[HN Gopher] Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new tax...
___________________________________________________________________
Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
Author : goindeep
Score : 371 points
Date : 2022-07-07 08:26 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (earth.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (earth.org)
| parkingrift wrote:
| It's about four decades too late to help anything.
| MrPatan wrote:
| Better late than never.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| The best time to build a nuclear power plant in 20 years ago.
| The second best is today.
| adrianN wrote:
| That is only true if nothing has changed in the last twenty
| years. But in that timeframe alternatives to nuclear have
| dropped in price quite a bit and know how about nuclear has
| retired.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| If that were the case there wouldn't be an energy crisis in
| every country without nuclear power. Yet the less nuclear
| power a country has the more electricity prices have risen
| since 2010.
| [deleted]
| parkingrift wrote:
| We need a rapid buildout of green energy. I like nuclear but
| the Green Democrats of the world ruined it. The world is
| worse off for their efforts, but someone has to win the race
| to peak stupidity.
| traspler wrote:
| I'm always a bit baffled by the amount of pro-nuclear comments on
| HN and their stance on how everyone who disagrees is just not
| educated enough. Please educate me: Is the waste problem solved?
| Are we not still fighting with all the previous attempts of
| handling it? Is "dig a hole in a salt deposit and keep it there"
| really good enough for the very, very, very long term? Are old
| powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with new ones
| when the time comes? Can we really claim to be able to handle
| worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)?
| nilsbunger wrote:
| There are at least two stances here:
|
| 1) Keeping existing nuclear power plants running and making
| incremental investments in them. I'm a proponent of this for
| the next 20-30 years because they generate carbon-free base
| load electricity. I don't think we have a choice given climate
| change - when we turn off a nuclear plant, we spin up coal and
| natural gas.
|
| 2) Building new nuclear plants. I'm skeptical of this - the
| costs don't seem to pencil out anymore and the political
| capital isn't there. From what I've seen we're better off
| investing in wind+solar+storage.
|
| The worst-case scenarios are a real issue and I wouldn't want
| to bet on nuclear forever, but to me the imperative to address
| climate change is bigger in the near term.
| Aachen wrote:
| You're asking us to Google all of these things for you and
| summarize the results into a neat coherent summary? I'd be more
| interested in why you're baffled by the popular opinion to
| begin with. What are the problems you see with the topics you
| bring up? Then we can cut to the misunderstandings rather than
| starting from scratch.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > Is the waste problem solved?
|
| It has never been a problem in the first place. At least not a
| technical problem. Sure, it is nasty stuff, to be treated with
| respect, but not worse than toxic chemicals we regularly deal
| with. It is also potentially useful stuff: rare, exotic matter
| that gives off energy. Compare with coal plants that also
| produce nuclear waste (there are radioisotopes in coal), but
| that waste is dumped in the air you breathe.
|
| > Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with
| new ones when the time comes?
|
| The are properly decommissioned, and it is really expensive,
| and that's indeed a real problem with nuclear power: it is
| expensive. But the thing is: nuclear plants don't have an
| expiration date like bottles of milk, you could potentially run
| them forever with regular maintenance. The reason we don't do
| that is that is that over time, maintenance becomes more and
| more expensive, parts become obsolete and stop being produced,
| etc... At some point it is cheaper to build a new, better plant
| and decommission the old one instead of spending a fortune on
| obsolete parts and retrofitting.
|
| > Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios
| well (e.g. Fukushima)?
|
| No, they wouldn't be worst case scenarios if we could, but we
| are doing our best. In the end, even with Chernobyl, nuclear
| power is still one of the safest per unit of energy produced.
| It is no excuse, Fukushima shouldn't have happened, but if the
| only response to an accident was to stop everything, we
| wouldn't do much.
| danenania wrote:
| "In the end, even with Chernobyl, nuclear power is still one
| of the safest per unit of energy produced."
|
| I'm not anti-nuclear at all, but I see this argument used a
| lot and I don't think it's a good one. The concerns with
| nuclear are all about tail risk. Comparing past results to
| other forms of energy doesn't address this since neither
| Chernobyl nor Fukushima were worst case scenarios for
| nuclear.
|
| An effective pro-nuclear argument should address the tail
| risk concern head-on rather than talking past it.
| potatoz2 wrote:
| Isn't this like comparing the safety of a motorcycle to
| that of an A380? The "tail risk" of the latter is 800+ dead
| versus a single rider, but the expected value is way lower
| in the plane's case.
| danenania wrote:
| In that case, there's plenty of data that shows the plane
| is safer mile-for-mile. There have been enough flights
| (of all jet models, not just the A380) and enough crashes
| to provide a reasonable estimate for the odds of a crash.
| From there, it's basic math to prove that the motorcycle
| is far more dangerous.
|
| The challenge with nuclear energy is we don't have a big
| enough sample to say with certainty, just from the data,
| what the odds are of a disaster 1000x worse than
| Chernobyl.
|
| My understanding is Chernobyl itself could have been
| 1000x worse and rendered much of Eastern Europe
| uninhabitable if the appropriate steps weren't taken in
| time, so to a neutral, non-expert observer, that would
| seem to indicate the odds are greater than zero.
|
| This is what many anti-nuclear people are concerned
| about, so if you want to get them on your side, you need
| to explain in detail why that kind of event is no longer
| possible. Just stating that it hasn't happened, as if
| that were proof it _can 't_ happen, isn't convincing.
| potatoz2 wrote:
| I see what you're saying, but it seems impossible to
| prove it literally cannot happen if you just assume every
| safety system we put in place all fail at once, which is
| _possible_ I guess.
|
| We live with worse tail risks daily though: we have
| nuclear weapons in the center of Europe (could be
| misused, there could be an accident, etc.), we have labs
| that handle or create deadly pathogens (there could be a
| leak, etc.), we live near volcanoes or in
| earthquake/tsunami prone areas, and of course we are
| living through climate change with unknown tail risk (to
| crops, to temperatures, etc.).
|
| If you accept that sort of question with no real
| probability of happening ("what if 5G renders us all
| infertile because we misunderstand high frequency radio
| waves?", "what if the flu vaccine produced this year
| kills us all?"), you can't really do anything. It's
| impossible to prove a negative, we have to deal with
| expected values given our knowledge.
| danenania wrote:
| There clearly is a line where we don't do projects if the
| tail risk is too high, just like you wouldn't build a
| house next to a volcano that is known to violently erupt
| every year or decade--if it's every 1,000 years, it may
| be a different story. The question is which side of the
| line nuclear energy is on.
|
| I basically agree that it's on the "worth doing" side
| given the right conditions are met. These conditions
| plainly weren't present in the USSR in the Chernobyl
| days, and probably aren't present _everywhere_ nuclear
| plants are operating today either, but that 's not a
| reason for a blanket anti-nuclear stance given its many
| benefits.
|
| My point is simply that comparing historical results
| isn't relevant to the tail risk discussion. Pro-nuclear
| people should stop using this argument imo--it makes it
| seem as though they don't understand the position they're
| arguing against.
|
| Sidenote on nuclear weapons: my sense is almost everyone
| _does_ agree that the tail risk of a disaster is
| unacceptably high, but because game theory makes a
| drawdown extremely difficult, they 're considered a grim
| necessity. If we could somehow destroy all nukes
| simultaneously and make it impossible to build new ones,
| we'd increase humanity's odds of survival quite a bit by
| doing that.
| CardenB wrote:
| That's a very fair argument.
|
| One consideration that comes to mind is if the scale
| necessary for operating nuclear is much greater than the
| examples you cited?
|
| Thinking out loud, without taking a stance on either
| side, it seems we would need to scale nuclear power to
| the hands of many lesser qualified people than in the
| cases you mentioned, which would push the tail risk much
| harder.
|
| That said, I haven't thought deeply about the comparison
| here. If we need heavy magnitude of power, then we are
| bound to have to accept the risk of disaster as such
| concentrated power centers inevitably become unstable.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| >Is the waste problem solved? Are we not still fighting with
| all the previous attempts of handling it? Is "dig a hole in a
| salt deposit and keep it there" really good enough for the
| very, very, very long term? It is technically solved, but
| politically unsolved. YMMV about how much of a deal breaker
| this is.
|
| >Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with
| new ones when the time comes? Not a problem that you can solved
| today
|
| >Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios
| well (e.g. Fukushima)? Yes, also Fukushima can't happen in
| geologically inert Western Europe.
|
| However, what is clear is that the world needs consistent,
| plentiful, reliable carbon-free energy. The storage required to
| meet the first three conditions with renewables DOES NOT EXIST.
| It doesn't exist for anything outside of a few minutes. Nuclear
| power is: consistent, reliable and carbon-free; and humanity
| has known how to do it since the 1960s. In a contest between a
| technology we DO NOT HAVE, and one we DO, it is a no-brainer.
| 7952 wrote:
| But it isn't a competition between technology. It is a
| competition between industrial-societal complexes that
| include supply chains, resources, training, politics and a
| large number of flawed human beings. Having the best
| technology isn't enough. The human infrastructure behind is
| what wins. And in that respect the renewables/battery complex
| is just more successful. We may well be able to scale up
| storage to support renewables more quickly than nuclear new
| build.
| traspler wrote:
| How is technically solved? We are talking enormous timelines
| for which we have to guarantee safe handling of the waste.
| Every try until now has proven to be inadequate.
|
| So we are in the situation where we live with old powerplants
| that are not up to standard and no way to handle that but we
| will definitely be in the future?
|
| ,,Can't happen" is always the argument until it does and it's
| a difference if we are talking about something that will be
| over in short time or will remain a problem forever. But my
| point was more in the direction of how to handle that, if the
| solution is bury it and move far away from it, it's not
| something that can be scaled.
| google234123 wrote:
| There are trillions of tons of uranium under your feet and
| somehow everything is ok.
| croes wrote:
| Reliable?
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-
| nuclear-p...
| schmeckleberg wrote:
| We need an alliance between nuclear fans and wind (heh) fans.
| You situate the nuclear fans in front of the wind fans' wind
| turbines. The wind fans then ask the nuclear fans about
| nuclear's ongoing problems with going over-budget on new builds
| and unresolved multi-century waste management commitments. The
| nuclear fans immediately try to hand-wave these objections
| away. The resulting draft turns the wind turbines. Viola,
| clean, green energy!
| andbberger wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
| belorn wrote:
| I hold all power sources to the same standard. As long nuclear
| don't put their pollution into the air, storing it is almost
| infinitive better. Any energy source that just release
| pollution into the environment as a cost-saving strategy should
| be banned, which by economical standard makes all fossil fuel
| energy sources (and possible some bio fuel ones) nonviable.
|
| The same is for handling worst case scenarios, and here we got
| a prime example for which to base a minimum standard.
| Hydropower dams has very bad worst case scenarios if they
| burst. For the person who dies, neither radiation poisoning or
| drowning is pretty pleasant, so which ever regulation and
| liability we want to apply to both is fine by me.
|
| One option to is to ban any energy source the release
| pollution, and any energy source that has a risk to human
| lives. The candle industry would be happy, through I suspect
| there would be an increase in house fires.
| breadloaf wrote:
| I'm always a bit baffled by the amount of pro-renewables
| comments on HN. Is energy storage solved problem, or are people
| in northern latitudes going to freeze to death during winter?
| legulere wrote:
| Winter is the time of the year most energy is produced by
| wind: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Germany_Monthly
| _Elec...
|
| It's also not really an issue that nuclear is free from. It's
| very difficult for nuclear to follow demand and it is not as
| reliable as can be seen with France's current struggles.
| merb wrote:
| you either have wind or you have solar. most of the time in a
| country as big as france there is always a place where you
| have tons of either one. storage is only needed for spikes,
| which btw. is also needed for nuclear (or you can use gas).
| btw. your argument is the one I think is so stupid from the
| pro nuclear crowd, as if peak nuclear is a solved problem.
| (p.s. it isn't no country in the world does use nuclear for
| peaks not even france.)
| uwuemu wrote:
| "Green" is an extremely politicized term. The nuclear
| aversion has nothing to do with rational thinking and
| everything to do with emotions. And since most people have
| emotions, you can get highly educated people to be "green"
| extremists. These people don't balance the equation with the
| suffering of the poor people (which rising energy prices
| absolutely bring to the table), and secondary effects of
| green extremism like shrinking economies and inflation is not
| something on their radar, all that matters is that there is
| less CO2 being produced (or so they think), everything else
| is secondary and temporary.
|
| All of that would be fine, there will always be extremists
| (and to a degree, we need them) and if you seriously believe
| in the cause, more power to you...
|
| ... the real problem is that left wing has adopted this
| extreme green position as one of its core elements. Now all
| the left wingers have to adhere to green extremism, otherwise
| they're not part of the team. In 2022, it is not acceptable
| for any member of any left leaning party to be climate
| moderate.
|
| The right wing has abortion and guns, the left wing has green
| extremism and critical theory. Try to be openly anti-gun or
| pro-choice on the right wing. Try to be openly climate-
| moderate or anti-woke on the left wing... see what happens.
| THAT's the problem. Nuance in politics went completely out of
| the window in the last decade. It's either extreme A or
| extreme B. And the other side is not only wrong, it is evil.
| jseliger wrote:
| Assuming this question is made in good faith: air pollution as
| generated from coal and methane ("natural gas") is really bad
| and much worse than previously realized:
| https://patrickcollison.com/pollution.
|
| The literature on it is credible:
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/wh...
|
| Nuclear produces no air pollution. It produces no direct
| greenhouse gases. The actual amount of centuries-long waste is
| tiny: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-
| fuel-c..., particularly compared to other industrial
| activities.
|
| People have some kind of aesthetic / disproportionate fear-
| based response to nuclear and ignore the deaths that occur due
| to combusting coal and methane. Most people can't or won't
| think numerically but we should also try to do better.
| legulere wrote:
| But nuclear or fossil is a false dichotomy: There are also
| renewables, which of course have their difficulties with
| intermittency but are often already now the cheapest
| electricity source.
| titzer wrote:
| The high-order bit is that nuclear waste isn't very much, is
| solid and is manageable. Your average US nuclear plant will
| produce 3 cubic meters of solid waste each year. That's about
| the size of a refrigerator. In the US, the vast majority of
| such waste is sitting inert in cooling ponds doing no harm at
| all, where it has been sitting for decades with no real
| incidents.
|
| Compare that with a coal-fired power plant where the waste is
| gaseous, toxic, and enormous. Thousands and millions of tons.
| And fly ash is radioactive. Far more radiation is produced by
| coal plants than nuclear plants because of the radioactive
| isotopes of carbon and other trace elements. And that's just
| blasted right into the air. Not to mention the CO2!
| Georgelemental wrote:
| > Is "dig a hole in a salt deposit and keep it there" really
| good enough for the very, very, very long term?
|
| Yes. It's not _that_ dangerous, the whole reason it is waste is
| that it 's no longer radioactive enough to power the plant.
| (And as plant technology improves, the threshold for "no longer
| radioactive enough" will get even lower)
|
| > Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios
| well (e.g. Fukushima)?
|
| Fukushima led to 1 death from radiation. Nuclear's overall
| safety record is far better that any alternative
| mort96 wrote:
| You're not gonna convince many sceptical people by looking
| only at death counts. How many people had to be relocated?
| How large of an area is now uninhabitable? How many would
| have died if our luck had been just a bit worse that day? Is
| there anything about the technology in all currently
| operating power plants which completely rules out a worst-
| case meltdown scenario?
|
| People are mainly afraid of nuclear because the worst-case
| scenario is so insanely ridiculously bad, not because it
| maintains a high stable death rate.
| logicchains wrote:
| >How many people had to be relocated? How large of an area
| is now uninhabitable? How many would have died if our luck
| had been just a bit worse that day?
|
| _Hiroshima_ was re-inhabited just a few years later, and it
| was literally hit by a nuclear bomb.
| mort96 wrote:
| Okuma, Fukushima is still largely a ghost town from what
| I can tell. Only parts of the town have been declared
| successfully decontaminated with residents allowed to
| return, and only as late as 2019.
| toyg wrote:
| And they are still paying the price for it.
| https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-
| nagasaki
|
| They were "lucky", btw: "since the bombs were detonated
| so far above the ground, there was very little
| contamination--especially in contrast to nuclear test
| sites such as those in Nevada"
| Krssst wrote:
| If we only replace coal with gas and leave climate change
| go awry, several order of magnitudes more will become
| inhabitable.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Seems like everybody is jumping on the "environmentalists that
| don't like nuclear power do it for ideological reasons and are
| paid by the oil lobby" resentment bandwagon. While I think it is
| a fair point and while I do think it's a stupid mistake to close
| nuclear plants, there are also issues that I rarely see addressed
| probably because they drown under all the rest :
|
| 1. Nuclear plants are very expensive and some projects have been
| pumping taxpayer's money. I suspect they are not so easy to
| conceive, build and maintain as other sources of clean energy.
| Especially since they become a security issue when they get old.
|
| 2. The problem of waste management has always been a problem. I
| hear it argued that it is a solved problem but certainly having
| this problem lying since the beginning of the industry has not
| helped not build trust.
|
| 3. The nuclear catastrophies have been overblown because they
| were more spectacular and a new thing affecting lot of people in
| a short period of time BUT it remains that it is hard to trust
| people that thought building a nuclear plant in an island that is
| the victim of dramatic eathquakes and tsunamis a good ides AND
| the problem is that it fucks up an entire area for who knows how
| long ? That is certainly scary, no need for oil producers
| lobbying there to explain distrust.
|
| 4. Is there even enough uranium for the world ? Is is sustainable
| to invest loads of money into systems whose fuel is on foreign
| countries that you have to dig up ? (so according you gathered by
| now I am not pro-oil. Keep it in the goddamn ground)
|
| 5. It is a single point of failure. Thank god no terrorist
| thought of "landing" a plane there. It's broken ? No power for an
| entire region.
|
| 6. Finally, but this is a minor point as those considerations may
| be a luxury during our climate crisis, the technology lends
| itself well to despotic elite rule, everyone depends on who can
| secure control of a little army of skilled workers and engineers.
| Those control the energy supply would have tremendous power.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| We still don't need nuclear. We have many other solutions,
| including reduction of power consumption, cap-and-trade carbon
| credits, and much more.
|
| What's happened is that, bizarrely, people have completely
| conceded to the reactionaries. People have given in, and now
| give the reactionaries free reign, making it a fait accompli
| that none of those solutions will happen. If you quit trying
| and let the reactionaries off the hook, then nuclear is
| (arguably) what's left.
|
| The anti-nuclear power position of the 1980s didn't take into
| account - and shouldn't have taken into account - that the
| American conservatives and the fossil fuel industry would
| prevent any action on climate change for decades, even denying
| climate change was happening, then falling back to 'it's not
| caused by humans', and now to 'there's nothing we can do'.
|
| > Seems like everybody is jumping on the "environmentalists
| that don't like nuclear power do it for ideological reasons and
| are paid by the oil lobby" resentment bandwagon.
|
| Again, everyone has completely capitulated to the
| reactionaries, like people in Vichy France. They are jumping on
| the reactionary bandwagon. The reactionaries are exceptionally
| aggressive (an obvious, unimaginative tactic) and people feel
| powerless against them, so like people bullied on the
| playground, they find a safe position: Join the bullies and
| attack their targets.
| herbst wrote:
| Thanks EU for making everything worse for no reason. Can't they
| just invent their own label.
|
| Gas likely is better than Germany still burning tons of coal
| every day for energy but it's not green.
|
| That's just sad really
| Juliate wrote:
| The point of the label is not that it's green or blue or
| whatever nature-friendly color.
|
| The point is to direct and strongly favor investments in less
| worse energy production sources.
|
| We're only sadly at a point where even some gas energy usage is
| a less worse option than no gas at all (because then, coal
| would be used instead).
| kmlx wrote:
| > We're only sadly at a point where even some gas energy
| usage is a less worse option than no gas at all (because
| then, coal would be used instead).
|
| good point, but still tragic.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| There is no reason to favour investments in gas. This is a
| political compromise to placate Germany that drove itself
| into a corner by not wanting to hear about nuclear for
| ideological reasons.
| osuairt wrote:
| "ideological reasons"
|
| Can you tell us what those ideological reasons why be?
|
| Or are you straight up trying to dismiss their approach as
| irrational and dogmatic in the eyes of reader by suggesting
| it is ideological only?
| LtWorf wrote:
| By your answer we can learn that:
|
| 1. you're german
|
| 2. you hate nuclear for ideological reasons
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Go for the man, not the ball.
|
| 1. I'm not german
|
| 2. I don't hate nuclear
|
| 3. I disapprove of nuclear, because its proponents never
| budget for decommissioning; not for "ideological"
| reasons.
|
| What are "ideological" reasons anyway, in this context?
| What ideology are you on about? You could say there's a
| "green ideology", I suppose, which amounts to preferring
| policies that don't wreck the environment. But how's that
| an "ideology"? Is it "ideological" to favour policies
| that don't result in widespread famine, or global
| thermonuclear war?
|
| I'd be pro-nuclear, very much so, if plans for new plants
| included detailed, budgeted explanations of how and when
| the plant would be fully decommissioned. They never do
| though.
| Juliate wrote:
| Cut completely gas out of the equation, you'll get coal
| instead and/or social uprising at the continent level.
|
| Unless you can favor fast nuclear reinstallment.
|
| The energy crisis we're facing for the coming century is
| ... not good.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| That's besides the point. To get to net zero we can't
| favour new investments in gas. Maybe such investments are
| unavoidable in some cases but that's quite different.
|
| So, again, this is all on Germany. They should clean up
| their own mess themselves and drop ideological dogmas.
| [deleted]
| herbst wrote:
| This also means that all the money people fought for in the
| last years to get countries to invest in green energy is now
| funelled back into non green energy. People who invest in
| green energy Fonds suddenly invest in gas.
|
| I wouldn't care about the label wouldn't it destroy years of
| work for a better environment.
| frafra wrote:
| From the article: "gas-fired plants built through 2030 will
| be recognised as a transitional energy source as long as
| they are used to replace dirtier fossil fuels such as oil
| and coal."
|
| "The technical screening criteria ensure that any new gas-
| based power/heat plant (or refurbished combined heat and
| power plant or heat/cool plant) is either below the
| technology-neutral 100g CO2/kWh life-cycle emission
| threshold (i.e. using Carbon Capture and Storage
| technologies) or meets a number of stringent conditions and
| obtains a construction permit by 2030." -- Questions and
| Answers on the EU Taxonomy Complementary Climate Delegated
| Act covering certain nuclear and gas activities
| herbst wrote:
| I've read that. A lot of the money was still ment for
| other projects. Essentially pausing the whole green
| energy effort for the next 8 years (at least)
|
| I think it's likely a good thing if Germany and some
| others invest money in Gas instead of coal. Especially
| now.
|
| But in no world or metric is this green energy and should
| be built with green energy money.
| frafra wrote:
| "Essentially pausing the whole green energy effort for
| the next 8 years (at least)" [citation needed]
|
| It is green energy as long as the criteria are met. Even
| solar could be not considered green, depending on where
| you set the emission bar. There is no black and white.
| There is a long transition process, with timelines,
| budgets and targets. Rules on gas are very strict. The
| regulation is an improvement. Some countries prefer to
| rely on gas than on nuclear, and there isn't much that
| the commission can do.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > It is green energy as long as the criteria are met.
|
| That's what the EU Parliament are saying; but the truth
| is that the criteria are met if the criteria are met.
| Energy doesn't become "green" just because some bunch of
| lobbied and whipped politicians say it's green.
| frafra wrote:
| It is a definition, which is needed when you need to make
| plans and decisions, as in any other case. It does not
| mean that reality changes because of an agreement, of
| course, even if mixing the two might be tempting when
| trying to discredit politicians as a whole. That is an
| _evergreen_ :)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Thing is, the plans and decisions have already been made,
| under a more stringent definition. By changing the
| definition, they have effectively undermined those
| earlier plans and decisions. That's dishonesty.
| frafra wrote:
| There were no plans and decisions on the taxonomy
| regarding gas or nuclear before, which is part of the
| Commission action plan on financing sustainable growth.
| The taxonomy still needs a final vote to pass, actually,
| and it does not replace any previous taxonomy or
| regulation. Check your sources before moving accusations.
| herbst wrote:
| I hope you are right and this is not just a big step in
| the wrong direction, just because it sounds so stupid
| (Neuspreching burning Gas to Green energy is nothing but
| that)
| rdsubhas wrote:
| > "Thanks EU for making everything worse ..."
|
| > "Gas likely is better than ..."
|
| Everything got worse, but likely better? You seem to be
| contradicting yourself.
| osuairt wrote:
| "Thanks EU for making everything worse for no reason. Can't
| they just invent their own label."
|
| I am going to go out on a limb and guess that you don't live in
| Europe.
| herbst wrote:
| I do live in the heart of Europe but not in the EU. Best of
| both worlds I guess.
| sofixa wrote:
| Europe but not EU can mean anything from Switzerland to
| Bosnia and Herzegovina to Moldova to Belarus, so it could
| be good or pretty bad.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| My guess would be Serbia, that's the typical attitude
| towards the EU there (not to mention not-so-subtle pro-
| Russian stance). The only place which sees the EU in
| worse light would probably be Belarus or Russia.
