McCain's French kiss

Financial Post ^ | May 13, 2008 | Lawrence Solomon

[Delacon]

The Republican nominee backed nuclear this week, but the U.S. shouldn't try to imitate the French disaster

                                    By Lawrence Solomon
"If France can produce 80% of its electricity with nuclear power, why can’t we?,” asks U.S. presidential candidate John McCain. Nuclear power is a cornerstone of Senator McCain’s plan to combat climate change, which he is unveiling this week.
McCain thinks he is asking a simple rhetorical question. As it turns out, he is not. His question is technical, with an answer that will surprise him and most Americans. Nuclear reactors cannot possibly meet 80% of America’s power needs — or those of any country whose power market dominates its region — because of limitations in nuclear technology. McCain needs to find another miracle energy solution, or abandon his vow to drastically cut back carbon dioxide emissions.
Unlike other forms of power generation, nuclear reactors are designed to run flat-out, 24/7 — they can’t crank up their output at times of high demand or ease up when demand slows. This limitation generally consigns nuclear power to meeting a power system’s minimum power needs — the amount of power needed in the dead of night, when most industry and most people are asleep, and the value of power is low. At other times of the day and night, when power demands rise and the price of power is high, society calls on the more flexible forms of generation — coal, gas, oil and hydro-electricity among them — to meet its additional higher-value needs.
If a country produces more nuclear power than it needs in the dead of night, it must export that low-value, off-peak power. This is what France does. It sells its nuclear surplus to its European Union neighbours, a market of 700 million people. That large market — more than 10 times France’s population — is able to soak up most of France’s surplus off-peak power.
The U.S. is not surrounded, as is France, by far more populous neighbours. Just the opposite: The U.S. dominates the North American market. If 80% of U.S. needs were met by nuclear reactors, as Senator McCain desires, America’s off-peak surplus would have no market, even if the power were given away. Countries highly reliant on nuclear power, in effect, are in turn reliant on having large non-nuclear-reliant countries as neighbours. If France’s neighbours had power systems dominated by nuclear power, they too would be trying to export off-peak power and France would have no one to whom it could offload its surplus power. In fact, even with the mammoth EU market to tap into, France must shut down some of its reactors some weekends because no one can use its surplus. In effect, France can’t even give the stuff away.
Not only does France export vast quantities of its low-value power (it is the EU’s biggest exporter by far), France meanwhile must import high-value peak power from its neighbours. This arrangement is so financially ruinous that France in 2006 decided to resurrect its obsolete oil-fired power stations, one of which dates back to 1968.
France’s nuclear program sprung not from business needs but from foreign policy goals. Immediately after the Second World War, France’s President, Charles de Gaulle, decided to develop nuclear weapons, to make France independent of either the U.S. or the USSR. This foreign policy goal spawned a commercial nuclear industry, but a small one — France’s nuclear plants could not compete with other forms of generation, and produced but 8% of France’s power until 1973.
Then came the OPEC oil crisis and panic. Sensing that French sovereignty was at stake, the country decided to replace oil with electricity and to generate that electricity with nuclear. By 1974, three mammoth nuclear plants were begun and by 1977, another five. Without regulatory hurdles to clear and with cut-rate financing and a host of other subsidies from Euratom, the EU’s nuclear subsidy agency, France’s power system was soon transformed. By 1979, France’s frenzied building program had nuclear power meeting 20% of France’s power generation. By 1983 the figure was about 50% and by 1990 about 75% and growing.
Despite the subsidies, the overbuilding effectively bankrupted Electricite de France (EdF), the French power company. To dispose of its overcapacity and stay afloat, EdF feverishly exported its surplus power to its neighbours, even laying a cable under the English Channel to become a major supplier to the UK. At great expense, French homes were converted to inefficient electric home heating. And EdF offered cut-rate power to keep and attract energy-intensive industries — Pechiney, the aluminum supplier, obtained power at half of EdF’s cost of production, and soon EdF was providing similar terms to Exxon Chemicals and Allied Signal.
These measures helped but not enough — in 1989, EdF ran a loss of four billion French francs, a sum its president termed “catastrophic.” The company had a 800-billion-franc debt, old reactors that faced expensive decommissioning, and unresolved waste disposal costs. To keep lower-cost competitors out of the country, France also reneged on an EU-wide agreement to open borders up to electricity competition.
France’s nuclear program, in short, is an economic disaster, and a political one too — 61% of the French public favours a phase-out of nuclear energy.
“Is France a more secure, advanced and innovative country than we are?,” McCain also asked. “I need no answer to that rhetorical question. I know my country well enough to know otherwise.”
But McCain does not know France well enough to know why nuclear power’s negative record over there says nothing positive about what it can do for people over here, on this side of the Atlantic.

