With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Back then, it was scared of what you don’t understand. Nuclear was bombs and radiation, bad stuff right. Then it was Chernobyl. And having talked with some of them online, they are scared that it’s not 10,000% safe.
Nuclear is probably the safest form of power when proper protocols are put in place but it’s hard to do that when the largest country in Europe (Russia, both by size and population) is currently in a war
Russian war has little to do with it. For example Germany had already decided to scrap nuclear for gas, which actually bit them in the ass when the war started.
The reason why Russia is mentioned might be that Russia (and one of their close allies Kazakhstan) are the source of a good chunk of the Uranium that’s used in Europe’s nuclear power plants.
Sweden has large stores of uranium but the green party has opposed any new mines (uranium or not) on environmental grounds. Ignoring the fact that we then have to import resources from other countries that don’t have regulations which could minimize pollution
I can’t look at their sources, so I’m going to believe them, buuut that is death per energy units. And I can’t argue that nuclear isn’t more efficient and generally safe. Presumably though, those injuries from wind are from construction primarily? Nuclear power plants have been out of fashion since the 80s for some reason, so there aren’t really equal opportunities for construction incidents to compare that while wind construction has been on the rise. And I can only assume that after construction, the chance incidents only go down for wind while they can really only go up for nuclear.
None of that is to say that nuclear is bad and we shouldn’t use it. Statistics like this just always bug me. Globally we receive more energy from wind than nuclear. It stands to reason that there’s more opportunity for deaths. It’s a 1 dimensional stat that can easily be manipulated. it’s per thousand terawatt per hour, including deaths from pollution. So I got curious and did some Googling.
After sorting through a bunch of sites without quite the information I was looking for, I found some interesting facts. I was wrong in my assertion that wind deaths don’t go up after being built. Turns out, most of those deaths come from maintenance. It does seem to vary by country, and I can’t find it broken down by country like I wanted. It’s possible that safety protections for workers could shift it. But surprisingly, maintenance deaths from nuclear power are virtually non existent from what I can tell. It seems like the main thing putting nuclear on that list at all is including major incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Well, Fukushima has really only been attributed for 4 deaths total. And Chernobyl was obviously preventable. So it looks like you’re right! Statistically, when including context, is definitely the least deadly energy source (if we ignore solar).
It’s enough for hundredthousand of years, if only one time happens a SuperGAU. Only once is enough.
And the nuclear waste is dangerous as fuck for also hundredthousand of years.
And you can produce 30, 40 or maybe 50 years electric energy, and it needs the same time to decontaminate and dismantle a nuclear powerplant. And before it takes 20, 30 or mor years, to build such a plant… This is not cheap, not safe and not sustainable.
Nuclear waste is not dangerous when handled correctly. I’d recommend checking out Kyle Hill on YouTube about this, but when mixed with cement/sand in large amounts it becomes safe much more quickly than that. A lot of the dangers of nuclear power are actually misconceptions
I don’t trust the US Federal government to properly dispose of it. The waste from the Manhattan Project is buried in a landfill, a landfill that’s on fire.
The problem isn’t fire, it’s that the waste at Hanford has leached into the soil and a plume of it is headed towards the Hanford Reach on the Columbia River. There’s a mitigation plan in place and it looks like it’s ultimately going to work, but it’s very expensive and not something that anyone wants to see happen again.
Fair play. That said, please do look up Hanford. It’s way bigger than Westlake and is potentially a much bigger problem, though granted, Westlake is problematic as well.
Real talk, why can’t we just launch that shit into the sun? Obviously, I understand the risk of a rocket filled with spent fuel rods exploding is low Earth orbit and the weight to cost ratio, but are there other reasons?
It’s insanely more expensive than any of the other options, even the long-term storage deep down underground with further burial and complete abandonment of the location in a way that would make the location as unremarkable as possible, preventing future generations developing interest to potential markings.
Tom Scott has a great, rather concise video about that. It’s not really just ground, but rock, making it even more secure and unaffected, especially given that the waste is first sealen into special containers.
Basically to put something in the sun you’ve got to bring it to a near-standstill relative to the sun. You have to slow it down from the speed Earth is orbiting at (2 * Pi AU/year) to almost zero. It takes a ton of rocket fuel to do that.
That plus the danger you mentioned makes burying it the cheaper and safer option.
Somehow people think it’s worse if you keep it contained rather than massively diluted. If we thought of it like we do radiation in coal waste, we’d be happy to just dump it in the ocean.
Living in Finland, I’m proud of the fact that we’ve got one of the first long-term/final storage sites for nuclear waste in the world. YIMBY.
I want to add, it also take a while to get it going and the upfront costs are several billions of dollars. There also needs to be some kind of training or something to get the right personnel.
And it’s a long project that will span multiple administrations, leading to low certainty of project completion. As long as it’s a political wedge issue the support can’t be relied upon throughout the project.
Right it would be something involving number of people harmed, for number of joules or watt-hours of energy produced. How much injury, death, etc is there on a per-unit basis. That would be how you’d get a probability of harm. Then you could compare it numerically with other forms of energy to see which is the safest, statistically speaking.
3 Mile Island occurred while “The China Syndrome” was in theaters.
That’s mostly it. A hit-job sensationalist film came out right before a minor incident that resulted in ZERO injuries, damage to the environment, or loss of containment, but was major news largely because of the film.
I agree that it shouldn’t be a matter of being for or against nuclear.
The best mix of renewable energy supply of any country is going to be very context dependent. Geothermal, hydro, solar, wind all perform best when they’re used in the right location. Nuclear energy is much more expensive per Megawatthour than renewable energy sources, but it’s highly predictable.
In addition to the high cost, the construction time of a nuclear power plant tends to be somewhere between 10-20 years. Therefore, it makes sense to find solutions first in grid balancing solutions like mega batteries (for balancing, not long term storage), smart EV chargers, and matching demand better with supply through variable pricing. These are all relatively affordable solutions that would reduce the need for a predictable energy supply like nuclear.
But, if the measures above are not enough or if there are concerns about the feasibility of such measures in a particular context, then analyses might point towards nuclear as a solution as the most cost effective solution.
It’s pointless to make nuclear power a polical issue while we’re rapidly approaching an irreversible climate crisis. We don’t have the luxury to act based on preferences. Policymakers shouldn’t view nuclear power as a taboo, but also shouldn’t opt to construct one simply to attract voters.
Fukushima and Chernobyl kinda stick out. Nuclear is safe until something goes catastrophically wrong. When that happens it’s 100s and 1000s of years before you can move back in and have a stable genome.
Nuclear power is a bit like aviation. Statistically, traveling by airliner is the safest way to travel; it’s been over a decade since the last fatal crash of an American-registered airliner. But when a plane does crash, SHEEW BUDDY does it make the evening news.
