Hopefully this will allow the EU to return to competitive reactors designs instead of leaving China to pull humanities weight on that front.
Though tbh I wouldn't be sad if we bought Chinese reactors until we are back up to speed, having Chinese nuclear > no nuclear. Everyone bitching about China stealing IP finally have something to steal back.
It is always much better to define objectively what is the issue and what is the aim. It seems to me that the main issue is emissions and that the aim is therefore to reduce them as much as possible.
In that context, nuclear is a perfectly valid option and probably unavoidable as things stand.
Gas is 'bad' since it obviously does produce emissions but it's the least emitting among fossil fuels so realistically it could also be allowed as a last resort (with 'last resort' underlined 3 times in red).
So green energies, delayed in the last decades for political reasons, will need to wait, again. And this delay could turn to be a very bad decision in a few years.
And when we will do, it is too late to change our mind
Too late, to little and, with bad luck, a very expensive error.
Money is a limited resource. The only reason to tag nuclear as green is to grant nuclear access to subsides for green energy.
More research is probably needed, but I wouldn't say we have "no evidence".
The things that are allowed by this law are fairly tightly specified, as even the article gives various details on:
> new nuclear and gas-fired plants built through 2030 will be recognised as a transitional energy source as long as they are used to replace dirtier fossil fuels such as oil and coal.
So, limited to the next 8 years, and only in places where they're not going to displace cleaner options.
> gas projects should only be financed if direct emissions are kept under a maximum cap and they switch to fully renewable energy by 2035
I've not read the legal text but this latter part likely refers to gas turbines that can run on methane or hydrogen or some mix of the two, which is a fairly standard part of forward planning.
There's some political shenanigans involved, but overall it's a fairly sensible compromise and another small step in the right direction.
The actual headline: "Gas and Nuclear Turn Green as EU Parliament Approves New Taxonomy" (HN left out gas)
So gas is actually being considered "green" now, so calling it a "cleaner" fuel as you do is actually what they're doing.
Mostly, the gas turbine must be able to run on a clean fuel, and there must be actual plans for a switchover.
When I first read that gas turbines can fit under clean energy rules now, I was kind of angry, but I calmed down after I read the full rules.
>>Gas and Nuclear Turn Green as EU Parliament Approves New Taxonomy
>>On the contrary, natural gas does emit greenhouse gas emissions, however, supporters claim it is less polluting than traditional fossil fuels and can thus be part of the energy transition.
So less pollution then heavy oil is now "green" in Europe....bravo, thank you Germany.
Gas emits so little CO2 compared to coal that it actually accounted for ONE THIRD of the drop in U.S. emissions from 2005 - 2016: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-us-carbon-emissions....
This is just politics redacting facts... because they want the votes.
These "neo-green policits" could perfectly say "we are green but we acknowledge but we need grey energy for a while". They chose redefining language, as always.
(Cf. Victor Klemperer, "The language of the third reich" and also, as always, Orwell... "good is bad, bad is good" and "the past can be changed").
Red energy sources are the ones we immediately need to stop using: coal and oil.
Yellow energy sources are the ones we should stop using only if we can safely do so, but if we can't (and we can't, right now) we should continue using them: gas and nuclear.
Green energy sources are where we really need to go.
We're in trouble when 100% green energy is not enough.
That's a myth based on old data, no one who understands the models makes such simplified black and white claims. Methane (which is natural gas) is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. As in up to 100x the warming potential in the first couple of years until it's naturally converted. When burned, it's turned into CO2 but the problem is there is leakage all over the place because methane is volatile. During production, during transportation, during storage - it gets leaked into the atmosphere all over the place. See this more recent article:
https://www.iea.org/news/methane-emissions-from-the-energy-s...
As others have pointed out the title has been blatantly edited to omit the gas part. This is propaganda, declaring fossil fuel to be renewable energy doesn't make it so. Words still have meaning and the laws of physics still exist. It's really sad to see this sort of political science denial finds its way into HN now.
As parent notes, every molecule of methane burned turns into a molecule of CO2.
Incidentally: I don't see how burning coal produces more CO2 than burning methane. Burning coal is worse than burning methane because burning coal produces lots of particulates, as well as nitric and sulphuric acids. Same for burning oil.
Has anyone ever done testing on automobile exhaust similar to the testing that has been done on cigarette smoke? Of course not - nobody pretends that autombile exhaust is safe to inhale. Everyone knows it's much more carconogenic than ciggie smoke.