                                                            Financial Post
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud. E-mail: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com. Fourth in a series.

[Nuc1]

Excellent! Welcome back.

[Nuc1]

Thanks partner. I am not a weaponeer. There are folks on FR that are. I'd suspect our deterrence is being maintained just fine, and will be regardless of who is in power.

We can make mixed oxide fuel MOX using Pu-239 and other stuff. Reprocessing spent fuel and using fast breeder technology will give us fuel for unlimited electric generation. Just the ticket for heating homes, powering industry, and making oil from coal, shale, and sands. My cars need fuel.

Remember loose lips sink ships. One never knows who is reading this stuff.

[Nuc1]

Most of what I know about breeders goes back to the days before Carter killed our project. Should be a simple process, conceptually anyway. Reactivity might be touchy though. Even if we can't perfect fast breeder technology we have hundreds of years of uranium in the oceans in addition to what we have on land.

Not quite on subject but I saw a write up about a gas cooled, carbon moderated, electricity generating reactor complex, optimized to make hydrogen. It was wicked cool. Worked on a heat cycle the name of which I was not familiar with and don't recall. Gitting old. Dang

[reg45]

If we have excess nuclear capacity at night, we could use it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen could be used as a non-carbon based fuel for vehicles.

[reg45]

Liberals don't want clean energy - they want no energy and no people. Remember the word banana (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything). They are neo-luddites. They want us to go back to living in trees and picking berries - like baboons.

[Nuc1]

Oh, and one more thing about breeders. The fuel produced is primarily Plutonium.

Yup and we use it in mixed oxide fuel. Don't worry about beta. Properly designed it will be fine. And we will design in plenty of margin. And we won't operate anywhere near it. Think of the car analogy; a nuke weapon would correspond to a runaway top fuel dragster. A nuke power plant would correspond to an 18 wheeler. Lots of low down power, in it for the long haul. Not that much peak power and certainly not something that would run away with you when you hit the accelerator. Stomp a top fuel dragster throttle and what do you get? Nuff sad. :D)

[reg45]

We could use the excess electrical power to charge up a huge electrified fence on our southern border. Fry those illegals like flies in a bug-zapper.

[Delacon]

“If we have excess nuclear capacity at night, we could use it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen could be used as a non-carbon based fuel for vehicles.”

The “we can use the excess energy for...” argument has been used several times on this thread. A big question come to mind when anyone gets all Jules Verne on me. Why aren't we already doing it? I usually get a sense after a little research that the reason is that its either not economically feasible or logistically possible. The “lets go hydrogen” is a bit of both don't you think?

[Delacon]

On a side note, did you know that one of the reasons domestic fissile material production is way down and incapable of meeting our current needs(we import that too) is that we made an arrangement with Russia back in 1993 to buy their weapons grade material. Not saying we shouldn’t have done it, but food for thought.

[Delacon]

Maybe it comes down to not doing it like the French(like I've never heard that before)...

French power myths

Posted: May 21, 2008, 7:44 PM by NP Editor

France may export massive amounts of nuclear power, but that success doesn’t come without its difficulties 

