EU Is Warned Green Label for Gas Would Be ‘Disastrous’ Mistake
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
"The whole proceeding against an industry that has made invaluable contributions to the American economy for more than fifty years is the worst example of fanaticism since the New England witch hunts in the Seventeenth Century."
"no person has ever been found having an identifiable toxic effect from the amount of lead in the atmosphere today."
"Tetraethyl lead had saved the American economy billions. It made the modern automobile, the entire car-centric structure of American life, possible. A phase-down would emasculate car engines, cause octane numbers to plummet, and waste crude oil. They might as well burn the money of the American people."
Larry Blanchard, Ethyl’s executive vice president
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-sc...
What about Nord Stream 2? I bet they will find enough money and political influence to justify it
The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity.
It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today.
It's time to stop mythologizing the technology, stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine. It's a theoretically cheap heat source, but when you add in the engineering to capture the heat to boil water, it's not so cheap in reality, and there's been no innovation on making the engineering more elegant or cheaper in decades. In fact, if anything, it's gotten less elegant, more expensive, and even harder to build.
Nuclear did and does work out. It was not overhyped and it has delivered as expected. I would argue that solar is overhyped and has continually underdelivered. Anyone who has installed a solar system on their house has seen the significant issues with it.
Nuclear remains the best way to replace coal/gas electricity generation for baseload power, to generate enough energy to power industries and cities, and is cleaner than filling a city with atrocious rare earth batteries that are required to paper over the problems with other inconsistently generating technologies.
It is what it is, but if nuclear isn't the future, then coal isn't going anywhere.
This is very important for the heavy industries yet opponents of Nuclear still pretend that solar and wind can cover it.
They are fine with Nuclear as long as it is in China.
https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/commentary-china-is-buil...
The coal capital expenditures into coal will likely be underutilized over the next 30 years, but that happens when there are massive plans that are set in motion over the course of many years without adjustment.
I think a bigger question is, do we have enough "political capital" to pay for nuclear energy?
Even if our politicians all agreed to it, across counties even, what are the odds that they would get ousted before the reactors are built and delivering cost efficiency energy.
These are all trivial compared to nuclear's construction problem.
But I've never heard that batteries are not "scalable," when they are actually one of the most incredibly scalable technologies out there. Want a few watt hours? No problem. Want 10GWh? No problem. Want to distribute a MWh at every distribution station across a country? No problem.
Batteries scale as small or large as we can conceive.
> atrocious rare earth batteries
There aren't rare earth elements in batteries. It's been funny to watch "rare earth" become a synonym for "harmful" because this does not seem to have any basis in fact that I can understand.
> coal isn't going anywhere
Coal is already a dead man walking. Most of its use in the US is uneconomic, and loses money for utility customers. Bad financial agreements, executive incompetence, and misaligned economic incentives between utilities and their customers are the only reason its still on the grid.
Everybody who bet on coal 10 years ago was foolish, and should lose their capital, but since that section of our economy is run on cronyism instead of capitalism, people bad at capital allocation are not losing their shirts like they should.
Its actually massively difficult challenge both from a production and supply chain perspective.
Lithium itself plentiful but getting it into the battery is a long way. Its more like specialty chemicals, even the 'Lithium majors' have had massive problems getting new plants online and producing high quality lithium.
Battery plants are incredibly complex mass manufacturing operations and even small manufacturing problems can leave to burning cars. Scaling these is very difficult and only a few companies are really producing lithium batteries at scale.
Lithium batteries in Grid operation have never been deployed at '10GWh' so if it was 'no problem' then somebody might have done it.
The challenge of producing enough batteries (and renewables), lithium or otherwise to have a 100% reliable electricity grid (even if there are 2 weeks without wind) is gigantic and to me it actually seems far harder then just building nuclear plants.
> Coal is already a dead man walking.
Look at China, India and Indonesia and then rethink your statement.
It just so happens that US and Western Europe are not the only places in the world.
