Good science doesn’t respect good ideology.
There are ideologically inconvenient truths: men who have sex with men should not donate blood in the US, for example.
Nuclear is safe. That’s a fact. Not a convenient fact. But a fact.
Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
631–640 of 676 posts
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get more CO2 reduction until intermittency or geopolitical issues require you to bring coal plants back online to address energy shortfalls, like with Germany. You'd need an order of magnitude more renewables and a huge grid expansion to even remotely come close to solving energy unreliability in Germany, and even then you'll still have some issues. CO2 reduction is not the only goal, power stability is important…
When you need storage, the residual demand is highly intermittent. Coal would serve this rather poorly (and nuclear even more so). Gas would be more likely. However, at that point there are wild swings in the price of power across each day (and possibly across seasons), making storage quite attractive, and it would be rolled out. If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask yo…
You can make all the theoretical arguments you like, but the empirical data (California, Germany, and more) disagrees with your conclusion. Perhaps you should consider a more serious argument that actually agrees with the current evidence.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear They haven't forgotten, they were fighting a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens. The same eco-ideologist that ruined Germany have made it impossible to properly invest in the nuclear plants in France and to ensure knowledge and expertise is properly transmitted and developed with the younger generation. For years the message was "don't invest in nuc…
We have many better solutions than nuclear, and have for decades. Why not use them - reduce energy consumption, use a market-based solution of making people pay the actual cost of greenhouse gas production (e.g., trading carbon credits), etc.? It's the reactionaries that are in the way. Why blame the only people who have been concerned about climate change? Because it's easier to attack them; because people are scare…
"Reduce energy consumption" is not a solution. The population is growing every year. Energy consumption is growing every year. Energy production has to grow to keep up. If it can't because the chosen technology doesn't scale, then that's a problem with that technology.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#634Earlier 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.
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?
In the very long run we don’t.
We simply trust that people in the future check their water for safety, or avoid drinking from water sources that correlate with illness.
We do this now, and humans have done it for millennia.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you need storage, the residual demand is highly intermittent. Coal would serve this rather poorly (and nuclear even more so). Gas would be more likely. However, at that point there are wild swings in the price of power across each day (and possibly across seasons), making storage quite attractive, and it would be rolled out. If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask yo…
You can make all the theoretical arguments you like, but the empirical data (California, Germany, and more) disagrees with your conclusion. Perhaps you should consider a more serious argument that actually agrees with the current evidence.
What? Experience in Germany and California is completely consistent with what I was saying. Of course natural gas without sufficient CO2 charges will continue to cover intermittency, especially when there's a great deal of already installed gas capacity whose capital cost is sunk.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flying is scientifically a well understood and safe thing. Still its the FAA that makes the rules, and engineering that needs to produce robust and reliable systems, and still planes fall out of the sky sometimes.. Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works, which would be the solution for a lot... So what does "scientifically...much solavable problem" in practice really mean? Worlds apart..
> Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works, which would be the solution for a lot... There is no evidence that fusion is a solution to any energy problems. The central problem of fusion power is that reactions consume more energy than they produce.
That's currently a problem, but I don't think it's the central problem. The central problem for DT is some combination of inherent complexity and very low volumetric power density.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides this being studies for which other studiest exist the same, we also learned in the pandemic that "deaths" cannot be the sole metric (however you want to interpret that). And seawater extraction is as renewable as CO2-scrubbing the atmosphere would allow us to go on with burnign coal - both would equally not scale to needs with current technology, so what?
Why wouldn't seawater extraction scale? There's 4 billion tons of uranium in the sea (a 60,000 year supply at current usage levels), and 100 trillion tons of uranium below that from which it's replenished as it is extracted. [1] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514
Supplying a single 1 GW(e) burner reactor with seawater uranium would require a 170 square kilometer absorber field on the continental shelf. That's much worse power/area than solar, and just slightly higher than the power/area of an offshore wind field.
Of course use of breeder reactors could extend this, but with breeders terrestrial U resources are adequate for a very long time.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fukushima also coincided with the largest earthquake Japan has ever seen (which caused Fukushima incident itself and complicated evacuation efforts). The expected death toll ranges between several hundred and several thousands. By comparison, vehicle emission is expected cause ~20,000 premature deaths in the US, every year [1]. (Sorry, I couldn't find a stat for Japan.) In other words, mankind's second worst nuclear…
The death toll for the Fukushima nuclear plant (as opposed to to deaths from the tsunami) is either zero or one. There was one 80 year-old who died of lung cancer, but it's unclear whether the cause was radiation from the incident or if he'd have died of lung cancer anyway as many 80 year-old smokers in Japan do. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofialottopersio/2021/11/04/no-...
The population exposure from radiation from Fukushima will likely cause some hundreds of cancers. These will not be statistically detectable, but that doesn't mean they won't exist and that policy cannot take their plausible existence into account.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear They haven't forgotten, they were fighting a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens. The same eco-ideologist that ruined Germany have made it impossible to properly invest in the nuclear plants in France and to ensure knowledge and expertise is properly transmitted and developed with the younger generation. For years the message was "don't invest in nuc…
This highlights the real Achilles heel of the nuclear industry - it is a labour efficient power producer that it doesn't employ enough people to guarantee political protection. We ended up with a group of people who would benefit a moderate amount from cheap power, and a fanatic anti-nuclear lobby that succeeded in scuttling decades of progress. The more motivated group won, as is predictable. It is amazing watching…
No, the real Achilles heel is that the nuclear power plants are too expensive and don't seem to be able to be built on budget in the West.
Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
The death toll for the Fukushima nuclear plant (as opposed to to deaths from the tsunami) is either zero or one. There was one 80 year-old who died of lung cancer, but it's unclear whether the cause was radiation from the incident or if he'd have died of lung cancer anyway as many 80 year-old smokers in Japan do. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofialottopersio/2021/11/04/no-...
The population exposure from radiation from Fukushima will likely cause some hundreds of cancers. These will not be statistically detectable, but that doesn't mean they won't exist and that policy cannot take their plausible existence into account.
Any sources for this estimation? I've read nothing even remotely close to that prediction. At its peak, people in Fukushima city were only receiving ~0.06 mSv/day of radiation. This only lasted a couple of days. The vast majority of people didn't even face that since they were evacuated.
In contrast, a transatlantic flight results in about 0.1 mSv of radiation. Someone getting a single abdomen x-ray would get over 0.2 mSv.