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

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#491

Post by dieortin » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #457

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't fall into the trap. Objective reality isn't political. The total number of people killed in nuclear accidents divided by TWh generated is pretty objective.

Not when deaths caused by nuclear energy are incredibly hard to quantify.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#492

Post by tomComb » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

dane-pgp wrote: post #445

willcipriano wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Costing more, Yes, but being more deadly, No.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#493

Post by hnaccount_rng » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #468

pydry wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Fukushima cost $800 billion Note, this is a figure cited by opposition politicians. Nowhere near this much money has actually been spent. The estimate from the government is a bit under $200 billion, and that includes not just cleanup but also resettling people and continued monitoring of the reactor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#:... .

So you exceeded the liability cap by a factor of 100, rather than 400... I'm sure there is a person for which a 99% vs a 99.75% payment by the state makes a difference. But ...

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#494

Post by otter-rock » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

osuairt wrote: post #24

throw827474737 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, Agreed. There seems to be a tendency by pro-Nuclear people, to try and frame nuclear as the only alternative energy source. They will say things like, "nuclear is by far the safer option, especially considering coal or gas".. They keep trying to frame the use of nuclear next to fossil fuels, while pretending that solar, wind, hydro and geothermal haven't increasingly been adopted for 10 years now. It is a very s…

The framing comes from this reasoning: not enough resources yet to build 100% renewable generation + storage => still need nuclear or fossils for now

But many people think this way instead: we have the technology for all the parts => build all the good stuff right now

Ironically, nuclear is selectively framed as just one thing with every safety issue ever, while fossils are further sub-divided into different environmental impacts.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#495

Post by varajelle » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

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…

> What happens in case of war?

War is horrible, many people die or get displaced. Cities gets destroyed.

Nuclear incident are nothing compared to that and not really a concern anymore. I don't know why people bring wars up.

And if the ennemy just wanted to destroy, they would just use nuclear or chemical weapons that are meant for this purpose, no need to get to a nuclear powerplant for that.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#496

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:23 PM UTC

dieortin wrote: post #491

arcticbull wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't fall into the trap. Objective reality isn't political. The total number of people killed in nuclear accidents divided by TWh generated is pretty objective.

Not when deaths caused by nuclear energy are incredibly hard to quantify.

Are they though? Do you have some quantification of that difficulty? Any studies? Any citations to back up your thesis?

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#497

Post by fsflover » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #438

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

> They're convinced Chernobyl can happen again Of course it can! It's almost certainly much less likely now, but I don't think anyone has presented convincing evidence that it's impossible that something like that could happen again. And that's a really big deal. Even if the risk of another Chernobyl is ridiculously low, another Chernobyl would be so bad that it's worth considering. Having said that, I do support nuc…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion_(psychology)

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#498

Post by concordDance » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:29 PM UTC

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…

The Japanese government (and indeed, insurance too) is doing far more work than they should be. The standard should not be "fix area to how it used to be" it should be "take what measures are cost effective to improve area". But that's politically untenable.

Radiation levels around Fukushima are perfectly fine for habitation and would have been so even if nothing but basic post-accident reactor containment had been done.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#499

Post by jpgvm » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:31 PM UTC

dane-pgp wrote: post #437

jpgvm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abortions aren't deaths. Even if they were I wasn't looking to draw comparisons, these were just examples of things people don't have informed opinions on.

> Abortions aren't deaths. ... people don't have informed opinions Well, you've definitely proven your point.

No, you have proven mine.

Abortions aren't deaths any more than pulling out constitutes murder. It's just a bunch of cells like any other until it becomes able to sustain life independently at which point abortion is essentially illegal everywhere in the world except in seriously extreme circumstances.

Attempting to define it otherwise takes some fairly substantial mental gymnastics. If I have to amputate my arm did I "kill" my arm? Or did I remove a piece of myself that was malfunctioning? Sure it was a bunch of cells and those cells are "dead" I guess. Is a baby part of the mother or is it special because some of the DNA was donated externally? If it's special is it a parasite? What distinguishes it from viral infections that introduce foreign RNA?

So no. I don't think I'm uninformed. It's fairly clear cut at this point but apparently most of the world thinks we should declare it ambiguous because it goes against cultural indoctrination of a significant portion of the population.

Exactly the sort of pandering that has led us to the edge (or potentially past) of no return on climate change.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#500

Post by oezi » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:36 PM UTC

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…

Your comment gets it entirely backwards. France is currently in a terrible spot with their monoculture of nuclear because the hot temperatures have caused shutdowns of many reactors, many old plants are offline because of security concerns and the French operator of the nuclear plants is close to bankruptcy and needs to be pulled back into government ownership because renewables can be so much cheaper today.

What Germany did get wrong is that they invested too much in renewables too early and that continues to haunts Germans by paying subsidies for renewables installed more than 10 years ago. Germany helped to jump-start the whole scaling of renewables (together with the US) but the price is high.

I would argue this isn't actually so bad because we need to price energy higher anyway to reduce consumption and further accelerate the building of renewable capacity.

No matter what anybody says: nuclear is dead. The number of projects in planning (outside China) is so small that it won't make the slightest dent for our emissions goals. The only topics worth focusing on is solar, transmission and energy storage. Wind only matters in the next 10 years. Afterwards solar will be another magnitude cheaper and wind won't be able to compete.