Nuclear is clearly green.
Gas is more interesting. At 500g/kwh it's on higher side normally. So there must be more to this.
Gas is more interesting. At 500g/kwh it's on higher side normally. So there must be more to this.
I guess the goal is to phase out coal in Germany and Poland by any means necessary..
Which will of course not be enforced, besides the fact that biogas as a “green energy” has huge caveats.
The 2035 "low carbon gases" thing is just ridiculously unworkable and will be repealed later as unrealistic.
So at best, they'll just trading ~10 years of coal power for ~5 years of coal power followed by 40+ years of fossil methane power. That's a terrible trade.
We should repaint radiation warnings in green, to indicate that.
> Gas is more interesting. At 500g/kwh it's on higher side normally. So there must be more to this.
Nord Stream 2.
And instead of comparing nuclear to a magical zero-pollution/emission, flawlessly safe, always-available power source, we should compare it to what it actually gets replaced with.
Still a bad choice.
Framing it as a contest versus fossil fuels is building a strawman nowadays.
Surely you have a risk assessment for this, or can point to holes in the existing ones?
No industry is clean by definition and at the moment both wind turbines and solar panels depend on local industry in China, which is quite bad even by European standards and also runs on coal. And then there is the insanity of cutting down forests to put solar panels.
> The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH.
They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage. But that’s not really relevant as I am not arguing against renewables. Both renewables and nuclear have different profiles, different advantages, and different use cases. And a combination is much cheaper than using only either.
The thing is, though, that by saying that nuclear is as bad as fossil fuels, we contribute to expanding our use of fossil fuels in the future, which is orders of magnitude worse than all the nuclear accidents that ever happened or are likely to happen. There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity.
It can be as long as this plan is not realized: gas is good for storing renewable energy over longer periods of time. Germany needs some way of compensating fluctuations of renewables over longer periods of times
Hey, nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by government, and it badly needs batteries for storage too.
For example, insurance for nuclear stations is provided by government for free, because its price is sky-high. If we include cost of insurance into the price of nuclear energy, its price will be too high for economy.
Nuclear can support base load only. For day-to-day management, a hydro, gas, coal, or batteries are necessary. Nuclear is not an option to reduce CO2 emissions substantially without hydro or batteries. We use nuclear power for decades already.
It can't be built anywhere either, given the local protests (personally I'd rather have a nuclear plant than a coal plant a few miles away, but for some reason people don't like that idea)
This seems to be pure incompetence on our collective part. The Chinese do it on time without much trouble. If you take the EPRs, all the delays are supply chain and contractors issues, and a moving regulatory target. Nothing about that is specific to nuclear.
> cost an order of magnitude more per kWh than offshore wind.
Not quite, but a bit more. I don’t have the data offhand, but EDF Energy’s offshore wind farms have a similar cost per kWh compared to Hinckley C. Also, in an all-intermittent grid, you need to add the cost of storage, which is far from negligible. The true advantage of wind is that you can scale the project in a much finer way (you can’t build half a nuclear reactor).
> It can't be built anywhere either, given the local protests
This is a problem in all cases. People are not thrilled about wind turbines or solar farms in their backyards either.
By all means try and get 100% of power from wind and solar, but we're not there yet. And until we are, and they can provide the required baseload power, it's not a strawman at all.
Baseload as a term does not exist on the producer side. Simply by chance the cheapest sources of energy were the most inflexible ones. This is coal and nuclear, they therefore got coined as "baseload" power generation. Today they aren't cheapest anymore and unsurprisingly suffer.
On the other hand, a base demand exist on the consumer side, that is true. But due to electricity being electricity it does not matter how it's met. Nuclear doesn't produce any other better kind of electricity. That's the gear strength of it, it is fungible.
In practice, switching too quickly to reliance on renewables has resulted in poor people seeing their electricity bills skyrocket and greater demand on coal plants when renewables fall short and nuclear plants are no longer running to provide base power.
But of course we can't look into the future. But we do know safe storage for such durations is not yet figured out. It's externalising the problem to the future. Just like CO2, but on a much longer timeframe. Still not very ethical though IMO.
And really we're already too late to prevent most of climate change. Especially because we won't replace fossil with nuclear in 10 years time.
That's how anything works, though. You replace the giant bleeding wound with a bandaid, and then you take it off and there's a scab, and then the scab goes away and you have a scar. It's always about replacing something with a lesser problem. For the past few years people have been trying to replace fossils with imaginary clean power, and it hasn't exactly gone great.
Risks and long term effects of nuclear is few order of magnitude larger than solar.
isn't that a common misconception though? Relatively the waste amount by volume is incredibly miniscule. I'm sure by 3022 we can figure out how to shoot it into space or something - that's a very very long time.
There's nothing interesting (e.g. terrorism, bombs) you can do with nuclear waste, and it's not especially poisonous.
If you just loaded it up in barrels and dropped it at the bottom of the ocean, what's the worst that could happen?
Sure, some fish would die, but where are the millions of deaths?
LOL. Nuclear materials, including waste, are extremely dangerous in evil hands. It regularly kills people by accident or due to negligence. Chornobyl was an accident. Just imagine what a team of motivated people with evil intent can do with a nuclear station or nuclear waste. Last attempt to use nuclear waste in war was in 2015: Russia-backed terrorist planed to use radioactive waste (Kyshtym) to throw a dirty bomb at Kyiv.
There's an inverse relationship here with the half-life. The most dangerous waste is stuff that burns up in a few decades, the type that lasts for millions will emit very little radiation per unit time.
Most waste is processed so its for example sealed into some kind of material prior to burial. So recovery of the radioactive portion, concentrating and refining it etc would be a pretty major undertaking.
You may also be confusing the long radiation stuff with high radiation stuff.
When you see volcanoes, earthquakes, and hot springs in action, that's the power of radiation. All of it.
The earth's core is just still hot from when it was formed. It's not being heated by an internal nuclear reaction.
Also, the problem with radioactive materials is that they damage the containers they're stored in over time. It's called radiation embrittlement.
Yes, it's better than coal and perhaps even gas, but....
There aren't greener alternatives that will produce all the power we need -- yes we can invest in wind power etc., but that won't produce enough power for a modern society.
Nuclear is the greenest realistic option.