I'm always a bit baffled by the amount of pro-nuclear comments on HN and their stance on how everyone who disagrees is just not educated enough. Please educate me: Is the waste problem solved? Are we not still fighting with all the previous attempts of handling it? Is "dig a hole in a salt deposit and keep it there" really good enough for the very, very, very long term? Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with new ones when the time comes? Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)?
Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
171–180 of 676 posts
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
"fully decommissioned" by some somewhat unintuitive definitions: > The DOE was required by contract and statute to begin removing spent nuclear fuel and GTCC waste by January 31, 1998. To date, the DOE has not removed any spent fuel or GTCC waste from the CY site, and it is unknown when it will. The current 'plan' is for the companies looking after the waste on the original site to sue the government every few years…
this is exactly the idealism thats causing problems -the energy futures in germany reaches the highest price in recorded history, the industry is being decimated and it's importing gas from a tyran that has started a war on Gemany's doorstep. Without Europe's gas dollars he would not be able to fund it's millatry and 12 million ukranians would never become homeless refugees.
Meanwhile you are complaining about waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#173Earlier 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…
This highlights the real Achilles heel of the nuclear industry - it is a labour efficient power producer that it doesn't employ enough people to guarantee political protection.
We ended up with a group of people who would benefit a moderate amount from cheap power, and a fanatic anti-nuclear lobby that succeeded in scuttling decades of progress. The more motivated group won, as is predictable.
It is amazing watching Europeans trying to achieve energy poverty in defiance of their technical head start. The energy figures out of places like the UK, France and Germany are startlingly bad (eg, [0]). Especially considered per-capita.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Historical_D...
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the same reason why people turn a blind eye to oil, coal, guns, alcohol and cigarettes yet have a problem with cannabis, abortions, nuclear power, gun control and until recently electric cars. PR/marketing trumps all because people aren't sufficiently educated in science and statistics to understand what represents risk vs what is feasible, etc. Because they can't interpret the data themselves they defer to media…
Well it depends on the country. In France for example, people who are anti-abortion, anti-cannabis, anti-EV, etc (most often those are Conservative people) are also anti-wind-turbines and pro-nuclear.
The specific issues aren't the point.
The point is that most people don't have informed opinions based on fact but rather just regurgitate whatever is fed to them in whatever media they consume.
Us sitting here having an educated debate on the merits of nuclear vs hydro aren't the problem, we lie in the relatively informed group. We have concerns about nuclear (and other technologies no doubt) but those come from a place of reason, not of group-think.
Side note:
Nuclear and it's relation with Green's parties around the world is also special as it was the platform on which those parties were created. So otherwise rational people, i.e environmentalists are irrationally against nuclear power because of long-standing historical reasons that probably don't hold anymore but can't change the very basis of their platform - or at least are unwilling to.
No amount of facts changes that as it has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with politics.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny that the real title is: >>Gas and Nuclear Turn Green as EU Parliament Approves New Taxonomy >>On the contrary, natural gas does emit greenhouse gas emissions, however, supporters claim it is less polluting than traditional fossil fuels and can thus be part of the energy transition. So less pollution then heavy oil is now "green" in Europe....bravo, thank you Germany.
Natural gas emits radically less CO2 than coal, which is why this is entirely necessary during the transition (Germany is now bruning coal to compensate for the Russian war). Gas emits so little CO2 compared to coal that it actually accounted for ONE THIRD of the drop in U.S. emissions from 2005 - 2016: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-us-carbon-emissions... .
> Gas emits so little CO2 compared to coal
At a molecular level this doesn't make sense to me. The fundamental carbon cycle value proposition is to harvest energy released when a carbon atom (re)joins two oxygens. For the same energy, how would methane and coal produce different amounts of CO2?
That said, I can see how the oxygen reaction would be less efficient and create more byproducts (i.e. acid rain) using coal given its less refined nature. How methane would have a better energy to CO2 ratio doesn't seem to have an obvious mechanism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
Imagination, Physics, Fire & Trees - Richard Feynman (aka Trees grow from air, carbon cycle): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLMysTpwhg
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#176Some back-of-the-grubby-napkin maths. Nuclear is currently about 10% of global electricity production. We could go all-nuclear, therefore, by going 10x on nuclear reactors (less in fact because there are renewables too but nvm). There have been two major, critical nuclear energy incidents - Chernobyl and Fukushima. I'll count them both, though see caveat [1]. That's 2 incidents in 50 years. If we went all-nuclear and…
I'll preface this by stating that I'm German and I'm intuitively against using nuclear. But hear me out anyhow. :)
At this point the climate crisis is bad enough that I won't even fight against nuclear as such. If you can build it safely I won't stand in your way. I'll be busy across the street, fighting against coal, oil & gas. Thing is, the time scale at which nuclear stations are constructed isn't at all the same as for renewables; starting the planning for new nuclear now isn't gonna put us on the right track to a livable future. Nuclear plants are huge; the big ones that would really be needed for a big shift like you describe would take a while to go online.