| chicob wrote:
| Why not the UK?
| sofixa wrote:
| Generally British people wouldn't say "heart of Europe".
| If anything when talking about Europe they mean
| continental Europe and don't include the British Isles in
| that.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Unless you're poor...
| herbst wrote:
| Not sure what you are referring too to be honest.
| timwaagh wrote:
| The bad part is Russian gas got the greenlight too (at least
| until 2035).
| seydor wrote:
| Now that we agree that nuclear is a better future, we need to
| talk about where to source fissile materials, and what
| technologies can make it so safe we won't have to think twice.
| cbmuser wrote:
| And it's backed by science, just in case someone is about to
| complain.
|
| See:
| https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/business_econo...
| ketanip wrote:
| I see a lot of opposition to Nuclear Energy in EU and
| particularly Germany, can anyone tell me why ?
|
| As far as I know, only nuclear has power to stop our reliance on
| fossil fuels as it can produce a constant supply of power and
| handle energy demand spikes like no other, and for Europe is more
| important as Russia can just cut energy supply to Europe and it
| will cause horrible effects to Europe's economy.
| throwawayjun21 wrote:
| So stupid to hate nuclear energy. you dont need to be a rocket
| scientist to realize how good deal its. Where i am from a lot of
| activists hit the road and blocked many nuclear plant from bein
| built.
|
| Brainless activism is destroying democracies around the world
| asdff wrote:
| It's not brainless, there is a very intelligent cohort of
| people who stand to gain a lot of money from investments
| shifting away from nuclear energy into sources they are
| personally leveraged in. People aren't generally able to form
| grassroots movements without the consent of at least some of
| the moneyed elite.
| pvaldes wrote:
| The same happened in Spain in 70s, and the ecologists saved
| several cities and the local economy of thee entire area when
| an earthquake hit at a few Km of were the smart people wanted
| to build the nuclear plant.
|
| So, some are brainless, other are genius able to predict the
| future and take the correct decision. Your mileage can vary.
| hedora wrote:
| So, the plan was to build a non-seismically protected nuclear
| power plant in a seismically active area? Do you have a
| source for that?
| pvaldes wrote:
| This was exactly the idea in 1973 Murcia, Spain, yup. BWR
| model. Same design as Fukushima plant at 30km of Lorca.
| Until a couple of dumb guys and a famous actor from the
| area see what was obvious, pick up some banners and saved
| the day.
|
| The action payback generously when in 2011 Lorca was hit by
| an 5.1 earthquake and no central nuclear was here to be
| hit. None of the tomato companies that sell vegetables to
| half Europe were destroyed, tourists keep coming as usual,
| and none of the fishermen were crushed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Lorca_earthquake
| pfdietz wrote:
| A 5.1 earthquake is rather weak. This would likely not
| have damaged an NPP near there.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Fortunately we will never know it. The damage to homes
| was 36 million euro in any case, but this is not the only
| thing that matters really. The bad press of an European
| Fukushima in the year of Fukushima would have destroyed
| the tourism in thousands of Km of the Mediterranean
| Spanish Coast.
|
| Would you buy tomatoes cultured near a central nuclear
| that "may not have been damaged" by an earthquake?. Would
| you pass your holidays dining fish and swimming a place
| that "probably is not leaking radioactivity to the sea"?.
| Most people would answer negatively.
|
| Nuclear benefits don't matter when you have a better plan
| for the place. If the other activity brings you ten times
| more money without the risks, and without excluding the
| rest of the economic activities in that place, the
| decision is easy.
| willcipriano wrote:
| You know how I know environmentalists are just dragging their
| feet on nuclear for ideological reasons?
|
| When we talk about a storage facility for nuclear waste, a
| scenario they insist you prepare for: if human civilization
| completely collapses to the point that any of the currently
| spoken languages on earth are no longer able to be read how to we
| keep the, whatever comes after us, from busting up the concrete
| and digging down deep into the earth and playing with it. That's
| the last gasp of someone out of obstructionist ideas. I've had
| these people tell me that launching the waste into the sun would
| be dangerous for the sun, they aren't serious and need to be
| ignored.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warn...
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Also, as a more near term issue, say next 1000 years, what
| happens in case of war? Right now number of nuclear plants are
| so few that each could be tracked by the world, e.g. Russia
| getting hold of Chernobyl area was frightening. But if there
| are 10 times or even 100 times more number of plants in many
| more countries, some country will use some other's nuclear
| plant to prove collateral damage, what Iraq did to
| Kuwait(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires)
| varajelle wrote:
| > What happens in case of war?
|
| War is horrible, many people die or get displaced. Cities
| gets destroyed.
|
| Nuclear incident are nothing compared to that and not really
| a concern anymore. I don't know why people bring wars up.
|
| And if the ennemy just wanted to destroy, they would just use
| nuclear or chemical weapons that are meant for this purpose,
| no need to get to a nuclear powerplant for that.
| willcipriano wrote:
| For thirty years people have been asking that question,
| telling us to use "renewables" instead. Renewables aren't
| getting here fast enough, we can wait another thirty years
| burning fossil fuels or we can start building nuclear plants
| now.
| adrianN wrote:
| Building nuclear plants is really not something that I'd
| put in the category of "things one can do quickly".
| Kon5ole wrote:
| Renewables are getting here faster than nuclear.
|
| At a fundamental level this is because you can mobilize a
| lot more manpower building renewables than you can building
| nuclear. A million homeowners adding solar power versus
| decade-long nuclear power plant projects.
|
| During the past decade in Germany, renewables added more
| power generation capacity than all the remaining nuclear
| reactors did combined. That energy is here now, and half of
| it gave benefits already 5 years ago.
|
| So I don't think it's wise to divert money from renewables
| and storage to build new nuclear, but keeping existing
| nuclear around for as long as possible is a completely
| different matter.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > That energy is here now
|
| Is it?
|
| "CO2 emissions per capita in Germany are equivalent to
| 9.44 tons per person" [0]
|
| "CO2 emissions per capita in France are equivalent to
| 5.13 tons per person" [1]
|
| [0]https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/germany-
| co2-emis... & https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM
| .CO2E.PC?location...
|
| [1]https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-
| co2-emiss... & https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.AT
| M.CO2E.PC?location...
| legulere wrote:
| How many of the languages that were spoken 10000 years ago do
| we still speak? Launching nuclear waste in space is dangerous,
| not because of what it will do there but because a lot of
| rockets explode on their way there scattering parts as fine
| particles all over the world.
| haadej wrote:
| Modern rockets, such as the Falcon 9, have an extremely low
| failure rate. Falcon 9 itself has had over 160 launches, with
| only 1 complete failure.
| martin_a wrote:
| Would you bet that there's not a second failure which
| distributes nuclear waste in our atmosphere?
| willcipriano wrote:
| You mean like a coal plant operating under normal
| conditions?
| martin_a wrote:
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > if human civilization completely collapses
|
| Even if it doesn't, nuclear waste storage is still a very
| expensive and indefinitely long project (assuming you want to
| keep adding to it, stop it poisoning the ground water, and stop
| terrorists getting access to it, etc.)
|
| > I've had these people tell me that
|
| It's still strawmanning if you pick an actual bad argument that
| someone told you and don't just come up with the bad argument
| yourself. I'm sure you're smart enough to imagine the failure
| modes of trying to launch millions of rockets full of nuclear
| waste, so the environmentalists are right to oppose such an
| idea even if they can't articulate why.
| pornel wrote:
| You know nuclear waste isn't green glowing leaky barrells
| like in cartoons, right?
|
| It's stored as solid glass. For super-duper cautious extra
| safety it can be stored _below_ ground water levels. The
| volume of the high-level waste is relatively tiny (roughly a
| swimming pool per year per country).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
| dane-pgp wrote:
| You're right, it sounds like it should be easy to avoid
| these cartoonishly bad outcomes, but unfortunately reality
| doesn't always meet our expectations.
|
| "Why Germany is digging up its nuclear waste"
|
| "But the waste had to be stored somewhere, so the voices
| that warned against selecting Asse II were ignored."
|
| "The office concluded that the risk of groundwater
| contamination was too big, and the only truly safe option
| was to retrieve all the waste from the mine and store it
| elsewhere."
|
| https://euobserver.com/eu-political/132085
|
| (Thank you for offering a fact-based criticism, though,
| rather than just angrily downvoting.)
| willcipriano wrote:
| > Asse II salt mine should never have been used in the
| 1960s and 1970s as a site to dump nuclear waste, said
| Ingo Bautz of the Federal Office for Radiation
| Protection.
|
| > "Today, nobody would choose this mine to place
| radioactive waste," Bautz told journalists during a
| recent tour of the mine, in the north-western state of
| Lower Saxony.
|
| How is this applicable in 2022? This proves his point,
| not yours. The problems from your article have long been
| solved.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I'm just not convinced by the argument "Nuclear power is
| safe as long as we don't make any of the mistakes of
| previous generations".
|
| Chernobyl didn't make the mistakes of Windscale;
| Fukushima didn't make the mistakes of Chernobyl; and
| future nuclear power stations won't make the mistakes of
| Fukushima (hopefully).
|
| It's possible that the track record for nuclear plants,
| and handling radioactive waste, is getting better, but
| it's also possible that on the scale of hundreds of
| years, there will be new things that go wrong which we
| didn't predict.
|
| I'm not asking for perfection, though. All I'm saying is
| that nuclear energy has a history of costing more and
| being more deadly than its proponents claim, and it's
| already too expensive to build (both generation and waste
| storage) at scale, safely, and on time in nearly all
| countries.
| pornel wrote:
| Count how many people have died in these accidents
| directly and possibly from thyroid cancers, and compare
| to lung cancers attributed to coal. Coal kills way more
| people. It's killing right now.
|
| There are estimates that more people died from fuel
| poverty due to closure of Fukushima and subsequent raise
| in fuel prices, than the Fukushima accident itself.
|
| Coal power plants release more radioactive pollution than
| nuclear power plants, simply because coal is never 100%
| pure and the sheer volume of coal burned.
|
| So you are demanding perfection. Your fear of
| hypothetical future risk of harm is perpetuating the
| actual harm currently happening.
| tomComb wrote:
| Costing more, Yes, but being more deadly, No.
| kevinpet wrote:
| Headline here omits part of the headline in the linked story: Gas
| and Nuclear are both now considered green. Which to me just
| reinforces the absurdity of environmental advocacy. It's clear
| that CO2 is the most urgent environmental issue today, and I say
| this as someone who is skeptical of many of the doom and gloom
| extreme claims and policy prescriptions that amount to shaming
| for wanting luxury. So in that regard nuclear is not just a
| bridge solution, but a long term (nearly indefinitely if we
| reprocess fuel and use breeder reactors), especially if we get
| our act together and stop making it cost a fortune. While natural
| gas is continuing to contribute to CO2 in the atmosphere.
| GamerUncle wrote:
| Ironically enough is the same "trust the science" crowd form
| Germany that has seemingly hindered the advance of nuclear
| SpEd3Y wrote:
| Isn't it smart to invest in Nuclear? Sure, there might be
| drawbacks right now but if we invest in research and improve it
| we might find a way to make it "greener"?
|
| Also we seem to be focusing on space exploration again. To take
| off we're always using fossil fuel. I'm going to take a wild
| guess and assume that you cannot take a ship into space with wind
| and solar. Also a wild guess but if we develop nuclear enough we
| might get smaller generators that are able to help a ship take
| off and then continue to have energy while in space. I know too
| little to make these claims but I'm sure the smart people here
| can help me understand if I am wrong or correct :)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > To take off we're always using fossil fuel.
|
| While yes, this is currently true even for SpaceX whose Falcon
| family uses RP-1, for the future the situation looks different
| - Starship uses liquid oxygen (which can be obtained by air
| liquefaction) and methane, which can be synthesized at high
| efficiencies [1] in a laboratory scale or captured from
| landfills.
|
| [1]
| https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/se/d0se0...
|
| [2] https://news.mit.edu/2022/loci-methane-emissions-
| landfills-0...
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal
| of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party. It's
| understandable that France doesn't want to go with that, as they
| don't want to be forced down the same ruinous path we're
| currently on here in Germany. And honestly, good for them.
|
| It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in
| Germany. I did my PhD at the French nuclear energy agency and my
| French colleagues would always be puzzled when I talked about
| German energy policies and our anti-nuclear sentiment. But here
| in Germany the Green party will probably never reverse it's
| stance on nuclear energy, as their rise to popularity was
| strongly fueled by the anti-nuclear movement from the 80s and
| it's the one thing they can't abandon without losing a large
| number of followers.
|
| I partially blame the highly ideological stance on the way people
| rise to power in politics and administration in Germany. In
| France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by
| people that are technically excellent and have gone through the
| system of grandes ecoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...), whereas in Germany
| most people rise through social engineering and party politics
| and most top positions in the administration are filled by people
| with law degrees that don't have a clue about technology. In my
| opinion that's also a reason why we completely fail in everything
| regarding digitalization, lawyers are simply not good technical
| problem solvers.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected
| in Germany.
|
| What part of this entire discussion has anything do to with
| science? Is anyone actually contesting the science?
|
| Is it a discussion about the number of orbitals of uranium
| atoms? Or is it a discussion on which entities handle the long-
| term financials obligations, whether we favor or not
| decentralized grids, whether we favor short term or longer term
| solutions -- which in turn depends on whether the (possibly
| international) risks are long term or short term, etc. Not much
| of the later is "science".
|
| Politics is not a science and never can be. This entire story
| -- the word "green" itself -- is as unscientific as it gets.
| Not in the "science contradicts it" sense; I mean in the "this
| is neither provable nor falsifiable and science has nothing to
| do with it" sense.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| A lot of the anti-nuclear opinion is passionately opposed to
| scientific analysis.
|
| They're convinced Chernobyl can happen again, and that
| scientists are arrogantly playing god when they explain what
| can and can't happen
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| What "scientific" analysis has claimed "chernobyl can't
| happen again" ? It would be as ridiculous as someone
| claiming the new Airbus XXX model can't crash. Even
| analysis of the type "a chernobyl will happen once every XX
| years" are more political in nature than scientific, since
| you are assuming a stable society for decades to come (i.e.
| no degradation in the skill level of constructors or
| operators, etc. -- even foreign ones). Which, barring
| sudden miraculous discoveries in the area of Psychohistory,
| is basically entirely politics and outside the realm of
| science.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Chernobyl can't happen again because the awful design
| that made that failure possible is long ago abandoned.
|
| It's a bit like how the Airbus A380 can't crash like the
| Hindenburg airship did.
| tobias3 wrote:
| RBMK-1000 is actually still in use in Russia at three
| locations (they obviously fixed the bug that lead to the
| disaster, so it won't repeat 1:1...).
|
| That also points at one issue. All the now >50 year old
| reactors should have been replaced with newer versions at
| some point. Just think about what kind of electronics
| there is in those things. This didn't happen anywhere.
| Not in Germany and not in France.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > All the now >50 year old reactors should have been
| replaced with newer versions at some point.
|
| Seems like an issue with how humans think in general.
| "It's not an issue now, so why worry about it?"
|
| These sorts of creeping disasters never seem to be
| addressed by any society in a timely fashion.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I'm quite sure that no one who asks "can chernobyl can
| happen again?" is actually interested in the response to
| "can chernobyl happen again _in exactly the same way_"?.
| This is malicious nitpicking.
|
| In the same way that I'm sure the victims of the next
| Airbus crash will be happy to know that "it didn't crash
| like the Hindenburg did".
| elgenie wrote:
| Distinguishing between failure modes isn't nitpicking
| when the difference is between the plant being totaled
| for the purposes of future power generation as opposed to
| spewing radioactivity over a third of a continent.
|
| An Airbus that loses an engine and has to immediately
| land has objectively failed; however, acting like that's
| equivalent to a plane homing into a skyscraper and
| exploding is not helpful.
| [deleted]
| knorker wrote:
| Is it not malicious to scream "chernobyl!" willfully
| deceptively or willfully ignorantly confusing what can
| and cannot happen?
|
| More people die every single year from radiation in coal
| than have died in the entire history of nuclear power.
| Replacing all coal with nuclear would save more lives and
| health than fighting nuclear ever could, even in theory.
|
| And delaying coal to nuclear under the banner of "wind
| and solar maybe one day can help a bit" has blood on its
| hands.
|
| Every year coal is still here, instead of nuclear, is 100
| years of death. If building powerplants (of any type)
| were instant, and solar were one year away, then we
| should STILL replace all coal with nuclear _TODAY_ , to
| minimize harm. (in a spherical chickens in a vacuum sort
| of way)
|
| And not only do we not have enough solar, we don't even
| have a plan for energy storage for solar and wind. We
| have ideas, not a plan.
|
| So solar&wind replacing coal&nuclear is further away than
| fusion power, by multiples.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| To exemplify the difference between science and politics:
|
| - Nuclear is safer than coal: science (true or not, it's
| not the point)
|
| - We need to go all the way nuclear: politics. There's a
| million other things to consider, many of them don't even
| each into the realm of what is falsifiable (e.g
| international relations, fuel availability, who knows).
| _Even_ if nuclear was literally the safest method ever,
| it is literally still politics whether to use nuclear or
| not; after all, we sacrifice safety for convenience
| _many_ times, and good luck defining "convenience" in a
| scientific way.
|
| Another example:
|
| - Vaccines are safe and effective (scientific; true or
| not is not the point)
|
| - Vaccines are safe enough compared to the risk of
| catching the disease itself ("social" sciences; caveat
| emptor)
|
| - We should force everyone to vaccinate (politics). It
| does not matter if vaccines are safe, or not. It is still
| a political topic, not scientific. There are things like
| ethics, social vs individual rights, etc. that are hardly
| quantifiable much less scientific.
| bawolff wrote:
| These are bad examples. "Vaccines are safe and effective"
| is not scientific because science can deal with
| comparisons, it cannot deal with absolutes.
|
| You can scientificly say something is safe compared to
| something else, or define safe in some way (less then 1
| in X chance of something happening statistically). But
| there is no such thing as 100% absolute safety. Even an
| injection with saline is not safe in the absolute.
|
| E.g. if there is a 1 in a trillion chance of a side
| effect, you will never see it, because there arent a
| trillion people on earth.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| You are completely right. I actually wanted to write
| "vaccinates are this safe and effective".
| knorker wrote:
| I don't think this is relevant to my point. Not wrong,
| just not relevant.
|
| Individuals who are anti nuclear have reasons, explicitly
| stated, that are misinformed.
|
| Being anti nuclear because Chernobyl is in fact like
| being anti airplane because Hindenburg.
|
| The criticism is actually (in this analogy) that they
| claim the hydrogen in a 747 will catch fire. "It's not
| hydrogen, it's just filled with oxygen and nitrogen" is
| met with "then what if that spontaneously combusts?!".
|
| But in a way you make a good point. "I don't want to have
| a rational discussion or learn anything" is indeed the
| anti nuclear stance. "I don't want the truth, i just want
| to be right" is political.
|
| The other things you mention are not really even known to
| anti nuclear people.
|
| Wanting to be right despite facts or ignorance is almost
| the definition of politics.
|
| People say they're anti nuclear because they want to
| spare us radiation and death, but when you tell them
| nuclear would reduce both then they just scream louder.
|
| You can be factually wrong in politics. When your stated
| and internal reasons don't align with what your actions
| will accomplish, then that's wrong.
| cure wrote:
| > Every year coal is still here, instead of nuclear, is
| 100 years of death. If > building powerplants (of any
| type) were instant, and solar were one year away, > then
| we should STILL replace all coal with nuclear TODAY, to
| minimize harm. (in > a spherical chickens in a vacuum
| sort of way)
|
| But... we all know that it takes a _lot_ longer to build
| a nuclear plant (on the order of 10-20 years) than it
| does to build (large) solar or wind farms (on the order
| of 1-5 years).
|
| So.... yeah, if it was magically possible to replace all
| coal with nuclear right now, that would be a net
| improvement in terms of carbon output and general
| pollution.
|
| But we live in the real world, and that is not possible,
| so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, to be
| honest.
|
| I'm pretty sure that enough solar/wind + storage can be
| built to replace a significant percentage (30%? 50%?) of
| the remaining coal plants, before the first new nuclear
| plant's plans and siting are even finalized, let alone
| before a new nuclear plant is fully operational.
|
| And it's going to be a lot cheaper, too.
| belorn wrote:
| People who made those exact arguments 10-20 years ago
| where wrong, since those plants would have prevented a
| lot of coal, oil and gas from being burned. Those people
| have both blood and an ongoing climate crisis on their
| hands.
|
| Who should we blame in 10-20 from now if people still are
| burning coal, oil and gas? Who will take responsibility
| for the inaction?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it takes a lot longer to build a nuclear plant (on the
| order of 10-20 years)_
|
| Because of the red tape the mob has strung up. China
| builds these in two years [1]. France does it in five
| [2].
|
| [1] https://interestingengineering.com/china-moves-
| toward-nuclea...
|
| [2] https://lemielleux.com/how-long-does-it-take-france-
| to-build...
| pfdietz wrote:
| China does not build nuclear plants in two years. In
| particular when China starts the clock on building a
| plant is not same as when the clock is started in the
| West. In China, there's already concrete and steel in the
| ground at that point.
|
| Also, the plan described there is an addition to take
| steam from an ALREADY EXISTING nuclear power plant.
| switchbak wrote:
| That red tape was installed (in North America) post-Five
| Mile Island however.
|
| South Korea is also very capable at building these
| quickly, though I've heard concerns raised about their
| safety (grain of salt, I have no opinion myself).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I'm not suggesting we strike all the rules. But they've
| metastasised. Korea and France aren't insensitive to
| popular concern.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If all you mean by "chernobyl happening again" is "a
| serious accident could happen", you've moved the
| goalposts beyond where I think meaningful discussion is
| possible.
|
| It also means that a "new chernobyl" can happen at any
| power station, be it hydro, coal, solar, etc.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > If all you mean by "chernobyl happening again" is "a
| serious accident could happen", you've moved the
| goalposts beyond where I think meaningful discussion is
| possible.
|
| WTF? Chernobyl will NEVER happen exactly the same way
| again, that much is obvious since
|
| a) it was already a pretty rare event to begin with,
|
| b) the event is likely referenced during the training of
| every nuclear operator _worldwide_, making an exact
| repeat of the human errors involved even more unlikely
| than it was to begin with,
|
| c) steps were taken to avoid this exact situation to
| happen _even on the other chernobyl reactors themselves_.
|
| I thought it quite obvious that no one would be worried
| about a exact repeat of Chernobyl like if you hit the
| "replay" button on YouTube. (But if you believe this is
| what people have in mind when they ask "can chernobyl
| happen again" then please do tell). Therefore the only
| remaining interpretation is "can a chernobyl[-like] event
| happen again" -- a category which would roughly map to
| "major historic nuclear accident, the kind of which it is
| still talked about several decades after on a non-nuclear
| discussion forum like HN".
|
| Most assuredly, non-nuclear accidents, no matter how
| large, won't fit this category. But I have been wrong in
| the past, maybe people would call a dam breakup "a
| chernobyl" these days?
| kelnos wrote:
| I think this is a disingenuous take.
|
| If the original argument was "the exact same thing that
| happened at Chernobyl will happen again", then that's
| meaningless and irrelevant, because... who cares? What
| people _actually_ care about is whether a nuclear
| disaster could happen again, one that kills a bunch of
| people and makes a significant area of land uninhabitable
| for some long period of time.
|
| If you think that's "moving the goalposts", then I don't
| think you're here to have a good-faith discussion about
| why people are worried about nuclear energy.
|
| Having said that, I _do_ believe that a significant
| accidental nuclear disaster is much much much less likely
| now than in Chernobyl 's time. But that doesn't mean it's
| impossible, or that we shouldn't think about or be
| worried about it. And also consider that's "accidental":
| we also need to consider the possibility of terrorist- or
| state-level attacks, which may be harder to protect
| against.
| bawolff wrote:
| How about a middle ground of, can a level 7 event on the
| International Nuclear Event Scale happen again?
|
| Its still kind of a bad question,because we can't rule
| out dinosaurs attacking the power plant. Maybe the
| question should be,is there a less than 1 in a million
| chance of a level 7 event happening when using a modern
| nuclear plant design in the next 100 years?
| hedora wrote:
| Here's an article from 2018 describing a commercial
| implementation of a reactor that cannot melt down. (The
| technology was decades old at that point.)