Nuclear power has that same effect. Statistically, nuclear power has a fucking amazing safety record. Very, very few people are hurt or killed in the nuclear power industry, especially compared to the fossil fuel industry, and the second hand smoke factor is non-existent as long as the plant is operating correctly. But as soon as it does go wrong, SHEEW BUDDY does it make the evening news. And it has gone wrong, multiple times, in spectacular fashion.
A major concern I have about building new nuclear power plants is my government is trying as hard as it can to steer into the hard right anti-science anti-regulation of industry space, and successful, safe operation of nuclear power plants requires strong understanding of science and heavy government oversight. The fact that we have no plan whatsoever for the nuclear waste we’re already generating, and that no serious solution is on the horizon indicates to me that we are already not in a place where we should be doing this.
There’s also the concern that nuclear power programs are often related to manufacturing fuel for nuclear weapons. That that’s what the megalomaniacal assholes that are somehow “in charge” actually want nuclear power plants for, and megawatts of electricity to run civilization with is a cute bonus I guess.
the Russia-Ukraine war has destroyed natural gas supply lines to Europe.
Didn’t the US bomb them, tried to blame Russia at first, and are now trying to blame Ukraine? With friends like that, who needs enemies?
The big problem with nuclear is scalability and infrastructure. The power plants take long to construct and require huge investment. Even if that’s solved and the whole world goes nuclear tomorrow, there’s huge doubts about there even being enough easily minable Uranium. Honestly solar and wind should be the way to go, but then there’s the intermittency issue. Which is an issue fossil fuels don’t have. At this point degrowth is desperately needed to avert the worst effects of global warming.
Look up the stuff Alex Hirsch has been putting out over the last decade.
It’s Gravity Falls, and a background role producing The Owl House. Great shows! The LGBT representation in the latter goes hard, and I love everybody involved pushing back hard on Disney to make it happen.
Anyways, I actually meant Seymour Hersh. I just typed it wrong at first, but I felt compelled to gush about some incredible kids shows with great messages.
In my country, because of a decades long fearmongering and disinfomation campaing that destoyed the nuclear energy industry. So now we’re stucked with coal to keep the power running at night and during winter.
Let’s be honest though, rivers running low in summer so plants had to shut down, core material being bought from Russia and overwhelming costs for dismantling old plants together with no solution at all for final storage also did their part in it.
But we could have worked on these issues for years by now. Abandoning the entire industry also lead to slowdown in research and inovation in the field. Of course now we’re hopelessly behind.
Oor the ressources could be better spent in renewables, which are available as long as the sun exists, while nuclear will run out of fuel within the 22cnd century.
Also with nuclear Europe is entirely dependent on imports, primarily from Russia and russia-aligned countries. Being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin.
Oor we can do both so that in the middle of winter when there’s only 6 hrs of sun (less when cloudy) we can still have electricity without ridiculously sized batteries.
Also uranium is so energy dense it can be mined and refined in Canada or Australia and shipped so, so very easily.
I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed. Also i used to be a proponent for nuclear power when i was younger. But unlike the nuclear shills i am willing to accept when a technology is inferior and risky.
I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed
Funny, so do I.
Anyway, believe that “being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin” or what ever absurd things you come up with.
I was here to give my response to OPs question. Discussing energy politics with the average German is as pointless as discussing biology with an anti-vaxxer and I have no interest in it.
Which is why you immediate derail the conversation by making ad himinen attacks, instead of interacting with the arguments… No suprise you cannot discuss things, because you don’t want a discussion in the first place.
It’s been discussed to death, check the most recent thread about Scholz’s comment on !worldnews if you want to read through all of the discussion AGAIN.
But you are right. I’m not willing to have a discussion about it with you. Just like I wouldn’t want to have a discussion about astronomy with a flat earther.
Your “nuclear = support russia” comment made it very clear where you stand on the issue and on what basis. So discussion is entirly pointless.
But it wasn’t really meant as a personal attack against you, if that comforts you. It’s a systematic problem, just like my other comparisons.
Germany was importing most of its uranium from Kazachstan through Russia. Even during the war and sanctions on other energy ressources taking effect, uranium was shipped, so the plants could keep running. Making our energy dependent on Russia, or trying to keep up the dependency, be it gas or uranium is heavily peddled by pro Putin shills. Funnily those are also often anti vaxxers and other consipracy theorists thanks to russian disinformation. So yes, peddling for more nuclear power remains peddling for Putin.
Sure, the Canadians just clap twice and the mines put out triple the Uranium they did before. It doesnt take years to expand mines or anything. Also the other sources in Niger or Mali are not at risk of needing replacement, since the region is super stable… Oh wait shit, that supply is also at risk since there was a coup in Niger just 6 weeks ago.
i am pro renewables. It is the pro nuclear faction that tends to be pro coal too, just that they pretend they aren’t. But it is the same businesses, the same industries and the same lobbying against renewables that unit pro coal and pro nuclear.
If you are anti-nuclear you are pro-fossil fuels. 100% renewables is a pipedream that is pushed by the energy companies amongst sports ads with scenic pictures of windmills in the background, while you ignore the other 44% of energy generation.
It is perfectly possible and necessary to go 100% renewables, interlocking sectors with systems such as hydrogen generation and physical and chemical power storages. But what do i know. I only studied energy systems.
Meanwhile nuclear power is a threat to energy security, as less stable water supplies in the rivers the plants cool from forces them to lower energy output or even shut down fully, because there isn’t enough water to cool them anymore.
That is indeed very wrong. With extracing Uranium from sea water and recycing fuel in breeder reacots, this goes up to like 90.000 years. And that’s just Uranium, other fuels can be explored.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Theoretically, if everyone was using state-of-the-art designs of fast-breeder reactors, we could have up to 300,000 years of fuel. However, those designs are complicated and extremely expensive to build and operate. The finances just don’t make it viable with current technology; they would have to run at a huge financial loss.
As for Uranium for sea-water – this too is possible, but has rapidly diminishing returns that make it financially unviable quite rapidly. As Uranium is extracted and removed from the oceans, exponentially more sea-water must be processed to continue extracting Uranium at the same rate. This gets infeasible pretty quickly. Estimates are that it would become economically unviable within 30 years.
Realistically, with current technology we have about 80-100 years of viable nuclear fuel at current consumption rates. If everyone was using nuclear right now, we would fully deplete all viable uranium reserves in about 5 years. A huge amount of research and development will be required to extend this further, and to make new more efficient reactor designs economically viable. (Or ditch capitalism and do it anyway – good luck with that!)
Personally, I would rather this investment (or at least a large chunk of it) be spent on renewables, energy storage and distribution, before fusion, with fission nuclear as a stop-gap until other cleaner, safer technologies can take over. (Current energy usage would require running about 15000 reactors globally, and with historical accident rates, that’s about one major nuclear disaster every month). Renewables are simpler, safer, and proven ,and the technology is more-or-less already here. Solving the storage and distribution problem is simpler than building safe and economical fast-breeder reactors, or viable fusion power. We have almost all the technology we need to make this work right now, we mostly just lack infrastructure and the will to do it.
