page onenuclear 2
SO, you thought that France was the nuclear system to follow.......? Read on....
/05/2008 :
Financial Post
McCain's French kiss
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/12/the-limits-to-nuclear-mccain-shouldn-t-try-to-follow-french-disaster.aspx
McCain's French kiss
Financial Post: May 13, 2008, 12:10 AM
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.
Whilst his groups other ideas on global warming are entirely against the currently accepted causes, i.e.basically man-made, his facts contained in the above article are perfectly true
French power
myths
Financial Post, 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
--
Member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM)
www.fissilematerials.org
Member of the Independent Group of Scientific Experts (IGSE)
on the detection of clandestine nuclear-weapons-usable materials production
www.igse.org
Right Livelihood Award 1997
(Alternative Nobel Prize)
www.rightlivelihood.org/recip.htm
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