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.
Now Iām more depressed than when I posted this
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Why āgoing back to itā have we ever stopped?
I was going to say, coal remains around 1/3 of our electric generation worldwide (as of 2022): https://www.statista.com/statistics/269811/world-electricity-production-by-energy-source/
Coal canāt be reused, created, or otherwise obtained outside of mining. Until we remove our dependency on coal, mining will continue.
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.
Germany had plenty of nuclear energy but decided they wanted to shut them all down. Now they have to use coal and LNG.
Yes. And even before the Russia mess they were going to replace nuclear with LNG, which is still pretty bad.
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 All of the nuclear power generation has been replaced by wind and solar power generation.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.
If only 56% is renewable, what exactly was nuclear replaced with, if not fossil fuels?
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 isnāt a fuel source. Itās 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.
Why replace nuclear and not coal though, seems like a pretty stupid choice
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 āpretty stupidā.
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 BrunsbĆ¼ttel and KrĆ¼mmel 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.
Oil propaganda convinced millions of people that renewable energy sources like nuclear power or wind turbine were dangerous/ineffective.
Basically humans are stupid and donāt like change and rich people know and took advantage of it.
How is nuclear renewable?
Itās renewable the same way as the sun is: Not, but it will last for a really, really long time.
Because the amount of fuel used in a nuclear reactor is exponentially less than fossil fuels.
Thereās enough nuclear material on this planet to power nuclear reactors for tens of thousands of years.
Nuclear power is clean, efficient, and lasts for essentially ever
Itās close to ārenewableā but technically it should be called ālow carbon fuelā.
Thatās like saying air isnāt renewableā¦
There are processes on our planet renewing air. Iām not aware of similar processes for fission materials.
Itās renewable in the same way that solar is. Eventually the sun will die and solar wonāt work just like weāll eventually run out of fissible material.
whereās the carbon in nuclear?
The graphite neutron moderator.
The carbon expended in producing the fuel is a good example.
As with all power plants, wind turbines, solar panels, etc. there are carbon costs associated with the manufacturing, construction and transport. Remember that thereās a lot of steel involved.
Itās an interesting take. I guess the sun is not renewable either.
Is any practically infinite (in human scales) source of energy called renewable? I am hearing this for the first time.
You are asking The Last Question Itās one of those short stories that youāll read once and think about it occasionally for the next 20 years
I donāt understand this comment.
How is the sun not renewable?
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.
Because the sun is also a depleting source of energy. I question the definition of renewable thatās all.
I would have never considered nuclear energy being renewable, but I guess a similar argument could be made.
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.
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 itās not reacting any more so it just gradually cools down over billions more years until itās just a cool lump.
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.
Which is similar to the reasoning for calling fissile material renewable.
The sun will eventually explode.
Long after humanity has ceased to exist.
Iām quite certain we can manage to stop existing before nuclear fuel runs out as well.
Is lemmy just stupid?
Like seriously?
The sun is an infinite resource to humanity. This isnāt a debatable fact. Yet I seem to be receiving downvotes despite this.
The sun will outlive humanity a million times.
We can either harness itās energy and other sources like it or run out of energy.
It seems people just donāt like the word ārenewableā
That just makes those people stupid.
Lemmy at this point is the same as Reddit for quality of discussion.
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.
Now it seems thatās normal everywhereā¦
WELL AKSHUALLYā¦ā¦
We all drank the
oilkoolaidNuclear just leads to more war and destruction.
Youā¦canāt be serious right nowā¦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 wonāt 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 weāve already built hydro just about everywhere thatās 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.
Nah. Nuclear will prevent far more war.
nuclear power and nuclear bombs are the same.
As long as nuclear power exists, it will be used to pursue bombs.
Not to mention that nuclear power is incredibly unsafe and damaging
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 itās 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
You can make an explosive out of a pressure cooker, therefore everyone that buys a pressure cooker is a domestic terrorist! Youāre welcome FBI
Youāve bought the misinformation.
Even if you get rid of every nuclear power plant, governments will still pursue bombs.
By your logic we should stop using wind power because more people have died per kWh produced than nuclear https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
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.
