The Greening of France
Geoffrey Lean has an interesting piece in Grist about Nicholas Sarkozy’s green agenda in France. He makes the point that this isn’t all about the nukes:
At least one new solar power station is to be built in each region by 2011; by contrast, only two new nuclear power plants will be completed by 2017, despite France’s history as the world’s chief champion of the atom. By 2020 national capacities for geothermal energy will have been increased sixfold, for wind energy ten fold, and for solar photovoltaic energy 400 times over.
Still, the fact that France already gets such a large proportion of its electricity from nuclear power means that carbon pricing will have less impact on France than on many other developed countries. And it would be hard for me to imagine a robust, worldwide effort at reducing carbon emissions not being good for the French nuclear power industry. I’m not, personally, a huge proponent of nuclear electricity but I think at least a few countries will probably wind up following France in going big-time nuclear. Meanwhile, another large French company, Alstom, is a leading provider of rolling stock for high-speed rail and mass transit projects. So on this front, too, you would expect the French business community to be relatively enthusiastic about a low carbon agenda.
31 Responses to “The Greening of France”
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May 7th, 2009 at 8:38 am
So, two productive solutions to the “warming/cooling/climate crisis”. Nuclear power and planting trees. Just do it and let’s move on to more constructive issues.
May 7th, 2009 at 8:52 am
I’m not, personally, a huge proponent of nuclear electricity
Why not?
May 7th, 2009 at 8:55 am
If you hate nuclear power then be thankful you live in the US. Nuclear power expansion totally collapsed 30 years ago and never came back because of our quaint insistence that it was a free enterprise undertaking. Once the promise of profit was destroyed by profiteers and incompetence the whole thing died. Stripped of all that nonsense many other nations went right on with it quite successfully.
As with so many things American our insistence upon clinging to illusion institutionalizes incompetence. Think Iraq, health care or the banking system.
May 7th, 2009 at 8:56 am
carbon pricing has no impact on France? If France doesn’t have to include carbon tax proceeds in its costs, or is able to sell rather than buy carbon credits, it may be at an enormous advantage within a group of more carbon dependent trading partners.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:09 am
And behold, France’s plan to conquer the world: atomic SUPERTRAINs.
As for being against nuclear power, I’m not really for it either. There are a lot of potential problems and dangers, which will require regulation that actually works (see the financial industry for how well that’s worked out). If proper regulation can be done, I think nuclear’s got a chance.
Incidentally, if you want to know more about nuclear power, this is a good lecture: LongNow seminar
May 7th, 2009 at 9:11 am
link FAIL: http://blog.longnow.org/2007/09/17/185/
*sigh*
(and what’s with the site telling me I’m posting too quickly?)
May 7th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Europe is already ignoring their Kyoto commitments, so I suspect they’ll ignore any harsher measures that come down the pike. With strong unions, just how popular do you think moving the rest of the manufacturing plant to sane nations (i.e., those that have said no way on carbon caps) like China and India will be?
Regardless of what you think of carbon caps, the whole idea is to have a global impact. If India and China opt out (and they have said clearly that they will), then carbon caps in the US and Europe are nothing more than a useless affectation. They’ll change nothing on a global basis, but they will trash a lot of jobs and move a lot of manufacturing offshore.
If the Dems go ahead with this plan, I suspect that the non-government unions will be pretty angry after a couple of years. While I doubt they would go Republican, sitting on their hands wouldn’t shock me.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:12 am
if that photo were not cropped, we would see that sarkozy is standing on a step-ladder.
no, seriously: al gore is like, over 6′1″, and sarkozy is about 5′5″.
not that this is in any way a useful contribution to the debate over nuclear’s role in making a greener future.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:23 am
to sane nations (i.e., those that have said no way on carbon caps)
Once more, the voice of white flight has spoken.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:28 am
As I’ve pointed out before, I grew up in a suburb, and I live in one now. I’ve never lived in a city, so there was nowhere for me to flee from. The closest cities to me are simply more expensive than the surrounding suburbs, have much higher rates of crime, and dramatically worse schools.
But – I can’t have “fled” from something I’ve never lived in.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Alstom also has big positions the power generation and transmission business.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:38 am
What really are the safety issues with nuclear? Three-Mile Island is actually a success story, right?–the containment structures did their job and prevent radiation from getting out into the environment. As for waste disposal, isn’t this only a problem in federalist, NIMBYist systems like the U.S.’s where powerful Senators or Congressmen can stymie plans for centralized waste storage? And is spent fuel any more dangerous w/r/t use in a dirty bomb than non-spent fuel? That is, fuel has to be shipped to the plant to start with, and so it’s not clear to me why it’s not a problem that the fresh fuel shipments could be intercepted by terrorists but it is a problem that the spent fuel shipments could be. This is all from an untutored standpoint.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:45 am
For me, the problem with nuclear is not only safety.
