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Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

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Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#391

Post by q1w2 »

hammock wrote: post #379
BurningFrog wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the anti-nuclear opinion is passionately opposed to scientific analysis. They're convinced Chernobyl can happen again, and that scientists are arrogantly playing god when they explain what can and can't happen

Thank you for this common sense reply. The truth is Chernobyl can never happen again, and scientists are completely all-knowing when they explain what can and can't happen.

Arguing with an anti-nuclear activist is indistiguishable to arguing with an anti-vax or climate change denier.

They are the same people who opposed all GMO food products despite the science.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#392

Post by dv_dt »

throw827474737 wrote: post #5
jpgvm wrote: post #2

About time. Nuclear is hardly an environmental risk even compared to the "cleaner" fossil fuels like gas. Hopefully this will allow the EU to return to competitive reactors designs instead of leaving China to pull humanities weight on that front. Though tbh I wouldn't be sad if we bought Chinese reactors until we are back up to speed, having Chinese nuclear > no nuclear. Everyone bitching about China stealing IP fina…

Strong disagree and just won't help besides fantasies. Lets not dig into the other mess again just because we never went and always deferred starting to do the right thing already 30 years back and now say: nuclear is the only way out. It isn't, it would be too late anyway, it will not scale to the world's power needs, it will cost too much.. and I just haven' touched the usual downsides of nuclear. Even some nuclear…

It would be pretty ridiculous if the lesson of energy after the disruption of energy during the war in the Ukraine is to build more nuclear plants, creating more central points of high disruption in potential conflicts.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#393

Post by pfdietz »

philipkglass wrote: post #279
jpgvm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to be expensive in the West for now. I'm waiting to see how China's rollout goes before declaring that it's straight up expensive. Even if you buy into crap like Chinese reactors being less safe or more poorly regulated they should still be a good benchmark for what is necessary to reach scale nuclear reactor production. Especially their small designs which are expected to be mass produced in factories and…

Chinese nuclear reactors built in China are completed faster than in other countries, and they probably [1] cost less. But it's not clear that Chinese nuclear reactors built in Western countries would be especially affordable. Consider this recently signed deal to build China's Hualong One reactor in Argentina: https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsargentina-optimistic-ab... It is supposed to take 8 years to build and…

China is also installing enormous amounts of pumped hydro for storage.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#394

Post by otter-rock »

black_puppydog wrote: post #176
rich_sasha wrote: post #169

Some 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…

People often don't realize that intermittent renewables must be paired with backup generation or storage. But energy storage at the scale of a 100% renewable system is currently an unsolved problem. So you really only have two options:

1. Continue to back up with fossil fuels

2. Temporarily back up with nuclear

Check my comment history for a debate on nuclear safety.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#395

Post by ZeroGravitas »

duskwuff wrote: post #345
denton-scratch wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WP says the plant has been "largely decommissioned". To my reading, that means the same as "not decommissioned yet".

From what I'm reading, that just means there are a couple of buildings (offices, warehouses, etc) left on the site. It hasn't been completely demolished yet, but it doesn't sound like there's anything extraordinary preventing that, either.

> The concrete casks sit on a heavy concrete pad, located adjacent to the former Trojan Nuclear Plant site.

> The ISFSI storage pad is surrounded by a secured area, which is monitored and protected round the clock.

Same word games as the other one.

The reactor itself is temporarily buried awaiting movement to Yucca Mountain, which has no planned date.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#396

Post by willcipriano »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #388
willcipriano wrote: post #154

You know how I know environmentalists are just dragging their feet on nuclear for ideological reasons? When we talk about a storage facility for nuclear waste, a scenario they insist you prepare for: if human civilization completely collapses to the point that any of the currently spoken languages on earth are no longer able to be read how to we keep the, whatever comes after us, from busting up the concrete and digg…

Also, as a more near term issue, say next 1000 years, what happens in case of war? Right now number of nuclear plants are so few that each could be tracked by the world, e.g. Russia getting hold of Chernobyl area was frightening. But if there are 10 times or even 100 times more number of plants in many more countries, some country will use some other's nuclear plant to prove collateral damage, what Iraq did to Kuwait…

