because you need these other sources to deal with intermittency anyway. But it is not counted as part of the cost of wind, even though it is directly linked to the amount of wind poer you have in your mix.
> Of course in France the government subsidizes the industry, so it’s not at the mercy of pure market forces.
No, no no and again no. You really need to stop believing in this bullshit and face the facts: France doesn't subsidize nuclear at all, it's completely the opposite: it has been a milking cow for decades. And for the past 10 years, because the EU wants to promote competition, EDF actually has to give away some of its nuclear electricity to its competitors because having a monopoly on such a money-making energy was considered unfair. (you definitely didn't look for ARENH as I advised you to do so yesterday, right?)
> As a pure economic question the cheapest option is to have some large scale energy storage. Unfortunately, once that’s on the table the capacity for steady state operation suddenly becomes vastly less useful. Which is the long way around to what I have been saying where nuclear can’t follow the grid and be economically viable close to 100%.
You don't really know what you're talking about. First of all, I don't think why you're obsessed by the idea of getting 100% nuclear, France shows that 70% is a good mix and I think everybody agrees that going higher would make little sense. But you can't run on 100% solar or wind either (you'd need at least to 2 weeks of storage if you wanted to to do, which is far out of reach) and in fact there isn't a single demonstrated example of a working grid with even “just” 70% solar/wind, and just going above 50% is going to be quadratically more expensive for each percent (the load factor decreases, and the need for storage quickly ramps up).
This rolls back to here: “Each time you build a wind farm you hurt the viability of other electricity sources.”
If you say nuclear is a fine 70% solution, what’s the other 30%? If it’s wind then 70% nuclear is no longer viable because that was already the limit and it just became less viable. Thus the core problem, wind and solar cost less per kWh, but as you add them they push out nuclear. Essentially what mix actually works? If say 70% wind and solar 25% nuclear 5% hydro is economically cheapest nuclear needs a very special power purchase agreement designed to support it.
Which gets to the hart of the matter, much of the problem with the current grid is power purchase agreements. No utility wants to sign a power purchase agreement for the lifetime of a power plant which pays nuclear even when it’s off. Even 35 years after construction means the power plant needs to compete on the open market in ~40 years. Which means subsides.
PS: “France doesn’t subsidize” among other things it’s agreed to limit liability in the event of a major disaster. That’s incredibly valuable, suppose you wanted insurance for a 1 in X per year per 1GW reactor risk of a 500 billion dollar failure what does that cost? Well X becomes really important, we have had what 2 major disasters in what 441 current reactors * ~70 years of operation = 1 in 16,000ish. Now I think a reasonable argument can be made that French reactors are safer than that, but napkin math says even if it’s 1 in 50,000 per year you’re still looking at ~10 million per year per reactor * 56 reactors or 1/2 billion per year for insurance. Even if their 100x as safe as historic examples it’s still significant money.
> France has low retail electricity rates because the government massively subsidized nuclear power. That doesn’t mean cheap electricity, that means hiding the costs for electricity.
No. The impact of nuclear electricity on public finances is a clear net positive over the lifetime of the park. And for the past 10 years, nuclear has actually been anti-subsidized by the political will to boost RE and competition in the french electricity sector (see ARENH if you're interested).
> Also, it doesn’t use 70% nuclear power, it currently exports ~20% of the nuclear power it generates and imports almost exclusively non nuclear energy. Net result it’s customers actually use about 55-60% nuclear power
This makes no sense. You can't just discount export from nuclear and count import as non-nuclear…
First of all, most of our biggest neighbours also have nuclear electricity (UK, Belgium, Germany) so we are definitely also importing nuclear (well, when it makes sense to actually export nuclear, see the next point).
Second, most of the time when we export we're actually producing electricity from other means than nuclear (gas, wind, hydro) why would you count only nuclear as being exported? If you want to draw an accurate line, you'd need to count the electricity at the marginal price as the one being exported and most of the time it's not nuclear.
Third, what about the past few days? We've artificially reduced nuclear production to import wind, because the weather leads to a massive overproduction of wind power in Europe. It's not that nuclear couldn't have produced this energy right, just that we had to turn it down to protect the grid from a collapse. Yet in your calculations you are somehow counting it as a liability for nuclear.