The gas plants are profitable because the prices you have to pay them are pretty high.
And this problem is getting worse all the time and its not really a great overall strategy.
I would argue renewables are subsides by how they use the grid. In the US renewables even get subsidies for energy they produce and sell at negative prices.
A big example is freight rail. The service in the US shrunk over time, and was basically reduced to captive-loop "coal mine to power plant" runs by the 1980s. If the entire country had similar economics, due to cheap ubiquitous nuclear power, there would be impetus to sustain and expand the electrified network. Instead of spending the 50s and 60s on half-baked turbine locomotives that burnt tar, and building ever larger diesels, the clear answer to more horsepower was to suck down more amperes from the overhead wire.
Similarly, trolley-bus designs get more interesting when the cost gap between electricity and petrol widens.
It is cheaper now but my suggestion is that this is not inherent.
My whole point about a nuclear society was that if existed the economics would be different.
> The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity.
Again, part of my point is that the best way to solve these problems is having cheap high temperature reactors.
These reactors are prefect in replacing gas in heat production, and be used to for example to produce hydrogen that then would get further transformed into all kind of chemical fuels and feed-stocks.
> It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today.
People have such a narrow view of this. Nuclear provided gigantic amounts of clean energy when the only alternative was coal. This by itself saved far more lives then any nuclear accident ever killed (that number is very low).
Not being able to beat massively powerful fossil industry with 60s technology in the middle of a massive anti-nuclear weapons (and thus everything nuclear) push is hardly grounds to dismiss it.
If people had given a shit about climate change in the 1970 and willing to give it the same kind of subsidies that renewables have been getting then things would be different. This would have been more expensive then coal but the public heath aspect and the clean energy aspect would have made this worthwhile 10x over.
The fact is, the reason we even started building PWR is that the military wanted them for submarines. And despite even the designers of them saying they were a bad fit for civil nuclear, the government and industry pushed forward on these designs and pretty quickly hard locked themself into these designs for everything commercial. Everything else with a few exceptions was locked into research efforts and those were reduced consistently after the 60s.
> It's time to stop mythologizing the technology
It has nothing to do with mythologizing. It has to do with simply first principles approach to problems solving. We have an energy source that is literally freely available as a waste product from mining. Existing rare earth mines already have unlimited thorium as waste stream. Natural Uranium is plentiful as well.
This energy source turns out to be 10^12 more energy dense then fossil fuels that have powered society for a century and produced highly available energy at cheap prices.
> stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine
All of this is wrong. You conclusions are only based a reactor design, not on nuclear as a whole. A modern type of reactor (some are going threw regulatory process in Canada and could have been designed in the 70s) are far, far smaller then PWR type reactors and use orders of magnitude less concrete.
There have actually been a lot of study about what makes nuclear expensive. And its mainly two things, that nuclear reactors are basically gigantic civil engineering projects that has to be done at a very high standard and to get those in on time, on budget you really need a workforce that has experience. This type of knowledge was achieved in a few cases and in those PWR were able to be build in 4-5 years reliably.
The second part of what makes it commercially not viable is that financing these projects is actually a huge problem. Because of the long time it takes to build such a first time project, you require refinancing for 10 years and that is huge part of the overall cost.
Pretty much all next generation reactors have a far more energy dense core. This means a far smaller reactor vessel.
Because you don't use water coolant, you don't need to have a high pressure system and reactor vessel. Meaning both vessel and pipes are MASSIVELY simpler. You literally operate at atmospheric pressure.
High temperature operations make air-cooled means you can use the same turbines as CCGT plants and you don't need the large water towers.
So if the overall civil engineering project is far smaller, very comparable to a CCGT plants.
> but when you add in the engineering to capture the heat to boil water, it's not so cheap in reality, and there's been no innovation on making the engineering more elegant or cheaper in decades
This is an absurd claim. Gas power plants also need all of those things and are massively cheap and often beat renewables specially so if renewables were required to provide full reliability.
