Wow, talk about timely! I’ve been trying to tell them that for years. Nobody listens! Of course the politicians will lose some votes from the anti-Nucs … but they might even gain some from the anti-Russian bloc?
Quick head math is they would save a bit less than 10% of current gas imports.
Reconsider nuclear shutdowns to cut gas imports, IEA tells EU
03 March 2022
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has set out a ten-point plan that could enable the European Union to reduce its imports of natural gas from Russia by more than one-third within a year, including maximising generation from existing low-emissions sources such as nuclear. Temporarily delaying the closure of EU reactors scheduled for shut-down over the next year could cut EU gas demand by almost 1 billion cubic metres per month.
The EU imported some 155 billion cubic metres of natural gas from Russia in 2021, accounting for around 45% of the bloc’s gas imports and nearly 40% of its total gas consumption. Progress towards net-zero will “over time” bring down gas use and imports, but the current “crisis” raises the specific question about imports from Russia and how they can be quickly brought down, the IEA said.
Keeping nukes also cuts carbon emissions. iirc, France didn’t shoot itself in the foot with misguided policy on reprocessing, so doesn’t have the disposal problem the US has either.
France does have high level nuclear waste disposal requirements as explained below:
Orano is responsible for nuclear waste processing and recycling in France including waste disposal.
Orano’s world-leading technologies in processing and recycling, almost 96% of the used fuel from nuclear power reactors and research reactors can be recycled. Nuclear material can be reused to make new fuels that will in turn generate their own electricity.
Another advantage of recycling: savings on raw materials. One gram of plutonium, 100 grams of uranium or 300 grams of depleted uranium have the same energy potential as 1 metric ton of crude oil, 2.5 metric tons of wood or 1.5 metric tons of coal.
10% of French nuclear electricity currently comes from recycled materials. With the steps forward being made in industrial terms, and in particular the use of recycled MOX fuel in new (1,300 MW) reactors or the multi-recycling of nuclear fuels, this ratio could be increased to as much as 30%.
Disposal of high-level waste: the CIGEO solution
Andra is responsible for managing existing disposal centers and conducting studies on geological disposal for high-level and long-lived intermediate-level waste. CIGEO, located at Bure-Saudron (Meuse/Haute-Marne - France), is a geological disposal project. It represents the most sustainable and safest solution for assuming our responsibility to future generations with regard to final waste which is currently in safe interim storage in facilities on the la Hague site.
which is currently in safe interim storage in facilities on the la Hague site.
Yes, one site, vs storage pools and dry casks at how many sites around the US? Perhaps I should have said “…does not have the magnitude of the disposal problem the US has”?
iirc, the US is the only country that does not reprocess, due to a law passed in the 70s, supposedly to fight “proliferation”.
The Megatons to Megawatts Program, successfully completed in December 2013, is the popular name given to the program which is also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement. The official name of the program is the “Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the United States of America Concerning the Disposition of Highly-Enriched Uranium Extracted from Nuclear Weapons”, dated February 18, 1993.[1] Under this Agreement, Russia agreed to supply the United States with low-enriched uranium (LEU) obtained from high-enriched uranium (HEU) found to be in excess of Russian defense purposes. The United States agreed to purchase the low-enriched uranium fuel.
…
The first nuclear power plant to receive low-enriched fuel containing uranium under this program was the Cooper Nuclear Station in 1998.[5] During the 20-year Megatons to Megawatts program, as much as 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States was generated by fuel fabricated using LEU from Russian HEU.[6]
Sort of like a de-proliferation while fueling US reactors with former Soviet warheads.
What makes you think French reactors do not have spent fuel cooling pools? Read the following:
PARIS (Reuters) - The spent-fuel pools of French utility EDF’s nuclear reactors are highly vulnerable to attacks, Greenpeace said in a report published on Tuesday.
Written by a group of nuclear experts and delivered to French authorities, the report says that spent-fuel pools, which typically contain the equivalent of one to three nuclear reactor cores, have not been designed to withstand external aggression.
An attack leading to a loss of cooling water could spark a spent-fuel fire that could contaminate areas as far as 250 kilometers away, Greenpeace’s Yannick Rousselet said.
“EDF must address this issue and reinforce its spent-fuel pools,” he said.
EDF, which operates 58 reactors, denied its spent-fuel pools are at risk and said they have been designed to withstand earthquakes and flooding as well as terror attacks.
PARIS (Reuters) - The spent-fuel pools of French utility EDF’s nuclear reactors are highly vulnerable to attacks, Greenpeace said in a report published on Tuesday.
Um, so Greenpeace knows more about nuclear safety than EDF?
PARIS (Reuters) - The spent-fuel pools of French utility EDF’s nuclear reactors are highly vulnerable to attacks, Greenpeace said in a report published on Tuesday.
Um, so Greenpeace knows more about nuclear safety than EDF?
Perhaps you should learn to read. The article says NUCLEAR EXPERTS wrote the report:
“Written by a group of nuclear experts and delivered to French authorities, the report says that spent-fuel pools, which typically contain the equivalent of one to three nuclear reactor cores, have not been designed to withstand external aggression.”
As a nuclear engineer I know that nuclear power plant designs treated spent-fuel pools less stringently than the reactor containment structure. I know you are not an engineer and do not understand those aspects of nuclear power plants.
LOL! You really proved lack of reading skills again.
Those words were not written by me, they were written by Reuters. I just copied their headlines. Go back and check. So you should tell Reuters you are putting them in the bin.