The competition is on for Eastern Europe’s #nuclear power market 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇪🇺 🇵🇱 🇦🇩
The long-term risks and costs of civilian nuclear power are too high.
France has the most nuclearised electricity:
* The cost of managing closed-down civilian nuclear reactors is huge: they produce no electricity but remain radioactive and must be permanently protected from tourists, thieves and terrorists.
* The plan of how to treat the most dangerous radioactive waste is still very uncertain; it *might* start at #Cigéo in 2025:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestion_des_d%C3%A9chets_radioactifs_en_France
> The plan of how to treat the most dangerous radioactive waste
Someone lied to you. Spent fuel has been not only treated by actually *recycled* for years in Orano la Hauge. This is truly fascinating process and worth watching how it's done:
https://scitech.video/videos/watch/53184e23-6490-4158-a616-68af6afc0925
Clarification: "the most dangerous" was an abbreviation for « Déchets MA-VL » 45000 m^3 + « Déchets HA » 3650 m^3 in https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestion_des_d%C3%A9chets_radioactifs_en_France. 90500 m^3 of FA-VL is not yet stored.
Lower emission waste is already stored.
A *tiny* fraction (1172 tonnes/yr , 2013) is recycled at:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_de_retraitement_de_la_Hague
As for the full life cycle:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Démantèlement_nucléaire
Very few FR politicians want to take proper responsibility for handling the full life cycle (waste + dismantling old reactors).
Regarding the waste, there are two reasons why new storage is introduced so slowly: political and economical. Political - people are misinformed by Greenpeace and protest. Economical - the amount of waste is so tiny now that it's not economically viable to build expensive underground storage. Yet.
You're absolutely right, but the worst nuclear accident that can happen in third-generation PWR reactor is shutdown in case of total loss of external and internal power, and loss of coolant.
https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurepassive-safety-in-vvers/
And you cannot run risk analysis in industry without *comparing* against alternatives, can you?
This is precisely why I highlighted the deep geologic repositories in Germany - they are there, they store cyanides, mercury, arsenic... yet nobody cares.
@kravietz @djsumdog
France is where most of the hard empirical data based on a half-century of experience is.
The number of quantifiable parameters for responsible social decision making is huge.
The (statistical) quantification of #risk is not just blabla (if done properly).
Low-probability high-risk events, such as pandemics or civilian nuclear accidents, are part of this. Modelling extreme events (e.g. with a #Gumbell distribution) is harder than modelling Gaussians...