Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, everyone is brainwashed. Sure. We see today how non brainwashed is Germany that not only is a bad polluter but plans gas expansion to firm renewables. Nuclear requires far less overcapacity and transmission. You can cycle maintenance schedules and if country's demand is smaller, you build smaller units like Candu to make this rotation.
Nuclear generates the same power when demand is minimum as when its maximum. Take Germany for example. It requires a peak of 45GW of power and a trough of 30GW. That means that you need 45GW running 24/7, with 10% overcapacity for maintenence, so 50GW running 247, Nuclear's lack of dispatchability means it needs to generate 50GW to produce 35GW-days, meaning the cost per MWh is more like $150 per MWh rather than $30M…
Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
991–1000 of 1001 posts
Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
#992Earlier quoted context omitted.
no, this is not an "actual" problem. It is a problem in the sense that it happens, but not at a meaningful enough scale. The bats and birds is an issue that the oil and gas industry regularly pushes because it sounds concerning, but really isn't.
Are you aware that tens of thousands of endangered bats are killed every year just in Germany (by wind turbines)? It is an actual problem for that species. Are you aware that wind turbines have detection systems for bird migrations and stop to avoid killing too many birds? If it was not an "actual problem", why would they spend money in actual solutions?
Are you aware of the context of this bat killing "problem"? it is almost entirely a problem for older, unregulated wind farms in Germany. The "problem" has a simple solution, which has been proven to work - stopping wind turbines when bats are known to be moving, for a total of about twenty minutes per day.
Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
#993Earlier quoted context omitted.
every single one of Ember's analyses are based on historical situations. That is certainly useful, and serves to demonstrate an important point - that wind and solar make economic sense. There is not a single analysis out there that tackles the twin problems of meeting growing electricity demand with a power source that depends on an uncertain and changing climate. You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no id…
> You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no idea whether occasional is once a season or once a decade. Yes, these are things we know with a high degree of statistical confidence. Many locations have hundreds of years of hourly weather records. We know that Europe has never had an hour where there wasn't significant sun or significant wind somewhere on the continent any hour in the past 30+ years. The same can…
What use is hundreds of hours of weather records when the climate is changing in ways we do not yet understand?
"somewhere" on the continent being windy is useless unless we have the transmission capacity to move that much power across thousands of kilometres. See also what just happened in australia last week - nearly 40% of the country stuck with very low wind speeds for nearly a week. What then?
Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
#994Earlier quoted context omitted.
china has confirmed building new coal plants until at least 2030.
And it's still building nuclear plants a decade after it decided to concentrate on solar + coal. Plans have lead times and inertia, and China doesn't want to put all of it's eggs in one basket. They'll keep building coal and nuclear at a low rate for a long time to ensure they never lose the core knowledge on how to build them so they're always available as an option.
Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
#995Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is china building new coal plants or not? Do you want to hazard a guess as to why? The answer is because we still do not know how to supply expanding electricity demand with wind, solar and batteries. The side of the story that people on this website love to bring up is the fact that China happens to be the largest builder of solar and wind, which is true, but the increased electricity demand is being met via coal, f…
The increased demand is absolutely and categorically not being met by coal. Look it up, chinas total coal emissions have declined the last few years, despite overall demand growth. It’s being entirely met by renewables.
Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
#996Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you aware that tens of thousands of endangered bats are killed every year just in Germany (by wind turbines)? It is an actual problem for that species. Are you aware that wind turbines have detection systems for bird migrations and stop to avoid killing too many birds? If it was not an "actual problem", why would they spend money in actual solutions?
yes, i am. Are you aware of the context of this bat killing "problem"? it is almost entirely a problem for older, unregulated wind farms in Germany. The "problem" has a simple solution, which has been proven to work - stopping wind turbines when bats are known to be moving, for a total of about twenty minutes per day.
Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
#997Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers. Note though that those limits exist just like the emission limits for WiFi: it was a sane number when it was decided. It's not clear at all that raising the temperature a little more will "kill all life in the rivers". It would probably deserve some research.
No, it isn't a made-up number. We know pretty well when do fishes die en masse , as we have seen it in periods of extreme heat before. The research has been done and is how the limits have been defined.
Or did we choose an arbitrary number that is lower than that limit, with some arbitrary margin?
Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
#998Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have been around a bit longer don't you think? How many nuclear actually killed is unknown because it's not as easy as: something happens, people drown. It's more like: something happens, a few die fast, the rest dies earlier, their children live shorter or have disabilities, their children also, and so on. Meanwhile collecting waste which will do the same for later generations who might not remember what nuclea…
> How many nuclear actually killed is unknown because it's not as easy as: something happens, people drown. Did you even bother to read about how we estimate the casualties of nuclear incidents? It really sounds like you didn't, and just shared your first thought about it not being trivial. > They have been around a bit longer don't you think? How in the world does that make them less risky? If a dam collapses, it's…
The numbers are highly speculative and are either those you get pushed in your face by the nuclear astroturf (killed on site) or are scientific and the range is very wide since it's so hard to calculate. It's cancer and it happened in the Soviet Era.
Your whole comment didn't add anything to the discussion. What's your point?
Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
#999Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also use the same money to flood many of those empty bunkers we have with water and pump it up and down indefinitely, with no radioactive waste to get rid of and no dependency what so ever on other countries. Solar panels on each square cm of roofs together with agrovoltaics and solar on every farm and a few more of those 2TWh hydro storage plants we have, and we are energy independent and can service a large…
No you can't. Hydro is already mostly tapped with few exceptions. Solar requires more materials per kwh even compared to nuclear. But even if it didn't - since hydro potential isn't sufficient - gas is required for firming. This was also mentioned by axpo
Solar doesn’t require more materials per kWh. LCOE of solar is order of magnitude lower than Nuclear.
And we do have more mountains that we can build out.
Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
#1000Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just the opposite. It's literally not in the EU. It's literally in Europe but not in the EU.
I like that you ignore that “in” means “inside” in one sentence and then use that exact meaning of the word in the following sentence