                                                By Mycle Schneider
In his rebuttal to Lawrence Solomon’s May 13 column on France’s nuclear power system, French ambassador Daniel Jouanneau made a number of highly misleading claims (letter, May 16). These assertions are especially relevant in light of France’s recent entry into Ontario’s potential multi-billion market, in which Franco-German Areva NP, the world’s largest nuclear vendor, is competing against Japanese-owned Westinghouse  Electric Co. and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.
Working in France on nuclear issues for 25 years, four of them as a direct advisor to the Environment Minister’s Office, I am familiar with the French nuclear establishment. The Ontario government should thoroughly scrutinize both the French nuclear program in general and, in particular, the ongoing difficulties of Areva NP in meeting quality-control standards, deadlines and budget terms at its current building sites in Finland and France.
The ambassador’s general claims conveniently confuse electricity and energy. While nuclear energy provides 78% of France’s electricity, this corresponds to only 18% of the total energy that consumers use. In other words, France’s nuclear program does not come close to “ensuring its energy independence.” Oil meets almost half, and fossil fuels over 70%, of France’s final energy needs, as is the case in many other countries. Moreover, all of France’s uranium is imported.
“Since 1970, 50% of France’s CO2 emissions have been avoided thanks to nuclear energy.” That statement by the French ambassador is flatly wrong. France’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2006 were some 13% lower than in 1970, but even higher than by the middle of the 1980s.
“Efficiently meeting the power needs of its population”? Let’s rather say, the government-owned electricity utility — Electricité de France (EDF) — deploys massive efforts to encourage ever more electricity use, in particular in the form of highly inefficient space heat. Picture this: To generate electricity, you heat water and lose between half (a modern gas plant) and two-thirds (a nuclear plant) of the energy in the transformation process, plus an additional 7% to 10% in the grid before the electricity heats air in the home. A modern natural gas or oil-based central heating system loses less than 10% of the energy in the form of waste heat.
“Environmentally responsible”? The Hague plutonium factories emit thousands of times the amount of radioactivity of a French nuclear power plant and cause a collective dose to the world population comparable with those that resulted from the major accidents in 1957 at Kyshtym in Russia or Windscale in the U.K.
France’s nuclear energy policy is anything but “innovative.” The best example is the nuclear establishment’s total inability to adapt to the failure of the plutonium-fuelled fast-breeder program. Having squandered tens of billions of dollars on the plutonium economy, it now sits on two giant plutonium factories at The Hague, despite having lost nearly all of its foreign commercial reprocessing clients. Yet Areva continues to boast that one gram of plutonium is “equivalent” to one ton of oil. It is amazing that such an apparently valuable resource gets a zero value in the accounts of EDF, owner of a stunning 50-ton plutonium stockpile  — at US$100 per barrel of oil, the plutonium should be worth more than US$30-billion! Even more amazing, the Dutch pay EDF to rid them of their plutonium separated at The Hague. Usually, one sells a valuable resource.
“France is the world’s largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation”? France in 2007 exported 83 terawatt-hours and imported 27.5 TWh, indeed a large net export. What the ambassador does not say is that France cheaply exports baseload power and imports very expensive, essentially fossil fuel peak-load power to use in madly wasteful heating systems in the winter. Net power imports from nuclear phase-out country Germany alone averaged about 8 TWh over the last few years. The CO2 emissions linked to these imports are, of course, attributed to the exporting country and not to France.
Finally, the ambassador states that “France is about to deploy new-generation reactors.” After 2.5 years of construction, the Franco-German European Pressurized Reactor project in Finland is two years behind schedule and US$2.3-billion, or 50%, over budget. The equivalent EPR project in France started on Dec. 3, 2007. The nuclear safety authorities carried out an inspection the same day and noted the company’s failure to meet basic technical specifications and procedures. Following inspections revealed more significant insufficiencies.
These difficulties stem from knowledge-management problems that can only get worse. Some 40% of EDF’s operators and maintenance staff will retire by 2015. Facing a formidable shortage of skilled workers, France has already started fishing in foreign waters for willing students. As the French Embassy points out on its Web site: “Indeed, the need for students in atomic energy is estimated at 1,200 graduated students a year for the next 10 years, although nowadays the number of graduated students is of 300 per year. … Among the most significant initiatives stands the creation of an international master in 2009, which contents will be taught in English in order to be open to French but also to foreign students.”
France’s nuclear program produces not only a bag of kilowatt-hours but also numerous problems, many of them hidden as negative system effects. Countries wishing to import French nukes should look behind the curtain first.

                                                            Financial Post
Mycle Schneider is a principal in Paris-based Mycle Schneider Consulting and is the author of World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2007. mycle@orange.fr
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/22/french-power-myths.aspx

[DoughtyOne]

I can’t fault that. It’s not going to hurt Obama either. Your vote would never have gone to him anyway. But it will make him think it hurt him, and I kinda like that myself. Something to think about...

[SierraWasp]

"...like baboons."

Nancy Pillousy fits the description of a MANDRILL!!!

[SierraWasp]

Excellent posted reply, Delacon... excellent!!!

[Delacon]

I started the thread with an article that asserts that McCain is wrong for looking at the French experience for a reason to pursue a pro nuke policy. I am pro nuke so I tossed it out there because I always like to challenge my beliefs, especially in areas where I KNOW there are more knowledgeable Freepers than I who can address the subject. I have to admit that the article led me to have a less positive view of nuclear power than I previously had. This thread made me search and find an article that not only defends Mr. Solomon but clarifies how bad the French nuclear power industry screwed up. I think that Mr. Solomon comes across as anti-nuke in the article with which I started this thread. Many on the thread think so. I don't think that was his goal. Its incumbent on that author to get his point across. I think he stumbled. This article isn't anti-nuke so much as it is anti-french energy policy.

[SierraWasp]

Ok... That does it! I'm bookmarkin this thread!!!

I dearly love those that provoke intelligent/commonsense thought/comment and this one has really done it!!!

I also like it best when experienced/knowledgeable contributors keep us all better informed as to the facts of the matter!!!

Great thread, Delacon... Great thread indeed...

[thackney]

The low value night time nuclear power production

Nuclear plants are almost always base loaded. They run near full power day and night. Plants that are easier to start and stop like Natural Gas Turbine tend to take the swing load from day to night.