We need a massive buildout of wind and solar and we need it now. There are no technological problems left, we just need to spend the money. The 20k coal jobs in Germany would pale against the workforce needed for a rapid switch to renewables.
I wish there was a lot more urgency in responses, we already had 1 year of the IPCC's 12.
Edit: Typo
Do you really think that people in these countries _love_ burning coal? Does this attitude help solve the problem?
Poland does not have nuclear power plants, therefore it has a bigger problem with the reduction of CO2 emissions than other countries. In addition, Poland has no conditions to produce energy from wind and solar in the winter. Sometimes when I read such comments, I would like Poland to present a plan to buy nuclear power technology from Russia (RBMK-1000 reactors) and to put it along the western border, 50 km from Berlin.
PS. Please take into account that in Poland there was no industrial revolution and that is why over the last 150 years Western countries have emitted much more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Still, an AP1000 would be preferable.
More difficult it may be, but no excuse for dragging feet or voting against EU action. Action that's far too little and too vague anyway. If it's any consolation I am equally critical of my own country's dire lack of adequate progress.
This is false: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/be... and problems include disposal, birds, and the intermittent nature of renewables.
Germany has been spending a lot of money and if it had spent equivalently on nuclear it would likely have near-zero power emissions already; a brief note on that: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/01/bi...
Europe has the tools to go down towards zero CO2 emissions for power plants but, except for France, has not widely pursued nuclear.
None of those counter points points really hold up under scrutiny:
1) Renewable power _is_ clean. It is also becoming baseload and dispatachable with the addition of batteries. Battery price is on a reducing price curve similar to solar experienced, during which we heard the following progression of arguments: It's too expensive for anything, it's too expensive to matter, it's too expensive for most regions, it's not a solution for everything, ok it's the cheapest source of power but we'll still need natural gas because... batteries are too expensive for anything! 2) Panel disposal is a TINY problem compared to climate change. Panel disposal is also TINY compared to environmental damage of other energy sources.
Nuclear would have been nice, but it's probably too late for that now, not worth the downsides, and also we don't need it (see battery price curve).
[1] An interesting twitter thread with an analysis of how the systems adapt depending on the conditions (in French sorry) : https://twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808658432
*If you ignore the climate cost and unreliability of the aging plants; coal power (both brown and black) in Australia is quite unreliable as the plants are super old and there has been no investment in power infrastructure due to policy uncertainty due to infantile governments. So on hot days, when demand is higher, coal plants break down due to the greater heat. At least you can predict when you'll have wind and solar power available; here coal power is more temperamental.
The steam generators, turbine, electric generators, condenser and cooling systems are all more or less the same as they would be in an equivalent coal plant. While I'm sure these things have significant lead times they are essentially off the shelf parts.
The secondary containment structure doesn't seem any harder to build than say a suspension bridge.
The only real challenge the seems to be the primary containment structure and potentially other elements of the primary heating loop. I heard it mentioned that possibly only Japan had the ability to make these at the moment.
But you don't need anything particularly difficult to build for construction to take forever. Look at Stutgart 21, or Berlin's airport.
The red tape.
Why don't we build the generators that can be built in a reasonable time frame, where there's the actual political will to build them. If and when there is political will for nuclear, we can see where we are, because I would guess by that point wind and solar turn out to be good enough anyway.
Ceteris paribus - everything else left unchanged - yes, it might make sense to build more nuclear. But what we really need is to build more renewables and to simultaneously scale down our energy use. To put it bluntly our energy using industry has to take a small hit.
This is one of the things even I as a leftist say the market can solve nicely. Electricity can get more expensive at night or when the wind doesn't blow. If it becomes uneconomical to do a certain business, then we should stop doing it, or only do it at certain times.
To put it differently, industry works like a buffered solution in chemistry. Put in more acid, and the buffering prevents the PH value from dropping. Shut down power plants, and the market will largely absorb the effect. Things will become marginally more expensive, or production will move to other regions where it makes more sense, but we will not have blackouts like some people fear.
