France to restart all nuclear reactors by winter amid energy crunch.

[NNadir]

Back in July, I reported on and linked a video from the Decouple Podcast titled "Something's Rotten in the French Nuclear Industry."

The interview by Chris Keefer, a Canadian physician and nuclear activist, with Mark Nelson was, in my view, excellent, and I was especially appreciative of the spin on Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree."

Because the Hollande administration, and the early Macron administration (having subsequently reversed itself) were hostile to nuclear energy and skimmed its profits to invest in the failed but popular gas and coal dependent wind and solar industries, the magnificent French nuclear infrastructure fell into disrepair and faced a number of materials science difficulties that might have been managed had France maintained its reactors as Americans do.

Putin has disabused Europe of the notion that one can build expensive (and often useless, depending on the weather) wind and solar plants without access to dangerous fossil fuels, and at precisely the time that Europe most needs them, French nuclear reactors have been unavailable.

I don't know if this is true, but I was pleased to see this report from an English language French News Site: [link:France to restart all nuclear reactors by winter amid energy crunch|France to restart all nuclear reactors by winter amid energy crunch].

France’s minister for energy transition said Friday that French electricity giant EDF has committed to restart all its nuclear reactors by this winter to help the country through the broad energy crisis aggravated by the war in Ukraine.

Agnès Pannier-Runacher said the government is taking steps to “avoid restrictive measures” over energy use in the peak winter cold season, following a special government meeting over energy issues.

France relies on nuclear energy for about 67% of its electricity – more than any other country – and on gas for about 7%.

>> Read more: France unveils nuclear power overhaul – with an eye on China

At the moment, 32 of France's 56 nuclear reactors, all operated by EDF, are shut down for usual maintenance and, in some cases, to repair corrosion problems.

“There’s a schedule that provides that starting from October, each week, a new (nuclear) plant is operational again,” Pannier-Runacher said.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne had warned that a worst-case scenario this winter could lead to rolling two-hour power cuts in French homes.

The government will “closely monitor” the situation of nuclear plants that reported corrosion issues. EDF “started taking action and they must confirm to us that it is progressing as they had planned,” Pannier-Runacher said...

If true, this should help Europe support Ukraine without leaving its citizens in the dark, weighted down by extreme energy prices. (European electricity rates recently hit the previously unimaginable figure of 1000 Euros/MWh, and people, notably the poor are suffering enormously.

Issues in the French nuclear industry were recently covered in a commentary in the scientific journal Nature:

Why France’s nuclear industry faces uncertainty

Subtitle:

No other country produces more nuclear power per capita. But climate change, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and French politics could change that.

Around 70% of French electricity is derived from the splitting of atoms, and no other country produces more nuclear power per capita. More than a means of keeping the lights on, France’s prowess in the nuclear space is also a source of national pride — the amalgamation of decades of research that stretch back to the discovery of polonium and radium by Marie Skłodowska Curie and Pierre Curie in Paris in the late 1890s.

Today, nuclear energy earns the country more than €3 billion (US$3 billion) per year in electricity exports. This has taken on fresh saliency as global energy prices spike in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Yet the nuclear energy industry in France is facing significant challenges. Climate change, for example, is already hampering French nuclear output. An especially hot and dry summer has warmed the country’s rivers and lowered water levels, reducing the ability of its energy companies to use the water to cool nuclear reactors. Some power plants are beginning to show their age and require extensive maintenance for corrosion damage, which could end up taking years. All of this has conspired to force half of France’s nuclear reactors offline for now. This couldn’t have come at a worse time: Europe’s energy prices and supplies are already under immense pressure following the invasion of Ukraine.

Politics is also at play. In the wake of presidential and parliamentary elections this year, the future of nuclear energy in France seems less certain.

Critics of centrist President Emmanuel Macron, who was re-elected in April for a second five-year term, accuse him of being inconsistent on nuclear policy. He previously promised to reduce France’s reliance on nuclear energy, and 2 years ago he pushed ahead with shutting a 42-year-old plant in Fessenheim, close to the border with Germany. Macron’s tone has since shifted: in February, he announced plans to build 6 new reactors at an estimated cost of €50 billion, with the first coming online by 2035.

