The only way these plants could have continued to run would have been with extensive maintenance - they were already running under a special permission allowing them to forgo scheduled maintenance. This maintenance could not have been put off any longer and would have meant the shutdown of the plants for an extended period as well as high costs that nobody (including the plant operators) was willing to pay. In effect, just continueing to run the plants as they were would have invited disaster by gross negligence. Another factor is the human factor: since the end of nuclear power generation has been a long time coming, a lot of the specialists at the various plants have changed their plans accordingly and moved to other industries or even countries to pursue new carreer opportunities, so that the knowhow and manpower to operate these plants simply does not exist anymore.

The real failure is that the existing alternatives have not been allowed to grow as needed. Previous governments have not just cut subsidiaries for power sources like wind, they have made it near impossible to install new plants with idiotic, over the top regulations and laws.

Oh you mean like the old plants in France that are out for maintainance so much, that France has to buy electric power from Germany? https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/01/05/germany-power-trade

France whose best idea this year was to make a law that now allows new built power plants to be built besides old ones, so “THEY CAN USE THE SAME PARKING LOT” because that was the ONLY idea they had to “speed up” the planning and building phase of power plants that in case of Finland took 13 years longer than expected, which was costly for the French power plant builder because they had to pay late fees?

The repeated delays led to bitter compensation disputes between the Finnish operator TVO and Areva (seated in France), with the latter ultimately agreeing in March 2018 to pay TVO financial compensation of €450 million.

When France finally will have a new power plant it will just replace the old ones and add nothing to the grid.

Holding France’s old power plants up und building new ones, despite no one in the private sector wanting to invest into it, costs so much money that they have to use funds that were meant to build social housing to keep them up and start building. In the UK investors are so unwilling to invest, because of high risks of building costs exploding and projects finishing 12+ years late, that the government considers to give them “upfront money” to even think about investing into Sizewell C.

https://www.ft.com/content/7311cbdd-f245-43ff-92a3-9b763959a2db

France aims to start construction work on the first pair of reactors by 2027 and to be completed by 2035. The last reactor that Paris commissioned, however, is more than a decade behind schedule.

Thats realistically 2045, when it is only 10 years late and that means the old power plants of France that were build in the 80s and 90s, having huge problems with maintenance and stress corrosion NOW, will have even more problems 12 - 22 years from now. I doubt they will make it for so long at all.

France is a mess and it will cost the whole EU billions to finally free them from their dead end. Not to mention that their unrealistic dreams of nuclear power also lead to them not having the money or the will to invest in insulation and heating/cooling that is not depending solely on electricity, which they desperately need to do and Germany does for years now.

I hate that the nuclear power chills have made the jump from Reddit to the Fediverse.

You mean the ones that are at the end of their expected lifetime and have been scheduled to shutdown for 12 years which surely hasn’t lead to a lack of maintenance and upgrades that would have been done otherwise? The ones that made up a tiny percentage of our energy mix even before they were shut down?

It is a limited resource we dig out of the ground in countries we don’t want to be depending on, because to do it in our own countries is too dirty for us. Then we use this bound energy and convert it into heat we release into the atmosphere. The only thing missing for being technically “fossil” is that it’s originated from organic matter.

Short from that, it definitively classifies as not renewable, not sustainable, dangerous, not climate neutral, expensive, antquiated idea. And in the sense of being an antiquated idea at least, it is “still fossil”.

It isn’t but it has all the same downsides as fossil fuels in terms of being dependent on some countries for fuel imports, extraction being extremely environmentally damaging, limited supply,…

It is not, but if you spout lied loud enough some people believe you.

Or hear me out, we introduce some of our invasive biomass and y’all can burn kudzu for power. Hell y’all’ll have to burn kudzu whether or not you need more power.

Or idk build renewables in areas where they’re viaible and maintain a large continental and robust electrical grid and storage system.

But nobody is doing that.