I’m not anti-nuclear, nor am I saying there’s no place for nuclear, and I think there should be more funding for nuclear research, but the boring obvious solution is to invest heavily in renewables, with nuclear as a backup and/or future option. Maybe one day nuclear will progress to the point where it makes more sound sense to go all in on, say fusion, or super-efficient fast-breeders, etc. but at the moment, it’s basically science fiction. I don’t think it’s a sound strategy to bank on nuclear right now, although we should definitely continue to develop it. Maybe if we had continued investing in it at the same rate for the last 50 years it might be more viable – but we didn’t.
Source for estimates: “Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?”, Prof. D. Abbott, Proceedings of the IEEE. It’s an older article, but nuclear technology has been pretty much stagnant since it was published.
If you are making a cost argument against nuclear energy, then you are supporting coal. If you are positioning renewables against nuclear, then you are supporting coal. Stop supporting coal and other fossil fuels. People like you have been hampering clean energy for 50+ years and are responsible for the fact that the world is burning more coal then ever before. Stop being a shill for coal.
No, I’m not. Saying Solution B is economically more feasible than Solution C is not an argument in favour of Solution A, even if A is cheaper than B or C. Because cost argument is not the only factor.
Had you actually read my comment, you’d see I’m pro-nuclear, and even more pro-renewables.
Why don’t you check your own biases and preconceptions for a second and read what I actually wrote instead of what you think I wrote. I could just as easily call you an anti-renewable shill for nuclear pollution, using precisely the same argument you used. It’s not valid.
Hint: if you ever find yourself arguing with “people like you…” – you’ve lost the argument. Try dropping the right-wing knee-jerk rhetoric and start thinking.
I don’t think I buy it. Like, there is a lot of uranium around the world, but most of it is prohibitively expensive to mine, the mining itself is extremely destructive, Australia has the largest uranium reserves but most of the rest is in the hands of authoritarian fuckwits like China and Russia, society’s collapsing into wars and suffering climate catastrophes around the world so the safety of nuclear plants is increasingly in doubt, it takes decades to build them…
Honestly, if we’re gonna spend decades on clean energy megaprojects, wouldn’t it be better to go with something like a space solar power station which is a lot safer and the rectennas on the surface a lot easier to fix and replace?
Out in space, it’ll unironically be exponentially cheaper both financially and in terms of he environmental damage caused by surface mining as the decade goes on. We actually could get a lot of material to make mirrors to bounce sunlight around from lunar regolith, and where you have mirrors and a liquid to heat up, like water, you have a solar thermal generator, and up in space, that kind of a generator can provide endless amounts of power.
I feel it’d be a better investment than nuclear and all of its political problems.
Sure. Just use molten salt energy storage, hydroelectric dams or whichever of the dozens of technologies makes most sense where you are.
Combine different kinds of renewables so you get power at night and when the wind isn’t blowing. Build more then enough and if you got excess energy, maybe make some hydrogen.
Have your devices and industry ‘smart’ so it draws less power when there’s less supply.
You really don’t need to do everything with ‘normal’ batteries like in a smartphone.
The ‘working’ thorium reactors are for research. They don’t generate energy. At least if we’re speaking about generating energy for a whole country. The planned thorium reactors of the next many years also don’t generate any significant amount of energy. With that argumentation we also (almost) have nuclear fusion power plants.
A thorium power plant that contributes to the power grid and shows up in the numbers is sci-fi. I mean, it’s not impossible. It’s just lots of very expensive work left to do.
The paper doesn’t account account for availability. Nuclear has over 90% availability, which means for 1MW of power installed, you get on average over 0.9MW of power to use. Renewable are far below that, between 40 and 60% iirc. Which means you need to double the cost for a defined output. And that doesn’t consider batteries.
Unless the document talks about that, please point me to the right chapter then.
Damn. I shouldn’t have linked auch a long PDF. What are you talking about? I’m referring to the diagram (and text) on page 293. The annual Levelized Cost Of Energy.
It’s not only calculated on sunny days. They take the annual energy output for the calculation. Availability and everything included or these numbers wouldn’t make any sense.
And yes, we need batteries. But the nuclear plants also need other (faster) plants alongside. And this match isn’t a close call. With a 5 fold increase in being economical, we have plenty of money to spare to afford some batteries and hydroelectric dams.
I was looking at the building cost. Looking more into the Wikipedia article, it seems to account for availability. But the numbers are very speculative still, there is a crazy variation both for the specific data points and for the studies. Another big factor is the interest rate for investment which can double the cost of nuclear energy depending on the assumption.
Another thing that bother me is the speculative nature of these things. No photovoltaic power plant ever went through its whole lifespan. No significant energy production was made with variable renewable. Whereas nuclear was used for 70 years now. Yet the speculation makes it like nuclear will be expensive and unreliable and renewable will be cheap and reliable when the actual history is the exact opposite. Technology advances obviously, but still. I don’t consider renewable to be a tried and tested technology that scales while nuclear is.
Idk. Solar cells have been around for a while, too. Wind turbines are kind of simple devices. I bet an engineer can predict their maintenance cost and lifespan fairly accurate. Hydroelectric power plants have been around for more than 100 years. Electric cars have been invented before the combustion engine took off. Nuclear power has been around for some time. But you can’t use that as an argument and simultaneously argue about using thorium which large scale deployments are still hypothetical.
And I don’t think those numbers are 500% off. You can double some cost and were only at 200%. And they’re not complete speculation. They took the actual numbers of the previous year. And the years before that. These numbers are the ‘actual history’.
No significant energy production was made with variable renewable
Pardon? Norway? New Zealand? Switzerland? Iceland? Sweden? Countless others I probably forgot because I’m bad at geography? The USA and China, Philippines, Indonesia all have major ‘variable renewable’. Thousands and thousands of megawatts of energy are generated this way as of today. Then there is biomass if you’re geologically not that favored by nature, but I barely know anything about that. And who says we can’t use the sun and wind? Of course we can also use those.
What proportion of those countries’ energy is renewable? Because that’s the big problem: when renewable are less than 50% of your energy, you can balance the load with the rest ; when it’s 80%, it’s a whole different story. No country has the most of its energy from renewables, and thus we don’t know if it can even work over time, it’s not proven. The scale matters. Producing a prototype is not the same as the whole industrial thing. That’s exactly what’s happening with nuclear btw: after 30 years of abandon, the construction is hard and more expensive and time-consuming than expected because we need to relearn how to do it. But prototype is not industrialisation. And that’s a problem renewable will run into: industrialisation. Where do you all the silicium you need for the batteries and solar panels? How do you deal with balancing the load? And there will be unexpected problems. Nuclear already dealt with these problems. Will renewable actually be able to expand everywhere? Because there isn’t wind and sun everywhere. I severely doubt Switzerland can power itself this way for example.
