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Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

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Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#301

Post by palata »

tribaal wrote: post #82
cogman10 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind would be particularly effective in Switzerland and it's fast to deploy. The swiss grid has less than 1% wind which was pretty shocking to me. It seems like Switzerland has a particularly bad renewable story for an EU nation.

Wind is not that developed in Switzerland because it's not actually that great of a situation... We have a lot of steep mountains which make building wind farms a real challenge, and the flat plains in between have "meh" levels of wind. And a very strong NIMBY mentality. We do have some projects but those are more exception than rule. The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well…

> Mine is a net producer for example.

All year? And do you mean you "inject" more than you "pull", or do you mean that you can live without ever pulling anything from the grid?

Because "being a net producer overall" doesn't say that it would work in practice if everyone was doing the same, right?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#302

Post by palata »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #151
Arodex wrote: post #15

Like the F-35 fighter jet, this is just another victory for lobbyists in the industry who will be able to siphon public money into over-budget, deadline busting white whale projects that will never recoup its costs. Especially nuclear. It is now economically non-viable.

It it turns out like the F-35 it would be amazing. F-35 is much better and safer than what came before and more important CHEAPER per unit than previous generations.

I can't say if this is uninformed or sarcasm?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#303

Post by palata »

Arodex wrote: post #15

Like the F-35 fighter jet, this is just another victory for lobbyists in the industry who will be able to siphon public money into over-budget, deadline busting white whale projects that will never recoup its costs. Especially nuclear. It is now economically non-viable.

Nuclear plants are useful, for one.

> It is now economically non-viable.

Nuclear is about the next 50+ years. The economy will explode long before that. Nuclear plants are a way to produce energy in a world without cheap oil. That changes the economical considerations a lot.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#304

Post by coryrc »

triceratops wrote: post #261
coryrc wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they were useful idiots funded by fossil fuel companies. (also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)

I'm not asking where they got funding. I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone . You don't find that strange at all? The elites, powers that be, whatever you want to call them, had their own reasons for killing nuclear power. And nuclear's economics, compared to fossil fuels, didn't make it a slam dunk to adopt despite powerful opposition. So it had no one to defend it. Environmentalists weren…

> I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone

First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger.

> That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.

Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#305

Post by FabCH »

_diyar wrote: post #25
orwin wrote: post #8

Switzerland, Norway and Austria are probably the country that needs nuclear the less, but anything to start the discussion in other European countries is good. Probably not economically viable in Switzerland though.

Hard disagree. As a. swiss voter, this is close to my heart. 50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are generated by hydro. The remaining ~1/3 by nuclear fission. Swiss electricity prices are sky-high, and the demand for electricity is going to continue to rise. To remain a competitive industrial economy, to transition away from oil/gas, and to offset any potentia…

I will probably vote in favor of nuclear, but you have to admit that us not having any uranium and having huge solar and pumped hydro potential up in the alps makes Switzerland pretty bad match for nuclear.

Still much better than gas though…

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#306

Post by tfourb »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #269
pydry wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says. The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think. Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd ne…

> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind. Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro…

> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.

2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.

Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#307

Post by subscribed »

geden wrote: post #276
remarkEon wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for t…

What is the solution? Where are the free nuclear plants? Sizewell C = £40 billion That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.

You're talking about building new, now, with very expensive nuclear and very cheap and performant solar.

Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past.

Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#308

Post by tfourb »

rayiner wrote: post #164
esarbe wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also incredibly expensive and brittle and cannot be moderated without additional costs[1]. At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...

It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies. If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the econom…

> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death.

The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems.

Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently.

That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports.

"Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#309

Post by jojomodding »

p1mrx wrote: post #255
lopis wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's not part of the EU as a member, Switzerland is quite literally in the EU.

You can escape Switzerland by going straight up into space. It's only "in" the EU in 2 dimensions, maybe 2.5 since you can't dig your way out.

Ah, that's what they're building the power plants for. Blasting things into space.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#310

Post by olau »

Archelaos wrote: post #280

The pro-nuclear propaganda in this discussion reminds me of the tobacco companies that claimed smoking was harmless, or of Monsanto, which insisted that its pesticides were safe, and so on. It is always the same pattern: obvious facts are denied, doubts are exaggerated, legitimate concerns are downplayed, and blatant lies are spread. I wonder how many undercover lobbyists for the nuclear industry are active here on H…

Probably only few. Nuclear attracts dreamers. But would they pay the price, literally? Cost is the real reason nuclear is dying.
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