To achieve this, however, he will need the backing of parliament, which is likely to be difficult following legislative elections in June. The coalition that includes Macron’s Renaissance party won 42.5% of seats — more than any other party, but not enough to keep a governing majority. Voters instead endorsed parties from the far right and left. The coalition of left-wing parties, led by anti-nuclear politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, gained 22.7% of seats. The far right, led by pro-nuclear politician Marine Le Pen, took 15.4% — but cutting a deal with Le Pen, who is a long-time presidential rival of Macron, could prove politically problematic...

This is not a pretty situation.

The issue with cooling water is serious. The French reactors were all built in a 15 year period, essentially eliminating the nation's dependence on coal, as the Nature article notes, 56 reactors came on line. As Mark Nelson notes however, the reactors were never subject to uprates, they just ran and ran and ran and as a result were taken for granted, treated as cash cows for "investments" in unreliable and fossil fuel dependent energy. Although the French ran a successful pilot liquid metal breeder reactor, the Phoenix, the commercial version, the Super Phoenix was a failure. (My son and I discussed sodium coolants this afternoon during our weekly call; I warned him against them.) Even though nuclear energy is the last best hope of having any shot of addressing climate change, reactors built in the 20th century were all basically light water reactors running on Rankine steam cycles with low thermodynamic efficiency and significant needs for liquid water cooling. Although coal plants and gas plants also need cooling, the water demand for Rankine light water reactors is somewhat higher.

The solution to this problem is actually to raise the operating temperatures of reactors to regions well beyond those which water is a working fluid, to increase the thermodynamic efficiency high enough so that the heat discharge requirements are lower. This however is not possible with French reactors as they exist.

But this is a long term solution, not an immediate solution.

Hostility to nuclear energy has left us with climate change, the severity of which is now readily evident all over the planet. As a result one of the many victims of the environmental collapse are rivers. Even under such dire conditions, the hostility has not entirely abated, although reality is forcing us to confront the ignorance behind this hostility.

It may be possible to jury rig a better heat exchange system for existing reactors, and certainly, one would hope that the reactors can run flat out at least in the winter, which looks dire for Europe without Putin's gas.

We'll see.

Interesting times...scary times...but interesting.

I do hope my French friends will pull through.

For the long term, because they hold the world's largest inventory of twice through plutonium from their use of MOX fuels, they do have, whether they are aware of it or not, the most interesting and potentially the most valuable plutonium in the world, with a well spread isotopic vector. I'm glad my kid speaks French. I'm advising him in his career to keep his eye on this stuff. It could save the world, this twice through MOX fuel.

[OhNo-Really]

1. Droughts & warmed rivers threaten French nuclear power

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-reduce-nuclear-power-output-as-french-river-temperatures-rise

And the Amazon continues to be mowed and burned, contributing to droughts. As well as other rain forests. Short-sightedness creates long lasting damage.

[kirby]

2. How does your nuclear...

hold up when shelled with artillery? Or occupied by the enemy?

Or maybe talk to former Fukishima population or Chernobyl?

Or the piling up waste that nobody wants in their back yard?

It is not a panacea. When or if things go wrong, the consequences can be massive.

[NNadir]

3. It's somewhat telling that people are more concerned with their irrational fears of a radiation...

...leak than from the nuclear plant in Ukraine than they are with the effect of shells on buildings or human beings.

So far the death toll from shelling the reactors has been zero, except perhaps for the coal and gas burned to power computers to carry on with paranoid fears of the situation, egged on by a myopic and indifferent media.

By contrast, the death toll from shelling buildings in Ukraine has not been zero. Is there a movement afoot to ban buildings because they don't stand up to shelling?

I note that the war in Ukraine has been funded by the billions of Euros Germany paid Putin so it could shut its nuclear plants in a paean to fear and ignorance.

I of course, am appalled by the death toll associated with the diversion of dangerous fossil fuels to weapons of mass destruction. Other people argue that any amount of people can be killed by anything, and be killed in vast numbers, so long as it doesn't involve exposure to radiation.

I discussed this morbid and frankly immoral selective attention in some detail here previously: Some comments on the war situation with Chernobyl as well as the operable nuclear plants in Ukraine.

As for things "going wrong," I note that the dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste kills about seven million people without a peep of outrage from people whining - insipidly I think - about so called "nuclear waste." When noting this, I often cite and quote one of the world's premier medical journals, The Lancet.

