16 years later coal generated electricity is still huge and 80% of the world’s electricity is still generated by fossil fuels.
I imagine if we’d used nuclear instead, the world would have bought itself an extra decade or two to solve the problem.
I don’t think she realizes the damage she’s responsible for. Lots of the fossil fuel usage she is now against only happened because of her cause in the 70s.
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/25/archives/haydens-start-a-...
After the movie the China Syndrome and the Three Mile Island accident, no one wanted nuclear power.
Brexit proved you wrong. People don't want facts.
https://qz.com/1291269/the-scottish-wind-farm-donald-trump-t...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0s5Zqmb09g
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-story-of-...
>The story of Donald Trump’s feud with his one true nemesis: Windmills
And even more ironically, one of the few Republicans who isn't mindlessly cheering him on and lying in support of him is a certain hard core right wing neocon who the Jane Fonda haters used to worship but now suddenly desperately despise and don't want to testify:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/us/politics/bolton-book-t...
>Bolton Book Puts New Focus on Trump’s Actions in Turkey and China Cases
>Interventions in Justice Department proceedings draw scrutiny after the former national security adviser raised concerns about the president’s embrace of authoritarian leaders.
It's almost as if they knew for sure that Bolton's testimony would incriminate instead of exonerate the president, don't you think?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opin...
Environmentalists are against fracking, coal, oil and pipelines, yet these sources have managed to be built pretty much endlessly since the dawn of the movement.
GE, Westinghouse and others in nuclear industry are hardly unfamiliar with lobbying and getting things done in almost any other industry. There is a lot of money to be made if nuclear was as cheap as some claim.
Instead the nuclear power plant operators in North America and the EU lobby for new government subsidies instead:
https://energynews.us/2019/04/24/midwest/ohio-nuclear-subsid...
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/05/30/ontari...
https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-nuclear-energy-idUSL6...
A plant expansion under construction in Georgia is expected to cost $27 billion for construction alone! Imagine how much wind/solar/storage that could buy, at a much faster speed.
https://www.ajc.com/business/after-wrangling-over-georgia-nu...
Also, there must be a name for the fallacy where you oppose one thing for some reason, without considering that the only alternative is much worse.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-story-of-...
https://qz.com/1291269/the-scottish-wind-farm-donald-trump-t...
Public and political opposition to nuclear has, over the decades, had a lot more to do with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima than Jane Fonda.
https://www.liveabout.com/how-to-dress-like-1980s-aerobics-3...
https://purpleclover.littlethings.com/entertainment/7556-reg...
Now how exactly did you mean she was responsible for Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima?
TMI was a minor event that was fearmongered way out of proportion by the movement.
When I was a kid, some old friends of my family lived on a horse ranch in Mt. Wolf, Pennsylvania, a mile or so from TMI (which had a 20 mile radius evacuation zone). When we visited them some time before it happened, they joked and teased me about how I should be worried if ever I saw steam rising from the cooling towers (which I could clearly see there always was).
A year or so later, they were cowering in their basement with diarrhea from the radiation leak, with no idea how long they would be there or how it would end.
TMI had much more influence over their change of opinion about nuclear energy than Jane Fonda did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Vol...
They also sampled wildlife from the vicinity afterwards and found no evidence of radiation.
Dickenson College is 30 miles or so from TMI, while Mt. Wolf is a few miles away, and from the ranch the cooling towers loomed clearly visibly on the horizon.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Mount+Wolf,+PA,+USA/Dickinso...
Do you have any doubts that the power company and public officials were terribly prepared for the disaster, and lied to the press and public (as was also true with Chernobyl and Fukushima), and that is a much bigger continuing problem for nuclear power's reputation than Jane Fonda ever was?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Eme...
>The uncertainty of operators at the plant was reflected in fragmentary, ambiguous, or contradictory statements made by Met Ed to government agencies and to the press, particularly about the possibility and severity of off-site radioactivity releases. Scranton held a press conference in which he was reassuring, yet confusing, about this possibility, stating that though there had been a "small release of radiation...no increase in normal radiation levels" had been detected. These were contradicted by another official, and by statements from Met Ed, who both claimed that no radioactivity had been released. In fact, readings from instruments at the plant and off-site detectors had detected radioactivity releases, albeit at levels that were unlikely to threaten public health as long as they were temporary, and providing that containment of the then highly contaminated reactor was maintained.