Nuclear power plants used to be built from repurchased nuclear weapon factories so if anything it leads to less war and destruction
It never stopped. Hasnāt even really slowed down.
People need electricity. Renewables are great, but they donāt 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 wonāt take a real hit until the grid-scale energy storage problem is solved.
I think thatsā¦ 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 itās become less expensive to transport. Many coal plants have been converted, even. So as demand has risen, itās natural gas, not renewables, that is filling the gap.
what is preventing renewables from providing full generation need?
Cost, resources availability, and fluctuations in supply.
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 thatās in the future soā¦).
If we actually valued the climate as much as we ought to, switching fully to renewables would be a bargain.
We dontā really care about the economy, otherwise we wouldnāt be doing this boom-bust shit and weād have a better planned economy that would ensure there wasnāt 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 theyāre a bad alternative and theyāre definitely before than fossil fuel or coal, just needs to consider the cost and the impact of everything.
Mmm, no, no they dont. Solar panels are primarily made from silicon. Sand.
They also need
and some others rare-earth elements, as well as some platinum-group metals. The current photocell chemistry we use is quite complex.
Youve pulled this out your ass https://www.kloecknermetals.com/blog/a-guide-to-metals-for-solar-suppliers/#:~:text=The%20primary%20metals%20used%20in,wiring%20of%20the%20solar%20array.
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions
and even then, solar panels are only one part of the whole system, since the source of energy fluctuates significantly.
solar panels do not use these metals you are worried about
Time. People can see past the storage issue when itās not that big of an issue.
Interconnectors and curtailment at peak output are economically optimal. The renewable transition doesnāt seem to be slowing.
The renewable boom has only been going for about 10 years. Give it another 10-20 and the world will look drastically different in one generation.
Oh itll look different in 20 years alright, with how slow this is going.
Things are changing fast
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-energy?tab=chart&time=2002..2022&country=CHN~GBR~OWID_EUR~USA~AUS
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption?tab=chart&time=2009..latest&country=IND~CHN~AUS~USA~ZAF~OWID_WRL~OWID_EUR
thatās 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.
The us is is doing shit because their population doesnāt care and the management is poor.
But itās about exponentials and us is just far behind where it should be.
Coal us and fossil fuels is crashing in Europe and China might have hit peak petrol usage.
The S curve is well in its way.
Because it got cheaper than natural gas.
Nobody thinks itās clean, they just donāt care.
There are concerns outside of the list you wrote. For example:
And theyāre going for coal in some places because the political situation has made other reliable energy sources unavailable:
Outside of coal, nuclear, and natural gas, there arenāt many options for reliable sources of electricity.
Why are people so against nuclear? It doesnāt make any sense.
Nuclear is probably the safest form of power when proper protocols are put in place but itās hard to do that when the largest country in Europe (Russia, both by size and population) is currently in a war
Safer than wind and solar?
Oddly enough, itās safer than wind.
Solarās a little better in that regard, but all three are so much safer than any high-carbon sources of energy that any of them are great options.
I canāt look at their sources, so Iām going to believe them, buuut that is death per energy units. And I canāt argue that nuclear isnāt 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 arenāt 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 shouldnāt use it. Statistics like this just always bug me. Globally we receive more energy from wind than nuclear. It stands to reason that thereās more opportunity for deaths. Itās a 1 dimensional stat that can easily be manipulated. itās 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 donāt go up after being built. Turns out, most of those deaths come from maintenance. It does seem to vary by country, and I canāt find it broken down by country like I wanted. Itās 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 youāre right! Statistically, when including context, is definitely the least deadly energy source (if we ignore solar).
I believe so because of construction injuries but idk how well that scales
This. Nuclear safety requires active habit keeping and protocols, hence is dependent on social stability.
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.
Youāre right with Germanyās decision.
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 thatās used in Europeās 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 donāt have regulations which could minimize pollution
What is safe on Nuckear Power Plants?
Itās 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 plantā¦ This is not cheap, not safe and not sustainable.
I donāt trust the US Federal government to properly dispose of it. The waste from the Manhattan Project is buried in a landfill, a landfill thatās on fire.
