Wow this is depressing. France had the worlds greatest fleet of standardized nuclear reactors. They mastered Nuclear Power... I'm assuming energy companies spent vast amounts of money to propagandize the French public to only support wind and solar (like in the US) but maybe that's not the case?

The Germans were unwise many years ago = now they pay the Russian piper - as we are seeing. The anti nuclear people were probably funded by Russia?? as they specialise at strategic plans of this type under Putin's helm = anything to weaken us = good. Wind/solar makes steady gains and will get even better as the use of newer junction geometries get better and approach the S-Q barriers.

Reading about the Superphoenix reactor makes me furious. They could have 10 of those babies running by now. But no, was killed by the Left and then not revived. And what are they planning to build now, more PWRs. Fucking incredibly how the world can just not move on to next generation nuclear.

> It's fun to imagine an alternate history where the left were more pro-nuclear power.

The thing is, nuclear is not incompatible with “the left”. After all, nuclear programmes make sense only with a lot of public investment and control, and work best in nationalised producers, in which case it provides cheap electricity for the people and revenues for the state. Both the socialists and the communists are in general pro-nuclear.

It’s horse trading to keep the greens in the “gauche plurielle” coalition that closed Superphénix. It’s the same kind of compromises that lead to the arbitrary policy that “we should not have more than 50% of nuclear electricity” and the closing of Fessenheim. Even now, the leftist alliance NUPES cannot really discuss this because the demagogues and greens are against but the other half is pro.

Nuclear inherently should be something the left love.

However the problem is that nuclear power is strongly associated with the cold war and nuclear weapons. It was seen as a way to subsidize nuclear weapons. That never was really true at all.

Also the early environmental movement had a strong 'naturalist' wing (and still does) and nuclear is seen as 'unnatural'. This strongly influenced leftists politics in general.

I would love to learn more about Superphenix and its design, history and the politcs around it but I wasn't able to find much. My French despite 12 years of getting forced to learn it, still sucks.

From a Swiss perspective, its crazy to think a Swiss green politician went and shot the reactor with an RPG.

> I would love to learn more about Superphenix and its design, history and the politcs around it but I wasn't able to find much

Most of my knowledge comes from private discussions with people involved with the project or with the government at the time or from French sources, unfortunately. The best I can find is the English Wikipedia page, which seems decently accurate although short on technical details (a lot of them remain more or less industrial secrets to this day: there hasn’t been a bigger breeder reactor before or since).

In the long run, sodium-cooled reactors are a dead end because of the risks associated with a sodium loop (which is terrifying). But a fast reactor would have been invaluable as a test environment for advanced materials and composites, and improved fuels.

> From a Swiss perspective, its crazy to think a Swiss green politician went and shot the reactor with an RPG.

Indeed. So much for neutrality! To be fair, that should seem crazy to anybody from any country.

Yeah, sodium is an somewhat unfortunate branch of the technology. It was sort of picked by many nations as a next set, put it had a number of drawbacks. Still, I would have preferred more of those to more PWRs.

I would like to know how cooling intensive it was compare to PWR. And what operating temperature.

Also, some of the Sodium reactor technology and materials is now used by companies like Moltex Energy.

Molten Salt reactors are the likely future in my opinion, but not sure yet what form.

> It was sort of picked by many nations as a next set, put it had a number of drawbacks.

It made a lot of sense. Sodium is an amazing coolant. It was also a relatively easy to implement design for a breeder reactor, with all the related advantages (much better way of using uranium fuel with no enrichment step, burning of plutonium and high-activity "waste", etc).

> I would like to know how cooling intensive it was compare to PWR. And what operating temperature.

Cooling should be overall similar to a PWR operating at the same power. The temperature in the core is higher than in PWRs (around 500 to 600°C instead of 300°C), but they have 3 cooling loops instead of 2. I can't remember the temperature in the most external loops off the top of my head but I don't expect them to be very different in both designs. They use similar steam turbines, so they should have similar operating regimes, but I could be wrong.

> Also, some of the Sodium reactor technology and materials is now used by companies like Moltex Energy.

Yes, the materials are quite different from PWRs because of the different neutron fluxes and spectra, but some of this knowledge can be applied to other fast reactor designs like the fast MSRs. Some of the corrosion mechanisms (which are a large hurdle to clear for MSRs still) also have some similarities.

> Molten Salt reactors are the likely future in my opinion, but not sure yet what form.

That is where the wind is blowing. It's difficult to say more at the moment, because there are very different designs (fast or thermal, uranium, thorium, or MOX, large or small and modular, etc), but there is a lot of activity around MSRs.