Something's Rotten with French Nuclear

What Hacker News said

Recommends leonidasrup · 2026-03 · on “Italy, Belgium set to lose gas supply after biggest LNG plant bombed”

I would really recommend listening to discussion with Mark Nelson, managing director of Radiant Energy Group, about the state of the French nuclear power industry. "Something's Rotten with French Nuclear" [this video]

Cites evilos · 2022-11 · on “EU electricity production by country and source”

Essentially these plants are forced to be unprofitable via energy laws. For example, the nuclear plants are forced to sell their energy to energy traders at unprofitable low rates but those traders are never required to buy the energy and if the price of energy drops below this rate (AFTER it was bought) then the traders can just "return" the energy and the operators have to eat it. This happened during covid when energy prices collapsed due to lack of demand. These middlemen profit off of cheap nuclear energy instead of rate payers. In addition, the nuclear plants must pay a 23 euro per MWh tax that subsidizes the operation of renewable energy. Since the plants are forced to sell their ener

Cites mpweiher · 2024-09 · on “Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal”

Yep. That was a one-time occurrence, due to (a) inspections being deferred during COVID and (b) France's long time catastrophic underinvestment in their nuclear fleet. Until March 2023, there was a law in France that made it illegal to increase nuclear capacity in absolute terms and mandated reduction to under 50% in relative terms. [this video] But again, a one-time event, and it doesn't change the high capacity factors world-wide (over 80%) and the extremely high capacity factors in reasonably well run fleets ( > 90% in the US, and also inGermany when they still had nuclear ).

Cites mpweiher · 2025-09 · on “EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy”

I never disputed that it's a fact that China currently builds more renewables than nuclear. I said it is irrelevant . Those are different things. It's also not "way" more...unless you don't understand the irrelevance of nameplate capacity with intermittent renewables. China is also currently seeing the bottom drop out of their renewables industry, with over a third of the workforce laid off and massive drops in installs and production due to a reduction in subsidies. The EPR2 projects could not even have started in 2022, because he law that prohibits increasing nuclear capacity beyond the currently installed 63.2GW was only repealed in March 2023. And yes, reversing course so massively takes

Cites natmaka · 2025-09 · on “EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy”

> China currently builds more renewables than nuclear. I said it is irrelevant. Those are different things No: nuclear and renewables are electricity-generating equipment types, and all the debate is about the proportion of renewables and nuclear in the final system. Seeing them as disconnected (in different universes) is not even funny. [LINK] > unless you don't understand the irrelevance of nameplate capacity with intermittent renewables. This perspective dates back a time when transporting electricity was expensive (lines, losses...), storing it also was expensive ( ), fossil fuels and nuclear were the only way to obtain gridpower... all this is obsolete. Explanations: [LINK] > China is a