Europe's fires are just the start • Hacker News Board

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#121

Post by zer00eyz » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

tremon wrote: post #55

toomuchtodo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I would agree that it is regrettable Germany sunset their nuclear early when they should've extended the runtime for another 5-10 years to avoid excess carbon emissions since shutdown, but clean energy has already surpassed coal in Germany and they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries. [My note: The US states of Illinois and California got this righ…

I think that's net zero for electricity only, not net zero for all power generation. It excludes heavy industry and freight shipping, which still have a projected investment window of at least 25 years. Heavy industry in particular would have benefitted from the predictable high-power output of nuclear energy.

This needs to be higher up.

Nuclear is an amazing solution for industrial steady state demand... This is data centers, smelters (glass and metal), lots of industrial processes (think auto plants).

But nuclear is terrible at TV pickup situations because it is simply not that responsive.

Delivery to industrial customers (regardless of source) is also much simpler than it is to domestic - and I don't think that were even beginning to address the issues there.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#122

Post by BurningFrog » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

s_dev wrote: post #75

world2vec wrote: post #40

"Being better at fighting fires, though, is not enough." Yeah, it's nowhere near enough. We need to seriously revamp how we manage forests. They must be regularly cleaned, huge fire breaks between fenced areas and roads must be created and maintained. Prescribed burns on a regular schedule. Houses cannot be too close to the trees, no matter how pretty it looks. A huge clean radius must be maintained between houses an…

>They must be regularly cleaned People keep reiterating this probably because Trump keeps reiterating but it just sounds ridiculous. How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there. A dead tree is actually an ecosystem of fungi and insects. Cleaning it may make it more fire prone as broken sticks and leaves shield…

Prescribed burns are a good way to clean forests!

Burn the debris every 10-20 years rather than let it accumulate and become unstoppable disaster fires once a century.

This tends to be very hard hard to do in a democratic system though. People really don't like their forests burning.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#123

Post by wongarsu » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #79

OKRainbowKid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively. So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclea…

I wonder how much battery you could install in a typical nuclear site. Maybe even stacked; if we make an apples-to-apples comparison in materials and say we can use the same amount of concrete and metal, could probably have several levels of batteries. Except no water needed, and no waste risks.

The top of this German article [1] has a rendering of a planned 1.4GW power, 6GWh storage battery plant, with the decommissioned nuclear plant in the background. The battery energy storage is a bit smaller in area and of course of lot less tall. Eyeballing, the area is actually very comparable if you deduct the power plant's parking lot. The nuclear plant is Grohnde, a 1.43GW single-reactor plant.

The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse

1: https://www.heise.de/news/Mehr-als-1-4-Gigawatt-Riesige-Batt...

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#124

Post by bluGill » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

Carrok wrote: post #94

bluGill wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every forest has different needs. OP is in Portugal, I don't know much about forest there, but the plan seems reasonable for there. The Rocky Mountains need a different plan, but it isn't much different.

Portugal is 35k square miles. The Rockies are 300k square miles, much of it, notably, is mountainous. I do not think “cleaning” it is going to work, so I’m curious what this “not much different” plan looks like.

See a forester. I would not assume the entire Rockies need the same plan.

In general I would say start fires near towns, and let fires that start elsewhere burn.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#125

Post by w4yai » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #98

palata wrote: post #4

There is no "new normal", we are in a slope. As long as we emit CO2, the climate will get worse. Year after year. With effects like fires accelerating it, or the loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?) that will just result in more CO2 being released. We don't have to adapt to the situation as it is now , because it is pretty much the best scenario. We have to adapt to the fact that it will get…

> (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?) Not even close. Look at satellite imaging. Not only is the Amazon far from lost, the jungles in Africa/Borneo/PNG all look to be doing surprisingly okay.