This is why the Green parties in a lot of countries need to be politically opposed. They attract people who care less about the environment than about changing our way of life.
Case in point: in Antwerp they're about to spend a cool billion to put a roof on the ring road, to put some plant pots and bicycle paths there.
Conservatives disagree that today's profit is inconsistent with a livable tomorrow.
You can attribute whatever motivations you like to conservatives, but if you claim they don't want a bright future you are wrong. Just because you don't agree with them doesn't mean they are evil or stupid. At absolute worst they have different priorities for what they think a bright future looks like. They are just as good at planning ahead as progressives, and stereotypically more organised albeit less passionate about achieving their goals.
The conservative bright future seems to be "My family will have enough money to buy safety and comfort in whatever dystopia global warming creates".
If you'd like to know the realistic reason, it's because of past experience. This [1] was published back in 1989. "The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said [director of UN Environmental Program] Brown." 30 years from the date of that article's publication is 6 days from now. Temperatures have increased 0.52 [2] degrees since then. He may have meant fahrenheit since he was the director in New York and so was likely speaking with an American demographic in mind. But even then that's still only about 0.9 degrees - still under his "most conservative scientific estimate." The article was full of plenty of other alarming hyperbole which also turned out to be completely false.
The problem is that that article is not an outlier. We've now had several decades of alarming climate predictions. The reason this timing is relevant is because we've now reached the point to where we go back to these predictions and see how they have played out. And in general the quality of predictions has been quite poor. Of course the response here is that 'well climate science is hard, and they're at least getting the general trend right - up.' The problem with this is that this general trend goes back long before even the industrial revolution. And so predicting heating to continue is about as meaningful as me predicting that in 30 years the stock market will be higher than it is today, which it almost certainly will be. What really matters are the specifics.
So this drives people into two groups. People that think that the mistakes of times past are something we've overcome and the predictions of today are now meaningful. The other group tend to think that the past 30 years of predictions will be representative of the next 30 years of predictions. People can view similar data and come to radically different conclusions. And only to preempt the typical mass-level ad-hominem that generally mentions here I'd mention individuals such as Richard Linzen [3]: MIT atmospheric physicist, member of the National Academies of Sciences, Fellow of American Geophysical Union, fellow of American Meteorological Society, lead author on the IPCC's 2001 climate report, etc. He also falls into the latter group. I would emphasize that this is not an appeal to authority (which I think is generally a very foolish idea), but rather a preempting of the exact same.
[1] - https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
[2] - https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
The models we have are wrong. There is no doubt about it. But there is very little evidence that they're wrong in the direction where we can just do business as usual and still live a comfortable live in fifty years.
ALL the people with significant power are wealthy.
I'm not downplaying the importance of the poor voting in elections, but that happens twice a year (primaries and general election) and the choice the poor get is which wealthy person gets the power, or in rarer cases, which policy proposed by wealthy people is enacted. The rest of the year, the wealthy people make all the decisions. Certainly which wealthy person is in power makes a difference, but they're still all wealthy people.
And to be clear, no major party is immune to this. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Paul--no supposed heroes of change are poor or even middle class.
> So this drives people into two groups. People that think that the mistakes of times past are something we've overcome and the predictions of today are now meaningful. The other group tend to think that the past 30 years of predictions will be representative of the next 30 years of predictions.
I'm not in either group. I don't believe we've overcome the mistakes of the past. I don't believe we even know what all of those mistakes are, so we can't possibly have overcome them all. What I do believe is that the only effective mechanism we have of predicting the future is science, and that science is a slow process that often gets things wrong, but slowly gets less wrong as it progresses. An alternate theory which just decides to let markets decide the truth isn't even wrong--it's a stopped clock, which is sometimes right but never useful. Science hasn't been right and it may continue to be wrong, but at least it's trying to find the truth via a proven method. Letting markets decide isn't even trying to find the truth.
On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not? Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely.