The problem isnāt fire, itās 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. Thereās a mitigation plan in place and it looks like itās ultimately going to work, but itās very expensive and not something that anyone wants to see happen again.
I was referring to the Westlake Superfund site in St Louis right next to the Missouri river
Fair play. That said, please do look up Hanford. Itās way bigger than Westlake and is potentially a much bigger problem, though granted, Westlake is problematic as well.
Nuclear waste is not dangerous when handled correctly. Iād 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
3 Mile Island occurred while āThe China Syndromeā was in theaters.
Thatās 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.
Because of Godzilla is my best guess. CGI is so good these days people think itās real.
Fukushima and Chernobyl kinda stick out. Nuclear is safe until something goes catastrophically wrong. When that happens itās 100s and 1000s of years before you can move back in and have a stable genome.
Back then, it was scared of what you donāt 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 itās not 10,000% safe.
Yes yes, we know people donāt understand statistics.
Iām looking forward to seeing your Instagram snaps once you move back to pripyat permanently. Statistics never tell the full story.
Ah yes, the clusterfuck of the 20th century is the lode stone
Also Pripyat isnāt that bad.
If youāre referring to the nukes-are-statistically-safe argument, then to be fair, you also have to take into account the scale of their failures.
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 youād get a probability of harm. Then you could compare it numerically with other forms of energy to see which is the safest, statistically speaking.
Time to start dismantling wind turbines then? https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
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 itās a long project that will span multiple administrations, leading to low certainty of project completion. As long as itās a political wedge issue the support canāt be relied upon throughout the project.
Nuclear power is a bit like aviation. Statistically, traveling by airliner is the safest way to travel; itās 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 weāre 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.
Thereās also the concern that nuclear power programs are often related to manufacturing fuel for nuclear weapons. That thatās what the megalomaniacal assholes that are somehow āin chargeā actually want nuclear power plants for, and megawatts of electricity to run civilization with is a cute bonus I guess.
itās not about the power but about the waste. no one wants that in their backyard.
Itās been long established that coal produces more radioactive waste than nuclear power, and largely dumps it straight into the environment.
Somehow people think itās worse if you keep it contained rather than massively diluted. If we thought of it like we do radiation in coal waste, weād be happy to just dump it in the ocean.
Living in Finland, Iām proud of the fact that weāve got one of the first long-term/final storage sites for nuclear waste in the world. YIMBY.
You guys have that super deep underground storage site right?
Real talk, why canāt 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?
Itās 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. Itās not really just ground, but rock, making it even more secure and unaffected, especially given that the waste is first sealen into special containers.
The waste is vitrified, meaning that itās encased in whatās basically solid glass.
Basically to put something in the sun youāve 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.
Itās literally easier to launch something outside the solar system than launching it into the sun.
Didnāt 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 thatās solved and the whole world goes nuclear tomorrow, thereās huge doubts about there even being enough easily minable Uranium. Honestly solar and wind should be the way to go, but then thereās the intermittency issue. Which is an issue fossil fuels donāt have. At this point degrowth is desperately needed to avert the worst effects of global warming.
Because the ecofanatics focused on fighting nuclear power for 50 years instead of fighting fossile fuels.
Fast forward to now, renewable are not ready at all and they need fossile fuels anyway to provide steady energy. But geopolitics is making oil too expensive, so countries are mining coal again.
In brief, ecofanatics were stupid (and still are) and war in Ukraine.
Were they stupid or deliberately misled, propagandized and manipulated by the fossil fuel industry? Sure some of them were stupid, but I donāt think thatās the whole story.
Iām an eco-fanatic and I am extremely pro-nuclear.
Again? Did we stop?
It doesnāt look like anyone has mentioned metallurgical coal yet. Even if you donāt burn it for energy, the carbon in steel has to come from somewhere and thatās usually coke, which is coal that has been further pyrolised into a fairly pure carbon producing a byproduct of coal tar.
How much of that carbon is emitted Vs embedded in the steel matrix? 50%?
Iām not actually sure. I imagine it depends on how exactly itās mixed in.
The green alternative would be to go back to charcoal (or ābiocharā if you want to sound fancy), but it might be a bit more expensive.
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 itās just smaller. Itās also one of the places where we canāt 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.