Which is okay I think; if anything, we'll need much more electricity in total anyhow as we electrify more processes. But we'll need more low-carbon energy much before that, now more than ever. So I'll only agree with this if it's not an either or but doing both.
Caveat: I don't trust big profit driven corporations, nor states, to run nuclear plants in an honestly safety-oriented way. I have yet to hear a proposal how the incentives could be set up to change that. If nuclear is relatively casualty-free so far, I feel that's mostly luck, and indeed there were a few close calls. Don't start arguing with me on this one please because it's not the core of my argument (here). :)
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putin's power in Russia is a lot more absolute than Biden's in the US or Macron's in France. And especially with his war against Ukraine and general hatred of democracy, Putin is relevant. The EU would have had less problems buying gas from Yeltsin's Russia. In fact, that's how we got into this situation; Russia was supposed to be on the road to becoming a normal, open democracy. And then Putin changed course.
Demonizing an enemy by personalisation and reduction to one evil dictator is a known propaganda / manipulation technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonizing_the_enemy#Personifi... This has always been a standard operation model for the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit... So yes, Putin's Russia is used intentionally to introduce the same feeling as Hitler's Germany. That's the way…
But Putin does have dictator level control...
It's Putin's Russia because Russia does what Putin wants.
Biden wants a lot of things for America but both the legislature and the courts are stopping that. So in that sense it is America's America.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, framing it as if Germany policy had not been also ... "influenced" by Russia's long-term strategy would be quite naive.
Why does everyone attribute to deception what could just as easily be attributed to this relationship being beneficial for Germany (and a lot of other EU countries which are conveniently omitted from this discussion)? Energy is at the core of economic development and Germany and a bunch of other countries were able to get gas for decades.
"could just as easily be attributed to this relationship being beneficial for Germany"
There is no single concience called Germany that may definitively answer the question of whether it benefits them.
As is often the case, people benefetting from this relationship are not the ones paying the price when something goes wrong.
For every 1 billion of economic benefit produced by this relationship, this war has destroyed 5.
most lukely, without this relationship, the qar would not be possible.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putin's power in Russia is a lot more absolute than Biden's in the US or Macron's in France. And especially with his war against Ukraine and general hatred of democracy, Putin is relevant. The EU would have had less problems buying gas from Yeltsin's Russia. In fact, that's how we got into this situation; Russia was supposed to be on the road to becoming a normal, open democracy. And then Putin changed course.
Demonizing an enemy by personalisation and reduction to one evil dictator is a known propaganda / manipulation technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonizing_the_enemy#Personifi... This has always been a standard operation model for the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit... So yes, Putin's Russia is used intentionally to introduce the same feeling as Hitler's Germany. That's the way…
You might have a point if any of the other people you mention had maintained unchallenged political power for 2 decades by the expedient of murdering their political rivals.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#180I'm always a bit baffled by the amount of pro-nuclear comments on HN and their stance on how everyone who disagrees is just not educated enough. Please educate me: Is the waste problem solved? Are we not still fighting with all the previous attempts of handling it? Is "dig a hole in a salt deposit and keep it there" really good enough for the very, very, very long term? Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and…
>Is the waste problem solved?
Are we not still fighting with all the previous attempts of handling it? Is "dig a hole in a salt deposit and keep it there" really good enough for the very, very, very long term?
It is technically solved, but politically unsolved. YMMV about how much of a deal breaker this is.
>Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with new ones when the time comes? Not a problem that you can solved today
>Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)? Yes, also Fukushima can't happen in geologically inert Western Europe.
However, what is clear is that the world needs consistent, plentiful, reliable carbon-free energy. The storage required to meet the first three conditions with renewables DOES NOT EXIST. It doesn't exist for anything outside of a few minutes. Nuclear power is: consistent, reliable and carbon-free; and humanity has known how to do it since the 1960s. In a contest between a technology we DO NOT HAVE, and one we DO, it is a no-brainer.