It still got damaged a lot : https://www.maapprogram.org/amazon-tipping-point/

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#126

Post by tuco86 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #59

tuco86 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find it interesting when politicians mention temperature target goals.. what are you still talking about, it's done. We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people that are neither asylum migrants or economic migrant but survival migrants. The real discussion will become how we keep those out very soon. And since there are no good solutions from the "good" people who ignored everything and got…

> what are you still talking about, it's done It's not. The climate will warm as much as we emit CO2. Sure, the CO2 that we have already emitted won't leave. We've passed 1.5C, that won't come back in our lifetime. But the more we emit, the worse it will get. To keep what we have now, we have to stop emitting entirely, right now . > We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people We need to worry about…

hundreds of millions of people coming to europe (i didn't mention) is still lowballing on purpose. sure it's billions, but not all will go to one place was my thinking here.

you are talking reason, you are in the wrong timeline buddy. i'm talking about what we will chose as a society, i feel we can't help ourselves.

You can convince a person (me certainly) that we should stop immediately (or very very short time frame). But most people have experienced their entire lifetime of propaganda and fallacious arguments that words and reason have lost all meaning.

We are still getting cooked so slowly that people will only see unrelated incidents for a long time. World War(s) 3 is what the survivors will call it.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#127

Post by palata » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

nancyminusone wrote: post #85

>by the end of the century Maybe I've missed it because I don't follow news on this much (apart from "it will get warmer/worse"), but what happens after that? Seems like I've been hearing "by 2100" for the last 20 years, but now that's only 74 years away. Some people alive today will live to see it. Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat? Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events…

> Will it just keep getting warmer or will it level off somewhat?

It will get warmer for every kg of CO2 we emit. If we emitted less every day, it would still warm, but slower. Right now we are emitting more every day, so it will warm faster and faster.

> Or is it not worth discussing because preceding events will already be such an overwhelming disaster?

It's always worth discussing. It is not linear: every extra degree makes it a lot worse than the previous one. We're finding it worrying now with 1.5C? We should do everything we can to stay as close as possible to it. Probably we cannot avoid 2C, and if we keep going with the current emissions, that's 4C. 4C means that billions of people have to leave their country. I think it pretty much means that more than half of us die in a global war?

There is hope: we don't have to reach 4C. But we have to change our way of life for that. Which should be worth it, right? I'm ready to change my way of life to... survive.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#128

Post by bluefirebrand » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:07 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #64

dncornholio wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that "green energy" in EU is dependent on gas and/or coal? When there's no wind or sun, we will gladly burn gas or coal, and call it green energy. Nuclear doesn't have this requirement. It's truly zero carbon. Unless you can show me plans to fill this gap with batteries on a national scale, renewables < nuclear

Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. We have solved fusion at a distance with solar and batteries. We're arguing speed and cost of deployment for the collection and storage system. The technology drops in cost rapidly, it lasts for decades with no moving parts and minimal maintenance. It can be trivially recycled today with no further technology advancements needed. It fails…

> Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year

Sure, the sun is incredible, but our capacity of actually using that power is the bottleneck. We still have to have energy to dig up the materials and manufacture the panels and batteries and deploy them and such.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#129

Post by piva00 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:07 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #89

OKRainbowKid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively. So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclea…

> They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear. [1] https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-sy... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Germany still has expensive thermal power plants which dictate the price of electricity given the bidding system used for pricing it.

Sweden and Norway have very cheap electricity while mostly being renewables.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#130

Post by pluto_modadic » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

sajithdilshan wrote: post #66

People are truly having a climate change discussion fatigue. They hear all the time from politicians, celebrities, influencers, etc. that they should stop eating meat, should not drive non-electric vehicles, should not use AC, reduce consumption, and all other bullshit while the people preaching those have started wars that emit billions of tons of carbon, travel on their private planes to climate change summits, tak…

well I have good news! normal people don't have to sacrifice, fossil fuel companies do. if the govt mandates something (like with the ozone layer, or with lead acid battery recycling), something that was once impossible becomes possible.