Waryle

They don’t

That’s not brain drain. Brain drain is when high qualified people leave their country, mostly because of the lack of infrastructures costing them opportunities for studying or working in their respective field.

What you’re talking about is capital flight. This is an issue that is systematically raised as a counter-argument by liberals in debates on taxation. The problem is that it is seriously overestimated:

• Leaving a country is a lot more complicated than it sounds: you lose your family, your friends, your culture, your habits. Many millionaires who leave their country end up coming back after a few years.
• You can’t relocate your real estate investments.
• Going abroad doesn’t exempt you from paying taxes (especially exit taxes).
• A country that wishes to do so can prohibit the relocation of a profitable company, or even nationalize it.
• Many rich people who threaten to leave if taxes are raised end up doing the math: if there’s a profitable business, they’ll stay. And in a country that finances its infrastructure soundly and has a good distribution of wealth, there’s profitable business to be had.

• Those are tires, not wheels.
• 35% which uses them means that 65% don’t use them.
• You said “no matter gear you have”, so you can’t use that point.
• With 20cm of fresh snow, even a normal car would be stuck. But if you tell me that you use a special car (a pick-up for example), I will argue that you can use a special bike (such as a fat bike) and roll with it without problem.

And we could save a lot of people if they put on helmets to walk down stairs, and yet I don’t see anyone saying that people are stupid not to wear them.

And your friend, if he drives at 30mph, of course he has to wear a helmet, but the subject is not a sporty practice of cycling, but bike commuting. And helmets does not protect you from a shitty infrastructure and tank-like cars that run you over, so maybe it would be good to stop insulting people and bring some nuance to this debate.

Guess dutch people are stupid, but at least they have way less death per kilometer while cycling ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Finnish children cycle to school

interesting idea, though Chernobyl and Fukushima were both gen2s 💀

The reactor that exploded at Chernobyl was an RBMK model, not a PWR. This implies major design differences from French PWRs, including:

• A positive temperature coefficient, which means that an increase in core temperature leads to an increase in reactivity, which in turn leads to an increase in core temperature, and so on, implying instability and the possibility of a runaway. French PWRs are designed with a negative temperature coefficient, so an increase in core temperature leads to a decrease in reactivity, and vice-versa, physically preventing the runaway that caused Chernobyl.
• A flaw in the shutdown system: graphite rods were used to reduce reactivity during reactor shutdown. On the one hand, these graphite rods descended too slowly into the reactor core, and on the other, they physically increased the reactor’s reactivity when they were first inserted, before reducing it. In fact, it was irradiated graphite that burned and radioactively contaminated the whole area around Chernobyl, not uranium or anything else. On french ones, there is simply no graphite, nothing inflammable nor any rods of any sort, it’s water that’s used to stop the reactors.
• There was also no containment vessel.

Two things to note: the USSR knew about these defects years before the Chernobyl disaster, but the scientists who raised the alarm were neutralized. The other is that the explosion and fire in the reactor were caused by the failure of inexperienced technicians to follow procedures, under pressure from senior management, because the plant was to be visited by a high-ranking official the following day, and therefore the tests they were running at the moment had to be completed at all costs.

Chernobyl exploded because of the USSR’s cult of secrecy and appearance, causing incompetence and corruption.

For Fukushima, it should be noted that Fukushima Daini, although closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, but with better safety standards, was only slightly damaged and even served as a refuge for tsunami survivors.

For Daichii, same thing as Chernobyl, we have a very long list of failures and even falsifications by TEPCO dating from 2002, and even more in 2007, with alarms sounded on all sides by seismologists and scientists of all sides, and the government did not react.

We must understand that these are not disasters that happened out of nowhere, that we could never have predicted, and even less that we could never have avoided. It was a very long succession of bad choices by the incompetent and corrupt.

But despite all this, the Fukushima nuclear disaster caused no deaths, and Chernobyl only killed a few thousand people at most. Nuclear power, in its entire history, has killed only a fraction of what coal kills each year.

I guess it could be made more safe cheaply with modern electronics and software (seeing IoT/“AI”/boeing software engineers in a nuclear facility would freak me the fuck out though)

It has already been done, and without AI/IOT or anything of that kind. For the French REPs, this resulted in the implementation of additional testing protocols (I know that they tested accelerated aging over 10-20-30 years of parts like cables, for example), addition of generators, renovation and improvement of industrial parts, etc.

Both Chernobyl and Fukushima could’ve been avoided/reduced in effect with good failsafe software imo.

No. Fukushima Daichi’s walls were just not meant to handle more than a 5 meters wave. It took a 14 meters high wave right in the face.

I kinda doubt we’d be able to make gen2s cheaper than gen3s (at least in small capacities) though, because their production lines and designs would’ve been long shut down/forgotten

The industrial fabric has been crumbling for a long time, that’s for sure, but at least the designs are much simpler, and we have thousands of engineers working on gen IIs and can contribute their expertise. We don’t have any of that on the gen IIIs.

Pretty much every nuclear reactor that’s recently been built has been crazily over budget and significantly late. It seems it is usually a decade later than planned.

If you look at the EPRs, well, we can thank the Germans who co-developed the project, and pushed for excessive requirements making the design complex, such as the double containment and the system to make maintenance possible without shutting down the reactor. Requirements that the French didn’t need or want, but which were accepted as a concession to keep the Germans in the project, before they slammed the door anyway.

Even Okiluoto and Hinkley Point can be regarded as serial entries, so different are they from Flamanville, and so much work had to be done to simplify them.

Let’s scrap the EPR design, go back to Gen IIs for now, since we know they’re reliable, safe, cheap and easy to build, and move straight on to Gen IV when it’s ready.