As I pointed out above, with the size of plant reduced to a CCGT gas plant, and the input being massively cheap compared to buying gas. A nuclear plant like this could have an very small staff (smaller then a CCGT gas plant) as the reactor is actually self balancing and you mostly need to monitor it and refuel it.
There has been a renewed interest in CO2 powered turbines that could potentially be more efficient and far smaller. Hopefully these will start to be commercialized at some point.
Considering how much harm to the environment has come by the hand of green parties, I'm beginning to wonder if they aren't lobbied by fossil fuel companies.
Both Greenpeace and FoEI were actually founded by Sierra Club members who thought Sierra was not anti-nuclear enough. After a while, Sierra's platform changed to be more anti-nuclear (its current position).
And don't discount funding from Russia, that goes really well with both Russia's destabilisation goals and anti-coal campaigns leading to higher dependence on Russian natural gas.
That seems like a statement that the claims are false, not a request for evidence.
See here: https://www.h2-international.com/2019/04/01/joint-effort-to-...
Greenpeace Energy was founded in 1998, started selling gas in 2011, and purchased that first electrolyser in 2018[0].
As of 2020, the gas they were selling was about 1% hydrogen[0], 99% fossil imports. In 2021 the major change was to add 10% biogas to the mix.
[0] although they've been feeding-in hydrogen since 2014
[1] we'll just trust that it is indeed all wind-powered electrolysis.
(https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by... )
People who wish to allege secret funding or influence should supply some evidence. Currently the only evidence I'm aware of is the infiltration of UK environmentalists by notorious communists the, er, Metropolitan Police.
They are. The mass hysteria about Fukushima was fueled by "environmentalists" who were being funded by the Australian coal lobby.
>I'm beginning to wonder if they aren't lobbied by fossil fuel companies.
There was a large oil-exporting and gas-exporting country that has been aligned with Green Parties' political programs back in the 80s. USSR was known to train and to sponsor activists, academics, and publishers as part of its influence campaigns.
It helps your case that the fossil fuel exporter USSR was ran in a top-down, by-fiat fashion, rather similar to how corporations function internally.
This is both in the night-and-day cycle meaning but also in the "we need more power in 10-years" meaning, since nuclear power plants take forever to build.
Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth, especially regarding climate change. Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others.
The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest, strong local and national (e.g. the minimum distance that wind farms need in germany, eliminating most of the possible options), opposition to new projects, strong opposition to new transmission lines, strong opposition to losing the jobs in the legacy markets (especially visible in the USA with "clean" Coal) and no burning desire to honestly consider the storage issue (both in regards to demand shifting and building of new storage facilities using hydrogen or synthetic gases and similar things).
Our problems aren't solved because solving them isn't a high enough political (and thus also economical, due to the negative externality not being financially relevant) priority around the world, not because we're not using nuclear for everything.
In France, the first nuclear plants of the current production group were contracted in 1970, and connected to the network in 1977, so that's 7 years for a pilot industrial project. Later plants were built in 5-6 years.
The kicker is that this work is highly scalable: France built over 6 reactors per year over its program.
The current issue with new generation reactors seem to be related to loss of industrial knowledge, there is no reason to think that the next built in the series would suffer from the same issues.
> A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial date to the end 2022.
> EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months. The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.
10 years late (so far) and 15 bil over budget (so far).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
I wouldn't surprised for Hinkley point C to also have such issues. What I would like to know is whether the amount of issues is significantly reduced compared to Flamanville and Olkiluoto. That would be a good indication about whether the design is faulty, or whether it's the industry having teething issues.
And it was a different time, in an economy with different skills, and entirely different technologies.
What was cheap and fast 50 years ago may not be the best thing to build today. For example, the wealthy no longer build many mansions with intricate stonework and wood molding, all crafted by hand. The workforce is no longer there.
We should pay close attention to the productive capacity of today, what sort of industrial machines we have at our actual disposal.
