Waryle

french power plants are getting old

Most of them still have 30+ years of life in them

can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves

Not this again… French nuclear plants has not being stopped because they can’t handle heatwaves, that’s plain bullshit, but because of ecological precaution, which on top of that, seems to be useless

and regularly have major accidents

Also plain bullshit

source(german)

That explains a lot of you take your sources from anti-nuclear organizations

in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.

It’s not the age of wind and solar. We’re still in the age of coal (35% of electricity) and gas (22,5%). If we talk about energy at whole, it’s even worse : 30% is petrol, coal 26% and gas 23%. If you think that solar and wind will stay cheap when everybody will compete for the large amounts of metal and other sources needed to build them, and when we will run out of petrol to mine and produce them all, you’re lying to yourself. Nuclear in comparison require very little resource to build and to operate them.

And that’s without taking into account a basic fact: we don’t have enough room to build enough STEPs and we don’t have enough resources to build enough batteries to run entire countries on solar and wind. Looking at costs in 2026 is just meaningless when we’re actually talking about science fiction.

also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct

Another bullshit: EDF has been making billions of benefits out of nuclear every year for decades (except in 2022). They even made 10+ billions of euros of net benefits the last 3 years.

And EDF is subsidizing France, not the contrary: the State forced EDF to take a huge part of the cost of the Bouclier Tarifaire, and EDF paid billions of euros of dividends to the State as well

Reactors in France are shut down not because of lack of water, but as an ecological precaution because the effects of warming up rivers even more is not well known (even if it seems to have not much more impact than the heat wave in itself )

And even with these reactors shut down, France still exported 5-10GW of power at the time.

So yeah let’s not propagate the anti-nuclear propaganda trying to paint the situation as “nuclear can’t handle global warming and will cause blackouts”, when in reality it’s just us having so much decarbonated electricity that we can afford to produce less as an ecological precaution.