That's fair--I think all I'd like to agree on here is that it's not useful to pretend that parties aren't majority wealthy when you weight for actual power rather than simply counting people.
One subtlety in my initial statement that I didn't really explain was that it's not necessary to be wealthy in order to believe that your family will be wealthy in the future.
> Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common.
This points to another issue, which is that "liberal" and "conservative" are really problematic groupings of ideas. Abortion has nothing to do with climate change, but it's usually impossible to vote on one without taking a stance on the other.
> On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not?
I don't know if I would say I "trust" climatologists, but I believe that they are presenting the best information we have, and I believe that we should always operate on the best information we have, rather than simply doing what's profitable.
> Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely.
To be clear, I don't think that (most) conservatives are stupid or malicious, and I think that too often liberals have done liberal ideologies a great disservice by making that assumption.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...
Edit: Why the downvotes without a counterpoint?
And I'm actually pronuclear.
Personally, I'm on board with getting rid of nuclear and fossil energy sources both, which appears technologically feasible to me (offshore windparks help with base load, flywheels can get you through the day and power-2-gas through the winter).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
Yes, Chernobyl happened, but even the worst nuclear accident in the history of mankind is 200 people. Fukushima was 2 or 3? The Banqiao dam was over a hundred THOUSAND dead.
[1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/151008-chernobyl...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/03/the-wild-boars-of-...
The direct cause is that there are no people around, not that a nuclear disaster happened. The nuclear disaster caused the people to leave, which makes the disaster the indirect cause of nature thriving.
It’s not as though the increase in background radiation made nature thrive. The lack of people did that.
I’m all in favor of nature reserves, but we do not need nuclear disasters to create them and I don’t think we should let luck pick around which nuclear plant we want a nature reserve. We should put our nature reserves wherever we damn well please.
(I’m honestly questioning whether you actually read the article you linked. I will admit, I also didn’t before I wrote the comment. I was surprised to find that it makes essentially the same argument I’m using, down to using the same exact words.)
1) increase of background radiation is not harmful to "nature" (usually defined as "all living things, arbitrarily excluding humans"), or at least less harmful than human presence
2) nuclear plants, merely by existing, tend to limit surrounding human population, and in case of accident totally eliminate it
3) the presence of humans is worse for nature than literally the worst nuclear plant accident ever
The original argument I was arguing against is "nuclear plants are bad because they're bad for the environment". However all evidence points to nuclear plants being good for the environment. You can't build nature reserves "wherever you damn please" because most habitable areas are already populated by humans. We can however build more nuclear plants, which has a two-pronged effect of reducing carbon emissions and limiting population around them, naturally creating nature hotspots.
How can you suggest that there's no hand-washing going on with coal emissions and keep a straight face?
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/353/6299/547/F2.l...
(Data is only up to 2015.) Source: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6299/547
"how much" / (10 years) = "how fast"
and nuclear.
also capitalisem will always makes the safest nuclear power plant unsafe.
A much simpler problem to solve as compared to other challenges due to climate change.
You can build a storage big enough to contain all radioactive waste from current and future nuclear power plants probably in less than one year.
That's factually wrong. There are several deep geological repositories currently in operation.
The US plan is Yukka Mountain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...) proposed in 1987 and not yet open.
Germany has a similar story with Gorleben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome), which was proposed in 1973 and also isn't actually operational. The prototype, also in an old salt mine, nicely showed how difficult these projects actually are when brine flooded the storage area, corroded the containers, and mixed with the contained polonium, cesium, etc.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m... for the full overview. It's full of great sentences like:
> Governments around the world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, although there has been limited progress toward implementing long-term waste management solutions
According to Wikipedia there are many currently in operation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository#Rep...
Is Wikipedia wrong?
The first active repository in the list I just linked to you is used for nuclear wastes from a nuclear power plant. I just checked the first, there will be more if you just take the time to get informed.
Get your facts straight.
Literally half the bad nuclear disasters happened under communism, the opposite of capitalism. Due 100% to gross mismanagement. That was Chernobyl.
