371–380 of 435 posts
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WWII? You mean the war that Russia started, allied with Germany?
Now that's pretty nasty rewriting of history. Did you forget that it was Drang nach Osten in the first place?
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Nuclear and renewables don't play well together. It really is an antagonist relationship for fundamental reasons.
Would anyone happen to know what those reasons are?
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I mean, £1/kWh is pretty high, but it's not totally outrageous and it appears to have been capped by some kind of regulatory limit. 42¢/kWh is the standard retail price in California during peak demand hours, and that's not a huge difference.
I pay $0.13USD per KWh in NH for electrical energy.
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Although I'm generally pro more nuclear, this argument isn't massively compelling to me. The failed reactors of the past were considered safe when they were built.
"The failed reactors of the past were considered safe when they were built." Honestly, this is a terrible argument. It's like saying 'a few people died from eating bad apples, so we should ban oranges for fear that they are the same'. The technologies being discussed are fundamentally different. Not to mention that we don't apply this 'past performance as an indicator of future performance for different systems' para…
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> There's nothing special or magic about nuclear. Apart from the technology, safety profile and generally being the cleanest source of energy ever discovered. And being able to stockpile enormous amounts of energy in a small heap if necessary ^^. And if we could just convince people to accept it only causing say, half as much damage as coal it would be ridiculously cheap too. These appallingly high safety standards a…
Half as much damage as coal is a pretty low bar! Natural gas also meets it, for example. Your broader point is strong though, and there's no reason 4th-gen nuclear power plants being designed now couldn't deliver a quarter (or less) the damage of coal while still being economical.
Natural gas has advantages over coal, but if we are talking about effects on climate change, natural gas is unfortunately comparable to using coal. The CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are much lower than a coal plant, but it isn't clear that if you account for methane releases during production/transporting/storage that it is better for climate change than coal.
>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...
As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.
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But also in terms of cost? Nuclear power plants are not exactly cheap.
At this point nuclear is the most expensive per mw. And the vast majority of that expense is upfront. So almost no one wants to invest in these things because they're incredibly risky.
The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is about as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates and they continue to strongly support subsidizing it.
The potential costs for renewables + storage is about the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.)
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously at least a direct cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.
Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap, simple or easy to protect against terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amigas super station hasn’t been completed yet. The potential costs here don't seem to matter to some advocates.
Some advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants where necessary to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term. (There are lots of atmospheric losses in the capture and distribution of natural gas.) No one concerned about climate change seriously thinks that burning natural gas is a long term answer.
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Would anyone happen to know what those reasons are?
There’s only so many dollars that can be spent on energy infrastructure. A dollar spent today on wind and solar gets you a megawatt next year. A dollar spent today on nuclear gets you 100 megawatts, but in a decade. Nobody wants to spend $2.
If you don't have a healthy tax system then that is the real problem. Not energy production.
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There’s only so many dollars that can be spent on energy infrastructure. A dollar spent today on wind and solar gets you a megawatt next year. A dollar spent today on nuclear gets you 100 megawatts, but in a decade. Nobody wants to spend $2.
Not spending the $2 is the real problem. Getting the $2 in the first place isn't an issue if you have a healthy tax system. If you don't have a healthy tax system then that is the real problem. Not energy production.
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Nuclear has never decarbonized an entire industrial economy, so by that definition, nuclesr is nkt "proven technology". It probably could have, if you priced carbon appropriately 50 or 60 years ago, but no one did so cars and various industrial processes never made the shift and other random things like cow burps it cant even theoretically fix. Now it's too expensive to bother trying even for the bits it's suited to.…
South Korea can build nuclear on time and on budget, so it is possible. And for the sake of the discussion, I think France can be fairly considered decarbonized, even if not really 100%. Note that TFA refers to decarbonization of electricity generation only, which is the definition I use as well.
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You need access to millions of gallons of water a year to run a huge solar plant like Ivanpah, not to mention there probably aren't a lot of great roads for bringing in materials for heavy construction in the sahara vs the American west where in a days drive you are in the container yards at the Port of Los Angeles, so its not as easy as just plopping solar panels in the middle of the desert all over the world.
Pointing to Ivanpah is disingenuous, as solar thermal of that kind is has failed to compete. PV is much cheaper now, and PV needs no cooling water.