And then, isthere any solar or wind farm of more than 30 years? I’m pretty sure there isn’t because their lifespan is less than that and the last models that are so efficient are less than 10 years old anyway.
The experience also shows that all countries that went for renewables ended up using more fossile energy btw. Spain and Germany most notably. How do you answer this problem? This is not theory, this is what happened when countries decided to use renewable energy.
I’m sorry. Let’s end the argument here. We won’t agree. Some of your points are valid, most of them are plainly wrong or don’t contribute.
No country has the most of its energy from renewables
Yes, this page shows there are currently 4 countries above your arbitrary 80% demonstrating exactly that.
it’s not proven
Yes. See above.
a prototype
We’ve already established countries like Germany with close to 50% renewable aren’t a prototype. I’ve given countless other examples.
after 30 years of abandon, the construction is hard and more expensive
then don’t do it.
Nuclear already dealt with these problems.
You’re sure nuclear is without issues nowadays?
there isn’t wind and sun everywhere
That’s why we shouldn’t only do 100% of those. I’ve explained several alternatives and you can store and transport energy across the continent.
silicium you need for the batteries and solar panels
We don’t focus on batteries and solar. We need a diverse mix. In fact we don’t need batteries at all, we need energy storage. But this doesn’t have to be batteries. Same applies to solar. I’m living a bit far north and it gets rainy here sometimes. Maybe just take another kind of energy.
Btw. where do you get your uranium 235? Is that a different argument?
How do you deal with balancing the load?
Well, how do you do it? Nuclear also is generating a relatively constant amount of energy. Day and night, 24/7. Nuclear also doesn’t balance the load. Same argument applies here.
Nobody says it has to be 100% this or that by tomorrow. It needs to be a diverse strategy. It needs to factor in individual geographical facts. If we’re only at 70% renewable tomorrow it’s better than 20%. It is a process. We don’t have to skip everything and jump to 100% immediately. Let those natural gas plants run a bit and balance out things, as they do today. Just put in the effort. Once there are cheaper alternatives, use them and don’t cling to old technology just for the sake of it.
is there any solar or wind farm of more than 30 years
Let’s scrap solar for the sake of this discussion. Let’s say material science is completely wrong and they vastly over-exaggerated lifespan of solar panels. Solar is a small fraction of the equation. Tell me what in a wind turbine we don’t understand. Windmills have been around for centuries. As have been generators. I’m not looking that up but I bet we had wind farms in the 70s. Water power has been used to generate electricity for more than a century. It works at scale for some time now. Geothermal works with steam and turbines. They’re also in your nuclear plant. Can you explain all this away?
and the last models that are so efficient are less than 10 years old
As is everything that made some progress. My computer is faster and better in most aspects than the one I had a decade ago.
The experience also shows that all countries that went for renewables ended up using more fossile energy btw. Spain and Germany most notably. How do you answer this problem? This is not theory, this is what happened when countries decided to use renewable energy.
Politics. Germany was supposed to invest into renewables and phase out the old stuff. In a sane way. Then we switched off all the nuclear plants at once (after Fukushima). Obviously this requires buying energy from neighboring countries and ramping up other technology. We subside companies wreacking havoc throughout the Niederrhein for brown coal which isn’t even economical in the first place. Instead of investing that money into our future. We also killed off our domestic solar industry years ago. The war in Ukraine happened. That took us by surprise and we were dependant on Russian natural gas. I’m not an expert on Spain.
You’re right with your distinction between theory and the real world. What we should do isn’t always what we do (or did). When someone does something stupid, it doesn’t automatically make it right or wrong. But you’re supposed to learn from their mistakes. And factor in everything if you want to talk about what makes sense for the future.
The wikipedia article on renewable energy also has some facts about history and state of the art in green energy, so you can have a look at the world-wide numbers and decide if your perspective is that this is sci-fi or actually out there. I don’t say this is easy or possible without changes to the energy grid, society or whatever. And I don’t argue we need to do 100% solar. Or get rid of all of the batteries in the world. Or do everything with lithium batteries. Or the problems getting from 0-20% are the same as going from 80-100%. That’s not my argument. My argument is, if it’s the cheapest option in the long run. And the way to not further temper with climate. Why not use this? Why not invest in this unless there is a proper argument against it? We’ve already begun, made some mistakes and are getting smarter by the day. Nuclear has so many challenges that are difficult to solve. And looking at the numbers, it’s unlikely it will improve so much in its current form that it’ll become better than renewable anyways. I’d be happy to reconsider things once sombody gets a nuclear fusion reactor viable for real-world use.
The countries you show that are high on renewable are using hydro/marine, not solar or wind.
Notice that I am not against renewable. I’m all for it. I’m just saying that it is delusional to think that we can forgo nuclear for energy production in a short or medium time scale.
My problem is not renewable, it’s people who are against nuclear.
I’m also not against nuclear per se. My problem is, handling the radioactive stuff is what makes it very expensive and there is no way around that at this point. For example I see many issues storing that waste. It is true that these geological structures have been there for millions of years. But once you drill into them, this isn’t the case any more. We have massive problems finding a final storage repository, and for several reasons. We’ve tried for decades. My prediction is that it’ll be massively expensive to look after these things in the tousands of years to come. At some point there will be an issue, water will get in and more billions of money will be needed to clean that up. This will not be payed for by the people who used that electricity.
It makes me a bit angry that nuclear is massively subsidised. They get subsidised when building plants, they didn’t have to have the money for dismantlement ready. I bet this will be some more 100 billions for the german taxpayer. They probably only pay a fraction of the needed research. If they’re basically only paying for operation, I can tell, why this looks feasable for people and nobody believes the actual numbers.
And it’s a bridge technology anyways. There’s no way around that. Once the real deal is around, you need to accept that and slowly phase it out.
I believe in the studies, the state of the art in research and actual numbers. Without factoring the subsidies I just talked about in, we talked about the study in the USA where nuclear power was 5 times as expensive to generate. And those are real electricity prices. The subsidies and unaccounted cost of waste storage that become just extra profit for those companies, get on top.
So why do you want to pay extra for electricity? Why do you want to create more and more difficult to solve problems? Why invest even more money in such a dying technology? I mean, I’m okay if we don’t switch off those existing plants before they’re due. They’re here and we may as well use them to cut down CO2. But please. If science tells you it is expensive and difficult by some huge factor. Don’t throw more billions and billions at yesterdays technology and research in blind hope that you’ll be able to bridge that gap somehow. It’s not competetive as of today. And you’ll need more and more money to stay in business in the future.