Nobody who is talking about nuclear pays attention to what it would actually take to build nuclear like France did in the 1970s, it's just an assumption that it could be done, without paying attention to any of the details.
Further, those proposing lots of new nuclear never deal with the massive failures of current attempts, whether it's France's EPR designs at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, or Hinkley. All have been failures. What would change to get a first-of-a-kind build down to 7 years?
Nobody has answers to these questions, least of all the nuclear industry. And until somebody has a clear and detailed and knowledgeable path forward on construction, we will waste billions and billions more on ineffective nuclear when those resources could instead be out to use right away with storage and renewables.
What's a good timeline then, and what technology not emitting co2 supports it?
The countries that have started wind&solar policies a decade ago are nowhere close to a clean electricity mix. In fact, fossil plants and infrastructures are still being built in these countries.
If you plot out the growth of wind and solar deployments rate, we are just baaaarely on track to replace all of our energy services with renewable energy in the next 15-20 years.
Storage is also growing at an acceptable rate for our needs, we are producing 200GWh/ year right now, will get to 2000GWh/year by 2026, and be at 20-30 TWh/ year by 2031-2036.
In contrast, if we figure out how to build a first-of-a-kind in 7 years, then start scaling up, most of the energy transition will have already happened.
The only reason to pursue nuclear is if it seems to be cheaper than the alternatives. It doesn't look like it will be. But even if it's more expensive, getting 10% or so of our power from nuclear might lead to a cost optimal solution, so I hope the industry can pull itself together. I'm doubtful, but hopeful.
I cite a previous example of a country starting several new reactors per year over a couple decades, with a mean build time of 6-7 years, and ending up with an electricity production which is mostly CO2-free.
It is not me thinking, or an hypothetical scenario, it's the history of France's commercial nuclear program between 1970 and 1990.
> There's a big contradiction in your two assessments here.[...]
> However, even with renewable's exponential growth to hundreds of GW deployed every year today, with exponential growth continuing from today, you seem to think it's not enough.
There's no contradiction. You simply chose to reframe my statement to make it say something else. My point is that despite "exponential growth to hundreds of GW deployed every year", countries with a strong wind/solar policy did not manage to curb their CO2 emissions per MWh to reasonable levels.
My concern is about the time it will take before these wind/solar policies have a significant effect on electricity CO2 emissions at the scale of a country. I don't really care about installed capacity.
So my point is, if 7 years is too long, what is a reasonable timeframe for effective CO2 reduction, and where did you see policies actually achieve that?
The NRC reviews only the safety of reactors, not if it's a constructible design. If somebody had held Westinghouse to the standard of having constructible designs, in addition to safe designs, maybe the disasters at Vogtle and VC Summer might have been avoided.
Even PWR don't take 'forever' to build if you actually build a large number. The problem is that, specially in the West, we have gone to a policy where its like 'lets do a tiny bit of nuclear' and that leads to basically 1 plant being in construction supported by a increasingly small nuclear industry getting endlessly delayed because nobody working on it has ever done it before.
Learning effects in nuclear building are massive and well researched. You need to have teams that have done it before and it goes much faster.
Even the most shitty PWR could be built in 4-5 years as we have seen in France, US or South Korea.
Of course, if you were serious today about doing this, you wouldn't use 60s PWRs anyway and if you use modern reactors you don't need to do a massive civil engineering project. Ironically in many way the civil engineering is gigantic part of the cost, not the nuclear itself.
> Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth
Well of course 'all' problems would not be solved, but the fact is we could have had clean energy for 40 years had nuclear continued and new types of reactors had come along.
It's my opinion, and I know most people don't agree that if you have real mass manufacturing of nuclear reactors, it would actually be viable to competitively produce green fuel. Maybe some subsidies or tax on non green version to push it faster.
I would have favored making all cars into FFV (Flex Fuel) and having a 5%-80% methanol requirement (increasing every few years). That methanol could then increasingly be made with nuclear power as your capacity grows.
