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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#841

Post by dgellow »

xkbarkar wrote: post #732

You know what, let’s turn popular city parks to windmill and solarparks. NY central park for example. Copenhagen has a few beloved open green places we could clean out and replace with solarcells, so does Berlin. Im unscientifically guessing support for nc energy would rise very quickly and wed have a whole bunch of them within a decade. Source, I live near a windmill, they are loud as f*k. I drive by solaparks nearl…

We have wind turbines in the north of Germany, close to cities, it’s a non-issue

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#842

Post by pfdietz »

pembrook wrote: post #556
jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

No. It’s as simple as: A) battery tech isn’t good enough or clean enough …and… B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times) You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear. Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it w…

But you're wrong. Batteries are now fine for diurnal storage, which is their intended use. Batteries are not fine for seasonal storage, but there are alternatives for that when it is needed.

China is installing vastly more renewables than nuclear. Their nuclear builds appear to be just a holding action to preserve their capability to build NPPs; that can't last forever.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#843

Post by nilslindemann »

dijit wrote: post #803
kranke155 wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason to be against nuclear energy is quite simple - human error. Unlike flying, we’ve not shown nuclear energy to be sufficiently idiot-proof for many people to be comfortable with it. That and the fact that radiation is invisible, which makes it somehow almost paranormal.

The main problem of course is that coal is killing much more people than any nuclear disaster ever did (per unit of energy delivered). But because it’s so spread and so normalised and not so bombastic, we don’t even consider it. The number of lives saved by using nuclear energy is easily in the tens of thousands even with disasters like Chernobyl. Although of course it has to be stated that the USSR moved to heaven a…

And brown bears are less dangerous than cars because fewer people are killed by them. If you see a car, RUN. They are dangerous. Brown bears, not so much. Go ahead, pat their fur, statistically this is safe.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#844

Post by mpweiher »

arcane23 wrote: post #825
gilbetron wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths. Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.

>50 direct fatalities This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives. Just saying that only 50 p…

It's actually not, as it correctly states 50 direct fatalities.

What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities.

The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude.

One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the evacuation and loss of income from the plant became greater than the effects of radiation, whether direct or indirect.

And of course all the fatalities and more or less all the negative health effects of Fukushima were due to the unnecessary evacuations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...

Neither case justifies turning off other nuclear reactors. Not even a little.

Radiophobia is more dangerous than radiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#845

Post by rcyeh »

thbb123 wrote: post #812
jenadine wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't judge plane safety from the design of the brothers Wright aircraft

Fun fact: in the 90's, the reference gauge for aircraft safety was 1 accidental fatality per 100 million hours of passenger flight. Which is amazingly safe, far better than car and on a par with train. Now, facing the growth of air travel, it was decided to raise this bar to 1 per billion hour. Not as an end by itself - this comes at very high cost and had a significant impact on travel prices. But because, with the…

I'm trying to reconcile your numbers with the Wikipedia "Aviation safety” article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety

which for 2019 describes "0.5 accidents per million departures" and "40 fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers". Considering that many or most passengers fly close to 800-1000 km/h, we're still quite a bit above above 1 fatality per 100 million passenger hours.

Would a factor of 10 be enough? Suppose we go from one major accident per fortnight to one per five months (10 fortnights). Is that higher than what we have seen in the past thirty years?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#846

Post by bluefirebrand »

pfdietz wrote: post #510
bluefirebrand wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who the actually cares about cheaper I want better and more reliable Can we please stop optimizing everything into low quality low reliability garbage for the sake of being cheaper ?

Renewables and storage would be cheaper at the same level of reliability .

You are delusional if you think renewables and storage will be the same reliability as base load plants like nuclear, gas, coal

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#847

Post by pfdietz »

realusername wrote: post #526
epistasis wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear. For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal. There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personall…

> Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers Well no, storage would need another 100x improvement for being usable in a 100% renewable scenario in any country you have any sort of winter. Say what you want on nuclear but we have example of countries which managed it successfully, for renewables, we still haven't.

It sounds like you're making the usual idiot argument that batteries are the only storage technology and would be used for seasonal storage.

That's not how it would work. There are far better -- orders of magnitude better -- storage options over timescales of many months.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#848

Post by [deleted] »

sdfssdf wrote: post #713
pzo wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany). And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

A look at destatis tells me something else for Germany (in 2024): Solar has a share of 15 %, and wind 28 %. In total 57 % of the produced energy comes from renewable sources. ( https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ... )

[deleted]

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#849

Post by zekrioca »

pzo wrote: post #641
kolinko wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far it was either the cheapest or the safest. Also, solar is now both cheaper and safer.

but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany). And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

Have you ever heard of batteries?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#850

Post by bluefirebrand »

yellowapple wrote: post #25
bluefirebrand wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries

Not even “instead”. We need all of the above: nuclear for base loads, solar for peak loads, batteries for surplus capture.

You need solar and batteries for peak loads, not just solar

In many places in the world, peak load does not occur during daylight hours, especially during winter

And yes, further north the days are longer but the solar capture efficiency is also much lower

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