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Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

allianceforscience.cornell.edu

171–180 of 306 posts

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#171
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only examples of major catastrophe they can point to, and one wasn't even directly caused by malpractice of the employees, and the last one that was malpractice was nearly 40 years ago... then I don't even know. The best I got is "they're stupid."

As we are seeing with the Russian invasion, Chernobyl isnt even over yet and is still a major risk.

Others coming right up, unless Russian expansion in southern Ukraine can be contained.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#173
post #42

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…

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…

I love to dig out this old article on why "baseload" is a bullshit argument against reneawbles and surprisingly, "baseload" comes up only when it's nuclear astroturf time again. Weird eh?

https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#174
post #19

the fossil industry loooooved the green hair folks fighting nuclear. now slowly everyone finds out that with "only renewables", thus without nuclear in the mix, we simply cannot guarantee interrupt free electrical power at scale in most places.

Now fossil industry looooves new nuke projects, because they divert money from renewables for at least a decade until they are finally cancelled.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#175

I think one of the biggest issues with nuclear power is that they are designed to last decades yet they need to bee maintained properly operate safely over time, which can be a bit expensive and responsibility shifts over time so it gets "forgotten" easily and leaders can blame their predecessors if something bad happens. Here is a research about the safety status of nuclear power plants in switzerland: https://corre…

The same issue with roads and bridges in the US.

Holes in roads and bridges tend not to be as catastrophic as holes in reactors.

Nice try though.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#176
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative isn't fossil fuels. It's renewables. Compare against reality instead of your made up competition.

You will be right one day, and I'll cheer with you. But that day isn't coming terribly soon - the enormous energy storage needed to have the necessary degree of reliability out of intermittent sources, at the level of countries, is far beyond our current practical means. What do we do in the meantime?

Storage cost is falling faster than renewables cost ever did.

So in the meantime, build out renewables so that you have something other than fossil fuels to charge your storage from. Then build storage. By then it will be radically cheaper than it is now.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#177
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative isn't fossil fuels. It's renewables. Compare against reality instead of your made up competition.

We don't have storage. It's like saying to starving nation the simple solution is to grow more crops.

We don't have storage because we have not built out storage. After we have built out storage, we will have storage.

Until we have enough renewables to charge storage from, any storage would have to be charged from fossil fuels. So, it would be stupid to spend money building out storage with money that could be spent building out renewables. After we have enough renewables, we will want storage. Storage will be radically cheaper at that time.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is right in the middle of the biggest and most stable grid on this planet. They don't have to build storage within a year because they don't have to store all that stuff. They can take their time and continue to expand their national grid. Something they've been doing even during the last 16 years where the conservative government has been crippling the expansion of renewable energy.

Germany derives 25% of its energy consumption from natural gas. In order to remove this, they'll need to replace it with something. If they want to replace it with renewable energy, then they'll need storage. In no universe can they simply swap 25% of their energy consumption within a year without additional infrastructure.

> Germany derives 25% of its power consumption from natural gas.

It's been barely over 10% in 2021. -10% from the previous year. Please stop spreading lies anybody can google up in seconds: https://strom-report.de/download/strommix-2021-deutschland/

> If they want to replace it with renewable energy, then they'll need storage.

They obviously don't because it took them one year to get rid of 10% of it already. Without any significant expansion of storage capacity or expansion of renewables btw because the previous Goverment was not in for that. This one is.

I don't know where you get those arguments from but you should seriously reconsider those sources.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#179
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative isn't fossil fuels. It's renewables. Compare against reality instead of your made up competition.

The reality is that no country has entirely replaced fossil fuels with renewables. If you're advocating shutting down nuclear plants while any amount of power is coming from coal, you are not being serious.

Shutting down Fukushima in the years before the earthquake would have been the correct choice no matter what else was going on.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#180
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The story for storage looks better than it ever has but it is still orders of magnitude more expensive more expensive than it needs to be to be practical. Storage is already cheaper than peaker plants and that's all it needs to be for now. Meanwhile HVDC lines appear to also be a viable solution: https://www.power-technology.com/projects/morocco-uk-power-p... Not mentioned in this article is the projected cost of t…

I can name some peaker plants but I struggle to name storage facilities other than a handful of oddities like https://damfailures.org/case-study/taum-sauk-dam-missouri-20...

Not much storage has been built out because there is not enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. Until there is enough, it would be stupid to divert money from building renewables to building storage. After there is enough, it will be time to build out storage. At that time storage will be radically cheaper than today.

This has been explained to you several times already. Repeating your assertion about lack of storage tells us about something other than the energy landscape.

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