If you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions effectively, you must support nuclear power.
France went the nuclear path and their energy sector causes 50 million tons of CO2 per year.
Germany went the renewable path and their annual energy sector emissions are about 300 million tons of CO2.
They were a bit less in both countries due to Covid-19 causing shutdowns of industries.
Not really. They held on hard to gas and coal power. Of the latter, a disturbing amount is still based on lignite or brown coal, which is more accurately described as "somewhat combustible dirt".
Germany is not nearly as dedicated to green energy as they would like the world to think. They shut down their nuclear sector due to fear, and primarily replaced it with more fossil energy.
I do agree that nuclear power is something we should be more positive towards, but that does not invalidate renewable energy sources.
The Wikipedia article [1] on Germany's energy production suggests that fossil fuel sources have fallen slightly and the reduction in nuclear has been replaced with renewables.
Although I agree that in order to significantly reduce CO2 emissions in the short term, nuclear power seems like the best option right now.
Very strong statement but no evidence whatsoever.
Germany's a bad example, we're (that is: the government during the last 16 years) doing a lot to keep really old crappy coal power plants running and slow the transformation towards renewables. And still, 50% of the electricity is produced by renewables.
Production of natural gas is a somewhat inefficient, but infinitely scalable battery for renewables.
My cynical take is that there's no hype to be generated around power-to-natural-gas, and people hyping up hydrogen don't want the public to know that most of originates from breaking fossil fuels.
That's my understanding, too; amongst the technocrats and field-experts, power-to-gas is taken very seriously. However, amongst the public and the press, even the pop-science press, it's scarcely ever mentioned. Hydrogen, batteries, biofuels, carbon capture, and even fusion all enjoy vastly more attention. I cannot think of any explanation that wouldn't be cynical or sinister
These biofuels only look good when one forgets we need to put a lot of carbon back into the ground, and the latter is already one of the most expensive parts of the transition.
biofuels for air transport make sense, simply because there might be no alternative, and in conjunction with basically limiting air travel to trans-oceanic routes. But it absolutely doesn't make sense for electricity generation.
Right now the United States has at least 108 sites designated as areas that are contaminated and unusable, sometimes many thousands of acres.
Events like Chernobyl and Fukushima will certainly happen again and again.
Relative to what! Coal power plans spew out more radiation. You could screw over just one km^3 of earth putting all our waste there for hundreds of years. Localizing the damage like that is almost incomparably better.
Nuclear waste from power generation is solid. A typical plant products 3 cubic meters of solid waste per year, which is stored on-site in cooling pools. Compare that to hundreds of thousands of tons per plant of radioactive fly ash just spewed into the atmosphere and millions of tons of CO2. You're going to need a citation for the "108 contaminated sites that are unusable." Also a thousand acres is a little over a square mile; again, which I doubt. That is absolutely not how waste is managed in the US, and leaks like that do not happen.
And if you want to talk about slowly poisoning the biosphere, stop with the anti-nuclear hype and start talking about microplastics and pesticides.
France has a huge problem having to replace crumbling nuclear power plants with new ones being too expensive and too slow to build.
That said, even with gaseous diffusion enrichment, nuclear power had much lower life cycle emissions per megawatt hour than any fossil generating source. Nothing is 100% "carbon free" over its full life cycle but nuclear power and renewables both have very low emissions compared to fossil combustion [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaseous_diffusion#Current_stat...
[2] https://www.urenco.com/about/history
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...