Today we have lithium batteries for most of transportation so that is no longer as relevant as it would have been if we had done this in the 90s. I still a good idea for aviation and other needs of chemical energy.
> Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others.
Power is still a huge issue for countries, if we had mass produced reactors, exporting them in those countries is a very viable option to get green energy to those people at a cheaper rate then coal they are actually building.
If emerging countries could call the US and say 'we like 50x500MW reactors' deployed over the next 10 years. They would very much want to do it.
> The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest
The same could be said for nuclear as well.
> strong opposition to new transmission lines
Renewables break the traditional local production concept for power and force an ever increasing amount of energy transportation. Because of non uniform wind and weather patterns and lack of economically viable storage you compensate by transporting energy.
I much favor having nuclear reactor, say 500MW units being deployed everywhere where it makes sense as close to consumption as viable. And for places this makes no sense also having a much smaller 100MW reactor type that you can deploy in shipping containers everywhere needed.
Reliable base load close to consumption combined maybe a few heat batteries (or hydro if available) can is the perfect solution. In theory modern reactors could be load following quite well, but its really a question of what is cheaper, lower utilization or energy storage.
This is exactly how Ontario (Canada) and Sweden have a green grid.
> not because we're not using nuclear for everything.
In my opinion part of the political problem is because what is attempted is so difficult and puts so many changes on people. Simply deploying nuclear reactors in the same location current coal plants are leads to basically no change in the overall gird.
Its literally build whatever number of 500MW modular reactors right next to each other in the same building (these building are very small if its a modern reactor) and put them right next to the coal plant and reuse the same transmissions lines. Literally 95% of people would never even know that anything what so ever had changed. No fields of solar panels, no gigantic wind turbine, as little as possible increase in energy transportation (or even a decrees).
Had the world actually made progress on nuclear technology (as I suggest was the problem) it would simply be an economic way for politicians to transition out of coal. Sure some regions where coal is produced have coal lobby, and in some regions you might have local opposition to nuclear being able to stop or delay the building. Overall however most people don't care.
When I say we are not a nuclear society, what I mean is that we are missing everything from a vibrant nuclear industry with startups and big players, a efficient regulatory framework and an agency that is motivate to actually make forward progress (FCC and SpaceX working together), and some public or semi-public organization to manage the fuel cycle and waste.
Literally all of that is missing. Nuclear industry is mostly just producing fuel for PWRs, nuclear startups are 50x hard then even space startups, the regulatory body that took over from the nuclear commission has basically destroyed any and all progress and has made any deployment of advanced nuclear essentially impossible (regulation hard code technology dependency) and no solution for nuclear fuel cycle (politics being deadlocked over the idiocy of Yucca despite billions that have already been paid and is sitting around).
Thankfully Canada regulators have realized this and we see a emerging industry. Canada even seems to think about the fuel cycle in a more imaginative way then 'dig hole dump in'.
And then we even think in terms of reactors, not power plants. So you get a permission for a reactor. As you only get one you want to buy the biggest one you can get. Which likely meant the newest theoretically available. Instead of two or three more mature and sensible designs, likely costing less in long run.
>nuclear power plants take forever to build
That is because of overregulation in North American and Western Europe. The overregulation is because of hysteria and coal lobbyists. Nuclear is working fine in the rest of the world with more plants under construction:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
Nearly all large construction projects have huge delays and go massively over budget, not just nuclear!
Weakening nuclear regulations (which ones?) will not solve the construction problem, because at best it will turn them into the other projects with big delays.
So not much to see there. Except a way for people that disagree with the protestors to reinforce their stereotypes or the daily fix of anger over nothing for tabloid readers?
If you don't see the obvious red line crossed there, you are completely detached from reality and want to protecter the attacker just because he happens to claim to be green (but hypocritically so, if he is also against nuclear energy).
Incredible, really.
Finally, yes it is a mob as nobody from the bystanders did anything to stop the attacker, tacitly agreeing with what he did.
