Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy • Hacker News Board

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#141

Post by chrsw » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 12:52 PM UTC

jpgvm wrote: post #138

henearkr wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, but the real argument against nuclear fission is not the economic one, it's the safety one. The safety during the (peace time) use of nuclear plants has been hugely improved, so I agree that's not anymore the main concern. But nuclear fission facilities are very cumbersome to dismantle, and they are liabilities during and after their commissioning. You can see that in Ukraine for example, Zaporizhia plant…

Nuclear safety in war time is unproven sure but I would argue that a nuclear power plant is much less dangerous than a hydro dam. Imagine a strike on Three Gorges Dam, at minimum millions would die, without needing to use a nuclear weapon. Sure it's a tough pile of concrete, but that is exactly what a nuclear power plant is too. Nuclear fuel is a non-issue if it was profitable to mine it. Australia has vast supplies…

Nuclear definitely has a PR problem and I don't have enough background in the science to claim how unfounded the problem actually is. But what I do have are memories of how people react to anything nuclear related. All it takes is one high profile incident and all the political capital spent on selling nuclear as an attractive option to the public vanishes instantly. I don't know why other energy sources don't seem to have this problem. Not to the degree nuclear has, at least.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#142

Post by sudden_dystopia » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 12:55 PM UTC

Too little too late. They clearly need nuclear power now. The west has made its energy bed and now we have to sleep in it.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#143

Post by lnsru » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 12:55 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #105

agapon wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you the famous (and maybe fake) quote 'The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them' ? It's the same here, but with selling energy to "capitalists". What Europeans might have seen as purely economic affair for the USSR / Russia was just means of getting money to grow and support its army, to buy Western politicians and media influence, etc.

Theoretically you’re right. Practically you’re not though, because as history attests, the USSR dissolved peacefully and thorough all the ups and downs the economic relationship survived. This is perhaps why the warnings from the US were ignored for so long: they were based on self-interest and they had a track record of being wrong for decades.

It was not peacefully. Rather without large scale war. Some people got killed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events_(Lithuania)

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#144

Post by ch4s3 » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #113

IMTDb wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear They haven't forgotten, they were fighting a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens. The same eco-ideologist that ruined Germany have made it impossible to properly invest in the nuclear plants in France and to ensure knowledge and expertise is properly transmitted and developed with the younger generation. For years the message was "don't invest in nuc…

> Nuclear is here to stay for the next decades (plural). That's the problem with nuclear; even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two. No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. Decommissioning of the first UK nuclear power plants is expected to last another century. That's being paid for by taxpayers. The bu…

In the US operators pay into a fund for decommissioning.

>No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned.

There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully decommissioned[1].

[1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#145

Post by henearkr » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

jpgvm wrote: post #138

henearkr wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, but the real argument against nuclear fission is not the economic one, it's the safety one. The safety during the (peace time) use of nuclear plants has been hugely improved, so I agree that's not anymore the main concern. But nuclear fission facilities are very cumbersome to dismantle, and they are liabilities during and after their commissioning. You can see that in Ukraine for example, Zaporizhia plant…

Nuclear safety in war time is unproven sure but I would argue that a nuclear power plant is much less dangerous than a hydro dam. Imagine a strike on Three Gorges Dam, at minimum millions would die, without needing to use a nuclear weapon. Sure it's a tough pile of concrete, but that is exactly what a nuclear power plant is too. Nuclear fuel is a non-issue if it was profitable to mine it. Australia has vast supplies…

I concur that, for this kind of near-civilzation-collapse risks, dams are less desirable than wind/solar facilities.

But I can't compare the risk posed by a dam and the risk posed by a nuclear fission plant.

One is an instant and relatively local disaster, the other is a long term and wide-spread (before containment) pita.

However, I suspect that dams are much harder to turn into a catastrophe than nuclear plants. While for a nuclear plant you just have to disable the cooling and move all the fuel rods all the way outside of the boron dampener and keep it this way for enough time to overheat, for a dam you would have to throw a really huge lot of explosives on it to physically destroy its concrete. There are several types of dams too, some of which are probably as strong as a natural hill.

About spent fuel: there are probably many reasons (that I don't know) why the actively-cooled-pools are not all in the middle of deserts, but right now they are just next to the plants. Of course we could put them on the Moon too, I would consider it a definitive solution (for this part of the problem).

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#146

Post by wronglyprepaid » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 1:00 PM UTC

henearkr wrote: post #87

wronglyprepaid wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised that they haven't heard of the possibility of energy storage. Have we not? I think the real issue is that we have capitalist pigscum that are greedy and want to burn the atmosphere if it can give them an extra buck and the EU is beholden to them that is why they made this change.

