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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

#441

Post by belorn »

Nitramp wrote: post #358
mlindner wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power. We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants. Heating problem IS a power problem given the high efficiency of heat pumps nowadays. And yes they work perfectly fine in Germany's relatively moderate winters.

Only in the most abstract sense, if you're willing to ignore actual installed capacity (and thus reality to some degree). There are around 350k heat pumps in Germany right now, of 40 million households (ignoring offices, ignoring multi family homes etc). There is no way Germany could install enough heatpumps to counteract the Russia induced gas crisis, not even over a timeframe of a decade or more. Optimistically you…

EU has an yearly report of the state of the energy grid, and a common finding is that different country spend subsidies on different things. Germany spend most of any country, and they spend a bit half of that on production of renewable energy and the remaining split between fossil fuel and shared infrastructure like power lines. Very little of the subsidies goes to the consumer side.

There are however countries who focused on the infrastructure/consumer side of the equation. When communal or heath pump based heating is significant cheaper, suddenly people interest to invest into home improvements goes up. As the report describe, it not obvious which strategy is best in order to reduce pollution.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#442

Post by worik »

OMG. The first sentence: "designate natural gas and nuclear as environmentally sustainable energy sources"

I argue that nuclear is making our descendants pay for our current consumption because of the waste. It can be argued that there are storage mechanisms that are safe tor two hundred millennium (I do not accept those arguments, but it is an argument).

But natural gas: It is not sustainable (it is a fossil fuel, it will run out). Burning it produces CO2 which is burning the world, and producing it releases huge amounts of methane that cannot even be counted and that is worse than CO2 at burning the world.

Such greed, such hubris, such willingness to ruin the world that we borrow from our children to satisfy our greed.

Evil.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#443

Post by worik »

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…

What is your "science" for dealing with the long term waste?

What "science" do you use to design mechanisms to keep highly toxic materials away from human contact for 200,000 years?

It is not science. There is no science that can solve those problems. It is greed.

(I live in the South Pacific. The French are hated here for what they have done for their nuclear programme)

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#444

Post by worik »

MattGaiser wrote: post #412
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc. Isn't your choice of telling them false based purely on political agenda? Same happens on other side of the camp, both believe their science is actual science.

It kind of depends on what you consider a fact. I support nuclear scientifically. I don’t think it has a chance politically. Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem. Politically, expect to spend billions upon billions and then have things like Yucca Mountain canned after lots of construction. Both are true and which ones you consider lead to very different conclusions.

> Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem.

No it is not.

There is no place on Earth that we know is geologically stable for the time periods required We have no way of knowing what society will be like ten thousand years from now, let alone 100,000 years. How do we communicate with those people bout the danger of what we left behind?

Greed. Hubris.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#445

Post by dane-pgp »

willcipriano wrote: post #400
dane-pgp wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fro…

I'm just not convinced by the argument "Nuclear power is safe as long as we don't make any of the mistakes of previous generations".

Chernobyl didn't make the mistakes of Windscale; Fukushima didn't make the mistakes of Chernobyl; and future nuclear power stations won't make the mistakes of Fukushima (hopefully).

It's possible that the track record for nuclear plants, and handling radioactive waste, is getting better, but it's also possible that on the scale of hundreds of years, there will be new things that go wrong which we didn't predict.

I'm not asking for perfection, though. All I'm saying is that nuclear energy has a history of costing more and being more deadly than its proponents claim, and it's already too expensive to build (both generation and waste storage) at scale, safely, and on time in nearly all countries.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#446

Post by worik »

arcticbull wrote: post #414
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc. Isn't your choice of telling them false based purely on political agenda? Same happens on other side of the camp, both believe their science is actual science.

Well no, we have plenty of data that shows in reality, nuclear is the safest (lowest deaths per TWh generated [1]), among the lowest-carbon intensity (lower than solar, higher than wind) [2] and with seawater extraction has the potential of being renewable. Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from. So-called environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without a…

> Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.

In the Australian outback those are places people used to live. How are you going to stop people returning for 200,000 years?

Greed. Hubris.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#447

Post by martin_a »

haadej wrote: post #418
legulere wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Modern rockets, such as the Falcon 9, have an extremely low failure rate. Falcon 9 itself has had over 160 launches, with only 1 complete failure.

Would you bet that there's not a second failure which distributes nuclear waste in our atmosphere?

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#448

Post by YetAnotherNick »

arcticbull wrote: post #414
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc. Isn't your choice of telling them false based purely on political agenda? Same happens on other side of the camp, both believe their science is actual science.

Well no, we have plenty of data that shows in reality, nuclear is the safest (lowest deaths per TWh generated [1]), among the lowest-carbon intensity (lower than solar, higher than wind) [2] and with seawater extraction has the potential of being renewable. Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from. So-called environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without a…

You fell into the same trap. You linked 2 studies. Other side could link 2 studies with very different conclusion. We should understand it is fundamentally a political issue, and both side shouldn't hide behind 2 links to support them.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#449

Post by kelnos »

tb0ne wrote: post #295
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…

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…

I don't think "deaths per TWh" is the only measure we should be looking at, though. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is around 1000 square miles. It's certainly arguable if that is the correct size, or how long it will need to be in place.

If you shut down a coal plant, the pollution dissipates in a fairly short amount of time. (Unfortunately the same is not true of the carbon that has accumulated in the atmosphere over time.) If there's a disaster at a nuclear plant, some amount of land area becomes uninhabitable for some long amount of time (amounts dependent on the severity of the disaster).

For the record, I am in favor of building new nuclear plants, especially in areas where they can replace coal or even natural gas (it's absurd that this EU parliament action is considering natgas "green" as well). But let's not pretend that they are 100% safe, that the worst case can't happen, that the effects of a nuclear disaster aren't that big a deal, or that we've solved the waste disposal and storage problem. I agree that many anti-nuclear folks are driven more by overblown fears than science and statistics, but pro-nuclear people seem to also cherry-pick stats to better support their position.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#450

Post by martin_a »

barbazoo wrote: post #421
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…

It's such a pain how certain groups are so hung up on specific energy sources. German greens will never consider nuclear energy, Albertans will never consider anything that didn't come out of the ground either as oil or oil derived. It's like belonging to a sports team, it's silly. I used to be very much against nuclear energy because of the unsolved issue around dealing with it's waste. Two decades later after learn…

So, what changed in regards to dealing with its waste in the two decades? Or do you simply not care enough anymore?
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