You can make really pure charcoal if you use plant fiber, like waste coconut husks. I guess itās just a cost issue?
More than likely itās a cost issue, coal is artificially cheap thanks to several countries subsidizing the coal industry like Germany, USA and Australia.
Thereās 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 āproducing plant fiberā for the steel industry.
Coconut husks are free with the coconuts, which is why I mentioned them. Without explicitly breaking out my highschool chemistry, Iām guessing you get about a third the mass of carbon from cellulose.
If itās a whole 7% of the coal mined, though, that is a pretty significant amount. I assume weāll 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.
So thatās where the name coke comes from! TIL!
Coal is just Cola with the letters swapped around.
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.
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:
Donāt 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 donāt have at the moment.
The article you linked isnāt very convincing in my opinion. āWe could shut down our nuclear reactors because France has plenty of nuclear reactorsā doesnāt explain why the switch to coal would be an advantage. The article also admits that in the winter the carbon intensive coal plants would need to switch on to supply power (but that happened not to be necessary last time).
Nuclear is expensive but not inherently more so than coal. Plants have become more expensive because of the nuclear scare in the 80s and 90s, but theyāre still cost effective today.
The anti nuclear propaganda from the left is as strong as the anti solar propaganda from the right. I think everyone sensible agrees that solar and wind energy are the future, but grid storage is ineffective to this day and electricity demand will only go up. The fact Germany is
constructing newreactivating decommissioned coal plants proves that.The best moment to start building a new nuclear power plant was ten years ago. The next best moment is right now. I donāt see why we should accept the carbon footprint and toxic, radioactive exhaust of coal plants, especially for how little electricity were getting out of them in exchange.
Germany has not build any new coal plants. At least not in the last five years.
Edit: Why are people down voting a factual statement? Go ahead and provide better info if you got it.
If hasnāt constructed any new ones, but it has reactivated plants that were previously shut down. I suppose that means youāre right, but it also means the coal plants that have been activated are using older environmental norms, so Iām not sure if thatās an improvement.
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.
There is no ānuclear lobbyā stop making shit up. Nuclear isnāt profitable, that is why we donāt have it. If itās not profitable, there will be no industry lobby pushing for it. The fact that it isnāt profitable shouldnāt matter. I care about the environment and if Capitalism canāt extract profit without destroying the environment (it canāt) then we need to stop evaluating infrastructure through a Capitalist lens.
Renewables are great until the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing.
And thatās more likely than enriched Uranium becoming unavailable or locally unobtainable?
If you havenāt 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.
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.
Itās not a great solution, but without Nordstream, thereās really not much else more sensible to do right now, just to make the transition.
what makes nuclear energy a bad option?
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.
SMR (small modular reactors) are looking like they could become the next hip thing in nuclear power tech.
Basically a lot lower initial investment and offer a lot more flexibility.
Linky link
The link has a lot of info on them
I really donāt see that as a good progression. We want to focus on renewables because thatās the most sustainable way to go. Why go back to nuclear again?
That said if you are saying thatās where the industry is moving even though thatās probably not the best approach, fair enough. My opinion has zero effect on the industry.
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A single new reactor takes decades to build and costs billions. Investing in solar, wind, the grid and storage instead will generate more energy, faster, and for less.
Itās not āinstead ofā.
Youāre supposed to run nuclear along side renewables. Opposed to running fossile fuels alongside renewables. Either way, something has be running besides renewables.
But thatās literally what youāre gonna have to do for 20+ years if you decide to go both ways and also build new nuclear plants. Put all your budget into renewables at once and you instantly cut down on the fossil fuel youād otherwise burn while waiting for your reactor to go online, all while youāre saving money from the cheap energy yield which you can reinvest into more renewables or storage R&D to eventually overcome the requirement to run something alongside it.
No 100% renewables is viable. You donāt need anything running beside it.
I donāt necessarily agree, but the usual arguments against are cost, lead time, and waste.
50+ years of fear from fossil fuel company propaganda.
āBuT thE WaSTe diSPoSaL PrObLEmā
Meanwhile coal:
āOh that thing thatās more radioactive than nuclear waste? Yeah, just toss it in the air. Who caresā
Itās just nuclear phobia.