Huge upfront capital costs, the carbon footprint of construction costs, the massive amount of water required for operation, the centralization of the grid, many things.
I am not opposed to nuclear, but would prefer to minimize it.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:02 am
@12: I think the *real* safety issue with nuclear is political rather than technological. It may not be impossible to have nonproliferation in a world heavily reliant on nuclear electricity, but the political and regulatory tasks are going to be challenging.
I’m saying this as someone who is cautiously in favor of nuclear power — at least in nations like the US and France. Just explaining some of my anxiety.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:08 am
To get nuclear plants built, we’re going to have to educate a new generation of nuclear engineers. You can’t build nuclear reactors and have Homer Simpson run them, and you can’t train people for jobs that don’t exist. Bootstrapping an entire industry? It took 15-20 years the first time. And then it shut down.
This happens a lot in non-petroleum energy fields. Several functioning, profitable shale oil projects were just turned off and shuttered when more profitable ways of spending r&d money were determined. Coal has been boom or bust for decades. It’s going to be an interesting experiment to avoid destroying civilization while still running at the beck and call of Big Oil. My guess is that it can’t be done, and we’re simply going to have to hope that the masses turn on their petro-masters like hungry wolves or that the terrible possibilities imagined for AGW turn out to be damp squibs.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:46 am
I can’t have “fled” from something I’ve never lived in.
It’s a state of mind, James, and one you’ve demonstrated consistently here. Your alarm system or your fence or your big wide lawn will protect you from the outside world. Your car is a climate-controlled isolation chamber, whether it’s on the commute or ferrying the kids to their carefully-supervised activities. Every penny in your paycheck is yours to be spent entirely as you see fit; every tax — and by extension, every penny of public expenditure — a confiscation, and anything with the sniff of collective benefit to be considered suspicious and possibly seditious.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Well being its 30 years since the only “disaster” that was actually a success, safety isn’t an issue. Unless we go the USSR route of well, just skipping all pieces of safety, which oddly enough we aren’t or ever have.
Heck, when it comes to transporting “waste” (or as I like to call it, unused fuel) we have such incredible designs for transport that you can even hit youtube and see what would happen if a train collided into a used fuel shipment container (poor train… it didn’t have a chance.)
Yes, the upfront capitol costs are HUGE. But being that in then becomes near “free” energy for decades after it actually is very affordable. You should compare how much it costs to build a wind farm that produces as much energy (do realize the land cost alone for that wind farm will be beyond your wildest imagination.) Wind farms, which happen to have the lowest impact also have huge carbon costs in building. Multi-story tall towers don’t just grow themselves. They even ship the blades for each from across the ocean. Again if you try and compare comparable energy output you’ll find Nuclear has lower construction cost. But most people try and ignore how efficient, how powerful a single nuclear site is.
AT the same time they ignore “base load” the bit that solar and wind will NEVER be able to handle. Most wind farms currently rely on coal power plants to handle base load, that is NOT a clean solution by any stretch.
Sarkosky has fallen for a simple canard, that the solution will be a combination of all forms of carbon-free energy. It never had to be, we don’t need solar or wind at all, they do nothing but take up lots of land and take the labor force that could be building nuclear and geothermal away, and price them higher.
It won’t be long from now that we realize how much a scam wind and solar are for long term energy production. Its like ethanol for auto’s, they are more damaging than most will admit (solar energy kills more than most, just they’re all Chinese downstream of the toxic factories.) More people will die this month from coal plants than EVER have died from Nuclear.
And water!?!!! You’re complaining about water usage. Nulcear plants have water desalinazation on site in the southern US. Many recycle most of the water used (which is run along different paths than the contaminated fuel.) More water is used construction than will ever be used in Operation, the same as Wind.
We need to maximize Nuclear power, or we’re not really trying to do anything about the climate. The safety regulations already exist, the problem is the constant fear mongering and suits from “well meaning environmentalists”, the suits delay construction and up the costs tremendously. Or do you think the prices don’t rise when you’ve hired tons of labor, trucked in tons of equipment then sue to delay construction another 6 months, then another, and another.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:55 am
The only thing protecting me is the general safety of the community. For that matter, the place I live is more diverse than Baltimore (the closest city).
