@heiglandreas We need to build our wind and solar at a massive pace, yes. But we will also need nuclear in the mix to supplement it, and to help get off coal faster.
And modern nuclear plan design is vastly cheaper and safer than most of the ancient one off designs currently in use. There has been a lot of work here in recent decades.
@Crell it's still insecure, expensive, nonsustainable, long term engaging.
It's replacing one energy supply that turns non-renewable ressources into a long-teem liability (coal/oil into ecxess co2 that we do not know or want to handle) with another one (plutonium into radioactive waste that we... oh wait.. still don't know how to handle).
The only advantage is that we can turn the waste of nuclear power into weapons.
@Crell Besides that: Nuclear power will for the near future be a big investmemt. So it keeps the current centralized structures. And it keeps the ones owning them in control. And they fear loss of their power. In both senses.
So not relying on it will help decentralizing energy AND political and financial power.
@heiglandreas@Crell can I say that your current opinion seems highly influenced by the current German choices? Your country recently shut down active nuclear plants, and that seemed the wrong choice from the outside to me.
You had the investment part already taken care of, you now need more energy from other sources right now, and you don't have the green solutions right away. I would've agreed with gradually replacing them with green energy tech, but shut it down during this crisis, no.
German politics (the ones empowering monopolists) fucked up investments into renewables some years ago but it was still not a problem to shut down all nuclear power plants.
Transitioning from monopolistic power production towards a more decentralized approach is a political struggle though.
And we still do not know where to put the waste. We might have a functioning final storage facility in about 100 years....
@alessandrolai The "German choice" is more likely influenced by a lot of people thinking that way.
BTW: The investments would have to be done soonish again as those existing power plants were coming of age. And were due to increasing failure rates going offline for quite some time.
@alessandrolai The nuclear waste from powerplants is a bit more powerful than from medical equipment. And needs to be stored in a safe location for a tad more than one or two generations. We still have no way of disposing that safely (Yes! Finnland has one facitily) and we still have no way of disposing the medical stuff either.
Leaving the stuff for future generations to deal with is the same previous generations did with carbondioxide.
@alessandrolai The whole discussion about nuclear power to me is not so much about energy.
It is about political and social power, money and greed.
Keep people concentrated on "The Solution" in the next 5 years and the fact that they will then not have to change and they will follow you and pay you and keep your current position intact.
@alessandrolai Nuclear power has teh advantage of not having to price in all the costs as some are taken on by the community. Factor those costs in and suddenly nuclear power is far less cost-effective than other resources.
@heiglandreas@alessandrolai@Crell this is nonsense to me: nuclear waste has killed exactly ZERO human beeings in the entire history, while every year millions die to CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.
Leaving future gens a dozen of shed of nuclear waste is much better than keep ruining our climate forever
@heiglandreas@alessandrolai@Crell
Nuclare waste killed no-one.
Living around a nuclear reactor kills less then living aroung a coal factory.
Nuclear incidents killed less than hydro incidents, and less than solar+wind incidents.
I care NOTHING about a harmless waste comparing to messing climate forever
@heiglandreas@slam@Crell those are nuclear meltdowns, incidents, not storage of spent fuel, that's not a fair comparison. As I said before, it's a problem that you already had, and shutting down the reactor didn't make that go away. Once you have to build the process and storage to hold them, adding a bit more of waste has a small incremental cost, with a hug added benefit and less deaths at the bottom row (with, you know, a lot less CO2 and pollutants produced).
@alessandrolai The main problem remains: We still do not have these facilities. We might get them in 100 years from now. And then we will need to maintain them for more than 100 years. Securely.
And I have the highest hopes in humanity that we will be able to do that safely and without any friction.
@alessandrolai And while some of them were nuclear meltdowns, some of those were also from the emissions of nuclear waste treatment facilities. So saying that zero humans have been killed by nuclear waste is plain wrong.
BTW: those millions that die of CO2 emissions do not die of CO2 directly. So the comparison is a tad off...
@heiglandreas@Crell but it's an issue that you already have, which is not technically complicated to solve (only politically, thanks to NIMBY), and you just added another one on top (clean energy scarcity).
Now you're forced to switch to less clean energy, without a solution right out the door.
Denying nuclear makes sense here in Italy, where we don't have it (thanks, Chernobyl 🤦♂️) and starting that now is really too late. You had functioning plants instead! It seems a waste to me..
@alessandrolai Besides: Those last 3 reactors were already on their last set of fuel. New fuel would have needed to be organized which would not have arrived in time so they would have had a downtime. And from what I know new Uranium is currently almost exclusively available from Russia.
Besides that: Uranium is a non-renewable resource and we do not want to depend on such resources.
@heiglandreas@Crell tosh. It's some of the safest ways of generating power. It's waste is manageable. And most cost comparisons forget about the downstream results of burning fossil fuels (ie coal). I was quite surprised to see coal power plants right in the heart of Berlin too.
@heiglandreas@Crell The latest generation of plants can also use the "waste" of older generations to generate more power too. The German's obsession against nuclear is an odd one, and directly benefitted the killer in the Kremlin.
