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EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

reuters.com

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Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#71

Post by exar0815 »

chmod775 wrote: post #41
Lammy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” and a link to the spiky ground and “this is not a place of honor”. Assuming a future civilization gets to exist considering we keep burning petroleum products and calling them clean while we waste time argu…

> I think the standard response is “but what about a hypothetical future civilization somehow disconnected enough from ours to not know what nuclear waste is who find it and dig it up thinking it’s holy or whatever” It is not. Why is it one straw man after another in this discussion? The response is that countries like Germany have already spent a lot of time looking for a suitable place, and haven't found one. At th…

This is not true. The most sensible place was intentionally overlooked because one of germanys larges political parties (CSU) has all her voters there, and the next best place (Gorleben) was politically and ideologically fought over for decades until we gave up and said fuck you and everyone, lets just store it where it stands.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#72

Post by brtkdotse »

jdsully wrote: post #4

Crazy they were able to label natural gas as “sustainable” but nuclear just barely squeaked in.

Natural gas or biogas? Same gas but the first is fossil while the other is made from fermenting sewage and hence renewable

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#73

Post by smartties »

pydry wrote: post #38
tpmx wrote: post #5

Germany's populistic policy decisions following Fukushima set us back so much.

Fukushima cleanup costs will be between $470 and $660 billion. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi... US nuclear power gets a liability cap of $0.2 billion. The nuclear industry will keep telling us it is safe but it will refuse to shoulder the insurance costs beyond a minimal level. That's the taxpayer's job and the taxpayer's job alone. And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more exp…

> And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more expensive than solar and wind.

Where can I find a source confirming that ?

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#74

Post by doikor »

Haemm0r wrote: post #20
dijit wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. It's like they succeeded and then many decades later flight MH17 happened and the world collectively lost its mind and declared air travel as inherently unsafe and condemned all research into it as dangerous. The issue though, is that energy production is mostly quiet unless there's a problem, but people do see personal benefit in air travel. Add to that: Coal is a silent killer, it's not obviou…

The comparison of a happening with basically no longterm consequences to future generations like MH17 to nuclear fallout / necessary waste treatment is quite lame imho. Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all. Just do the math if you need decades to dismantle and decontaminate an old nuclear power plant alone.

> Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all

And yet we seem to be doing just that here in Finland. The for profit companies operating and building the plants have been trying to get permits to build more (and very likely are going to get another one soon). Even with the "failure" of Olkiluoto 3 they seem to find a way to do it in a profitable enough way that they (2 companies TVO and Fennovoima) want to build more.

There are no subsidies for nuclear power at all in Finland.

Also our permanent spent fuel storage site is almost finished and should hold around 100 years of spent fuel. Though there have been now some talks to not really use it for most fuel as it makes more sense to build breeder reactors and just burn that fuel into much smaller amount. If that happens it will fit much more then 100 year of spent fuel.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#75

Post by hedora »

winter_blue wrote: post #61
chmod775 wrote: post #15

There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a l…

The solution to nuclear waste is to use breeder reactors extensively. Breeder reactors both (1) substantially reduce the radioactivity of nuclear waste, and (2) allow you to get up to 100 times the energy out of the same quantity of initial nuclear fuel. A lot of the final breeder reactor products are non-transuranic general nuclear fission products (like iodine, caesium, strontium, xenon and barium, etc); and if a r…

We should move to breeder reactors. However, there is one unsolved problem: As the fuel is repeatedly refined/recycled, there is a step where it is trivially easy to skim some weapons grade material out of the process.

I think this can be solved with a 100% automated (robotic) facility, that’s completely transparent to outside observers, and where no humans are allowed.

Alternatively, pay people 10x market rate to not steal material from the line.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#77

Post by max_ »

rando57 wrote: post #69

I hope that in the future we will seriously consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power Compared to current methods of producing nuclear energy, thorium: - produces significantly more energy per ton - produces significantly less waste - the waste is significantly less dangerous (cools down in x00 years, instead of x0000 years)

You can make your own thorium battery. [0]

[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optoelectric_nuclear_battery

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#78

Post by hanniabu »

arrosenberg wrote: post #40
j-pb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima is what caused the setback, because it proved that, again, "risk of a fault is neglegible" turns out to be not neglegible enough. I don't care if nuclear can be made safe on paper, as long as it's build by humans it's going to be messed up somehow. I once took a school trip to a nuclear power station in northern germany, turns out they had a direct link to their local coal plant to manage demand. That link…

You could say the same thing about any power source though - humans have created way bigger disasters with fossil fuels than nuclear power. > The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors. How much do those solar panels cost once you factor in environmental remediation, EOL recycling, land use, etc.? Since that's the standard nuclear is held to, it would be g…

Sites of nuclear accidents can't be remediated. They're essentially lost "forever".

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#79

Post by makomk »

cbmuser wrote: post #51
chmod775 wrote: post #15

There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a l…

> The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It's actually the best type of waste that exists. It's extremely dense, is solid and any leakage can easily detected. And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled: > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-.…

The big problem with recycling spent nuclear fuel is that the required reprocessing is much worse in terms of safety than the nuclear power plants themselves. Lots of lovely, toxic, highly radioactive solutions which are practically iching to go prompt critical and ruin everyone's day. I think the only reprocessing program which managed not to be a safety train wreck is France's, and I half-suspect they might have just been better at covering up because it's so unusual (and in keeping with other aspects of their nuclear program).

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#80

Post by hekker »

pitaj wrote: post #24
hekker wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, I am pro nuclear as well, looking at the technological benefits, but how are we practically going to handle nuclear waste that will be there for thousands of future generations to handle?

Nuclear waste storage isn't a technology issue: we know how to store it safely. It's an issue of political obstructionism.

If that’s true why would be this obstructionism be there? It does not make any rational sense if we can use nuclear to win us time until we have working fusion and/or wind/sun/etc energy implemented.
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