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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

#421

Post by neoromantique »

lispm wrote: post #366
effie wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

West had the money and the will, I think that was a dollar well spent. US irradiated large areas of Pacific Ocean and atmosphere (US) with its testing program, harming people living there and contaminating whole world with radioactive isotopes. UK dumped radioactive waste in barrels into Atlantic ocean, has bad record on nuclear safety (Windscale accidents) and continues to run old nuclear power plant that does not p…

> West had the money and the will, I think that was a dollar well spent. And the need, since the baltic sea has a lot of countries which would be effected by leaking nuclear reactors. mining, processing and 'storing' of nuclear material isn't any better in Russia. > Soviet-build power plants near cities aren't as bad as people think, if run safely by competent people I think there is not much reason pretending that t…

>I think there is not much reason pretending that the russian nuclear industry is especially competent.

Yeah, except for the decades upon decades of research they've been doing on the topic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#423

Post by p_l »

lispm wrote: post #335
vidarh wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not shutting down plants is an alternative to instead slowing down phasing out coal, like Germany did. And almost all of the alternatives have costly problems too, like causing more deaths for most of them. Large scale solar might be less lethal, but pretty much every other power source causes more short term deaths. I'm not arguing against renewables. I'm arguing that this fear of nuclear costs huge numbers of lives…

> Not shutting down plants is an alternative to instead slowing down phasing out coal, like Germany did. Germany accelerated the development of renewable energy. That was the goal. Nuclear had to go first. Coal is following. The Germany time scale to rebuild its electricity landscape goes over many decades. By investing many many billions into renewables, instead of investing them into nuclear, Germany helped to kick…

Yet looking at energy transfer maps, it seems that a lot of German renewable investment ends up exported elsewhere, so that central and southern germany keeps importing nuclear power from France, and uses lignite from local + imported lignite power from elsewhere.

Anyway, the argument is that instead of panic-closing nuclear power plants requiring more gas and coal plants being run in their place, they could have instead ran them as long as possible while building up the renewables.

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

#424

Post by p_l »

nickik wrote: post #210
chmod775 wrote: post #15

There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a l…

I still don't understand why nuclear waste needs long terms storage. With Burner reactors you can produce waste that only needs storage for 100s of years, not 1000s. Its easy to store and manage, basically it can just stand in a field, doing nothing for 100 years. The 'waste' is not waste, its material we might want to use in the future and putting it into some 10000 years storage is idiotic.

The reason why you don't see much of fast-neutron "burners" is that NPT is essentially an empty shell, and you have to be lucky to survive putting up so-called plutonium economy - and the "survive" part might be literal. It all goes back to Indian nuclear program, AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production. Now that climate crisis pushes for more solutions to power, you get absurd proposals from USA like reactors with remote disable on them controlled from USA.

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

#425

Post by exporectomy »

loeg wrote: post #285
Jabbles wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The error is 10^17, not 10^3. Units are important.

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

#426

Post by exporectomy »

whatever1 wrote: post #417
redisman wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by recycled in this case? From my understanding you can pretty much only grind it down to garbage filler and maybe press it into some primitive shape. It’ll never become cling film or whatever again

Polymers can fundamentally be de-polymerized and then you can reuse the monomers, for example see [1]. They call it "chemical recycling". Questionable whether it will ever be price competitive with direct production from crude oil derivatives. You can also burn them (pyrolysis), collect the carbon and start from scratch. Of course this is insane (economically and thermodynamically), but hey, you are "recycling" the s…

If you convert it to solid carbon, there's no need to recycle it any further because it's already harmless to the environment. So perhaps it could be more cost effective than it seems.

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

#427

Post by p_l »

hanniabu wrote: post #66
pydry wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima cleanup costs will be between $470 and $660 billion. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi... US nuclear power gets a liability cap of $0.2 billion. The nuclear industry will keep telling us it is safe but it will refuse to shoulder the insurance costs beyond a minimal level. That's the taxpayer's job and the taxpayer's job alone. And, EVEN INCLUDING that, nuclear is about 3x more exp…

Yup, and everyone says nuclear is safe but that's only technologically speaking. The technology is safe, but it's the human and regulatory aspect that has glaring red flags... This first link here makes me absolutely furious. There's too much to quote from here, but this succinct excerpt touches on loosening safety tests. It goes into more detail in other parts of the article. The post has numerous example of very co…

It really didn't help that USA pretty much stopped all work on NPPs by 1980s, and IIRC (don't ask for link, don't have it now) doesn't allow NPPs on brownfield sites - i.e. you can't remove an old reactor, then build a new more modern one in its place, even if you updated everything to new norms. You have to get a new site, new planning, new acceptance, etc.

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

#428

Post by cinntaile »

andbberger wrote: post #355
cinntaile wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research has been ongoing since the 70s to find geologically stable underground storage, this is not a solved problem.

Yes it is. You are spreading misinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

Spreading misinformation... That's a bit harsh. It's not even in use yet. Thanks for the example though.

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

#429

Post by Chris2048 »

godelski wrote: post #200
whatever1 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All plastics can be recycled. Does not mean they do. In fact, we have unmitigated leaking dumps here in the US, but since it is not in your backyard you don't care. Not your problem, someone elses problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#:~:text=The%20Han... . I can play the environmentalist on the backs of other people as well. Super easy.

Most plastics aren't actually recyclable, which is why they aren't recycled. But we say that we can because it shifts the burden. Companies like Coke have been saying that they'll have 50% recycled material in the next 20 years for the last 60. ~~Fusion~~Full recycled product chain is only 20 years away! Also, 17% of France's energy comes from recycled nuclear (70% from nuclear)[0] [0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/i…

Is this literally "not recyclable" or, not economically recyclable?

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

#430

Post by p_l »

fulafel wrote: post #271
tpmx wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So why would the electricity prices become unaffordable for heat pump heating in your well insulated houses with local hydro and nuclear power? Umm. This whole thread is about the existence of nuclear power. Is it hard to understand that if nuclear power went away, the baseload would become extremely expensive during cold and wind-free days? That's a substantial part of the year, here.

In a nuclear rampdown scenario, hopefully it would not come as an overnight surprise. Usually there are plans on a 10 year timescale or more. But I'm not arguing against nuclear, just for dynamic electricity pricing.

Like some people found out in Texas, with 5 digit bills due to short term spike?
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