I don’t want to pay that with my taxes. And we need that money for the energy transition. To address some of the issues you mentioned. Especially like you said for the last few percent getting close to 100% renewable. That will also be expensive. And now we need money to make changes to the energy grid and afford more offshore wind for example. And politics to really think hard and have the right incentives for people and companies in place. The off-shore wind park will generate energy day and night for decades to come once you build it. The energy grid and energy storage facilities will be an investment. Please don’t waste all the money because I want someone to build a carbon-neutral helicopter to fly to these off-shore windmills and service them.
There had been a time where your nuclear was the right choice. Now it’s a money-losing business for the people. And renewable would be an investment into their future. The actual numbers tell the same story. So I’m more against stupid and expensive choices, than against nuclear specifically.
I want to pay for something that works. That’s how you wisely invest money. And what works is a mix or nuclear and renewables.
But ecologist are pushing hard their propaganda against nuclear so we would have to use gas or coal for decades before the smart grid can work.
As for the cost, it doesn’t account for storage. Unlike nuclear that does account for dealing with wastes. Wastes that are far, far less of a problem than what ecologists are afraid of.
Again, that’s simply false. Around the world, the taxpayer ends up paying the major portion of the cost needed to dealing with that. Look it up.
And a mix of nuclear and renewables isn’t that smart. These two don’t complement each other. Nuclear doesn’t ‘balance out’ the fluctuations of renewable by pushing the rods more in or pulling them out. Look at the diagrams. Nuclear produces a constant amount of energy, day and night. It is theoretically possible, but practically not feasible to cycle this too much. They do not complement each other. You’d need almost the same energy storage facilities you’d need without nuclear being in the mix. It’s a waste. And I don’t know who listened to too much propaganda. If the studies and numbers tell a different story, maybe reflect a bit on your previous knowledge. I’ve also grown up learning nuclear is a cheap way of generating energy and it produces less CO2. But technology has made advancements and the first thing just isn’t true (anymore).
And you’re generating more cost for future generations. Dealing with the waste. Dismantling those reactors is a huge ordeal. You end up with vast amounts of concrete that is expensive to treat. That isn’t an investment, that’s a liability. On the other hand, a wind farm is an investment.
(Sorry. I don’t want to argue with you specifically. I’m more annoyed by politics for making the wrong decisions. And getting us to in the situation where we now burn all that coal that we wanted to get away from. This was the original subject of this discussion anyways. We’re now in that situation and we can’t change the past. But we can make the right decisions for the future, now. And I expect politicians to know how much for example 100 billions of money is. And they should do scientific studies with the current state of knowledge and then do the calculation and do what’s best.)
You know that there are fou tries already having most of their power from nuclear right? There is no theory crafting to make about it. We’re already doing it.
Meanwhile there is no country running with wind or solar. Balancing those is theoretical because we never did it on a country scale.
That’s hard facts. The only renewable energy that’s proven to work on a country scale is hydro/marine.
And no, nuclear is not so expensive. Germany for example spent much more on renewables than France did to build its whole nuclear parc.
Finally, talking about wastes and stuff is a distraction. Co2 is a life threatening problem on a global scale. Nuclear will never be dangerous like that, so the point is moot. Anything that can help remove co2 emission should be used. This includes nuclear.
Nuclear power plants are expensive to build but the cost of running one especially when adjusted to the amount of electricity it produces is not significantly more than running any other power plant. Also uranium is not considered to be a gobally scarce resource.
The high cost is largely explained by the fact that there’s no “standard model” for nuclear power plants but instead they’re all designed and built from scratch which can make them really expensive. Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland is the world’s 8th most expensive building at whopping 12 billion dollar cost to build. The original price estimate was 3 billion. Many of the buildings on that list ahead of Olkiluoto 3 are also nuclear power plants.
This however isn’t some inherent probem about nuclear power itself but rather the way we do it. It doesn’t need to be that expensive.
Yeah, I’m still not convinced. If current state of the art makes it 5 times more expensive than current state solar or wind. Your explanation needs to be more than ‘but we choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be’.
Sure theoretically this might not be an inherent problem. But the same applies to renewable. I’m not sure if solar or wind are close to something limiting their efficiency or cost of production. There might be new technology advancing both of them. We can talk about this and look for more information. But it’s a very hypothetical discussion. As of now in the real world, there are real-world power plants and if no-one can demonstrate to bridge that big gap in economic efficiency… Maybe there’s something to it…
And apart from that. I’d argue that there are some inherent problems. For example mega-projects having issues with their budget. That’s a very interesting topic but inherent to big and complex projects for several reasons. Also a nuclear plant and all the infrastructure around it is inherently more complex and more expensive than for example a wind turbine and what we need to assemble a bit of steel tubing, wings and a bit of copper. (Broadly speaking.) I think it’s a combination of factors. But I’d be surprised if the future holds something increasing the economic efficiency of nuclear (fission) power plants by that factor.
(Edit: Those numbers from the video are for the US. But 5 times more expensive is huge.)
We don’t choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be. It’s by nature always going to be more expensive to build one of something instead of what the cost per unit is going to be when you make many.
Wind and solar isn’t going to solve the issue untill we come up with a way to store energy on large scale. When you plug in an appliance that electricity is not taken from a reserve but it’s produced for you in real time. Wind doesn’t blow and sun doesn’t shine according to how much electricity is needed at each moment. Finland produces all its electricity basically by hydro, wind and nuclear power. When it’s windy we have excess electricity and the prices drops to negative and we got to sell it abroad but when it’s calm the opposite is true. This wouldn’t be the case if we could somehow store that excess energy.
We’re talking about effective cost of the resulting power, altogether. All things included. (Except for nuclear waste, which is a topic for a different discussion and difficult to quantify.) Just comparing one aspect wouldn’t be fair.
store energy on scale
Yeah, and science and investors are way ahead of politics. There are several concepts already available or already in place somewhere. Several promising ideas and projects that need funding. Storage facilities that aren’t able to store energy because Bavaria is not willing to run cables across the country. It is a complex topic that also needs individual solutions. For example depending on geography you could have dams and pump water. Or one of the concepts that work everywhere. Infrastructure and cunsumer get more advanced/intelligent. You could charge your car automatically during periods where renewable is abundant. You can fine-tune factories, maybe have the large heat pump of an office building vary temperature a bit when there is a Dunkelflaute. Some countries just get geothermal power for free because of their location… You can put those storage facilities close to energy generation or close to the consumer. And as supply and demand changes prices, it’s also well aligned with the way our economy (and capitalism) works.
We should really hurry up and put in the effort this needs. Because we really need those storage facilities. And I’d like energy costs to come down again, and CO2 emissions also.
And if I remember correctly, the current natural gas power plants are the ones that can react to supply and demand the most quickly. But this seems not to be a good idea anymore, now that we have enough problems with the natural gas in central europe. I (personally) would be happy if there was an alternative.
