471–480 of 619 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Western as in democratic, high income, economically prosperous, broadly supportive of human rights, etc.
A better term for that is "developed country".
We've seen already what harm this type of thinking (cost-effectiveness of health systems, worry about costs of closing travel) is causing thanks to the Covid19 example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It takes decades to build a new plant. No, it doesn't. It only takes a few years. What takes decades is resolving all the NIMBY lawsuits.
Vogtle, Summer, Flamanville 3, and Olkiluoto 3 weren't delayed by NIMBY lawsuits. They were delayed by construction screw ups. Nuclear power plants are complex, and if they are required to be constructed to high standards, delays and overruns are almost inevitable. A PV field, on the other hand, is much simpler, with much more inherent redundancy, and can tolerate construction mistakes without either safety implicati…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much can the provider shave off the load though? if i set my band between 21 and 23 degrees, is the reduction more than a few percent max? Doesn't seem to make a dent given the peak requirement when the majority of the people all shift locations (i.e. go home)?
This paper [1] says up to 8GW in Germany with full integration of heating, cooling and mobility. [1] https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S03062619150018...
Everyone is pro nuclear energy untill the government decides to set up a plant near your neighborhood.
Yet I have 3-4 reactor near my neighborhood and I'm not against. It is used for research, and produce Technetium-99m that is used for nuclear medicine for scintigraphy.
BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter. You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time y…
1. It's slightly less than 2x, not 10x. 2. Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy. 3. We'd be making actual progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever…
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epig...
Simply put, we often see the DNA as a kind of program which is executing on our body. But it is actually a program which, activates, inactivates, modifies and rewrites itself, so that the program code can reflect environmental conditions - especially during the growth of a fetus.
Radiation effects are very difficult to capture by statistics. A part of the reason is that cancer is not a rare illness, and any kind of cancer which might be induced by additional low doses of radiation will be covered by a lot of noise. But if these low doses of radiation affect a large number of individuals, radiation could still cause a lot of damage. What makes it even more difficult is that radiation, as it affects genetic control loops in the cell, has no distinct picture of its effects. It could be cancer, but it could also be effects on the central nervous system. Or circulatory diseases, which have been reported from Chernobyl as well. And what makes it more difficult of course is that it is not an area where one can make controlled experiments, so it is mostly science by observation. This is tricky because there are so many confounding factors. Even with something entirely plausible like, say, "smoking causes cancer", or "neonicotinoids probably affect bees and insects", it is hard to come to a conclusion.
There are also more concrete causes for concern. In Germany, following some irregularities at the Kruemmel nuclear plant, in the Wesermarsch area near Hamburg, it was found there was a cluster of leukemia cases in children - many times more than what was to be expected from the normal statistical case numbers. In the follow-up, the incidence of leukemia near all nuclear power stations was determined, and compared to other factors. A significantly higher incidence of leukemia was found, with no good explanation so far.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9728737/
http://www.crause.de/elbmarschleukaemie.html
https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leuk%C3%A4mieclus...
Some researchers also have found there is a correlation between the proportion of sexes of humans at birth, and radiation:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...
I need to point out that this is not established science - but it poses very important questions.
The traditional theory on effects of ionizing radiation can so far still not explain this. A possible hypothesis is that radiation disturbs the expression of the delicate self-modifying genetic program, which has disproportionately large effects during early development.
Another interesting observation is that in Chernobyl, insects seem more affected by radiation than vertebrates.
https://www.thoughtco.com/chernobyl-animal-mutations-4155348
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679916/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/chernobyls-bugs-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This paper [1] says up to 8GW in Germany with full integration of heating, cooling and mobility. [1] https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S03062619150018...
Found the paper but couldn't find the 8GW claim. Doesn't that seem very little considering germany is producing electricity in the 500 TWh region?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing to require). A nuclear plant can’t be built if the money to make it safe (as per some specification), insure against all health complications while it’s in operation, decommission it, clean up the site, securely dump all spent fuel, and return the…
> Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front Can you state in which country nuclear has to pay all the externalities up front? And if that country has any nuclear to begin with? (I know from Germany that the opposite was always a major point of criticism - the insurance nuclear plant operators need is limited, lots of the respon…