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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

#541

Post by wolverine876 »

guerrilla wrote: post #83
Juliate wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, framing it as if Germany policy had not been also ... "influenced" by Russia's long-term strategy would be quite naive.

I think it's a mistake to see that as one sided. Bringing Russia closer to Europe and (according to the now falsified theory) creating conditions for peace while also getting cheap energy has been a goal of plenty of European elites.

> Bringing Russia closer to Europe and (according to the now falsified theory) creating conditions for peace

It's not falsified. It may have improved conditions for peace; the situation could have been far worse now. Real-world issues don't work out neatly; they are extremely complex; you never know what the alternative outcome would have been.

As an analogy, eating healthy food and getting exercise isn't 'falsified' as health recommendations when someone happens to die young.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#542

Post by sam345 »

brunes wrote: post #531
wolverine876 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas. Could you identify any broadly accepted environmental analysis that says this? It's easy to make accusaiont > Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from. The waste rocks are not at all like the ones removed from the ground, in critical ways (ra…

The cost to store nuclear waste is $600 / kg When Starship is fully operational the expected cost to launch payload will be $20 / kg IE you can have a 30x margin of error and still just launch the nuclear waste into space.

I agree with more nuclear but blasting waste (at least highly radioactive) to space is a problem as there's always a risk the rocket explodes and spreads the radiation on earth. At least I've always understood that's the objection and seems to me reasonable. Yucca mountain type solutions seem more palatable.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#543

Post by blablabla123 »

belorn wrote: post #385
blablabla123 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end. 65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 220 billion kWh from renewables actually https://www-destatis-de.translate.goog/DE/Presse/Pressemitte...

65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 45 billion kWh from solar, actually ... 111 billion kWh from wind, 30 billion kWh from bio gas, 18 billion kWh from hydro, 156 billion kWh from coal, 65 billion kWh from gas. 25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany.

I'm aware of that and it's summed up together with hydro etc. Why would you want to compare Nuclear with solar? I mean solar alone doesn't make much sense because it depends on daylight - which surely is great since most energy is used during the day and battery storage is getting increasingly deployed. But it's better to diversify and therefore rather consider the sum.

> 25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany.

Well yeah but it's getting phased out on the long-term.

Edit: also it's worth considering that gas and bio gas (the renewable version) power plants can be used during peak times because they can be started and shutdown quickly. That's not possible for nuclear which provides base load - in fact they need to be shut down during heat waves

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#544

Post by blablabla123 »

bobro wrote: post #366
blablabla123 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end. 65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 220 billion kWh from renewables actually https://www-destatis-de.translate.goog/DE/Presse/Pressemitte...

The table in that page says photovoltaics are 41B kWh.

I know, that's why I wrote "renewables". Comparing with one of several widely deployed options seems a bit arbitrary

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#545

Post by arcticbull »

oezi wrote: post #511
arcticbull wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Still nuclear is finished everywhere (or on the way out except in China) and won't come back from the grave. It is like asking for cars from the 70ties to return.

Isn't that exactly what Tesla just did? The electric car was of course the 'car of the 70s' until it was the car of the 2020's.

Defeatism never solved everything, and China building hundreds of reactors might just be the shot in the arm to get things back on track. The big loss will be that it's these Chinese designs the world will use instead of Western designs.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#546

Post by belorn »

worik wrote: post #444
MattGaiser wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are water around mines that will be toxic to human life until the sun collapse and the earth burns up. People will have to be aware of those dangers for as long human exist, unless humans mutate enough to tolerate lead and sulfur in their fresh water.

How should we communicate to those people of those dangers?

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#547

Post by c1ccccc1 »

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.

1% per what? 1% per GWh? Coal power kills a huge number of people through air pollution, and that's during regular operation. So for me personally, coal power is much more scary than nuclear power.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#548

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

I think much of the friction in this discussion is that we mean different things with "Chernobyl can happen again".

Chernobyl lacked many security features that are standard on all modern reactors. The biggest flaw was it had no containment structure. That's the steel & concrete dome which, if the worst happens, keeps the melted uranium contained within it.

That alone would have made the Chernobyl disaster just a bad local industrial accident, and that's the main thing I mean when I say it can't happen again. Though it's far from the only security improvement modern reactors have over Chernobyl.

> But that doesn't mean it's impossible

This is the "you never know!" argument. The good and bad part of it is the same: It is always true! Any thinkable disaster, can conceivably happen, and maybe you "should" be worried about it.

Of course, applied consistently, it would lead to total paralysis. This is no way to rationally approach risk.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#549

Post by wolverine876 »

brunes wrote: post #531
wolverine876 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas. Could you identify any broadly accepted environmental analysis that says this? It's easy to make accusaiont > Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from. The waste rocks are not at all like the ones removed from the ground, in critical ways (ra…

The cost to store nuclear waste is $600 / kg When Starship is fully operational the expected cost to launch payload will be $20 / kg IE you can have a 30x margin of error and still just launch the nuclear waste into space.

Thanks. Where does that number come from?

Despite his Twitter account, Musk is not the savior for everything. However, maybe he would like to be blasted into space on the first journey to Proxima Centuri? If anyone can do it, he can!

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#550

Post by kromem »

ask_b123 wrote: post #522
pornel wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count how many people have died in these accidents directly and possibly from thyroid cancers, and compare to lung cancers attributed to coal. Coal kills way more people. It's killing right now. There are estimates that more people died from fuel poverty due to closure of Fukushima and subsequent raise in fuel prices, than the Fukushima accident itself. Coal power plants release more radioactive pollution than nuclea…

Here's the comparison: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Great link, as the data is normalized to per watt.
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