@derickr Absolutely. More people are killed by the industry and output of coal plants every week than have ever died as a result of nuclear power, and yes that includes Chernobyl and Fukushima. Coal is also responsible for more radioactivity (amongst other pollutants) in the atmosphere than nuclear, and it gets there as a result of normal operations, not accidents. This is also leaving out any climate effects, for which coal is the worst available option.
Nobody was arguing for not building out more wind or solar. But that can't be the only solution as these are intermittent. That can be addressed by 1. Massive grid storage, 2. Baseload generation (in most countries LPG, with Germany being a large exception) with fossil fuels, 3. Nuclear, 4. Fusion.
@heiglandreas@Synchro
1 and 4 are decades away and not well understood , 2. is CO² in the air. Nuclear is well understood and is my many arguments also renewable. As in 1000 years we'll have either 1 or 4.
Small scale renewable-only is doable. Some Scottish island is off the grid. But there are limitations on usage.
But nuclear is also getting smaller. General Electric have small modular plants now, or very soon. The big projects like Hinckley Point are IMO done wrong, but it is still faster to realise than going strait to solar/wind only.
Wind and solar at scale is also not trivial. Both require a lot of space and resource extraction. These resources are also not finite, and neither tech allows for much recycling. There is some progress with solar here, but that's still research.
@derickr It is not only about energy security but also about global energy consumption. And there will be more people requiring energy on a global scale. Providing them with nuclear power will probably not work as the settings do either not permit that or due to other issues. So it's not about fuzzy feelings but about global equity. On a power level.
That seems like a huge shortcut to take this to its conclusion and give up on nuclear from that?
I read recently about India's small nuclear reactors. I will try to find the piece again. But the tl;dr; was that rather than building a gigantic power station that takes 10 years an 10 billions to build, they're making small ones that bring results quickly, for cheap.
With the huge need for energy, nuclear must be part of the solution.
@t_dtm I find it soothing to know that an increasingly fascist country gathers more and more nuclear power plants.
But in the end: If it's possible it'll be done.
To me it does not make sense and it will - for me -make the world a more dangerous place.
And I'm not even talking about the technology lock-in on an unsafe system. And yes: No system is safe. The question is what you are willing to sacrifice.
@heiglandreas@derickr@Synchro what does the global scale have to do with Germany's choices? I was advocating on not shutting down existing plants. Building new ones (elsewhere) is a different discussion, which has different pros and cons.
@heiglandreas@Crell This is the most horse shit comment I've seen in a while. And, no offence, but pure German anti-nuclear propaganda.
Nuclear waste is a non-issue because the quantities are so small, and the reason we haven't stored them is to be able to extract more power of the current waste.
It is also safe, the natural radiation of Rome is twice the radiation within Fukshima prefecture. But sure let's ignore the science, and open new lignite coal mines and destroy century old villages.
@heiglandreas@Girgias Once again, it's not an either-or. Solar panels on every roof in the world? I'm all for it. But that's going to take, um, a very long time, and trillions of dollars in lithium mining, which has its own issues. Wind is great, but it takes time to build those big windmills.
Modern nuclear as a baseline underneath a wind/solar/hydro system (distributed and not) is our best way forward. And we don't have time to only do one and hope for the best.
@heiglandreas@Girgias (Minor correction: The lithium is for the batteries we need to back the solar, not for the panels themselves. The panels have other mining requirements for the raw materials.)
@Crell@heiglandreas@Girgias to be honest, I'm not sure if all the solar panels we place here in the Netherlands and other northern Europe countries are not giving a false sense of sustainability.
Given the resources to build solar panels are finite, aren't we better of placing them in countries that don't have a clouded sky 80% of the year?
@Crell@heiglandreas@Girgias in the Netherlands they are planning to build a new nuclear plant, but they say it will take 6 to 8 years to complete... By then we should be ready with the energy transition. Not sure if that's different in the U.S. but to me, it sounds like a lot of time to build other solutions.
I don't know if solar or wind will be the way to go, but preparing for something, that will give you benefit after the deadline seems to be a waist of valuable time.
@jaapio@heiglandreas@Girgias Yes-and. Yes-and. Build wind turbines now, and start shutting down coal plants. In 6 years, we bring some nuclear online as well, and can shut down the coal plants even faster.
This has been the recommendation from most experts for years now. If we wait to start until we're certain we have everything, we'll never start. Which is exactly what's happened, and why we're on target for total civilization collapse.
Solar and wind and any other renewable resource are good and should be considered
BUT there simply is not enough space in Europe to put enough of them to supply enough energy
Therefor other resources are required
And of all the options, nuclear is, for the moment, the least bad one.
@Girgias No one opened up any new coal mines! Nice propaganda there 😉
The mines were actually reduced. But decade old contracts that were renewed just in time before the last election sadly allowed some people to continue with earning money by polluting the atmosphere.
Renewed by the same people that stopped investments into renewable energies so now we "need" the coal.
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