The green lobby would rather have a new coal plant (with no pollution control at all) than a nuclear power plant.
There are no new coal plants being built in the US.
We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal
381–390 of 397 posts
Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but there's also the mining and purification of silicon to produce solar power. Same with the mining and purification of steel and aluminum to produce windmills. The energy density of uranium is much, much greater than all of the alternatives. It's is, literally, a million times more energy dense than natural gas and about two million times more energy dense than coal. You only need to mine a little bit of fuel…
> Sure, but there's also the mining and purification of silicon to produce solar power. Same with the mining and purification of steel and aluminum to produce windmills. But a lot of those materials are renewable, or becoming more renewable. Most/all materials are used in dozens of other things that are essential to modern society, so investing in making mining cleaner and making recycling more efficient and cheaper…
Nuclear fuel can also be recycled.
Again, the energy density of fission is such that producing the same amoy of energy results in orders of magnitude less waste. Decommissioning nuclear plants doesn't change this figure.
Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal
#383First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also…
We're killing our planet because we externalise cost. CO2, deforestation, habitat destruction, species extinction, overfishing, ocean pollution are proximate problems arising from that deeper ultimate problem. Nuclear is an adequate response to the proximate problem of global heating, it the worst possible response to ultimate problem of externalising cost. To advocate nuclear in good faith it is essential to acknowl…
Nuclear also externalizes cost -- to future generations, for thousands of years.
Wave energy, wind and solar is different though.
> ... Nuclear is an adequate response to the proximate problem of global heating ...
It's not the only way -- what about heavier taxes for energy from burning oil and coal.
But I guess people like their cars and getting stuck in the daily 08:00 traffic jams too much. Who wants trains or buses or bikes or running shoes.
Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
AOC can claim any position she wants, but the Green New Deal says (page 7, lines 6-9 as linked in another post) says "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources". That's a clear anti-nuclear stance.
Following that logic, then Solar Panels are off the table. They don't last forever and their waste is not environmentally friendly. Mining the material to produce them also creates a large amount of greenhouse gasses.
> [solar panels] creates a large amount of greenhouse gasses.
Sounds misleading to me. A quick websearch and I found that currently they seem to be 10 x better than oil and coal etc:
> Making solar or photovoltaic cells requires potentially toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium. It even produces greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that contribute to global warming. Still, the researchers found that if people switched from conventional fossil fuel-burning power plants to solar cells, air pollution would be cut by roughly 90 percent. Although manufacturing solar cells requires heavy metals, the researchers noted that coal and oil also contain heavy metals, which get released during combustion
https://www.livescience.com/2324-solar-power-greenhouse-emis...
> Mining the material to produce them ...
I think everything is off the table then, also your laptop or tablet -- websearch for "minerals laptop environment" for example.
It seems you don't like solar panels?
Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet even the most stable western democracies do it often enough to make investors consider nuclear power plans too risky - not because of the technology but because of political risk. For instance here in Finland companies that invested in nuclear made good profit, because of not having to pay costs related to carbon offsets. Politicians saw the profits, considered them "windfall" and taxed them away. So why would yo…
> For instance here in Finland companies that invested in nuclear made good profit, because of not having to pay costs related to carbon offsets. Politicians saw the profits, considered them "windfall" and taxed them away. Can you please expand on this a bit? Did they the change the law to tax something that was previously un-taxed? Did they tax it at an effective 100% rate so all the benefit would go to the state an…
Yes I wonder that me too, and also, what does "considered them windfall" mean? Not a native speaker, sorry
It means the politicians looked at the profits they could get from the taxes, as apples and fruit that had fallen from the trees (because of a wind), and they could pick it up with no effort?
Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal
#386We might want new nucelar power plants for industrial centers. But what we certainly shouldn't be doing is using them as an excuse to propagate the idea of a centralized grid of power authorities distributing power nationally or globally. Centralized grids are incredibly expensive, difficult to manage, and introduce single points of failure in the physical and information domains. We should be doing everything we can…
Folks also get so worked up about highly efficient new renewable power sources that they forget about transit and storage. I don't know about the situation today, but for years the massive wind farms on Tehachapi weren't even connected to the grid. Even after PG&E bought the electricity to meet their renewables quota, it was cheaper to waste it than to build the transmission infrastructure. Renewables have the invers…
Transmission on a local level is a MUCH easier problem to solve. Storage on a local level is plummetting in price and rising in efficiency; while also reducing its reliance in rare minerals.