Taxes in Maryland are confiscatory (regardless of where in the state you live), at least compared to many other states in the country. In general, my biggest complaints with the area I live have to do with my dislike of “traffic calming”, compared to other solutions to the same problem.
My car is a 20 year old clunker with no working A/C, and I don’t commute to work anyway – I work out of a home office unless I have a customer meeting, or a meeting at corporate HQ (which requires me to take a flight). I drive under 5000 miles a year, less than many urban dwellers, never mind my fellow suburbanites. Heck, I drive so little that the time available to me to listen to podcasts is restricted to my daily exercise time…
You assume a lot about me, without actually knowing the first thing about me. I don’t make wild assumptions about you in return, because I have no basis for making them…
May 7th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Also, remember that the US produces more electricity via nuclear than any other country. We also have more nuclear power plants than any other country.
One thing France has on us: they recycle fuel. This is a much better way to handle the fuel cycle. With fuel recycling, we have tens of thousands of years of fuel, compared to only a few hundred years with our use once and bury “cycle”.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:51 am
“What really are the safety issues with nuclear?”
This for one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis-Besse_Nuclear_Power_Station#Reactor_head_hole
Reactor head hole
In March 2002, after the government had allowed a delay in safety inspections past a December 31, 2001 deadline, it was discovered that boric acid had eaten almost all the way through the 6½-inch thick reactor pressure vessel head. A breach might have partially flooded the reactor’s containment building with reactor coolant, and resulted in emergency safety procedures to protect from core damage. In 2005 the NRC ranked this occurrence as the tenth (excluding TMI) most likely incident to have led to a nuclear disaster in the event of a subsequent failure.[9]
The resulting corrective maintenance took two years, during which time further material problems were corrected to bring the reactor back online safely. Repairs and upgrades cost $600 million, and the Davis-Besse reactor was restarted in March 2004. Follow up action by the NRC on the March 2002 incident occurred on April 21, 2005, when the NRC issued a Notice of Violation and Proposed Imposition of Civil Penalties in the amount of $5,450,000 for multiple violations including the degradation of the reactor pressure vessel head.[10]
On January 20, 2006, the owner of Davis-Besse, FirstEnergy Corporation of Akron, Ohio, acknowledged a series of safety violations by former workers, and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice. The deferred prosecution agreement relates to the March 2002 incident (see above). The deferment granted by the NRC were based on letters from Davis-Besse engineers stating that previous inspections were adequate. However, those inspections were not as thorough as the company suggested, and as proved by the material deficiency discovered later. In any case, because FirstEnergy cooperated with investigators on the matter, they were able to avoid more serious penalties. Therefore, the company agreed to pay fines of $23.7 million, with an additional $4.3 million to be contributed to various groups, including the National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Habitat for Humanity, and the University of Toledo as well as to pay some costs related to the federal investigation. In addition, two former employees and one former contractor were indicted for statements made in multiple documents and one video-tape, over several years, hiding evidence that the reactor pressure vessel was being corroded by boric acid. The maximum penalty for the three is 25 years in prison. The indictment mentions that other employees also provided false information to inspectors, but does not name them.[11]
May 7th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
The navy pumps out a couple hundred nuclear trained personnel every year. And SRB’s are going down across the board.
May 7th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Not to mention, of course, that there are tons of nuclear-related professionals from other countries, such as France (obviously), who we could hire to help build and operate plants while we train new professionals.
Realistically speaking, we’re not going to get away from our dependency on coal and fossil fuels without a massive expansion in nuclear power to handle the baseload. Solar is limited by the grid, the appropriate weather, and time to intermittent power, and wind would require a truly massive amount of terrain to be realistic – far more than a series of nuclear plants.
As for nuclear plants, we really need to streamline the inspection processes; they take forever. Other than that, it’s pretty safe stuff, actually, and even safer when you use breeder reactors to recycle the waste. The centralization of it is actually an asset, since it minimizes ecological impact, and allows for a more efficient electrical grid (electrical grids are natural monopolies).
May 7th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
There’s no good reason not to go nuclear, especially if we use more advanced fuel cycles (e.g. thorium breeders.) It solves the CO2 crisis while only introducing minor issues in its place. I’ve been watching this debate for several years now while everyone avoids settling on the obvious solution because of special interest politics and the need for political differentiation. But when we get serious about CO2, nuclear is going to be the main component. It’s just a question of how long it takes to get serious.
It’s just obviously self-evident. France has meagre natural resources. But it’s basically tied for first-place for first-world CO2 emissions, at 6MT/capita/year, or, about 1/3rd the US.
