90
How dependent is France on Niger's uranium?
(www.lemonde.fr)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
90 points (100.0% liked)
Europe
8332 readers
1 users here now
News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures
Rules
(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
- Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
- No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
- No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.
Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The question is more like: "How dependent is France on uranium which is a finite resource?"
"The demand for uranium continues to increase, but the supply is not keeping up. Current uranium reserves are expected to be depleted by the end of the century, and new sources of uranium are hard to find. As a result, uranium prices have been steadily rising, with some estimates predicting a doubling of prices by 2030. This is causing a global uranium squeeze, where the demand for the resource is outstripping the supply."
France: Let's build more nuclear plants, also do not invest into renewable energy, also since we are used to wars for oil, why not having wars for uranium in the future too?
Well, "By the end of the century" is almost 80 years away, that is significantly longer than any normal nuclear power plant lasts.
Also it is very difficult to know which exact price someone pays for uranium because they normal dont buy on the spot market, but via long lasting contracts.
So from my point of view we don't have sufficient information for a proper estimation of the situation.
The end of the century at current rates of use which means about 77 years. At just 10% increased use annually that would double roughly every 7 years which means it won't last nearly that long.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2023/german-net-power-generation-in-first-half-of-2023-renewable-energy-share-of-57-percent.html
No, it is a perfekt baseline energy production method. France is buying our renewable energy, because it can't produce enough with its broken nuclear power plants and the ones not producing full because of the drought. The numbers do not lie.
Is that why you're reopening coal plants?
You have heard of the war in Ukraine, right?
Yes, and if you hadn't closed your nuclear plants you wouldn't have needed to rely on carbon-emitting russian gas-burning power plants.
Renewables are great. But like anything else, they're not suitable for all use cases. And where they're not suitable you have to use greenhouse gas emitting power plants. Wouldn't it be much preferable if those were instead NPPs?
People arguing against nuclear power are arguing for oil/gas/coal, whether they know it or not.
Also, what I see in that graph is that your grid's baseline isn't renewables, but fossil fuels. That's shameful.
Ah yes, 4th generation nuclear reactors will save us, as will fusion reactors. We could make stuff work with existing technology, but that's somehow not good enough. The whole future plans section of the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor reads like the technological challenges of these type of reactors are not as solved as you state it in your post.
Well, you can potentially design them in a way, that you can control the energy output more easily. However, then they will be even less economical than they are now. If you run at lower output, you waste more fuel.
@MattMastodon @Sodis
Free and cheap?!?
You are one deluded individual. Go do your research. Also, nuclear never had subsidies, only wind/solar did.
@MattMastodon @Sodis Only about 40% of demand can be directly met from volatiles (wind and solar), i. e. no intermediate storage. The rest has to come from »backup« or »storage« or however you call it.
Current storage tech is still almost 100% pumped hydro. Batteries have not made a real dent there yet. But pumped hydro is not enough by far, even potentially, and batteries have a long way to go to be even as scalable as pumped hydro.
So, backup. The only clean, scalable backup is nuclear.
@Ardubal @Sodis
We have to be careful. Different counties have very differnt energy make ups. I live in the UK where nuclear is
I don't understand where you got 40% from. This seems arbutrary.
In the UK Nuclear is 15% and renewables about 40% (over the last year) we mainly burn gas for the rest.
@MattMastodon @Sodis Careful about labels. »Renewables« often includes biomass (which is just fast-track fossil tbh) and hydro (which is not so volatile). I'm talking about wind and solar specifically (volatiles).
40% is roughly the mean capacity factor of a good mix of volatiles. This is what you can directly feed to the user from the windmill/panel, without storage. You can expand a bit by massive overbuilding, but you can't overbuild your way out of no wind at night.
@Ardubal @Sodis
Mostly we don't use energy at night. In the UK there is a peak in the morning. In the UK we mainly use gas to fill this. We will have to find a storage solution as nuclear can't be upscale that quickly. Gas was meant to be used just to fill the gaps but it's quickly become a staple.
We need to find a way of smoothing the graph. Energy storage is the best option in the short term.
Or we can vary use.
#nuclear #renewables
@MattMastodon @Sodis Again: that demand is lower at night is already factored in. Roughly 40% of demand can be directly met by volatile sources. You may think nuclear is slow to deploy, but it's still much faster than anything that doesn't exist.
The gap is 60%. Gas is a fossil fuel. Varying use is mostly a euphemism. If you hurt industry, you won't have the industry to build clean energy sources.
@Sodis @MattMastodon Nuclear power plants can quite easily do load following. It happens regularly e. g. in France. However, since it has the lowest running costs, other sources are usually cut first as far as possible.
Yes, it runs at full power most of the time. That's what being a "baseline energy source" means.