But they are allowed to hide behind this false narrative because the population is not aware enough, which is why we should speak publicly a lot of the energy storage solutions and projects.

They are allowed to hide behind the false narrative because governments only care about shareholders and not stakeholders.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#147

Post by YinglingLight » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 1:00 PM UTC

IMTDb wrote: post #82

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet weirdly, those non-technical people seem to have accidentally stumbled on the solution that the whole world is moving towards, while the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear and even their most ambitious goals include using less nuclear and replacing it with the stuff the ideological German's came up with, because it's better. And it wasn't that long ago that they were threatening to sc…

> the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear They haven't forgotten, they were fighting a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens. The same eco-ideologist that ruined Germany have made it impossible to properly invest in the nuclear plants in France and to ensure knowledge and expertise is properly transmitted and developed with the younger generation. For years the message was "don't invest in nuc…

No post body was provided.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#148

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 1:01 PM UTC

viscountchocula wrote: post #133

mcv wrote: post #122

I think it's good to recognise gas and nuclear as being preferable to coal and oil, but green they are not. I consider them transitional energy sources; we will be stuck with them for a long time while we transition to greener energy, but coal and oil need to be stopped as soon as possible. After the Fukushima disaster, Germany closed its nuclear power plants and replaced them with coal plans; absolutely the worst po…

I get why gas isn't green, but why isn't nuclear?

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#149

Post by ben_w » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 1:03 PM UTC

Swenrekcah wrote: post #30

ben_w wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is uneconomically expensive and currently looks like it may always be so, but there are ways to fairly rapidly scale it up to world demand if we really wanted to.

It’s true it’s expensive. But 1. a large part of that is regulatory expenses not inherent to the technology, and 2. are we sure it is uneconomically expensive after taking into account the expenses spared by not completely fucking up our climate stability?

1. then it would be even less politically acceptable, which is already the biggest problem.

2. yes we are sure, because even current green tech — PV and "enough" batteries — is already cost-competitive with nuclear, and we have good reasons to expect both PV and storage to get cheaper.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#150

Post by ZeroGravitas » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 1:08 PM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #61

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet weirdly, those non-technical people seem to have accidentally stumbled on the solution that the whole world is moving towards, while the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear and even their most ambitious goals include using less nuclear and replacing it with the stuff the ideological German's came up with, because it's better. And it wasn't that long ago that they were threatening to sc…

Solar and wind alone won't work without support by gas or other non-renewable sources. Try to find a single scientific study that gives a detailed overview of how the German energy mix is supposed to work and that explains how supply will be matched to demand 24/7 all year round. None exists. The whole "Energiewende" is built on the hope that either our neighbors will produce the necessary base capacity to stabilize…

I read the book before the numbers it cites were decades out of date. And even then, it made a pretty good case for renewables in the parts of the globe where most people live.

Once you update it with current figures I'm assuming it can only make a stronger case. So are you just using the old figures and pretending those haven't changed?

That's like trying to model the next iPhones specs from first principles with specs from the last century.

Well it won't have a very big HDD because all that spinning rust will really drain the AA batteries.

edit to add, but his basic strategy is sound:

> The principal problem is that carbon pollution is not priced correctly. And there is no confidence that it’s going to be priced correctly in the future. When I say “correctly,” I mean that the price of emitting carbon dioxide should be big enough such that every running coal power station has carbon capture technology fitted to it.

> Solving climate change is a complex topic, but in a single crude brush- stroke, here is the solution: the price of carbon dioxide must be such that people stop burning coal without capture

The UK basically did this. Note that it was found by the market that replacing the coal plants entirely was cheaper than adding carbon capture to them.

edit 2:

> The most promising of these options, in terms of scale, is switching on and off the power demand of electric-vehicle charging. 30 million cars, with 40 kWh of associated batteries each (some of which might be ex- changeable batteries sitting in filling stations) adds up to 1200 GWh. If freight delivery were electrified too then the total storage capacity would be bigger still.

> There is thus a beautiful match between wind power and electric vehicles. If we ramp up electric vehicles at the same time as ramping up wind power, roughly 3000 new vehicles for every 3 MW wind turbine, and if we ensure that the charging systems for the vehicles are smart, this synergy would go a long way to solving the problem of wind fluctuations.

The UK also did this.

I'm baffled at the books continued popularly with renewable "debunkers". The book clearly described the problems and solutions. The main skepticism was aimed at politicians being able to overcome the political power of fossil fuel lobbiest and do something sensible.

The only explanation is a willful disregard for the new knowledge we've acquired in the intervening time period, much of which the author guesses correctly but we now know for a fact.