PG&E's failures should show that running one big statewide grid is so difficult and expensive it shouldn't be done. We should reclaim to copper and use the savings to make communities self sufficient, which for many small communities is entirely possible
Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
A "guarantee" from the state is worth a lot less than face value as it can simply legislate away that guarantee.
Stable governments don’t do this because it calls into question all the other agreements they have made.
> Stable governments
Are there any stable governments, when the one with the most money can buy Twitter and FB ads, or a foreign country can setup a troll army of internet manipulators, and get to choose the president?
How long is the, say, 2 x return-of-money-invested, for a nuclear plant, compared to how often elections happen
Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Following that logic, then Solar Panels are off the table. They don't last forever and their waste is not environmentally friendly. Mining the material to produce them also creates a large amount of greenhouse gasses.
> [solar panels] creates a large amount of greenhouse gasses. Sounds misleading to me. A quick websearch and I found that currently they seem to be 10 x better than oil and coal etc: > Making solar or photovoltaic cells requires potentially toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium. It even produces greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that contribute to global warming. Still, the researchers found th…
It seems you don't like solar panels?
I never said that. I'm saying that based on AOC's 100% plan, pretty much everything is off the table, meaning that the plan needs to be revised. I plan to have 30kw of solar panels in my next home and a large collection of LifePo4 batteries that also have a dependency on strip mining. I also plan to do some of my own mining (drilling, blasting) for zinc and silver.
Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why impractical??? Whith a diversified mix, energy efficiency, a big market for demand response, thermal storage, and a bit of electrical storage, there is no problem with current technologies. Coming tech could decrease the cost and make it easier to implement. And nuclear is much much more expensive than most renewable now ( https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ )
> thermal storage, and a bit of electrical storage I'll acknowledge that renewable generation costs have been falling at an impressive rate. However you're understating the problem for storage. Besides cost, there are far more complex regulatory and political hurdles. Just read about the public response to "smart meters" when they were proposed a while back. We'll likely have price-competitive storage technology by t…
Sure it is not easy, but price-competitive (cheap renewable + some cost to manage intermittence) technologies are ready
Political hurdles... what is easier ? - Saying let's have reltively cheap 100% renewable energy that create a lot of job - Let's have super expensive nuclear energy, there are risk but those risk are small
Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Great, you regurgitated all the standard talking points. Have a pat on the head. Again, I suggest you adjust your tone, as site rules are pretty clear. > Except even if all of that were true (which it isn't) [citation needed], as of course, I provided mine. > As for Yucca Mountain, funny that the "genuinely tiny amount" of nuclear waste produced in the USA as of 2011. You're going to have to provide some clarificat…
So do I take your lack of response to the key part to mean that you agree with me that nuclear waste is not, in fact "less hazardous to work with" than solar waste? Because that was what my original comment was about. > You're going to have to provide some clarification there, like, all the nuclear waste generated in the history of nuclear power in the United States in the last hundred years? The GAO says the nation…
> So do I take your lack of response to the key part to mean that you agree with me that nuclear waste is not, in fact "less hazardous to work with" than solar waste? Because that was what my original comment was about.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. The best part about nuclear waste is it's easy to detect, with a geiger counter and a dosimeter. That's not true of environmental contaiminants. In some ways its safer, in some ways it's not. It really depends how it's handled. After all, we can agree, you shouldn't be licking either. A few well placed geiger counters is all the alarm you need, but constant environmental testing and monitoring is needed when you're managing things like cadmium waste.
> So? It still needs to go somewhere.
The existing stash can stay where it is, the next 40 years can go into Yucca, which gives us 40 years to find new places to put it. Also, as I mentioned, fast breeders produce orders of magnitude less waste.
> Except it's already more than filled by existing waste. And except that's at the current level of nuclear power usage which people here are saying should be massively expanded.
Which is something we can do with fast breeders, without compromising storage.
> Wait, no: the state that actually contains it has not agreed:
We're talking about technical feasibility not nimbyism.
> That is not how you do risk assessment for a storage site for waste that will be hazardous for thousands of years, my dude.
Yes, it is. Have you read the risk assessment? It took years to complete, and if you are interested in anything other than a quick win on the internet in an inconsequential argument, I'd suggest looking at that instead of taking my word for it.