"France will save 39 billion euros ($44.5 billion) if it refrains from building 15 new nuclear plants by 2060, and bets instead on renewable energy sources to replace its all its aging atomic facilities, a government agency said."
If France with it's experience with last gen, and one of the most built next gen designs is thinking this, then it doesn't really bode well for fission plants. I think the world should go hard for renewable and storage as imperfect as they are, while increasing research for fusion plants.
The basic tech/economic balance point is that fission plant tech is highly matured to a high-cost point that is unlikely to shift downwards anytime soon, while renewables and even more so storage tech is on a rapid cost decrease in the manufacturing s-curve - with quite a bit more to run, and they're at pretty close to parity with nuclear in price/watt. Renewables + storage are faster to put up at watt/time - which factors into even more reduced project costs - and more importantly a much wider range of financing options and players who have or can rapidly develop capability to put up renewable plants, leading to even more cost reductions.
Someone from EDF's US division came to our department (this was late 2016) to give a colloquium and try to recruit undergrads to work in their renewables research division. He and I got into a massive fight about what would happen if they had any revenue bonds out on peaker plants (or nuclear) and something like this happened.
Given that they sit on a massive number of aging reactors, extremely costly new ones, very few renewables deployed and a state-owned centralized energy production I can't see how they are in a much better position.
I see a few people in this thread making the mistake of thinking France went nuclear for cost or environmental reasons.
The main motivation was geopolitical. You don't need a lot of uranium (less than 10,000 tonnes a year), you can stockpile it, and you can buy it from many countries around the world and indeed across the political spectrum.
Think about how much the US spends to secure its energy supply, which until recently mostly came from the Middle East...
"...and are now in a much better position to decide what to do next."
...if you deliberately ignore the small "issue" of accumulated nuclear waste, that somehow has to be handled for the next couple of hundred years. For many people, this seems to be neglectable compared to the ugly sights of wind turbines.
So you think it's better to have massive quantities of CO2 and various pollutants (including radioactive ones) pumped into the atmosphere? How exactly is that better than a few buckets of nuclear waste?
Why is that a problem? We can still understand all the writings on ancient Roman buildings without any trouble. And it isn't too hard to make pictograms showing that something is dangerous and radioactive. We put some effort into universal pictograms understandable by actual aliens for the Voyager probes; making pictographs understandable by humans is much simpler.
Finally, why are you so determined to believe that no one will have a solution for radioactive waste in a few hundred years? How hard will it be to launch it off the planet if necessary? With the cost/kg of rocket launches coming down, it shouldn't be too hard to dispose of it that way. But for some reason, people like you just insist on sticking with coal power and breathing in all the pollution that creates. I will never understand it.
that was pretty clearly a joke you responded to. (because you can't put a sign on a gas distributed throughout the upper atmosphere even if you wanted to.)