>Angry that Met Ed had not informed them before conducting a steam venting from the plant, and convinced that the company was downplaying the severity of the accident, state officials turned to the NRC. After receiving word of the accident from Met Ed, the NRC had activated its emergency response headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland and sent staff members to Three Mile Island. NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie and commissioner Victor Gilinsky initially viewed the accident, in the words of NRC historian Samuel Walker, as a "cause for concern but not alarm". Gilinsky briefed reporters and members of Congress on the situation and informed White House staff, and at 10:00 a.m. met with two other commissioners. However, the NRC faced the same problems in obtaining accurate information as the state, and was further hampered by being organizationally ill-prepared to deal with emergencies, as it lacked a clear command structure and did not have the authority either to tell the utility what to do, or to order an evacuation of the local area.
Walker, J. Samuel (2004). Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23940-1. (Google Books)
https://books.google.com/books?id=0EDwbQF5k24C&dq=%22three+m...
Imho the industry brought it in itself. Even now — look at how TEPCO was irresponsible prior to Fukushima and initially dishonest in its reports to the public about the scope of the problem.
There was actually big talk about a "nuclear renaissance" in the first decade of this millennium. It hasn't worked out.
Reason for the delays mostly has to do with the project model, i.e. having two vendors from France (Areva) and Germany (Siemens) working for the Finnish client TVO. Poor management by the client has allowed the vendors to point fingers at each other on various issues, so not only is the plant completing a decade late but there's also a court battle brewing between the parties. Most of this has nothing to do with nuclear power per se, however.
But of course you're right - it's very easy to deploy a bunch of solar panels compared to building a nuclear plant. And once you're done, you get to start to figure out the energy storage part - which in many practical settings is still mostly an unsolved problem.
But ask yourself "why". What causes delays in nuclear projects? Was it because the technology is somehow flawed, or is it because of the fearmongering and politics around nuclear power that make it a frequent target for the uneducated masses.
The Finish reactor projects have faced steep opposition from the Green Party in the government. They have delayed and blocked construction where-ever possible.
It is like pushing someone off a cliff and then accusing them of being clumsy.
We need cars to go electric, etc.
The point is that co2 generated over the last 16 years will stay with us for some time. We could have delayed the problem by doing more sooner.
A slow train wreck of decades that everyone sees coming.
At this rate, we’ll be saying the same thing in 2030.
Yes, and that creates massive extra demand for electricity generation, which seems very hard to achieve without nuclear power.
Marketing is once again far from the truth, check how co2 expensive producing a battery is. Then couple that with the fact that you need let's say 20 years of normal use of a car to "paybacck" that co2 footprint (comparing to an oil car).
Last one is : are you going to keep that same electric car for 20 years?
(I guess we should do both, but I feel like hydrogen as a fuel seems to be ignored.)
Synthetic CH4 from H2+extracted CO2 seems more likely to happen.
Because I very rarely see mention of ammonia as a fuel, I conclude that no one is seriously attempting to develop hydrogen fuel cells.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-ev-battery-production-co2-em...
Also, consider that we are in the early stages. Battery technology will improve.
Batteries making process is far from being carbon-free yet.
Even if, somehow, you had a perfectly safe magic hot rock that could put out a gigawatt, all the plumbing and turbine machinery would still have a minimum cost level that would be cheap but still metered. Maybe something like half the cost of natural gas.
If it is clever to shut down existing nuclear power plants (which are very often past planned life time) one can argue, but building new ones?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
The problem with this fantasy is that nuclear power is not by any stretch of the imagination "basically free". New build nuclear is very expensive, costing much more on a per-MWh basis than most renewables.
This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be developing new technology to improve the cost effectiveness of nuclear in the future. But right now, each dollar spent on renewables delivers more carbon savings than each dollar spent on nuclear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
> The point is that co2 [sic] generated over the last 16 years will stay with us for some time. We could have delayed the problem by doing more sooner.
There's never been a commercially viable thorium reactor.
Some of the claims are true. Cheap, abundant and safer. It's the "economically viable" part that's tricky. No-one has solved that yet. India has a ton of thorium and are highly motivated to build a commercial reactor but haven't been successful yet.
Coal can be used in some markets seasonally (ie to supply additional baseload demand for summer AC / winter heating depending on local needs).
And totally agreed on the rest. The crazy bit is that in order to make nuclear power as safe as possible, very strict standards were created. Laudable. Now those very strict safety standard are used to paint nuclear power as unsafe, when any realistic accounting of actual harm done shows it to be either the single safest or at least amongst the safest forms of power generation available.
And we could make it better still, by switching to reactor designs that weren't optimised for military use.