So I'm not defending coal and oil; they're worse than methane. Just not because they produce more CO2.
The issue is, all extracted methane isn't burned, and that's where the trouble starts. Over the past years, we've seen estimates for how much of it is lost into the atmosphere grow and grow. Some recent studies already claim more than 3%: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/methane-leaks-era...
There has recently even been speculation that gas from certain sources where monitoring and environmental regulations aren't very strong could actually be worse than black coal. The truth is we don't really know this for sure yet.
You're right about the pollution, this and some other considerations are important as well. In certain countries air pollution is a serious issue. Germany doesn't really have this problem and the German plants have good filters. Germany has it's own coal, gas has to be imported. They're experiencing the effects of a dependency on foreign gas as we speak. So in the end, they might have actually better kept their coal power. I doubt it's going to happen though, coal is dead for purely political reasons. It's simply extremely unpopular.
At a molecular level this doesn't make sense to me. The fundamental carbon cycle value proposition is to harvest energy released when a carbon atom (re)joins two oxygens. For the same energy, how would methane and coal produce different amounts of CO2?
That said, I can see how the oxygen reaction would be less efficient and create more byproducts (i.e. acid rain) using coal given its less refined nature. How methane would have a better energy to CO2 ratio doesn't seem to have an obvious mechanism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
Imagination, Physics, Fire & Trees - Richard Feynman (aka Trees grow from air, carbon cycle): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLMysTpwhg
Gas: CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O
I don't know off hand exactly how many joules of energy (heat) are produced per mole in each case but it's not surprising that gas gives more joules per mole of CO2: it's a bit like you're burning hydrogen at the same time.
EDIT: It's relevant that O-H bonds are stronger than C-H bonds, presumably.
Water...
It isn't, it would be too late anyway, it will not scale to the world's power needs, it will cost too much.. and I just haven' touched the usual downsides of nuclear.
Even some nuclear operators start seeing it this way now already..
Even if you buy into crap like Chinese reactors being less safe or more poorly regulated they should still be a good benchmark for what is necessary to reach scale nuclear reactor production.
Especially their small designs which are expected to be mass produced in factories and shipped to the site rather than built in-place as current Western designs have been been.
Combined with their target reactor numbers should bring down the cost substantially due to economies of scale when producing 200+ of the same reactor.
Only then will we have a decent picture of economics.
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsargentina-optimistic-ab...
It is supposed to take 8 years to build and cost $8 billion for 1090 net megawatts (1170 gross megawatts) [2]. That's far better than Western AP1000 and EPR projects currently under construction, if it meets its targets. But it's far worse than the planned costs that Western AP1000 and EPR projects had at project start.
Or consider the relative pace of Chinese nuclear and renewable additions in China. China connected a record 8374 megawatts of nuclear power to its grid in 2018 [3]. (In 2021 it connected 2321 megawatts). At a 95% capacity factor, that's about 70 terawatt hours of electricity generated per year. In 2021, China added a record 54880 megawatts of solar power [4]. At a conservative 15% capacity factor, that much solar capacity will generate about 72 terawatt hours of electricity per year. It also added over 47000 megawatts of wind capacity in 2021 [5] which can be expected to yield more than 82 terawatt hours annually at a conservative capacity factor of 20%.
In terms of added electrical output, Chinese renewable projects are outpacing Chinese nuclear projects despite the much lower capacity factors for renewables. I suspect that's because they are much cheaper to build. There may come a saturation point where adding more renewables no longer does anything to displace fossil fuel consumption, because additional supply is all curtailed due to mismatched supply/demand timing, but curtailment can go pretty high (more than 50%) before nuclear yields more marginal decarbonization per dollar of investment.
[1] It's difficult to determine the ground level truth of Chinese project economics. The government is more heavily involved in the economy, press freedom is limited, and language barriers make it hard for people who only read English to keep abreast of what appears in Chinese publications. I am acutely aware that the only reports I read coming out of China are things that somebody else wanted translated into English.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
[3] https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-solar-power-c...
[5] https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1738591/china-repor...
It lacks the more advanced passive safety of molten-salt designs but it's significantly more advanced than reactors being built anywhere else in the world and is a natural stepping stone to molten salt to replace the helium coolant at some stage.
