691–700 of 712 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2038: Germany Well, sure is good the environmentalists shut down the German nuclear plants!
> Well, sure is good the environmentalists shut down the German nuclear plants! Shutting down the nukes is inversely proportional to homeopathy popularity in Germany. That says it all
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the low quality comments that ruin everything. China connected 4 solar panels per SECOND last year. China is also has 265x the population and has growing energy demands. They build much less coal than they phase out. All you can muster is a "But uh china is doing something so you are irrelevant" which is neither helpful nor correct. You are supporting the status quo and support not changing a damn thing.
China has not had a 3rd party verified emission report published in over 3 years. You can only go based on their word and very low quality articles reporting all this success. Every year I hear their emission are peaking and every time the emission report comes out it turns out they've increased. People say "oh China reduced emissions by 1% this year" but it turns out they only reduced the rate of emission growth by…
United States: per capita about 3x the global average CO2
Projections for China is that these numbers will go down massively over the next 10 years. How is that going for the US for "lowest environmental standards in the 1st world"? Please get over your 20 year old views of china. They get their act together while the US shits the bed.
We can talk about 50% new car registrations are EVs in china and how the US is doing?
Or how ~60% of all renewable capacity added globally by 2030 will be in China? Or how it is already at 50%?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chernobyl's political nonsense was mostly down to the USSR wanting to deny that anything had, or possibly could, go wrong; if anything, the exclusion zone is the opposite of the western nonsense about nuclear power. It's our unique freedom-themed nonsense, not the Soviet dictatorial-nonsense, which means we have radiation standards strict enough that it's not possible to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant with…
Nuclear plans have objectively made power generation save and clean. When they were built in the 1960-1990s the were objectively the best and cleanest energy that saved a gigantic amount of lives. The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm. An…
My parents who lived in central Europe during Chernobyl hate nuclear power, while believing lots of nonsense that was in the news back then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chernobyl's political nonsense was mostly down to the USSR wanting to deny that anything had, or possibly could, go wrong; if anything, the exclusion zone is the opposite of the western nonsense about nuclear power. It's our unique freedom-themed nonsense, not the Soviet dictatorial-nonsense, which means we have radiation standards strict enough that it's not possible to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant with…
Nuclear plans have objectively made power generation save and clean. When they were built in the 1960-1990s the were objectively the best and cleanest energy that saved a gigantic amount of lives. The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm. An…
Yes indeed. But that wasn't why they were built*, and that safety comes with an enormous cost. Ironically not including the exclusion zone, even with that included the amortised cost is quite small, but rather all the things that Chernobyl didn't have but should've plus all the international inspections and regulations to make sure nobody's secretly got a weapons program, either deliberately or via organised crime.
* Even just plain simple diversity of energy supply is good, as per another comment I made on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47309196
> The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samosely
That's a tiny sample size, consisting of people who are in poverty (and already mostly elderly) and can therefore be expected to have unusual health outcomes. Which could be higher or lower cancer rates, depending on what else is going on. Like, cancer won't get you if you pickle your liver too hard first with moonshine.
Though yes, the linear relationship between radiation and harm is known to be an oversimplification.
> Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context.
Radioisotopes. They're really useful for a lot of stuff, but the options for making them are mostly "fission plant" or "particle accelerator". This includes but is not limited to weapons.
> In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.
The cheapest are cheap, but the average and the trend line says they're mostly now a worse option than PV+batteries. Your milage, as the saying goes, may vary, so I wouldn't be even mildly surprised if e.g. Alaska says "hydro and nuclear" given this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_electricity_genera...
> In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.
Indeed. It was terrible for the environment and general population health that we didn't have a huge roll-out of nuclear power up until the 2010s when renewables got interesting.
But unfortunately, although even the full cost (both monetary and to lives lost) of Chernobyl would, if amortised over all reactors, be much smaller than for fossil plants, the scale of that accident would have been an existential threat to many smaller nations. Arguably, it was existential damage to the USSR, even. People don't want to be subjected to someone else's game of Russian Roulette, not even when the overall odds of survival go up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gas is kinda easier to replace though. As you can burn other Gases instead of Natural Gases with a few modifications to the Powerplant.
