France closes its last coal mine
The final shovelful of coal has been mined in France, bringing to an end an industry nearly 300 years old.
A last, symbolic block of coal was dug out at the La Houve mine, kicking off three days of events to mark the end of coal mining in France.
The mine, near the town of Creutzwald on the German border, is the last of an industry that once employed 300,000 and fuelled France's industrial revolution.
Nuclear power now provides 80% of the country's energy needs.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3651881.stm
The German experiment with wind and solar energy has failed. They will have to import vast quantities of natural gas to replace coal, most likely from Russia. The U.S.A. is pressuring Germany to import Liquefied Natural gas from the U.S.A..
Natural Gas, especially fracked natural gas, is hardly any better than coal. Any amount of natural gas extracted from the earth will contribute to global warming. Hybrid natural gas / wind power systems are supposedly "better than coal" but they will not save the world.
Nuclear power is the only sustainable power source capable of supporting the high energy industrial economy many affluent consumers now enjoy.
We can now build nuclear reactors that burn the "waste" fuel of traditional light water nuclear reactors, the huge stockpiles of depleted uranium many nations have accumulated, the plutonium from nuclear weapons, and uranium and thorium extracted from existing mine tailings.
One example of such a reactor design is TerraPower, which is supported by Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Bill Gates’ Nuclear Startup Unveils Mini-Reactor Design Including Molten Salt Energy Storage
Nuclear power is the Immovable Object of generation sources. It can take days just to bring a nuclear plant completely online, rendering it useless as a tool to manage the fluctuations in the supply and demand on a modern energy grid.
Now a firm launched by Bill Gates in 2006, TerraPower, in partnership with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, believes it has found a way to make the infamously unwieldy energy source a great deal nimbler — and for an affordable price.
The new design, announced by TerraPower on August 27th, is a combination of a "sodium-cooled fast reactor" — a type of small reactor in which liquid sodium is used as a coolant — and an energy storage system. While the reactor could pump out 345 megawatts of electrical power indefinitely, the attached storage system would retain heat in the form of molten salt and could discharge the heat when needed, increasing the plant’s overall power output to 500 megawatts for more than 5.5 hours.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2020/08/31/bill-gates-nuclear-firm-says-new-reactor-can-backstop-grid-with-molten-salt-storage/#7955be645e65
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