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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

#461

Post by loeg »

Chris2048 wrote: post #432
loeg wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> They are only a net store of carbon while they're alive. Is wood not a carbon store?

Only until it decomposes, which is usually relatively quickly after it dies.

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

#462

Post by loeg »

torresmo wrote: post #453

I see a lot of fair concerns about nuclear waste. Here's a crazy thought: Can we just send it to space? With all recent developments in space technology, I'd expect it to be extremely safe and reliable in the next decades.

The failure mode of flying nuclear waste is much, much worse than just leaving it in the ground. It's relatively safe in the ground; the concerns are unfounded.

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

#463

Post by loeg »

croes wrote: post #253
croes wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't even handle a pandemic and you think we can handle nuclear energy?

To the down voters, which company or authority do you trust enough to operate this systems for decades?

The Navy.[0]

> By 2003 the U.S. Navy had accumulated over 5,400 "reactor years" of accident-free experience, and operated more than 80 nuclear-powered ships.

They've been sailing nuclear subs since the 1950s without major safety incident. The big carriers supply grid power when they're docked in Hawaii.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_navy

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

#464

Post by flemhans »

loeg wrote: post #88
random_kris wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but i can imagine as we scale the hall like that will soon be able to contain only 10 years worth of material. Then 1 year etc...

Scale what? France already generates all of its own power requirements and is a net exporter of electricity. They're at 100% scale already.

We could heat the streets in winter, keep all lights on, mine bitcoin, drive around like crazy due to almost free "fuel".

All possible thanks to Nuclear!

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

#465

Post by Klinky »

godelski wrote: post #351
aszantu wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The places where uranium is mined is uninhabitable afterwards :(

Yeah, but because there is a giant hole in the ground, but that's not specific to uranium mining. Luckily 1) uranium is extremely energy dense so we don't have to mine as much of it and 2) people usually don't live where mines open up in the first place. If we're talking about uranium mining you may notice that Canada isn't particularly habitable to begin with. Though in situ mining is pretty popular with uranium bec…

Just because it's energy dense after enrichment, doesn't mean it has high concentrations within mined ore. Most mines operate with only a fraction of a percentage of the ore being uranium, and only a fraction of a percentage of that is U-235, and viable for a nuclear reactor.

Some mines use ISL techniques which is similar to fracking. Canada does have Cigar Lake, the highest grade uranium mine in the world (15%), but due to the dangers of high uranium concentrations and the challenging geology, it has not been the easiest to extract.

This is to say, you don't just dig up some ore and stuff it in a reactor(it takes a lot of ore to power a reactor), nor is uranium mining a clean process.

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

#466

Post by lispm »

neoromantique wrote: post #421
lispm wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)_/¯

Like how to run dangerously outdated reactor designs for decades?

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

#467

Post by zizee »

tpmx wrote: post #381
zizee wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For one common naive case: Storing the energy in Li-Ion batteries in e.g. a Tesla Powerwall: $437/kWh. How did you come up with that number? Total cost of the battery divided by its capacity? Since you do not dispose of the battery upon first discharge, the true cost should be amortized across the thousands of cycles it would go through during its lifetime. Batteries are still far from economical in many situations…

Oh, you don't understand the difference betweeen power and energy... The context here is storing energy for the days when it's not windy or when it's cloudy. > Batteries are still far from economical in many situations, but there are many situations where they now make sense. This a not about your Tesla, or what you feel about Tesla and batteries in general.

>> Also what is the cost of storing that energy?

> Insanely high compared to the cost of producing it.

Ok, how about you share your numbers on the cost of production for 1kwh.

Your use of "insanely high" leads me to believe you are comparing the capital outlay for batteries, vs operating costs of a power station. It's important to compare like for like.

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

#468

Post by lispm »

p_l wrote: post #423
lispm wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ins…

Sure electricity gets exported a lot and Germany is a large exporter of electricity. That's a European market now. That's what we (the EU) have been doing for decades now: EU wide markets instead of country markets (or smaller). That's also a large building block fir a new electricity landscape: EU wide connected grids, in many places with high-capacity HVDC lines.

Germany was not 'panic closing' nuclear. The nuclear exit was hotly debated for decades and decided long before Fukushima.

Germany was doing a lot more than just closing 'some' of its nuclear reactors and setting a timeline for closing the rest. Germany also removed the centralized monopoly business model around the big nuclear&coal-based electricity companies. The electricity production was in the hand of four large companies who had divided Germany into four monopolistic regions. These large companies had zero intention investing into renewable, since that already owned all the market and were free of competition. The government opened up the market and reduced the influence of the companies.

Germany has in sum now not more coal power than in had then. It has less coal capacity.

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

#469

Post by opo »

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…

>...The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste

Why would you think that?

In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste:

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

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

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

While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.

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

#470

Post by Lammy »

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…

Renewables seem like a great way to cap the total possible energy usage of humanity and keep us in a lower-evolved state. I want the future promised by unlimited nuclear energy instead.
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