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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

#501

Post by jsmith45 »

arcticbull wrote: post #459
worik wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you think those aren't solved problems? First, fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years. [1] And even to answer your original question directly, there's a whole area of study that's fascinating on how to provide long-term warnings. [3] Not necessarily in the Australian outback, Yucca Mountain is a great choice. [2] [edit](That area is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site…

Exactly right. The goal with nuclear waste is basically to get it back down to levels similar the original ore. At that point, it isn't especially dangerous.

Many radioactive products are either very short lived, and will decay down to minimal levels within a few hundred years, or are very long lived, causing very low radioactivity.

The problem are the elements that are in between which is mostly the other actinides. Those are the ones that would require tens of thousands of years or more to reach safe activity levels. Fast reactor designs don't have significant amounts of such elements in the waste. The waste will decay to uranium ore-ore like levels within only hundreds of years.

The biggest issue is that they need relatively enriched uranium to operate at first. After they are started, they can be used as a breeder reactor that can take in natural uranium and convert it to the enriched uranium it needs to continue running.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#502

Post by cassepipe »

Seems like everybody is jumping on the "environmentalists that don't like nuclear power do it for ideological reasons and are paid by the oil lobby" resentment bandwagon. While I think it is a fair point and while I do think it's a stupid mistake to close nuclear plants, there are also issues that I rarely see addressed probably because they drown under all the rest :

1. Nuclear plants are very expensive and some projects have been pumping taxpayer's money. I suspect they are not so easy to conceive, build and maintain as other sources of clean energy. Especially since they become a security issue when they get old.

2. The problem of waste management has always been a problem. I hear it argued that it is a solved problem but certainly having this problem lying since the beginning of the industry has not helped not build trust.

3. The nuclear catastrophies have been overblown because they were more spectacular and a new thing affecting lot of people in a short period of time BUT it remains that it is hard to trust people that thought building a nuclear plant in an island that is the victim of dramatic eathquakes and tsunamis a good ides AND the problem is that it fucks up an entire area for who knows how long ? That is certainly scary, no need for oil producers lobbying there to explain distrust.

4. Is there even enough uranium for the world ? Is is sustainable to invest loads of money into systems whose fuel is on foreign countries that you have to dig up ? (so according you gathered by now I am not pro-oil. Keep it in the goddamn ground)

5. It is a single point of failure. Thank god no terrorist thought of "landing" a plane there. It's broken ? No power for an entire region.

6. Finally, but this is a minor point as those considerations may be a luxury during our climate crisis, the technology lends itself well to despotic elite rule, everyone depends on who can secure control of a little army of skilled workers and engineers. Those control the energy supply would have tremendous power.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#503

Post by [deleted] »

xorcist wrote: post #477
BenoitP wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima caused exactly one death from ionizing radiation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di... Fossil fuel air pollution cause one fifth of premature death worldwide: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p... Do the sources I use suit you? Is it enough to convey sense about the orders of magnitude involved? And I didn't even talk about CO2 and the impending climate c…

Exactly no one is advocating the use of fossil fuels to replace nuclear. In a debate, it is much better to counter the actual arguments instead of the more convenient ones.

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#504

Post by bawolff »

kelnos wrote: post #440
BurningFrog wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you mean by "chernobyl happening again" is "a serious accident could happen", you've moved the goalposts beyond where I think meaningful discussion is possible. It also means that a "new chernobyl" can happen at any power station, be it hydro, coal, solar, etc.

I think this is a disingenuous take. If the original argument was "the exact same thing that happened at Chernobyl will happen again", then that's meaningless and irrelevant, because... who cares? What people actually care about is whether a nuclear disaster could happen again, one that kills a bunch of people and makes a significant area of land uninhabitable for some long period of time. If you think that's "moving…

How about a middle ground of, can a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale happen again?

Its still kind of a bad question,because we can't rule out dinosaurs attacking the power plant. Maybe the question should be,is there a less than 1 in a million chance of a level 7 event happening when using a modern nuclear plant design in the next 100 years?

