French National Grid is 75% nuclear using reactors with average age of 40 years against life expectancy 25-30 years. Currently 40% of all French reactors are shut down for servicing, maintenance, repairs or replacement. French exisiting reactors were financed privately and today almost half of the annual running cost is paying off the investors, even with some reactors shut down. France cannot afford to replace them nor find partners willing to invest in new nuclear. UK new build reactors stuck in limbo, unlikely to be finished. Nobody wants to invest in nuclear for a launch in 2050 when they can invest in green solutions now that will eliminate the need for anything else long before 2050. Only potential investors in UK nuclear are Chinese. Do we want our grid run by Chinese, or the reactors banned in 5 years when it is discovered they run off Huawei software?
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Dave Takes It On was founded in 2023 and focuses primarily on content about electric vehicles and issues that impact drivers. Dave is based in the North West of the UK and owns a Tesla Model S. He regularly travels around the country, so if you see him feel free to say hello. The channel is supported by his son Jonas, who helps with thumbnails, titles, and technical aspects of the channel.
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26 Comments
That's not quite true. The expensive bit of nuclear reactors are the concrete structure: The foundations, walls, and containment dome. The actual reactor is quite cheap.
So France could simply swap-out the old moving parts in its legacy fleet for new bits, quite cheaply, and keep the reactor buildings working for another 40 years.
Spot on, Dave. Many thanks for this video. You really do make good sense. Cheers, mate! 🎉😊
Nuclear has a place in the mix Dave the issue is lack of development the Chinese are steaming ahead with MSR and other technology that can consume existing waste if designed for this purpose.
Thorium is a relatively common material in the earths core and i believe the Indians are developing technology to utilise this as they have access to the material.
We will end up with waste from Solar, wind and any other power technology that's what human activity does.
Scotland had an oil industry before Middle East Oil was a thing.. It tended to make paraffin and you can still see the piles of waste in many parts of Scotland.I worked in the nuclear industry in the early days at a plant near Preston called Springfields. What is not generally acknowledged is that it came out of a Defence requirement for re-processing nuclear fuel. The other thing which is not acknowledged from the early days are cancers in the area. I was prevented from finishing a report on cancer occurrences near Sellafield when the report started coming up with the wrong answers. The UK are better at hiding information from their citizens than the French. We should stop building new nuclear power stations at Hinkley Point C and invest in grid scale batteries for the base load supply.
But surely the whole point is to not do do it all at once?
Dungeness A 1960s to 2000s
Dungeness B 1980s to 2020s
Sizewell B 1995 to …..
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The range of nuclear power options is increasing. Micro nuclear powerststions are now possible, quicker and cheaper to build. They will have the flexibility to be placed near to heavy industries, where constant demand means they will run close to capacity.
Great video Dave!
This is totally correct. Also the businesses that build the Nuclear Power plants know that they have a finite life, but the private companies take a lot of dividends and fail to put money towards replacement.
Thing is, renewables have now became far cheaper and far quicker to get working. France should be able to add renewables and battery storage at a large scale and rate to then be able to turn off the reactors.
The UK needs to remove nuclear as battery storage and other new technologies are making this possible.
spot on – almost. What happens when you have enthusiasts (fanatics?) driving the agenda. Not only in energy do we currently have crises driven by 'social media'. What happened in the recent auction of new wind licences? Who owns NS oil and gas. Not the UK govt. Look it up. Who owns existing UK wind generation? Not the UK govt. Future UK wind? Not the UK govt. You highlight the danger of 'all eggs in one basket'. All EV sales by 2030? Sensible.? Vast number of EVs provided by ?? No prizes for the answer.We are led by slogans not rational policies. Resilience, cost achievability. national security are paramount. Still first class Dave – mostly.
Nuclear power is a renewable energy source.
It is likely the only viable option for us to remove our dependency on oil and gas without completely destroying our planet and using land that needs to be used for food production and population centres for power generation.
A modern nuclear power plant has upwards of a 60 year life span. At which point it can be refurbished. Nuclear waste is so minute the amounts produced over that 60 year lifespan it can be stored several times over within the footprint of the plant itself.
What do you expect of the wind farms and solar farms also spun up at the same time? They also have a life expectancy, of around 10-20 years.
Blades on turbines being well known for being unrecyclable, needing replacing many times over in that time period.
Name any place, and Tesla Full Self-Driving (Supervised) 12.5.1.3 Will Take You There
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In the context of the renewable energy transition, nuclear makes no sense from any perspective. Baseload is an irrelevance in the age of electrification and smart appliances provided heavy intensive industry electrifies or switches to green hydrogen, and we install sufficient over capacity and short term battery storage to deliver adequate suppy in winter.
