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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

#941

Post by [deleted] »

nilslindemann wrote: post #853
adastra22 wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate. 3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.

See my brown bear vs car comparison above/below. Also, solar causes less deaths, according to your counting method. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

[deleted]

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#942

Post by mcv »

Ruling nuclear as green is something I can understand (though I still vastly prefer solar), but I've read elsewhere that natural gas has also been ruled green, and that just makes no sense.

Personally I see gas and nuclear as transition technologies until we can go fully renewable, and I can tolerate gas staying around for a bit longer as long as we phase our coal and oil as soon as possible, but that doesn't make it green. Gas is still a CO2 producing fossil fuel.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#943

Post by seec »

mpweiher wrote: post #852
scandox wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It turns you are right that there was a ton of BS around the Chernobyl accident...but going in the other direction. Every decade, the WHO publishes a report on the health effects of Chernobyl. Every decade, they had to reduce the projections for casualties. By an order of magnitude. When it happened, we didn't know better. Now we do.

This. People have phantasm about Chernobyl that are straight out of their imagination, in a fear driven narrative that is very far from the reality. When you look into it, you find that deaths directly linked to the meltdown are contained to people on site and first responders. Even the army of cleaners suffer more from random life risk (alcohol, smoking, cardiovascular diseases, etc...) than anything related to nuclear meltdown induced health issues.

But people are ideologically driven against it, in a quasi-religious way (worse than actual soft religion followers actually). There is no way to properly argue with those people, just like flat earthers, so we get the current sentiment on nuclear.

At least it's changing and those people will go the way of the dinosaurs, I hope.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#944

Post by seec »

teamonkey wrote: post #801
gilbetron wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that’s my point. They are scary - memorably so - in a way that very few other forms of power generation are. The closest equivalent I can think of is a major hydroelectric dam breaking. Also remember that at each major incident, despite the failures that led to it, people fought tirelessly, in several cases sacrificing themselves, to reduce the scope of the disaster. Each of them could have potentially been wors…

Yes that's the point. Dam failure is much worse and actually the largest event of fatalities related to power generation was a dam breaking. Yet people are not against dams at all, even though they are not much better in terms of risks.

It's entirely irrational just like people who are scared of flying.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#945

Post by seec »

arcane23 wrote: post #825
gilbetron wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>50 direct fatalities This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives. Just saying that only 50 p…

Not many unlike what you want to believe. And there is no mechanism to directly link them to the nuclear meltdown. Since they are suspiciously clustered in specific places, it is more likely that there are other environmental and genetic problems that have more influence than the result of secondary radiation.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#946

Post by makeitdouble »

tiberius_p wrote: post #920
makeitdouble wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in places where they can be damaged by natural disasters. And places where they can be damaged by human actions as well. That leaves so many places to build reactors, right ?

I think human actions are easier to predict and prevent than natural disasters. Earthquakes are the biggest deal breakers.

Current Ukraine would beg to differ.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#947

Post by latentsea »

ackfoobar wrote: post #927
zekrioca wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever heard of batteries?

Have you done the math of how insufficient battery tech is, if we are to go 100% renewable? I'm so tired of renewable proponents just use the thought terminating cliche "BATTERIES!" when intermittency is brought up.

Even if you can't get to 100%, it would still make sense to strive for as large a % of renewables as you could achieve. So, that's going to involve batteries necessarily.

For context I work at a company in Japan working on this problem. The entire reason the company exists is Japan's energy policy in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Batteries are severely underutilized in Japan at this point in time, so we can at least vastly improve on where we are.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#948

Post by UltraSane »

kolinko wrote: post #637
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.

So far it was either the cheapest or the safest. Also, solar is now both cheaper and safer.

Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#949

Post by UltraSane »

zekrioca wrote: post #849
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...

Have you ever heard of batteries?

Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#950

Post by arcane23 »

mpweiher wrote: post #844
arcane23 wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>50 direct fatalities This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives. Just saying that only 50 p…

It's actually not, as it correctly states 50 direct fatalities. What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities. The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude. One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the ev…

I will use the "rabid" replies I got as evidence towards interests of minimizing the scare for nuclear because there's many other interests behind it and I doubt it would get a fair shake. A lot of political and economic interests are known to muddy the truth.

And this isn't the first time this happened, had a few debates before and out of nowhere quite a few people insist going as hard as possible, to no end, to dispel "misinformation", like that is what normal people do. I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for denying the pain and suffering of so many people "for a greater purpose".

>Radiophobia

I do not have this issue, I am not scared of a bit higher radiation, I understand the body can deal with quite a lot (compared to normal background).

I am scared of what could happen when humans and their politics get involved. There's more dangers than proper implementation, there can also be sabotage fears, as recent events have shown. I really don't understand why you'd accuse me of such a thing unless you're trying to smear me, which again...makes your rabid responses rather suspicious.

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