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#505

Post by rjzzleep »

Retric wrote: post #242
JanSt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6.5ct is added to the cost of every used kwh (no matter where it comes from) and paid to the producers of renewable energy

Germany jumped into solar really early and it's very far north so it’s not that relevant when considering todays tradeoffs. 41.3 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2016 was frankly excessive though it helped PV get much cheaper. Unfortunately, Germany now stuck with these huge agreed upon subsides for another decade.

They also "pulled out" of solar early. I have idea how anyone can make sense of German policies. They seem to be working solely on the basis of emotion. The outcome is a disastrous policy that created one of the highest energy prices for consumers for no good reason.

The Greens in Germany seem to be hell bent on de-industrializing Germany. They hate nuclear power and they hate all fossil fuels, but want to buy fracking LNG from the USA and fire up brown coal plants that were previously shut down to shove it to Putin. The outcome seems to be mass bankruptcies in what seems to be the social fabric of Germany, while getting a lot less energy for the same price.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#506

Post by oezi »

xxpor wrote: post #305
JanSt wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Stromsteuer ist only 5% of the price. It depends on your definition of taxes. The EEG-Umlage alone reached 6.5ct/kwh and directly paid for renewables. It‘s now taken out of the price, so the real price of energy is higher than what is paid by the consumer. The EEG Umlage is now hidden in and paid for by a special fund („Energie- und Klimafonds“)

Jeez, I know electricity prices in Europe are higher than in the US generally, but a 6.5c per kwh tax would have been a rate of around 66% at the beginning of 2021 when it was 1.20 USD/EUR and the average US residential rate was ~13c/kwh.

Yes, rates can be much higher. We pay 37c for instance at the moment.

On the other hand: To have higher energy prices provides incentives for less use and must be part of an intermediate strategy to bring down CO2 emissions.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#507

Post by oezi »

Manuel_D wrote: post #463
worik wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Tectonic plates don't move nearly quick enough to be a concern in the span of 100k years. A spot square in the middle of a plate is going to be safe from earthquakes for millions of years. And not to mention, how does ground vibration bring sometimes buried under 500 meters of solid rock back onto the surface? Earthquakes shake the ground, they don't dig deep boreholes.

Yet, all the attempts to store nuclear fuel underground in Germany proved so catastrophic that they had to scrap all of them and restart the selection process.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#508

Post by bawolff »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #308
knorker wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not malicious to scream "chernobyl!" willfully deceptively or willfully ignorantly confusing what can and cannot happen? More people die every single year from radiation in coal than have died in the entire history of nuclear power. Replacing all coal with nuclear would save more lives and health than fighting nuclear ever could, even in theory. And delaying coal to nuclear under the banner of "wind and solar m…

To exemplify the difference between science and politics: - Nuclear is safer than coal: science (true or not, it's not the point) - We need to go all the way nuclear: politics. There's a million other things to consider, many of them don't even each into the realm of what is falsifiable (e.g international relations, fuel availability, who knows). _Even_ if nuclear was literally the safest method ever, it is literally…

These are bad examples. "Vaccines are safe and effective" is not scientific because science can deal with comparisons, it cannot deal with absolutes.

You can scientificly say something is safe compared to something else, or define safe in some way (less then 1 in X chance of something happening statistically). But there is no such thing as 100% absolute safety. Even an injection with saline is not safe in the absolute.

E.g. if there is a 1 in a trillion chance of a side effect, you will never see it, because there arent a trillion people on earth.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#509

Post by MR4D »

oezi wrote: post #500
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 Ger…

I wonder how much of your comments/predictions will be true after this coming winter.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#510

Post by AshamedCaptain »

bawolff wrote: post #508
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To exemplify the difference between science and politics: - Nuclear is safer than coal: science (true or not, it's not the point) - We need to go all the way nuclear: politics. There's a million other things to consider, many of them don't even each into the realm of what is falsifiable (e.g international relations, fuel availability, who knows). _Even_ if nuclear was literally the safest method ever, it is literally…

These are bad examples. "Vaccines are safe and effective" is not scientific because science can deal with comparisons, it cannot deal with absolutes. You can scientificly say something is safe compared to something else, or define safe in some way (less then 1 in X chance of something happening statistically). But there is no such thing as 100% absolute safety. Even an injection with saline is not safe in the absolut…

You are completely right. I actually wanted to write "vaccinates are this safe and effective".
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