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[1] https://forceofnature.com/blogs/regenerate/carbon-sequestrat....
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
> As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage. What a comparison... The worry with nuclear waste is of course that the shielding doesn't last long enough and waste then contaminates surroundings with much much higher radiation than in coal ash
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> Nuclear can be useful too. I wouldn’t call it just useful. As far as I understand it’s the best realistic shot we’ve got.
Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports…
Edit: I should note that one proposal I’ve seen to mitigate some of this is to improve long distance transmission, since it’s never cloudy everywhere, and taken to an extreme, you could, for example, put lots of solar in the Sahara to power the UK, or even send power from the hemisphere in summer to the hemisphere in winter. But then, besides the huge capital costs for building out transmission infra, you run into energy independence issues/trust issues between governments. But maybe within large political blocs like the EU, Italy/Southern Spain could sell solar power to the more northern European countries, with less risk.
As this brilliant cartoon points out, we've had 128 years of warnings about human-induced climate change, and over all those years, humanity did not change course. That's because warnings and exhortations rarely accomplish anything. Things tend to change only after there's no other choice, i.e., when there's a crisis . There's an insightful quote from Milton Friedman on this: "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived --…
Except that warnings and exhortations did accomplish the result of causing nations to begin banning CFCs back in 1987, well before the hole in the ozone layer became a global crisis.
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You can’t just shut down the fossil fuel industry before you have alternative green energy infrastructure in place, this is a multi decade project. Otherwise the price of oil shoots up and you get inflation which affects most people’s ability to get by. “Populist anger” might be justified if people have a hard time paying their bills.
> “Populist anger” might be justified if people have a hard time paying their bills. If the costs of current living standard wasn't externalized to future generations (to the detriment of the environment), they couldn't afford those bills to begin with. Unfortunately, it's very hard to reduce people's living standards once they got used to it. So yes, the end result is what you're saying - however, I think it's a ver…
Exactly. Too few people understand economics, that current costs are being brought down by offsetting future costs.
The same with any pollution in any industry. If the industry is allowed to follow bad practices, and cause pollution but not deal with it, then they are not bearing the brunt of the full costs of generating that pollution. Someone has to clean it all up eventually, typically the government, then people complain about taxes.
You can complain about taxes, but you just voted for someone to cut regulations on industry which then causes the pollution which needs tax dollars to clean it up.
(I know CO2 is not a 'pollutant' technically, it is just another example of the 'cost' to the environment is not being allocated correctly to the producer. I feel need to be correct since even using the word 'pollutant' is a right wing argument point on why climate change advocates don't know what they are talking about.).
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> Nuclear can be useful too. I wouldn’t call it just useful. As far as I understand it’s the best realistic shot we’ve got.
Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports…
Because it’s nowhere near effective enough.
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I suggest watching a few videos by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder to educate themselves on this topic
Mere ~30 years after discovering the Greenhouse Effect we managed to split the atom, harnessing heretofore unimaginable amounts of energy. Yet almost 100 years later, here we are - Oil and gas dependent, boasting an energy and climate crisis, all the while fooling regulators with worthless climate certificates, unaccountable off-shore factories and just plain rampant fraud when it comes to CO2 emissions.
Environmental activists are almost entirely responsible for the killing of nuclear energy in the 1970s. Much of the blame for climate change lays at their feet.
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They do and they are? As far as electricity is concerned, that is.
I think you underestimate how widespread petroleum derivates are outside of energy. Construction materials, roads, tires, plastics, cosmetics, cleaning products, paints, inks, dyes, adhesives, sealants, lubricants, clothes, waterproof fabrics, batteries, fertilisers, medicine, tooth paste, shampoos, &c. It's _the_ building block of modern life, unless you're in nature you can bet everything you lay your eyes on is at…
Some energy input may be required. ( But likely on par with current diesel/gas processing.)
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Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports…
Last time I worked the numbers on nuclear vs storage, I came up with… for the same amount of money and for the same amount of generation capacity, battery storage could provide about 4 hours of electricity before needing to recharge while nuclear could provide about 24 months without needing to shut down for a few days for a fuel change. Pumped hydro storage was better, if you have the water resources and elevation c…
The magazines will be full at times, but when they are not, it should be possible to just pump the water back up again and thereby store excess wind and solar power.
I live in Sweden, and yeah, flooding large amounts of new land will be impossible by now.
The indigenous (Sami) people will say no and file lawsuits. And rightly so, they just didn't had that option 100 years ago.
But there is an abundance of existing magazines that can be used this way. They are full around November but after that they start to drain.