81–90 of 1001 posts
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> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans... And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places. Shoving immigration diatribes randomly into unrelated discussions is really tiresome. Sir, this is a comment thread about nuclear power .
It’s absolutely related. It's constantly being excused by politicians as a solution to labor shortages.
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> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime. This is pretty much the summary of the whole discussion. Building new nuclear is a debate, seeing as renewables are dirt cheap it might or might not make sense to build new nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many y…
> nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online. Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather. I'm a big advo…
It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.
Strictly: France will no longer decommission Belgium's nuclear power plants, as Belgium will buy them. The current owner Engie are majority-owned by the French government. Apparently there also used to be a phaseout policy which is being rescinded: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/belgium-and-czechia-ram... I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out…
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> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans... And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places. Shoving immigration diatribes randomly into unrelated discussions is really tiresome. Sir, this is a comment thread about nuclear power .
It’s absolutely related. It's constantly being excused by politicians as a solution to labor shortages.
To nuclear power?
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> want Belgium to go all-in on renewables I want everyone to go all in on anything that isn't a fossil fuel. The problem with gatekeeping new energy is upgrading the grid to accomodate wind and solar, and waiting for batteries to be delivered, creates a gap that gets filled with fossil fuels. The pragmatic solution to the energy problem is all of the above; joined with climate change, it's everything above but fossil…
Depending on the country's situation, you might have to use fossil fuels during the transition, that's alright. But the transition is non-negotiable at this point.
The EU has north of €1 trillion into new gas infrastructure. That's €1 trillion of commercial interests with a vested interest in negotiating the non-negotiable.
Using fossil fuels for transition is fine, particularly if it's replacing coal with natural gas. But building LNG terminals and installing gas turbines because ding dongs in Dusseldorf got scared of nukes a quarter of a continent away is a great way to raise the continent's energy prices, volatility and carbon continent.
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Any evidence? It has made Europe more reliant on Russian gas, but claiming planning and intent should be backed by evidence.
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Renewables (especially wind) are mostly more variable. I have lived in a country that was reliant on hydroelectricity and the consequences of a drought were severe (literally days of power cuts, water cuts because of the lack of power...). Part of the solution was to build coal and oil power. Surely nuclear is better than coal?
I'm no expert but I believe the problem there is that you can only vary the power output of a nuclear reactor by very little. Essentially, it's either on or off, and is therefore not able to provide the flexibility needed for power outages, since only some of the generators might be offline, not necessarily all of them. Whereas you can vary the output of a coal or gas plant by a lot, simply via using different amount…
On the other hand it doesn't make economic sense to not utilize 100% of nuclear reactor output, because nuclear fuel is cheap.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
This doesn't seem like a terribly great idea, for several reasons. Belgium is nearly bankrupt, with a government deficit that the EU is already giving us grief for, in spite of some of the highest tax rates in the world. That same government hasn't exactly managed any of its semi-public companies particularly well: the national telco is for shit, postal service is nearly bankrupt, railways are mismanaged and underfun…
Nuclear it’s still the densest, most reliable zero-carbon option they have. Keeping the existing plants running (and ideally extending their life properly) is far cheaper and faster than hoping wind + batteries will replace dispatchable power.
At some point reality has to trump ideology.
Belgium seems to be slowly waking up to that. The deficit is real, but blackouts and intermittent electricity production prices are also real — and usually more politically painful.
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> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans (time and costs as much as anything else). > And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places. That seems fundamentally OK? The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources. We can't unlimit resources. There isn't a very nice way to force peo…
Not particularly. We've ridden massive increases in both quality of life and population (at both the per-country and global scales) over the last two centuries.
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> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans (time and costs as much as anything else). In my state the immediate costs to parents for raising a kid up to the age of 18 are around eight median gross incomes with the opportunity costs usually estimated about as high. This means having a kid loses parents around one quarter to one third of their total lifetime income . That's before even considering…
> This means having a kid loses parents around one quarter to one third of their total lifetime income. There's no better investment.