101–110 of 399 posts
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If fossil fuel power plants were legally responsible for harm caused by their carbon emissions, they would also be impossible to insure.
Who compares against fossil plants nowadays? Except wanting to put a carbon tax on them to account for that issue you mention. Truly, it's new built nuclear compared compared to renewables, storage and long-distance distance transmission. Spatial and temporal arbitrage of energy.
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Safety concerns are moot when the coal alternative will kill orders of magnitude more people.
But your own point is itself moot, given that we are not comparing nuclear to the dirtiest most lethal of fossil fuels, but nuclear to composite solutions of renewables+batteries/electricity storage or renewables+natural gas
It's worth noting that nuclear is really expensive when factoring in insurance and disposable, a lot more so than wind and solar. >The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Europes-E...
The UK is suffering the most from the drop in wind power output, caused by mild weather. The country, which prides itself on its wind capacity and whose Prime Minister last year said wind farms could power every home by 2030, produced less than 1 GW of wind power on several days. This compares with a generation capacity of 24 GW, according to ICIS senior energy economist Stefan Konstantinov.
The view I share with a majority of Germans: Costs of nuclear energy are very much a burden that future generations will have to carry. A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price. It is also clear now that the the companies running the plants will not pay for the deconstruction of the plants after they reached their end of life. Tax payers have to pay for this, and a…
A 30x30m pool of radioactive fuel is nothing compared to what their powerplants are doing to the future of young generations. Is cancer caused by coal particulates really something you wish on people around you?
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It's not just a matter of safety of the plans themselves. You need safety against external threats e.g. a nuclear plant can be targeted during war or by terrorists You need safety around illegal dumping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Illegal_dump... Also, extremely centralized energy production creates political risks (coups, corruption, hiding mismanagement) Nuclear proliferation risk. Investment ri…
At least two of those points don't hold when you're talking about existing plants though. Germany already hosts nuclear weapons courtesy of the US, so where's the proliferation risk from nuclear power? And there's nothing worse for ROI than shutting down the plant. For the other points I'd say that I'd rather build solar to replace coal plants first before replacing nuclear plants.
Proliferation is not a binary 1 or 0.
> For the other points I'd say that I'd rather build solar to replace coal plants first before replacing nuclear plants.
That's a false dichotomy.
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To a first approximation, Fukushima did not cause any harm. I view the plant iself as a success story, given ancient reactor design etc. etc. I think a lot of half-paying-attention people confused the reactor and the tsunami. Of course the news coverage and in-hindsight-unnecessary evacuation didn't help either.
"did not cause any harm" - for a very loose defintion of harm. Sure it could have been much worse. But enough ground and water was contaminated, and much more will be in the future when they run out of storage.
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Cost is irrelevant if you can’t store the energy generated. Nuclear is predictable and carbon free. Look at France.
Solar + 4 hours of storage clocking in at $40/MWh in ideal conditions. Substitute for windpower and some worse conditions and nuclear energy still look awful from a cost perspective. https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
From 2020 to 2021, Coal is up 8%, Wind is down 7%, Solar is down 1%.
Non-renewable in total is up 8% and renewable is down 8%.
If they can find a battery solution that actually works, then that would be amazing, but existing solutions clearly aren't cutting it.
While it might cost more, nuclear power is extremely reliable and offers energy independence, a form of national security that is vital with Russian pipelines strongly influencing the geopolitics of the region. I hope better batteries can offer them the same, because it's sad watching coal expand dramatically.
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Nuclear was also promoted as save decades before Chernobyl and Fukushima by the lobbies. So is there a guarantee that it is safe this time around?
To a first approximation, Fukushima did not cause any harm. I view the plant iself as a success story, given ancient reactor design etc. etc. I think a lot of half-paying-attention people confused the reactor and the tsunami. Of course the news coverage and in-hindsight-unnecessary evacuation didn't help either.
For example: https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/fukushima/canada-i...
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41447603 Former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder oversaw the shutdown of Germany's nukes. Now he's on the board of Rosneft, a giant fossil fuel company controlled by the Russian Government.
Ha, and people keep saying there's no corruption in Germany.
Everyone knows that, and there are even more such scandals. Yet a lot of people vote for them (at least they got their worst ever election results in this years elections)