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EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

reuters.com

421–430 of 451 posts

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#421
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maximally 10 extra years and waste of a lot of labor and money that could be put into building and developing nuclear power plants and more renewables.

10 more years is needed if you want nuclear. Possibly also batteries, but that’s harder for me to estimate — we’ve got the price down, but we need way more volume.

It would take mere months to open back up those plants recently closed. Back in the 70s they could construct plants in 2-5 years. Chernobyl 1 began and completed construction in the same year!

Has our technology gotten worse since then? Or is it just permits and bureaucracy impeding us?

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#422
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing interesting (e.g. terrorism, bombs) you can do with nuclear waste, and it's not especially poisonous. LOL. Nuclear materials, including waste, are extremely dangerous in evil hands. It regularly kills people by accident or due to negligence. Chornobyl was an accident. Just imagine what a team of motivated people with evil intent can do with a nuclear station or nuclear waste. Last attempt to use nuc…

Nuclear materials yes, waste no. Chernobyl was an active reactor, for example. There's an inverse relationship here with the half-life. The most dangerous waste is stuff that burns up in a few decades, the type that lasts for millions will emit very little radiation per unit time.

You clearly have no idea what we are talking about, but I will not write about the issue with nuclear waste on a public forum. I don't want to inspire somebody.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you include the deaths that nuclear waste will cause during the tens of thousands of years it remains radioactive it wouldn't be so positive. But of course we can't look into the future. But we do know safe storage for such durations is not yet figured out. It's externalising the problem to the future. Just like CO2, but on a much longer timeframe. Still not very ethical though IMO.

How about we use the same principles that we use for lead, arsen... Those have to be stored indefinetly, so an infinitly more difficult problem.

Not really. A single dust particle of lead in your lungs isn't going to kill you. A particle of plutonium is. It's not comparable to lead on terms of dangers.

Also, the problem with radioactive materials is that they damage the containers they're stored in over time. It's called radiation embrittlement.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you include the deaths that nuclear waste will cause during the tens of thousands of years it remains radioactive it wouldn't be so positive. But of course we can't look into the future. But we do know safe storage for such durations is not yet figured out. It's externalising the problem to the future. Just like CO2, but on a much longer timeframe. Still not very ethical though IMO.

Those "millions of years" comments always seem rather out of place, considering that the Earth naturally contains enough radioactive elements that literally kept it warm for 4.6 billion years. (And they come with several billion years of half-lives.) When you see volcanoes, earthquakes, and hot springs in action, that's the power of radiation. All of it.

It's only radiation power in the way of the sun being our main heat source which slows our planet's cooling. Which is of course one huge fusion reactor. And if you were outside the protection of our magnetosphere and atmosphere its radiation would actually be pretty dangerous even at this distance.

The earth's core is just still hot from when it was formed. It's not being heated by an internal nuclear reaction.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is such a minute amount of carbon in comparison to the energy produced by a gas plant in generating power Citation needed. A gas plant dwarves solar in energy output. The whole point is that solar does have an emission and burying your head in the sand does no good when we are comparing solutions that don’t emit during generation but do to make (solar vs wind + batteries vs nuclear?).

Yes, solar has emissions. But in your previous message you implied that it is larger than it is by making a deceptively long list of items. These are the number of total CO2 emited per energy produced (gCO2e/kWh): - Nuclear and eolic, 4. - Solar, 6. - Gas CCS, 78. - Hydro, 97. - Coal CCS, 109. Citation, as requested: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9 Implying that solar, nuclear or wind have emissions…

> But in your previous message you implied that it is larger than it is by making a deceptively long list of items.

No I didn’t. Your reading comprehension did that. I was simply pointing out that a dipshit stance like “no energy source can have any emissions and be called green” actually rules everything out and destroys the nuanced discussions between green energies. The statement I replied to was literally “It is as simple as I originally stated”.

> Implying that solar, nuclear or wind have emissions nowhere near gas or coal is not fair play.

Wanna try that sentence again? I think you meant to say something else because solar, wind, and nuclear absolutely have emissions nowhere near gas or coal.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is by value. Please use some relevant stats. https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/electricity-balanc... https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/world-electricity-... Additionally: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-fuels

> We’re Europe’s largest exporter of electricity, thanks to our nuclear power. None of your relevant stats actually show that, France only shows up in total production, and there it ranks lower than Germany. It's also a bit odd to now move the goalpost to fossil fuels, when your original point was about electricity exports, and how France can allegedly only export so much due to nuclear power. But over the years Fran…

Quoting the original post I was replying to: "we import electricity from germany that is burning coal for it"

Reality: We're a top exporter of electricity (I'll give you that we're not THE top exporter all the time), and Germany's exports are thanks to its "huge renewable sector" (quoting you).

There are no goalposts to move. This is just a bunch of nonsense. People who want to complain can use whatever stats and values they want to make their point, I guess. retinaros' other posts tells me I should just have flagged and moved on from the beginning, but that leaves the risk of misinformation spreading anyway...

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#428
post #207

Very good news! We need to build fast breeder reactors which burns up the nuclear waste that we have created through older reactors. Ie in normal nuclear reactirs only about 1% of nuclear fuel is converted into energy, the rest is waste. Breeder reactors can take the nuclear waste and convert it into useful energy. BioGas which is methane gas extracted from waste is also very green. Fast Breeder Reactor https://en.wi…

Those reactors are a castle in the air and your comment regarding bio gas misses the point. The idea is to label non renewable gas as green.

Fast reactors have been providing power to electrical grids for years.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been gravely disappointed with the climate moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the planets great stumbling block in his stride toward salvation is not the Oil Industry or the Coal Barrons, but the political pragmatist, who is more devoted to "order" than to climate justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of just…

That's a misrepresentation of what they did. They said it was OK if it replaced certain stuff temporarily, not that you could just keep on building gas plants for ever and ever. The recent attention that "the environment" has been getting is a direct result of this, and you mustn't confuse it for a general interest in green politics. Frankly, I really do not care about "the environment". I care about people , and the…

Thats a false trade off! You can make the US carbon neutral with 4% of GDP over ten years.

What percentage of GDP did we spend trying to steal oil from brown people since 2001

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#430
post #402
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear make inhabitant 400x more land than gas.

Nope. Nuclear is very land efficient, and you can build them in the desert far away from civilization, and the new reactors are much safer than the Chernobyl reactors.

Nuclear stations are efficient until they leak or blow up.

We cannot build a nuclear station in a desert, because it needs a river or a lake with fresh water for cooling. Nuclear station is the huge steam machine. It cannot work without water. Fresh water is a scarce resource. For example, nuclear station near to me (Rivne Nuclear station, North Ukraine) is at edge of closing since 2015 because of drought. It competes with the city for drinking water. The same situation is at Khmelnyck Nuclear station, Western Ukraine.

New reactors are better protected from mistakes, but they are not protected from evil intent. We are at the war with RF since 2014 and this is THE problem. We already had issues with drinking water in Dnipro river, which supplies lots of cities including capital, and food after Chornobyl, but Chornobyl was just a mistake, not an act of war. Potentially, a nuclear station has enough uranium to cause environmental damage equivalent to 1M of Chornobyls.

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