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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

#771

Post by pzo »

pfdietz wrote: post #706
pzo wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany). And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

Yes, but all that can be taken into account in the analysis, and renewables and storage have become so cheap they're now the superior option. Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. I wonder if some of the reactionary takes trying to promote nuclear are a consequence of that. I think you're average far right type is not going to be comfortable living in a relat…

> Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations.

Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#772

Post by spookie »

Luker88 wrote: post #559

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...

Well, nuclear energy will also serve a dual-purpose for Europe. Especially when discussing France and its nuclear deterrent.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#773

Post by Heliosmaster »

pzo wrote: post #709
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

60% of that energy is lost as waste heat and doesn't need replaced as we decarbonise and electrify. For already developed nations predictions are for electricity to double but energy use to halve at the same time as they electrify end uses.

Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste. I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail

Apart from cities with crazy density, you underestimate how much solar we could put in the city outskirts, and it would be fine. We have already the power lines anyway to bring electricity from power plants that are far from those apartments you mention.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#775

Post by natmaka »

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…

> Car accidents kill 10-15 times more people every year worldwide than Chernobyl did but we don’t give up on cars either. Heck, smoking

Avoiding car accident and not smoking is way, way easier than avoiding most effects of a major nuclear accident (fine dangerous and very durable dust disseminated on a vast geographical zone, thanks to wind and rain).

The total amount of victims of the Chernobyl accident is a matter of debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#776

Post by epistasis »

nec4b wrote: post #671
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's typically called Wright's Law:

https://quickonomics.com/terms/wrights-law/

But it's not a law that applies to all technologies, and it will likely end at some point, but there's at least 1-2 decades of cost decrease left.

There is no law of physics that makes renewables work where there are poor renewable resources, except through transmission, which is usually engineered using several of Maxwell's laws.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#777

Post by dalyons »

Saline9515 wrote: post #664
gpm wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload. Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation…

This is not how nuclear works. Nuclear sets a low price that corresponds to its cost, then lets more expensive marginal energy sources set the final price. Nuclear can by the way be modulated +20%\-20%, which makes it quite flexible in real condition. See https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ... as a proof - nuclear generation in France can go from 25GW to 45GW during a day. New small modular r…

The massive capital costs of the plant have to be paid back in the sale price of energy, that’s what makes it expensive. France’s state built plants don’t have that accounting

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#778

Post by goobatrooba »

xkbarkar wrote: post #732

You know what, let’s turn popular city parks to windmill and solarparks. NY central park for example. Copenhagen has a few beloved open green places we could clean out and replace with solarcells, so does Berlin. Im unscientifically guessing support for nc energy would rise very quickly and wed have a whole bunch of them within a decade. Source, I live near a windmill, they are loud as f*k. I drive by solaparks nearl…

I don't doubt your experience but this is not at all mine. I live by, cycle by, and work by windmills and there is no notable noise from any of them, even the older ones don't make a noise that I'd hear through a wall.

And the argument you make against PV is absurd, no one suggests that that's the way to use PV. Where I live everyone has PV on their roofs to produce mostly for own consumption. There are also many concepts to use it on otherwise unused spaces more at scale (office buildings and train stations for example, but also in combination with greenhouses, as roof for farm areas, ...

Yes you can do both of them badly but nuclear takes a huge space and makes it unusable for generations, and in addition requires vast infrastructure to actually get the energy safely into the grid. I'm a fan of nuclear power, but the arguments you make renewables are neither actual arguments pro nuclear nor do they seem to me to hold much water.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#779

Post by prinny_ »

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 am against nuclear energy because my government is deeply corrupted and give contracts to their friends. They also appoint unqualified people to the highest positions to award them big salaries and the results are catastrophic tragedies with tens of casualties each time. I don’t trust them to operate the railroads, why would I trust them to operate a nuclear facility?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#780

Post by scandox »

gilbetron wrote: post #769
teamonkey wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s. Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... https://en.wik…

And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths. Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.

I'm open to Nuclear if it can be done safely and if we can show we have the cultural maturity to keep it safe...but in the case of Chernobyl at least I think that statistics and other officious BS has been used to greatly downplay the true human cost in death, sickness, displacement and on many other metrics.
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