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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

#321

Post by pizzapill »

dylan604 wrote: post #304
pizzapill wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are talking about time frames that are many times longer than the existence of modern humans as a species. We have absolute zero clue what most humans did 200k years ago, we have only little knowledge what humans did 4000 years ago. How can you expect us to communicate with a world in eight hundred thousand years, or 1.6 million years? We don't even manage to get any of the nuclear waste out of our oceans we put t…

What are the odds of having large chunks of learned knowledge wiped out at this point? When the Romans did it, few could read/write and few people had access to the stored information of the day. That made it very easy to sequester knowledge. At this point in time, other than ELE type of events, can knowledge be kept away from all of humanity now? Sure, dictators can make it hard for the parts they control, but the r…

There is zero chance that we can communicate anything at those timespans. As I already wrote we have trouble to tell what happened 4000 years ago (how were the Pyramids build exactly?) and that is just a blink of an eye when compared to a million years.

Ancient Egypt was a super advanced civilization continuously existing for 4000 years! Yet shortly after the decline nobody could read Hieroglyphs anymore.

We don't know what the future holds. Lets say in 50 years a low intensity Gamma Ray Burst hits earth and destroys all digital information but fries only half of all living creatures. The survivors dig trough the trash of the past to get to the rare earth metals they need to rebuild their civilization and find this really neat bunker with those funny signs...

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

#322

Post by ducleonctor »

tpmx wrote: post #301
ducleonctor wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...Germany gets its natural gas from mother Russia. Which is more dirty, has a touch of corruption and allows mother Russia to tell the Germans how to behave. But it makes some politicians and companies in two countries happy and shows that large scale energy projects can work if there is a will. So it's a start I guess.

Ok, I'll bite: > Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts? In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure the cables going north from Africa. Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with a factor of 100-1000x. Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...

> In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure the cables going north from Africa.

They are indeed unstable - for reasons that may not be discussed - but buying the required sites and securing them should be possible anyways. If local jobs are created in the process, even better. So much effort has been wasted on partially securing much more dangerous countries like Afghanistan and Irak with questionable lasting benefit and apparently low strategic gain.

> Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with 1000.

A very good point. One pipe obviously isn't enough and one shouldn't push too large objects through it without a capable plumber around.

> Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...

Aren't the Chinese endavours mostly directed at farming and some mining for now? OK, they may also try to develop some industry, but how well Chinese business culture meshes with the African population's culture remains to be seen.

Also, just because a competitor is doing something one shouldn't do it? If everybody had always followed this rule, the USA would now maybe be called "North Mexico" because the Spanish sailed some ships there, first. I am not saying colonization is a good idea, much better arrangements could be made today.

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

#323

Post by lispm »

effie wrote: post #291
lispm wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of authoritarian and pro-nuclear countries which have not solved the problem. Actually some of them (Russia, ...) have the worst environmental track record when it comes to nuclear technology.

Russia has a lot of uninhabited space, so the contamination does not seem to be a big problem for them. Lots of countries behave this way, UK and US included.

Western countries have spent many billions to secure the nuclear reactors of rotten USSR / Russian submarines which were endangering the baltic sea and also the Soviet RBMK-1000 reactor, which was causing the chernobyl disaster...

> Russia has a lot of uninhabited space

Nuclear installations are not in uninhabited space. For example the still operating (!) RMBK-style reactors are not that far away from major cities.

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

#324

Post by lostlogin »

sampo wrote: post #316
lostlogin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but compare their CO2 footprints to nuclear. Have you a source that shows Nuclear is better? I hunted around a while back and got a large range of answers, but nuclear seemed consistent worse. Eg see page 29 of this link. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

In that figure, if you look at the median (the black line), it's quite small. There is this one very anti-nuclear Stanford professor, who has managed to publish some estimates where the carbon footprint of nuclear power is way larger than in other estimates. These numbers are probably now forever part of the literature, and they make the range of published numbers quite large in every literature survey. Sometimes thi…

Wow. Have you any idea how much his study pushed up the mean or got a summary of how his study differed? As you say, the estimates vary wildly and I haven’t really got any idea where his sit relative to others

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

#325

Post by pas »

dylan604 wrote: post #296
anonporridge wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that this simple line of reasoning seems to be completely missing from the minds of anti nuclear activists is...perplexing.

