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Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

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Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#621

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

garbagewoman wrote: post #613
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, Can you tell me more about it because I genuinely don't know how you think Nuclear energy is bad. It's one of the cleanest forms of energy. Is there any particular reason why you think Nuclear is bad in all honesty as its worth having a discussion here? Why do you feel Nuclear Energy is a hazard? I understand if you feel Chernobyl or any event makes it sound dangerous but rather, Please take a look at t…

Nuclear plants are great if they actually happen to get built and every person designing and operating them and storing the waste never makes a single mistake

> every person designing and operating them and storing the waste never makes a single mistake

Even within Chernobyl Disaster, it was a series of mistakes which led to the full scale disaster IIRC so it isn't as if a single mistake

Also Thorium based Nuclear Reactors wouldn't have this issue from what I understand as in the idea of explosions or anything,

> Nuclear plants are great if they actually happen to get built

I get this part but shouldn't this mean that people should be more vocal about support for Nuclear. We are vocal about support for Solar, might as well be vocal about support for Nuclear and Solar both too?

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#623

Post by bilekas »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #584
NicuCalcea wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moldova's coal plant is in Transnistria, a territory occupied by Russia. There are no phasing out plans because we have no control over it.

How is it "Moldova's" then

Territory occupied does not translate to territory owned.

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#624

Post by moominpapa »

zahlman wrote: post #545
moominpapa wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how this refutes my rhetorical question whether China are building more coal power stations. Nothing disingenuous about giving an answer deliberately picked from a source favourable to the carbon scare mongerers. As for obnoxious, I replied in the manner the question was asked.

> Not sure how this refutes my rhetorical question whether China are building more coal power stations It invalidates the rhetorical question by pointing out how it is irrelevant to your original position .

It doesn't invalidate anything, China are still building coal power stations whilst Ireland have none.

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#625

Post by moominpapa »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #501
moominpapa wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with that strategy. Might have worked for suicidal Western Europe, but a snowball's chance for China.

It is happening even in the USA with a federal government dead set on bankrolling coal companies.

I said China

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#626

Post by moominpapa »

iknowstuff wrote: post #617
moominpapa wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What projects is it cheaper for? And why will coal be obsolete in 10 years time?

Because solar keeps getting cheaper, duh. Coal is already obsolete.

Obsolete, and yet China keep building coal power stations

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#627

Post by endominus »

ggm wrote: post #593
renhanxue wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Sweden, the coal plants were exclusively for cogeneration (district heating with electricity as a byproduct) and only used as peaker plants in winter. Some of them still exist but have been converted to burn biofuels instead, mostly woodchips and other byproducts from the forestry industry. For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.

I may be wrong, but I believe the british experience with biofuels is that although you want to believe its surplus byproduct, the cheapest source is often grown to be fuel for a biofuel generator. It's like soy/corn for ethanol, it isn't sufficiently profitable to do this solely with waste product, you get better margins growing to fulfill the contract.

Even if that were the case, wouldn't it still be an essentially net-zero pollution system (disregarding small contributions from transport etc.)?

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#628

Post by tpm »

endominus wrote: post #627
ggm wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be wrong, but I believe the british experience with biofuels is that although you want to believe its surplus byproduct, the cheapest source is often grown to be fuel for a biofuel generator. It's like soy/corn for ethanol, it isn't sufficiently profitable to do this solely with waste product, you get better margins growing to fulfill the contract.

Even if that were the case, wouldn't it still be an essentially net-zero pollution system (disregarding small contributions from transport etc.)?

Depends on the input into growing the biomass. If you are using industrial fertilizers, it's very far from net-zero. Besides that, from my memory there are studies analyzing this and I think they found it's never net-zero.

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#629

Post by sehansen »

troupo wrote: post #407
sehansen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5% per minute is not extremely fast. Simple cycle gas turbine (peaker) plants routinely go 0 to 100% in less than 10 minutes. Nuclear plants can only hit 5% per minute in the 50 to 100% interval (per your own source). And all of this is confused by the way the nuclear industry uses the term "load following". You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuc…

> 5% per minute is not extremely fast. 5% of nameplate capacity . > You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day" Which is clearly invalidated by the very source I provided, and which you then somehow quote back at me. > "th…

Gas turbines do 16% of nameplate capacity per minute without catching a sweat. 5% per minute isn't particularly extreme.

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Let me quote page 10 of your source "In brief, most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design) to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of rated power per minute". Your own source defines "load following" as changing the targeted power level once or twice per day.

Again on page 14 (about how the French currently run their nuclear plants): "The nuclear power plants operating in the load following mode follow a variable load programme with one or two power changes per period of 24 h". Weirdly enough this is contradicted by table 2.1 on page 20 where they do four changes per day.

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> Oh look. What's limited is an actual emergency ramp up of 5% per second or power drops of 20% per minute.

If you look at table 2.4 on the same page it states that it (the Russian VVER-1200) can do the 5% per second/20% per minute emergency change 20 000 times over the lifetime of the reactor. The 10% per minute change can also only be done 20 000 times over the lifetime of the reactor. Table 2.2 on page 21 helpfully calculates that 15 000 cycles is once per day for 40 years, so the VVER-1200 only can do a bit more than one >5% change per day (outside of emergencies) assuming a similar 40 year lifespan. And that was the point of my footnote: that nuclear plants technically can go faster than 5% but not up and down on a minute-by-minute basis.

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#630

Post by SvenL »

huhkerrf wrote: post #609
bramhaag wrote: post #45

https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/ keeps track of coal phase-out commitments. 24 European countries still use coal generators, and 6 have not even planned to phase them out (Serbia, Moldova, Turkey, Poland, Kosovo, Bosnia). Never used coal power: Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway Phased out: 2016: Belgium 2020: Sweden, Austria 2021: Portugal 2024: United…

> 2038: Germany Well, sure is good the environmentalists shut down the German nuclear plants!

Yes it’s good, but it’s bad that conservative parties still blocking modernization of the power grid/renewables.

It would be good if we could modernize our grid to support easier exchange of power from north to south and vise versa.

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