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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#551

Post by procaryote »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #506
fy20 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to bear in mind about Europe is that to go carbon neutral you need to be able to deal with winters. First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the…

I don't think you should dismiss opposition to wind as mere NIMBYism Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill" I wouldn't want to live anywhere near one myself

Isn't that exactly what NIMBY means?

People want the power to stay on but they don't want the power generation built near them.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#552

Post by wenchu »

Oh well then the Oligarchs have spoken,let the world be green, glowing green. I'm not anti nuclear but the technologies used to date have been seriously flawed. But It is the Idea that people who really have no technical knowledge of this technology its supply chain issues or its real impact on long term health are so arrogant that they believe they alone can dictate to the world, that I find offensive. We look at immediate effect but a study by a Japanese researcher after Fukushima shows the effect of irradiation may not show for multiple generations after exposure.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#553

Post by procaryote »

jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

> Sure, it might cost more

That.

There are reasons why the cost rises if you lack other base and reactive generation to balance out the grid as you then need over production and storage. But in the end that's about cost

Spiking electricity prices will lose you an election

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#554

Post by zvrba »

jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed.

This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is.

EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpeace activist on the street who was collecting money. While I would gladly donate to WWF, I said sharp "NO" to him and explained that it was because Greenpeace opposes nuclear.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#555

Post by maxglute »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #543
bryanlarsen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T. Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.

France has 58 reactors with combined power of 60GW. The audit in 2011 (after Fukushima) estimated their cost at 96B euros and the total investment into the nuclear industry since 1950 including research at 228B euros. And that doesn't include the fact that for all these years electricity prices in Germany were higher than in France which helped to keep renewables afloat. > But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear…

> subsidizing coal power plants in China along the way

~10% of PRC energy is generated from solar now. That's enough to carbon offset every panel they've produced and will produce in perpetuity.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#556

Post by pembrook »

jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

No. It’s as simple as:

A) battery tech isn’t good enough or clean enough

…and…

B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times)

You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear.

Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it with renewables. Renewables only scale by using up a crap ton of fossil fuels to mine the materials and factory produce the equipment and ship it around the globe. Nuclear runs steady and practically forever off material that fits in a small box.

Ultimately, we need both. As China has already realized.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#557

Post by cakealert »

Nuclear power capital costs should be cheap too.

The incentives of the regulators are not aligned with the public.

Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.

They only care about reducing the risk of an accident however minor happening on their watch while not appearing to completely annihilate the technology because that would open them to political attacks.

So the balance is struck at a point where nuclear power capital costs are absurdly high.

I suspect that trying to make nuclear reactors accident proof has always been the wrong approach. Instead they should have made it so an accident could always be managed - something along the lines of if something happens drown it in concrete and forget about it, because there are 100,000 more reactors. The only safety cost would come from making a meltdown slow enough or happen in a place no one cares about for it to become a balance sheet problem.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#558

Post by Tade0 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #506
fy20 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to bear in mind about Europe is that to go carbon neutral you need to be able to deal with winters. First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the…

I don't think you should dismiss opposition to wind as mere NIMBYism Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill" I wouldn't want to live anywhere near one myself

I went right up to a 2MW windmill once to test this hypothesis and all I could hear were cars on a road (100km/h speed limit) several hundred metres away.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#559

Post by Luker88 »

I am not sure people understand the implications of this.

First, it's not just nuclear, it's also Natural gas.

Second, lots of nations have incentives for "clean" energy. And now magically, all those incentives apply to nuclear and gas.

It's a money grab from nuclear and gas manufacturers. It's not that the courts were involved for nothing.

Still, we should use more nuclear. If only it was less expensive to build...

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#560

Post by m101 »

jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

That, as well as intermittency being difficult to manage.

Nuclear+gas is the cleanest solution.

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