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/01/24/can-
| we-ma...
| yk wrote:
| A article reiterating a press release from a company that
| doesn't have a prototype is not exactly a good source.
|
| And at any rate, the article claims that
|
| > The small size and large surface area-to-volume ratio
| of NuScale's reactor core, that sits below ground in a
| super seismic-resistant heat sink, allows natural
| processes to cool it indefinitely in the case of complete
| power blackout.
|
| Of course, the surface that allows efficient cooling here
| is the same surface that allows neutrons to escape, so my
| hunch is that it has poor neutron economy. (And of
| course, heat escaping through it will not turn turbines.)
|
| > 2) refueling of this reactor does not require the
| nuclear plant to shut down.
|
| That is very nice when you're trying to breed plutonium,
| the natural uranium fuel assemblies only have to
| irradiated a few weeks and then you would already need to
| shut the reactor down. When you can switch during
| operation, than there's less downtime.
|
| So in total I guess it's a pretty inefficient reactor
| that's perhaps a nice addition to your weapons program.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm of course one of the anti-nuclear types
| HN always tells me are only anti-nuclear because we don't
| understand these things.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _> 2) refueling of this reactor does not require the
| nuclear plant to shut down.
|
| That is very nice when you're trying to breed plutonium,
| the natural uranium fuel assemblies only have to
| irradiated a few weeks and then you would already need to
| shut the reactor down. When you can switch during
| operation, than there's less downtime.
|
| So in total I guess it's a pretty inefficient reactor
| that's perhaps a nice addition to your weapons program._
|
| This is incorrect. The NuScale reactor is not an online-
| refueling design like the CANDU (which is indeed easily
| adapted for breeding high grade plutonium simply by
| adjusting irradation time). It is an offline-refueling
| design like every other operating PWR. See this NuScale
| presentation about refueling operations:
|
| https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1515/ML15159A311.pdf
|
| The reactor has to be completely shut down for more than
| a week during refueling (slide 13). The _plant_ can stay
| online because a plant contains a minimum of 4 reactor
| modules:
|
| https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us/faq
|
| So by staggering refueling times, the plant can
| continuously generate at least 75% of rated output.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| There is a big stretch from a "manufacturer claims my
| reactor design can't be hacked" to "chernobyl can't
| happen again", and neither is still a scientific claim.
|
| The problem that I was trying to show is that people try
| to answer a question "can a chernobyl(-like) event ever
| happen again?" which one simply _can't answer_. Not in a
| "science" way, since to answer this question you need to
| predict the existence (not probability!) of a literal
| _punctual_ event which depends on a gazillion factors
| outside your control (i.e. this is not simply computing a
| MTBF).
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think what the commenter is saying is that it's not
| typical for good research to make statements like "X can
| _never_ happen ". Even if the conclusion of the research
| is that it's very unlikely for X to happen, or that there
| is no known way for X to happen.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| If by "Chernobyl" you mean any nuclear accident that
| results in some kind of radiation release, then of
| course, it is a possibility as long as we build any kind
| of nuclear reactor. But if by "Chernobyl" we mean a
| massive explosion of an uncontained reactor that
| contaminates thousand of square kilomoters of land
| severely, and spreads some degree of contamination across
| continental areas, then it's an entirely different story.
| It is possible to build reactors that simply don't have a
| catastrophic failure mode like the Soviet RBMK, or evenm
| like those of 1950s and 1960s designs for BWR (used at
| Fukushima) or PWR (Three Mile Island). Any design can
| fail, of course, but how they fail, matters.
| hammock wrote:
| Thank you for this common sense reply. The truth is
| Chernobyl can never happen again, and scientists are
| completely all-knowing when they explain what can and can't
| happen.
| q1w2 wrote:
| Arguing with an anti-nuclear activist is indistiguishable
| to arguing with an anti-vax or climate change denier.
|
| They are the same people who opposed all GMO food
| products despite the science.
| [deleted]
| kelnos wrote:
| > _They 're convinced Chernobyl can happen again_
|
| Of _course_ it can! It 's almost certainly much less
| _likely_ now, but I don 't think anyone has presented
| convincing evidence that it's _impossible_ that something
| like that could happen again.
|
| And that's a really big deal. Even if the risk of another
| Chernobyl is ridiculously low, another Chernobyl would be
| so bad that it's worth considering.
|
| Having said that, I do support nuclear energy, and wish
| there wasn't so much FUD spread about it. But let's not
| delude ourselves into believing there are no safety
| concerns, or that we've solved the waste storage/disposal
| problem.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion_(psychology)
| k__ wrote:
| The last time I heard a physicist evaluate nuclear, it
| didn't look like any notable improvements happened in the
| last 20 years.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| Do you have the source where you heard that? Also worth
| noting that Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island
| were all built 50-60 years ago.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Right. This is a bit like evaluating airline safety based
| on the design of Amelia Earhart's plane.
| hedora wrote:
| Well, maybe, but most nuclear reactor designs are at
| least 50 years out of date, and a lot of progress was
| made between 1970 and 2000.
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| Let's talk Fukushima ?
| yongjik wrote:
| Fukushima also coincided with the largest earthquake
| Japan has ever seen (which caused Fukushima incident
| itself and complicated evacuation efforts). The expected
| death toll ranges between several hundred and several
| thousands.
|
| By comparison, vehicle emission is expected cause ~20,000
| premature deaths in the US, every year [1]. (Sorry, I
| couldn't find a stat for Japan.)
|
| In other words, mankind's second worst nuclear disaster
| killed about as many people as vehicle emission kills in
| the US _every month_. That 's not counting car accidents.
|
| In fact the wikipedia page about the disaster [2]
| contains this amusing bit of information, which might not
| be a fair way of looking at it, but I can't say it's
| factually wrong:
|
| > it has been estimated that if Japan had never adopted
| nuclear power, accidents and pollution from coal or gas
| plants would have caused more lost years of life.
|
| [1] https://apnews.com/article/science-health-business-
| environme...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nucle
| ar_disa...
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Let's build a nuclear plant in a country famous for
| tsunamis next on the coast. What could go wrong?
| BenoitP wrote:
| Fukushima caused exactly one death from ionizing
| radiation:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear
| _di...
|
| Fossil fuel air pollution cause one fifth of premature
| death worldwide:
|
| https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-
| air-p...
|
| Do the sources I use suit you? Is it enough to convey
| sense about the orders of magnitude involved?
|
| And I didn't even talk about CO2 and the impending
| climate change catastrophe looming.
| xorcist wrote:
| Exactly no one is advocating the use of fossil fuels to
| replace nuclear.
|
| In a debate, it is much better to counter the actual
| arguments instead of the more convenient ones.
| [deleted]
| trinovantes wrote:
| Issues with Fukushima that could've prevented the
| disaster were raised by engineers/scientists but were
| ignored for years by the government/politicians
| 8note wrote:
| That's always going to happen though.
|
| The government doesn't always have attention and money to
| shower on nuclear plants.
| sangnoir wrote:
| ...and what lessons can we draw from this?
| trinovantes wrote:
| Trust your nuclear scientists/engineers because they know
| what they're doing and are, in fact, not playing god
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| So? Anything could have been prevented on hindsight.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| It's not hindsight when someone warns you beforehand.
| belorn wrote:
| Fukushima in 2011 is very similar to Oroville Dam in
| 2017. 154,000 evacuated vs 180,000, and both were caused
| by very rare natural disaster. Both involved failures in
| handling emergency scenarios like natural disaster, and
| failures in technology that was supposed to prevent
| catastrophic failures. Both also involved political
| failures in addressing risk to people who live near those
| power plants, and failures in addressing prior safety
| concerns.
|
| Hopefully those incident will have taught those countries
| to respect the enormous destructive forces involved,
| create a work culture where safety concerns do not get
| ignored, and to build power plants with consideration of
| very rare natural disaster.
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| The German greens were more against nuclear power than
| fossil. If you care about the environment that's a pretty
| irrational choice.
| q1w2 wrote:
| Russian influence operations at work. Russia has been
| promoting anti-nuclear sentiment in the West since the
| 1960s.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Many of the claims made by the anti-nuclear ground directly
| contradict established science.
| concordDance wrote:
| Nuclear power was ended in Germany for political reasons. The
| public has an incorrect idea of how dangerous nuclear power
| is and how dangerous nuclear waste is and it was easier for
| the politicians to go along with it for points than stand
| it's ground.
|
| If you're making policy based on scientifically inaccurate
| ideas then you aren't respecting the science.
| xorcist wrote:
| This argument is tiresome. Several strong interests wanted
| to end nuclear power in Germany for a long time before it
| finally happened. And it wasn't the greens that did it.
| That much is public knowledge, there are wikipedia pages
| and everything.
|
| The reason nuclear power ended in Germany was _economical_.
| There 's no way nuclear can compete with cheap Russian gas,
| and Germany had over invested in the latter for over two
| decades, for reasons that obviously had nothing to do with
| nuclear power.
|
| Look no further than Gerhard Schroder to see how this
| started. Again, this is not secret and there were newspaper
| articles everywhere. Then follow to the path across time
| and party lines to Angela Merkel who saw it through. Simple
| economics ruled all the way.
|
| This is not complicated, and there's no reason to see a
| conspiracy here.
| pydry wrote:
| In Germany the maximum insurance liability for nuclear
| disasters is $2.5 billion. In the US it's $0.35 billion.
| Fukushima cost $800 billion.
|
| This happened essentially because without a liability cap
| the entire insurance industry considers nuclear power to be
| _ridiculously_ risky. So the government, who wanted to
| protect investors, stepped in.
|
| I feel like a lot of people who dont know this want to
| educate me about how safe nuclear power truly is.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Fukushima cost $800 billion
|
| Note, this is a figure cited by opposition politicians.
| Nowhere near this much money has actually been spent.
|
| The estimate from the government is a bit under $200
| billion, and that includes not just cleanup but also
| resettling people and continued monitoring of the
| reactor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disast
| er_cleanup#:....
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| So you exceeded the liability cap by a factor of 100,
| rather than 400... I'm sure there is a person for which a
| 99% vs a 99.75% payment by the state makes a difference.
| But ...
| fallingknife wrote:
| That's not going to protect the investors. If a company
| causes damages beyond its liability insurance cap,
| plaintiffs can sue the company for the difference.
| q1w2 wrote:
| There is a world of difference between a modern Gen III+
| reactor, and the 1960s design of Fukushima and Chernobyl.
|
| It's like comparing the dangers of doctors using 12th
| century blood-letting and leeches vs getting an MRI.
| oynqr wrote:
| At least the leeches won't irradiate me
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| > In the US it's $0.35 billion.
|
| I was curious about this figure, found info here. Also,
| apparently the Price-Anderson Act which created the
| liability limit was passed in 1957, and there's a
| reasonable argument to be made that it no longer makes
| sense now that nuclear technology has matured:
| https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-
| sheets/n...
|
| > Over time, the "limit of liability" for a nuclear
| accident has increased the insurance pool to more than
| $13 billion. > > Currently, owners of nuclear power
| plants pay an annual premium for $450 million in private
| insurance for offsite liability coverage for each reactor
| site (not per reactor). This primary, or first tier,
| insurance is supplemented by a second tier. In the event
| a nuclear accident causes damages in excess of $450
| million, each licensee would be assessed a prorated share
| of the excess, up to $131.056 million per reactor. With
| 95 reactors currently in the insurance pool, i this
| secondary tier of funds contains about $12.9 billion.
| Payouts in excess of 15 percent of these funds require a
| prioritization plan approved by a federal district court.
| If the court determines that public liability may exceed
| the maximum amount of financial protection available from
| the primary and secondary tiers, each licensee would be
| assessed a pro rata share of this excess not to exceed 5
| percent of the maximum deferred premium ($131.056
| million); approximately $6.553 million per reactor. If
| the second tier is depleted, Congress is committed to
| determine whether additional disaster relief is required.
| concordDance wrote:
| The Japanese government (and indeed, insurance too) is
| doing far more work than they should be. The standard
| should not be "fix area to how it used to be" it should
| be "take what measures are cost effective to improve
| area". But that's politically untenable.
|
| Radiation levels around Fukushima are perfectly fine for
| habitation and would have been so even if nothing but
| basic post-accident reactor containment had been done.
| greedo wrote:
| Governments insure a lot of things, some that are
| arguably idiotic. The US gov insures people who build
| houses right on the coast. The homeowners couldn't afford
| private insurance since the expected costs would be
| astronomical. So the Gov steps up. Same with New Orleans,
| built on an unsustainable location. So every decade or
| so, the Gov chips in a couple hundred billion so people
| can go to Mardi Gras...
| tb0ne wrote:
| It is stuff like people religiously dissmising you when you
| tell them that nuclear is nearly the safest power source in
| terms of deaths per TWh [1].
|
| They don't base their opinion regarding safety on data, they
| base it on the feeling that they get from seeing large
| disasters and not seeing the countless deaths caused in
| silence, and they refuse to update their view even in the
| face of contradicting data.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
| Krasnol wrote:
| Those numbers are based upon flawed and selective numbers
| making them quite ridiculous for several reasons:
|
| For example: with Fukushima the nuclear bandwagon arguments
| that those deaths which actually occurred resulted from
| moving people to a safe area. As if not moving them would
| have been an option or if the movement would have happened
| without the accident.
|
| For Chernobyl it's even worse since there the bandwagon
| arguments with dead firefighters, ignoring all the
| "fallout" victims which to these days exist and lose years
| of life. Not even mentioning missing data: https://www.sv.u
| io.no/sai/english/research/groups/anthrotox-...
|
| Besides that it is the same people who say that Germany
| could have less coal plants with nuclear running. Something
| which is also not true since the reason for keeping coal so
| long was not the lack of electrical power: https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
| tb0ne wrote:
| Uh, did you actually read the source I posted?
|
| For Fukushima for example, the deaths from evacuation ARE
| included in the death toll (the total number is estimated
| to be 2,314).
|
| You have a detailed article about the data here [1].
|
| But I am open to change my mind. Can you give a source
| that compares the mortality rate of energy sources and
| that, in your opinion, better accounts for all deaths?
| What is the highest mortality rate for nuclear someone
| has every estimated?
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-
| from-cher...
| q1w2 wrote:
| The source you posted is highly biased against nuclear -
| and HEAVILY inflated the number of deaths caused by
| Fukushima, while strangely putting outrageously low
| numbers for the deaths from Chernobyl.
|
| You can look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushim
| a_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
|
| ...for a better breakdown, but this wikipedia article
| conflates deaths caused by the meltdown evacuation with
| deaths caused by the tsunami and earthquake evacuation
| (remember the massive tsunami and earthquake?).
|
| Additionally, while trying to predict future deaths based
| on undetectible doses of radiation is a very unreliable
| task. ...and if you compare it to other energy sources,
| nuclear is one of the safest, if not the safest of the
| scalable solutions.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think "deaths per TWh" is the only measure we
| should be looking at, though. The Chernobyl exclusion zone
| is around 1000 square miles. It's certainly arguable if
| that is the correct size, or how long it will need to be in
| place.
|
| If you shut down a coal plant, the pollution dissipates in
| a fairly short amount of time. (Unfortunately the same is
| not true of the carbon that has accumulated in the
| atmosphere over time.) If there's a disaster at a nuclear
| plant, some amount of land area becomes uninhabitable for
| some long amount of time (amounts dependent on the severity
| of the disaster).
|
| For the record, I _am_ in favor of building new nuclear
| plants, especially in areas where they can replace coal or
| even natural gas (it 's absurd that this EU parliament
| action is considering natgas "green" as well). But let's
| not pretend that they are 100% safe, that the worst case
| can't happen, that the effects of a nuclear disaster aren't
| that big a deal, or that we've solved the waste disposal
| and storage problem. I agree that many anti-nuclear folks
| are driven more by overblown fears than science and
| statistics, but pro-nuclear people seem to also cherry-pick
| stats to better support their position.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Radioactive fallout can be cleaned. Most of the Fukushima
| exclusion zone has been resettled. Pripyat was not
| resettled because it was a planned town specifically
| created to support the power plant and its workers. So
| there's no reason to spend the money to rehabilitate it.
| hello_marmalade wrote:
| The reason people are skittish about nuclear is because
| when it _does_ fail, it fails _catastrophically_. The
| biggest failures in memory are all failures that risked
| making a multi kilometer area potentially completely
| uninhabitable for decades. Even if the risk is only 1%,
| coal is a much less scary prospect.
| tb0ne wrote:
| I understand that, but really you have the option of
| either going all-in on nuclear and potentially making
| patches of several km2 uninhabitable, or going all-in on
| fossil fuels and making gigantic regions of the earth
| uninhabitable due to climate change.
|
| It is a choice between a very local problem or a global
| one. There is no free lunch.
| kelnos wrote:
| No, we also have the option to go all-in on solar and
| wind power, and avoid both of those bad outcomes. Of
| course, solar and wind aren't perfect either, and have
| other problems that need solving (energy storage for
| nighttime and dark/calm days, for one thing), but
| "nuclear or fossil fuels" is the falsest of false
| dichotomies.
| belorn wrote:
| Let the marker and voters decide by removing fossil fuel
| from the choices. Without fossil fuels as a cheap storage
| solution it will be up to tax payers, investors and
| market operators to decide if energy storage or nuclear
| is the best/cheapest/technology viable solution.
|
| As long the choice is between nuclear vs wind + fossil
| fuel, the discussion will be focused about fossil fuel.
| varajelle wrote:
| How about hydro? There have been catastrophic damm
| faillures in the past, too.
|
| Not a damm failure, but last year there was ~250 death in
| Europe and 10 billions of euros of damages because of the
| floods. [1] That's much more damages than Fukushima and
| comparable to Chernobyl.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods
| q1w2 wrote:
| See - this is exactly the kind of irrational comment that
| is a problem. "multi-kilometer" "1%" "catastrophically".
| ...these are all emotionally driven elements to an
| argument that does not hold water under scientific
| scrutiny.
|
| Reactors like Chernobyl and Fukishima are not built today
| and cannot meltdown. The chance of meltdown is nearly 0%.
| ...and the danger of meltdown on a modern reactor is like
| what happened at Three Mile Island (which is basically
| nothing). No one died, nor was even irradiated. ...and
| even that type of meltdown is no longer possible.
|
| ...and finally "multi kilometer" is not even that big.
| The Earth is 300 million square kilometers in area. Even
| if your estimate was correct (which it isn't), then it
| still wouldn't be a big deal.
| Krasnol wrote:
| It has nothing to do with science. OP is just parroting a
| meme circulating in a certain group of people who didn't
| realise that nuclear is gone and has been replaced by
| renewables years ago.
|
| It goes with the meme that you glorify France while ignoring
| it's failures which are quite prominent these days just the
| same way he ignores the fact that the chancellor for the last
| 16 years was an actual physicist.
|
| This is the level of debate we currently have again here in
| Germany.
| BenoitP wrote:
| > nuclear is gone and has been replaced by renewables years
| ago
|
| This only works because Germany is still burning ungodly
| amount of coal, to fill the gaps when there is no wind or
| sun (about 60% of the time)
|
| Is this the meme you're talking about?
|
| Maybe sources are memes too? What happens if you take coal
| away from here:
|
| https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
| yrgulation wrote:
| "De-nuclearization of other European countries" - Germany
| should mind its own business.
| worik wrote:
| What is your "science" for dealing with the long term waste?
|
| What "science" do you use to design mechanisms to keep highly
| toxic materials away from human contact for 200,000 years?
|
| It is not science. There is no science that can solve those
| problems. It is greed.
|
| (I live in the South Pacific. The French are _hated_ here for
| what they have done for their nuclear programme)
| colechristensen wrote:
| Let the waste sit in place for decades to decay away much of
| its radioactivity, dig a hole in a geologically boring
| mountain away from people, dump waste in the hole.
|
| Alternative first step: build breeder reactors to recycle
| most of the waste into nuclear fuel and dump the smaller
| amount of leftovers in the mountain.
| worik wrote:
| > dig a hole in a geologically boring mountain away from
| people
|
| Where?
|
| Where on Earth will you find a place that will still be
| like that in 200,000 years.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Deep holes in mountains in deserts in tectonically boring
| locations in the middle of plates.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Ancient geologically stable rock formations _exist_
| oezi wrote:
| Your comment gets it entirely backwards. France is currently in
| a terrible spot with their monoculture of nuclear because the
| hot temperatures have caused shutdowns of many reactors, many
| old plants are offline because of security concerns and the
| French operator of the nuclear plants is close to bankruptcy
| and needs to be pulled back into government ownership because
| renewables can be so much cheaper today.
|
| What Germany did get wrong is that they invested too much in
| renewables too early and that continues to haunts Germans by
| paying subsidies for renewables installed more than 10 years
| ago. Germany helped to jump-start the whole scaling of
| renewables (together with the US) but the price is high.
|
| I would argue this isn't actually so bad because we need to
| price energy higher anyway to reduce consumption and further
| accelerate the building of renewable capacity.
|
| No matter what anybody says: nuclear is dead. The number of
| projects in planning (outside China) is so small that it won't
| make the slightest dent for our emissions goals. The only
| topics worth focusing on is solar, transmission and energy
| storage. Wind only matters in the next 10 years. Afterwards
| solar will be another magnitude cheaper and wind won't be able
| to compete.
| MR4D wrote:
| I wonder how much of your comments/predictions will be true
| after this coming winter.
| oezi wrote:
| I am not looking forward to my gas bill indeed. Still hard
| to forsee that nuclear could come to the rescue in any way.
| Even in France they have scaled back eletric heating and
| will face hard times when cold weather strikes.
| athinggoingon wrote:
| Germany's anti-nuclear environmental movement was, in part,
| funded by Russia.
| https://www.transparency.org/en/press/germany-state-governme...
| Krasnol wrote:
| This is a conspiracy which doesn't have anything to do with
| reality or what is written in the article you've linked to.
|
| The article describes a "Foundation" which was created 2021
| to keep on building Gazprom 2. It neither has something to do
| with the decision to get out of nuclear energy (that was
| 2000) nor does it have anything to do with the Green party or
| any group which is against nuclear energy in Germany.
| godelski wrote:
| In America Green Peace and Sierra Nevada had major donations
| by gas companies.
| https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-
| sierra...
| pojzon wrote:
| Its really funny that this description not only fits my country
| also but probably quite a few other.
|
| Issue that happens world wide is that politics is filled with
| "nice face" or "easy to buy" by corporations.
|
| There are no engineers with passion or corruptless ppl joining
| politics.
|
| Smile and wave guys, smile and wave.
|
| Ps. Here in Poland we talk about German politics as they were
| those competent ones, go figure.
| dimitar wrote:
| Anti-nuclear sentiment (both environmentalist and anti-nuclear
| weapons) was generously sponsored by the Soviet Union. What a
| surprise than nowadays the same groups are serving the
| interests of Russia.
|
| The most cynical thing is that the biggest nuclear accident in
| history was caused by Soviet negligence and incompetence and
| yet they managed to exploit it politically.
| dv_dt wrote:
| That doesn't make any sense because Russian companies are
| significant suppliers within the nuclear power production
| logistics footprint.
|
| edit: eg. https://www.wired.com/story/the-nuclear-reactors-
| of-the-futu...
| sp0ck wrote:
| Money Russia gets from nuclear poewr production are
| miniscule comparing to money from gas/oil export. _any_
| expansion of nuclear energy in Europe is against Russian
| agenda to be major gas/oil provider. Geramany suppose to be
| broker of that.
|
| For Germany cheap Nuclear energy on central/east Europe is
| dangerous because cheap energy = more competitive market.
| Add cheaper workforce and you have very dangerous mix. Read
| why Bulgaria was forced to shut down majority of their
| reactors before joining EU. Offically it was about
| "security". Bulgaria with cheap nuclear energy from already
| built power plants and cheap workforce was too "dangerous"
| for old EU countries. Politics is very important when
| discussing energy market.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I would love to read more about this. Can you provide
| sources?
| barbazoo wrote:
| It's such a pain how certain groups are so hung up on specific
| energy sources. German greens will never consider nuclear
| energy, Albertans will never consider anything that didn't come
| out of the ground either as oil or oil derived. It's like
| belonging to a sports team, it's silly.
|
| I used to be very much against nuclear energy because of the
| unsolved issue around dealing with it's waste. Two decades
| later after learning about climate change and understanding
| more about pros and cons of different fuels and ways to
| generate electricity, it's obvious that nuclear energy can play
| a useful role in the transition off fossil fuels.
| martin_a wrote:
| So, what changed in regards to dealing with its waste in the
| two decades? Or do you simply not care enough anymore?
| barbazoo wrote:
| I put too much weight on the waste storage problem. Looking
| at it now, in my opinion it might be preferable to have
| nuclear waste underground somewhere than keep polluting the
| atmosphere. It seems silly to still get hung up on that.
| Sure it's not great and I'd rather we don't, but we're at
| the eleventh hour and we've got to take more drastic,
| albeit suboptimal, steps.
| yetanother-1 wrote:
| When oil producing countries are racing to get nuclear
| energy, it remains no surprise that it is something that will
| only help in the transition, because burning the fule is not
| a enough!
| bambax wrote:
| > _In France, top positions in the administration are usually
| filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone
| through the system of grandes ecoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...)_
|
| That's a misconception. ENS has two branches, science and
| literature. ENS Sciences is technical, the other isn't. X
| (Polytechnique) is an engineering school in theory, but in
| practice very few of its students become actual engineers.
|
| ENA is essentially a law school; it's even less than that, it
| only teaches how the French administration works, not law.
|
| The one thing these schools have in common is that they are
| extremely competitive, and select for extreme dedication (and a
| bizarre capacity to study with high intensity at an age when
| other people are dating or partying).
