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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

#521

Post by crote »

cm2187 wrote: post #397
bilekas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.

I don’t think it can. Nuclear is cheap at scale, not when you build a single prototype every 20 years. You need large countries with large programmes to be successful.

> Nuclear is cheap at scale

Citation needed. We saw at-scale buildout during the 1970s and 1980, did it result in result in order-of-magnitude cost reductions back then?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#522

Post by s1artibartfast »

Arodex wrote: post #477
s1artibartfast wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be more accurate to say "avoid killing the most vulnerable life" crossing the line would not be the end of the world.

https://phys.org/visualstories/2024-05-mass-fish-die-vietnam...

Relevance? That's not proof that we are teetering on the edge of that with a proposed nuclear reactor

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#523

Post by crote »

qwe----3 wrote: post #431
pocksuppet wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you trust that any of today's politicians will not be poor at nuclear reactor design and management?

Do you trust today's politicians with tall buildings, or bridges, or chemical plants, or guns, or fighter gets, or ammunition production?

No? That's exactly the point.

Today's politicians can't even be trusted to maintain critical infrastructure, leading to things like the Ponte Morandi collapse, or the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse, or the Carola Bridge collapse, and so on and so on.

They can't even properly maintain fairly trivial infrastructure, routinely leading to at most a few dozen deaths per incident. Why would you assume they'd do any better with nuclear reactors - where a second Chernobyl is the potential result of an incident?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#524

Post by hyperpallium2 »

jokteur wrote: post #32

This still has to pass with the people in a referendum. The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic. Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full fro…

Why not replenish with solar i.e. pump it back up into a dam-battery?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#525

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

aeturnum wrote: post #499
leonidasrup wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are looking in tritium leaks, I would encourage to look into leaks from coal power plants, which are gigantic in comparison to nuclear power plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10...

This is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Yes coal power is worse! I know that and clearly you know that. What are we even talking about? So far, in the over half-century of efforts, the fact that coal is unsafe has never convinced anyone that nuclear power is safe. Those are two separate situations. I merely cited the tritium leaks as a counterexample of the hubris of the post I was replying to suggestin…

Because obviously(yes this should be obvious right?)...

The more we dance around nuclear, the longer we're still pumping coal by product into the atmosphere... a non storage solution.

Move to nuclear faster. Do it now. You want your EVs right?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#526

Post by crote »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #417
bryanlarsen wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days. That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe. Th…

> the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.

So how do you propose the energy is supplied in the 20 years it would take for the first nuclear reactors to become offline? Let me guess: gas turbines?

So we either fully rely on gas turbines for the base load for the next 20 years, orrrr we rely on gas turbines during the few days it is both dark and wind-less for the next 20 years.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#527

Post by Ray20 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #253
sharpneli wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydro has a natural limit. After you have put a dam to every river that’s it. And the Swiss aint far from that. There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter. What should one do then? Just shut everything down?

Solar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days. That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe. Th…

We have statistics on solar performance at the huge countries levels. And it shows that, in reality, we're talking about 20x overbuild. Not 3x and not even 10x. And there is no way around it.

Wind and solar anti-correlation does not lowering this number. Number is still 20x, just it's more rare now, but it is still there.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#528

Post by ncruces »

tfourb wrote: post #308
rayiner wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

German Greens have managed the feat of presiding over extending strip coal while closing nuclear power plants. But hey, they fought for it since the 70s, and finally won; we all lost.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#529

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

lukan wrote: post #518
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…

"We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity" Did you ever handled radioactive material yourself? Or watched how Uranium mining works and what gets left behind? I doubt that.

Have you?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#530

Post by crote »

palata wrote: post #264
thomasmg wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar, wind and hydro are all much cheaper, far safer and more efficient these days.

Whether or not that's the case, the problem is that if you put together all the nuclear, solar, wind and hydro we can manage, we will still have less energy than what we get easily with oil. I don't get why they even compete against each other: we need as much as we can of everything that we can.

You can only spend a dollar once, so any money going into nuclear won't go into solar, wind, or hydro - which have far better payoff when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions.
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