Now to the part of your comment that is on-topic:
> Finally, yes it is a mob as nobody from the bystanders did anything to stop the attacker, tacitly agreeing with what he did.
The bystanders did exactly what bystanders do. They stood by. That doesn‘t make them agree with the attacker.
What would you habe done if you were there? I know I don‘t have the reflexes and fighting skills to stop this from happening. And I bet she had her friends helping her afterwards so there wouldn‘t have been any need to get involved.
Disclaimer first: Me = Pro nuclear.
But if you try to take over a mainly also anti-nuclear demonstration with your messaging and stir up "the mob" with that, you probably should not call somebody taking away your "Nuclear against climate-change" sign an "attack by a no-nuclear climate mob"
If you slap somebody, you'll likely get a fine, which is issued as "so and so many day's rates" (Tagessätze), which means e.g. you can get a fine of "20 day's rates" i.e. you'll have to pay the equivalent of 20 days worth of income, calculated based on your monthly net income divided by 30 days and capped at 1 EUR to 30000 EUR per day.
A prison sentence can be issued as a suspended sentence if it is 24 months or less, which is up to the discretion of the judge(s). You only have to go to prison if you receive another prison sentence for another crime in a time frame specified by the judge, or if you violate any of the additional requirements a judge may issue. If I remember correctly about 70-80% of all prison sentences below 24 months are issued as suspended sentences, and only a tiny fraction of people end up going to prison because the suspension is lifted later for some reason.
However realistically even the "dangerous" variant quite often ends in a light sentence of a couple of months which is then usually issued as a suspended sentence. This depends on what happened, the level of involvement and previous criminal history if any and whether you confess and show remorse. However, the suspension of a sentence is usually contiguous on you paying everything you owe, from damages for pain and suffering to the court fees.
[0] Which may happen if the state thinks it cannot prove the allegation or the act was so minor, it would be a waste of everybody's time. But the "case dropped because too minor" doesn't usually happen in assaults, but more for non-violent things like riding the bus without a valid ticket or illegally downloading a few songs.
You can't just get away with attacking people.
(Actually, on a serious note, the person going there with the sole goal of stirring up the protest is more likely the one to be the terrorist, no? I'd say taking away that sign and even potentially removing the person is actually de-escalating. But you should obviously let the police do that.)
The potential for loss is much higher with nuclear power.
Nuclear contamination can be cleaned. The majority of the Fukushima exclusion zone has been cleaned and reopened. There's no motivation to do this in Chernobyl because the town of Chernobyl only existed to support the nuclear power plant.
And somewhat oddly he Chernobyl Exclusion Zone literally shows that nuclear accidents are good for the environment, as human activity turns out to be way worse for wildlife than elevated radiations.
To get a perspective of how nuclear accidents compare with those of other energy production methods, have a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
The worst case for hydro at least is immense, possibly multiple millions death in some cases.
Hydro is also surprisingly low at 0.02, though failures are absolutely catastrophic I guess they tend to be out of the way and fairly local: so a dam failure will take out a village at once, and do extensive geological-scale damage, but not much more.
This isn't true. Fossil fuels kill much, much more people per Kwh than nuclear [1]. But much like airplanes vs car accidents, fossil fuels kill constantly and widespread in small amounts, while nuclear kills very rarely in high amounts.
Compare the countries that had real phases where they build a lot of nuclear and it easily beats any renewables.
If Germany had gone all out on nuclear for the last 20 years, they could easily be finishing 5-6 nuclear plants a year, and likely get the construction time down to 4-5 years even if you built old school PWRs. Germany would be shutting down coal plants and end up 100% clean far earlier then their current way of doing.
If you however figure out a newer type of reactor (as we should have long ago) you could likely build 5x as many. The limiting factor in PWRs (outside of money) is the extremely complex construction of the reactor vessel. These have to be 'thicc' and are hard to weld, only few places in the world can do it.