|
| But at the top level of the French government you mostly find
| only enarques (= people who attended ENA); they are not
| technical in the least, "don't have a clue about technology",
| but think they know everything. It's a terrible, terrible
| system.
|
| Source: am French.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| I had colleagues that went through Ecole Polytechnique and
| the Corps de Mines (usually reserved to the top 2 graduates
| of a given graduating class of several grandes ecoles) that
| then went on to work for the government. And I think it's
| still mandatory to work a certain number of years in the
| administration after going through some of the grandes
| ecoles, not sure if that was changed (I graduated in 2012 so
| it was a while ago).
|
| Of course not everyone is graduating with a technical degree,
| but coming from Germany where top politicians often don't
| even have a finished university degree and high-ranked
| politicians are regularly found out to have been plagiarizing
| their PhD work it was pretty impressive to see a working
| elite system. It also has some negative aspects and nepotism
| is a thing as well (in the sense that people who went through
| the system know how to game it to get their children in with
| high probability) but it's much better than what we have
| here, in my opinion.
|
| Germany was and still is scared of anything that can be
| considered elitist as people always associate it with the
| elitism from the Third Reich.
| coffeeaddicted wrote:
| 70% of the people in current Bundestag have finished
| University and another 15% some other colleges. 5% studied
| without finishing. With a clear upward trend in those
| numbers each legislature period. I'd consider that a high
| enough number for people representing society. Thought
| technical degrees are sadly rather low (don't have exact
| numbers, but seem to be around 10% of those with degrees).
| Source (in german): https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/
| 272942/924eeff93db104...
| bambax wrote:
| I know almost nothing about the German political system so
| I won't discuss that. But the French system has plenty of
| flaws, two of the biggest being that
|
| 1/ enarques aren't technical at all, don't actually _know_
| anything except how bureaucracy works, and yet they 're in
| charge of everything
|
| 2/ super-selective schools have the side effect of letting
| people think they're geniuses because they topped a
| competition while in their teens
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Yeah I'm sure the French system also has its problems, my
| general impression about the administration (not top
| level political positions) was that people were more
| technically competent though. I might be biased though as
| I mostly know people from a few institutes on the Saclay
| plateau, so it might just have been an "island of
| happiness" in a sea of problems.
| moooo99 wrote:
| I don't really have a strong stance on the nuclear energy
| debate (although I highly doubt that it is as clear cut as the
| debates make it out to be). But I can't really blame people for
| not being too excited about a technology that was first
| introduced to them by bombing two Japanese cities, had two
| worst case disasters, and was subject of the biggest arms race
| in history.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| You typed your message on a binary computer, often used to
| calculate missile trajectories and to run nuclear fuel
| centrifuges.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| For politicians and administrations, I'm pretty sure any
| ideological stance is simply a facade to allow them to climb
| the ladders. The real propellent, throughout history, for
| politicians and administrations, are always more $$ and more
| power so I don't think Germany is an outlier.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| > blame the highly ideological stance on the way people rise to
| power in politics and administration in Germany
|
| Don't be so harsh on your country. It's like that everywhere.
| But it gets better over time. It used to be a lot worse
| centuries ago...
| themitigating wrote:
| "In France, top positions in the administration are usually
| filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone
| through the system of grandes ecoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...)"
|
| These are schools that train bueurocrats, "technically
| excellent" yes, at politics and public service but not
| engineers. For example the new energy transition minister has a
| business degree and went to ENA.
|
| I'm not one to call people elites but it's strange how you are
| using this to differentiate between France and German
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held
| goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green
| party
|
| which was funded by Russia behind the scenes, along with anti-
| fracking and any other alternatives to Russian fossil fuel
| exports.
|
| >"I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of
| their sophisticated information and disinformation operations,
| engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations
| - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to
| maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas."
|
| this was the former head of NATO in 2014, all of this has been
| known for a long time but nothing was done to prevent it
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| And yet weirdly, those non-technical people seem to have
| accidentally stumbled on the solution that the whole world is
| moving towards, while the highly technical French have
| forgotten how to build nuclear and even their most ambitious
| goals include using less nuclear and replacing it with the
| stuff the ideological German's came up with, because it's
| better. And it wasn't that long ago that they were threatening
| to scrap the whole idea of nuclear if the industry didn't
| produce one on time and budget, which still seems to be the
| main problem, they've just been given another chance to fail.
|
| Weird, it's almost like these ideological people were listening
| to experts, but you didn't like what the experts were saying,
| and so you labelled 'following expert advice' as 'ideological'
| to help you continue to ignore expert opinion.
| progrus wrote:
| You are arguing in bad faith. As IMTDb correctly points out,
| these plants have become more difficult to build _because of
| a deliberate bullying campaign_ - one that you are continuing
| here.
|
| > Weird, it's almost like these ideological people were
| listening to the experts.
|
| Go away, bully.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| It's basically victim blaming. "I just punched you in the
| face and broke your nose. Why are you so ugly now?"
| IMTDb wrote:
| > the highly technical French have forgotten how to build
| nuclear
|
| They haven't forgotten, they were fighting a witch-hunt
| orchestrated by the greens. The same eco-ideologist that
| ruined Germany have made it impossible to properly invest in
| the nuclear plants in France and to ensure knowledge and
| expertise is properly transmitted and developed with the
| younger generation.
|
| For _years_ the message was "don't invest in nuclear, don't
| study nuclear, don't build nuclear, don't maintain nuclear".
| Now the message is "we can't even do nuclear properly", it's
| a disengenous argument.
|
| What we need is a bit of future perspective: Nuclear is here
| to stay for the next decades (plural). Nuclear related jobs
| will be in high demand. Nuclear jobs will be well paying.
| Nuclear jobs will be safe. Nuclear formation is important,
| and here is money to ensure it happens. Maintenance of
| nuclear plants is important, it needs to happen and it will
| be financed. And that will lead to true expertise and safety.
| roenxi wrote:
| This highlights the real Achilles heel of the nuclear
| industry - it is a labour efficient power producer that it
| doesn't employ enough people to guarantee political
| protection.
|
| We ended up with a group of people who would benefit a
| moderate amount from cheap power, and a fanatic anti-
| nuclear lobby that succeeded in scuttling decades of
| progress. The more motivated group won, as is predictable.
|
| It is amazing watching Europeans trying to achieve energy
| poverty in defiance of their technical head start. The
| energy figures out of places like the UK, France and
| Germany are startlingly bad (eg, [0]). Especially
| considered per-capita.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Histori
| cal_D...
| ricardobayes wrote:
| The message and reality have always been detached in
| Europe: almost every physics department I know has a
| nuclear institute. And funding is there, too. The know-how
| was never lost in my opinion.
| touisteur wrote:
| I think the engineering know-how isn't there as much.
| When you haven't actually built a plant in 30 years and
| all the experienced building and designer engineers have
| moved on, you don't actually know how to build one any
| more. I feel the delays on the new projects are mostly
| caused by lack of experience, lack of clarity on actual
| risks, a lot of second system syndrome (we're doing it
| right _this time_ , say the maintainer of the previous
| systems...) and also more regulatory oversight (which is
| IMO a gold thing). Let's see how these plants built with
| far more oversight age better than the old ones.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Hungary is just building one right now.
| lwswl wrote:
| Money->safety is not a provable claim
| YinglingLight wrote:
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Nuclear is here to stay for the next decades (plural).
|
| That's the problem with nuclear; even if every nuclear
| power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear"
| would still be here to stay for at least a century or two.
|
| No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned.
| Decommissioning of the first UK nuclear power plants is
| expected to last another century. That's being paid for by
| taxpayers. The builders and operators of those plants were
| never asked to plan or pay for decommissioning; and anyway,
| 200 years is a long time to expect a corporation to stay
| alive.
|
| So let's be quite clear: the cost of a nuclear power plant
| includes the cost of decommissioning. Since decommissioning
| takes such a long time, you can't rely on contracts with
| private companies to ensure they finish the job.
| Decommissioning is a horrible insurance risk; never having
| been completed successfully, there's no reliable guide to
| how much it might cost.
|
| So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my
| grandchildren!
| the_gipsy wrote:
| > even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were
| shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay
| for at least a century or two.
|
| Is this really a problem, though?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Well, I think nuclear waste is a problem. It's highly
| toxic, and there's no process for detoxifying it. It has
| to be "got rid of", somehow, or put somewhere that humans
| can't accidentally encounter it. And it remains dangerous
| roughly forever, in terms of the span of a human
| civilisation.
|
| 200 years is sorta manageable, I suppose, if you have the
| resources and longevity of a nation state. You can bury
| it under a mountain, and set a battalion of armed orcs to
| guard it. But nation states can change their minds;
| whether the cost of hiring those orcs is money well-spent
| is a political decision, and the politicians responsible
| may not have "the long view" in mind.
|
| I think nuclear power can be done safely; but I don't
| think that's possible as long as the task is overseen by
| profit-making corporations or short-termist governments.
| And I don't see who else can do it.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| In the US operators pay into a fund for decommissioning.
|
| >No nuclear power plant has ever been fully
| decommissioned.
|
| There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully
| decommissioned[1].
|
| [1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| "fully decommissioned" by some somewhat unintuitive
| definitions:
|
| > The DOE was required by contract and statute to begin
| removing spent nuclear fuel and GTCC waste by January 31,
| 1998. To date, the DOE has not removed any spent fuel or
| GTCC waste from the CY site, and it is unknown when it
| will.
|
| The current 'plan' is for the companies looking after the
| waste on the original site to sue the government every
| few years to get paid for looking after the waste.
|
| http://connyankee.com/
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| this is exactly the idealism thats causing problems -the
| energy futures in germany reaches the highest price in
| recorded history, the industry is being decimated and
| it's importing gas from a tyran that has started a war on
| Gemany's doorstep. Without Europe's gas dollars he would
| not be able to fund it's millatry and 12 million
| ukranians would never become homeless refugees.
|
| Meanwhile you are complaining about waste that sitting
| sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.
| Brometheus wrote:
| No, what's creating the problems is the gas and coal
| lobby that dug into the conserveratives (CDU) and social
| democrats (SPD) to prevent the Energiewende from
| completion by creating burocratic and economical hurdles.
|
| For example, it was forbidden to have more than 50GW
| installed capacity of solar. By Law.
|
| oh and also destroying the industries building the solar
| panels, therefore losing the entire market to China...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I think that misses the point.
|
| If you reckon it's OK to leave waste lying around,
| especially in constrained economic and political
| circumstances, that's a legitimate point of view. Argue
| for that. But don't declare that "decommissioning" simply
| means something like "Do your best, and then be done with
| it". That's dishonest (I'm not accusing you personally of
| any dishonesty).
|
| If "decommissioning" doesn't mean complete reversal of
| all harmful results of the operation of a plant, then we
| need a new word that does mean that.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It doesn't matter if something is "OK" or not. It matters
| what your options are. And they are:
|
| 1. Spew the waste into the air (fossil fuels)
|
| 2. Contain and bury the waste (nuclear)
|
| 3. Go without electricity when the weather is not
| favorable until major tech improvements in storage
|
| So unless you want to argue for 3, and I don't think you
| do, 2 is clearly the best option.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| That's not what decommissioning means and what you're
| asking for is childishly ridiculous.
|
| How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal
| and gas plants we've been running for forty years while
| people like yourself threw ignorant tantrums over
| nuclear?
|
| How would you "reverse all harmful results of the
| operation of a plant"?
|
| How are you going to recapture all the pollution they
| dumped into our air, exactly?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > That's not what decommissioning means
|
| The word apparently means whatever the responsible
| authorities want it to mean.
|
| > How, by your definition, would you decommission the
| coal and gas plants
|
| We used to make gas by heating coal with steam; the
| result was a contaminated site, coal gas, and coke for
| steel. But the site was left contaminated with chemical
| waste - stuff that can in principle be chemically
| denatured, or buried _fairly_ safely. Thing is, I 'm
| against making new coal-to-gas plants, as much as I'm
| against new nukes.
|
| I don't have to defend coal and gas power plants; I don't
| have to explain how to reverse their effects; I'm against
| building any new ones, and my lack of any remedies for
| the effects of plants built before I was born doesn't
| invalidate my stance.
|
| [Edit] I think I missed your point, which was probably
| based on my use of the word "reversing". You're
| effectively asking me how to complete the decommissioning
| of plants that were put out of use before I was born. If
| you want childish, that's childish: you're asking me for
| a proposal for reversing climate change.
|
| I'm talking about how to build a nuclear power plant that
| can be _properly_ decommissioned, in the sense that there
| 's no persistent environmental pollution, and the land
| can safely be returned to normal uses, such as
| agriculture and residential housing. I'm against
| repeating the mistakes my grandparents made, in all their
| ignorance.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| > I'm against repeating the mistakes my grandparents
| made, in all their ignorance.
|
| You're making the exact same mistake by rejecting today's
| an attainable but imperfect solution in favor of an
| unattainably perfect one.
|
| The end result is that we waste another few decades
| spewing pollution into the air.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The casks are safe where they are and should hold safely
| for at least 90 years according tot he notoriously
| conservative NRC. They should be moved, and congress
| needs to get its shit together, I agree.
|
| We really need to get deep storage unstuck from the Yucca
| Mountain issue, but I think this still counts as
| decommissioned.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Why do we need to get deep storage unstuck? Putting the
| waste in dry casks is cheaper.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| There are radionuclides in those casks with half-lives of
| 200,000 years - much longer than human civilisation, and
| much longer still than the lifetime of a human writing
| system. We don't even know how to make a label that will
| make sense in 200,000 years.
|
| This attitude only makes sense if one's view is that
| humanity isn't going to last more than 10,000 years.
|
| Unless we can find a way of rendering nuclear waste safe,
| then we have to find a way of making it so inaccessible
| that a future civilisation is unlikely to come across it
| by accident, and so secure that even a major earthquake
| won't cause it to leak into the environment.
|
| Storing this stuff in metal tins on the surface isn't
| even a gesture at a solution.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I sort of mostly agree. Long term deep storage is nice
| because with a good design, we can pretty much set and
| forget. Most LLFPs aren't actually very dangerous as they
| don't emit gamma rays, but Tc-99 and I-129 are pretty
| nasty stuff. we could probably reprocess those into Ru
| and throw the rest of it into a deep geologically stable
| hole. Any society in 10k years that could find the stuff
| will be advanced enough to avoid or rebury it. As long as
| we don't store anything highly bioavailable near water,
| it should be fine. By 10k years from now the amount of
| radiation actually being released will be miniscule. But,
| I'm all for a big deep hole.
| pfdietz wrote:
| No, the attitude makes sense because of the time value of
| money.
|
| At any point, if interest rates aren't pretty much
| exactly zero, it pays to delay burying waste. The present
| cost of guarding it at the surface is < the cost of
| burying it now. If, at any time, the interest rates do
| drop to zero and stay there, it can be buried then.
|
| The only real argument against this is that the waste
| ceases to be self-protecting from "amateur" diversion of
| plutonium in about 300 years, which could greatly
| increase the cost of guarding. But that's no
| justification for burying it now.
|
| Waiting also reduces the thermal output from fission
| products, which reduces heat buildup in the repository,
| at least a bit. And it would allow the waste to be
| reprocessed (and more easily) if that (perhaps
| unexpectedly) becomes appropriate. It would also allow
| time for other disposal methods, such as launching into
| space, to become competitive. How cheap will the
| descendants of SpaceX's launchers be in 300 years?
|
| I think there may have been an argument for rapidly
| burying waste during the cold war, where surface waste
| could be volatilized by a direct H bomb strike, causing
| enhanced local long term fallout. That's more an argument
| against nuclear power itself, though, as NPPs could also
| be disrupted by direct strikes.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > "amateur" diversion
|
| This is always a funny topic when people wax
| philosophical about dirty bombs as though you wouldn't
| get cooked trying to open a cask.
| DennisP wrote:
| The US government made nuclear plants pay into a fund for
| long-term waste storage. Last I saw, that fund had
| accumulated over $40 billion. But since the Yucca
| Mountain facility was canceled, the government never
| provided the waste storage they were charging for. It's
| not surprising if nuclear operators don't want to pay
| twice.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Not only that, congress mandated that Yucca Mountain is
| the only allowable site, and has also prevented its
| use...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > There have been 10 plants in the US that have been
| fully decommissioned
|
| According to your link, there are 10 plants that have
| achieved "DECON status": that is, the spent fuel and
| machinery have been removed from the site (presumably to
| some other site).
|
| I'm sorry, but that's a cop-out: it's cheating to say
| you've decommissioned a site, when what you've really
| done is transport the entire site, including topsoil, to
| a new location. That's like saying your plastics are
| green, because when they are no longer wanted they are
| all shipped to Indonesia. And apparently at least some of
| those "decommissioned" sites still have spent fuel stored
| on-site; I don't see how a site with spent fuel can be
| considered to have been returned to "greenfield"
| condition.
| knorker wrote:
| No coal plant has ever been decommissioned either,
| because its radioactive waste, and other waste, is now in
| the air we all breathe.
|
| Same with solar. Spent solar panels don't go nowhere.
|
| No other plant either.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| > So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my
| grandchildren!
|
| We're the grandchildren of the eco-ideologists that spent
| the last forty years dumping coal and gas pollution into
| the atmosphere because they were afraid of nuclear power.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| My father was born in 1914; they didn't invent nuclear
| power until he was 40. It wasn't until the early 2000s
| that there was consensus that coal and gas caused
| pollution that was a very serious problem, if you set
| aside the smogs of the early 50s.
|
| My grandparents were from the era of steam-powered mills;
| I doubt the word "pollution" had been coined before they
| died. I'm pretty sure the term "ecology" dates from the
| mid-20th-century, after all my grandparents had died.
|
| So yes: my grandparents left me with a problem; but it's
| not their fault, because they didn't know. We _do_ know,
| and my grandchildren would be right to curse me if I left
| a similar problem for them to solve, _knowing what I was
| doing_ all along.
| greedo wrote:
| The term pollution dates back to the 14th Century...
| floxy wrote:
| >No nuclear power plant has ever been fully
| decommissioned.
|
| Trojan?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
| denton-scratch wrote:
| WP says the plant has been "largely decommissioned". To
| my reading, that means the same as "not decommissioned
| yet".
| floxy wrote:
| The reactor and fuel were removed, and the reactor
| building and cooling tower were demolished. Maybe we need
| to use another word? Seems like that plant is pining-for-
| the-fjords.
| duskwuff wrote:
| From what I'm reading, that just means there are a couple
| of buildings (offices, warehouses, etc) left on the site.
| It hasn't been completely demolished yet, but it doesn't
| sound like there's anything extraordinary preventing
| that, either.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > The concrete casks sit on a heavy concrete pad, located
| adjacent to the former Trojan Nuclear Plant site.
|
| > The ISFSI storage pad is surrounded by a secured area,
| which is monitored and protected round the clock.
|
| Same word games as the other one.
|
| The reactor itself is temporarily buried awaiting
| movement to Yucca Mountain, which has no planned date.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Solar and wind alone won't work without support by gas or
| other non-renewable sources. Try to find a single scientific
| study that gives a detailed overview of how the German energy
| mix is supposed to work and that explains how supply will be
| matched to demand 24/7 all year round. None exists. The whole
| "Energiewende" is built on the hope that either our neighbors
| will produce the necessary base capacity to stabilize our
| energy grid, or that a miracle storage technology will
| somehow be invented in the next 10 years.
|
| I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" [1]
| by a Cambridge professor, it goes into great detail about the
| problems of matching electricity demand to supply day- &
| year-round.
|
| 1: https://www.withouthotair.com/
| cm2187 wrote:
| And somehow the cost of the non renewable energies that are
| required to deal with the volatility of wind and solar are
| never factored in the cost.
| Brometheus wrote:
| In 2011 ENERTRAG had a constructed a system to use a
| windpark to produce hydrogen and burn this in a
| gas/fuelcell plant. But since a change in the EEG Umlage
| Gesetz made them pay for their own energy produced by
| wind, it became unprofitable to do so.
|
| If that sounds idiotic to you, that's because the change
| in the EEG was created to make exactly this impossible.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I read the book before the numbers it cites were decades
| out of date. And even then, it made a pretty good case for
| renewables in the parts of the globe where most people
| live.
|
| Once you update it with current figures I'm assuming it can
| only make a stronger case. So are you just using the old
| figures and pretending those haven't changed?
|
| That's like trying to model the next iPhones specs from
| first principles with specs from the last century.
|
| Well it won't have a very big HDD because all that spinning
| rust will really drain the AA batteries.
|
| edit to add, but his basic strategy is sound:
|
| > The principal problem is that carbon pollution is not
| priced correctly. And there is no confidence that it's
| going to be priced correctly in the future. When I say
| "correctly," I mean that the price of emitting carbon
| dioxide should be big enough such that every running coal
| power station has carbon capture technology fitted to it.
|
| > Solving climate change is a complex topic, but in a
| single crude brush- stroke, here is the solution: the price
| of carbon dioxide must be such that people stop burning
| coal without capture
|
| The UK basically did this. Note that it was found by the
| market that replacing the coal plants entirely was cheaper
| than adding carbon capture to them.
|
| edit 2:
|
| > The most promising of these options, in terms of scale,
| is switching on and off the power demand of electric-
| vehicle charging. 30 million cars, with 40 kWh of
| associated batteries each (some of which might be ex-
| changeable batteries sitting in filling stations) adds up
| to 1200 GWh. If freight delivery were electrified too then
| the total storage capacity would be bigger still.
|
| > There is thus a beautiful match between wind power and
| electric vehicles. If we ramp up electric vehicles at the
| same time as ramping up wind power, roughly 3000 new
| vehicles for every 3 MW wind turbine, and if we ensure that
| the charging systems for the vehicles are smart, this
| synergy would go a long way to solving the problem of wind
| fluctuations.
|
| The UK also did this.
|
| I'm baffled at the books continued popularly with renewable
| "debunkers". The book clearly described the problems and
| solutions. The main skepticism was aimed at politicians
| being able to overcome the political power of fossil fuel
| lobbiest and do something sensible.
|
| The only explanation is a willful disregard for the new
| knowledge we've acquired in the intervening time period,
| much of which the author guesses correctly but we now know
| for a fact.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think I figured out why they like it.
|
| There's an E (for economics) plan outlined as a proposed
| solution, that assumes we'll deploy a lot of the cheapest
| energy source, whatever that is. It then also assumes (!)
| that onshore wind will cost the same as Nuclear and
| offshore wind will cost more. Put those two assunptions
| together and you get a plan with lots of nuclear.
|
| Note, he's not actually predicting this outcome, though
| it does seem to be his personal preference at the time.
| He mentions that cheaper solar-to-fuel might be an
| alternative, as what really mattered was which was
| cheapest, which he assumed, incorrectly, would be
| nuclear.
|
| Actual reality looks a lot closer to his G plan, for
| 'greenpeace' named sarcastically because they just love
| wind power, because as it turned out wind was cheaper
| than basically everything else (until solar caught up in
| most of the world). Maybe Greenpeace got lucky, maybe
| they were just better informed.
|
| So if he was to rewrite that same plan with today's
| figures, the Economist and Green party plans would
| probably agree. Amusingly ironic and a testament to his
| methods even if his clearly stated assumptions no longer
| hold true.
| belorn wrote:
| The evidence that renewables need to be supported by gas
| and oil is evidential in northern Europe, observed by
| anyone who pay their own electricity bill. When the wind
| is weak the market price is determined by gas and oil
| prices. When the wind is strong the price goes down to
| basically transit costs. Since the average wind condition
| is pretty much the same each year, the market cost for
| electricity has been 100% determined by gas and oil
| prices for the last decade.
|
| If one also follow energy politics this has also been
| very clear by the politicians themselves. The green
| political movement has been advocating the concept of
| "reserve energy" over nuclear "base load". The strategy
| is to build out as much wind and solar as possible, while
| keeping natural gas and oil plant on subsidized plans.
| When the weather is bad for energy production, those
| natural gas and oil plant starts up and supply the
| missing supply.
|
| For oil and gas operators this is a pretty great deal.
| They get paid twice, once by the government and then a
| second time by the market. They also only need to spend
| fuel when the market price is at its highest, reducing
| fuel costs and improving profits. It is pretty much a
| win-win situation for the government and power plants
| operators.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| I'm mostly referring to the section on storage, which is
| still largely true today. Germany does not have enough
| mountain areas to build significant hydro storage, and no
| other storage technology currently comes close to that in
| terms of efficiency and scale. We could of course produce
| hydrogen and burn that again but there the round-trip
| efficiency is only around 20 % in the best case I think
| (up to 50 % if we could use the waste heat as well),
| compared to around 80 % for hydro. Hence we would need to
| over-provision wind & solar energy production by 400 % to
| use this form of storage, which is highly unlikely as we
| will have trouble fulfilling our current ambitious goals
| for wind and solar, which already require a 500-1000 %
| increase in construction rates over the next decades.
