Live data from Hacker News

Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

allianceforscience.cornell.edu

211–220 of 306 posts

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#211
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This, to me, sounds like a pipe dream. We can become carbon neutral with the tech we have _right now_ whereas I fail to imagine how these necessarily exponential improvements in storage capacity will happen. The _one_ thing that gives me hope for storage is maaaaybe synthetic fuels. But currently it's unproved.

If you mean using nukes, nukes started today will ensure burning fossil fuel for at least ten more years while we wait for them to come online. Money (including cost overruns) spent on them will be unavailable to build out renewables that would displace fossil fuels immediately.

Electric synthetic ammonia is mature tech. It just takes a long time to build the factories to produce the needed amount of synthesis equipment.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#212
post #194
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the money spent on cancelled reactors is ever given back. And, they will all be cancelled, so all that is unknown is how much money will turn out to have been diverted from renewables, first.

Will giving this money to built up solar and extract the needed neodyme/copper increase the worldwide deployment of solar and wind, or are the mines already running at close to max capacity anyway and new developments are stalled by a lack of workforce, administrative decisions, or environmentalists? If the response is 2, what's the real issue?

Money is diverted from build-out for political and military pressures. Is that "administrative"?

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#213
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The topic is utility-scale storage. For your house, batteries is currently your best alternative. New battery tech is coming online which may turn out to scale down to single home use. Or may not. But even lithium storage gets cheaper every year. The right mix of storage technologies will very widely according to where it serves.

>The topic is utility-scale storage. The topic of this thread is storage that you can have built in 1 year, at max 2. Hydro storage takes a lot more time to be built from scratch.

We don't have enough renewable generating capacity to charge storage from, and won't two years from now, either.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#214
post #94

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…

> Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, Source? The largest grid scale batteries to date don't come close to the numbers you are talking about. The largest operational deployment gives a paltry 0.4 GW and can only sustain that for a few hours[1]. People love to hand wave away storage, but it is a monumental and unsolved problem. [1…

Battery storage projects have tended to be smaller and in the UK average around 20MW. They have followed the pattern of distributed energy rather than big projects connecting at 400kV. In the UK there is over 20GW in the pipeline.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reactor is on one of my favourite wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_buildin...

Huh, I was unaware of Flamanville 3 [1]. Sounds like the exact same story as Olkiluoto 3, except even more expensive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

They share a common main contractor and construction.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#216
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now all the people who insisted the Greens had been co-opted by Big Oil will be completely silent about their having now been co-opted by Big Nuke. But Big Oil/Gas/Coal loves new nuke projects; each represents a decade or more of still buying fossil fuels, instead of incrementallly displacing fossil with renewables. What this really means is probably that their position is moot, because no new nukes are planned or li…

Eh, many of the stakeholders of the Hanhikivi project were individual municipalities which very much would have liked to get their carbon-free source of electricity. In the case of OL3, the only winners were probably lawyers due to the years of court battles between Finnish stakeholders and the French reactor supplier Areva. Everybody else lost. The Greens' new position is mostly relevant in the context of small, mod…

The individual municipalities are not the ones driving up cost and delaying completion. They do not benefit from delays and cost overruns. It is not hard to find who does benefit from those.

It is yet to be seen whether those empowered to gatekeep nuke projects will be able to identify enough places where they can extract graft from projects using from SMRs. If not, they will surely steer clear, even at the expense of having no nuke to milk at all.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#217
post #50
post #10

If Germany's Green Party takes the same line, I think it will be a huge blow to Russia. Also, it's about time.

The German green party demanded a ban on sending weapons to conflict zones just at the end of last year, now they would love to send all our army's equipment to Ukraine immediately. They fought tooth and nail for the ban of genertical modified food, but now are in favor of a mandatory mRNA vaccination even for young people. So why shouldn't they make another 180 on their fight against nuclear power, for which they co…

Being able to change your mind is a feature of democracy.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#218
post #166
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any credible person or German party ever claimed that. It's the food you're eating that's modified, not that you get genetically modified from eating it (Of course gmo is a thousand times better than previous practices with random mutation)

You are correct, nobody claimed that. But environmentalists often warned of "unknown risks" [1] when consuming genetically modified food. Why at the same time there should be no unkown risks when injecting mRNA vaccines into children is beyond me. [1] htts://www.bund.net/themen/landwirtschaft/gentechnik/risiken/gesundheit/?wc=23315

Or rather people felt hat the benefit outweighed the risk. That was just not the case for some people with GMO.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#219
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well not Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...

And who do you think has a huge influence over Kazakhstan (and recently helped them prevent a coup).

If one's goal is influence, fighting wars is counter-productive.

The top five countries investing the most into the economy of Kazakhstan remained unchanged in 2019. Being the largest investor, the Netherlands invested $7.3 billion in Kazakhstan (30.2%), followed by the USA — $5.5 billion (23.0%) and Switzerland — $ 2.2 billion. China outran the Russian Federation in terms of investments and took 4th place with $1.7 billion (7.0%), while the Russian Federation closed the top five with $1.4 billion (5.8%) invested in Kazakhstan.

Source: https://www.timesca.com/index.php/news/22338-kazakhstan-attr...

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This source says that natural gas was 25% of Germany's energy consumption: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... Your link only covers electricity generation, which is only a part of total energy consumption.

It covers electricity because this is the only sector where nuclear could be relevant. The other sectors like heating and industry use of gas can't be covered by nuclear since electrical heating is negligible in Germany. Didn't you look that up?
Post reply on HN