Natural Gas is such a weird PR term coined by fossil industry. I think the term "fossil gas" is much clearer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear plans have objectively made power generation save and clean. When they were built in the 1960-1990s the were objectively the best and cleanest energy that saved a gigantic amount of lives. The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm. An…
What I didn't mention, in terms of propaganda, the anti-nuclear people are way ahead of any pro-nuclear propaganda. Its not even remotely close. The anti nuclear-weapons movement an environmental movement from the 1970s spread myths that are still repeated an often with emotional attachment. My parents who lived in central Europe during Chernobyl hate nuclear power, while believing lots of nonsense that was in the ne…
I have no idea if that's true, but it sounds very plausible.
However, if it was true, it would make it very much easier for governments to justify big spends on pro-nuclear propaganda. I mean, the USA managed to make test-detonations into a tourism opportunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Las_Vegas#Atomic_te...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not cost competitive with solar+batteries in many locales (less so the closer to the poles), and no learning curve, if anything a negative learning curve, nuclear never was more expensive than new nuclear. And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues.
The cost competitiveness and societal issues make sense (though I suspect some of the cost is being externalized in terms of materials extraction and manufacturing). I don’t understand what you mean by “no learning curve”. Do you mean that the learning curve is particularly steep for plant operators?
We make too few nuclear power plants for them to have a noticeable learning curve, and recently each subsequent one ends up more expensive than the latest, notably because of safety regulation. Korea and I think China had the best success in that regard (and France in the 80s) by being able to make real series, but you don't really see those now except maybe China.
More here: https://ourworldindata.org/learning-curve
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how cheap one would have to make electricity to make up for CA's silly regulatory environment and confiscatory taxes. Places like California, which is right up there w/ Tunisia as the best-case scenario for solar, will have so much surplus electricity that USX and Tata are rushing to build steel mills there to take advantage. Any day now, for sure.
That’s called moving the goalposts. No one ever claimed CA would have “so much surplus electricity that USX and Tata are rushing to build steel mills”. Your “concern” was that there is no non-fantasy means to deal with transient output of solar or other renewables, I showed you how that is being implemented in the real world as we speak to deal with CA’s notorious peak evening load without blackouts. And it will only…
Again-I have been hearing for 25 years about the infinite potential of solar energy in CA-and yet, even now, you need to play games as to when the cheapest time of day it is to charge your car from your residential address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's huge greenwashing to claim to not have coal power, but just import it when needed. What practical difference is that to having coal power domestically? That's just saying you recycle all plastic, only to send it to the third world to dump in rivers. So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts. I rely on being able to take a breath e…
> So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts. The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible. But it's not the case that there would be blackouts, since the price mechanism is used to match production, demand and return on production investments. So policy decisions to ramp down fossil generation result in investment decisio…
This is the point I'm making. It's not a counter point, it's exactly the point I'm making. Sweden "has" a bunch of coal plants, just located in Germany and Poland. This allows Sweden to skip planning for exactly what renewable is bad at.
Otherwise this is like saying "antibiotics are completely unnecessary because 99.99% of the time you don't need them, and when I do need them I just get them from a pharmacy". Right… so you do need and rely on them.
But Sweden also has a geographic electricity transportation problem. Electricity generation exists where (most) consumers are not. And this is also due to the MUCH more limited flexibility of renewables, especially hydro. Could easily be cheaper to get coal power in the south instead of hydro "shipped" from way up north. Hell, sometimes electricity in the north has a negative price.
Sweden is a good local example of why we also can't just power all of Europe from some solar panels in Sahara. Except instead it's hydro way up north.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes the share of electricity produced by coal plants is going down: https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/ So it appears they’re building more renewable capacity than coal capacity.
Your graph shows only increasing emissions from coal. by the way also it shows increasing CO2 emissions from solar and wind. it doesn't make any sense
