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If Germany's Green Party takes the same line, I think it will be a huge blow to Russia. Also, it's about time.
Where do you think the fuel for the reactors will come from?
Is this a case of politics, like science, proceeds one funeral at a time? Did the 1970s anti-nuclear people age out of the party leadership and membership so this could get revisited?
If Germany's Green Party takes the same line, I think it will be a huge blow to Russia. Also, it's about time.
Where do you think the fuel for the reactors will come from?
This is great, and hopefully it will stop the premature shutdown of existing nuclear reactors. But it's pretty tiny climate news overall. Nuclear reactors are aging out and nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore. Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, which won't come on line…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As others have said, nuclear not is comparable to wind and solar. Nuclear provides base load, something that wind or solar can't do. Here is a graph: https://i.imgur.com/SaC1HR4.jpeg Wind electricity production in x-axis (MWh/h), y-axis is consumption of electricity (MWh/h). Each do is one hour, dot color is a month. There is no correlation. Here is great summary of how Finland can go 100% fossil fuel free electricit…
No generator provides base load, because load is usage, not power. Lots of places in the world satisfy base load with dispatchable power.
What do you do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing?
There isn't enough batteries on earth to even make a dent in the storage you would need. We don't want to burn any more hydrocarbons. What are our other options? Massive pumped hydro might get us there, but that construction is on a similar time horizon to a new nuclear plant anyway.
The Greens' idiotic anti-nuclear stance has empowered and embolden decades of coal and oil exploration and proliferation. As a Green voter I desperately hope this pattern gets adopted and replicated here in Australia the sooner the better.
It isn't idiotic. While it is partially ideological reasoning behind their rejection, nuclear power is overall a bad deal with current technologies. France might have problems operating theirs because they have a drought and rivers aren't able to cool the plants. Uranium is only available in limited supply additionally to the high costs of nuclear energy this will become a problem in the long term. We only recently h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same applies for Germany; our plants that have been shut down can, de facto, not be reactivated. The effort would be too big, and the industry lacks the experts as priorities shifted for obvious reasons. In other news, Germany just started a partnership with Quatar to import Gas, because, you know, we don't want to support abusive regimes :-) Everything just gets more messy and distorted by the day.
There's also coal electricity from Poland and France seems to be nuking up to serve as Europe's reserve battery for when greens aren't producing or a large exporter misbehaves in politics next time.
Wait… someone in the realm of politics changed their mind in a… sane… rational direction? I feel like I could count instances of that in my lifetime on one hand. Everywhere on the political spectrum everyone seems to have been utterly losing their minds for a long time.
Running nuclear power plants isn't a sane thing to do, but let's pretend Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island never happend.
If we would pour into nuclear research the kind of money we pour into renewables, nuclear power would become safer and cheaper.
You still have to haul around huge amounts of radioactive materials with whatever technology. That alone is a big factor in the impossible risk calculations. So far there has never been a dirty bomb. What if the pro-nuclear fanboys get their wish and we solve the energy problems of the developing world using nuclear power? What if a modestly developed country gets overrun or overturned? I don't like the odds. Most ri…
Also, same impossible calculations apply to any power tech. Number of people injured installing rooftop solar or wind, poisoned by graphite mining, trucking accidents, aluminum production, and the like.