Itās literally the second safest form of energy production we have only behind solar.
Itās literally safer than wind power.
Yeah thereās been a few disasters with older reactor designs or reactors that were put where they shouldnāt have been, but even with those itās still incredibly safe.
Fantastic. Weāre doomed
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It didnāt, at least not in the way you think. The headlines of the past few days show the aftermath of the last decades: industry contracts that were made in the last century and the political heritage of a generation of politicians who are no longer in power.
Coal is being phased out and thatās not changing. It cannot change substantially anyway; there is only so much coal in the gound. Recent political decisions moved to keep most of it there. For technological, political, economical and industry related reasons this wonāt be a fast process unfortunately.
One of the roadblocks of our transition to a sustainable energy supply is how much money (and in our capitalisic society, therefore, power) the industry itself holds. Coal lobbies will work hard for you not to think about them too much. Nuclear lobbies will work hard for you to blame those pesky environmentalists. A game of distraction and blame shifting. This thread is a good example of how well itās working.
Our resources are limited. This is true for good old planet earth as well as our societies. We only have so much money, time, and workforce to manage this transition. And as much as Iād love to wake up tomorrow to a world with PVC on every roof, a windmill on every field, and decentralised storage in every town center, this is just not realistic overnight. Weāll have to live with the fact of our limited resources and divert as much as possible of them towards such a future. (And btw, putting billions of dollars in money, time, and workforce towards a reactor that will start working in 10-30 years is not the way to do this, as much as the nuclear lobby would like you to think that.)
Climate change āloomingā? Dude, itās already here.
Oh good, letās quibble about semantics instead of actually discussing the meat of the problem.
First time online? But yes itās annoying.
Itās not about semantics. Itās abut the fact that itās already too late and people are still not doing anything. Why do people still mind coal? Because our civilization is not ready to deal with climate change. Nothing serious will be done about it.
Meat? I ā¦ Iām vegan!
/s
Sad reality people doesnt want to realise/acknowledgeā¦
Over here (Australia) we never stopped. Our coal lobby is simply too influential with our government.
In my country, because of a decades long fearmongering and disinfomation campaing that destoyed the nuclear energy industry. So now weāre stucked with coal to keep the power running at night and during winter.
Letās 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 weāre 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.
Nuclear wonāt run out of fuel. But if renewable are so good, why are so many countries mining coal?
Oor we can do both so that in the middle of winter when thereās 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.
Australia and Canada both have very large amounts of nuclear fuel that are currently unused because of short-sighted comments like this.
False information. There is enough fissionable material to last humans 10s of thousands of years.
Do you all have a source for that?
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
Several other studies estimate 90 thousand years. All of this is Uranium alone.
I donāt 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, societyās 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 themā¦
Honestly, if weāre gonna spend decades on clean energy megaprojects, wouldnāt 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?
You think mining for solar panels is free or something?
Out in space, itāll 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 itād be a better investment than nuclear and all of its political problems.
And the feddit.de misinformation brigade has arrived.
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.
Why are you pro-coal?
i am pro renewables. It is the pro nuclear faction that tends to be pro coal too, just that they pretend they arenāt. 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 isnāt enough water to cool them anymore.
Funny, so do I.
Anyway, believe that ābeing pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putinā 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 argumentsā¦ No suprise you cannot discuss things, because you donāt want a discussion in the first place.
Itās been discussed to death, check the most recent thread about Scholzās comment on !worldnews@lemmy.ml if you want to read through all of the discussion AGAIN.
But you are right. Iām not willing to have a discussion about it with you. Just like I wouldnāt want to have a discussion about astronomy with a flat earther.
Your ānuclear = support russiaā comment made it very clear where you stand on the issue and on what basis. So discussion is entirly pointless.
But it wasnāt really meant as a personal attack against you, if that comforts you. Itās 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.
Or you could just make deals with Canada or Australia instead.
The Russian supply problem is a very badly made up stawman if you think about it for more than 15 seconds.
