France is so hugely reliant on nuclear in the first place that they were always going to have to do something about that, even if there were no climate-related energy transition, given that their fleet has now reached an age where its got reliability issues. And its ability to export spare power from its overly large nuclear fleet is an important part of balancing the system in other countries including the UK. But they've left it very late to start the renewal of the sector, and have suffered the same delays with new build reactors of the EPR design as seen elsewhere, so the situation is going to be a bit tricky for years to come.
And one of the things I've learnt from watching UK select committee meetings about new nuclear is that in addition to the other issues, the sector will be in competition with so many other areas for the required civil engineering skills and capacity to build. There are challenges with maintaining sufficient nuclear-specific skills too, so countries like UK and France have to provide certainty about the sectors future in order to get new young people to take that career path.
No matter how much wind etc capacity countries like the UK and France install, to abandon nuclear at this point rather than build another generation of reactors would require two things: progress with energy storage on a very large scale, a mission that should have been started in earnest a long time ago in order for the timing to comfortably work. And there is also a military issue, countries with nuclear submarines tend to require a healthy domestic nuclear power scene to support and effectively subsidise the military nuclear skills and logistics. If there is no honest conversation about that, and no alternative military path offered, then I dont expect those governments to actually abandon nuclear power, though its obviously not going to be presented to the public in that way.
Taking this sort of stuff into account, it seems to me that over many years our governments never set themselves up for the abandonment of nuclear power to be a realistic proposition in this era. They delayed all sorts of difficult decisions for so long that there will be trouble and some timescale problems that might leave large gaps in the system for prolonged periods. But now we are moving into a period where conditions are ripe for them to press on in a slightly more convincing manner, and they have found a bunch of new ways to sell the proposition to the public.
So for countries like UK and France, I dont think there is really much uncertainty about whether nuclear will persist for the next generation. The big uncertainty will remain for some time a question of scale. For example even if our governments commit to a very large nuclear programme that is supposed to provide quite a large chunk of future electricity generation capacity, it will take ages to find out whether that ultimately comes to pass. One scenario is that we will commit to a lot, but the delivery schedule will keep falling behind. And then at some stage if there is great progress with non-nuclear stuff, very much including storage at huge scale, there will be a big reappraisal which will allow them to significantly shrink their nuclear ambitions, give them a realistic pathway to either phase out or at least phase down nuclear, relegating it to a far more minor role. Public opinion is only one part of this equation, and probably wont get to have the casting vote unless the other pieces fall into place, so we'll be treated to plenty of manufacturing of consent in the meantime. Likewise the economic arguments for nuclear have never really been able to stand on their own merits, other factors are propping them up, and this may become even more obvious as we move forwards. If that happens then the national security arguments will still be left standing, at least unless energy security when the wind doesnt blow can be secured by other means, and the military situation changes.
loop.homes
www.newcivilengineer.com
www.offshore-energy.biz
