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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

#941

Post by Moldoteck »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #936
Moldoteck wrote: post #929

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is just a prime example. Germany was better off to not shut down existing plants and invest in ren+nuclear to retire leftover fossils. It's also fascinating to hear the "horrifyingly expensive" statement. Germany spends on EEG equivalent of one failed french nuclear project each year. It also spends the same on transmission to acomodate distributed generation. And also plans to expand gas. Anyone suggesting G…

Why are you unable to look forward? I see a wall of text complaining about the past. Again. Are you suggesting that Germany would be better off by keeping their current emissions until the mid ~2040s waiting for horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power to come online?

I'm complaining that Germany also plans gas expansion into _future_ instead of either refurbing some of existing units for cheap or build new nuclear. Germany doesn't need to wait for it to come online. It needs to keep building ren while building nuclear and erase all fossils infrastructure entirely. No stupid parallel gas/coal firming. Nor cheap green hydrogen pipedreams. France doesn't have parallel gas network so it's possible and should be done.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#942

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

Moldoteck wrote: post #941
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #936

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you unable to look forward? I see a wall of text complaining about the past. Again. Are you suggesting that Germany would be better off by keeping their current emissions until the mid ~2040s waiting for horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power to come online?

I'm complaining that Germany also plans gas expansion into _future_ instead of either refurbing some of existing units for cheap or build new nuclear. Germany doesn't need to wait for it to come online. It needs to keep building ren while building nuclear and erase all fossils infrastructure entirely. No stupid parallel gas/coal firming. Nor cheap green hydrogen pipedreams. France doesn't have parallel gas network so…

Ahhh. The magical, ”just restart”, handwaving away all issues.

You do realize that the nuclear lobby group found the easiest reactors to restart were in the north? Which is already constrained by an oversupply of renewables and limited transmission infrastructure.

How will that help?

Also. Why get less decarbonization by wasting money and opportunity on new built nuclear power when we still need to decarbonize construction, agriculture, shipping, showroom, industry?

Do you think we have infinite money?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#943

Post by esarbe »

Moldoteck wrote: post #906
esarbe wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not actually that concerned about excessive government spending. I just don't like wasteful spending, and that's what nuclear is. Wind and PV build up much faster, are orders of magnitudes less complex and provide cheaper electricity. There is just no reason to build nuclear. > €50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal. No, that €50 billion is just what EDF is in the reds. The…

So you are concerned about EDF having 50bn debt and France spending 120bn to build it's entire fleet but you are fine with Germany spending almost 400bn on EEG alone till now to have far worse emissions and still drive coal? This is your concern? "No, that €50 billion is just what EDF is in the reds. The actual cost is much, much higher, of course. French citizens still have to pay for their electricity, after all."…

No, my concern is that France will have to spend around €150-200 billion in the next ten years just to keep their current capacity.

I guess that's the reason that they went for renewables for capacity expansion - it's much cheaper to build and operate renewables rather than nuclear.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#944

Post by remarkEon »

lukan wrote: post #678
remarkEon wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.

Maybe have a look at that by now old old image. Notice the red square. It is a bit larger today, but the principle stays the same https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DESERTEC-Map_large.jpg There are enough roofs and waste lands for solar. But out of curiosity, would you like to live next to a nuclear plant/uran mining/radioactive waste deposit?

Sorry is the idea here that we’d cover the Sahara in PVs? The Sahara desert, in Africa, the most dysfunctional continent on the planet. And, what, we’d lay a billion miles of transmission lines? You can’t keep reliable electricity running in those countries today because of how frequent copper theft is. You think building a solar farm is going to work?

This is the problem with PV boosters. It’s just fantasy about a supranational government doing mega projects, when in reality you can just build reactors today for an order of magnitude less in complexity and real estate. “Would I live next to a reactor” of course I would, because if I had that option my electricity would be free. Asking me if I’d want to live next to a uranium mine, well would you live next to a lithium mine? Disingenuous environmental activists have been using this bullshit argument for 30 years now, it doesn’t work on me.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#945

Post by Kon5ole »

Moldoteck wrote: post #940
Kon5ole wrote: post #935

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual Chernobyl deaths is not a measure of potential deaths. It's the same flawed argument in different clothing. It assumes that what has happened is the worst that could happen, but it's not. Chernobyl was not a worst case scenario.