The half that happened under capitalism (Fukushima) was a mild incident compared to the catastrophic natural disaster that triggered it.
Capitalists, funny to say, go to extraordinary lengths to protect their very expensive capital. They want safe nuclear power more than anyone.
Are you serious? The price of the reactor is an insubstantial part of the potential cost of a nuclear accident.
I don't really follow your complaint. Yes. I don't see how the cost of the accident is relevant to the incentives a plant operator works under; the odds of an accident are lower than the odds of being hit by a car (and the effects of a car impact are worse, because someone/several somebodies will likely be dead instead of mass inconvenience as is typical in the capitalist half of all nuclear accidents). So that isn't a major risk as the engineers see it and probably won't affect any individuals behavior as much as the fact that if someone owns an expensive thing they look after it because they are not stupid.
If someone owns an asset that cost >$100 million dollars to obtain they are not going to skimp on maintenance costs in a way that risks it breaking down. Owners who can afford to buy infrastructure are going to keep it in good condition.
If you think it is worth owning something that expensive then it is worth keeping it maintained. Capitalists have a lot of problems, but they are good at maintaining capital. The idea that capitalism can't maintain capital is absurd - what type of capitalist lets their capital decay? They would cease to be capitalist by virtue of having no capital. Doing a good job of maintaining capital is one of the core tenants of capitalism as practiced. The idea that capitalism will "makes the safest nuclear power plant unsafe" is so wrong that it just needs to be called out.
Nuclear is a great example of this because - as mentioned - under capitalism the disasters have been much tamer and required more to trigger them than under an alternative system such as communism.
That was my point
Even if you assume they are rational actors with complete information, it may be rationally in their interests to double their profit in exchange for doubling their risk. Capitalists balance risk against profit all the time. Also their liability only extends to their own capital. A risk of losing twice as much is rationally no less attractive. The excess cost is borne by the community who has to clean up.
So what if they aren't bearing the full cost of the disaster? The incentives are still pretty much all in the direction of keeping the plant in good condition, and direction matters more than magnitude for incentives. The costs are unimaginable once they get past a couple of million anyway. Engineering perspective, I think the official guidance on a human life is ~$10 million for cost/benefit analysis, and I'd be pretty motivated well before that to do the right thing. This isn't a radical idea; the only time I've seen something that expensive be run down is when the government (or other political forces, I suppose) is somehow mandating a shutdown. I've seen a lot more examples of extremely well maintained bits of kit, and I've seen a lot of very expensive machines that still cost nowhere near as much as a power plant. I know engineers who work in coal power plants too, they are not risk takers in any sense.
We've oodles of evidence on this one; the costs are high enough that capitalists will keep the thing maintained at least as well as any other system you care to name. No system is perfect, but there isn't going to be one more systemically capable of maintaining capital than capitalism.
But when the fake environmentalists discovered nuclear power as their new cause around 1980, and realized that The Waste Issue[TM] is their killer argument, they noticed that they had to blow up the time scale. So for political reasons, it was decided that other components, such as plutonium with a half life of 24000 years, are even more harmful. And just like that, a manageable 500-year-problem became an insurmountable million-year-problem that requires the invention of a new religion, and artists coming up with fields of spikey structures, and geologists to come up with formations stable forever, and lots more of careers to be made managing a problem that doesn't exist.
If you speak German, there is a very informative interview with Prof. Quaschning of Scientists for Future here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3EoCKgzLo4
With current technology, it is an unimaginable sum of money, if you're talking about building a balance of renewables and batteries to meet current baseline load targets.
Your estimate of the cost is not even in the right ballpark; even if the circumstances are dire enough to call for such drastic spending, renewables are not even a moderately effective way to eliminate fossil fuel dependence.
Alternatively, the solar and wind economics may just kill it off way before 2038. Lots of coal plants are already shutting down because of that all over the planet. German ones will not be an exception. Several of the companies behind this stuff have already been aggressively divesting. E.g. RWE knows full well it has a huge problem with rising cost, the probability of fines/fees, and the inevitable outcome of them shutting down this part of their business. They're just buying time to get out without too much damage.