I haven’t heard any scientist in the last years tell something different from renewable plus storage is the way. Not unless some miracle happens and we get fusion reactors or something. But it’s still unclear it that’s going to happen.
Right, but that’s why people are talking about nuclear as a bridge technology, not as a permanent solution. Whether or not we can make it pencil out before smashing through all of the critical tipping points in global temperature averages is not something I’m qualified to have an opinion on, but I’m credibly informed that we might at least want to give it a serious look.
At one point in the future I’m sure we can look back, do the calculations and see if that had been a good bridge or an expensive thing for the taxpayer to deal with the dismantling and long time storage.
As of now I think the time of that bridge technology has come to an end anyways. We now have efficient renewable energies available. And concepts for energy storage. I think we should invest in that instead of putting the money into a thing of the past.
No. Among other things it remains the linchpin of energy security for industrial countries like China and Germany that lack adequate domestic oil or natural gas reserves to power their economies with those.
While in hindsight not all the decisions of the German energy policies seem right and it would have been better to keep the nuclear power plants operating for a few years, there was never the plan to replace nuclear with coal. All of the nuclear power generation has been replaced by wind and solar power generation. In fact, the plan was to phase out nuclear and replace the remaining coal generation with natural gas power plants. This definitely got more difficult in the time of LNG. The plan in any case is to phase out coal as well and with 56% renewable generation in 2023 Germany is on track to do so.
I hope this is a serious question, obviously this depends on your baseline. In 2013 Germany had a 56% share of fossil fuels, 27% share of renewables and 17% share of nuclear power generation. In the current year, the shares are: 59% renewables, 39% fossil fuels and 2% nuclear power generation. So in the last ten years there has been a switch in generation from both nuclear and fossil fuels to renewable generation. Could it have been better in the wake of the looming crisis of both climate and energy? Yes, I think it would have been better to keep some newer nuclear power plants running. But Cpt. Hindsight always has it easier.
In the long run every successful economy will generate its major share of electricity from renewables. Some countries will choose to generate a part with nuclear, others will choose to use a mix of hydrogen, batteries etc. to complement renewables. We will see what works best.
Hydrogen isn’t a fuel source. It’s at best an energy storage technology, and you know you generate hydrogen? Electricity so if 56% of your electricity is renewables, then 44% is fossil fuels, and that is still WAY too much.
Yes, of course, hydrogen is not an energy source (neither are batteries). Sorry if I was not clear about that, I thought it was clear from the context. I was talking about hydrogen and batteries as means of balancing fluctuating output from renewables.
I tend to agree that 44% fossil fuels are still too much, the transition could have been faster and needs to faster in the future. Not a lot of countries have done the successful pivot from fossil energy to renewable energy. The only example that comes to mind is Denmark, where they have great policies (and great wind resources). So I guess everything needs to be viewed in context.
While I agree that it would have been better to phase out coal before nuclear power plants, I also think that those decisions have to be viewed in context and are more nuanced than ‘pretty stupid’.
For example, as other in this thread pointed out, nuclear power plants can be pretty safe to operate IF there is a good culture of safety and protocols in place. Which of course need to be followed and supervised by a strong regulatory body. Two of nuclear power plants in Brunsbüttel and Krümmel were missing this kind of safety culture in the opinion of the regulatory body. They were both operated by Vattenfall. If you lose trust in the operator of such critical infrastructure, then a decision to shut down nuclear power plants has to factor in all the arguments at hand.
There’s also good reasons to have a fistful of generation plants with coal or natural gas.
To put it simply, nuclear is clean, far cleaner than just about anything else we have. If you compare the waste product with the energy produced… It’s just not an argument that nuclear loses versus something like coal. Where coal puts out its waste mainly in the form of smoke, nuclear waste, like discarded nuclear power rods, are a physical and far more immediately dangerous thing. The coal waste kind of blends in, and lobbyists have been throwing around “clean coal” for a while… Although coal use has gotten a lot more efficient and produces less waste than before, it’s still far more than what nuclear could do. “Clean” coal is a myth, it’s just “less bad” coal, with good marketing.
Regardless, coal and natural gas fired plants can ramp up and down far quicker than nuclear possibly could. Where nuclear covers base demand and can usually scale up and down a bit to help with higher load times, to cover peak demand, coal and natural gas can fire up and produce power in a matter of minutes. With nuclear, they have to ramp up slowly to ensure the reaction doesn’t run away from them, and to ensure all the safety measures and safeguards are working as intended as the load increases. It’s just a fat more careful process.
The grid is hugely complex, and I’m simplifying significantly. But from the best of my understanding, nuclear can’t react fast enough to cover spontaneous demand. So either coal or natural gas needs to exist for the grid to work as well as it does.
Wind is unpredictable and solar usually isn’t helping during the hours where the grid would need help with the demand. The only viable option is with grid scale energy storage, which can hold the loads while the nuclear systems have a chance to ramp up.
There’s still far more coal fired plants in the world than we need for this task alone, so there’s still work to be done… But I suspect coal use will diminish, but not be eliminated from grid scale operation for a while.
To my knowledge, apart from very new battery-based systems, the most common energy storage used for grid scale applications is pumped hydro, and even that is pretty rare… Either you need geographic features that make it viable, which is relatively rare in proximity to all the geographic features you would need for a nuclear plant, or you need to build such structures which is insanely expensive.
The main issue with grid scale anything, is that until very recently, most energy companies have been living on insanely long timelines, far longer than most industries. Infrastructure, when built, almost always has multiple decades of lifespan if not longer. Most energy storage tech that’s old enough to be considered for the time that many of the nuclear were built, did not have multiple decade lifespans and would need full or at the least the majority of their working material replaced within a decade at best. For an industry where a new facility will last 50+ years, that’s not a good investment. The only long term solution that would last is pumped hydro. This is changing and new grid-scale storage tech is reaching a high level of development, aka, almost ready for large scale production.
Simply put, if you think about the technology that was available when these facilities would have been built, around 50-80 years ago for many, energy storage wasn’t something that people really thought about, you either had live delivery of energy (from generator to device in micro-seconds) or primary cell batteries, like alkaline. Without much in-between, and most of what was there wasn’t grid-scale, not even close.
Sure, there are newer reactors than that, but a remarkable number of nuclear energy facilities are many decades old, most of the viable grid scale energy storage tech has been developed in the past decade or so.
To be clear, nuclear plants usually have conventional generators, often diesel, but that energy isn’t for export (for sale to customers), it’s used to restart the pumps and power the facility for a cold start of the nuclear generation systems. And that’s about it. 50 years ago, you didn’t have viable energy storage for the grid, everything was generated as it was used, when the load increases, fire up more generation capacity. So base load was handled by plants that needed to run 24/7 like nuclear, since it’s difficult or impossible to turn them off, and they would ramp up when demand increased, and any gap would be filled by plants that can go from off to making energy in minutes, like coal and natural gas.
