Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

Chernobyl disaster was biggest nuclear accident, but not the biggest disaster related to energy production. In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes. It's not much known in the West because various elements of the Chinese government concealed the details of the disaster until the 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

In terms of loss of life Chernobyl disaster is comparable to Bhopal disaster (at least 3,787 over 16,000 claimed deaths), caused by Methyl isocyanate leak from the storage tank. A combination of poorly-maintained or non-functional facilities, a disregard of safety standards, and an under-trained workforce made it possible for water to leak into the MIC tanks in the absence of properly working safety systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

Chernobyl disaster was caused by a combination of reactor design error and operator error. After this errors have been fixed (different nuclear fuel composition, modern monitoring and controlling equipment, improved operator training and procedures) there are still 7 operational RBMK in Russia. (The same reactor type as Chernobyl)

> Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation?

The premise of "excess" already has the problem baked into it.

Suppose an efficient company could provide service for $100 with a $10 profit, but regulators have no practical way of establishing this. The incumbent is instead providing service for $200 with a $10 profit, but then receiving $30 in kickbacks under the table or something of equivalent value not being accounted for in the official books from whoever is now getting $190 instead of $90.

Whereas getting them to invest in a particular type of generation was never hard because you can just give them a financial incentive to do it. If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?

It implies we'll get cheap VPS and cloud services, right?

> BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."

No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days.

The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time.

You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal.

> Yeah, it's because of the above points.

Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal?

Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.

Here in Norway we already have issues with volatile and high electricity prices, because:

1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a political consensus behind it, and even if it did, it would take years. And our geography is uniquely ill suited for solar.

2) Winters have less and less snow, summers have less and less rain, leading to issues filling reservoirs. This will only get worse in the future.

3) The north has a surplus, but the infrastructure for transferring it to the south is underdeveloped

4) lots of the electricity we generate is being sold to central Europe to compensate for Germany's idiotic decision to shut down their nuclear reactors and Trump's idiotic decision to send oil prices over $100

Unfortunately data centres are currently being built, which depresses me. Because who will use them? Giant American tech companies will use them, to lobotomise our youth, poison our political discourse and steal our personal data. Fuck that.

Data centres also create very few jobs beyond the initial construction phase. Overall it's a very, very bad deal for Norway as a nation.