161–166 of 166 posts
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At least you can say that Germany kickstarted mass manufacturing of PV modules. So even if Germany itself didn't benefit, everybody else did. Including Chinese manufacturers. So I'd argue that the money was well invested.
and how are these PV users going to cover their baseload?
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I'll be convinced when I'll start to see people campaigning for building storage facilities in their neighbourhoods, rather than generic claims that storage facilities are as safe as it can be.
That's a pretty strange statement. Lots of industrial facilities meet very high standards of safety, say for instance battery and electric vehicle factories, yet we still place them out in the desert? Nobody is campaigning to build those in their neighbourhoods?
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We haven't solved the 'waste problem'. 1) Long term storage has some existential risks. Over very long time horizons, these risks become real. 2) Transportation, processing and storage: all of this operational stuff is totally ripe for accidents.
What's the existential risk? The absolute worst case that I can imagine is that all the waste somehow ends up in the ground water. That would be extremely bad, but localized to the area where the waste is stored.
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It's not so much about money, the implication is that making solar panels costs some amount of resources that according to the parent, could possibly be spent in better ways. The money just represents, indirectly, the amount of resources.
The question is, what's the limiting factor: Availability of manpower, natural resources, etc, or 'merely' the money to pay for them? The latter is an artificial constraint. Take nuclear fusion as an example: Supposedly, this is a case where the projected investments necessary to go from theory to practice just haven't been made. With return of investment only anticipated in the far-off future, it was decided that th…
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They blow up in the sense of a dirty bomb. That's a lot worse. It would be great if NPPs just blew up in a nuclear explosion! We could safely use them by making the blast radius a forbidden zone.
> They blow up in the sense of a dirty bomb. That's a lot worse. It would be great if NPPs just blew up in a nuclear explosion! We could safely use them by making the blast radius a forbidden zone. I do not know how to respond politely to such a ridiculous statement.
To clarify: “great” is no absolute, an NPP that generates electricity is obviously better than one that explodes. It also depends on the size of the explosion. A Hiroshima-class explosion would be acceptable, the one of a tsar bomb might not be. Also an NPP that fails like that would still kill its operators and perhaps some unlucky farmers. But compared to the actual worst case, that's negligible.
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What's the existential risk? The absolute worst case that I can imagine is that all the waste somehow ends up in the ground water. That would be extremely bad, but localized to the area where the waste is stored.
Existential is as you mentioned: ground water pollution of the entire NE seaboard. Terrorist dirty bomb in NYC that affects 30 million people as the weather carries particles etc.
Again, waste storage is incredibly secure and safe. It wouldn't leech into the water. Nuclear subs have sank into the ocean, and, surprise, there wasn't a global disaster.