"China Is Home to First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor"
But 1. a large part of that is regulatory expenses not inherent to the technology, and 2. are we sure it is uneconomically expensive after taking into account the expenses spared by not completely fucking up our climate stability?
2. yes we are sure, because even current green tech — PV and "enough" batteries — is already cost-competitive with nuclear, and we have good reasons to expect both PV and storage to get cheaper.
I love PV tech, I think it’s incredibly useful for small and medium scale self sustainability. And yes, in many areas it makes sense to dedicate a bunch of space to PVs and energy storage.
But PV is inherently intermittent and unless you massively overbuild capacity you’ll always face a weather threat.
Until we manage to harness nuclear fusion we’ll need nuclear fission along with hydropower to be the backbone of our energy generation.
This is why I still support nuclear despite the cost.
Although…
> But PV is inherently intermittent and unless you massively overbuild capacity you’ll always face a weather threat.
isn't strictly true. In a magical alternative reality where we can do mega-projects and can ignore geopolitics, antipodal power grids are technically fine, much cheaper than batteries, and don't need any backups.
(I'm not sure how easy/hard it would be to make one without such assumptions, only that it takes a minimum of about one years' global aluminium production, so treat it as merely an interesting though experiment at this point).
A large reason why nuclear has recently gain a lot of popularity is that wind + natural gas has quickly became very expensive and political damaging. One can no longer just pay Russia for cheap gas and look the other way.
There seems to be a tendency by pro-Nuclear people, to try and frame nuclear as the only alternative energy source. They will say things like, "nuclear is by far the safer option, especially considering coal or gas"..
They keep trying to frame the use of nuclear next to fossil fuels, while pretending that solar, wind, hydro and geothermal haven't increasingly been adopted for 10 years now.
It is a very selective way of framing nuclear.
Until we have found ways to drastically cut down power usage AND to store huge quantities of energy OR found another similar and cleaner and safer energy source, we will need it in the mix to balance with other renewable sources.
And I am sorry to say but the many countries have made great strides on running their countries on more and more renewable energy sources.
In 2018, Scotland generated 98% their energy from wind alone.
Denmark 72%, Germany 45%, Uruguay 97%, Norway 93%.
It's a whole patchwork of solutions, depending on geography.
Nuclear is not this magic bullet, and just means flipping a switch, it has a major cost, logistical, technological and risk overhead associated with it. If you are France, great, but they have been doing Nuclear since the beginning, it doesn't mean that the world has to do the same, when far simpler, cheaper and safer alternatives are in abundance.
Germany is doing Sektorenkopplung, so attempting to switch everything over to electricity.
This is done because electricity is more efficient and we will use less total energy for the same effect. E.g. a heatpump can make available 3-5 times it's consumption of electricity as heat, where a gas stove can only reach 1.
Usual fluctuations (eg. no photovoltaic by night, more wind in the afternoon) can be planned for, but local events such as big clouds or no wind are frequent but have a great impact on
Solar, wind, hydro and geothermal are going to be important parts of the mix (perhaps even the dominant parts in many places of the world) but all have unsolved challenges that are much more difficult than nuclear. Storage ofcourse, the world is almost already maxed out on what hydro it can build, geothermal is only viable in very few places in the world. Solar is gated on Chinese polysilicate and cell production unless some other country wants to step up and make what is needed.
Don't make good the enemy of perfect. Nuclear is a very good option to killing off fossil fuels in addition to the obvious renewables.
It also provides key features that they don't, like being almost entirely independent of weather and geography, good in places like Japan that are hard to build other renewables after they max out on hydro. They have no space for solar, wind is hard to build with their terrain, off-shore wind is hard because they have too many tsunamis and adverse conditions etc.
Renewables good, nuclear also pretty good, coal and oil bad.
If nuclear is replacing coal and oil we should be happy, if we are building it -instead- of cheaper renewables despite having the correct sites, enough storage and enough supply then I would be against it but we aren't. The economics of renewables should put them at a consistent cost advantage to nuclear except the cases where they aren't viable - where nuclear should be able to slot in.
But many people think this way instead: we have the technology for all the parts => build all the good stuff right now
Ironically, nuclear is selectively framed as just one thing with every safety issue ever, while fossils are further sub-divided into different environmental impacts.