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 stableā¦ Oh wait shit, that supply is also at risk since there was a coup in Niger just 6 weeks ago.
what was that Scholzās comment thread again? The community doesnāt list anything from Scholz for me.
https://feddit.ch/post/797652?scrollToComments=true
Theyāre not wrong, I think initial estimates was 500 years, but that will change as more reactors get built.
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 thatās just Uranium, other fuels can be explored.
Unfortunately, itās 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 donāt make it viable with current technology; they would have to run at a huge financial loss.
As for Uranium for sea-water ā 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 ā 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, thatās 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.
Iām not anti-nuclear, nor am I saying thereās 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, itās basically science fiction. I donāt think itās 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 ā but we didnāt.
Source for estimates: āIs Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?ā, Prof. D. Abbott, Proceedings of the IEEE. Itās 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, Iām 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, youād see Iām pro-nuclear, and even more pro-renewables.
Why donāt 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. Itās not valid.
Hint: if you ever find yourself arguing with āpeople like youā¦ā ā youāve lost the argument. Try dropping the right-wing knee-jerk rhetoric and start thinking.
Well, nuclear energy is expensive anyways and the amount of uranium on this world seems quite limited.
Itās just not the technology of the future. In the long term we should use regenerative energies that are way cheaper.
Right, but thatās 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 Iām qualified to have an opinion on, but Iām credibly informed that we might at least want to give it a serious look.
At one point in the future Iām 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.
Nuclear is no more expensive than renewable. The amount of uranium is limited, but itās not the only fuel for nuclear.
Sure it is. The World nuclear status report 2021 for example says itās five times more expensive than wind energy.
And sure there are other fuels for nuclear. But I think most of them are even more limited?!
The paper doesnāt 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 doesnāt consider batteries.
Unless the document talks about that, please point me to the right chapter then.
Damn. I shouldnāt have linked auch a long PDF. What are you talking about? Iām referring to the diagram (and text) on page 293. The annual Levelized Cost Of Energy.
Itās not only calculated on sunny days. They take the annual energy output for the calculation. Availability and everything included or these numbers wouldnāt make any sense.
And yes, we need batteries. But the nuclear plants also need other (faster) plants alongside. And this match isnāt 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 donāt 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 canāt use that as an argument and simultaneously argue about using thorium which large scale deployments are still hypothetical.
And I donāt think those numbers are 500% off. You can double some cost and were only at 200%. And theyāre not complete speculation. They took the actual numbers of the previous year. And the years before that. These numbers are the āactual historyā.
Pardon? Norway? New Zealand? Switzerland? Iceland? Sweden? Countless others I probably forgot because Iām bad at geography? The USA and China, Philippines, Indonesia all have major āvariable renewableā. Thousands and thousands of megawatts of energy are generated this way as of today. Then there is biomass if youāre geologically not that favored by nature, but I barely know anything about that. And who says we canāt use the sun and wind? Of course we can also use those.
What proportion of those countriesā energy is renewable? Because thatās the big problem: when renewable are less than 50% of your energy, you can balance the load with the rest ; when itās 80%, itās a whole different story. No country has the most of its energy from renewables, and thus we donāt know if it can even work over time, itās not proven. The scale matters. Producing a prototype is not the same as the whole industrial thing. Thatās exactly whatās 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 thatās 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 isnāt 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? Iām pretty sure there isnāt 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.
Iām sorry. Letās end the argument here. We wonāt agree. Some of your points are valid, most of them are plainly wrong or donāt contribute.
Yes, this page shows there are currently 4 countries above your arbitrary 80% demonstrating exactly that.
Yes. See above.
Weāve already established countries like Germany with close to 50% renewable arenāt a prototype. Iāve given countless other examples.
then donāt do it.
Youāre sure nuclear is without issues nowadays?
Thatās why we shouldnāt only do 100% of those. Iāve explained several alternatives and you can store and transport energy across the continent.
We donāt focus on batteries and solar. We need a diverse mix. In fact we donāt need batteries at all, we need energy storage. But this doesnāt have to be batteries. Same applies to solar. Iām 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?
Well, how do you do it? Nuclear also is generating a relatively constant amount of energy. Day and night, 24/7. Nuclear also doesnāt 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 weāre only at 70% renewable tomorrow itās better than 20%. It is a process. We donāt 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 donāt cling to old technology just for the sake of it.