I still have my book of petrol vouchers….. somewhere…
Nuclear plants can be upgraded and parts replaced to take it beyond 50-60years. Older stations in the uk are now being targeted for new technologies such as hydrogen or nuclear fusion, great british nuclear have plans 🙂
Dont scaremonger about the safety of them, they are maintained daily as if they were new,
What makes nuclear a government favourite around the world is the ability to have a nuclear weapons programme on the back of it.
Nuclear has never been economic and never will be.
Have you done a video with Paul Burgess yet ? He also has an EV, but does have a different opinion about battery storage or Wind as not be good because of the curtailment costs (being paid for energy that can't be taken by grid but would of been generated)… can you talk about this ? Along with how many batteries does the UK actually need ? I have 30KWh and in the winter still need grid for half of my needs… I can't imadgin how many homes + industry would need whats that 70Million homes * 30kwh + industry etc… can you tell us what you know PLEASE ?
The most fundamental problem with nuclear: It doesn't work well on a small scale, for multiple reasons. Plants are most economical at very large scale, where you spend billions to get gigawatts. This is not just thermodynamically better, but there is a lot of complexity, for each plant, that can then be spread over a lot more megawatts in a larger facility. It then takes a long time to build a plant, by which time the demand may have changed considerably—an example being the WPPSS project, in the Seventies, in the state of Washington. And when there is an accident, it can be a BIG accident, also requiring billions to take care of, along with the human cost and destruction of your whole reputation.
And because they're so big, and so few, opportunities for learning and innovation are hard to take advantage of. Indeed, nuclear seems to be special in actually getting MORE expensive over time.
Yes, you can put a reactor on a submarine, but that requires highly enriched uranium, and that's a whole different critter.
Currently there is a lot of interest in so-called small modular reactors. But most of those are not really all that small, usually being in the hundreds of megawatts.
I said scaling is the core problem with nuclear, but an important second is just the amount that its proponents LIE. Oh, they don't usually tell outright falsehoods, but I've seen case after case of the most ridiculous deception and spin, to minimize the risks of nuclear and to disparage the alternatives. We can get into that if you want, but as I said, the big problem is the necessarily huge scale of a nuclear plant. Hydro has a lot of the same problems, but there are smaller hydro plants, so the problem is not quite so intractable.
The waste problem is actually not as bad as anti-nuclear commentators make it out to be. One good option is deep borehole disposal. The problem with that: Once you drop some barrels down a hole hundreds of meters deep and pour concrete over it, you can pretty much forget about ever retrieving that waste again for reprocessing, or maybe using it in new, more advanced reactors such as LFTR. And that, of course, is what they would love to do.
Meanwhile, solar grows relentlessly, on scales from microwatts to gigawatts, and Wright's Law just keeping rolling along. Wind and solar, together, are now much bigger than nuclear. That trend is not going to reverse.
I'd like to know the numbers attached to the decommissioning of solar/wind systems….. then there is the replacement cost for both as neither have the longevity of nuclear. But the overall issue has to be *what does the UK do when French nuclear isn't available*. The UK draws from France when our grid is stressed (winter etc) and we have NO access to an alternative.
The gas-fired power stations in Britain didn't, on the whole, replace the older open-cycle gas turbine stations. They replaced coal and stunted the new nuclear power stations which were supposed to be replicas of Sizewell B. All due to the short-term thinking of the Tories and the private energy companies they created. If things had gone as they should have, today we'd have another 15-20 GW of nuclear available with another 30-40 years of service life.
Great video
Why are you just jumping on the misinformation and alarmist tropes…..this is utter bull…..🤦♂️
Am I correct in say that the French nuclear power stations are not all coastal, as you need a lot of water to cool them, but many are alongside rivers for their cooling water and guess what global warming and the lower of river levels giving industry needing water one big problem .
You don't half talk a load of crap. I will employ you to talk to my allotment. Shit is great manure. You're going into the realms of fantasy again. For every ounce of carbon we save, China increases 10 fold. They are laughing at us. Silly English, we fart in your general direction. Your farther was a hamster, and your mother smelt of elderberry's We are making loads of money from your stupidity.
Bugger it, I’m buying solar panels and batteries, they’ve dropped 40% in the last month 😮😊😊😊
7:27 – And why? Because the US president stopped nuclear in the US around 1960. If he hadn't done that, the US would be burning nuclear waste now.
Do you know what happens?
The cycle closes when materials are used for nuclear energy, which means that waste is also consumed and converted into energy. This changes nuclear waste disposal from 1000+ years to even 100 years or less.
If anyone is wondering if this is possible… The nuclear waste reactor was built in 1960. So, a nuclear reactor for waste is nothing special or new.
Japan has been doing this for decades….
So, in terms of waste, the Nuclear Power Plant is very good when the cycle is completed.
Maybe I wrote the wrong year… but everything else is even on YouTube.
Reactive power. Look it up.