It pretty much was compared to modern plants. What happened there can't physically happen in western gen2 plants and even more so in gen3 units. Chernobyl is de facto the worst thing that could have happened unless we start using some wild imagination. Fukushima is a proof that a better design (albeit far from stellar) will result in orders of magnitude less damage/danger despite extreme tsunami and earthquakes

> Chernobyl is de facto the worst thing that could have happened unless we start using some wild imagination

A scenario where the fire continued for 4 weeks instead of 10 days takes very little imagination and would be much much worse than what actually happened.

>Fukushima is a proof that a better design (albeit far from stellar) will result in orders of magnitude less damage

Fukushima would not have had a graphite fire, but we were lucky to not get a fuel rod fire which would have been very bad as well, although likely more limited geographically than Chernobyl.

As it is, Fukushima will perhaps "only" cost an estimated 500-600 billion dollars for the Japanese taxpayers over the next 100 or so years. Unless another earthquake hits and breaks the ice wall of course, which also requires very litte imagination, it being Japan.

Seriously, why are we doing things like this when we have cheaper, faster and safer options? Why are we not instead going for the options?

"It will require so much batteries" Yes. So let's get started, we can build as many batteries as we need 10 times over. "Synth fuels are inefficient", yes, but that doesn't matter when the electricity is close to free.

What else is the problem? Why does it HAVE to be nuclear?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#946

Post by slibhb »

Arodex wrote: post #462
slibhb wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a silly argument. Battery and solar technologies are progressing regardless of people building nuclear. It's simply not the case that we can stop investing in nuclear and use that money to accelerate battery/solar. The best energy strategies are all-of-the-above.

This isn't a silly argument, this is a problem of allocation of resources. We could have had mass solar deployment since the 70s. We chose not to, and allocate the money elsewhere. Nuclear will take away billions in public money, put it into the hands of nuclear industries, to get electricity at twice the going rate, maybe, in twenty years. A white elephant and a waste of effort.

We don't live in a command economy. Nuclear and solar both great and our only stance should be encouraging both.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#947

Post by ShadowOfThePit »

dalyons wrote: post #937
bit-anarchist wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also used to say that solar and wind were fundamentally flawed: solar panels had an exotic manufacturing process, energy storage was limited and expensive, they are fundamentally tied to specific environmental conditions which may not hold, etc. We still managed. Likewise, we could see cost reductions with cheaper/better alternatives to concrete, models that don't require so much piping, the exotic pressure weldin…

I absolutely agree we could see cost reductions with scale. Maybe 2x ? But solar is a much more simple manufacturing process that’s amenable to massive massive volume. Print silicon, add traces, assemble. 100% automated. As such it has seen a 20x cost reduction since 1994. Nukes will never be able to touch that reduction.

Did you just call nuclear reactors as "nukes"?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#948

Post by pfdietz »

Moldoteck wrote: post #919
pfdietz wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you call it when you turn off a nuclear power plant and then turn on a coal power plant? This isn’t rocket surgery. Still waiting for examples of countries that did that. Also, that's not replacing nuclear with coal. Plants age out and are replaced even if one is not replacing one kind with the other. We retire pickup trucks and build sports cars; that doesn't mean sports cars are replacing pickup trucks.

IT IS REPLACING. If you had nuclear plants that worked fine (highest CF globally probably after US), some even not reaching 40y (when most are extended to 60-80y) and you retire them instead of retiring coal, it means coal replaced nuclear. This is not hard to comprehend. You as a country have a choice - retire coal/gas or retire nuclear. Germany made it's choice and paid heavily https://link.springer.com/article/10.…

> IT IS REPLACING. If you had nuclear plants that worked fine (highest CF globally probably after US), some even not reaching 40y (when most are extended to 60-80y) and you retire them instead of retiring coal, it means coal replaced nuclear.

No it doesn't mean that at all. In particular, in Germany, the total coal generation went down, so it couldn't have replaced anything. What replaced nuclear in Germany was renewables and gas.

Consider your logic: if we had nuclear and retired it instead of shutting down renewables, does that (by your logic) mean renewables replaced nuclear? If not, why not? The structure of your argument seems to be privileging coal over other sources on the German grid.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#949

Post by throwaway473825 »

dalyons wrote: post #609
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Finland is the definition of an outlier, and folks in similar situations make up a tiny percentage of the world population. They can burn gas for the next 50 years, and we can still be good.

Finland is a cold country that needs cheap electricity for heating during winters. Burning gas isn't an option.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#950

Post by inigyou »

UltraSane wrote: post #800
inigyou wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like it wasn't reasonably possible?

It wasn't reasonably affordable!

Why would things that are not reasonably achievable have any relevance to "as low as reasonably achievable"?
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