Despite that insane reactor vessel France and the US managed at reasonably high production rate.
However if you go to something like a molten salt cooled reactor, or a molten salt reactor of some kind you have no pressure and thus no 'thicc' reactor vessel. These can be constructed incredibly quickly.
If you actually put a challenge with a fix amount of money to produce 100GWh of 100% clean highly reliable electricity setting up a assembly line of reactor production and develop traveling build teams that set up site. Then show up with a huge truck and dump the reactor into the site.
Doing that with renewables is an unsolved problem unless maybe in countries where you have a massive amount of hydro.
Thank the gods, Canada has finally changed its regulations (and the US is slowly doing so too) so actual real progress has been made on commercial molten salt (and other) reactors. Terrestrial Energy, Moltex Energy and a number of other companies are deeply engaged in the process of getting these reactors threw licensing now. These reactors are often more 10x smaller for the same output of energy and thus far cheaper to build.
The EU is the one considering including it...
It's more important to get emissions down now than to aim for a perfect standard that no one has yet reached, and doesn't appear reachable any time soon.
The emissions matter, not the goals of activist NGOs.
This cuts emissions, that's why it qualified.
Results > ideology.
Results > ideology
Snark aside we have already have low/no emission energy alternatives. Nuclear, wind, and solar. No need to pretend that gas is part of that group.
The argument reminds me of "sceptics" who appeal to "the effect of the sun cycles", as I'd climate scientists wouldn't have thought of that.
Aside from that, we need net zero by 2050 and building new gas plants that will last longer than 30 years is not helpful for that.
New gas plants ARE helpful for cutting emissions if you compare it to the most likely alternative (eg coal).
It's only NOT helpful if you compare it to utopia. If you could reliably assume that there will be net zero otherwise, then you wouldn't need to worry about these gas plants would you? They'd be shuttered soon anyway.
Combined with the benefits of gas being much less than advertised due to leakage, it seems reckless to build new fossil plants of any sort, since we have alternative energy sources that don't emit at all. That's not utopian, it's just the rational direction to take right now.
[1] https://www.ccag.earth/newsroom/net-zero-by-2050-is-too-litt...
[2] https://theconversation.com/climate-scientists-concept-of-ne...
As the obvious example, the EU leader in solar is Germany, while solar is almost non existent in Spain. Spain by contrast has a lot of wind turbines in spots with poor/mediocre generation availability.
From an environmental point of view the biggest mistake was to cut down on the development and production of nuclear plants because now it's too late to just bet on pivoting to nuclear if we still want to reach literally any of the climate goals.
But more fossil fuels are not the answer. The most effective way to cut emissions at this point is to reduce energy use, but there is no economical incentive for the industry to do so and you can only go so far by shaming consumers.
There is political capital in talking about overconsumption. There is no political capital in talking about overproduction.
EDIT: The original slogan for recycling was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" but you there's no money in reducing (not "buy electric" or "buy low-energy" but literally not buying) or reusing (not "buy second hand" or "buy refurbished", literally using what you already have).
The Russian elites (politicians, oligarchs) could however benefit significantly - opening of north passage -> better access to ocean for the navy; better access to natural resources; and other powers will suffer more, so Russia could get relatively more powerful. I think this is part of the reason why we see climate denial from the disinformation sources...
Climate change doesn't simply mean some areas get warmer. Climate change means the entire climate system changes. Air streams and water currents shift, ground water evaporates or rises, and so on.
On avg no country is better placed for overall warming then Russia, except maybe Canada.
No problem though, everyone will just pack up and move north east. /s
Being better placed because most of your territory gets extremely cold a lot of the time doesn't mean climate change would provide a net benefit to you. This isn't Civ, you can't just reload a save file if your strategy doesn't work out.
