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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

#671

Post by nec4b »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #567
epistasis wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear. For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal. There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personall…

Yes, this is the real answer. Nuclear, which is currently dropping as a percentage of global electricity demand and is now under 10% needs a miracle to reverse that and maybe reach 15% if everything goes well for it. Meanwhile renewables are surging and every relevant expert suggests they'll dominate the future. https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-is-gettin... The graph without the relatively flat hydr…

Would point to the law of economics which says only renewables can get cheaper with investments? And which law of physics makes renewables work in places, which have little wind and solar?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#672

Post by oneshtein »

close04 wrote: post #657
oneshtein wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power plants require international laws and international cooperation for insurance, because one serious incident, such as Chornobyl, can wipe a continent. In Ukraine, profits from all nuclear plants will cover damages, caused by Chornobyl, in 1000-5000 years IF nothing more will happen to Chornobyl or other an other nuclear power plant in those years, which is unlikely.

We can make nuclear safe (enough) but after one big incident nobody wanted the political career suicide to push for this. So we are stuck with criticizing stone-age level nuclear power because we never took it further. The West never stopped doing something just because the USSR didn’t do it properly. If we did the same with commercial air travel after the first disasters we’d still cross the oceans in boats. Car acc…

You arguments boils down to «it's OK to wipe a continent once in a while, because nuclear energy is the safest energy option per megawatt produced».

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#673

Post by [deleted] »

LunaSea wrote: post #660
T-A wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A methane molecule is one carbon atom bound to four hydrogen atoms. More than half of the energy released by burning it (53% according to [1]) comes from oxidizing the hydrogen to water. So it's roughly half as bad as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and does not have the additional problems of sulfur (acid rain) and soot. [1] https://people.wou.edu/~courtna/GS361/Energy_From_Fossil_Fue...

So not climate friendly.

[deleted]

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#674

Post by Kon5ole »

MostlyStable wrote: post #493
Kon5ole wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.

A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions. We can imagine reasonable numbers of accidents and still be sure that it would be dramatically safer than fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change. And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, mos…

>A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions

This is not true. You are using the lawyers definition of damage from Chernobyl, but the doctor's definition for fossil fuels. Chernobyl was much worse than you believe, but I don't expect to change your mind on that point here.

But why are you arguing as if it's either nuclear power or global warming?

China has added the equivalent of 25 nuclear power plants worth of solar generation yearly for the past couple of years. Not even China is able to build nuclear plants faster than in 5-6 years or so - it takes too many workers, too much resources. It's too little and too slow to make a difference.

Efen if you believe it is safe, Nuclear is clearly a roadblock, or a detour. We should instead build storage and solar, which can add orders of magnitude more power in shorter time.

(But even then we'll have to deal with global warming).

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#675

Post by mpweiher »

kla-s wrote: post #669
mpweiher wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: The US achieved more for the climate with fracking gas than Germany did with its "Energiewende".

Do you care to explain more, id be interested :)

In 2005, both the US and Germany had specific emissions of around 600g CO₂/kWh.

In 2015, due mostly to fracking gas, the US was down to around 450g CO₂/kWh.

Germany, with its Energiewende, was at around 560g CO₂/kWh.

Because, of course, the Energiewende was not about climate change. It was about shutting down climate-friendly (CO₂ free) nuclear plants.

Both could have done better. France is currently at something like 32g CO₂/kWh and has been at roughly that level for decades.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#677

Post by jeroenhd »

kpmcc wrote: post #585
m101 wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear + gas is the climate friendly solution.

What is climate friendly about natural gas?

It's cleaner than coal and oil. If you upgrade a coal plant to a gas plant, that's a step forward against climate change.

Yes, we'd be much better off with wind farms, solar plants, and nuclear reactors, but a step forward is a step forward.

Countries like Poland, running mostly on coal, would get cleaner air and contribute less to global warming if they were to upgrade their power plants to anything non-coal.

Replace them with nuclear generators and they'd also significantly reduce the amount of radiation people would be exposed to.

It's not that gas is that good, it's more that coal is that bad.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#679

Post by 7952 »

theptip wrote: post #368
7952 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.

True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.

And that might work if there is a linear relationship between apparently unnecessary engineering work and deaths. My argument is that such a relationship does not exist, or is not something we can model.

As this is HN I assume you have some understanding of software/IT etc. Do you think a project manager on a massive software project could do the same with security flaws? Reduce the engineering effort by some percentage and get a predictable increase in security issues? And lets say that this project has massive amounts of sunk costs, is hugely important for the livelihood of everyone involved and also classified and closed source. All you have to do to reduce costs is increase data breaches from one to three per year. Easy. But in a complex human-technical system leadership do not have that kind of control authority.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#680

Post by jeroenhd »

AndyPa32 wrote: post #587
m101 wrote: post #561

I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.

I disagree with cheapest. If you factor in twenty years build time and nuclear waste disposal, the whole thing is not economically viable. Then there's a problem with nuclear fuel. The sources are mostly countries you don't want to depend on. You are of course right with your assessment that nuclear is green, safe and eco-friendly. That's a hard one to swallow for a lot of eco activists.

Until we solve the long-term energy storage problem that renewable sources have, we're going to need a backup of some sort. Something you can turn up late at night in the middle of winter.

So far the cleanest solution we've come up with is gas plants, but gas plants made Europe extremely dependent on Russia. The alternatives are oppressive regimes or the US, which has been starting trade wars seemingly out of boredom.

Nuclear fuel, on the other hand, is exported not only by Kazachstan, but also Canada and Australia. In terms of "countries you don't want to depend on", I'd rather have Canada than Qatar.

I'm not sure if the economics still work out if you factor in the ineffective, half-assed Russian sanctions that have Europe fund Russia's war economy. The only alternative is probably coal, but only if you don't hold coal to the same standards in terms of waste disposal and nuclear exposure of the public as nuclear plants.

Nuclear isn't cheap, in part because it's become a niche market only some countries still participate in, but the politics and large-scale economics aren't as bad as the anti-nuclear crowd make them seem. They'd probably be bad for America, because the mighty oil industry stands to lose money and they'd need to import their fuel, but for countries already importing their fuel the balance is completely different.

Infuriatingly, the crowd that wants to do something about global warming also seems to think every nuclear reactor is going full Chernobyl within the decade. All of the parties I even consider voting for are staunch anti-nuclear activists for no documented reason other than "we don't like it".

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