|
| Batteries would be another candidate but again the
| required amount of energy and the power slew rate are
| enormous, so storage facilities would be extremely costly
| and would compete with electric car battery production. I
| don't have much faith in the idea of storing energy in
| electric vehicle batteries as most of these cars will be
| on the road when the energy is needed (7-9 am) and will
| be mostly plugged in to charge when renewable production
| is low (during the night). Also I'm not sure if the
| electricity grid would even allow such a conversion as
| it's not designed for many small producers arranged in a
| mesh.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The section on storage that literally starts by pointing
| out that a renewable only _or_ nuclear only plan would
| both require storage?
|
| And then lays out multiple solutions, including 20Kwh of
| EV battery storage for every person which must have been
| basically science fiction at the time of writing but now
| sounds entirely boring and inevitable for reasons
| entirely separate from power storage.
|
| Yeah I'd say that holds up pretty well, but I'm still not
| seeing the problem it apparently poses for today's world
| of cheap renewables?
|
| We need and want to produce lots of green hydrogen for
| non-burning purposes. That fits perfectly into the demand
| response idea he lays out in reasonable detail. So why do
| you seem to think pumped hydro storage was the only
| solution he mentioned?
|
| Even with his dated view on PV prices, he raises the
| possibility of importing hydrogen:
|
| > "Solar photovoltaics were technically feasible for
| Europe, but I judged them too expensive. I hope I'm
| wrong, obviously. It will be wonderful if the cost of
| photovoltaic power drops in the same way that the cost of
| computer power has dropped over the last forty years."
|
| What a great quote to look back on from a future where
| his hopes came true.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| UK did this and that, and yet currently gas + nuclear
| generates over half of energy production.
|
| https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB
|
| Also, UK has one of the best in the world conditions for
| wind power. Wind sucks in Poland or Czech Republic.
| scythe wrote:
| >Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air
|
| This book has come up on Hacker News before, and I've read
| it, and it has a crucial flaw, well, two actually:
|
| - It underestimates the efficiency of solar panels by quite
| a bit, supposing that 10% would be a lofty goal (and
| arguing on this basis that solar farms are not economically
| viable). In fact, panels on the market are approaching 20%
| [1], and 25% seems well within reach.
|
| - It uses the United Kingdom, one of the dimmest countries
| in the world [2] and one of the most densely populated, as
| an index for the viability of solar power in any country.
| In fact, the UK is probably the worst-case
| geography+population for solar power, and almost every
| other country would have a better time of it. In this
| context, it is worth considering that nuclear power may be
| particularly appropriate for Europe specifically, since it
| is peaceful, densely populated, mostly north of the 45th
| parallel, and cloudy, but solar is probably more practical
| elsewhere.
|
| The real problem with cost estimates for solar and wind
| power is that they do not necessarily adjust well for the
| rate of construction. They may be reasonably accurate
| assuming a constant rate of construction, but a truly
| worthwhile implementation of solar and wind power would
| require a much higher rate of construction than is
| currently being implemented. I rarely see much of the
| methodology of these studies, but what I have seen
| basically involves taking the current price of solar and
| battery installations, applying a few fudge factors, and
| scaling up linearly. That may not be realistic.
|
| Meanwhile, the cost estimates for nuclear power are based
| on data from the construction of large facilities, and
| therefore necessarily incorporate a much more realistic
| high rate of investment. Nuclear plants are big.
|
| 1: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/pho
| tovo...
|
| 2: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Worl
| d_DN...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The book doesn't actually use british solar numbers for
| the rest of the world, it even suggests shipping in solar
| energy derived fuels from other countries to the UK and
| that even including the extra conversion and
| shipping/transmission costs would be competitive with
| nuclear built in the UK, which implies its a no-brainer
| for those source nations to use it for their own power.
|
| Where it feels a little parochial, is its focus on the UK
| as if the GDP or population of the UK matters in the
| context of a global issue like sustainable energy.
|
| It simply doesn't and he has enough facts and figures
| available even at that time to put that together, but
| probably fell into the classic british position of
| assuming they are more important than they really are in
| a global context.
|
| Anyone outside the UK must read it in the same way people
| in the UK would read a small island dweller writing "Yes
| this might work for most of the UK but the Isle of Man
| would need to import power, which is simply unthinkable,
| even though it already does, so maybe we should build
| nuclear there instead to maintain the islands
| sovereignty".
|
| Or maybe we can discount the needs of half a percent of
| the population if they run counter to the needs of the
| other 99.5% and focus on the big picture?
|
| In the end we didn't need to as the wind power, heat
| pumps, EVs and carbon fees required for the UK overlapped
| heavily with other nations but this was a clear blindspot
| which I think you are charitably interpreting as a silly
| mistake when really it's more akin to arrogance.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I believe it also assumes significant input from biomass,
| which has a very large effect on the amount of land area
| needed because of the extremely low power/area of
| biomass.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Nuclear is no different that solar and other technologies. It
| is economical at scale. It is prohibitive if all you build is
| a prototype once every 10 years, which is what we do in
| Europe. China and Korea found a way to make it work.
| croes wrote:
| Seems like France nuclear power has it's own problems
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...
| Kon5ole wrote:
| Very interesting! So basically what this story says means
| that the nuclear operator in France has been selling the
| electricity at a loss, so much so that they are way behind on
| maintenance and almost bankrupt.
|
| Which in turn means that the actual cost of nuclear power in
| France is higher than has been reported so far. The cost has
| just been postponed for decades, until now.
|
| It's certainly bad timing to discover it now - what a nasty
| "perfect storm" of unfortunate events we are having for
| electricity in Europe this year. :(
| konschubert wrote:
| The grande ecole aristocracy in France isn't desirable either.
| It's a form of nepotism.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Yeah there's definitely problems with that as well, not
| saying it's perfect. I mostly want to contrast it to the
| anti-intellectual approach here in Germany, where top-level
| politicians are proud of not having any higher education and
| see it as their mission to get more ideologically-formed
| people into top positions.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| The German Green party showed in multiple occasions that it's
| completely anti-science. They pick scientists that support
| their agenda, and then represent it as the one and only truth.
|
| They are basically a spiritual successor of the middle-age
| Catholic Church. All they talk is about sacrifice, suffering in
| our earthly life for better afterlife, bans, and restrictions.
| The only difference is that instead of God, they swear by
| "Klimawandel".
|
| And of course, it's not relatively rich Green party members and
| supporters that suffer from their policies. They keep their
| SUVs, flight regularly, and the poorer half of the population
| will need to save the planet.
|
| Atom energy is bad, but fracking is obviously fine for them.
| What a bunch of hypocrites.
|
| I hope the Green get off their moral high horse or get replaced
| before they do even more harm to the German economy, wealth and
| even environment. They are just the most destructive force
| leading Germany to collapse.
| dd36 wrote:
| Is it supported by the fossil fuel industry?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| That might explain why Mojib Latif's books are published by a
| publisher otherwise specializing in religious books
| kergonath wrote:
| > I did my PhD at the French nuclear energy agency
|
| Cheers from Saclay! :)
|
| To be fair, Germans always (in the recent past anyway) cared
| more about environment issues in general. Recycling, cycling
| instead of driving, things like that. It was not mainstream in
| France until fairly recently. But yeah, the lack of
| understanding of scientific and technical aspects of energy
| production from a supposed nation of engineers is disturbing.
| yrgulation wrote:
| A shame german carmakers didnt care much.
| kergonath wrote:
| Indeed. Well, no country is perfect.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| This is a very good (and long) article looking at the history
| of nuclear energy in Germany in a broader context.
| https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/20/germany-nuclear-power-e...
| logifail wrote:
| > In France, top positions in the administration are usually
| filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone
| through the system of grandes ecoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...),
| whereas in Germany most people rise through social engineering
| and party politics and most top positions in the administration
| are filled by people with law degrees that don't have a clue
| about technology [..]
|
| Would one really claim France is _succeeding_ at a national
| level in the technology space due to all those excellent
| technically-trained administrators?
|
| > In my opinion that's also a reason why we completely fail in
| everything regarding digitalization, lawyers are simply not
| good technical problem solvers
|
| Why are administrators supposed to be the ones actually solving
| technical problems? Aren't government administrators more
| likely to be reading and writing plans and contracts (which
| trained [ex-]lawyers must have _some_ useful skills...)?
| google234123 wrote:
| The French manage to spend less on military than Germany and
| seem to get about twice the capability.
| doe88 wrote:
| While it's evident nuclear sentiment is not great in germany,
| from my point of view, I wouldn't characterize it as great in
| france either. Sadly, I think in this domain (as in many)
| france lives with the infrastructure and build of its past and
| currently fails to invest for its future, it's more _managing
| decline_ than anything else. I think as current nuclear plants
| become older and mismatch between current needs and true green
| energies production become more apparent, people still live in
| a bubble and don 't see the urgency nor courage to really
| invest in new reactors and plants and prepare the future, for
| france and europe. My dream would be that france, with help of
| germany and other willing eu countries would build new reactors
| with an overcapacity for france alone such that it would then
| provide this energy to other ue countries. Nuclear energy is a
| chance and is not mutually exclusive with other energies.
|
| _(of course i 'm french)_
| kergonath wrote:
| > While it's evident nuclear sentiment is not great in
| germany, from my point of view, I wouldn't characterize as
| great in france either
|
| I think it is changing. Both the IPCC and the ERDF reports
| were unambiguous and politicians and technocrats who were
| paying attention noticed. Now, skyrocketing gas prices are a
| warning shot. A blackout or a brownout could completely
| change public opinion (not that si would welcome it, but at
| this point it seems inevitable; we almost had 3 last winter).
|
| > Sadly, I think in this domain (as in many) france lives
| with the infrastructure and build of its past and currently
| fails to invest for its future, it's more managing decline
| than anything else.
|
| That is very true, unfortunately. That's why building a
| series of EPR would be a good thing long-term, as it would
| provide some justifications to train new engineers and a
| refreshed skilled workforce.
|
| > My dream would be that france, with help of germany and
| other eu countries would build new reactors with an
| overcapacity for france alone and would then provide this
| energy to other ue countries.
|
| This would make sense from a technical point of view (one
| large fleet in a single country is easier to manage and more
| efficient than the same number of reactors distributed across
| several states). But that's very difficult from a political
| point of view.
|
| > Nuclear energy is a chance and is not mutually exclusive
| with other energies.
|
| This is something a lot of people do not seem to grasp. We
| need _all_ the low-carbon energy we can produce, and we need
| it 20 years ago. There is no point bickering about the share
| of renewable and the share of nuclear. We need renewables
| where we can and nuclear where we must.
|
| In the end, what matters is that even a carbon-free
| electricity supply is just half the journey, and the easy
| half at that. It's not something we will solve with a one-
| size-fits-all approach.
| doe88 wrote:
| > That's why building a series of EPR would be a good thing
| long-term, as it would provide some justifications to train
| new engineers and a refreshed skilled workforce.
|
| Also very true. The most difficult is most likelihy to
| build the first one, reacquire the supply-chain,
| engineering, knowhow, then, you can build the next ones at
| scale, certainly with both an economy of time and money.
| logifail wrote:
| > My dream would be that france, with help of germany and
| other eu countries would build new reactors with an
| overcapacity for france alone and would then provide this
| energy to other ue countries. Nuclear energy is a chance and
| is not mutually exclusive with other energies.
|
| I think this will stay a dream. Aren't "modern" nuclear
| plants such as the EPR all a) very late and b) massively over
| budget?
|
| The EPR project is basically a complete train-wreck.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Aren't "modern" nuclear plants such as the EPR all a)
| very late and b) massively over budget?
|
| The Finnish one was both due to epic project management
| failures, from bad suppliers with dodgy welds, to changing
| the reactor design as it was being built to accommodate
| future regulations. Flamanville is also late and over
| budget for much of the same reasons (shoddy project
| management and unreliable suppliers; this time the concrete
| was out of specs as well). These sort of issues get sorted
| naturally if yew build in series instead of one-of-a kind.
|
| The Chinese did not have any problem building two, and the
| British one is progressing more or less as planned.
|
| Also, the EPR is not really a modern design.
| logifail wrote:
| > These sort of issues get sorted naturally if yew build
| in series instead of one-of-a kind
|
| That would appear to rule out any possibility of rapid
| increasing nuclear generating capacity if we are going to
| be forced to build them one after another in order to
| work out how to do it well?
|
| > The Chinese did not have any problem building two
|
| ...that they've admitted to?
|
| > the British one is progressing more or less as planned
|
| 2022: "The nuclear power station being built at Hinkley
| Point will start operating a year later than planned and
| will cost an extra PS3bn, EDF has said"[0]
|
| 2021: "British Hinkley Point Nuclear Plant Delayed With
| Higher Costs First reactor will start producing power in
| June 2026. Cost will be 500 million pounds more than
| previously planned"[1]
|
| 2019: "Costs Rise Again for U.K. Hinkley Point Nuclear
| Project. Utility increases bill for Hinkley units, flags
| possible delay. EDF also cuts estimated return from plant
| to as little as 7.6%"[2]
|
| My issue with it is more the spectacularly bad deal for
| the consumer that it represents. Originally the UK
| government insisted that "the private sector would
| shoulder both the development costs and risk", but then
| the financial crisis happened, and they ended up having
| to rework the deal to the benefit of EDF, who basically
| had them over a barrel.[3]
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-61519609
| [1]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/edf-
| sees-... [2]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-25/edf-
| raise... [3]
| https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-
| point-c...
| osuairt wrote:
| The people that usually are puzzled about this approach, also
| avoid any of the arguments on why people don't want nuclear
| facilities as the basis of their energy infrastructure.
|
| Framing it as some closed minded ideological stance, and that
| Germany wouldn't be in a position to understand the pros and
| cons to nuclear technology, just looks to dismiss those that
| might have actual rationales for running their countries
| differently.
| Veen wrote:
| I'm puzzled about why nuclear is deemed less satisfactory
| than dependence on Putin's Russia for the energy requirements
| of the world's 4th biggest economy.
| blub wrote:
| Dependence on the Soviet Union and later Russia worked for
| 50 years.
|
| This partnership, which was being undermined by the US from
| the beginning, is attributed to establishing a basis for
| cooperation between the Soviet Union and Western Europe.
| Considering that the Soviets pulled out peacefully of
| Eastern Germany, that worked pretty great.
| agapon wrote:
| This is incredibly short-sighted. Soviets pulling out of
| Eastern Germany, the collapse of the GDR, the Warsaw
| Pact, the USSR has very little to do with the energy
| imports. One might even argue that the USSR would
| collapse economically even earlier if not for all the
| currency it got from oil and gas sales.
| blub wrote:
| Having a relationship based on mutually beneficial
| economic exchanges is an important reason why one would
| treat their economic partner nicely. It's perhaps not
| _the_ reason, but it is _a_ reason.
|
| Given how peacefully it collapsed and the huge potential
| for mayhem, I'd stay away from altering the timeline.
| bluGill wrote:
| We have no idea what the alternate histories would look
| like. We can guess - yours is a reasonable guess - but it
| is all guesses. I can come up with reasons thing would
| things went far worse, and if you think a little you
| should be able to as well - they may be somewhat
| unlikely, but that is all the more we can say.
|
| What we do know is where we are today: Russia is not
| playing nice with the world despite our attempts to have
| beneficial economic exchanges. Would the not play nice
| with USSR scenarios be worse - we have no real idea.
| greedo wrote:
| Yes, please give the Soviets due credit for how well they
| treated the Eastern Bloc countries. The Czechs and
| Slovaks, along with the Hungarians might like a word with
| you, to point out a few extreme examples. Same with the
| rest of the Bloc countries that had to cope with decades
| of repression.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| > dependence on Putin's Russia
|
| First, it's Russia, not Putin's Russia. It's derogatory to
| frame discussion like that. Should we also start putting
| "Biden's USA" and "Macron's France"? Just writing this way,
| and suddenly both USA and France appear like some fourth
| world banana republics.
|
| Second, both Russia and Soviet Union before were the most
| reliable energy partner. They didn't fail their obligations
| a single time.
|
| Reduction in Russian gas should be blamed on NATO sanctions
| that prevented a timely maintenance of North Stream 1 by
| confiscation of the gas turbine, and the refusal to start
| using North Stream 2 although it is ready to deliver gas
| tomorrow, if Germany decides so.
| Veen wrote:
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| > Second, both Russia and Soviet Union before were the
| most reliable energy partner. They didn't fail their
| obligations a single time.
|
| Sorry, this is bollocks. For more than 30 years Russia is
| using energy supplies as a weapon against pretty much all
| the eastern and central Europe.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Can you give one single example when it was Russia's
| guilt for not delivering gas?
|
| The only time when we had issue with gas it was some ten
| years ago when Ukraine stopped the transit hoping to
| blackmail both Russia and the EU to get a better deal for
| themselves. Ukraine was a failed state then that couldn't
| pay for gas they used.
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| First well published incident was cutting off Estonia in
| 1993, right after it regained independence.
|
| Note Russia always does something to shift the blame,
| usually starts "dispute" over payments. It's done because
| media need to report "balanced" view, so just by reading
| general news it's not apparent tha this is really
| blackmail. Stockholm tribunal regularly disproves Russian
| version, it just takes time, which is what Russia is
| after: you can't survive winter without heating, and the
| final verdict won't arrive in time. So until LNG
| terminals and pipelines to Norway sprang around the
| Baltic Sea, coupled with Third Package, Eastern Europeans
| mostly had to yield to this blackmail.
|
| > The only time when we had issue with gas
|
| ISTM you live west of Oder. No one in Eastern Europe
| would say this.
|
| > it was some ten years ago when Ukraine stopped the
| transit hoping to blackmail both Russia and the EU to get
| a better deal for themselves. Ukraine was a failed state
| then that couldn't pay for gas they used.
|
| This is false, Ukraine wasn't "failed state". What failed
| was an attempt to rig an election.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| It is a failed state. Or call it a puppet state. After
| the Maidan coup it became pretty fast s fascist
| autocracy. And it was corrupt since the gain of
| independence. How else would you call it? A pinnacle of
| democracy certainly not.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > After the Maidan coup it became pretty fast s fascist
| autocracy
|
| I think you are confusing Ukraine after Maidan with
| Russia under Putin.
|
| (Well, no, I really think you are just parroting
| laughably dumb Russian propaganda, but it would be more
| accurate with those substitutions.)
| mcv wrote:
| Putin's power in Russia is a lot more absolute than
| Biden's in the US or Macron's in France. And especially
| with his war against Ukraine and general hatred of
| democracy, Putin is relevant. The EU would have had less
| problems buying gas from Yeltsin's Russia. In fact,
| that's how we got into this situation; Russia was
| supposed to be on the road to becoming a normal, open
| democracy. And then Putin changed course.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Demonizing an enemy by personalisation and reduction to
| one evil dictator is a known propaganda / manipulation
| technique.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonizing_the_enemy#Person
| ifi...
|
| This has always been a standard operation model for the
| US:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(U
| nit...
|
| So yes, Putin's Russia is used intentionally to introduce
| the same feeling as Hitler's Germany. That's the way how
| Biden's USA works, supported by Ursula von der Layens EU,
| Stoltenberg's NATO and their minions.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| But Putin does have dictator level control...
|
| It's Putin's Russia because Russia does what Putin wants.
|
| Biden wants a lot of things for America but both the
| legislature and the courts are stopping that. So in that
| sense it is America's America.
| dTal wrote:
| You might have a point if any of the other people you
| mention had maintained unchallenged political power for 2
| decades by the expedient of murdering their political
| rivals.
| mcv wrote:
| It's done mostly out of compassion with the average
| Russians who have no say in the matter. I think it's
| important to remind people that it's specifically Putin
| who wants this war, and that most Russians don't. Just
| like we try not to blame the average German for Hitler's
| mad aggression.
|
| As many people have pointed out, comparisons to Hitler's
| conquests at the start of WW2 are not unjustified; Putin
| is using much of the same rhetoric that Hitler used. His
| state media is actively discussing the need for genocide.
| Those "same feelings as Hitler's Germany" are because the
| facts are far too similar.
| google234123 wrote:
| > Putin who wants this war, and that most Russians don't.
|
| I don't think we have enough data to say this
| confidently. Putin enjoys a very broad base of support
| dragonwriter wrote:
| People, including elites in Putin's inner circle,
| perceived as insufficiently loyal to Putin have
| experienced a rash of widely reported "murder-suicides"
| of their entire families, and others who have avoided
| that fate have experienced, other very public, severe
| adverse consequences.
|
| This, along with Russia's notoriously pervasive secret
| police and domestic surveillance may have something to do
| why even "anonymous" polling of Russia finds fairly small
| numbers of people willing to say they don't support the
| regime wholeheartedly, independent of actual sentiment.
| mcv wrote:
| Because he controls the media. There have also been very
| persistent protests against the war. Russians in a
| position to speak freely often criticise it. That's not
| true for the majority of Russians, however.
| jpgvm wrote:
| In what ways has nuclear energy failed Germany that don't
| stem from small scale and lack of investment?
| Juliate wrote:
| Also, framing it as if Germany policy had not been also ...
| "influenced" by Russia's long-term strategy would be quite
| naive.
| blub wrote:
| Why does everyone attribute to deception what could just as
| easily be attributed to this relationship being beneficial
| for Germany (and a lot of other EU countries which are
| conveniently omitted from this discussion)?
|
| Energy is at the core of economic development and Germany
| and a bunch of other countries were able to get gas for
| decades.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "could just as easily be attributed to this relationship
| being beneficial for Germany"
|
| There is no single concience called Germany that may
| definitively answer the question of whether it benefits
| them.
|
| As is often the case, people benefetting from this
| relationship are not the ones paying the price when
| something goes wrong.
|
| For every 1 billion of economic benefit produced by this
| relationship, this war has destroyed 5.
|
| most lukely, without this relationship, the qar would not
| be possible.
| agapon wrote:
| Do you the famous (and maybe fake) quote 'The Capitalists
| will sell us the rope with which we will hang them' ?
|
| It's the same here, but with selling energy to
| "capitalists".
|
| What Europeans might have seen as purely economic affair
| for the USSR / Russia was just means of getting money to
| grow and support its army, to buy Western politicians and
| media influence, etc.
| wsc981 wrote:
| Germany is just the b*tch of the USA though, that becomes
| very clear in this press conference. Germany has nothing
| to say over Nordstream: https://youtu.be/OS4O8rGRLf8?t=74
| mannerheim wrote:
| 'US Senate approves Nord Stream 2 Russia-Germany pipeline
| sanctions | The move by US lawmakers is part of a push to
| counter Russian influence in Europe, but European [i.e.,
| German] lawmakers have said the US should mind its own
| business.' 2019 December 17 https://www.dw.com/en/us-
| senate-approves-nord-stream-2-russi...
|
| 'Why Germany pipes down when talk turns to Nord Stream 2
| sanctions | Chancellor Olaf Scholz won't say pipeline is
| finished if Russia attacks Ukraine, despite strong
| pressure from allies.' 2022 February 8
| https://www.politico.eu/article/olaf-scholz-silence-on-
| nord-...
| blub wrote:
| Theoretically you're right.
|
| Practically you're not though, because as history
| attests, the USSR dissolved peacefully and thorough all
| the ups and downs the economic relationship survived.
|
| This is perhaps why the warnings from the US were ignored
| for so long: they were based on self-interest and they
| had a track record of being wrong for decades.
| lnsru wrote:
| It was not peacefully. Rather without large scale war.
| Some people got killed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J
| anuary_Events_(Lithuania)
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think it's a mistake to see that as one sided. Bringing
| Russia closer to Europe and (according to the now falsified
| theory) creating conditions for peace while also getting
| cheap energy has been a goal of plenty of European elites.
| greedo wrote:
| Elites who have been compensated handsomely by the
| Kremlin. "Useful idiots" comes to mind.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Nuclear does have a cost problem in the sense that costs have
| not really dropped since forever, which is not boding well for
| a technology (unlike, for example costs for solar). So I can
| accept people arguing that way - but could also still argue for
| nuclear as an expensive baseload technology.
|
| The whole taxonomic discussion is a distraction anyway. We are
| long past some simple carbon reduction path making a dent (and
| also coming at high costs), so in the end will be about
| mitigation and even attempts at geoengineering - as usual
| politics are way behind the curve.
| pfdietz wrote:
| One could argue ten years ago for nuclear as an expensive
| (but still overall desirable) baseload technology, but I
| think the window on that argument has closed.
| api wrote:
| I heard someone call Germany the "California of Europe" for
| this reason. It's simultaneously full of high-tech and
| engineers yet paradoxically also full of alternative-medicine
| quackery and anti-science viewpoints on things like nuclear
| power.
|
| AFAIK there's a weird through-line here where California new
| age and 70s "new left" ideology has some of its roots in the
| same early 20th century romanticism that was and I'm sure in
| various forms still is popular in Germany. Look up the Volkisch
| movement:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkisch_movement
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Environmental sciences are still a niche and the storage
| problem hasn't been solved yet. E.g. the infamous Asse II has
| empirically proven to be unsafe mostly because of water influx
| and the 126.000 containers (which are partially captured within
| slowly floating salt) now have to be retrieved which is going
| to cost billions
|
| No insurance company in the world is willing to insure a
| nuclear power plant and both risk and operation have been
| heavily subsidized since decades.
|
| In fact renewable sources are even cheaper:
|
| "The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per
| megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power
| comes in at $29-$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112
| and $189."
