Nuclear or nothing, because with nuclear you need nothing else.
Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
121–130 of 166 posts
Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear plants do not "blow up". This is FUD, pure and simple. People are unreasonably scared of nuclear energy, and we might lose a planet because of this. For real data on how dangerous nuclear energy is, please look at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Well, there actually is some unreasonable view on nuclear. Especially in Germany. Doesn't change the fact that long term we should get rid of it. The storage of the waste is just to tricky and when not if something goes wrong we talk about serious damage. That we should IMHO get rid of coal earlier isn't exclusive, so.
Yes long term we should get rid of it (for fusion), but in short term the priority is climate change. And nuclear fision is a tremendous asset for climate change. There are still huge challenge of course, and we are unfortunately not at all on course to tackle them, but depriving ourselves of nuclear is only going to make things worse.
Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> CO2 is not the only thing that counts. In terms of existential threats to human life as we know it, it is. The choices aren't "renewables and nuclear" or "renewables and ponies and magical unicorns." The choice is what proportion of energy do we want from nuclear vs renewables vs fossil fuels. The best option is reducing energy requirements. After that, though, a large proportion of every unit of nuclear energy you…
Energiewende is no ponies and magical unicorns, it is a quite well thought out system to about zero CO2 ouput in 2050 (except some industries like steel production where fossils will be needed for some time to come until better chemical processes are found). 2050 is not the number that "Fridays for future" want to hear, but still ambitious enough to really make a difference. A lot of new infrastructure has to be buil…
No it is not zero CO2 output in 2050 but about 65% reduction only, or 80% if a 25% reduction of electricity consumption is achieved. This is 1) too late, 2) not even on par with France's electricity C02 production.
And a nuclear accident would not involve closing the whole country, it would involve an exclusion zone of 10-20 km (Fukushima exclusion zone is 20km, but it include zones where the residue radioactivity is <50 mSievert, way less than some natural radioactive places), a whole lot of economic damage (but negligible compared to climate change), and between 0 and (at worst) a few thousand deaths.
Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
#124The Energiewende is actually one of the reasons I still live in Germany: I want to see how it happens. It is stuff that our grandchildren will be proud of. And by the way, private energy consumption is heavily taxed (for a good reason), yet energy hungry industries are exempt from it. And they feel the effect: because of the growing effect of the renewable energies, they now pay one of the lowest electricity prices i…
> It is stuff that our grandchildren will be proud of. The French can be proud today, consuming electricity with 1/6 of the carbon footprint per kWh, compared to electricity in Germany. And paying half the price, too, compared to what electricity costs in Germany. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136192091...
Not only that but their move to renewables will be more hassle free as they have enough base load power to compensate for lack of wind and sun, more shoreline and sunnier areas south of Bordeaux.
Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear plants do not "blow up", at least not the ones that are built after Chernobyl. Please stop spreading FUD.
Why do you keep posting this lie? Chernobyl's unit 4 was destroyed by an explosion. Fukushima had multiple explosions that destroyed the upper levels of reactor buildings, and ruptured the containment of unit 2. During the three mile island accident there were several days where engineers were sweating bullets because there was a hydrogen gas bubble at the top of the pressure vessel, and they were afraid it would exp…
They blow up just like a pressure cooker blows up. If we build an unpressurized reactor with unflammable coolant, nothing ever blows up.
Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you keep posting this lie? Chernobyl's unit 4 was destroyed by an explosion. Fukushima had multiple explosions that destroyed the upper levels of reactor buildings, and ruptured the containment of unit 2. During the three mile island accident there were several days where engineers were sweating bullets because there was a hydrogen gas bubble at the top of the pressure vessel, and they were afraid it would exp…
They do not blow up in the sense of a nuclear explosion. It's a normal explosion. With normal consequences.
When you blow up a bunch of radioactive material in a large steam explosion you get widespread contamination from fallout and a massive cleanup necessary to recover the scattered material, as well as dealing with the melted core material. That's not "normal".
Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept of `baseload' is entirely a creation of the system of extremely large thermal plants that are essentially a path-dependent outcome of the electric grid's development. There is no intrinsic usefulness in the concept. In other words it would be good to stop acting as though the only possible grid is one that looks exactly like the one that was developed in the early 1900's. There are many other arrangements…
well we certaintly aren't moving towards that in Germany so I wonder where they actually are and what that looks like in reality. If everyone else is also just going to burn more coal than ever before all of this is nothing but a very expensive step backwards.
What makes you say that? Take a look at the summary in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19913933
That looks like progress to me. Why do you say "everyone else is just going to burn more coal?"
Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
While there are some pretty huge electrical links in place already, there is a large political and public resistance towards expanding this. For the public, they know that the endgame is more expensive electricity. No good. For local industry, it basically amounts to taking the increasingly large competitive advantage they have of cheap, low emission electricity and just giving it away to Europe.
The generation capacity will idle otherwise. It's probably better to sell the electricity for cheap than let the capacity idle to the point where it rusts and becomes useless.
Oh, it won't idle, no worries. They're running as hard as they can. We use the 'leccy to produce the world's cleanest aluminium, nickel, silicon etc. These industries are what drove construction of the hydroelectric plants in the first place.
People are talking maybe we'll build the next gigafactory for batteries here. There is no shortage of electrochemical industries hungry for that power, and that green image.
Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe I remember from my masters that there are plans (underway? to be? already in place?) to actually connect the countries. Would be great if that worked out.
You probably think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORD.LINK ? Building is in progress.
IIRC one issue of NorGer(a similar cable) was that German energy law prefers domestic plants over imported electricity.
This of course is a huge risk to investors of submarine cables and was an obstacle in getting it built.
Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
#130It's very popular to criticize the Energiewende as a failure because it apparently failed to reduce CO2 emmissions of the whole country. And of course, it's true that Germany could have had greater reductions if nuclear was kept alive instead of coal. But the Energiewende actually changed Germany. Suddenly everywhere you go you have solar panel farms and many houses have them on their roofs and there are wind turbine…
I also get a warm fuzzy feeling from solar panels and wind farms. But we are losing our planet to climate change, and warm fuzzy feelings do not help. Lowering CO2 emissions does. Germany could have had zero CO2 emissions by now, if money were invested into nuclear instead of the current efforts. The declaration to move away from nuclear power was misguided and will be regarded as a huge error in the future.
Feelings and impressions are more important than you think. Stock markets for example are not perfect but instead also reflect human perception: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reflexivity.asp
This deal requires investment at the start but will pay off in the end by lower costs caused by climate change. So what is holding people back? Their perception. They feel like they will die before the impacts will happen. They feel like nobody is doing anything about it so why should they be the first? Humans are built in a way that joining an existing movement is easy but starting one is hard. Germany helped getting the start of the s-curve going.