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Russian gas flows to Europe

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81–90 of 279 posts

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't summarizing the article, I was providing a source for my statement. It's irrational that Germany is shutting down secure and climate friendly power plants while Europe is in the midst of an energy crises and a war. The reason for the irrationality is that Germans (I'm one) do not want to admit that they've been wrong about nuclear energy for decades.

The problem with nuclear is simply that it is irrelevant to the current situation. Won’t add enough energy to the grid, won’t solve the problem of gas demand at all, so it really doesn’t matter if Germany was right or wrong about it.

What is "enough"? If any solution has to solve all the problems to be considered at all, you're going to have trouble noticing solutions that chip away at the problem until it's solved.

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#82
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be more specific? The storage graph look relatively flat to me. Interactive graph: https://agsi.gie.eu/graphs/eu

https://berthub.eu/gazmon/gascontent.svg

see the second line of the article

Be careful, this realtime graph is not always correct (especially the last hour)!

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#83
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the alternative though? I also wish we would completely stop paying Russia, but this will come at incredible financial and stability (i.e: Europe falling apart) costs. Perhaps we should increase our spending on ending the war sooner instead. I don't know. We're caught between a rock and a hard place.

Well, what was the alternative during WWII? Defeating Nazi Germany for instance. Which is what happened. But surely not doing business with it during the war, that's self explanatory.

>doing business with [Nazi Germany] during the war

it is often forgotten that this is exactly what the US did for the first 2-3 years of the war. Germany swallowed up the wealth of Europe. Britain had already swallowed up the wealth of a quarter of the world. the US swallowed up both of their wealth and ended the war with 2/3 of the world's gold

this is a simplification, but it's also huge overarching story of WW2 that is often missed. people know the US and Russia became the world's two superpowers, but there's very little attention paid as to how the US came to be one of them

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#84
post #78
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any world where getting rid of nuclear power is better...it's one of the cleanest, least deadly forms of power generation.

Let's be fair: it's clean on the CO2 front, but the nuclear waste will be relevant for 100.000 years! That is way, way longer than we have anything like civilization!

At the moment it seems that the CO2 problem is more pressing and of greater magnitude than the problem of nuclear waste. It sounds like a relevant tradeoff.

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#85
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any world where getting rid of nuclear power is better...it's one of the cleanest, least deadly forms of power generation.

The biggest concern is that when things go wrong with nuclear, they really go wrong.

And yet we’re all still here and given the number of nuclear power plants and how long we’ve been using them compared to the tiny number of accidents it shows that it is truly the safest form of large scale power generation.

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#86
post #84
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be fair: it's clean on the CO2 front, but the nuclear waste will be relevant for 100.000 years! That is way, way longer than we have anything like civilization!

At the moment it seems that the CO2 problem is more pressing and of greater magnitude than the problem of nuclear waste. It sounds like a relevant tradeoff.

Nuclear waste, as far as I have been learning, is pretty "safe". Yeah, you need a place to deal with it, but it's mostly highly shielded solids.

A video I watched recently explaining a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't summarizing the article, I was providing a source for my statement. It's irrational that Germany is shutting down secure and climate friendly power plants while Europe is in the midst of an energy crises and a war. The reason for the irrationality is that Germans (I'm one) do not want to admit that they've been wrong about nuclear energy for decades.

The problem with nuclear is simply that it is irrelevant to the current situation. Won’t add enough energy to the grid, won’t solve the problem of gas demand at all, so it really doesn’t matter if Germany was right or wrong about it.

France is produces 75% of its energy with nuclear. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

A German produces almost twice as much CO2 as a Frenchmen. https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#88
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly believe that is a fair summary of the article? The decision to shut them down happened long ago. They voted against a proposal from the opposition to revert that. The plants were planned to shut down since a long time, there is a lot of unsolved issues around keeping them running, like fuel and personnel. The plants also would impact gas usage only by 1% and electricity isn't a great replacement short…

I don't think there is any world where getting rid of nuclear power is better...it's one of the cleanest, least deadly forms of power generation.

It is also a lot safer today if new reactors are built. The problem are the old reactors need to be shut down because they're based on older designs. We need to start building Pebble Beach reactors where even if there is a containment break, safe small carbon balls with a thin sliver of fissile material just spill out on the floor. These spread out and reduce their combined temperate averting a meltdown. Individually the balls themselves are not dangerous, they're lukewarm and could be held in the hand (not that you would). I think there are some even newer designs that go beyond this in safety. The problem with the anti-nuclear argument is that it is based on the old rod reactors like the one that failed in Fukushima prefect, Chernobyl or 3 mile island. Of course we shouldn't run those older models anymore. You need to start building the new safer reactors before you begin shutting down the old ones so you can logistically switch, however. Instead we're unfortunately heading for a future where we eventually just shut down these old reactors for safety without a real plan for replacing them. Or, we keep running the old models until they become the very cautionary tale that makes everyone nervous about nuclear.

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shutting down secure That is under dispute. Its the entire reason they are shut down in the first place.

There is no dispute about the safety of nuclear. We have statistics going back decades. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#:~:text=... .

Germany's shutting those down because of the Fukushima disaster.

A lot of Germans believe (rightly or wrongly) that Japanese are as quality-conscious and dependable as they themselves. Corollary: if the Japanese can fuck up in the ways that led to Fukushima, then the German operators can fuck up in similar ways.

Now, these people may be wrong. But they made the decision. Until Fukushima, there was a net pro-nuclear vote, after, against, because these people switched.

If you want to argue about safety, I think you might do well do focus on the safety issue that made the significant voter segment change their opinion.

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with nuclear is simply that it is irrelevant to the current situation. Won’t add enough energy to the grid, won’t solve the problem of gas demand at all, so it really doesn’t matter if Germany was right or wrong about it.

France is produces 75% of its energy with nuclear. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... A German produces almost twice as much CO2 as a Frenchmen. https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

Careful: of it's electricity, not energy !
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