For thirty years people have been asking that question, telling us to use "renewables" instead. Renewables aren't getting here fast enough, we can wait another thirty years burning fossil fuels or we can start building nuclear plants now.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#397

Post by q1w2 »

hello_marmalade wrote: post #359
tb0ne wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is stuff like people religiously dissmising you when you tell them that nuclear is nearly the safest power source in terms of deaths per TWh [1]. They don't base their opinion regarding safety on data, they base it on the feeling that they get from seeing large disasters and not seeing the countless deaths caused in silence, and they refuse to update their view even in the face of contradicting data. [1] https://o…

The reason people are skittish about nuclear is because when it does fail, it fails catastrophically . The biggest failures in memory are all failures that risked making a multi kilometer area potentially completely uninhabitable for decades. Even if the risk is only 1%, coal is a much less scary prospect.

See - this is exactly the kind of irrational comment that is a problem. "multi-kilometer" "1%" "catastrophically". ...these are all emotionally driven elements to an argument that does not hold water under scientific scrutiny.

Reactors like Chernobyl and Fukishima are not built today and cannot meltdown. The chance of meltdown is nearly 0%. ...and the danger of meltdown on a modern reactor is like what happened at Three Mile Island (which is basically nothing). No one died, nor was even irradiated. ...and even that type of meltdown is no longer possible.

...and finally "multi kilometer" is not even that big. The Earth is 300 million square kilometers in area. Even if your estimate was correct (which it isn't), then it still wouldn't be a big deal.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#398

Post by pfdietz »

jpgvm wrote: post #94
henearkr wrote: post #60

As I heard today again on the radio, the narrative is "to get energy whatever the weather, we cannot rely only on wind and solar". I'm surprised that they haven't heard of the possibility of energy storage . Both already available storage solutions, and the many other solutions in development, are largely enough to enable wind/solar and other renewable sources to replace fossil fuels, without relying on nuclear.

I think you (and most people that talk about storage) drastically underestimate the scale of the storage required and just how tight supply is for the resources necessary to build it. For now EVs are going to consume the world's supply of batteries. Leaves you with thermal or potential energy storage like pumped hydro. All of which aren't even fully developed yet or are restricted to specific geography. As of right n…

Of course the scale is large. Anything that replaces fossil fuel use is large. That doesn't mean it impossible, or even uncompetitive.

If you think there is some specific resource limit that would prevent adequate storage (from all storage technologies) from being implemented, do please tell me what you think it is. Realize you have to kill ALL the disparate storage technologies to make this argument, not just one specific one.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#399

Post by Kon5ole »

croes wrote: post #226
ThePhysicist wrote: post #16

De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party. It's understandable that France doesn't want to go with that, as they don't want to be forced down the same ruinous path we're currently on here in Germany. And honestly, good for them. It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. I did my PhD at the French nuclear…

Seems like France nuclear power has it's own problems https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

Very interesting! So basically what this story says means that the nuclear operator in France has been selling the electricity at a loss, so much so that they are way behind on maintenance and almost bankrupt.

Which in turn means that the actual cost of nuclear power in France is higher than has been reported so far. The cost has just been postponed for decades, until now.

It's certainly bad timing to discover it now - what a nasty "perfect storm" of unfortunate events we are having for electricity in Europe this year. :(

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#400

Post by willcipriano »

dane-pgp wrote: post #383
pornel wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know nuclear waste isn't green glowing leaky barrells like in cartoons, right? It's stored as solid glass. For super-duper cautious extra safety it can be stored below ground water levels. The volume of the high-level waste is relatively tiny (roughly a swimming pool per year per country). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k

You're right, it sounds like it should be easy to avoid these cartoonishly bad outcomes, but unfortunately reality doesn't always meet our expectations. "Why Germany is digging up its nuclear waste" "But the waste had to be stored somewhere, so the voices that warned against selecting Asse II were ignored." "The office concluded that the risk of groundwater contamination was too big, and the only truly safe option wa…

> Asse II salt mine should never have been used in the 1960s and 1970s as a site to dump nuclear waste, said Ingo Bautz of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection.

> “Today, nobody would choose this mine to place radioactive waste,” Bautz told journalists during a recent tour of the mine, in the north-western state of Lower Saxony.

How is this applicable in 2022? This proves his point, not yours. The problems from your article have long been solved.

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