561–570 of 672 posts
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The other aspect of the Ukraine war used for advocating for nuclear, which the nuclear proponents like to omit is that 25% of European uranium comes from Russia, so Europe's dependence on Russia is even stronger for Uranium than for gas. It's simply dishonest to use the current situation as an argument for nuclear. If anything it shows that we should have invested into renewables much more strongly, but nuclear propo…
I would say that comparing the purchase of gas to the purchase of uranium is uninformed, if not dishonest, for two reasons: - Fuel costs for nuclear is only 15-20% of the total cost, half of which is the uranium itself [1]. For natural gas, the majority of the cost is the fuel, even during "normal" times. In other words, natural gas imports generate a lot more $ per GWh of energy produced, even if imported from the s…
What seems "uninformed, if not dishonest" to me is the argument that fuel price matters here. Imagine this: Your country needs seven doohickeys per year to run. What exactly those doohickeys are is unimportant; the only important thing is that you need then. Russia can provide you with four doohickeys per year. The rest of the world can provide you with only five doohickeys per year, and for many years they won't be able to provide any more than that. So you need at least two doohickeys per year from Russia, no matter what, otherwise your country stops running. So Russia can stop your country from running at any moment. Did you notice how price never entered this discussion?
> The reserves of Uranium across the globa are still huge, much of which can be found in (relatively) politically stable places such as Australia and Canada.
Reserves of uranium matter here much less than enrichment and fuel assembly production capacity. Russia has over 40% of enriched fuel production capacity (as per https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...). Until you build new plants for this, it doesn't matter that you can get natural uranium from Australia or Canada. You won't be able to do anything useful with it (unless your reactor is CANDU).
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I would say that comparing the purchase of gas to the purchase of uranium is uninformed, if not dishonest, for two reasons: - Fuel costs for nuclear is only 15-20% of the total cost, half of which is the uranium itself [1]. For natural gas, the majority of the cost is the fuel, even during "normal" times. In other words, natural gas imports generate a lot more $ per GWh of energy produced, even if imported from the s…
3 reasons, I suspect - if someone wants an enormous stockpile of uranium fuel they can probably do that. The volumes check out - uranium is very dense and so will not take up much space. I'm not sure if it has a shelf life, but being a rock I expect something can be sorted out. I can't pretend to know how feasible it is in practice, but long term strategic uranium stockpiles should be doable. Long enough to weather a…
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Such a simplification is very hypocritical in my eyes. Even Ukraine itself is not shutting down the Russian gas pipeline on its territory "to save Ukrainian lives". And the sanctions against Russia are not so complete that the West is blocking every cooperation. For example, no one wanted to immediately stop the cooperation regarding the International Space Station "to save Ukrainian lives", because the cost would ha…
Germany is paying hundreds of millions of euros per day to Russia for the gas. In March EU total payment was 700 million per day. This completely dwarfs any even billion dollar level support given to Ukraine. This is one quick graph that I could find. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1281568/daily-russian-ga... On Friday, Russia stopped gas exports to Finland. Electricity export to (and import from) Finland was st…
Was Finland better prepared to ensure its energy independence? Absolutely. Nevertheless, they were about to forfeit some of the independence if Russia hadn't attacked Ukraine.
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From what I've been reading lately, South Korea is currently the country with the best expertise in building cost-efficient nuclear plants. Maybe Finland should switch vendor. [1]. https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/historical-construction...
If the only method to be successful is to cheat and coverup issues then that's frightening. > In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea du…
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> Uh...Germany's actually recarbonized by shutting down their nuclear [increasing coal and imported electricity to pick up the slack]. No, they did not -- look at the fourth chart in https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... . There's no "increasing coal". The recent changes in nuclear and coal generation correlate rather than anti-correlate. You'd need them to anti-correlate for the thing that…
Coal and other carbon sources would have been able to dive much more sharply if the nuclear capacity had remained online or been replaced appropriately. By taking down nuclear capacity, the Germans _kept_ coal and other non-renewables online and prevented them from being replaced by rising renewable sources. More important to the discussion, note the sharp rise in coal when there is a renewable availability dip. This…
While this is true, the claim that carbon emissions could have decreased even more than they actually decreased is very different from a claim that they increased (as opposed to decreased).
> More important to the discussion, note the sharp rise in coal when there is a renewable availability dip
Annual fluctuations are to be expected. They don't change the long-term trend. In fact you can see on the charts that the fluctuation was comparable to one year of recent trend. Additionally, this rise happened together with the abatement of the pandemic recession effect which impacts consumption of electricity. Without the anomalous electricity consumption dip in 2020 (which you can see clearly in the third chart), the rise in coal in 2021 vs. 2020 would have been about halved.
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> Recent events in the Ukraine are cutting off cheap Russian supply of both coal and gas This is not the impression I have gotten from recent events. The reason Germany hasn’t experienced blackouts is because they are funding the Russian Federation’s war in Ukraine in exchange for energy. Germany has advocated for the continued purchase of Russian gas and has pushed back against the EU admitting Ukraine to the union.…
Germany can't wave a magic wand and switch off Russian imports overnight. But they did just commit a few hundred billion to accelerate their plans to get rid of coal and gas based generation. That's a direct consequence of the Ukrainian situation. Like the US, Germany was overly depending on cheap gas until recently. Now that it has to import the gas in liquid form from the US (and a few other places), it's going to…
Pigs are especially bad since they eat basically what humans can eat. So stopping producing pigs will solve both energy and food crisis.
And if Denmark managed to stop pigs production in 1917 almost instantly when facing a war crisis [1], then surely modern Germany can do the same.
[1] - https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2012nl/jul/hindhede.pdf
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Can't Uranium be easily sourced from somewhere else or is Russia the only viable supplier?
All you need to do is Google for "wiki uranium deposits". It takes less time than your reply. Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining
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> This is a common theme that the WSJ opinion pages push. Am I reading this correctly when I take it to mean that you think something being on the WSJ opinion pages gives it credibility ?
I said that phrase so that people that care know this article was pushed in their opinion section. Opinion pages don't mean they lie, it means they will use facts to back up an opinion the writer is expressing. Their opinion pages have a slant for sure, but tend to be much on the rails that some other papers. You are welcome to argue against the point WSJ editorial board (or guest writers, such as the piece I linked)…
This is simply untrue of the WSJ opinion pages, they've been publishing climate change denials for the last 30 years, so "factual" is absolutely not something you can just take for granted if you find it there. This is why I found it incredible that you implied it would be a mark of quality.
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You mean environmentalists have been ceded total control over all utility decisions? They can't even stop government sponsored mass wolf kills.
What would environmental organizations coopted by the fossil fuel industry care about wolves? Their ineffectiveness at anything other than stopping nuclear power plant construction is a symptom of what TrispusAttucks said.