131–140 of 149 posts
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I can never understand why attacks by "activists" do not result in dozens of arrests and convictions for multiple years of prison every time they happen. Isn't it basically what any sovereign law says?
Usually that's called oppression and leads to bigger protests and riots.
You can't just get away with attacking people.
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The same could be said about the US as the warming will also make natural resources in Alaska more approachable.
Pretty sure transportation and drilling/mining is harder when the ground thaws and is a swampy mess.
Or could it rather be that this "Climate change good for Russia!" talk is just the same old American jingoism merely adopting modern environmentalism?
Why would Russia be the only country for which climate change is "good"?
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Are you claiming that the parent posters comments about funding are false? You don’t actually address them.
They're simply unevidenced. They carry as much weight as me accusing you of being funded by the Russians.
That seems like a statement that the claims are false, not a request for evidence.
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Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs, hairy security situation in many countries and very limited ability to adapt to demand. This is both in the night-and-day cycle meaning but also in the "we need more power in 10-years" meaning, since nuclear power plants take forever to build. Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth, especially regarding climate chan…
I think by "nuclear society", your parent meant a united society that works together, not one powered by nuclear fission.
Its sadder everyday that somehow humanity has failed to become a nuclear society. All our problems could have been solved decades ago but we are still nowhere near a solution.
We’re past that point for fission, no way to build new plants fast enough. It’s renewables or bust at this point.
Compare the countries that had real phases where they build a lot of nuclear and it easily beats any renewables.
If Germany had gone all out on nuclear for the last 20 years, they could easily be finishing 5-6 nuclear plants a year, and likely get the construction time down to 4-5 years even if you built old school PWRs. Germany would be shutting down coal plants and end up 100% clean far earlier then their current way of doing.
If you however figure out a newer type of reactor (as we should have long ago) you could likely build 5x as many. The limiting factor in PWRs (outside of money) is the extremely complex construction of the reactor vessel. These have to be 'thicc' and are hard to weld, only few places in the world can do it.
Despite that insane reactor vessel France and the US managed at reasonably high production rate.
However if you go to something like a molten salt cooled reactor, or a molten salt reactor of some kind you have no pressure and thus no 'thicc' reactor vessel. These can be constructed incredibly quickly.
If you actually put a challenge with a fix amount of money to produce 100GWh of 100% clean highly reliable electricity setting up a assembly line of reactor production and develop traveling build teams that set up site. Then show up with a huge truck and dump the reactor into the site.
Doing that with renewables is an unsolved problem unless maybe in countries where you have a massive amount of hydro.
Thank the gods, Canada has finally changed its regulations (and the US is slowly doing so too) so actual real progress has been made on commercial molten salt (and other) reactors. Terrestrial Energy, Moltex Energy and a number of other companies are deeply engaged in the process of getting these reactors threw licensing now. These reactors are often more 10x smaller for the same output of energy and thus far cheaper to build.
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There is nothing cheaper and easier and more scalable than nuclear for baseload gigawatt generation, especially when you actually account for the insane amount of batteries required to make wind/solar/etc viable as a baseload technology. People point at solar panel progress and always conveniently stay silent on the big battery problem (the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc) Nuclear d…
> the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc These are all trivial compared to nuclear's construction problem. But I've never heard that batteries are not "scalable," when they are actually one of the most incredibly scalable technologies out there. Want a few watt hours? No problem. Want 10GWh? No problem. Want to distribute a MWh at every distribution station across a country? No problem…
Its actually massively difficult challenge both from a production and supply chain perspective.
Lithium itself plentiful but getting it into the battery is a long way. Its more like specialty chemicals, even the 'Lithium majors' have had massive problems getting new plants online and producing high quality lithium.
Battery plants are incredibly complex mass manufacturing operations and even small manufacturing problems can leave to burning cars. Scaling these is very difficult and only a few companies are really producing lithium batteries at scale.
Lithium batteries in Grid operation have never been deployed at '10GWh' so if it was 'no problem' then somebody might have done it.
The challenge of producing enough batteries (and renewables), lithium or otherwise to have a 100% reliable electricity grid (even if there are 2 weeks without wind) is gigantic and to me it actually seems far harder then just building nuclear plants.
> Coal is already a dead man walking.
Look at China, India and Indonesia and then rethink your statement.
It just so happens that US and Western Europe are not the only places in the world.
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> the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc These are all trivial compared to nuclear's construction problem. But I've never heard that batteries are not "scalable," when they are actually one of the most incredibly scalable technologies out there. Want a few watt hours? No problem. Want 10GWh? No problem. Want to distribute a MWh at every distribution station across a country? No problem…
Even more weird: most people think rare earth is rare as in: "there isn’t a lot in the ground and it is easily depleted". Whereas in reality, rare earth means that it is less common per cubic meter of earth than other minerals. But there is plenty.
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We are really really close to a solution, and for the one thing that nuclear is hyped to provide--clean electricity--we have cheaper and easier and more scalable solutions than nuclear. The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc.…
I've been listening to this rhetoric for years, yet every year, more energy problems are caused by (lack of) stable base load electricity supply, both in US and Europe, and much more in countries that heavily invested in "green" (non-nuclear) tech (e.g. Germany), than not (e.g. France).
The gas plants are profitable because the prices you have to pay them are pretty high.
And this problem is getting worse all the time and its not really a great overall strategy.
I would argue renewables are subsides by how they use the grid. In the US renewables even get subsidies for energy they produce and sell at negative prices.
This is the collision between imperfect (but working) versus perfect (but not working). It's more important to get emissions down now than to aim for a perfect standard that no one has yet reached, and doesn't appear reachable any time soon. The emissions matter, not the goals of activist NGOs. This cuts emissions, that's why it qualified. Results > ideology.
Adding more methane(or any GHG) doesn’t cut emissions. That’s why it doesn’t qualify Results > ideology Snark aside we have already have low/no emission energy alternatives. Nuclear, wind, and solar. No need to pretend that gas is part of that group.
This is the collision between imperfect (but working) versus perfect (but not working). It's more important to get emissions down now than to aim for a perfect standard that no one has yet reached, and doesn't appear reachable any time soon. The emissions matter, not the goals of activist NGOs. This cuts emissions, that's why it qualified. Results > ideology.
Gas cuts emissions if you're only looking at CO2, but accounting for methane leaks it has about the same climate impact as coal.
The argument reminds me of "sceptics" who appeal to "the effect of the sun cycles", as I'd climate scientists wouldn't have thought of that.