To summarize, with the exception of pumped hydro, nothing is capable of handling that much power for the grid. We’re not talking a few minutes of energy storage, this is more like an hour+ as reactors heat up and more turbines come up to speed. The only energy generation that can meet that demand that quickly is coal/gas-based plants and pumped hydro, with pumped hydro being so difficult to build, coal and gas are used. Of the gas-powered plants, natural gas is the most economically viable.
This is changing, but the infrastructure in use is usually significantly older than the technology you’re mentioning.
Yes, the correct answer is that “net zero” Is a greenwashed lie to placate the masses into inaction while the oligarchy continues business as usual until collapse.
I thought net zero meant there was no net co2 being emitted at any time? This is saying countries can claim net zero by just promising to remove co2 in the future. I’ve never seen it used that way, is that the common understanding?
The way people get to net zero is stupid accounting tricks. I burned a whole bunch of coal, but i paid a buddy of mine to plant trees. So now Im celebrating net zero with my buddy in his brand new tesla roadster. Who knew planting trees was so lucrative.
It’s actually worse than that they are paying people to not cut down trees. It’s the same logic when my GF says she saved $200 because the dress was half price.
So we need good regulation to make sure the carbon is being sequestered. If planting trees and then burying them actually gets carbon permanently out of the atmosphere, I’m all for it. I would love planting trees to be lucrative, we could use more forests, they’re great!
Oh I just remembered, someone who worked at an arboretum who I met a while ago mentioned that trees actually diffuse carbon dioxide directly into the soil. I think he said it was about one third of the weight of the tree? That amount would still be sequestered even if the tree wasn’t buried. But I don’t know how stable that is over the long term.
For offsets to work, they’d need to be based on the actual science of how much carbon they trap over what period of time. Different methods would need to have offset values published by the government. But I agree, offsets with algie or similar look much more feasible than trees.
It’s a lie because several of the dependent solutions are essentially impossible to achieve (given time, technology, resources, investment, economics, etc), as well as being the bare minimum necessary to avert disaster, with a deadline decades after it’s required to avert disaster.
It doesn’t look like anyone has mentioned metallurgical coal yet. Even if you don’t burn it for energy, the carbon in steel has to come from somewhere and that’s usually coke, which is coal that has been further pyrolised into a fairly pure carbon producing a byproduct of coal tar.
Metallurgical coal only makes up for rather small part of coal mining, around 7% of all coal production goes towards it, and while the process produces more GHG than just burning it for power it has a less profound impact because it’s just smaller. It’s also one of the places where we can’t really find an alternative, to produce steel you need to use bitumen coal because they have more carbon and less volatiles than charcoal.
On top of that steel is extremely recyclable meaning that any steel produced can be reused pretty much 1:1 with only a small amount of energy needed.
More than likely it’s a cost issue, coal is artificially cheap thanks to several countries subsidizing the coal industry like Germany, USA and Australia.
There’s also I guess the practical question of how much plant fiber per ton of metallurgical coal is needed, i.e. how land would be dedicated towards ‘producing plant fiber’ for the steel industry.
Coconut husks are free with the coconuts, which is why I mentioned them. Without explicitly breaking out my highschool chemistry, I’m guessing you get about a third the mass of carbon from cellulose.
If it’s a whole 7% of the coal mined, though, that is a pretty significant amount. I assume we’ll have to find less agricultural ways of fixing CO2 at some point, because it is kind of a shame to use prime agricultural land to make industrial feedstock. NASA already has a device that can turn it into CO electrically, I guess.
Renewable energy means using renewable resources. Meaning things that either replenish themselves within a short enough period or things that produce massive amounts of energy over long periods of time.
The sad part is it seems like this has become a recent problem. As in the past few days.
I deliberately switched from sh.itjust.works to lemmy.world because I was sick of hexbear users starting fights and just being disingenuous with their arguments.
The sun will exist for hundreds of thousands of years after humanity has gone extinct. The sun will exist for millions of years before it burns out. Humanity will thrive diminish and die before the sun dies.
It is by all intents and purposes an infinite resource for a finite species.
Technically speaking, it does not renew itself. It is being slowly depleted. You are right in saying that we can treat it as a renewable source as far as us and our technologies are concerned.
The sun will exist for hundreds of thousands of years after humanity has gone extinct. The sun will exist for millions of years before it burns out.
Your timescales are off. Even if humanity lasts a very long time, which seems unlikely, the sun will last for billions of years after humanity is gone. In one billion years the sun will have become hotter so that life becomes impossible on Earth. There will be four billion years of a lifeless Earth before the sun expands into a red giant and either swallows up or cooks the Earth. One billion years after that the sun will kick off its outer layers into a nebula and become a white dwarf. At that point it’s not reacting any more so it just gradually cools down over billions more years until it’s just a cool lump.
It’s renewable in the same way that solar is. Eventually the sun will die and solar won’t work just like we’ll eventually run out of fissible material.
As with all power plants, wind turbines, solar panels, etc. there are carbon costs associated with the manufacturing, construction and transport. Remember that there’s a lot of steel involved.
You…can’t be serious right now…can you? Or are you conflating nuclear power with nuclear bombs? Because the two are very different things.
As climate change leads to non-traditional weather, people won’t be able to farm in the same places. People will be displaced, famine will hit. Droughts will clear up water sources and fights over water rights will happen.
The only way to reduce the impact is big, non-emitting power that can run 24/7/365 and the only contender for that is hydro and nuclear. And we’ve already built hydro just about everywhere that’s feasible to do so. With a surplus of cheap energy, we can improve hydroponics/vertical farming, reduce transportation needs for food (by growing it closer to population centers), and develop a means of scalable desalination.
There are newer models of plants that dont produce the byproducts needed for nuclear armaments. The problem is that our governments want those byproducts for nuclear armaments so the safer reactors were never built.
Coal mining kills more people per year than nuclear does. Pollution kills more people by several magnitudes than nuclear ever could. When proper safety measures are put in place it’s by far the safest form of energy. And regardless of whether people make nuclear power plants, the technology exists, so it will be used to make bombs regardless
Because of the war against nuclear plants. Our green party shut down nuclear plants in favor for renewable energy. But as predicted, renewables don’t meet our demands. So the green party started building gas plants to compensate instead of keeping nuclear running.
So why? Because of green idiocracry that demand the impossible of green energy (at this moment) and nuclear = evil
People will do everything that givesthem an advantage in anykind of way. If coal is an affordable resource to fulfill a need it will be mined and put to use.
You may change the view on a thing for a few persons, but never of all of them.
People need electricity. Renewables are great, but they don’t provide for the full generation need. Coal and natural gas power generation will continue unabated until a better (read: lower price for similar reliability) solution takes their place.
