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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

#551

Post by oblio »

rhodozelia wrote: post #216
oblio wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :) I don't work in this field, but I'd have a bunch of basic assumption you could dismantle: 1. We need a solid power grid, anyway, you know, for transporting ele…

Imagine how overbuilt and under utilized a communications network would have to be in order for it to work the same way people imagine solar and wind power can be transported across the country. Networks offer the best return on investment when they are fully utilized not sitting idle.

Aren't communication networks also overbuilt and underutilized ? After all that's why retail ISPs oversubscribe so much, and why we had issues at the start of the lockdowns.

If anything, communication networks are even spikier, which means that they need to be more overprovisioned than a power grid.

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

#552

Post by raffraffraff »

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.

The problem with coal waste is that most of it is in the atmosphere causing climate change. That might not seem like a storage problem but it is. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

To me, it's like someone asking where me to choose which part of my house to infect with wood rot:

1. A single scrap of wood, extremely badly affected, stored in a sealed box under the stairs

2. My entire roof mildly affected by rot.

I'd take the box under the stairs.

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

#553

Post by ivan1783 »

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…

Maybe I'm missing something, but why do the coal & oil plants get a free pass to dump their waste into the air? Its much easier to contain and store nuclear waste because you can keep track of it, whereas the coal and oil waste is just dumped in the air for everyone to breathe.

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

#554

Post by dtech »

random_kris wrote: post #483
dtech wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you scale this up you're also having more Area. If that hall contains all the waste from decades of energy for France, I'm sure we can also build 1 in Germany, Italy, and every US state.

When our energy consumption increases by 10000 times where will.we store the waste? I am not against the nuclear, I am for it but I like to ask hard questions

That's a nonsensical question, there's not enough nuclear or fossil fuel in the world to increase our energy consumption 100.000x for any significant time period. We'd need to build a dyson sphere.

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

#555

Post by lispm »

Lammy wrote: post #548
lispm wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Evidently not very hard, as I've seen in my home state of California The US had been one of THE major proponents of nuclear technology. If the country lost interest, there must be a deeper reason than 'we did not try hard enough'. I would guess that the US invested more than a trillion dollar (in todays money) in its nuclear industry. Instead lately the US invested in fracking with huge climate impact and President…

It’s weird that in the post-9/11 years everyone seemed to talk about how the USA waged wars for oil and how oil is what props up USD, but now two decades later there “must be a deeper reason” why nuclear didn’t get to succeed on its own merits. We are literally ruled by oilmen so this should not be a surprise lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HRG_Group#Early_business_histo...

There is very little electricity generation from oil anywhere. I doubt that oil had or has a huge impact on the electricity energy policy.

What had an impact was 'cheap' fracking gas, which is used for electricity production in the US. It has a share of roughly 40%. Coal adds roughly another 20%. That makes around 60% gas + coal in the US for electricity production.

For Germany gas + coal has 40% share in electricity production (2020).

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

#556

Post by pydry »

tpmx wrote: post #404
pydry wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing became cost effective last year: https://ieefa.org/ieefa-grid-scale-battery-costs-have-reache... >If storing energy were cost effective you could make a killing buying low and selling high on the national grid. Maybe not a killing but you could make $$$ yes. This is starting to happen.

You're not understanding that correctly. They are talking about things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve This giant (world's largest!) and very expensive thing provides short term-relief against grid outages. The batteries last for ~1 hour and it can still only provide electricity for something like 50k homes. (It's used for more economically useful things, like stabilizing the grid in emerge…

And it was built in 2017. And battery prices have plunged since then. And it's not the only project mentioned.

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

#557

Post by consp »

XorNot wrote: post #539
chrisseaton wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "natural" has nothing to do with risk to human life. Not sure who you think you're disagreeing with? Nobody said otherwise if you read the thread.

Then I have no idea it was necessary to talk about the "naturalness" of radioactive sources at all given the subject matter.

I usually give the "natural" qualification if it is not immediately obvious there are plenty of naturally occuring sources of radioactivity around us. This has mostly to so with human perception of radioactivity being something unnatural, maybe it was not necessary on HN. It does not matter that much in the end with respect to radioactivity.

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

#558

Post by hajile »

csunbird wrote: post #330
godelski wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dirty bombs aren't an issue. You might want to ask yourself why we've never seen one used, especially if you understand how easy it is to obtain the necessary materials. IIRC we've only caught a handful of devices (none exploded). Also we have to consider when it explodes, it just doesn't make enough radiation. It is pretty difficult to generate enough radiation that would actually cause an increase in cancer rates (…

Terrorists are not known to be the most logical people, to be honest. They are going to try anything that can generate terror in large scale and a dirty bomb is a very, very terrorizing thing to general population. General population thinks anything with radiation is panic worthy, even though there isn't that big of a deal.

1 in 5 Islamic terrorists have engineering degrees (that’s nearly 10x the rate of engineers in the general population) and a further 2 out of those 5 have degrees in Islamic studies. That 3/5 of terrorists and doesn’t include those with other degrees. Suicide bombers are probably patsys, but they aren’t anywhere near the majority.

These people are smart, but are still indoctrinated. Despite the “religion of peace” propaganda, a clear reading of the Koran shows certain duties that cannot be avoided if you accept the premise that (unlike most of the Bible) it God’s exact words and also the final truth. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the smarter the reader, the more inescapable those conclusions become.

It’s also not a fringe idea. Imagine if everyone in the US or everyone in the EU suddenly started believing suicide bombings of civilians is at least sometimes justified. That’s around the total number of people who actually believe that across the globe (even more believe in terrorism when targets and/or methods are changed).

More generally though, lots of very smart people get indoctrinated into cults every day. If our life history were just a bit different, you or I probably would have joined one too no matter how smart we are.

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

#559

Post by natch »

oblio wrote: post #550
natch wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confusing centralization of manufacturing, which is possible and not so bad, with centralization of energy production, which is much more insidious.

No, I'm not. The only "personal" production of energy is from solar panels. Which still comes with its own problems, as you generally still want to be connected to a grid, in which case utility companies generally attach a lot of strings. Solar will seem to be less centralized but in reality and over the long term we will have huge solar farms owned by big companies, for the same reason we generally have huge actual…

None of this stuff is one or the other. It can be centralized, and also it can be on the average Joe’s roof or in the average Joe’s backyard. With or without a grid. Without the grid, you need some extra equipment so people who can, tend to opt for having the grid hooked up. But it’s possible to do it independently and be free of all the centralization.

Oh, wait. Not true for nuclear.

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

#560

Post by biren34 »

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…

The best resource I can think of offhand is the book "Overshoot" by William catton. It has a pretty strong political bent to it that I don't agreed with. But despite that, it frames up the problem of energy quite well.
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