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...
| catchclose8919 wrote:
| There's no reason to require polyticians to be technicians, and
| no reason to expect less formally-educated people to be more
| anti nuclear (except in the presence of massive disinformation
| campaigns). Requirements for formal education just select for
| conservative and obedient people - and we put them on the
| _leaders_ (we got it backwards!). The US seems to kind of got
| it a bit more right, but it 's probably just circus.
|
| Technocratic politics doesn't work in practice (ask USSR), and
| there should be no requirements of formal education on
| politicians (not even non technical). But politicians and
| administrators _do need to (re)learn_ fast on-the-lob so in
| practice _an IQ test requirement would be great for them_ and
| probably for them only (yes, IQ measures well only _how fast
| someone can learn something_ and not at all _how good is
| someone at doing something after they 've learned it_, but,
| guess what... _knowing and (re)learning fast about stuff they
| don 't actually do_ is kind of the job requirement for
| politicians and administrators - an 145 IQ high-school-dropout
| with or without some alchol or substance issues _is kind of the
| best person for a job like Prime Minister_ , Energy or Finance
| Minister etc.).
|
| Oh, and on the active (we know their effects, so they must
| exist) campaigns of disinformation against _known to work tech_
| , there's a solution for that: laws for spreading false-facts
| and disinformation + throwing in jail people breaking them.
| Glue your ass on the highway or spread misinformation on
| facebook fueling anti-nuclear protests: how about a 5 years
| prison sentence baby?
|
| As a society _we 're so f terrible at allocating human
| resources, that it's no wonder that other resources like those
| involved in energy production are massively missalocated
| too..._
| dsq wrote:
| Lawyer-run government is the norm in most Western countries.
| Software dev today is dominated by the US because of the brain
| drain great sucking noise.
| JanSt wrote:
| There are also many institutes (e.g IDW) constantly pumping out
| papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest
| danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable
| energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no
| problem etc.
|
| These people are constantly invited to present these
| ,,Zukunftsenergien" as opposed to the old bad nuclear in talk
| shows.
|
| And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion
| dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive AND
| highest CO2 energy in Europe.
|
| In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more
| power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were
| closed at year end.
|
| Now we are reliant on russian gas and the politicians still
| want to keep closing the remaining three nuclear power plants.
|
| The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and
| not a power problem, so we don't need the nuclear power. We are
| still burning gas and restarted coal power plants.
|
| It's ridicioulous.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| > And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion
| dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive
|
| Do you have any sources? Last time I checked, Germany and
| France weren't that far apart, if you _remove taxes_ out of
| the costs. The thing is that Germany has a lot of Taxes that
| have nothing todo with how we generate the electricity. I.e.
| 90% of the _electricity tax_ (Stromsteuer) goes into the
| government pension fund.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Technically, you're still not removing taxes from the
| equation, because the state owned nuclear plants in France
| are also funded by taxes, it's just not taxes that are
| added to the cost of units of electricity.
|
| Which actually makes sense, if you have a high upfront
| cost, constant output source iike nuclear, taxing each
| individual unit makes no sense since the marginal cost is
| effectively zero up till you need to build a new plant.
| Whereas if you burn coal or gas, you want to incentivise
| people to cut back for cost, carbon and pollution reasons.
|
| An even more sensible approach would be to tax the carbon
| directly and charge more for peak electricity since that
| contributes more to the infrastructure requirements, which
| I guess both countries will already be moving towards as is
| the current trend in most places.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Yes, taxes and subsidies distort the actual costs of
| energy production. But if you look at my example, 90% of
| the Stromsteuer (tax on your energy bill as a household)
| don't go into funding of energy production, but to
| stabilize the (very broken) german mandatory
| pension/retirment system. But yes, one could argue that
| it is just moving around taxes in the government spending
| household.
| derrasterpunkt wrote:
| This is because taxes in Germany can't be tied to a
| specified purpose. This is intentional.
| JanSt wrote:
| The Stromsteuer ist only 5% of the price. It depends on
| your definition of taxes. The EEG-Umlage alone reached
| 6.5ct/kwh and directly paid for renewables. It's now taken
| out of the price, so the real price of energy is higher
| than what is paid by the consumer. The EEG Umlage is now
| hidden in and paid for by a special fund (,,Energie- und
| Klimafonds")
| tbihl wrote:
| You're saying that there is a transfer from nuclear to
| renewables of 6.5 cents/kWh for every kWh nuclear
| generates, or a net market distortion of 13c/kWh between
| the two (using the tenuous assumption of roughly
| equivalent capacities between the two sectors)?
|
| That's more than I pay in the US in total per kWh for
| electricity, generated, distributed, and taxed.
| JanSt wrote:
| 6.5ct is added to the cost of every used kwh (no matter
| where it comes from) and paid to the producers of
| renewable energy
| Retric wrote:
| Germany jumped into solar really early and it's very far
| north so it's not that relevant when considering todays
| tradeoffs.
|
| 41.3 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2016 was frankly
| excessive though it helped PV get much cheaper.
| Unfortunately, Germany now stuck with these huge agreed
| upon subsides for another decade.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| They also "pulled out" of solar early. I have idea how
| anyone can make sense of German policies. They seem to be
| working solely on the basis of emotion. The outcome is a
| disastrous policy that created one of the highest energy
| prices for consumers for no good reason.
|
| The Greens in Germany seem to be hell bent on de-
| industrializing Germany. They hate nuclear power and they
| hate all fossil fuels, but want to buy fracking LNG from
| the USA and fire up brown coal plants that were
| previously shut down to shove it to Putin. The outcome
| seems to be mass bankruptcies in what seems to be the
| social fabric of Germany, while getting a lot less energy
| for the same price.
| Brometheus wrote:
| The EEG Umlage had also been payed by renewable producers
| which made storage unprofitable in Germany. ENERTRAG was
| kneekaped by this afaik.
| xxpor wrote:
| Jeez, I know electricity prices in Europe are higher than
| in the US generally, but a 6.5c per kwh tax would have
| been a rate of around 66% at the beginning of 2021 when
| it was 1.20 USD/EUR and the average US residential rate
| was ~13c/kwh.
| oezi wrote:
| Yes, rates can be much higher. We pay 37c for instance at
| the moment.
|
| On the other hand: To have higher energy prices provides
| incentives for less use and must be part of an
| intermediate strategy to bring down CO2 emissions.
| petre wrote:
| > The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat
| and not a power problem, so we don't need the nuclear power.
|
| Which is even more ridiculos because heat is the primary
| product of nuclear reactors. Their thermal rating of a
| nuclear reactor is about 3x the electrical rating.
| liftm wrote:
| Out of curiosity, are there any nuclear reactor
| cogeneration plants in operation?
| morning_gelato wrote:
| Yes, for example Switzerland uses two of their nuclear
| power plants for district heating [1][2]. China has also
| started using it for district heating in Haiyang [3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Pl
| ant#Ref...
|
| [2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-
| library/country-pr...
|
| [3] https://www.nucnet.org/news/city-of-haiyang-first-in-
| country...
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| Sure
|
| "Russia, Dec 1, 2019 -- Unit 1 of the Leningrad 2 nuclear
| power station in western Russia has been integrated into
| the heat supply system of the city of Sosnovy Bor"
| mlindner wrote:
| > The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat
| and not a power problem, so we don't need the nuclear power.
| We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants.
|
| Heating problem IS a power problem given the high efficiency
| of heat pumps nowadays. And yes they work perfectly fine in
| Germany's relatively moderate winters.
| Nitramp wrote:
| Only in the most abstract sense, if you're willing to
| ignore actual installed capacity (and thus reality to some
| degree).
|
| There are around 350k heat pumps in Germany right now, of
| 40 million households (ignoring offices, ignoring multi
| family homes etc).
|
| There is no way Germany could install enough heatpumps to
| counteract the Russia induced gas crisis, not even over a
| timeframe of a decade or more. Optimistically you could fix
| this by 2050.
|
| So yes, there's a heating crisis, not an electricity
| crisis.
| belorn wrote:
| EU has an yearly report of the state of the energy grid,
| and a common finding is that different country spend
| subsidies on different things. Germany spend most of any
| country, and they spend a bit half of that on production
| of renewable energy and the remaining split between
| fossil fuel and shared infrastructure like power lines.
| Very little of the subsidies goes to the consumer side.
|
| There are however countries who focused on the
| infrastructure/consumer side of the equation. When
| communal or heath pump based heating is significant
| cheaper, suddenly people interest to invest into home
| improvements goes up. As the report describe, it not
| obvious which strategy is best in order to reduce
| pollution.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| > In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more
| power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were
| closed at year end.
|
| 65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 220 billion kWh from
| renewables actually
|
| https://www-destatis-
| de.translate.goog/DE/Presse/Pressemitte...
| bobro wrote:
| The table in that page says photovoltaics are 41B kWh.
| belorn wrote:
| 65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 45 billion kWh from solar,
| _actually_...
|
| 111 billion kWh from wind, 30 billion kWh from bio gas, 18
| billion kWh from hydro, 156 billion kWh from coal, 65
| billion kWh from gas.
|
| 25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single
| largest but source for energy in Germany.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Sorry but you and GP complaining about how policy prevented
| nuclear from being the backbone of energy supply, then
| totally ignoring the impact of policy on the supply of
| renewables, that is a pretty weak way to argue.
|
| The politics in Germany have been pretty actively hostile to
| wind under the conservative governments. Check this graph I
| just compiled out of the stats from wikipedia:
|
| https://wtf.roflcopter.fr/pics/gcd4Rw5d/49s68U7X.png
|
| Yeah, if you introduce legislation that "these people" tell
| you will stall the construction, then _exactly_ that tends to
| happen. The 10H rules and other BS from the conservatives
| were expressly and successfully introduced to stifle wind
| energy construction.
| Brometheus wrote:
| This is the correct take from my perspective. The same
| happend to: - biogas - solar - offshore wind
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| - LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and
| coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a
| political and management issue.
|
| - maybe you keep the existing nuclear around for levelling,
| well, fine. But just be ready for it to get "nuked" once the
| battery/storage costs combined with wind/solar drop under
| everything. That day isn't today, and it isn't next year, but
| with cheap sodium ion and many other chemistries in active
| improvement... it will.
|
| - nuclear waste disposal is solved... if you have a LFTR or
| similar tech to "burn" it. Otherwise, the usual handwave on
| nuclear waste is a telltale sign of "old nuclear", as are the
| people that say it is safe. Solid fuel rod designs are not
| safe.
|
| I am not saying that LFTR should be the only path forward for
| nuclear, but the advantages of LFTR should be what a "real"
| nuclear solution has. LFTR is:
|
| - scalable in size - meltdown-proof (plug and pool where the
| liquid loses criticality) - burns/breeds virtually all of its
| fuel, and IIRC can "burn" spend rod waste - somewhat
| proliferation resistant
|
| Again, I don't know if the LFTR design challenges are truly
| problematic, but the CAPABILITIES of LFTR should be a
| standard next-gen nuclear must be held to.
|
| The Greens aren't correct generally in engineering or
| science, but what they are right about, indirectly, is the
| culture of nuclear power that grew up in the Cold War and
| attached to military needs for weapons isotopes.
|
| Those political priorities overrode safety, good design,
| economic performance, and other concerns, and left us with
| the terrible solid fuel rod design.
|
| LFTR got canned in the US in a backroom political power move,
| and the same nuclear establishment keeps it restricted from
| funds and research.
|
| Again, I'm not saying LFTR is the "one true path". But its
| core abilities address the Green concerns: meltdown proof and
| virtually waste free. Those two aspects are the base table
| stakes a "next gen nuclear" would need. Maybe you have a
| combined reactor approach where one design produces from
| solid or pebble fuel, and then that gets fed to LFTRs for
| final burn off.
|
| So I guess I would recommend Germany / France keep their
| nukes going for now, but view them as life support: these
| things are going away once battery/storage tech scales to
| meet the need, a virtually guaranteed proposition in the five
| year near future timeline.
|
| For nuclear to be relevant long term you'll need the safety
| tablestakes mentioned, but all nuclear projects are 10 years
| out: you'll need a stable price to target/combat 10 years out
| from wind/solar, and you don't know that right now.
| baybal2 wrote:
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy
| has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable
| toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap,
| building enough storage is no problem etc.
|
| Isn't your choice of telling them false based purely on
| political agenda? Same happens on other side of the camp,
| both believe their science is actual science.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It kind of depends on what you consider a fact.
|
| I support nuclear scientifically. I don't think it has a
| chance politically.
|
| Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much
| solvable problem.
|
| Politically, expect to spend billions upon billions and
| then have things like Yucca Mountain canned after lots of
| construction.
|
| Both are true and which ones you consider lead to very
| different conclusions.
| worik wrote:
| > Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much
| solvable problem.
|
| No it is not.
|
| There is no place on Earth that we know is geologically
| stable for the time periods required We have no way of
| knowing what society will be like ten thousand years from
| now, let alone 100,000 years. How do we communicate with
| those people bout the danger of what we left behind?
|
| Greed. Hubris.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Tectonic plates don't move nearly quick enough to be a
| concern in the span of 100k years. A spot square in the
| middle of a plate is going to be safe from earthquakes
| for millions of years.
|
| And not to mention, how does ground vibration bring
| sometimes buried under 500 meters of solid rock back onto
| the surface? Earthquakes shake the ground, they don't dig
| deep boreholes.
| oezi wrote:
| Yet, all the attempts to store nuclear fuel underground
| in Germany proved so catastrophic that they had to scrap
| all of them and restart the selection process.
| cma wrote:
| Translating the numbers:
|
| Billions upon billions per capita is three-dollar bills
| upon three-dollar bills.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It would be one thing if billions and billions lead to
| success, but we are nowhere near a politically acceptable
| solution for nuclear waste.
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Flying is scientifically a well understood and safe
| thing. Still its the FAA that makes the rules, and
| engineering that needs to produce robust and reliable
| systems, and still planes fall out of the sky sometimes..
|
| Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works,
| which would be the solution for a lot...
|
| So what does "scientifically...much solavable problem" in
| practice really mean? Worlds apart..
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works,
| which would be the solution for a lot...
|
| There is no evidence that fusion is a solution to any
| energy problems. The central problem of fusion power is
| that reactions consume more energy than they produce.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Well no, we have plenty of data that shows in reality,
| nuclear is the safest (lowest deaths per TWh generated
| [1]), among the lowest-carbon intensity (lower than solar,
| higher than wind) [2] and with seawater extraction has the
| potential of being renewable.
|
| Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks
| back where they came from.
|
| So-called environmentalists are advocating removing this
| capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement
| will be coal, oil and gas.
|
| [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-
| energy...
|
| [2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-
| library/energy-and...
| worik wrote:
| > Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy
| rocks back where they came from.
|
| In the Australian outback those are places people used to
| live. How are you going to stop people returning for
| 200,000 years?
|
| Greed. Hubris.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Do you think those aren't solved problems? First, fast
| reactors yield waste products that principally live only
| a couple of hundred years. [1] And even to answer your
| original question directly, there's a whole area of study
| that's fascinating on how to provide long-term warnings.
| [3]
|
| Not necessarily in the Australian outback, Yucca Mountain
| is a great choice. [2] [edit](That area is adjacent to
| the Nevada Test Site which is already some of the most
| radioactive land on earth).
|
| What greed exactly are you talking about? I've no
| financial interest in the success of nuclear power. I
| recognize it's more expensive than some competing options
| but it's a _better_ solution.
|
| As for hubris, again, you're not exactly coming to the
| table with data on the risks, especially since we've got
| 80 years of experience with nuclear power.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_
| waste_r...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-
| term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
| jsmith45 wrote:
| Exactly right. The goal with nuclear waste is basically
| to get it back down to levels similar the original ore.
| At that point, it isn't especially dangerous.
|
| Many radioactive products are either very short lived,
| and will decay down to minimal levels within a few
| hundred years, or are very long lived, causing very low
| radioactivity.
|
| The problem are the elements that are in between which is
| mostly the other actinides. Those are the ones that would
| require tens of thousands of years or more to reach safe
| activity levels. Fast reactor designs don't have
| significant amounts of such elements in the waste. The
| waste will decay to uranium ore-ore like levels within
| only hundreds of years.
|
| The biggest issue is that they need relatively enriched
| uranium to operate at first. After they are started, they
| can be used as a breeder reactor that can take in natural
| uranium and convert it to the enriched uranium it needs
| to continue running.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| You fell into the same trap. You linked 2 studies. Other
| side could link 2 studies with very different conclusion.
| We should understand it is fundamentally a political
| issue, and both side shouldn't hide behind 2 links to
| support them.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I didn't fall into the trap. Objective reality isn't
| political. The total number of people killed in nuclear
| accidents divided by TWh generated is pretty objective.
| dieortin wrote:
| Not when deaths caused by nuclear energy are incredibly
| hard to quantify.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Are they though? Do you have some quantification of that
| difficulty? Any studies? Any citations to back up your
| thesis?
| oezi wrote:
| Unfortunately despite the track record nuclear won't make
| a revival. The planning cycles for new plants are just
| too long. Renewables will yet again half in price by the
| time you could just build another nuclear plant. That's
| why really nobody is trying anymore.
| oezi wrote:
| Still nuclear is finished everywhere (or on the way out
| except in China) and won't come back from the grave. It
| is like asking for cars from the 70ties to return.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity
| without accounting for the fact its replacement will be
| coal, oil and gas.
|
| Could you identify any broadly accepted environmental
| analysis that says this? It's easy to make accusaiont
|
| > Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy
| rocks back where they came from.
|
| The waste rocks are not at all like the ones removed from
| the ground, in critical ways (radioactivity). Who says
| anything about putting them back in the original mines?
| Why would the original mines happen to be suitable for
| nuclear waste storage?
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Besides this being studies for which other studiest exist
| the same, we also learned in the pandemic that "deaths"
| cannot be the sole metric (however you want to interpret
| that).
|
| And seawater extraction is as renewable as CO2-scrubbing
| the atmosphere would allow us to go on with burnign coal
| - both would equally not scale to needs with current
| technology, so what?
| arcticbull wrote:
| Why wouldn't seawater extraction scale? There's 4 billion
| tons of uranium in the sea (a 60,000 year supply at
| current usage levels), and 100 trillion tons of uranium
| below that from which it's replenished as it is
| extracted.
|
| [1] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514
| timwaagh wrote:
| Meanwhile in Russia they are doing heating with water from
| nuclear powerplants. While price gouging Germany for gas.
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| "While price gouging Germany for gas" Huh?!? Price is
| settled somewhere in Netherlands, what Russia has to do
| with it?
| JanSt wrote:
| They send very little gas (much less than agreed upon)
| through NS1 to send a message and try to force-open NS2,
| which leads to very high spot prices
| anotheracctfo wrote:
| Yeah the OPEC model. Except you can't end it by
| threatening to "nuke their ass and take their gas."
| kitkat_new wrote:
| Check the data:
| https://www.stromdaten.info/ANALYSE/periods/index.php
|
| - Timeframe: 01.06.2021 - 26.06.2022
|
| - Import/Export country: Frankreich
|
| Data:
|
| - physical export balance 11,77 TWh
|
| - monetary export balance: 2,13 Mrd EUR
|
| - average import price/MWh: 133,71 EUR
|
| - average export price/MWh: 169,91 EUR
|
| It's good for Germany, not for France. Germany is selling
| electricity to France when prices are high, and buying when
| prices are low. And it is selling way more than buying.
|
| Additionally, France is reducing the nuclear power share. Not
| by decommissioning working plants, but simply by not building
| as many new plants as would be necessary to keep the share.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Instead of accusing people of being ideological and irrational
| why don't you address all the issues around nuclear?
|
| Political stability VS centralization of power is one. Nuclear
| power is highly centralized and vulnerable to corruption.
|
| And also to war, terrorism and social unrest.
|
| If we are to expect extreme climate and social instability in
| the next 50 years, it's safer to democratize and localize
| energy production and storage.
|
| Renewables go in that direction. Nuclear goes in the opposite
| direction.
| lven wrote:
| New nuclear is decentralizing with micro reactors.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Unless microreactors are stacked up at centralized sites to
| share labor their operating costs are likely to be
| prohibitive.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Except it's impossible to safely scale down nuclear to
| domestic/community/small-town level.
|
| Instead renewables and especially solar as well as
| batteries and geothermal heat storage scale down very well
| and can build resilient networks.
|
| After the horrific blackouts that happened in some
| countries people on HN should be able to grasp this...
| dsq wrote:
| The problem with nuclear right now is that even if we decide to
| massively increase the share of nuclear power in the energy mix
| (in itself a very good idea), it will take a lot of time to build
| up the human technical capital necessary to plan, build, and
| operate these plants. This should have been started 5-10 years
| ago, and new graduates woukd be ready. Not to mention physical
| plant which also takes many years to finish. My worry is that
| once the energy crisis becomes completely obvious, with people
| shivering in blankets, govts will panic and push through
| emergency building plans, cutting all corners.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| Too little too late. They clearly need nuclear power now. The
| west has made its energy bed and now we have to sleep in it.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Why are Germans so stubbornly against nuclear power? Is it
| because of losing WWII? Is it because of the Holocaust? I don't
| get it.
| sylware wrote:
| near-zero carbon energy without nuclear at the current level of
| energy needs?
|
| ...
| sputr wrote:
| When it comes to nuclear, no story is better than the story of
| the Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant in Austria.
|
| It was built, finished, ready to start providing 692 MW of power.
|
| But was prevented with a referendum on 5 November 1978 by a
| narrow majority of 50.47% against.
|
| So they didn't start it.
|
| They instead replace it with Durnrohr Power Station, a termal
| power station burning coal and gas.
|
| The push for ideological purity that prevented them from
| accepting a less-than-perfect choice, lead to getting stuck with
| the worst-possible choice when reality came knocking. It's a
| cautionary tale for all ideologically "passionate" people, of
| which we have far too many in today's society.
| sofixa wrote:
| And to top it off, Austria imports nuclear energy from
| neighbours.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| henearkr wrote:
| As I heard today again on the radio, the narrative is "to get
| energy whatever the weather, we cannot rely only on wind and
| solar".
|
| I'm surprised that they haven't heard of the possibility of
| _energy storage_.
|
| Both already available storage solutions, and the many other
| solutions in development, are largely enough to enable wind/solar
| and other renewable sources to replace fossil fuels, without
| relying on nuclear.
| wronglyprepaid wrote:
| > I'm surprised that they haven't heard of the possibility of
| energy storage.
|
| Have we not? I think the real issue is that we have capitalist
| pigscum that are greedy and want to burn the atmosphere if it
| can give them an extra buck and the EU is beholden to them that
| is why they made this change.
| henearkr wrote:
| But they are allowed to hide behind this false narrative
| because the population is not aware enough, which is why we
| should speak publicly a lot of the energy storage solutions
| and projects.
| wronglyprepaid wrote:
| They are allowed to hide behind the false narrative because
| governments only care about shareholders and not
| stakeholders.
| paganel wrote:
| > I'm surprised that they haven't heard of the possibility of
| energy storage.
|
| They have probably heard of it, most probably they also know
| that it isn't scalable. It might be scalable, in I don't know
| how many years, but the here and now (and especially the coming
| winters) is closer to the EU electorate than some possible
| technological breakthrough that might or might not happen.
| henearkr wrote:
| Why wouldn't it be scalable? Most of the solutions I know of
| are scalable (those that do not require rare minerals).
| paganel wrote:
| What solutions do you know? The hydro ones are not
| scalable, that's for sure. One, you'd never, ever get the
| environmental permits to build the dams behind them, and
| two, you can only build them in mountainous, maybe hilly
| terrain, that would add tons of costs related to
| distribution.
|
| I had also read something about using salt deposits, but
| maybe I'm remembering wrong.
|
| And no, Tesla-like batteries, or any batteries for the
| matter, are not a solution at the scales we're talking
| about.
| moffkalast wrote:
| There's nothing quite as infuriating when people scream
| about NIMBY being a deal breaker for nuclear, then peddle
| damming up entire valleys where people actually live
| right now to use as pumped hydro storage. It's like they
| can't even hear themselves speak.
|
| And as you point out, most recent battery advances seem
| to be on par with graphene in that they promise
| everything yet can't seem to leave the lab, much less be
| manufactured anywhere close to the scales required.
|
| Out of all the renewables I suppose wave power is the
| most prospective right now. It's consistent, runs 24/7,
| and could be placed at most shore locations. Probably not
| quite enough output to make a dent though.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > I'm surprised that they haven't heard of the possibility of
| energy storage.
|
| Neither have our grid operators it seems. Current worldwide
| grid storage capacity is so absolutely abysmal we could call it
| a rounding error.
|
| In the end of the day, we'll need both renewables and nuclear
| combined to get us out of this fossil powered mess, and
| ignoring one of them won't exactly give us a good chance, with
| whatever tiny probability we still have left to unfuck the
| atmosphere.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The key thing is, we need a better grid in Europe. While we do
| have a better grid than the US, simply measured by checking
| outage rates, it is nowhere near large enough to allow large
| scale transfer of power across the continent.
