alt Hacker NewsFrance is part of the EU power grid and flexibility comes from that not from nuclear power plants. And the government had to rise the subsidies for nuclear energy to prevent higher rises of the energy prices. The costs for the consumers still raised.
And their power plants were in trouble in the last hot summer because the rivers were too hot to be used for cooling. Won‘t be the last time. And that will be a big problem when people turn on their AC in a heat wave but the power plants can’t power up because they don’t have enough cool water.
And that was before drone wars were a thing.
People react nervously when unknown drones fly around airports and power plants.
And didn’t we learn from the internet that centralization is a bad thing? Nuclear power plants are exactly that.
Imagine a grid where every consumer is also a producer who can satisfy their energy needs at least partially for themselves even without the grid. Try to blackout that.
"France is part of the EU power grid and flexibility comes from that not from nuclear power plants." - blatant lie. You can see in generation data they are flexing a lot in the summer. https://www.services-rte.com/en/view-data-published-by-rte/g...
"And their power plants were in trouble in the last hot summer" - blatant lie. Cooling was fine, it's env protection law to avoid damaging the fauna(read - to not boil fish). Yet, it affects about 0.02% of annual generation and valid almost exclusively to NPP without cooling towers. Yet in those exact periods EDF was net exporting about 14GW to neighbors, again, data is public. French nukes can handle ppl's AC's just well, probably EDF even hopes for that to modulate their npp less and get more $
Why people always spread such nonsense without even checking the facts? Like https://www.vie-publique.fr/files/rapport/pdf/288726.pdf
"And didn’t we learn from the internet that centralization is a bad thing? Nuclear power plants are exactly that." France has a combination of centralized and decentralized power - npp's are distributed around the country but each can generate a lot of power. Even more distribution and you start paying a ton for transmission lines and maintenance. That's the reason Germany started subsidizing them from this year, with about 6bn/y. Full decentralization is not a feature and you still can't achieve it since transmission system is centralized, prime example being recent cascade blackout in Spain.
"Imagine a grid where every consumer is also a producer who can satisfy their energy needs at least partially for themselves even without the grid. Try to blackout that." - that'll mean having to need a fully parallel grid for firming. Besides, a lot of home solar are grid followers - if there's a blackout, it'll shut down too unless you have a special invertor+bess which many dont have (yet)
"And that was before drone wars were a thing." - a drone would do nothing to a NPP. Even an airplane impact can be tolerated depending how new is the NPP.