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France makes massive nuclear bet

RT | February 10, 2022

French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Thursday that the government will back the construction of six new nuclear reactors across the country. The first will enter service by 2035, according to the French leader.

“We must continue the great adventure of civil nuclear power in France,” Macron told the media on a visit to the eastern city of Belfort – the home of General Electric’s France-based turbine unit. He also announced the commissioning of a study to assess the feasibility for a further eight reactors.

“Given the electricity needs, the need to anticipate the transition, the end of the existing fleet, we are going to launch today a program of new nuclear reactors,” Macron declared.

The six new units will be EPRs – originally known as European Pressurized Water Reactors – which have been designed and developed by French company Framatome and its parent Électricité de France (EDF). The technology is also being used in the UK’s Hinkley Point power station and in Taishan, China.

The new EPR reactors will be supplemented by small modular reactors (SMR) with the aim of creating “25 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity by 2050,” Macron said.

The president added that he had made two further big decisions. He said he had asked EDF to study the conditions for extending the lifespan of a reactor beyond 50 years and claimed he wanted future reactors to be ever-lasting, only shutting down for safety reasons.

France has strongly supported the development of its nuclear industry throughout the last four decades, however neighboring Germany has phased out nuclear power, with environmental and safety concerns at the heart of its reasoning.

February 12, 2022 - Posted by | Nuclear Power |

1 Comment »

  1. On RT many commenters point out that nuclear reactors are meant to produce fuel for nuclear weapons, whilst this is denied by many other commenters. Because the Fukushima reactor was fueled with a mix of uranium and plutonium it seems more likely that these plants are meant for processing nuclear waste from nuclear weapons, instead of producing it. So, either Japan is hit with nuclear material in the form of nukes, or it is forced to process the same material from other nukes that had not been thrown on them. This mix from Fukushima was later send to The Netherlands in order to be processed in the nuclear plant at Borssele.

    Years ago, in a Dutch newspaper (De Telegraaf) a short article written by a woman working for the no longer extant Fortisbank argued that if the operators of a nuclear plant were to pay the insurance for the risk involved with such a plant, the costs would be so enormously high that it would not be profitable to build any more nuclear plant at all. That’s why nuclear plants can only become ‘feasible’ if the state takes care of these risks. This means literally that the operators of the plant will get the profits, and in case anything goes wrong, the ordinary people will have to pay for the damages.

    All attempts to store nuclear waste have failed. The plants in Fukushima were filled to the brim with used fuel rods, which caused the roofs of these buildings to be blown away.

    But anyway, we have to be thankful to Emmanuel Macron for ensuring that if a nuclear war will NOT follow the current turmoil with/against Russia, we could still be nuked from within.

    And we should also be thankful that the innocent carbondioxide gas (that is part of the natural cycle) will be replaced with uranium waste.

    The largest bet is now in what way it will go wrong. In 1987 it was written in a paper from Rebel that France is bothered with 400 nearly-accidents a year. Five years later the Volkskrant (a Dutch newspaper) wrote an article with the number of 600 nearly accidents in France, while also mentioning that no information was available from military nuclear installations.

    What remains is one question: why are we doing this? Is this meant to make our lives a little bit more convenient, for as long as it goes well?

    Like

    Comment by Balthasar Gerards | February 13, 2022 | Reply


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