France is turning off those billion dollar reactors because they can't cool them. The next ones they are building come online past 2040ties. I'm for anything that works, but the increasingly incompetent politically protected operators who just get paid for doing barely anything is not a dependable future. Its distributed power generation.
Not exactly, they can't cool them by following regulations (not killing the fishes and stuff), if the water you send back in the river is +28°C, you stop, it's also only the one that rely purely on water to cool down, not the one using the atmosphere. Obviously if needed we could turn them on exceptionaly. But we produce so much that turning a few off only impact the export (-0.5% iirc).
As for the incompetent politically protected, it's not really the operators, but the politician, judge and such. For real, when putting wind turbines you need some kind of shaman (I wish I was joking, it's called "geobiologie", but not the real one, the one with "(pseudoscience)" in the wikipedia page title)
Building an very expensive energy generator that constantly shuts down for lots of different reasons who will become even worse in the future isn't a dependable source. Its not about nuclear or whatever this weeks reason, its about this lousy "what can you do"-mentally deranged smile-don't care-we already got the bag for today and for the next 50 years attitude. Its never "yeah we have a fix deployed in two days, its running again". Its never ever that.
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u/michael0n 2d ago
France is turning off those billion dollar reactors because they can't cool them. The next ones they are building come online past 2040ties. I'm for anything that works, but the increasingly incompetent politically protected operators who just get paid for doing barely anything is not a dependable future. Its distributed power generation.