Heck, the best strategy for Russia would be to break up large international trade blocks by destabilizing their political structures, especially in Europe, to be gain more leverage and make it easier to expand its territory further into southern Ukraine. And incidentally with Turkey provoking NATO, the UK leaving the EU, Trump being president and the rise of far-right anti-EU sentiments in other EU countries that matches what happened for several years prior to the pandemic, whether with their influence or without.
It's far more likely Russia having little interest in averting climate change is for the same reason as with everybody else including the US: it's a long-term process requiring intense international collaboration putting anyone fully committing to it at a competitive disadvantage if anyone else doesn't join in. Economically it's a game of chicken.
EDIT: I guess I struck a nerve with some people? I'm not arguing that Russia is manipulating the political climate of EU countries or the US. I'm arguing that if you want to engage in conspiracy theories like Russia intentionally accelerating climate change for strategic benefit, there are better strategies that are more plausible and don't require rolling the dice on whether your entire country will go up in flames (or drown) in ten years.
But what are they gonna do about it? The Russophiles in the West are already climate change denialists and nobody takes them serious
It’s not hard to see: board a (non-express) train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, get off on a small station of your choice somewhere in the middle, the kind that has a couple of platforms if that, then take one of the (cheap) local taxis to a random local settlement that’s not on the railroad. Stay there for several days. The people you’ll see will be fundamentally lovely, but most will be one or more of over 60, deep into the bottle, or only there until they can leave for what passes for a larger settlement. (Stay away from the local disco, though, and don’t expect anybody to speak anything but Russian.)
Or at least that’s how I learned it.
All of this is to say that the main thing keeping Russian agricultural development down is disintegrating infrastructure and a horrid business environment, not an inhospitable climate.
(If you’re wondering why I’m overlooking the enormous three fourths of the country that are known under the unassuming name of the “Asian part”, the simple answer is—with apologies to the wonderful inhabitants of Novosibirsk and many other places—not that many people live there; 20% of the already pretty sparse population, in fact. So if you’re looking at all of those humongous tracts of land and thinking what life would be like if they were used for agriculture, think again. The problem is not that it’s cold there on average, necessarily, even if it is in many parts—the problem is that it’s very continental there, and there is no friendly neighbourhood body of water to even things out. Wikipedia tells me Novosibirsk and Omsk are about as far north as Ontario and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, while Chita and Irkutsk are even further south. There’s also only the one railroad, with a rugged 4x4 your only hope of getting to most other places, and the soil sucks. If it thaws out, which would of course be disastrous in terms of greenhouse gases, it would still suck, only in a more squishy fashion. Can’t farm it, can’t quarry it, can’t build upon it, which is why people hardly ever do. My God, it’s full of empty space.)
As a final note, looking at Russia as an adversary ... serves to tickle the fancy of the powerful arseholes here, of course, but looks kind of silly to me TBH. There’s a lot of good people and interesting stuff happening, but the population is half that of the US and the GDP is less than a tenth. I mean, come on. Not in third world territory, yet, but getting there, definitely. Russia is not an all-powerful boogieman, except in the fever dreams it has on its sickbed. Even if it still contains enough spite to ruin your day repeatedly (as well as enough brilliance to carry the world forward for years).
Or could it rather be that this "Climate change good for Russia!" talk is just the same old American jingoism merely adopting modern environmentalism?
Why would Russia be the only country for which climate change is "good"?
> Silvia Pastorelli explained that companies “have been consistently over-estimating the need for gas and basically, ENTSOG members have received something like, just short of 90% of the EU’s gas infrastructure subsidies which is a lot of money, and the fact that they basically can decide gives them lots of power.”
> But according to Global Energy Monitor’s (GEM) report, ‘Gas at a Crossroads‘, the EU already has a large excess of gas infrastructure. The EU gas import capacity is nearly twice as high as EU gas consumption – according to the report, “The utilization rate in 2018 was ~60%, with ~40% spare capacity.” And GEM’s survey found €117 bn in new EU gas projects are in development, including €52 bn for gas pipelines, €12 billion for LNG import terminals, and €53 bn for gas-fired power stations.