Actual 'nuclear' (Uranium fission based) is a proved environmental risk:
- Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi (INES level 7) are not some sort of small environmental incidents
- Kyshtym, First Chalk River, Sellafield (1957), Three Mile Island, Goiânia (INES level 6 & 5), and maybe the Tomsk-7 explosion (not rated) where comparably smaller but the environmental impact was not small
- we still do not know what to do with nuclear waste in the long term... But we do know than this waste is not a 'green' crap
- fortunately nuclear waste is not drooped anymore in the ocean... but only since 1993! The quantity rooting under the sea is estimated around 200,000 tons (this also include waste from medical usage). Everybody look elsewhere and cross finger on this.
- (we could also add 8 or 9 nuclear submarines rooting under the sea, and an unknown number of lost wea pons, but i agree than this not from civil reactors)
- it is no secret than environmental researchers who study marines currents, already use "small leaks" from know origin since a long time. The quantity may not have environmental impact, but the leaks are big enough to be used in scientific studies. See for example https://hal-normandie-univ.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02433310... (and many more for the English channel)
That said, Nuclear power could be environmental friendly. Thorium based reactor are promising. They are certainly not 'green' but, far less problematic. Also Fusion reactors could be the perfect 'green energy' if solved.
But, Uranium fission based reactors, are useful: you could use them to start your nuclear bombs collection... And this is one of the historical reason why the Green parties and Greenpeace are against them. With reasons, because actual nuclear plants, do come from military origins (most are based from submarines reactors), and in nuclear power countries the separations between 'nuclear civil' and 'nuclear military' was never a real thing. The other big reason is the historical 'democratic' way all this nuclear plants where build: simply rain local authorities with money, and put anti-nuclear militants in prisons.
Personally, my main problem with the uranium reactors is than it's a dead-end technology. It's true than it do not product greenhouse-effect gas and create a lot of energy, but it's like taking a very big loan instead on working on more secure and less risky nuclear energy. Or investing in more renewable energy, or in less energy consumption, or in non-battery powered electric cars...
Saying than it's 'green' is just green-washing from the actual nuclear lobby.
In a once-in-a-generation worst-case scenario (an earthquake beyond the safety parameters to which the plant was designed), you have something on the order of a hundred deaths caused by the reactor leak (this estimate attempting to include lifetime deaths from cancer and so on). Compare this to the death toll of the disaster itself -- something like ten thousand people died from the tsunami. And the conclusion we draw is that nuclear is unsafe? Certainly, the damage and disruption caused by the exclusion zone were substantial. But you'll notice that despite the tsunami, people want to move right back into the tsunami zone even though they know there is a once-in-a-generation risk of a 10k death disaster. Contrasting that tsunami risk with nuclear, "this is worse than climate change and we need to turn off existing reactors" is the opposite conclusion than we should have come to. The correct conclusion IMO is "even extremely rare disasters now result in relatively small damage and death toll". In other words, Fukushima should update you towards thinking that modern nuclear is quite safe, not away from that.
One PR problem that nuclear has is that we have extremely sensitive detectors for radiation, so it was possible to detect an increase in radiation in Pacific fish following the Fukushima disaster. The lay public doesn't understand that this is increase was something like one banana's worth of radiation per fish, completely harmless. We simply have extremely sensitive detectors, and most people aren't able to understand the concept of orders of magnitude that small.
While I definitely don't advocate for dumping nuclear waste in the ocean as a general approach, it's worth noting that deep underwater is not the worst place for a small amount of nuclear waste to end up. There is a lot of water in which to dissolve the radioactive particles, and so it's unlikely to actually cause harm. For example the one-off plan to discharge Fukushima cleanup waste water in the ocean was controversial but probably makes sense.
Is worth noting also that sometimes the deep underwater currents raise to surface in some points when crashing against continents, so is not so simple.
That (and many others similar incidents, e.g. Ciudad Juárez) is an incident related to medical nuclear technology, caused by radiation source for radiation therapy. Irrelevant to nuclear energy discussion.
Competition is often about price.
So I doubt that it is any better in the EU, just less known. Like Greece and Germany. The greece know there is corruption therefore their place in the corruption index, the germans ignore/don't know of corruption hence the better position in the index. And still who paid the corrupt politicians in Greece? companies like Siemens.
Not to mention that certain types of corruption that are illegal in the modern world are still legal in Germany.
Like giving politicianshigh positions afterwards. Because we know it isn't corruption if you got paid afterwards /s