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Your comment and submission histories are interesting to read. Have you ever considered that you're wrong, and indeed obnoxiously wrong?
EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
101–110 of 149 posts
Re: EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
#102Don't forget that climate change is good for Russia...
Where the permafrost melts it'll be a giant horrid swamp not particularly useful land. Not to mention every established interest will be stressed by the chaos of climate change from losing land directly to the economic chaos that big migrations and flooding/storms/droughts will cause.
Re: EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs, hairy security situation in many countries and very limited ability to adapt to demand. This is both in the night-and-day cycle meaning but also in the "we need more power in 10-years" meaning, since nuclear power plants take forever to build. Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth, especially regarding climate chan…
>Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs >nuclear power plants take forever to build That is because of overregulation in North American and Western Europe. The overregulation is because of hysteria and coal lobbyists. Nuclear is working fine in the rest of the world with more plants under construction: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
> overregulation in North American and Western Europe.
Nearly all large construction projects have huge delays and go massively over budget, not just nuclear!
Weakening nuclear regulations (which ones?) will not solve the construction problem, because at best it will turn them into the other projects with big delays.
Re: EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing cheaper and easier and more scalable than nuclear for baseload gigawatt generation, especially when you actually account for the insane amount of batteries required to make wind/solar/etc viable as a baseload technology. People point at solar panel progress and always conveniently stay silent on the big battery problem (the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc) Nuclear d…
> the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc These are all trivial compared to nuclear's construction problem. But I've never heard that batteries are not "scalable," when they are actually one of the most incredibly scalable technologies out there. Want a few watt hours? No problem. Want 10GWh? No problem. Want to distribute a MWh at every distribution station across a country? No problem…
Even more weird: most people think rare earth is rare as in: "there isn’t a lot in the ground and it is easily depleted". Whereas in reality, rare earth means that it is less common per cubic meter of earth than other minerals. But there is plenty.
Re: EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno about parties, but multiple eco-focused organisations are paid at least in part by oil & gas. Greenpeace actually founded a gas-providing energy utility in Germany (Greenpeace Energy, recently renamed Green Planet Energy to… avoid headlines about Greenpeace selling gas, despite those headlines being true). Other orgs got more direct funding from oil & gas players e.g. FoEI was literally founded with an oil baro…
Greenpeace Energy is selling methane generated by electrolysis from wind energy. See here: https://www.h2-international.com/2019/04/01/joint-effort-to-...
> Greenpeace Energy is selling methane generated by electrolysis from wind energy.
Greenpeace Energy was founded in 1998, started selling gas in 2011, and purchased that first electrolyser in 2018[0].
As of 2020, the gas they were selling was about 1% hydrogen[0], 99% fossil imports. In 2021 the major change was to add 10% biogas to the mix.
[0] although they've been feeding-in hydrogen since 2014
[1] we'll just trust that it is indeed all wind-powered electrolysis.
Re: EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs, hairy security situation in many countries and very limited ability to adapt to demand. This is both in the night-and-day cycle meaning but also in the "we need more power in 10-years" meaning, since nuclear power plants take forever to build. Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth, especially regarding climate chan…
> nuclear power plants take forever to build. In France, the first nuclear plants of the current production group were contracted in 1970, and connected to the network in 1977, so that's 7 years for a pilot industrial project. Later plants were built in 5-6 years. The kicker is that this work is highly scalable: France built over 6 reactors per year over its program. The current issue with new generation reactors see…
Let's check the stats on the newest nuclear power plant built in France:
> A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial date to the end 2022.
> EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months. The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.
10 years late (so far) and 15 bil over budget (so far).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Re: EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing cheaper and easier and more scalable than nuclear for baseload gigawatt generation, especially when you actually account for the insane amount of batteries required to make wind/solar/etc viable as a baseload technology. People point at solar panel progress and always conveniently stay silent on the big battery problem (the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc) Nuclear d…
>baseload gigawatt generation This is very important for the heavy industries yet opponents of Nuclear still pretend that solar and wind can cover it. They are fine with Nuclear as long as it is in China.
Why is China building as we speak 184 coal plants than?
https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/commentary-china-is-buil...
Re: EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think nuclear was the way forward, and I kind of still do, but it's understandable why it isn't prevalent. It's all about magnitude of loss/failure. Traditional power plants are much safer and failure isn't nearly as catastrophic as with nuclear. If a nuclear plant fails, look at what can happen - you can lose an entire city indefinitely - Chernobyl. The potential for loss is much higher with nuclear power.
Hydroelectricity has inflicted orders of magnitude more damage. Yet nobody seriously proposes removing hydroelectric plants, they are by far the most effective form of renewables. Nuclear contamination can be cleaned. The majority of the Fukushima exclusion zone has been cleaned and reopened. There's no motivation to do this in Chernobyl because the town of Chernobyl only existed to support the nuclear power plant.
> Nuclear contamination can be cleaned. The majority of the Fukushima exclusion zone has been cleaned and reopened. There's no motivation to do this in Chernobyl because the town of Chernobyl only existed to support the nuclear power plant.
And somewhat oddly he Chernobyl Exclusion Zone literally shows that nuclear accidents are good for the environment, as human activity turns out to be way worse for wildlife than elevated radiations.
Re: EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are certainly high risks with nuclear power, but accidents with a large loss of life also happen with other energy production methods. Also, a big accident like Chernobyl sounds horrible, but people forget that burning coal produces a lot of pollution (including radiation!) that over time kills much more people. To get a perspective of how nuclear accidents compare with those of other energy production methods,…
I wonder if we were to count total loss of life in maintenance and installation of solar, wind and hydro. How much worse would nuclear do. At least per energy produced. The worst case for hydro at least is immense, possibly multiple millions death in some cases.
As of 2020, nuclear energy's death toll (including Chernobyl and Fukushima) was roughly the same as the combined death toll of solar and wind (resp. 0.07, 0.02, and 0.04 deaths per TWh): https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Hydro is also surprisingly low at 0.02, though failures are absolutely catastrophic I guess they tend to be out of the way and fairly local: so a dam failure will take out a village at once, and do extensive geological-scale damage, but not much more.
Re: EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> nuclear power plants take forever to build. In France, the first nuclear plants of the current production group were contracted in 1970, and connected to the network in 1977, so that's 7 years for a pilot industrial project. Later plants were built in 5-6 years. The kicker is that this work is highly scalable: France built over 6 reactors per year over its program. The current issue with new generation reactors see…
I think large part of it is increased scrutiny and standards. Which is entirely justified. And most of issues could be solved as said with knowledge and proper pipeline of keeping people who already gained experience from past projects on new ones.
I think the problem is the compensation model. None of the people building the plant have any skin in the game. At some level the people doing the work aren’t paid enough to care enough to prevent the issues that plague new nuclear projects, or they don’t have the resources, or they don’t have any incentive to go the extra mile to ensure project success. Are there stock options and equity for the engineers and project managers? Any ambitious engineer graduating in the last 15 years probably went to tech, not utilities. I’m in the energy sector