|
| Assuming we had a decently sized cross-continental grid, it
| would be possible to have a _lot_ of overcapacity in wind farms
| pretty much anywhere on the European coast lines - particularly
| in Portugal [1] and other areas with constant, strong wind
| power - and then transferring it to countries which do not have
| enough wind power.
|
| Additionally, we could transform our industry, particularly
| aluminium smelters (for example, in Germany one percent of the
| entire power usage of the country goes to just two huge plants
| in Essen and Hamburg [2]) to seasonal production - basically,
| they would only be allowed to produce during the summer when
| there is enough solar power available. This will be expensive,
| yes, but unlike the sparsely settled US Europe simply has
| nowhere to store the waste of nuclear energy.
|
| [1] https://www.evwind.es/2020/02/19/wind-energy-in-portugal-
| alr...
|
| [2] https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/das-technologie-
| update/...
| jpgvm wrote:
| I think you (and most people that talk about storage)
| drastically underestimate the scale of the storage required and
| just how tight supply is for the resources necessary to build
| it.
|
| For now EVs are going to consume the world's supply of
| batteries. Leaves you with thermal or potential energy storage
| like pumped hydro. All of which aren't even fully developed yet
| or are restricted to specific geography.
|
| As of right now, even ignoring new designs nuclear is 100%
| technically viable, it's just expensive. Expensive is generally
| easy to fix just needs scale like what we have for solar now.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> EVs are going to consume the world 's supply of batteries_
|
| The ideal battery technologies for electric vehicles are
| completely different than what you want for balancing the
| grid: vehicles need very high energy density because they
| need to move the batteries, while the grid can use bulky
| heavy options.
|
| For example, a friend is working on very heavy iron-air
| batteries targeting grid applications:
| https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
| jpgvm wrote:
| I get that but they are also not ready yet. Right now both
| cars and stationary storage are competing for LFP capacity
| (somewhat also NCA).
|
| Which is exactly the problem with the storage argument,
| simply not ready yet.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Of course the scale is large. Anything that replaces fossil
| fuel use is large. That doesn't mean it impossible, or even
| uncompetitive.
|
| If you think there is some specific resource limit that would
| prevent adequate storage (from all storage technologies) from
| being implemented, do please tell me what you think it is.
| Realize you have to kill ALL the disparate storage
| technologies to make this argument, not just one specific
| one.
| henearkr wrote:
| I hear you, but the real argument against nuclear fission is
| not the economic one, it's the safety one.
|
| The safety during the (peace time) use of nuclear plants has
| been hugely improved, so I agree that's not anymore the main
| concern.
|
| But nuclear fission facilities are very cumbersome to
| dismantle, and they are liabilities during and after their
| commissioning.
|
| You can see that in Ukraine for example, Zaporizhia plant has
| been taken into hostage.
|
| Chernobyl was too, briefly.
|
| This kind of liability is especially concerning in our era of
| crisis (triggered by the global warming), that we could even
| suspect to be the beginning of a civilization collapse, which
| is a big word to say simply that situations of conflict,
| including internal conflict (civil wars and guerrillas) will
| multiply everywhere. Imagine the 6th January folks marching
| to a nuclear plant...
|
| There is still also the problem of the nuclear fuel: now West
| Africa and Sahel are providing a sizable part of it. But what
| will happen when they do not want to cooperate anymore with
| the Western world? (Russia is working very hard to push to
| this situation)
| mcv wrote:
| This is an important point. Nuclear can be very safe _in
| theory_. Under the right circumstances, all risks can be
| accounted for (except long term waste storage, apparently).
| Problem is, in the hands of profit-seeking companies and
| aggressive and /or corrupt governments, those circumstances
| will not be right.
|
| Remember that both Fukushima and Deep Water Horizon were
| caused by companies cutting costs in the face of warnings
| of the risks.
| origin_path wrote:
| Why can't the waste just be ejected into space. SpaceX
| has made launches a lot cheaper than it once was and once
| you push it into the solar system it'll never cause
| problems again.
| mcv wrote:
| Launching large amounts of nuclear material comes with
| its own risks, and if it orbits the sun in an earth-
| crossing orbit, we will eventually encounter it again.
| Launching into the sun would be nice, but that's way more
| expensive.
| 988747 wrote:
| Putting few tons of radioactive material on top of dozens
| of tons of highly explosive rocket fuel... what could
| possibly go wrong?
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| I assume you mean nuclear fission.
| henearkr wrote:
| Big oops!
|
| Yes, thank you!!
|
| I fixed it in the comment.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Nuclear safety in war time is unproven sure but I would
| argue that a nuclear power plant is much less dangerous
| than a hydro dam. Imagine a strike on Three Gorges Dam, at
| minimum millions would die, without needing to use a
| nuclear weapon.
|
| Sure it's a tough pile of concrete, but that is exactly
| what a nuclear power plant is too.
|
| Nuclear fuel is a non-issue if it was profitable to mine
| it. Australia has vast supplies of very high quality
| Uranium deposits and a substantial portion of the worlds
| supply of Thorium so the "West" will have ample supply to
| fissile material for the next several millennia.
|
| Spent fuel is also really a non-issue. It gets talked about
| a lot but even if we were to supply 100% of the worlds
| energy on nuclear (which we never would, solar and hydro
| are too good for that) we could still store all of it in
| probably a single facility in a desert in Australia far
| from where anyone could give a shit about it. Australia is
| -extremely- large and -extremely- sparsely populated,
| especially the interior.
|
| I get why people don't like the sound of nuclear but the
| arguments just don't stack up against the facts, cost
| really is it's only downside and I'm certain that can be
| fixed with mass production of reactors and designs that
| don't need active cooling in failure scenarios.
| chrsw wrote:
| Nuclear definitely has a PR problem and I don't have
| enough background in the science to claim how unfounded
| the problem actually is. But what I do have are memories
| of how people react to anything nuclear related. All it
| takes is one high profile incident and all the political
| capital spent on selling nuclear as an attractive option
| to the public vanishes instantly. I don't know why other
| energy sources don't seem to have this problem. Not to
| the degree nuclear has, at least.
| jpgvm wrote:
| For the same reason why people turn a blind eye to oil,
| coal, guns, alcohol and cigarettes yet have a problem
| with cannabis, abortions, nuclear power, gun control and
| until recently electric cars.
|
| PR/marketing trumps all because people aren't
| sufficiently educated in science and statistics to
| understand what represents risk vs what is feasible, etc.
|
| Because they can't interpret the data themselves they
| defer to media and public figures and unfortunately in
| our world those people aren't incentivised to present
| things honestly - even in the rare cases they are
| educated enough to do so.
| henearkr wrote:
| Well it depends on the country.
|
| In France for example, people who are anti-abortion,
| anti-cannabis, anti-EV, etc (most often those are
| Conservative people) are also anti-wind-turbines and pro-
| nuclear.
| jpgvm wrote:
| The specific issues aren't the point.
|
| The point is that most people don't have informed
| opinions based on fact but rather just regurgitate
| whatever is fed to them in whatever media they consume.
|
| Us sitting here having an educated debate on the merits
| of nuclear vs hydro aren't the problem, we lie in the
| relatively informed group. We have concerns about nuclear
| (and other technologies no doubt) but those come from a
| place of reason, not of group-think.
|
| Side note:
|
| Nuclear and it's relation with Green's parties around the
| world is also special as it was the platform on which
| those parties were created. So otherwise rational people,
| i.e environmentalists are irrationally against nuclear
| power because of long-standing historical reasons that
| probably don't hold anymore but can't change the very
| basis of their platform - or at least are unwilling to.
|
| No amount of facts changes that as it has nothing to do
| with facts and everything to do with politics.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Sorry to pick up on your specific examples, but I don't
| know why you are classifying alcohol deaths as under-
| estimated and abortions as over-estimated(?).
|
| For the record, the National Center for Drug Abuse
| Statistics reports there are about 95,000 alcohol-related
| deaths in the United States annually[0], while the CDC
| reports over 600,000 abortions per year.[1]
|
| It's true that someone who reads PR/marketing material is
| more likely to die from being hit by a drunk driver than
| by being aborted, but I don't think that's the point
| you're trying to make.
|
| [0] https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-related-
| deaths/
|
| [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
| tank/2022/06/24/what-the-da...
| jpgvm wrote:
| Abortions aren't deaths. Even if they were I wasn't
| looking to draw comparisons, these were just examples of
| things people don't have informed opinions on.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Abortions aren't deaths. ... people don't have informed
| opinions
|
| Well, you've definitely proven your point.
| jpgvm wrote:
| No, you have proven mine.
|
| Abortions aren't deaths any more than pulling out
| constitutes murder. It's just a bunch of cells like any
| other until it becomes able to sustain life independently
| at which point abortion is essentially illegal everywhere
| in the world except in seriously extreme circumstances.
|
| Attempting to define it otherwise takes some fairly
| substantial mental gymnastics. If I have to amputate my
| arm did I "kill" my arm? Or did I remove a piece of
| myself that was malfunctioning? Sure it was a bunch of
| cells and those cells are "dead" I guess. Is a baby part
| of the mother or is it special because some of the DNA
| was donated externally? If it's special is it a parasite?
| What distinguishes it from viral infections that
| introduce foreign RNA?
|
| So no. I don't think I'm uninformed. It's fairly clear
| cut at this point but apparently most of the world thinks
| we should declare it ambiguous because it goes against
| cultural indoctrination of a significant portion of the
| population.
|
| Exactly the sort of pandering that has led us to the edge
| (or potentially past) of no return on climate change.
| henearkr wrote:
| I concur that, for this kind of near-civilzation-collapse
| risks, dams are less desirable than wind/solar
| facilities.
|
| But I can't compare the risk posed by a dam and the risk
| posed by a nuclear fission plant.
|
| One is an instant and relatively local disaster, the
| other is a long term and wide-spread (before containment)
| pita.
|
| However, I suspect that dams are much harder to turn into
| a catastrophe than nuclear plants. While for a nuclear
| plant you just have to disable the cooling and move all
| the fuel rods all the way outside of the boron dampener
| and keep it this way for enough time to overheat, for a
| dam you would have to throw a really huge lot of
| explosives on it to physically destroy its concrete.
| There are several types of dams too, some of which are
| probably as strong as a natural hill.
|
| About spent fuel: there are probably many reasons (that I
| don't know) why the actively-cooled-pools are not all in
| the middle of deserts, but right now they are just next
| to the plants. Of course we could put them on the Moon
| too, I would consider it a definitive solution (for this
| part of the problem).
| BrainVirus wrote:
| _> However, I suspect that dams are much harder to turn
| into a catastrophe than nuclear plants._
|
| https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-deadliest-dam-
| failur...
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| "One is an instant and relatively local disaster, the
| other is a long term and wide-spread (before containment)
| pita."
|
| And then the flood crashes into a chemical plant or two
| and suddenly the problem is very long term and wide
| spread.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Some back-of-the-grubby-napkin maths.
|
| Nuclear is currently about 10% of global electricity production.
| We could go all-nuclear, therefore, by going 10x on nuclear
| reactors (less in fact because there are renewables too but nvm).
|
| There have been two major, critical nuclear energy incidents -
| Chernobyl and Fukushima. I'll count them both, though see caveat
| [1]. That's 2 incidents in 50 years. If we went all-nuclear and
| extrapolated, that'd be 20 incidents per 50 years, or 40 per
| century. UN estimates 4,000 deaths from Chernobyl (contentious
| but I'll stick with it). Wikipedia quotes Fukushima as 2,000
| deaths - well, 2,002 deaths caused by evacuations and 1 in the
| incident. Let's not mince around and make it 4,000 per pop.
|
| 40 incidents per century at 4,000 deaths per event, that's a
| total of 160,000 deaths per _century_. In return, we're basically
| carbon-neutral and don't need storage. How many people die if
| we're not carbon-neutral? Millions for a start. It seems like a
| no-brainer to me. Also subtract all the deaths from not-
| generating power using these now-replaced means, improvements to
| air quality from not burning stuff, and I think humanity is in a
| much, much happier place.
|
| I'm not saying nuclear is without downsides, I'm saying if you
| take all the downsides on the chin, nuclearise through the nose,
| you're better off than the alternative of burning stuff. Solar
| and wind are great but plenty of regions would require months
| worth of storage, which we're nowhere near to technologically.
|
| So, now some nuance:
|
| [1] Chernobyl, as I understand it, was basically man-made.
| Fukushima happened in one of the most extreme environments - east
| coast of Japan, one of the world's most seismically active
| regions. Also nuclear safety went ahead since then - these were
| both designs from 70s (!), we're 50 years away from the 70s.
|
| [2] There are proliferation risks (though I still question
| whether they are as bad as global warming), but most of carbon
| emissions are from rich countries anyway (and we kinda equate
| rich with non-terrorist).
|
| [3] Nuclear is expensive, but it is because it got much safer. We
| could, presumably, just take the old, less safe designs and build
| using those - and recreate all the above back-of-the-napkin
| maths. We could instead assume nuclear is indeed very expensive,
| but then we'd need to reduce the expected death toll numbers.
|
| [4] Many regions can perhaps, indeed, do without nuclear and rely
| on solar, wind and hydro - great, good for you. Can you really do
| it without gas peaker plants or other "top ups"? Well if you can
| even nicer, but plenty of places cannot. But that's all good,
| that means we need less nuclear to achieve the same zero-carbon
| goal.
| hedora wrote:
| Rooftop solar PV kills about 10x more people than nuclear per
| terawatt hour, at least according to this 2008 study:
|
| https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...
|
| There might have been big advances in rooftop safety since then
| (but I doubt it).
|
| (I think we need more solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, and whatever
| other carbon neutral renewable energy sources you can think
| of.)
| black_puppydog wrote:
| I'll preface this by stating that I'm German and I'm
| intuitively against using nuclear. But hear me out anyhow. :)
|
| At this point the climate crisis is bad enough that I won't
| even fight against nuclear as such. If you can build it safely
| I won't stand in your way. I'll be busy across the street,
| fighting against coal, oil & gas. Thing is, the time scale at
| which nuclear stations are constructed isn't at all the same as
| for renewables; starting the planning for new nuclear _now_ isn
| 't gonna put us on the right track to a livable future. Nuclear
| plants are huge; the big ones that would really be needed for a
| big shift like you describe would take a while to go online.
|
| Which is okay I think; if anything, we'll need much more
| electricity in total anyhow as we electrify more processes. But
| we'll need more low-carbon energy much before that, now more
| than ever. So I'll only agree with this if it's not an either
| or but doing both.
|
| Caveat: I don't trust big profit driven corporations, nor
| states, to run nuclear plants in an honestly safety-oriented
| way. I have yet to hear a proposal how the incentives could be
| set up to change that. If nuclear is relatively casualty-free
| so far, I feel that's mostly luck, and indeed there were a few
| close calls. Don't start arguing with me on this one please
| because it's not the core of my argument (here). :)
| otter-rock wrote:
| People often don't realize that intermittent renewables must
| be paired with backup generation or storage. But energy
| storage at the scale of a 100% renewable system is currently
| an unsolved problem. So you really only have two options:
|
| 1. Continue to back up with fossil fuels
|
| 2. Temporarily back up with nuclear
|
| Check my comment history for a debate on nuclear safety.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > Temporarily back up with nuclear
|
| I think the assumption that we can build nuclear baseload
| capacity faster than storage solutions is... just that. An
| assumption. Needs citation.
| otter-rock wrote:
| I'm saying there's no storage solution yet. Even
| combining all storage types, you'd still run out of
| materials (battery) or locations (hydro) before
| finishing.
|
| It's not speed vs speed. It's speed vs forecasted
| capacity.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Well, in principle, we know how to build nuclear. We're
| slow at it, it's expensive, but it's sort of off-the-
| shelf.
|
| Long term energy storage, by batter or otherwise..? I
| don't believe anyone has done it. We're not talking about
| maybe smoothing out energy supply/demand over 24h, were
| talking producing energy in the summer for the winter.
| mcv wrote:
| I think it's good to recognise gas and nuclear as being
| preferable to coal and oil, but green they are not. I consider
| them transitional energy sources; we will be stuck with them for
| a long time while we transition to greener energy, but coal and
| oil need to be stopped as soon as possible.
|
| After the Fukushima disaster, Germany closed its nuclear power
| plants and replaced them with coal plans; absolutely the worst
| possible reaction to that disaster. We do need a middle category
| to recognise that nuclear and gas are better than coal and oil,
| but I really don't want energy companies selling me nuclear and
| gas power as part of my green energy subscription.
| viscountchocula wrote:
| I get why gas isn't green, but why isn't nuclear?
| mcv wrote:
| Nuclear waste.
|
| Also, nuclear disasters tend to be quite dramatic, leading to
| birth defects and uninhabitable areas.
|
| Nuclear is only green when you only look at CO2. CO2 is the
| most pressing issue right now, which is why I support nuclear
| as a transitional energy source on our way to greener energy,
| but let's not fool ourselves and pretend it's as clean as
| wind.
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| It's cleaner. Wind turbines break down, and chemical waste
| never decays.
| [deleted]
| lakomen wrote:
| "If reality doesn't fit our narrative, we'll just put our labels
| on reality and act as if we're the ones who decides what reality
| is" - aka children putting their hands on their eyes pretending
| no one sees them now.
|
| Von der Leyen and consorts are so ugly and stupid. The whole EU
| as an institution has to be teared down and rebuilt. It starts
| with the Lisboa treaty. When you create a construct on top of old
| but better constructs you get the results like increase right
| wing following, corruption and whatnot. It used to be that bad
| politicians were moved to the EU to have them out of sight of the
| real governments. Now those failures make laws that change what
| those governments can and can not do.
|
| It's a trojan horse only sitting on top, the pinnacle of
| uselessness.
| jpgvm wrote:
| About time. Nuclear is hardly an environmental risk even compared
| to the "cleaner" fossil fuels like gas.
|
| Hopefully this will allow the EU to return to competitive
| reactors designs instead of leaving China to pull humanities
| weight on that front.
|
| Though tbh I wouldn't be sad if we bought Chinese reactors until
| we are back up to speed, having Chinese nuclear > no nuclear.
| Everyone bitching about China stealing IP finally have something
| to steal back.
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Strong disagree and just won't help besides fantasies. Lets not
| dig into the other mess again just because we never went and
| always deferred starting to do the right thing already 30 years
| back and now say: nuclear is the only way out.
|
| It isn't, it would be too late anyway, it will not scale to the
| world's power needs, it will cost too much.. and I just haven'
| touched the usual downsides of nuclear.
|
| Even some nuclear operators start seeing it this way now
| already..
| dv_dt wrote:
| It would be pretty ridiculous if the lesson of energy after
| the disruption of energy during the war in the Ukraine is to
| build more nuclear plants, creating more central points of
| high disruption in potential conflicts.
| ben_w wrote:
| Nuclear is uneconomically expensive and currently looks like
| it may always be so, but there are ways to fairly rapidly
| scale it up to world demand if we _really_ wanted to.
| belorn wrote:
| The economics change very fast if we disallow fossil fuel
| from being used in the energy grid. The current combination
| of using wind when the weather is optimal and natural
| gas/oil when demand exceed production is a very cost
| effective strategy, and it is this combination that has
| enabled energy prices at very low levels.
|
| A large reason why nuclear has recently gain a lot of
| popularity is that wind + natural gas has quickly became
| very expensive and political damaging. One can no longer
| just pay Russia for cheap gas and look the other way.
| jpgvm wrote:
| It appears to be expensive in the West for now. I'm waiting
| to see how China's rollout goes before declaring that it's
| straight up expensive.
|
| Even if you buy into crap like Chinese reactors being less
| safe or more poorly regulated they should still be a good
| benchmark for what is necessary to reach scale nuclear
| reactor production.
|
| Especially their small designs which are expected to be
| mass produced in factories and shipped to the site rather
| than built in-place as current Western designs have been
| been.
|
| Combined with their target reactor numbers should bring
| down the cost substantially due to economies of scale when
| producing 200+ of the same reactor.
|
| Only then will we have a decent picture of economics.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Chinese nuclear reactors built in China are completed
| faster than in other countries, and they probably [1]
| cost less. But it's not clear that Chinese nuclear
| reactors built in Western countries would be especially
| affordable. Consider this recently signed deal to build
| China's Hualong One reactor in Argentina:
|
| https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsargentina-
| optimistic-ab...
|
| It is supposed to take 8 years to build and cost $8
| billion for 1090 net megawatts (1170 gross megawatts)
| [2]. That's far better than Western AP1000 and EPR
| projects currently under construction, if it meets its
| targets. But it's far worse than the planned costs that
| Western AP1000 and EPR projects had at project start.
|
| Or consider the relative pace of Chinese nuclear and
| renewable additions in China. China connected a record
| 8374 megawatts of nuclear power to its grid in 2018 [3].
| (In 2021 it connected 2321 megawatts). At a 95% capacity
| factor, that's about 70 terawatt hours of electricity
| generated per year. In 2021, China added a record 54880
| megawatts of solar power [4]. At a conservative 15%
| capacity factor, that much solar capacity will generate
| about 72 terawatt hours of electricity per year. It also
| added over 47000 megawatts of wind capacity in 2021 [5]
| which can be expected to yield more than 82 terawatt
| hours annually at a conservative capacity factor of 20%.
|
| In terms of added electrical output, Chinese renewable
| projects are outpacing Chinese nuclear projects despite
| the much lower capacity factors for renewables. I suspect
| that's because they are much cheaper to build. There may
| come a saturation point where adding more renewables no
| longer does anything to displace fossil fuel consumption,
| because additional supply is all curtailed due to
| mismatched supply/demand timing, but curtailment can go
| pretty high (more than 50%) before nuclear yields more
| marginal decarbonization per dollar of investment.
|
| [1] It's difficult to determine the ground level truth of
| Chinese project economics. The government is more heavily
| involved in the economy, press freedom is limited, and
| language barriers make it hard for people who only read
| English to keep abreast of what appears in Chinese
| publications. I am acutely aware that the only reports I
| read coming out of China are things that somebody else
| wanted translated into English.