Letās scrap solar for the sake of this discussion. Letās 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 donāt understand. Windmills have been around for centuries. As have been generators. Iām 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. Theyāre also in your nuclear plant. Can you explain all this away?
As is everything that made some progress. My computer is faster and better in most aspects than the one I had a decade ago.
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 isnāt 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. Iām not an expert on Spain.
Youāre right with your distinction between theory and the real world. What we should do isnāt always what we do (or did). When someone does something stupid, it doesnāt automatically make it right or wrong. But youāre 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 donāt say this is easy or possible without changes to the energy grid, society or whatever. And I donāt 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%. Thatās not my argument. My argument is, if itās 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? Weāve 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, itās unlikely it will improve so much in its current form that itāll become better than renewable anyways. Iād 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. Iām all for it. Iām 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, itās people who are against nuclear.
Iām 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 isnāt the case any more. We have massive problems finding a final storage repository, and for several reasons. Weāve tried for decades. My prediction is that itāll 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 didnāt 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 theyāre basically only paying for operation, I can tell, why this looks feasable for people and nobody believes the actual numbers.
And itās a bridge technology anyways. Thereās 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, Iām okay if we donāt switch off those existing plants before theyāre due. Theyāre 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. Donāt throw more billions and billions at yesterdays technology and research in blind hope that youāll be able to bridge that gap somehow. Itās not competetive as of today. And youāll need more and more money to stay in business in the future.
I donāt 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 donāt 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 itās a money-losing business for the people. And renewable would be an investment into their future. The actual numbers tell the same story. So Iām more against stupid and expensive choices, than against nuclear specifically.
I want to pay for something that works. Thatās 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 doesnāt 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, thatās 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 isnāt that smart. These two donāt complement each other. Nuclear doesnāt ābalance outā 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. Youād need almost the same energy storage facilities youād need without nuclear being in the mix. Itās a waste. And I donāt know who listened to too much propaganda. If the studies and numbers tell a different story, maybe reflect a bit on your previous knowledge. Iāve 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 isnāt true (anymore).
And youāre 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 isnāt an investment, thatās a liability. On the other hand, a wind farm is an investment.
(Sorry. I donāt want to argue with you specifically. Iām 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. Weāre now in that situation and we canāt 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 whatās 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. Weāre 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.
Thatās hard facts. The only renewable energy thatās 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.
Where do you get these numbers?
Thorium is one of the most abundant material on earth. Unlike lithium for example.
Yeah. But the technology is - at this point - more sci-fi than anything else. Probably nothing we need to worry about in the next few years.
And you still need to mine some non-renewable resource. Itās still nuclear and produces waste. And it seems super expensive.
There are working thorium reactor for 50 years or something. Hardly sci-fy.
Renewables need batteries to work. Which needs lithium.
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 isnāt blowing. Build more then enough and if you got excess energy, maybe make some hydrogen.
Have your devices and industry āsmartā so it draws less power when thereās less supply.
You really donāt need to do everything with ānormalā batteries like in a smartphone.
The āworkingā thorium reactors are for research. They donāt generate energy. At least if weāre speaking about generating energy for a whole country. The planned thorium reactors of the next many years also donāt 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, itās not impossible. Itās just lots of very expensive work left to do.
Thorium reactor that contribute to the power grid is as much sci-fy as all the technologies you describe to have a working renewable energy grid.
Meanwhile there are whole countries powered from nuclear energy, and switching to thorium makes no difference for the grid itself.
Finally if ecofanatics didnāt shut down or sabotage research on thorium reactors we would be closer from a working tech.
Well you didnāt google any of that.
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.
Thatās also what I believed. But turns out nuclear is the most expensive kind of energy.
Hereās a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k
(Seriously, watch it)
The high cost is largely explained by the fact that thereās no āstandard modelā for nuclear power plants but instead theyāre all designed and built from scratch which can make them really expensive. Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland is the worldās 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 isnāt some inherent probem about nuclear power itself but rather the way we do it. It doesnāt need to be that expensive.
Yeah, Iām 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 ābut we choose to build it more expensive than it needs to beā.
