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It is still absolutely stupid to get rid of nuclear power before coal, I guess that's what they're talking about.
Our coal usage is at an all time low and continues to decline. In fact the decline in recent years is greater than the contribution of nuclear power has ever had to our energy mix (roughly 2% per year).
Let's be honest here: The last nuclear plants in Germany (and most of the western world!) were build in the 70s and 80s. The last german nuclear plant was finished in 1989 and switched off in 2023 after 34 years. Every other reactor was even older. Even if other countries are running reactors that are old as fuck, that is not safe. So there was no way to keep them running into the 2030s or 2040s.
(and I know that other countries are running their old reactors and that is also not safe)
Those reactors get refurbished frequently. The site may be 34 years old but the reactors and cooling are newer.
No, they are not. What gets refurbished is everything in there (pipes, cables etc.), but you can't replace the reactor vessel and containment.
How do you know that? Are you an expert on nuclear power technology? I at least see absolutely no reason why proper maintenance wouldn't allow reactors to work infinitely. That's kind of the definition of "proper maintenance".
There are several reasons: Those reactors were planned for a runtime of 30-40 years. And you can't prolong those runtimes by "proper maintenance" due to some hard facts introduced by the radioactivity. The steel in the containment & pressure vessel will get radiation damage with time. That is something you can monitor - but the pressure vessel is the reactor and if that is damaged, you can't simply replace it. So there is a hard limit on runtime. You might get a few years more out of them, you might be lucky, but that really is not a safe way to run a reactor.
You can take a look at what that actually means when you look at France: They have build nearly all of their reactors between 1977 and 1994 and that means that most of their reactors have reached those 40 years they were designed for. France totally failed to start building replacement reactors - Flamanville III is not enough and was extremely expensive and way late. And they need to run those reactors - if there are problems with too many reactors, they have not enough capacity. We already saw that a while ago when too many of those old reactors developed cracks. So if there is a big issue, french politics need to ensure that there is enough electricity generation. And that political pressure is something that is not compatible with a safe way of running nuclear reactors, esp. when you're running old reactors.
I get that. But if proper maintenance means "replace the reactor pressure chamber", then that's what should be done. I'm sure building a new reactor pressure chamber every 40 years and replacing it creates less CO2 than 40 years of coal power generation.
And anyway, everyone seems to miss the part where I only said that coal should be phased out before nuclear, not that nuclear never needs to be phased out. Both coal and nuclear need to go, but overall, coal is worse. The only reason coal is kept for longer is because it's cheaper than properly maintaining nuclear.
You can't replace the pressure chamber. The way to do this is to build a new reactor block with a new pressure chamber and this is exactly what is not happening.
Ontario has this issue and we are building SMRs for this reason.