Anyway, the beginning of construction is a highly misleading timeframe. There’s a long process before construction even starts. Not unique to nuclear reactors.

You still have nuclear power plants, you don’t even have to start from scratch. But yes, NIMBYS are a significant problem, but renewables are already facing this problem too, and it’s going to intensify greatly with the amount of space it takes to build wind turbines, solar panels, and the colossal amount of storage it takes to make them viable without fossil, hydro or nuclear power.

I dislike nuclear reactor discussions because of similar arguments. E.g. “new technology” fixes some problem, while ignoring the drawbacks

I’m talking about Gen II reactors like the 56 that make up France’s nuclear power fleet, which are tried and tested, safe, inexpensive, efficient, and have enabled France to decarbonize almost all its electricity in two decades. I’m not into technosolutionism, I’m into empiricism.

If someone says that it’ll take 15 years then the person didn’t solely mean the actual construction. They mean from wanting it to having it working.

Okay, so the 4 Blayais reactors, totalling 3.64GWe (equivalent to almost 11GW of wind power, but without the need for storage or redundancy) were connected to the grid 6.5 to 8.5 years after the first public survey, made before the project was started.

I’m not claiming that every reactor project will be built so quickly, but we have to stop pretending that nuclear power is inherently slow to build. It’s the lack of political will that makes nuclear power slow to build, and it’s not an unsolvable problem.

Gen II reactors are the reactors design which has been built between the 70’s up to 2000, it has nothing to do with SMRs.

My point was that there’s no reason to insist on a ridiculously complex reactor design such as the EPR (which is a Gen III reactor), and that we can simply go back to the proven designs of the second generation for two or three decades, until we finish developing the fourth generation, which has real arguments.

Building nuclear takes on average something like 15 years

Building EPRs, yes. Not Gen II reactors, which could be built and running only 4-5 years after the beginning of the construction.

Germany’s coal will be shut off by 2035 anyways.

Only to be replaced by gas, which is still far from being carbon free.

Besides, Germany already has a huge problem because no one can figure out where to put the nuclear waste they already have

No one can agree on where to put nuclear waste. This is not some unsolvable problem, it’s just anti-nuclear that opposes every solution given by scientists.

but we certainly have technology that does the job.

Absolutely not if we’re talking about nation-wide energy storage. The world’s largest STEP, Hongrin-Leman, Switzerland, which occupies a considerable amount of space, has only a capacity of 100 GWh, which represents less than 1h15 of the winter night consumption of a country like France which consumes 70 GW at that time.

It would take 10 to sustain one night without wind, as you can have several each year. Then we would have to fill them entirely in one day for the next night which is impossible.

And that’s just for the problem of capacity, such a STEP generates less than 500MW of power, so it would actually take 140 STEPs of that size to provide enough power.

And we’re talking about today, where most cars and heating are still fossil-fueled and need to be replaced by electric.

Unless you find a technology that is now a miracle, running a country on solar and wind without hydro-electricity or nuclear is science fiction.

I don’t know if that’s what you meant, but you can block JavaScript per-site, block first or third-party scripts separately, etc

The most popular sandwich in France is the Jambon-Beurre, which is just butter and ham

Basically, we can move the times that we use most of our power to the times that power is easy to generate.

How?

For example, the typical risk period for a power grid is during winter nights, when people come home and turn on the heat, cook and do their chores, or relax watching their TVs or playing videogames. How can we postpone such a power usage to another time?

A bad mouth could argue that it wouldn’t make Marseille dirtier

It’s too expensive

Nuclear power isn’t expensive. It’s launching a cutting-edge industry with a lot of inertia and not giving it the time and means to pay for itself that’s expensive.

And don’t even get me started on the Levelized Cost of Energy. These studies give a big advantage to renewable energies, since they only take into account the cost of building, maintaining and dismantling a given energy plant.

That’s roughly 100% of the cost of a nuclear power plant, whereas most of the cost of solar and wind power will be found in the solutions that need to be put in place to compensate for their lack of controllability, such as redundant power plants, dams and other forms of storage of considerable size, which are therefore never counted in these cost estimates.

At present, we don’t even have the technical means to have enough storage to afford 100% wind + solar in a country, so we’re completely unable to estimate how much it would actually cost.

with less carbon-free energy in the end for the money spent and more fossil fuels being used as a consequence

The reality is exactly the opposite: France has been producing most of its electricity with nuclear power since the 70s and 80s, and has had its electricity almost entirely decarbonized since the 90s, for a total cost of less than 150 billion euros for the nuclear industry between 1960 and 2010, according to a report by the Cour des Comptes.

Germany, on the other hand, which has been anti-nuclear and pro-renewables for 20 years, with 40% RE, produces 9 times more carbon with its electricity mix.

And still produces nuclear waste.

The entirety of high level radioactivity waste produced by France for 60 years (containing 90%+ of the radioactivity).

• New reactor designs, whose research projects have been opposed and working prototypes shut down by anti-nuclear campaigners, can reprocess and reuse this nuclear waste.

Just develop batteries, hydrogen and the likes for storage

You can see the contradiction here: how can we claim that renewable energies are cheaper when we have yet to develop solutions to make them work on a national scale?

We’re still a long way from having the technology for batteries that can power entire countries for hours or days on end, and hydrogen means we’ll have to oversize our power plants several times over to make up for its inefficiency.

Thanks to French nuclear power, we have proof that it is possible to produce safe, inexpensive nuclear power that can be deployed in two decades. Almost all of France’s current nuclear fleet was built between 1970 and 1990, providing 70%-80% of French electricity production for almost 40 years, at a rate of 2 reactors completed per year at a cost of 1 billion per 1000MW unit.

We’re still waiting for a working example of a country that runs on wind and solar power without huge hydroelectric capacity or nuclear power for backup.