At the same time it's not. Big scary looking symbols plastered over everything compared to just filling the air making it out of sight out of mind. Once that's achieved, the mass populace doesn't care. Try to build a facility with those scary symbols that are visible anytime one chooses to look, and people get all NIMBY very quickly.

The solution seems obvious. Set up a town of nuclear power activists. YIMBY.

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

#326

Post by vidarh »

lispm wrote: post #244
vidarh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that in the meantime the alternatives that are actually being used are killing thousands of people a year right now .

Nuclear is not an alternative. It has a lot of unwanted side effects and it just does not scale to solve the problem. It's extremely costly, comes with costly unsolved problems and is slow to build up.

Not shutting down plants is an alternative to instead slowing down phasing out coal, like Germany did.

And almost all of the alternatives have costly problems too, like causing more deaths for most of them.

Large scale solar might be less lethal, but pretty much every other power source causes more short term deaths.

I'm not arguing against renewables. I'm arguing that this fear of nuclear costs huge numbers of lives by extending the lifetime of e.g. hydro and fossil fuel plants, all of which are far more dangerous.

The fear mongering over nuclear has killed more people than nuclear ever has.

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

#327

Post by belorn »

patall wrote: post #201
godelski wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bigger factor to note is that 95% of radiation is contained within 1% of the waste. I think the problem here is that people don't realize how small this number is. Because 11ktons sounds like a lot. But if you compare it to any other waste in the world it is tiny. Perspective is lost. I also don't understand why not having a geological repository is an issue. Many researchers propose just storing it in place after…

Call me irrational but storing small amounts of highly radio active material in many locations is, from my point of view, basically asking for a dirty bomb to happen at some point. It only needs an event like the end of the soviet union to happen in a single country on earth and any terrorist organization would be able to buy enough of it. I acknowledge that this may happen anyways with the current situation but your…

Pulverised fuel ash seems a much more effective component for a dirty bomb. It mixes good with air, is much more harmful to humans both long term and short term, is also very radiactive, and mixes well with fresh water supplies. It also much easier to find and is likely much less guarded, and if stolen less likely to be tracked.

The only reason I can see why no one has used that already is that chemical weapons designed for the purpose are more effective.

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

#328

Post by pas »

pizzapill wrote: post #166
spideymans wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And to find a place where no post worldwar 5 civilization accidentally diggs is up. This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear…

We are talking about time frames that are many times longer than the existence of modern humans as a species. We have absolute zero clue what most humans did 200k years ago, we have only little knowledge what humans did 4000 years ago. How can you expect us to communicate with a world in eight hundred thousand years, or 1.6 million years? We don't even manage to get any of the nuclear waste out of our oceans we put t…

Why does it matter if some hypothetical future civilization cannot understand it though? If humanity as we know it is gone then compared to that some random future bad mining accident seems silly to worry about.

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

#329

Post by effie »

Krasnol wrote: post #223

It still remains a waste of money if you have other sources: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099... Nuclear is just too slow to fix our CO2 problems https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...

What else do you propose as replacement for coal and gas power plants?

Who expects nuclear energy to fix our CO2 problems? In the following decades, it is supposed to slow down CO2 buildup, not "fix our CO2 problems".

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

#330

Post by csunbird »

godelski wrote: post #227
patall wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me irrational but storing small amounts of highly radio active material in many locations is, from my point of view, basically asking for a dirty bomb to happen at some point. It only needs an event like the end of the soviet union to happen in a single country on earth and any terrorist organization would be able to buy enough of it. I acknowledge that this may happen anyways with the current situation but your…

Dirty bombs aren't an issue. You might want to ask yourself why we've never seen one used, especially if you understand how easy it is to obtain the necessary materials. IIRC we've only caught a handful of devices (none exploded). Also we have to consider when it explodes, it just doesn't make enough radiation. It is pretty difficult to generate enough radiation that would actually cause an increase in cancer rates (…

Terrorists are not known to be the most logical people, to be honest. They are going to try anything that can generate terror in large scale and a dirty bomb is a very, very terrorizing thing to general population.

General population thinks anything with radiation is panic worthy, even though there isn't that big of a deal.

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