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EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

reuters.com

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Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#281

Post by loeg »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #231
dijit wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what, you’re right- I agree. However our largest energy creation mechanism is absolutely destroying the planet in non-linear and difficult to measure ways. Coal is not a dramatic killer but it kills us in droves, now and long into the future. Nuclear waste, in comparison, is more of a “known” issue, and were scared of what we know. I’m talking about coal because Sweden is displacing its nuclear power draw wi…

I haven't read that we can't just recapture the carbon by re-planting a bazzilion trees. I'll do some googling now.

The problem with trees-as-carbon capture is:

1. They are only a net store of carbon while they're alive.

2. Because of that, you need to dedicate land to carbon-capture forest, indefinitely.

3. Burning fossil fuels for energy releases more and more carbon into the atmosphere.

Like, you get N tons of carbon captured out of a given land area. It's constant per area. So you would need to continually grow the amount of forested land just to follow the amount of carbon released by burning fossil fuels.

But: land is finite. The actual worldwide trend has been to deforest land, either for lumber, or slash-and-burn for subsistence farming in poor countries, or just to allow for population growth, or the large land area needed for wind and solar farms. We don't have a huge surplus of not-yet-forest land — can't grow trees in deserts.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#282

Post by godelski »

brtkdotse wrote: post #99
loeg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either? The problem is that combusting it produces CO₂.

Not quite, it depend where the carbon forming the CO2 comes from. Carbon extracted from sewage is already in the carbon cycle giving a net 0 carbon when burned. Extracting and burning fossile carbon ADDS carbon to the cycle, hence the problem

Or we could extract it and not burn it, making it "carbon negative".

Though your comment has a problem. It isn't carbon that is the problem, it is carbon in the air. If we did 100% CO2 extraction from coal fire plants they wouldn't be a real climate issue (overly simplified). Similarly we can't consider sewage as a carbon 0 cycle because eating turns a solid carbon source (food) into a gas. Carbon is fine, carbon in the air is not fine. Sewage is only neutral in the respect that we've already converted it to a gas (unless we accelerate this process, which is typically done) but doesn't account for the conversion process that happens.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#283

Post by lispm »

yellowapple wrote: post #270
lispm wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is not an alternative. It has a lot of unwanted side effects and it just does not scale to solve the problem. It's extremely costly, comes with costly unsolved problems and is slow to build up.

> It has a lot of unwanted side effects So does literally every other power source. Nuclear is, if anything, among the least bad options in this regard. > and it just does not scale to solve the problem. It absolutely does, if we're willing to actually try. Evidently, we'd rather just keep killing ourselves with coal.

> It absolutely does, if we're willing to actually try.

We are trying that since 66 years, since the first nuclear power plant.

What we have achieved so far is a nuclear industry which is hardly able to keep the status quo of installed power generation, sky high rising costs for building nuclear power plants, extremely long build times, very little technological progress in the last decade, unsolved financial and technological problems, ...

If it were commercially viable and scalable, it would thrive by now.

All the promised next-gen problem solvers like breeders, thorium fuel cycle, reprocessing industries, ... have been more costly and financially toxic.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#284

Post by fulafel »

tsimionescu wrote: post #238
fulafel wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unlikely to hit 0 even at night, no reason to stop all the windmills and hydro, and there will be stored energy buyers and sellers. But there won't be production guarantees to some level based on anticipated demand.

I know it's unlikely, but the point was that there exists some minimum need of energy, even in the most flexible grid imaginable, some base load necessary.

Technically yes, I guess the grid has to be kept energized to work.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#285

Post by loeg »

Jabbles wrote: post #269
loeg wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy density is the main reason you don't need much volume of uranium. Fission is just extremely energetic. That c² factor in E = m c² is huge (9 * 10¹⁶). It is really hard for humans to intuit about factors of ten to the power of 16 or 17.

You need to include the units, else that doesn't make much sense - many physicists use units such that c = 1. In this case the units (for speed²) you want are m²/s² = J/kg

The fun thing is, the units are basically unimportant! A factor of 10^3 or two is peanuts on 10^17. Humans have just as terrible intuitions about 10^14 and 10^11 as they do about 10^17.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#286

Post by yellowapple »

Rarebox wrote: post #129
hedora wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we made a giant four sided pyramid out of stone, and used the inner 1% of its volume to store your box? We could put it in the middle of the desert, and hope it gets covered in sand.

To discourage people from finding the box inside, we could insert traps to hinder explorers.

Maybe also spread some myth about an ancient curse to ward off looters.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#287

Post by rpastuszak »

consp wrote: post #248
godelski wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also just isn't a lot of waste. It sounds like a lot, but consider that the US produces 100 million tons of coal waste per year (2014). Hell, solar has ~30ktons of waste a year (just PV panels). 11ktons over 60 years just is astronomically tiny. That's 138 tons a year, 150x less than solar and 500000x less than coal. They just don't compare.

That coal waste is also radioactive. Natural, but still radioactive.

“Natural” as opposed to? :)

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#288

Post by ducleonctor »

Nuclear power seems incredibly expensive and complicated, even more so than large coal power plants. The logistics alone are crazy.

Nuclear power's inherent radiation danger to living organisms and our shiny new 3nm GPUs is also real. Additionally uranium ore seems quite limited on earth and thus makes nuclear fission seem like a non-scaleable technology. Maybe this resource is better used to solve rare edge cases like powering infrastructure in space and implementing big red buttons for our presidents, supreme leaders and chairmen.

Nobody can rule out accidents or malicious things going on with the spent fuel anyways.

Wind and solar are very cheap and the sun won't turn off anytime soon. Can't we cover the planet's deserts with photovoltaics and wind turbines? Couldn't we ship the converted energy using high voltage DC lines or hydrogen/methane pipelines?

Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#289

Post by scatters »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #191
biren34 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to say, but the idea that "we don't need energy" is both false and dangerous. The earth's carrying capacity before fossil fuels was far, far lower than the 7 billion current population, especially with current living standards. The only reason we can support that many is because of a complex web of economics that causes the earth to produce far more food than it otherwise could, and then enables distributio…

I would like to do some more reading about this, do you have any links? The wikipedia page is a little light on detail. I agree that we should have food security for everybody, and I agree that if we don't provide everyday people with power for heating and cooking they will just start burning things again which would create a bigger disaster. But when I look around me I see massive amounts of waste in every sector be…

Look at your own body. Half of the nitrogen in your body tissue - in particular, in protein - was clawed from the atmosphere by the Haber process. There is simply no replacement for industrial society.

Re: EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document

#290

Post by alexott »

consp wrote: post #248
godelski wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also just isn't a lot of waste. It sounds like a lot, but consider that the US produces 100 million tons of coal waste per year (2014). Hell, solar has ~30ktons of waste a year (just PV panels). 11ktons over 60 years just is astronomically tiny. That's 138 tons a year, 150x less than solar and 500000x less than coal. They just don't compare.

That coal waste is also radioactive. Natural, but still radioactive.

Depending on location, it could be very radioactive... I studied and worked at lab that did measurements, and it was push for closing a nuclear plant in our city (in Siberia) for coal-based plant, but after evaluation of waste, it was decided to continue to use nuclear-based station.
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