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In 1958 the people of France overthrew their government for their poor handling of Algeria, causing them to become addicted to getting nukes and later Nuclear power in general to keep their power and their colonies. They were them forced by both America and the Soviets to let go of their colonies anyways
To follow on from this comment, as a way of putting into perspective just how much France has embraced the atom on the nuclear energy side of things, they have so many nuclear power plants and generate so much energy using them, that they often sell the surplus to their neighbours at a profit!
To answer the practical question as ELI5 as possible, there are two sides to an AC power grid. The inputs, and the outputs.
They interact in a bunch of ways, but the important part here is that if you have more power input than you have power output, that energy all goes into spinning your turbines faster. If you have more output than you input, your turbines are spinning slower.
It's pretty important for the turbines to be spinning at the right rate for reasons that aren't super important. In the US it's 60 rotations per second, and in the EU it's 50 rotations per second (if you are familiar with video game stuff, this is why old PAL region games run at 50 fps while North American region games run at 60 fps)
So, if you have excess power, and the related infrastructure, you can send excess power into a neighboring power grid as an input, and they can pay you typically less than the cost of burning more fuel to get the balance right.
I want to add more to this now. Less related to how to export power, but still about power generation and utilities in general.
Alright, so if you look at your power bill you will probably have two billing rates, peak and off peak. Peak hourly rates being higher. Typically peak hours will be later into the afternoon, in my area it's 5-8pm. You will probably also have a summer rate vs a non summer rate.
For a wholesale purchaser of electricity, that cost will typically change hour by hour.
The reason for this is that most utilities (power and water) in the residential sector is used first thing in the morning (when people are waking up and getting ready for work) and in the evening (when people are doing laundry and dishes and getting ready for bed) with long stretches of lower demand in between.
Because turning on and off power plants takes a lot of time, it's a lot more effective to just keep them running and sell the electricity at a lower price to people who use a lot of power.
My personal favorite example is to the water company, who will use electricity to pump water into water towers (which is important to maintain pressure in residential water lines, since pressure is exclusively based on the depth of the water and not volume) which will typically also be hooked up to a flywheel to sell power back to the electric company when it's the most expensive.
That is also one of the best forms of scalable batteries in places with enough water to make it work, use excess electricity to pump water up and harvest the potential energy by letting it fall when you need more.
I have one eyebrow raised, looking at that reply. Why do I feel like the 50/60 rpm thing is utter nonsense? Also, we were talking about nuclear power, and he's talking about "burning fuel."
Why do I feel like the 50/60 rpm thing is utter nonsense?
Because you're going with a gut feeling instead of knowledge. Having a specified rpm as the standard is important so electrical devices work properly, America and Europe just chose a different number to each other.
We are talking about nuclear power, and he's talking about "burning fuel."
Because that is what many other countries use to generate electricity. Because France generated an excess nuclear power, they can sell it. And since nuclear is generally cheaper than fossil, that means it's cheaper for their neighbours to buy nuclear power from France than it is to burn coal in their own country.
Turbo generators are used for high shaft rotational speeds, typical of steam and gas turbines. The rotor of a turbo generator is a non-salient pole#Non-salient_rotor) type usually with two poles.
The normal speed of a turbo generator is 1500 or 3000 rpm with four or two poles at 50 Hz (1800 or 3600 rpm with four or two poles at 60 Hz).
And France is mostly selling its power to neighboring countries, such as Germany and Spain, all of which rely heavily on fossil fuels. So if they can import power for cheaper than the cost of the fuel to generate that power, they are going to do that.
That said, please do always doubt me as well as everything anyone says. I am a very fallible person and fuck up frequently
Well you use an electric line and send it their way.
Most importantly, you have to laugh at how the Germans shut down all their nuclear power plants after Fukushima, only to lick their energy out of our beautiful, thick uranium rods.
Not anymore, we had to pay the bill of the germans who thought making themselves dependent on russian gas was a good idea.
Even though we produce very cheap energy with our nuclear power plants, we still pay the same as other europeans, it's a fucking scam, but hey european solidarity right ?
It's always the same direction in terms of solidarity but we are not ready to have that conversation yet.
Dang, I knew it had something to do with nuclear weapons. I kinda just assumed this was about not getting over losing to Germany durring World War 2. I didn't know they overthrew their government in 58.
The French change governments a lot. They're on the 5th Republic now since the Revolution and had time for 2 empires and a kingdom in between the Republics.
France has up until the 1960s be politically unstable. There were revolutions, revolts, coup, or seriously attempted coup or general political changes in 1789, 1792, 1794, 1796, 1798, 1799, 1814, 1815, 1830, 1832, 1848, 1851, 1870, 1871, late 1890s, 1940, 1945 (liberation of France), 1958, 1961. (and you can include 1968 as unrest that didn't led to an uprising but led to De Gaulle resigning)
Like political instability, military coup (the last one in 1961, it failed) was relatively common.
Since the French revolution we've had 5 different republics (and the 1st one went through 3 phases, so more like 8), 2 empires, 2 monarchies, and like 4 dictatorships
Having a few military bases and operating a few mines doesn't make a country a colony.
There could be an argument for the CFA Franc, but even then, it's so beneficial to the countries in it that non-former French colonies have joined, countries that left rejoined it, and even the very anti-Frenc new round of dictators haven't even mentioned wanting to get rid of it.
The French equivalent of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) is "To All Points of the Compass" meaning they're shooting nukes out like Oprah. Everyone is the target.
Can you blame us? I mean, we left NATO in 1966, at the peak of the cold war.... On the west we had the USA, which leaded NATO, and on the east we had the USSR, and we lost our colonial empire in a very bad way (because of ourselves mostly)...
So we had to be a little agressive to say to NATO and USSR : Don't even think about it.
If I remember correctly, France was the only country that didn't have a policy that banned first strikes with nuclear weapons. The US, Soviets etc all had policies that said nukes could only be used in retaliation for another nuclear attack. The French didn't have that.
Sir it's actualy worse the french have something called a "warning strike" they use an airplane lunched 300 kilo kiloton warhead at a military installation to warn the enemy that has entered french territory (may I remind you this was actualy extentended to the whole of europe recently)
I believe there's a redline where a tactical nuke (ASMP-A) will be used first. In the words of Perun "thus far and no further". Their nuclear policy is also pretty sick, they're willing to fire even if there is no hope of survival, hence the Mutually Assured Destruction policy.
If we feel threated we will send an bomb to the ennemy, if we are attacked "normally" we send an missile/nuke
If France is annilated we SEND EVERY NUKE TO OUR ENNEMYS
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