Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

earth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 676 posts

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#401

Post by pfdietz »

pvaldes wrote: post #301
hedora wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the plan was to build a non-seismically protected nuclear power plant in a seismically active area? Do you have a source for that?

This was exactly the idea in 1973 Murcia, Spain, yup. BWR model. Same design as Fukushima plant at 30km of Lorca. Until a couple of dumb guys and a famous actor from the area see what was obvious, pick up some banners and saved the day. The action payback generously when in 2011 Lorca was hit by an 5.1 earthquake and no central nuclear was here to be hit. None of the tomato companies that sell vegetables to half Euro…

A 5.1 earthquake is rather weak. This would likely not have damaged an NPP near there.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#402

Post by teakettle42 »

denton-scratch wrote: post #275
teakettle42 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what decommissioning means and what you’re asking for is childishly ridiculous. How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants we’ve been running for forty years while people like yourself threw ignorant tantrums over nuclear? How would you “reverse all harmful results of the operation of a plant”? How are you going to recapture all the pollution they dumped into our air, exactly?

> That’s not what decommissioning means The word apparently means whatever the responsible authorities want it to mean. > How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants We used to make gas by heating coal with steam; the result was a contaminated site, coal gas, and coke for steel. But the site was left contaminated with chemical waste - stuff that can in principle be chemically denatured, or…

> I'm against repeating the mistakes my grandparents made, in all their ignorance.

You’re making the exact same mistake by rejecting today’s an attainable but imperfect solution in favor of an unattainably perfect one.

The end result is that we waste another few decades spewing pollution into the air.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#403

Post by belorn »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #150
ThePhysicist wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

The evidence that renewables need to be supported by gas and oil is evidential in northern Europe, observed by anyone who pay their own electricity bill. When the wind is weak the market price is determined by gas and oil prices. When the wind is strong the price goes down to basically transit costs. Since the average wind condition is pretty much the same each year, the market cost for electricity has been 100% determined by gas and oil prices for the last decade.

If one also follow energy politics this has also been very clear by the politicians themselves. The green political movement has been advocating the concept of "reserve energy" over nuclear "base load". The strategy is to build out as much wind and solar as possible, while keeping natural gas and oil plant on subsidized plans. When the weather is bad for energy production, those natural gas and oil plant starts up and supply the missing supply.

For oil and gas operators this is a pretty great deal. They get paid twice, once by the government and then a second time by the market. They also only need to spend fuel when the market price is at its highest, reducing fuel costs and improving profits. It is pretty much a win-win situation for the government and power plants operators.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#404

Post by q1w2 »

tb0ne wrote: post #347
Krasnol wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers are based upon flawed and selective numbers making them quite ridiculous for several reasons: For example: with Fukushima the nuclear bandwagon arguments that those deaths which actually occurred resulted from moving people to a safe area. As if not moving them would have been an option or if the movement would have happened without the accident. For Chernobyl it's even worse since there the bandwagon a…

Uh, did you actually read the source I posted? For Fukushima for example, the deaths from evacuation ARE included in the death toll (the total number is estimated to be 2,314). You have a detailed article about the data here [1]. But I am open to change my mind. Can you give a source that compares the mortality rate of energy sources and that, in your opinion, better accounts for all deaths? What is the highest morta…

The source you posted is highly biased against nuclear - and HEAVILY inflated the number of deaths caused by Fukushima, while strangely putting outrageously low numbers for the deaths from Chernobyl.

You can look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

...for a better breakdown, but this wikipedia article conflates deaths caused by the meltdown evacuation with deaths caused by the tsunami and earthquake evacuation (remember the massive tsunami and earthquake?).

Additionally, while trying to predict future deaths based on undetectible doses of radiation is a very unreliable task. ...and if you compare it to other energy sources, nuclear is one of the safest, if not the safest of the scalable solutions.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#405

Post by adrianN »

willcipriano wrote: post #396
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Building nuclear plants is really not something that I'd put in the category of "things one can do quickly".

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#406

Post by q1w2 »

oldsecondhand wrote: post #369
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. What part of this entire discussion has anything do to with science? Is anyone actually contesting the science? Is it a discussion about the number of orbitals of uranium atoms? Or is it a discussion on which entities handle the long-term financials obligations, whether we favor or not decentralized grids, whether we favor short term or longer…

The German greens were more against nuclear power than fossil. If you care about the environment that's a pretty irrational choice.

Russian influence operations at work. Russia has been promoting anti-nuclear sentiment in the West since the 1960s.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#407

Post by legulere »

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…

How many of the languages that were spoken 10000 years ago do we still speak? Launching nuclear waste in space is dangerous, not because of what it will do there but because a lot of rockets explode on their way there scattering parts as fine particles all over the world.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#408

Post by asdff »

throwawayjun21 wrote: post #47

So stupid to hate nuclear energy. you dont need to be a rocket scientist to realize how good deal its. Where i am from a lot of activists hit the road and blocked many nuclear plant from bein built. Brainless activism is destroying democracies around the world

It's not brainless, there is a very intelligent cohort of people who stand to gain a lot of money from investments shifting away from nuclear energy into sources they are personally leveraged in. People aren't generally able to form grassroots movements without the consent of at least some of the moneyed elite.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#409

Post by trinovantes »

sangnoir wrote: post #377
trinovantes wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Issues with Fukushima that could've prevented the disaster were raised by engineers/scientists but were ignored for years by the government/politicians

...and what lessons can we draw from this?

Trust your nuclear scientists/engineers because they know what they're doing and are, in fact, not playing god

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#410

Post by q1w2 »

pydry wrote: post #312
concordDance wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power was ended in Germany for political reasons. The public has an incorrect idea of how dangerous nuclear power is and how dangerous nuclear waste is and it was easier for the politicians to go along with it for points than stand it's ground. If you're making policy based on scientifically inaccurate ideas then you aren't respecting the science.

In Germany the maximum insurance liability for nuclear disasters is $2.5 billion. In the US it's $0.35 billion. Fukushima cost $800 billion. This happened essentially because without a liability cap the entire insurance industry considers nuclear power to be ridiculously risky. So the government, who wanted to protect investors, stepped in. I feel like a lot of people who dont know this want to educate me about how s…

There is a world of difference between a modern Gen III+ reactor, and the 1960s design of Fukushima and Chernobyl.

It's like comparing the dangers of doctors using 12th century blood-letting and leeches vs getting an MRI.

Post reply on HN