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
|
| [3] https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryD
| etails....
|
| [4] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-solar-
| power-c...
|
| [5]
| https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1738591/china-
| repor...
| pfdietz wrote:
| China is also installing enormous amounts of pumped hydro
| for storage.
| jpgvm wrote:
| China is building all forms of energy as quickly as
| possible. They are still building coal plants while all
| this is going on because they are that desperate for
| additional generation capacity.
| jpgvm wrote:
| The most interesting project is the Chinese HTR-PM[1]
| which is a small ~250MW design that is specifically
| engineered to be run in the Chinese interior where it
| will displace coal power plants.
|
| It lacks the more advanced passive safety of molten-salt
| designs but it's significantly more advanced than
| reactors being built anywhere else in the world and is a
| natural stepping stone to molten salt to replace the
| helium coolant at some stage.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM
| philipkglass wrote:
| I think that the HTR-PM is interesting too. I submitted a
| story about it 6 months ago, but it didn't get a lot of
| traction here:
|
| "China Is Home to First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29804547
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| It's true it's expensive.
|
| But 1. a large part of that is regulatory expenses not
| inherent to the technology, and 2. are we sure it is
| uneconomically expensive after taking into account the
| expenses spared by not completely fucking up our climate
| stability?
| ben_w wrote:
| 1. then it would be even less politically acceptable,
| which is already the biggest problem.
|
| 2. yes we are sure, because even current green tech -- PV
| and "enough" batteries -- is already cost-competitive
| with nuclear, and we have good reasons to expect both PV
| and storage to get cheaper.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I doubt it's a good strategy to put all our eggs in a
| photovoltaic basket.
|
| I love PV tech, I think it's incredibly useful for small
| and medium scale self sustainability. And yes, in many
| areas it makes sense to dedicate a bunch of space to PVs
| and energy storage.
|
| But PV is inherently intermittent and unless you
| massively overbuild capacity you'll always face a weather
| threat.
|
| Until we manage to harness nuclear fusion we'll need
| nuclear fission along with hydropower to be the backbone
| of our energy generation.
| pfdietz wrote:
| No, we don't need nuclear. Intermittency of renewables is
| a problem that has solutions, and the cost of those
| solutions is low enough to render new construction
| nuclear entirely uncompetitive in the US and Europe, and
| likely elsewhere. At worst, if the cost estimates of the
| solutions are grossly underestimated, this just means
| we're paying a bit more. At the same time, costs of
| nuclear power plants are consistently grossly
| underestimated, so one should honestly address the cost
| risk on both sides.
| ben_w wrote:
| > I doubt it's a good strategy to put all our eggs in a
| photovoltaic basket.
|
| This is why I still support nuclear despite the cost.
|
| Although...
|
| > But PV is inherently intermittent and unless you
| massively overbuild capacity you'll always face a weather
| threat.
|
| isn't strictly true. In a magical alternative reality
| where we can do mega-projects and can ignore geopolitics,
| antipodal power grids are technically fine, much cheaper
| than batteries, and don't need any backups.
|
| (I'm not sure how easy/hard it would be to make one
| _without_ such assumptions, only that it takes a minimum
| of about one years ' global aluminium production, so
| treat it as merely an interesting though experiment at
| this point).
| osuairt wrote:
| Yes, Agreed.
|
| There seems to be a tendency by pro-Nuclear people, to try
| and frame nuclear as the only alternative energy source. They
| will say things like, "nuclear is by far the safer option,
| especially considering coal or gas"..
|
| They keep trying to frame the use of nuclear next to fossil
| fuels, while pretending that solar, wind, hydro and
| geothermal haven't increasingly been adopted for 10 years
| now.
|
| It is a very selective way of framing nuclear.
| Juliate wrote:
| It's not the only alternative, it's an inevitable part of
| the mix, where it serves as the raw large power source
| (similar to hydraulic, only much larger).
|
| Until we have found ways to drastically cut down power
| usage AND to store huge quantities of energy OR found
| another similar and cleaner and safer energy source, we
| will need it in the mix to balance with other renewable
| sources.
| osuairt wrote:
| That just isn't the case.
|
| And I am sorry to say but the many countries have made
| great strides on running their countries on more and more
| renewable energy sources.
|
| In 2018, Scotland generated 98% their energy from wind
| alone.
|
| Denmark 72%, Germany 45%, Uruguay 97%, Norway 93%.
|
| It's a whole patchwork of solutions, depending on
| geography.
|
| Nuclear is not this magic bullet, and just means flipping
| a switch, it has a major cost, logistical, technological
| and risk overhead associated with it. If you are France,
| great, but they have been doing Nuclear since the
| beginning, it doesn't mean that the world has to do the
| same, when far simpler, cheaper and safer alternatives
| are in abundance.
| dsq wrote:
| Total energy consumption or just electricity? Because
| electricity is itself only a third of total energy use
| in, say, Germany. So a third of 45 percent is 15 percent.
| Good, but doesn't save the day. Also, is that steady
| throughout the year, or just in the windy months?
| Brometheus wrote:
| It's in the windy month while in the non-windy month
| solar takes the lead.
|
| Germany is doing Sektorenkopplung, so attempting to
| switch everything over to electricity.
|
| This is done because electricity is more efficient and we
| will use less total energy for the same effect. E.g. a
| heatpump can make available 3-5 times it's consumption of
| electricity as heat, where a gas stove can only reach 1.
| plopilop wrote:
| The massive issue I have with these sources is their
| reliability. Scotland can produce 98% from wind because
| they can sell the excess or buy when in deficit from
| their neighbours who modulate their coal/gas plants. If
| all its neighbours switch to similar methods, I don't see
| how we can have reliability on a wide scale.
|
| Usual fluctuations (eg. no photovoltaic by night, more
| wind in the afternoon) can be planned for, but local
| events such as big clouds or no wind are frequent but
| have a great impact on
| Brometheus wrote:
| These unusual fluctuations are in fact usual and they can
| be planned for. https://www.energymeteo.com/products/powe
| r_forecasts/wind-so...
| otter-rock wrote:
| The framing comes from this reasoning: not enough resources
| yet to build 100% renewable generation + storage => still
| need nuclear or fossils for now
|
| But many people think this way instead: we have the
| technology for all the parts => build all the good stuff
| right now
|
| Ironically, nuclear is selectively framed as just one thing
| with every safety issue ever, while fossils are further
| sub-divided into different environmental impacts.
| jpgvm wrote:
| It's not the only option and it -is- better than coal or
| gas.
|
| Solar, wind, hydro and geothermal are going to be important
| parts of the mix (perhaps even the dominant parts in many
| places of the world) but all have unsolved challenges that
| are much more difficult than nuclear. Storage ofcourse, the
| world is almost already maxed out on what hydro it can
| build, geothermal is only viable in very few places in the
| world. Solar is gated on Chinese polysilicate and cell
| production unless some other country wants to step up and
| make what is needed.
|
| Don't make good the enemy of perfect. Nuclear is a very
| good option to killing off fossil fuels in addition to the
| obvious renewables.
|
| It also provides key features that they don't, like being
| almost entirely independent of weather and geography, good
| in places like Japan that are hard to build other
| renewables after they max out on hydro. They have no space
| for solar, wind is hard to build with their terrain, off-
| shore wind is hard because they have too many tsunamis and
| adverse conditions etc.
|
| Renewables good, nuclear also pretty good, coal and oil
| bad.
|
| If nuclear is replacing coal and oil we should be happy, if
| we are building it -instead- of cheaper renewables despite
| having the correct sites, enough storage and enough supply
| then I would be against it but we aren't. The economics of
| renewables should put them at a consistent cost advantage
| to nuclear except the cases where they aren't viable -
| where nuclear should be able to slot in.
| plutonorm wrote:
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Gas is accepted if it's a replacement for much worse sources
| of energy such as coal or very old gas plants.
|
| This law basically classifies anything that's better as a
| green investment. Relatively, it is, of course.
|
| Activists want the EU to only brand renewables as green
| investments, but doing so would make replacing coal plants by
| much cleaner gas plants more expensive. Renewables have
| different characteristics than coal plants, which can operate
| at night in a storm during droughts, unlike many real green
| alternatives.
|
| I think we should aim towards a 100% green energy grid with
| the necessary battery banks to maintain power during
| difficult weather. However, it'll take us a while to get
| there.
| koheripbal wrote:
| It produces one quarter the CO2 compared to oil, so as long
| as we're burning oil, it makes sense to increase gas usage -
| especially since it requires almost no additional capital
| investment.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The problem here is that the term "green" means nothing and
| anything.
|
| It is always much better to define objectively what is the
| issue and what is the aim. It seems to me that the main issue
| is emissions and that the aim is therefore to reduce them as
| much as possible.
|
| In that context, nuclear is a perfectly valid option and
| probably unavoidable as things stand.
|
| Gas is 'bad' since it obviously does produce emissions but it's
| the least emitting among fossil fuels so realistically it could
| also be allowed as a last resort (with 'last resort' underlined
| 3 times in red).
| dd36 wrote:
| Is it less emitting once you account for leaky wells and
| infrastructure?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The term 'green' in the headline means everything and
| nothing, but...
|
| The things that are allowed by this law are fairly tightly
| specified, as even the article gives various details on:
|
| > new nuclear and gas-fired plants built through 2030 will be
| recognised as a transitional energy source as long as they
| are used to replace dirtier fossil fuels such as oil and
| coal.
|
| So, limited to the next 8 years, and only in places where
| they're not going to displace cleaner options.
|
| > gas projects should only be financed if direct emissions
| are kept under a maximum cap and they switch to fully
| renewable energy by 2035
|
| I've not read the legal text but this latter part likely
| refers to gas turbines that can run on methane or hydrogen or
| some mix of the two, which is a fairly standard part of
| forward planning.
|
| There's some political shenanigans involved, but overall it's
| a fairly sensible compromise and another small step in the
| right direction.
| Brometheus wrote:
| Thank you for your voice of reason in this bubbling sea of
| uninformed nonsense.
| pvaldes wrote:
| The problem is that now there is less money for developing a
| grid of green energies and we need it for yesterday. Because
| nuclear will take a chunk of the grants, as is much more
| expensive to build and much more time consuming.
|
| So green energies, delayed in the last decades for political
| reasons, will need to wait, again. And this delay could turn
| to be a very bad decision in a few years.
| jpgvm wrote:
| That is just fear mongering. We have no evidence of nuclear
| being built in-place of cheaper renewables. Until we do
| it's just FUD.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Well, there is at least one study[0] (using data from 123
| countries over 25 years) which found that investment in
| nuclear energy tends to reduce investment in renewables,
| while not reducing carbon emissions as much.
|
| More research is probably needed, but I wouldn't say we
| have "no evidence".
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00696-3
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Until we do it's just FUD.
|
| And when we will do, it is too late to change our mind
|
| Too late, to little and, with bad luck, a very expensive
| error.
|
| Money is a limited resource. The only reason to tag
| nuclear as green is to grant nuclear access to subsides
| for green energy.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Who says money is a limited resource? I'd think only key
| things it can pay for (skilled human labour) are what're
| limited - you can "print" as much money as you like. We
| need far more people skilled in and dedicating their time
| toward developing low carbon energy sources. Given the
| number of us doing all manner of BS jobs, that doesn't
| seem like a hard problem to solve (even if it will
| necessarily take a number of years).
| pvaldes wrote:
| If money is unlimited, then just give solar panels for
| free to everybody. Put it in every roof of the country
| and you will achieve your goals much faster
| croes wrote:
| Competitive reactor design sounds like corruption, botched
| construction and profit over security.
| Aachen wrote:
| Not sure it gets better when everyone gets paid regardless of
| performance, also things like corruption.
| croes wrote:
| Remember Boeings competitive 737 max?
|
| Competition is often about price.
| miniwark wrote:
| I do not agree.
|
| Actual 'nuclear' (Uranium fission based) is a proved
| environmental risk:
|
| - Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi (INES level 7) are not some sort
| of small environmental incidents
|
| - Kyshtym, First Chalk River, Sellafield (1957), Three Mile
| Island, Goiania (INES level 6 & 5), and maybe the Tomsk-7
| explosion (not rated) where comparably smaller but the
| environmental impact was not small
|
| - we still do not know what to do with nuclear waste in the
| long term... But we do know than this waste is not a 'green'
| crap
|
| - fortunately nuclear waste is not drooped anymore in the
| ocean... but only since 1993! The quantity rooting under the
| sea is estimated around 200,000 tons (this also include waste
| from medical usage). Everybody look elsewhere and cross finger
| on this.
|
| - (we could also add 8 or 9 nuclear submarines rooting under
| the sea, and an unknown number of lost wea pons, but i agree
| than this not from civil reactors)
|
| - it is no secret than environmental researchers who study
| marines currents, already use "small leaks" from know origin
| since a long time. The quantity may not have environmental
| impact, but the leaks are big enough to be used in scientific
| studies. See for example https://hal-normandie-univ.archives-
| ouvertes.fr/hal-02433310... (and many more for the English
| channel)
|
| That said, Nuclear power could be environmental friendly.
| Thorium based reactor are promising. They are certainly not
| 'green' but, far less problematic. Also Fusion reactors could
| be the perfect 'green energy' if solved.
|
| But, Uranium fission based reactors, are useful: you could use
| them to start your nuclear bombs collection... And this is one
| of the historical reason why the Green parties and Greenpeace
| are against them. With reasons, because actual nuclear plants,
| do come from military origins (most are based from submarines
| reactors), and in nuclear power countries the separations
| between 'nuclear civil' and 'nuclear military' was never a real
| thing. The other big reason is the historical 'democratic' way
| all this nuclear plants where build: simply rain local
| authorities with money, and put anti-nuclear militants in
| prisons.
|
| Personally, my main problem with the uranium reactors is than
| it's a dead-end technology. It's true than it do not product
| greenhouse-effect gas and create a lot of energy, but it's like
| taking a very big loan instead on working on more secure and
| less risky nuclear energy. Or investing in more renewable
| energy, or in less energy consumption, or in non-battery
| powered electric cars...
|
| Saying than it's 'green' is just green-washing from the actual
| nuclear lobby.
| theptip wrote:
| Fukushima is a good case study. Everybody freaked out about
| it, but if you actually look at the data objectively, I can't
| see how it's anything other than a resounding success for
| nuclear.
|
| In a once-in-a-generation worst-case scenario (an earthquake
| beyond the safety parameters to which the plant was
| designed), you have something on the order of a hundred
| deaths caused by the reactor leak (this estimate attempting
| to include lifetime deaths from cancer and so on). Compare
| this to the death toll of the disaster itself -- something
| like ten thousand people died from the tsunami. And the
| conclusion we draw is that nuclear is unsafe? Certainly, the
| damage and disruption caused by the exclusion zone were
| substantial. But you'll notice that despite the tsunami,
| people want to move right back into the tsunami zone even
| though they know there is a once-in-a-generation risk of a
| 10k death disaster. Contrasting that tsunami risk with
| nuclear, "this is worse than climate change and we need to
| turn off existing reactors" is the opposite conclusion than
| we should have come to. The correct conclusion IMO is "even
| extremely rare disasters now result in relatively small
| damage and death toll". In other words, Fukushima should
| update you towards thinking that modern nuclear is quite
| safe, not away from that.
|
| One PR problem that nuclear has is that we have extremely
| sensitive detectors for radiation, so it was possible to
| detect an increase in radiation in Pacific fish following the
| Fukushima disaster. The lay public doesn't understand that
| this is increase was something like one banana's worth of
| radiation per fish, completely harmless. We simply have
| extremely sensitive detectors, and most people aren't able to
| understand the concept of orders of magnitude that small.
|
| While I definitely don't advocate for dumping nuclear waste
| in the ocean as a general approach, it's worth noting that
| deep underwater is not the worst place for a small amount of
| nuclear waste to end up. There is a lot of water in which to
| dissolve the radioactive particles, and so it's unlikely to
| actually cause harm. For example the one-off plan to
| discharge Fukushima cleanup waste water in the ocean was
| controversial but probably makes sense.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > it's worth noting that deep underwater is not the worst
| place for a small amount of nuclear waste to end up.
|
| Is worth noting also that sometimes the deep underwater
| currents raise to surface in some points when crashing
| against continents, so is not so simple.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > Goiania
|
| That (and many others similar incidents, e.g. Ciudad Juarez)
| is an incident related to medical nuclear technology, caused
| by radiation source for radiation therapy. Irrelevant to
| nuclear energy discussion.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| The headline from HN: "Nuclear turn green" (why the typo?)
|
| The actual headline: "Gas and Nuclear Turn Green as EU
| Parliament Approves New Taxonomy" (HN left out gas)
|
| So gas is actually being considered "green" now, so calling it
| a "cleaner" fuel as you do is actually what they're doing.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Not really. Under the rules, it's possible for a gas turbine
| investment to fall under the clean energy rules, but there is
| a lot of small print.
|
| Mostly, the gas turbine must be able to run on a clean fuel,
| and there must be actual plans for a switchover.
|
| When I first read that gas turbines can fit under clean
| energy rules now, I was kind of angry, but I calmed down
| after I read the full rules.
| nix23 wrote:
| Funny that the real title is:
|
| >>Gas and Nuclear Turn Green as EU Parliament Approves New
| Taxonomy
|
| >>On the contrary, natural gas does emit greenhouse gas
| emissions, however, supporters claim it is less polluting than
| traditional fossil fuels and can thus be part of the energy
| transition.
|
| So less pollution then heavy oil is now "green" in
| Europe....bravo, thank you Germany.
| nicohvi wrote:
| Natural gas emits radically less CO2 than coal, which is why
| this is entirely necessary during the transition (Germany is
| now bruning coal to compensate for the Russian war).
|
| Gas emits so little CO2 compared to coal that it actually
| accounted for ONE THIRD of the drop in U.S. emissions from
| 2005 - 2016: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-us-
| carbon-emissions....
| herbst wrote:
| Germany was burning coal the whole time. There are
| interesting docs on YouTube how they literally buy up small
| towns to turn them into coal mine areas in 2020 and
| ongoing.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| https://www.science.org/content/article/natural-gas-could-
| wa...
|
| That's a myth based on old data, no one who understands the
| models makes such simplified black and white claims.
| Methane (which is natural gas) is a much worse greenhouse
| gas than CO2. As in up to 100x the warming potential in the
| first couple of years until it's naturally converted. When
| burned, it's turned into CO2 but the problem is there is
| leakage all over the place because methane is volatile.
| During production, during transportation, during storage -
| it gets leaked into the atmosphere all over the place. See
| this more recent article:
|
| https://www.iea.org/news/methane-emissions-from-the-
| energy-s...
|
| As others have pointed out the title has been blatantly
| edited to omit the gas part. This is propaganda, declaring
| fossil fuel to be renewable energy doesn't make it so.
| Words still have meaning and the laws of physics still
| exist. It's really sad to see this sort of political
| science denial finds its way into HN now.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I think the propagandistic title is just an expression of
| the Parliament's meaning; they've declared that nuclear
| and gas are to be treated as "green" for the purposes of
| various exemptions. You can legislate that Pi is equal to
| three, but that doesn't make it so.
|
| As parent notes, every molecule of methane burned turns
| into a molecule of CO2.
|
| Incidentally: I don't see how burning coal produces more
| CO2 than burning methane. Burning coal is worse than
| burning methane because burning coal produces lots of
| particulates, as well as nitric and sulphuric acids. Same
| for burning oil.
|
| Has anyone ever done testing on automobile exhaust
| similar to the testing that has been done on cigarette
| smoke? Of course not - nobody pretends that autombile
| exhaust is safe to inhale. Everyone knows it's much more
| carconogenic than ciggie smoke.
|
| So I'm not defending coal and oil; they're worse than
| methane. Just not because they produce more CO2.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| It's because of how it burns. It is true that you get
| more energy out producing the same amount of CO2 with gas
| compared to burning coal. This might sound
| counterintuitive but it has been studied and isn't
| controversial. Although I doubt that "one third" claim
| the other person made, but in principle that part of
| their argument is correct.
|
| The issue is, all extracted methane isn't burned, and
| that's where the trouble starts. Over the past years,
| we've seen estimates for how much of it is lost into the
| atmosphere grow and grow. Some recent studies already
| claim more than 3%:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/methane-leaks-
| era...
|
| There has recently even been speculation that gas from
| certain sources where monitoring and environmental
| regulations aren't very strong could actually be worse
| than black coal. The truth is we don't really know this
| for sure yet.
|
| You're right about the pollution, this and some other
| considerations are important as well. In certain
| countries air pollution is a serious issue. Germany
| doesn't really have this problem and the German plants
| have good filters. Germany has it's own coal, gas has to
| be imported. They're experiencing the effects of a
| dependency on foreign gas as we speak. So in the end,
| they might have actually better kept their coal power. I
| doubt it's going to happen though, coal is dead for
| purely political reasons. It's simply extremely
| unpopular.
| kmlx wrote:
| > The extraction and consumption of natural gas is a major
| and growing contributor to climate change. Both the gas
| itself (specifically methane) and carbon dioxide, which is
| released when natural gas is burned, are greenhouse gases.
| When burned for heat or electricity, natural gas emits
| fewer toxic air pollutants, less carbon dioxide, and almost
| no particulate matter compared to other fossil and biomass
| fuels. However, gas venting and flaring, along with
| unintended fugitive emissions throughout the supply chain,
| can result in natural gas having a similar carbon footprint
| to other fossil fuels overall.
|
| from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas
| pfortuny wrote:
| Yep, but that does not turn grey into green.
|
| This is just politics redacting facts... because they want
| the votes.
|
| These "neo-green policits" could perfectly say "we are
| green but we acknowledge but we need grey energy for a
| while". They chose redefining language, as always.
|
| (Cf. Victor Klemperer, "The language of the third reich"
| and also, as always, Orwell... "good is bad, bad is good"
| and "the past can be changed").
| mcv wrote:
| Instead of dividing them into grey and green, we should
| rank them in red, yellow and green.
|
| Red energy sources are the ones we immediately need to
| stop using: coal and oil.
|
| Yellow energy sources are the ones we should stop using
| only if we can safely do so, but if we can't (and we
| can't, right now) we should continue using them: gas and
| nuclear.
|
| Green energy sources are where we really need to go.
| contravariant wrote:
| I don't object to using gas over coal, I object to calling
| it green.
|
| We're in trouble when 100% green energy is not enough.
| [deleted]
| adolph wrote:
| > Gas emits so little CO2 compared to coal
|
| At a molecular level this doesn't make sense to me. The
| fundamental carbon cycle value proposition is to harvest
| energy released when a carbon atom (re)joins two oxygens.
| For the same energy, how would methane and coal produce
| different amounts of CO2?
|
| That said, I can see how the oxygen reaction would be less
| efficient and create more byproducts (i.e. acid rain) using
| coal given its less refined nature. How methane would have
| a better energy to CO2 ratio doesn't seem to have an
| obvious mechanism.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
|
| Imagination, Physics, Fire & Trees - Richard Feynman (aka
| Trees grow from air, carbon cycle):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLMysTpwhg
| bloak wrote:
| Coal: C + O2 -> CO2
|
| Gas: CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O
|
| I don't know off hand exactly how many joules of energy
| (heat) are produced per mole in each case but it's not
| surprising that gas gives more joules per mole of CO2:
| it's a bit like you're burning hydrogen at the same time.
|
| EDIT: It's relevant that O-H bonds are stronger than C-H
| bonds, presumably.
| 988747 wrote:
| You also need to consider that H2O itself is also a
| greenhouse gas, much worse than CO2, although much easier
| to remove from atmosphere.
| adolph wrote:
| Thanks, that makes some sense. I wonder how that
| additional bond works in the hydrolox to methalox
| comparison of rocket fuels.
| why-el wrote:
| How do people square climate change and violent currents across
| EU rivers with Nuclear installations so close to such rivers (for
| instance the Blayais power plant)? I am genuinely curious. Is the
| idea that we will build stations that can withstand such forces?
| It's not just warming rivers, but also notoriously unpredictable
| conditions and our inability to make up an accurate model of what
| might happen. If someone has a study that takes this angle I am
| happy to read it.
| rasz wrote:
| "Gas and Nuclear Turn Green as EU Parliament Approves New
| Taxonomy"
|
| Why TF dont they unbundle obvious German written putin gas part
| from the Nuclear option and vote separately on those two??
|
| Edit: this is such an obvious German EU blackmail - let us fund
| putin or you dont get clean Nuclear power plants.
| JanSt wrote:
| Germany planned to use gas to bridge times with little wind and
| solar power to be able to turn off nuclear energy. Not smart
| but true. The new plan is to build even more renewables. and
| massive storage capacity, a very optimistic undertaking.
| legulere wrote:
| Less optimistic than expanding nuclear power when even France
| does not even manage to replace old failing reactors.
| Brometheus wrote:
| The plan is to use the plenty of excess renewable production
| to generate hydrogen and then burn that in the gas plants.
| Therefore, all gas plants qualifying as "green" have to be
| able to burn hydrogen.
| JanSt wrote:
| Hydrogen is a form of storage. Much energy will be lost in
| between.
| Brometheus wrote:
| It doesn't matter when the energy is basically thrown
| away right now and therefore free. It's called
| Einspeisemanagement (EisMan or EinsMan).
|
| At the moment: Windy & sunny day? Just throw the energy
| away! Future: Windy & sunny day? Store the energy for a
| rainy day!
| JanSt wrote:
| Yeah it's not that easy is it? Enthusiasm and optimism is
| good but Germany is currently like a train speeding to a
| wall and people shout: ,,go faster! We will build breaks
| easily!" Russia just took off another big break. And
| still people don't change. This is an emergency situation
| and people just keep going on the same path. Would be
| funny if it wouldn't be so terrible.
| rasz wrote:
| How about specifying its about hydrogen and hydrogen _only_
| in the EU resolution then? Is it because its really about
| whats being pumped over Nord Stream? Lets face it, this
| resolution has Schroder/Scholz fingerprints all over it.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Germany was the main push behind "burning wood = renewable
| energy"
| rasz wrote:
| You have to admit its a clever scheme. Start co-firing small
| % of wood pellets in a coal plant and you magically get a
| renewable energy plant!
| konschubert wrote:
| Well, is it not?
| rasz wrote:
| Not if you cut ancient forests to heat your house to 24C in
| the winter
| https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/illegal-
| logging-...
| balfirevic wrote:
| It is if I only use it to heat the house to 20C?
| merb wrote:
| btw. the gas push was not only by germany, in fact if you have
| nuclear you have the same remaining problem as renwables.
| germany btw. was one of the countries which wanted to block the
| nuclear part. In fact there were some countries (and still are)
| who wants to block the whole law (both of it). in fact the gas
| turbines that are getting funded do need to support hydrogen.
| (btw. the whole law is mostly about funding)
| worik wrote:
| OMG. The first sentence: "designate natural gas and nuclear as
| environmentally sustainable energy sources"
|
| I argue that nuclear is making our descendants pay for our
| current consumption because of the waste. It can be argued that
| there are storage mechanisms that are safe tor two hundred
| millennium (I do not accept those arguments, but it is an
| argument).
|
| But natural gas: It is not sustainable (it is a fossil fuel, it
| will run out). Burning it produces CO2 which is burning the
| world, and producing it releases huge amounts of methane that
| cannot even be counted and that is worse than CO2 at burning the
| world.
|
| Such greed, such hubris, such willingness to ruin the world that
| we borrow from our children to satisfy our greed.
|
| Evil.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Morality is the privilege of the rich.
|
| In times of war, morality is often the first casualty.
| fulafel wrote:
| Egregriously editorialized title (real one: "Gas and Nuclear Turn
| Green as EU Parliament Approves New Taxonomy"), the big thing is
| the greenwashing of gas here.
|
| But you can always clickbait HN by focusing on nuclear, well
| played for internet points I guess.
| henearkr wrote:
| Please restore the full title.
|
| It is truncated, as noticed by an other comment.
| brnt wrote:
| The press release direct from the EU:
| https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-07 23:00 UTC)