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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

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Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per TWh, nuclear kills fewer people than solar , mostly because roofing is dangerous. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

That's almost certainly just an artifact of old data, and I typed that before realizing your URL has the year 2011 in it. A lot more utility solar has been installed since then. And continual improvements in efficiency spread the mining related deaths over a great many more TWh. Our World in Data covers this and every time they update the stats, solar gains on nuclear. It's currently in the lead but they haven't upda…

Thanks, that's the website I was originally looking for.

I agree it's close, and either way both are orders of magnitudes safer than coal.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#902
post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're expensive because of, arguably, over regulation. The are not inherently expensive, we've just declared them so. The next response will be "all that regulation is needed" but it's arguably that the over regulation is killing people by the unintended consequences of keeping things like coal viable, etc...

The over regulation is there becaused the Soviets have shown us what under regulation, disregard for safety and zealotry can lead to. Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development. Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.

You left out the culture of borderline malfeasance on the utility's part and the failure to aggressively pursue that culture on the regulator's part.

Anyway if the fine print were risk of catastrophic failure in the event of a >9.0 earthquake I think that would be acceptable (and I think a lot of people would agree with me) depending on the geography where it was to be built.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#903
post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root of the German Green party goes back to anti-nuclear and anti-war movements from 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement "Before the 1980s, it was unclear whether the warming effect of increased greenhouse gases was stronger than the cooling effect of airborne particulates in air pollution." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change The original 1980 plan for the Energiewende "Energie-We…

Indeed, anti-nuclear sentiment predates the 1990s. The book _The Power of Nuclear_ by Marco Visscher does a good job tracing the history from the shock of the nuclear bomb in 1945 to the enthusiasm of the 1950s and the increasing scepticism of the 1970s and 1980s.

I recommend book "The Rise of Nuclear Fear" by Spencer R. Weart

"After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy. "

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#904
post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a really bad idea to half-ass this. A nuclear disaster in Europe would likely kill off any positive sentiment the public has for nuclear power. And that’s ignoring all the physical effects of the disaster.

I'm not sure where I proposed to half-ass something?

When the parent said that the reactors may not actually be safe and you said

“Better a potential bad outcome than directly measurable and ongoing harm, though“

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#905
post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense, the reluctance of governments to reduce carbon emissions has been driven by the reluctance for entrenched industries to give up their gravy train. There are many ways for power to be produced with lower carbon emissions, it's absolutely not a binary situation at all. What nuclear is is a wedge issue that can successfully split the opposition to the fossil fuel industry. People should be incredibly wary of t…

I would be very happy if people who oppose nuclear would abstain from supporting the fossil fuel industry. When EU voted on green technology, one side voted for nuclear to be defined as green, while the other side voted for natural gas to be given the green status. Looking at different party platforms here in Sweden (and similar parties in nearby countries), there is a major split between either supporting nuclear or…

> We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform.

Well yeah because the battery storage to do that is still exorbitant, at least for the time being. There are some situational options but nothing universal. Other than waiting for the cost of existing battery tech to fall the most promising option I'm aware of are the prototypes utilizing iron ore for seasonal storage.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#906
post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're expensive because of, arguably, over regulation. The are not inherently expensive, we've just declared them so. The next response will be "all that regulation is needed" but it's arguably that the over regulation is killing people by the unintended consequences of keeping things like coal viable, etc...

The over regulation is there becaused the Soviets have shown us what under regulation, disregard for safety and zealotry can lead to. Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development. Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.

How could japan have made that powerplant tsunami proof? Put the emergency generators on a pontoon or on a inland moumountain?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ivanpah is solar thermal. Nobody is advocating for solar thermal, photovoltaic has decisively won.

mount signal, the largest PV plant in california makes 1,200GW/hrs per year. it would still take ~15 copies of mount signal for a single diablo canyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar my whole point is solar is great, but the insane scale it requires to get reasonable output is really underestimated. you would need solar fields 100sqmi big. probably many of them. solar alone won’t be the future of hum…

100 square miles isn't big, the US is 3.5 million square miles. It's also the size of a nuclear plants emergency planning zone, so sizes are comparable.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#908
post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The over regulation is there becaused the Soviets have shown us what under regulation, disregard for safety and zealotry can lead to. Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development. Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.

How could japan have made that powerplant tsunami proof? Put the emergency generators on a pontoon or on a inland moumountain?

The same way anyone else avoids flooding: by building it on slightly higher ground.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#909

Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind, and opposition to nuclear from environmentalist orgs should be viewed as a massive historical mistake as it set us back decades in moving the needle on carbon emissions. The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.

"carbon emissions" LOL. Just lookup what's happening In Tuapse, and in other war zones. And we are penalising some poor bugger burning wood to warm his house at winter ...

You are just looking at current event (a massive refinery and oil storage fire) and not the longer term picture. By that petrochemical complex burning down (arguably in quite a dirty manner) much more oil than has burned will not move through it, contributicontributing to CO2 emissions, pollution and war funding.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#910
post #870
post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe in a climate crisis and are serious about it you probably want to run the numbers on different options and policies to see what works rather than saying yay this boo that. Running numbers on producing energy in say 15 years time which is roughly how long it takes to approve and build nuclear, and comparing it with projected solar+wind+battery costs for 15 years hence you tend to come with much better f…

We can both build Nuclear that is safe and also build it faster. Its a matter of political will and reasonable regulation. Nations looking on the 100 year horizon would build nuclear and they would be newer and safer nuclear as time goes on. The next generation of reactors are safer and promise to be cheaper to build but the last of the GEN4 nuclear still are safe especially when we actually pay to have nuclear regul…

I don’t see why you would look at nuclear at all on a 100 year horizon. At that timescales you gotta look at the fundamentals:

1. We’ve got a free fusion reactor in the sky and collecting and storing that energy is fundamentally cheap. Especially in a long term perspective when the materials needed to store the energy will be mostly recycled and practically free.

2. We’ve got a free fission reactor under our feet. Drilling deep enough expensive now but there’s no reason it needs to be. Se Quaise for progress in that area.

3. In a 50 year timeframe we don’t have any spare capacity to add more global warming from the thermal forcing of thermal power plants. Yeah you heard me right, thermal power plants contribute directly to global warming, and the effect is surprisingly significant. The good news is the effect disappears rapidly when you shut them down, unlike greenhouse gases. And we should certainly never shut down any nuclear power plants until we’ve eliminated greenhouse gas emissions. But at the same time, while we have an insane amount of greenhouse gases lingering in the atmosphere we can’t afford adding global warming from thousands of new nuclear reactors… like some nuclear proponents would have us do.

A 100 years from now, if we’ve brought greenhouse gases down again, that’s when we can start considering adding significantly more nuclear power. Though I doubt there will be any interest. Makes sense for space travel though.

I’m pro nuclear despite all that. But more from an R&D perspective.

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