Either way, I doubt burning brown coal, or most kinds of coal, will continue all the way until 2038.
Nuclear is unlikely to happen in Germany. They just got rid of that. There's no public support for it and the economics are just wrong. It would require billions of investment and take decades to complete. Not going to happen before wind solar deployments catch up with the demise of coal. I don't actually disagree that it might be a good thing to do these investments but I'm realistic enough to realize that this is not going to happen before coal collapses completely in the next two decades. IMHO nuclear fission and fusion may make a comeback some time in the second half of this century; this will be after even the most conservative predictions for solar and wind have replaced coal.
As opposed to the cheap and quick Energiewende, which has been going on for a mere three decades by now, cost just 150 billion euro by 2015 and is expected to cost a further 370 billion euro by 2025 (https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article158668152/Energiewende...).
Back when Siemens still built nuclear power plants, 500 billion euro would have bought 500GW worth of generation capacity, roughly 2.5x as much as Germany needs to become carbon neutral.
Wind and solar on the other hand are extremely popular and all over the country. Arguably not the best use of government money, especially early on, but at this point these are starting to get so good that they are out competing everything else on cost for new projects (and some existing plants) even without subsidies. This is also a problem for nuclear because it would still be on the expensive side compared to that.
Absolutely nobody here actually wants a nuclear plant in their backyard. And yes I agree this is irrational but it remains a reality that is also preventing the construction of nuclear elsewhere in the world. It pretty much requires an autocratic regime to be able to get away with this. For reference, even building new highways is controversial in Germany and takes many years of planning, approvals, and bureaucracy. Also finishing the new airport in Berlin is now taking almost a decade past it's original scheduled opening time and is rumored to face yet more delays. The decision process to build a single nuclear plant alone would likely take decades.
Then actually designing and building these things takes time. A lot of the expertise related to this is simply gone or will be by the time plans for this get any political support whatsoever. Rebooting 50 year old reactors is not going to be a popular decision; and besides most of that stuff will be gone by the time that decision gets taken. Buying legacy designs from the Russians would be an act of desperation. At this point the Chinese are the only ones left building and deploying modern nuclear plants.
It's much easier and cheaper to just put up more wind and solar. This is at this point not controversial (actually the opposite) and unlike a nuclear plant you can just plan and deploy these things without any political backlash with a minimum of hassle. Even cost is actually much less of an issue as wind and solar are getting quite competitive these days and people put solar on their own roofs to save money. Doubling the current capacity seems a lot more feasible and would get them most of what they need. And why stop there. Economies of scale are awesome. The more they do this, the cheaper it gets.
> Absolutely nobody here actually wants a nuclear plant in their backyard.
I love it how greenies always presume to speak for everybody. I live in Germany, and I want a nuclear plant in my backyard. (What is actually in my backyard is a lignite burning plant and and bunch of wind turbines.)
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/planting-1-2-trillion-trees-cou...
We could save the planet this way! But we need that room for wind and solar!
Nuclear is the only way to go.
It would literally be better to destroy thousands of jobs and depend on another country for some of your energy needs? Well let me dispute that.
According to Wikipedia, "27 percent of Germany's electricity came from lignite power plants"
Right now about 100k jobs in the wind energy sector in Germany are in immediate danger because the government essentially stopped all new construction. Already 80k jobs in the solar industry are lost to China. So please don't tell me about the 20k jobs in coal (or 60k or whatever if you count secondary industries).
I don’t understand why “jobs” is even a part of the discussion here. What percentage of the workforce is in fossil energy production? Has to be tiny.
It’s been all over the local news in recent years — be it Senvion, Enercon, Powerblades, or any of the other companies affected, with entire towns losing half of their jobs or more.
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/schleswig-holstein/Senvion-Si...
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/Windenergie-Branche-bangt-um-...
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/oldenburg_ostfr...