Sure theoretically this might not be an inherent problem. But the same applies to renewable. Iām 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 itās 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 efficiencyā¦ Maybe thereās something to itā¦
And apart from that. Iād argue that there are some inherent problems. For example mega-projects having issues with their budget. Thatās 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 itās a combination of factors. But Iād 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 donāt choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be. Itās 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 isnāt 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 itās produced for you in real time. Wind doesnāt blow and sun doesnāt shine according to how much electricity is needed at each moment. Finland produces all its electricity basically by hydro, wind and nuclear power. When itās windy we have excess electricity and the prices drops to negative and we got to sell it abroad but when itās calm the opposite is true. This wouldnāt be the case if we could somehow store that excess energy.
Weāre 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 wouldnāt be fair.
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 arenāt 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 locationā¦ You can put those storage facilities close to energy generation or close to the consumer. And as supply and demand changes prices, itās 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 Iād 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 havenāt 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 itās still unclear it thatās going to happen.
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It will slow when nuclear is the main energy source, especially in the United States (its currently ~47%)
Nuclear can also get recycled, and for the average American, the actual waste that can no longer be recycled is about a soda can (standard 12 ounce can)
Imo, the US needs to work toward nuclear usage being 90-95% instead of using coal. Thereās still a need for natural gas but it can be minimized
Why? Wind and solar are cheaper, faster to build and donāt produce toxic waste. They can easily cover most of the energy needs. Or technically all of it, once you start using any overcapacity for hydrogen production (which is needed for carbon neutrality anyways).
The focus on hydrogen is a trick by fossil fuel companies. The most efficient way we currently have to generate hydrogen for a theoretical hydrogen based grid is through methane. The playbook is quite simple: convince everyone that hydrogen is clean, which in itself is true, then use the cost effectiveness of subsided fossil fuels to outcompete renewable hydrogen production.
We still need something for winter nights without wind, and renewables arenāt cutting it everywhere. Iām not saying many coal plants could easily be replaced by renewable power sources, but without a few nuclear plants here or there weāll never be able to get rid of them.
Here in Texas, we use wind and solar a lot. Thatās why in 2021 when it froze, we had zero power. The wind turbines were seized from the freeze and snow covered the solar panels. We had dropped our coal production until we had to suddenly go to 100% utilization.
And with it being texas and hardly snowing, we donāt have infrastructure in place for the roads. Thereās no snow plows, road salt, tire chains, etcā¦
I think that was propaganda.
The shitty electrical grid and the gas plants that couldnāt operate in winter failed. Wind power prevented worse blackouts as they kept working.
The fuel is cheap. Itās the reactors are consistently over budget. Westinghouse Electric is bankrupt because of the last nuke they built.
Itās never really stopped.
But from the actions of those in power it seems theyāre just plowing through climate change and making money whilst they can. Imagine the decision is weāre fucked anyway so letās get mine whilst I can and see if it helps me survive.
Because renewable energy and nuclear energy require significant capital investment, which the private sector and governments in the age of āfiscal disciplineā are not willing to make.
Renewables (solar and wind) are actually the cheapest forms of electricity generation (see Lazardās Levelized Cost of Energy report). This has been true since at least the 2016 version of the report, and it is true even when the cost of generation is not subsidized with government funding.
This is why Texas is investing so much in building new wind turbines, even though theyāre not politically inclined toward āgreen energyā - the cost per MWh is lowest.
This is also affecting nuclear power projects. The cost of wind and solar has dropped to the point where building new nuclear power plants looks financially irresponsible.
yea but the report also mentions energy storage which is necessary for solar and wind because of its intermittent nature.
also cheaper electricity means potentially less profit. why would private sector want that?
electricity market must be destroyed and energy must be exclusively public sector
Can we justā¦ Cull all old people, start fresh? Make some new laws that arenāt based on ideologies from the year 1910?
Old people arenāt really the problem, capitalists are
Iām going to assume that youāre being facetious when you talk about ācullingā them (otherwise thatās pretty concerning). many old people are annoying, many of them are downright hostile to any progress whatsoever, but they, and the viewpoints they hold, are the symptoms of a much larger problem.