In my opinion, fossil fuel generation won’t take a real hit until the grid-scale energy storage problem is solved.
my energy bill right now is like a new solar panel a month. what resources do we not have, and are you familiar with pumped storage? spoilers, we already have renewable stable energy supply
The truth is, we do have enough resources. We just care more about the economy and profit than our future climate (which will also strongly affect the economy, but that’s in the future so…).
If we actually valued the climate as much as we ought to, switching fully to renewables would be a bargain.
We dont’ really care about the economy, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing this boom-bust shit and we’d have a better planned economy that would ensure there wasn’t a perpetual under-class of starving people in every industrialized nation.
Our Government DO care about making sure their donors get paid though.
Everything has a cost of course, building solar panel requires a significant amount of precious metals, which may or may not be easily accessible or affordable depending on the political climate between countries who mine vs the countries who needs the resources.
And the production of solar panel does create some toxic leftovers which needs to make handled appropriately. Not saying they’re a bad alternative and they’re definitely before than fossil fuel or coal, just needs to consider the cost and the impact of everything.
Storage. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear generate power regardless of weather, day and night.
Solar generates plenty of electricity (with enough panels installed), but it slows down significantly under cloudy skies and stops entirely at night.
Wind generates plenty as well…unless the wind stops blowing.
The grid needs power all the time, not just when it’s sunny and windy. For renewables to actually compete, the excess power they generate during sunny and windy times needs to be stored for use when it’s dark and still.
As much as we applaud lithium batteries, our energy storage technologies are abysmally inefficient. We’re nowhere near being able to store and discharge grid-scale power the way we’d need to for full adoption of renewables. The very best we can do today (and I wish I were kidding) is pump water up a hill, then use hydroelectric generators as it flows back down. Our energy storage tech is literally in the Stone Age.
Don’t underestimate the battery potential of gravity!
According to …wikipedia.org/…/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity#…. The round-trip efficiency of pumped storage is 70-80%, that’s pretty darn good for cheap mass-storage. There’s not much more to gain there.
But, like geothermal power generation (which is also very good), it’s extremely dependent on location. Most populated areas don’t have the altitude differential (steep hills) and/or water supply to implement pumped hydro storage.
Where it can be used, it should be (and largely is - fossil fuel generation does better with some storage as well, since demand is not consistent), but it’s hardly something that can be deployed alongside solar and wind generators everywhere.
I might also add there’s smart algorithms being developed for about 5y+ now that distribute power surplus and deficiency over a grid. This will probably be key. Just take a look at “energy metering”.
Long range transmission of AC power is limited to about 40 miles. DC can be transmitted much farther, but the infrastructure is substantially more expensive (because it’s more dangerous), so that’s only done for extreme need.
We aren’t getting away from having many power generators all over the place, so one location-dependent storage solution isn’t going to solve all the problems.
that's uh, a 5% increase over 20 years for US. Another 20 years and renewables might make up 20% of our power! With skyrocketed energy demands for AC keeping us alive from the hellscape outside.
I think thats… not wrong per say, but somewhat misleading. Coal consumption has been steady worldwide for the last decade despite the population going up a whole billion, and as the average persons energy usage has gone up (largely as a result of growing quality of life in developing nations).
Absolutely. Coal has remained consistent as demand for power has risen steadily. Renewables are growing, but remain a tiny slice of the whole generation picture.
Natural gas has become a cheap and reliable replacement for coal over the last 10-15 years as it’s become less expensive to transport. Many coal plants have been converted, even. So as demand has risen, it’s natural gas, not renewables, that is filling the gap.
It’s a cheap, non intermittent, easily scalable, and highly available source of energy compatible with existing infrastructure. When the choice becomes rolling electricity blackouts/shutting down factories, or coal powered electricity due to extremely poor planning for the future, coal will win every time. I wish we just started getting renewables running decades ago. Most of the limited electricity in South Africa is produced from coal power plants or diesel generators.
I’m typing this during a rolling electricity blackout. Really not looking forward to my cold shower in the next few minutes
Yes, countries like Germany are turning to coal as a direct result of nuclear-phobia.
The US, with all its green initiatives and solar/wind incentives, is pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia. The US has been the top oil producer on whole the planet for the last 5-6 years. The problem is getting worse.
As people pointed out in another thread, nuclear energy is NOT the future and also a really bad short term solution,so countries like Germany are going back to coal short term to make the transitions to renewables in the meantime.
It’s not a great solution, but without Nordstream, there’s really not much else more sensible to do right now, just to make the transition.
It’s literally the second safest form of energy production we have only behind solar.
It’s literally safer than wind power.
Yeah there’s been a few disasters with older reactor designs or reactors that were put where they shouldn’t have been, but even with those it’s still incredibly safe.
nobody knows how much nuclear fuel will cost in 20 years
you have to take out a big loan and make interest payments on it for maybe 30 years before you start making a profit
if you don’t have enough water for cooling because of climate change, the plant must shut down
if your neighbor decides to start a war against you, your nuclear plants become a liability, see Ukraine.
I think smaller, decentralized renewable energy is cheaper in the short and long run and has a much lower risk in case of accidents, natural Desasters or attacks.
I really don’t see that as a good progression. We want to focus on renewables because that’s the most sustainable way to go. Why go back to nuclear again?
That said if you are saying that’s where the industry is moving even though that’s probably not the best approach, fair enough. My opinion has zero effect on the industry.
Sorry, this is just false info. Germany is not turning to coal as a result of your called nuclear phobia.
I will repeat my comment from another thread:
If you are able to read German or use a translator I can recommend this interview where the expert explains everything and goes into the the details.
Don’t repeat the stories of the far right and nuclear lobby. Nuclear will always be more expensive than renewables and nobody has solved the waste problem until today. France as a leading nuclear nation had severe problems to cool their plants during the summer due to, guess what, climate change. Building new nuclear power plants takes enormous amounts of money and 10-20years at least. Time that we don’t have at the moment.
If you haven’t noticed, the sun stops shining for several hours every day and how much the wind blows changes pseudo-randomly on a hourly basis. Are problems with uranium supply more common than that? Not to mention that uranium can be recycled.
There is no “nuclear lobby” stop making shit up. Nuclear isn’t profitable, that is why we don’t have it. If it’s not profitable, there will be no industry lobby pushing for it. The fact that it isn’t profitable shouldn’t matter. I care about the environment and if Capitalism can’t extract profit without destroying the environment (it can’t) then we need to stop evaluating infrastructure through a Capitalist lens.
Hmm I think what you mean is that some coal plants have been put into active maintenance. IIRC this was rather a countermeasure in case of absence of gas supplies. They are not part of the regular energy market.
Anyway, I think there is not only one way forward. Countries like France choose to use a big portion of nuclear, Germany does not. And every way has its own challenges. What is important is that energy supply should be independent of oppressor states and moving into a direction of carbon neutrality.
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