It looks like an ordinary building site, but for the two massive, rounded concrete shells looming above the ocean, like dusty mushrooms. Here on the Normandy coast, France is building its newest nuclear reactor, the first in 10 years, costing $5.1 billion. But already, President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that France will build another like it.
Flamanville is a vivid example of the French choice for nuclear power, made in the late 1950s by Charles de Gaulle, intensified during the oil shocks of the 1970s and maintained despite the nightmarish nuclear accidents of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Nuclear power provides 77 percent of France’s electricity, according to the government, and relatively few public doubts are expressed in a country with little coal, oil or natural gas.
With the wildly fluctuating cost of oil, anxiety over global warming from burning fossil fuels and new concerns about the impact of biofuels on the price of food for the poor, nuclear energy is getting a second look in countries like the United States and Britain.France is way ahead. Électricité de France, or EDF, is in talks to buy British Energy, for about $24 billion, to renovate Britain’s nuclear plants and build new ones. The French have already contracted to build a third-generation European Pressurized Reactor of the Flamanville type — the world’s safest and most powerful — in Abu Dhabi and China.
There is pride in French exceptionalism and in the technical skill that has produced an industry with no major accidents. In a recent op-ed article in Le Figaro, for example, Yves Thréard boasted: “France hasn’t any oil, but she knew how to exploit a rich idea. In the whirlwind of globalization, civil nuclear power became a weapon, commercial and political, that allowed the country to remain at the avant-garde in the concert of nations.”
I happen to agree. As thoroughly as I embrace renewable energy sources like wind and photo-voltaics, nuclear power generation makes absolute sense.
Absent the corruption and profiteering which dominated the first generation here in the United States.
#30 – O’ Furniture
>>I guess you have researched the subject for
>>about 30 seconds total.
I don’t think they did the 30 seconds. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be blabbering that nonsense.
The were just talking out of their asses. Or maybe the saw an ad from Exxon-Mobile or something.
The ultra greens will block everything including nuclear and coal until we start having brown outs and rolling blackouts.
At this point in time a lot of people will change there minds and say so but it will take years to fix.
32-
Please cite references, otherwise kindly stfu. It’s moronic to make wild accusations that ‘greens’ will block everything, and have nothing whatsoever other than your opinion to back it up.
#24, you make a good point, however I would counter with the argument that many people will make. What if I want to go further than 100 miles? Personally I like to go places on my weekends, and I am sure many others do as well. So my alternatives are to get a second vehicle, or just get one vehicle that is versatile. Given that we have a ways to go before we have an electric car that costs just $10,000 and can keep up with traffic. I just don’t think people are going to want yet another vehicle, that’s of very limited use, and lets be honest at the current time costs allot of money (even 10K is not chump change), when they can get a good little 3 cylinder vehicle and use it, and when they actually want to go further than 80 miles they only have to spend a minute or two filling up the tank.
#25, I think the current problem with hydrogen is cost and generation. The cost of an hydrogen vehicle is pretty expensive. Also their is no infrastructure for the transport of the quantity of hydrogen required to meet all our transportation needs, we would have to build one from scratch. Finally, their is the generation issue, making all that hydrogen through electrolysis is going to required power, and allot of it. The new nuke plants could help with that, but they too would have to be built is large quantities. I agree that hydrogen is probably the best very long term solution, but the costs for it would be pretty staggering.
How do we know oil isn’t renewable? Were there that many dinosaurs to produce all that oil?
# 30 amd # 31. I guess you didn’t do your homework. The re-processing certainly reduces the amount of waste. But it does not completely eliminate it, and there is no way to get rid of what’s left. Also, the reactor sites themselves have useful lives of only decades, compared to thousands of years as no go zones after they are decommissioned. Again, tell me how this qualifies as clean energy.
Eventually we will have to accept wind, solar, geothermal, water wave, MHD, and others as a basket of energy sources.
All we do with oil, coal, gas, nuclear is delay the inevitable.
On the good side, we will never ever have to wage war for alternative energy. I wonder what the military will be doing in the future?