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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Please provide those “studies and researches” that backup your claim, because a simple calculation shows that the world’s largest WWTP, Hongrin-Leman (100GWh in capacity and 480MW in power, over a 90km² basin) contains just 10% of the capacity needed and only 0.7% of the power required for a country like France to last a winter night (~70GW during ~14h of night).

    So we’d need “only” 10 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of capacity, but 142 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of power. In other words, we’d need to flood at best 8.5x the surface area of Paris, and at worst the entire surface area of the Île de France department, home to 12 million inhabitants. And that’s just for one night without wind (which happens very regularly), assuming we rely on solar and wind power.

    Then we need to find enough water and enough energy to pump it to fill the STEP completely in 10 hours of daylight, otherwise we’ll have a blackout the following night.

    Wind and solar power cannot form the basis of a country’s energy production, because they are intermittent energies, and the storage needed to smooth out production is titanic. These energies rely on hydroelectricity, nuclear power and fossil fuels to be viable on a national scale.



  • interesting idea, though Chernobyl and Fukushima were both gen2s 💀

    The reactor that exploded at Chernobyl was an RBMK model, not a PWR. This implies major design differences from French PWRs, including:

    • A positive temperature coefficient, which means that an increase in core temperature leads to an increase in reactivity, which in turn leads to an increase in core temperature, and so on, implying instability and the possibility of a runaway. French PWRs are designed with a negative temperature coefficient, so an increase in core temperature leads to a decrease in reactivity, and vice-versa, physically preventing the runaway that caused Chernobyl.
    • A flaw in the shutdown system: graphite rods were used to reduce reactivity during reactor shutdown. On the one hand, these graphite rods descended too slowly into the reactor core, and on the other, they physically increased the reactor’s reactivity when they were first inserted, before reducing it. In fact, it was irradiated graphite that burned and radioactively contaminated the whole area around Chernobyl, not uranium or anything else. On french ones, there is simply no graphite, nothing inflammable nor any rods of any sort, it’s water that’s used to stop the reactors.
    • There was also no containment vessel.

    Two things to note: the USSR knew about these defects years before the Chernobyl disaster, but the scientists who raised the alarm were neutralized. The other is that the explosion and fire in the reactor were caused by the failure of inexperienced technicians to follow procedures, under pressure from senior management, because the plant was to be visited by a high-ranking official the following day, and therefore the tests they were running at the moment had to be completed at all costs.

    Chernobyl exploded because of the USSR’s cult of secrecy and appearance, causing incompetence and corruption.

    For Fukushima, it should be noted that Fukushima Daini, although closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, but with better safety standards, was only slightly damaged and even served as a refuge for tsunami survivors.

    For Daichii, same thing as Chernobyl, we have a very long list of failures and even falsifications by TEPCO dating from 2002, and even more in 2007, with alarms sounded on all sides by seismologists and scientists of all sides, and the government did not react.

    We must understand that these are not disasters that happened out of nowhere, that we could never have predicted, and even less that we could never have avoided. It was a very long succession of bad choices by the incompetent and corrupt.

    But despite all this, the Fukushima nuclear disaster caused no deaths, and Chernobyl only killed a few thousand people at most. Nuclear power, in its entire history, has killed only a fraction of what coal kills each year.

    I guess it could be made more safe cheaply with modern electronics and software (seeing IoT/“AI”/boeing software engineers in a nuclear facility would freak me the fuck out though)

    It has already been done, and without AI/IOT or anything of that kind. For the French REPs, this resulted in the implementation of additional testing protocols (I know that they tested accelerated aging over 10-20-30 years of parts like cables, for example), addition of generators, renovation and improvement of industrial parts, etc.

    Both Chernobyl and Fukushima could’ve been avoided/reduced in effect with good failsafe software imo.

    No. Fukushima Daichi’s walls were just not meant to handle more than a 5 meters wave. It took a 14 meters high wave right in the face.

    I kinda doubt we’d be able to make gen2s cheaper than gen3s (at least in small capacities) though, because their production lines and designs would’ve been long shut down/forgotten

    The industrial fabric has been crumbling for a long time, that’s for sure, but at least the designs are much simpler, and we have thousands of engineers working on gen IIs and can contribute their expertise. We don’t have any of that on the gen IIIs.


  • Waryle@jlai.lutoWorld News@lemmy.worldGermany to miss 2030 climate goal: experts
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    5 months ago

    Pretty much every nuclear reactor that’s recently been built has been crazily over budget and significantly late. It seems it is usually a decade later than planned.

    If you look at the EPRs, well, we can thank the Germans who co-developed the project, and pushed for excessive requirements making the design complex, such as the double containment and the system to make maintenance possible without shutting down the reactor. Requirements that the French didn’t need or want, but which were accepted as a concession to keep the Germans in the project, before they slammed the door anyway.

    Even Okiluoto and Hinkley Point can be regarded as serial entries, so different are they from Flamanville, and so much work had to be done to simplify them.

    Let’s scrap the EPR design, go back to Gen IIs for now, since we know they’re reliable, safe, cheap and easy to build, and move straight on to Gen IV when it’s ready.

    Anyway, the beginning of construction is a highly misleading timeframe. There’s a long process before construction even starts. Not unique to nuclear reactors.

    You still have nuclear power plants, you don’t even have to start from scratch. But yes, NIMBYS are a significant problem, but renewables are already facing this problem too, and it’s going to intensify greatly with the amount of space it takes to build wind turbines, solar panels, and the colossal amount of storage it takes to make them viable without fossil, hydro or nuclear power.

    I dislike nuclear reactor discussions because of similar arguments. E.g. “new technology” fixes some problem, while ignoring the drawbacks

    I’m talking about Gen II reactors like the 56 that make up France’s nuclear power fleet, which are tried and tested, safe, inexpensive, efficient, and have enabled France to decarbonize almost all its electricity in two decades. I’m not into technosolutionism, I’m into empiricism.

    If someone says that it’ll take 15 years then the person didn’t solely mean the actual construction. They mean from wanting it to having it working.

    Okay, so the 4 Blayais reactors, totalling 3.64GWe (equivalent to almost 11GW of wind power, but without the need for storage or redundancy) were connected to the grid 6.5 to 8.5 years after the first public survey, made before the project was started.

    I’m not claiming that every reactor project will be built so quickly, but we have to stop pretending that nuclear power is inherently slow to build. It’s the lack of political will that makes nuclear power slow to build, and it’s not an unsolvable problem.


  • Gen II reactors are the reactors design which has been built between the 70’s up to 2000, it has nothing to do with SMRs.

    My point was that there’s no reason to insist on a ridiculously complex reactor design such as the EPR (which is a Gen III reactor), and that we can simply go back to the proven designs of the second generation for two or three decades, until we finish developing the fourth generation, which has real arguments.



  • None of this stuff exists and there is no timeline as when it might be made into reality. Just another pipe dream.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    No they haven’t. Not at all. You obviously have no clue what you’re talking about.

    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.

    Yeah yeah yeah, same old bullshit. The reality is that this stuff just doesn’t work economically.

    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.



  • 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.

    You cannot even put a price tag on nuclear storage because it’s never been done before

    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.




  • Morrowind has never been a pale shadow of Daggerfall. It’s just another take on the RPG genre, and a masterful one.

    Of course, it’s not a RPG sandbox like Daggerfall was and that might put off the early Elder Scrolls fans, but it’s superior to its big brother on numerous accounts : story lines, lore, immersion, quests, etc.

    Morrowind is a handcrafted marvel with manually placed details everywhere that make the game fascinating and fun to explore, unlike Daggerfall which was big, but repetitive due to its procedural system.