May 7th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Of course it should also be noted, when you’re already getting 80% of your electrons from non-GHG sources, there’s not much blood to be squeezed. Reading the Grist article, it seems the solar/wind/etc. is mostly for show, as there is very very little actual GHG reduction to be had from it because it’s not displacing GHG positive sources.
The transportation investments are the really significant thing about their plan, the component that will have a direct impact on GHG.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I grew up in a suburb, and I live in one now. I’ve never lived in a city
What a shocker!
May 7th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
What they forget to say is that each of those two nuclear power plants will generate about 14,000,000,000 kWh each year while all the solar plants put together will generate not even 1% of that.
But solar is cute and trendy.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
“Upfront capital costs?”
I think we should target these “No” Democrats as unwilling to invest in the though changes our carbon economy is going to have to contemplate if we want to escape the horrors of global warming. If you want to save the globe, cost cannot be an object.
“Carbon footprint of construction costs?”
Ah, I see we are only to focus on costs, instead of benefits, like our progenitors the candlestick makers. You know, I could have sworn the entire reason nuclear energy is being pushed is that in the long run, the carbon footprint of nuclear energy is much lower than the potential costs of constructing up-and-running nuclear power plants!
“Massive amount of water required for utilization”
Well, if we’re not going to band together and save the world, all of New York City will have all the fresh water they want – literally drowned in it – by 2100. Do you want that?!!
“Centralization of the grid”
You know, I’m tired of the wing-nut myth that all centralization and federalization of anything is a problem. True, in some industries government ownership of the means of production is a bad thing, but in the very special industry of power generation, it’s eminently clear that we need technocrats who understand the ecology of the environment and industrial production who can efficiently design systems to provide cheap power for the lowest and most vulnerable among us.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
It solves the CO2 crisis
Not even vaguely. It’s simply less bad than continued reliance on coal or natural gas for electricity. The production of nuclear generation has lots of environmental costs as well.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
New York City will have all the fresh water they want – literally drowned in it – by 2100. Do you want that?!!
I don’t even think James Hansen is talking about drowning NYC by 2100. If we add 1 ft. of ocean by 2100, I’d be surprised. (If someone dead 50 years or so could be surprised.) Hansen has said that time scales of decades is possible for dramatic increases in ocean depth, but that 100s of years is more likely.
May 7th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
It is vastly better than coal or even natural gas in CO2 production. Most of the waste is relatively harmless, and the small amount that is is small enough in quantity it can be stored en-site (or better yet, fed into a breeder reactor and re-processed into fuel). The total CO2 output is vastly lower over the lifetime of the plant than that of a corresponding coal plant – and the nuclear plant generates more electricity, pound for pound. Probably the biggest environmental impact is that you need a good deal of freshwater to keep them going, but freshwater isn’t in short supply in most of the country, and we can even do desalinization if we have to.
Not to mention that you could even minimize CO2 in the construction process, if you wanted to. A nuke plant sits in one location, and you could theoretically run a railroad line right up to it for re-supply instead of road transport.
It is, but these people are frequently looking for excuses to discount nuclear while promoting their pet alternative energy cause.
For that matter, what about the CO2 and environmental costs involved with the production of solar panels and the production and maintenance of wind turbines? The process of making solar panels, if I recall right, actually produces some toxic components. That’s not to mention that if you have a million turbines spread out over the land and sea, you are going to probably have to, you know, drive trucks and other CO2-producing vehicles around all of creation to maintain them.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
I don’t think you can discuss nuclear energy without discussing terroism. A nuclear plant would be a target.
On the other hand , i think that you can not discuss solar or wind energy, without mentioning NIMBY [not in my back yard].This is a major reason that many projects can not get off the ground.
We should have a sensible conversation about what kind of energy we should use ,and where we should build the facilities.Simply stating over and over again how Europe is better than us is not going to solve our problems.
I would be the first to say that we could learn a lot from not just the Europeans, but the Aisan’s as well.They both are making great advances in public infrastructure and energy.
But i remember how once upon a time MR YGLESIAS used to write about the practicle ways the US could modernise .
Now unfortuantly, all he seems to write is one Europhile column after another about how much better Europe is than America.As an American i feel strongly that we should invest in alternative energy and public infrastructure[such as high speed rail].
But why can’t MR YGLESIAS go back to disussing how this can be acheived, instead of simply gushing over Europe .
I have never been a “love it or leave it” type of American.But at a certain point you have to wonder why MR YGLESIAS lives here , instead of Europe.