I keep the text handy to use whenever I encounter people who in my opinion, just don't give a shit about the effects of dangerous fossil fuels.

It is here: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

It would be interesting if people carrying on about the nuclear reactors at Fukushima were at all interested in the fact that being a coastal city, about 20,000 people were killed nearly instantly by seawater.

The above data suggests that something like 70 to 80 million people died from air pollution since Fukushima, without a mote of acknowledgement from people who want to prattle endlessly about the reactors without giving a rat's ass about the destruction of a coast city.

Is there a movement afoot to ban coastal cities because of the Tohoku earthquake, or is this another instance of selective attention where only radiation matters, and any number of people can be killed by anything else without a whit of care?

Yet, I note, with more than a modicum of moral disgust, that in the minds of many people, Fukushima matters despite the vanishingly small death toll - if any - from radiation, and climate change doesn't matter.

I think maybe, just maybe it's not a matter of "if" and "when" dangerous fossil fuels go wrong. They are going wrong. It's killing 18,000 people per day, every day. The waste is piling up in the planetary atmosphere with the result that the world's rivers are dying, crops are failing around the world, ancient glaciers on which billions of people depend for water are disappearing, and people are literally dying from extreme heat. It's called climate change.

And someone wants to chat pleasantly about Fukushima? Really? Can this be even remotely serious?

I hear this sort of rhetoric all the time. There are few silver linings for me or anyone else on the Covid situation, but it was nice to see in any case, an equivalent of anti-nukes in anti-vaxxers. These are the sort of people who elevate cartoonish risks and their own ignorance above human life in my view.

It's well understood that nuclear energy, while not risk free, any more than any energy system is risk free, saves lives, as noted in a very famous paper by the climate scientist Jim Hansen and his colleague:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

I have spent the bulk of my adult life eagerly learning every damned thing I've had time to learn about used nuclear fuels. I consider them a tremendous resource for the future generations that my generation screwed over with climate change, selective attention, and specious silliness and sloganeering.

Have a pleasant week.

[kirby]

4. My concern

My concern is that when technological solutions are evaluated to address climate change, serious consideration needs to be given to what happens if that technology fails. Nuclear disasters due to whatever reasons -- poor design, corrupt business practices, shoddy maintenance, stretched supply chains, terrorist attack, tsunami / weather, war conflicts, etc -- are too often trivialized. When something does happen those dangers may not even be known for 10-20 years until there are cancer hot spots. Or failure can cause both displacement of large populations for decades and make land areas inhabitable. Compare those failure scenarios with natural disaster (or shelling) wiping out a solar farm or windmills. You might feel those are cartoonish risks, but I don't. I think any technology can fail for a variety of reasons and what happens when it fails is extremely important. From an engineering point of view, I think of it as similar to requiring designs to meet a hundred year flood standard. With climate change those so called hundred year floods are happening much more frequently and once in a hundred year failures happen. When that failure is nuclear the consequences of that failure are much greater than other technologies.

[hunter]

5. Solar and wind have already failed us...

... serving only to prolong our dependence on natural gas, and destroying large swaths of the natural environment.

They are false hopes and the fossil fuel industry knows it.

[NNadir]

6. I'm sorry to state that it is nonsense to state that a nuclear plant failure...

...is "much greater" than "other technologies."

If Chernobyl had wiped out the closest major city to it Kyiv - which it obviously did not - the death would have been the order of three million people or about 3/6ths of the annual death toll associated with the normal operations of dangerous fossil fuel operations killed in the year the reactors failed, 1986.

Since 1986 about 250 million people have died from air pollution, most of them killed, in my view. because of a public fetish about radiation. This is not counting the death toll associated with extreme weather from climate change, nor the death toll associated with the famines that surely will result from wilted crops and vanished water supplies that we observing in 2022.

It was Chernobyl, more than any other event, that changed me from rote, badly educated antinuke into a pro-nuclear activist, since the pabulum I'd heard up to that time about the consequences of a major reactor failure did not stand up to even a superficial inspection.

We now know what the consequences of reactor failures are, and we also know the design features and operational features by which we can further minimize risks.

Frankly this fetish about radiation is killing far more people than radiation has killed in the 70 year history of commercial nuclear operations