Germany to Keep Last Three Nuclear-Power Plants Running
wsj.com
wsj.com
Edit: I searched to find a dictionary for word connotations, best I found in a couple mins is https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~ychoi/connotation/
But you are right, it's not a thing you'd really say about somebody you liked.
When you're so rabidly anti-nuclear that you ignore the fact uranium is 1.5 million times as energy-dense as coal, you are an ideologue. Uranium has so much energy per kilogram you could fuel the world's reactors by shipping it via airplane.
There's plenty to criticize about the environmental damage of uranium mining. Carbon emissions is not one of them.
It's my opinion this choice to attack nuclear energy by casting it in whatever critical light is trendy rather than its actual weaknesses demonstrates Morgan is against nuclear energy for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with its actual dangers, hence she is doing little or no risk/reward calculation, and that her future choices will not be based on human energy needs and accurate assessments of nuclear technology and industry.
The arguments they make is that producing electricity and most usage of electricity are bad for our planet and thus we should use less electricity if we want to preserve it (and as a result wouldn't need to add extra nuclear or coal capacity).
This part is often forgotten which results of thinking they want to replace nuclear by coal, which would be absurd.
I imagine it's probably hard to imagine that someone would think that seriously from a US perspective (one of my US based colleague asked "when are you getting AC in Europe??" when here many people are wondering if the Americans are going to stop being crazy with their freezing AC ^^)
Unless they have ideas about how people and society can continue to accomplish all of the things we want to, using less electricity, this is not a serious argument. It's simply ideological fluff, advocating for people to embrace a lower standard of living for nothing in return.
If a person advocates against cleaner sources of energy on the grounds that "we should just be using less energy", then I don't think they are a serious person and they should be ignored. Let them go live their hippie life on a commune somewhere and free up the space for the adults to talk about real solutions.
But there are also plenty of things that can be done to reduce energy consumption without impacting anyone's little confort. Regarding thermal confort the obvious solution is to improve insulation so they wouldn't have to heat or cool as much and might even save money in the long run
The anti-nuclear-power movement started 60 years ago. Imagine what our past would look like now if instead we had replaced all coal and gas with nuclear back then. Is there a chance we would have had more disasters? Sure. But it's impossible to know. What we do know for a fact is that coal and gas emissions are killing the planet.
We have a problem with CO2 emissions and here you are talking about better insulation in homes to reduce power usage. We have a great, direct solution to reduce emissions by orders of magnitude. But no, let's continue to burn gas and coal, just use less of it.
This is why I say anti-nuclear isn't a serious position.
It's not hard to imagine, I'm French and we did replace most things with nuclear back then ^^
The result is that right now we are purchasing (probably coal made) electricity to our neighbors because around 50% of our theorical nuclear capacity is unavailable either for maintenance or because we don't manage to cool them enough with the current heat :)
Nuclear is certainly a good thing overall but not the obvious and only solution to all problems as some would like to believe.
Of course there are many upside to it too (low carbon emissions and not from Russia among the obvious ones)
But it's pretty rare to find balanced and nuanced speech on the topic unfortunately, and I don't find the anti nuclear side to be any worse than the pro nuclear side on this.
> Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/fighting-climate-chaos/issues...
"Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants."
* Germany has no prime minister, Germany has a chancellor.
* The prime minister didn't appoint her, the cabinet did.
* She is not head of climate policy, she is a special envoy for climate policy as part of the federal foreign office. This is a diplomatic position. That means such decisions are out of scope here entirely.Non-computer sciences and engineering comment sections are full of people speaking their guesses with authority.
Especially in a multi cluster, kustomize, istio, argocd, Jenkins on bare metal over multiple physical data centers.
To me with intermediate data dev ops knowledge this is quite a level of complexity.
Any idea why this is the case? I wonder, because I would expect most engineers to have had a university education that taught them respect for the complexity of things around us in the first place. The realisation alone of how little one really knows about one's own subject after several years of study should make one very cautious when it comes to subjects one has only heard about in passing. Or is it simply that an overwhelming majority of modest people simply remain silent, and that is why a few uninformed who rush to judgement stick out?
Technical people with some knowledge of a topic will often find themselves on the peak of mount stupid (see comic).
In other words, knowing just enough to feel like you know a lot, not knowing enough to realize how much you don't know.
And... well university education often doesn't succeed in teaching people to estimate their knowledge on a subject appropriately. "I don't know but I want to know more!" isn't a very common outcome when a topic comes up. I think it really has to do with people who spend a lot of time being the most knowledgable one on most topics around getting used to just having an answer whether or not it's correct.
Not sure about Greenpeace though, they are a bit messed up.
Nuclear is carbon friendly, might even be climate change friendly but its a long way from being environmentally friendly.
1. tax the carbon content of fuels
2. use nuclear power for baseload power generation
2. Let the market decide how to profitably generate power.
If in case of surproduction you ask baseload to reduce production in favor of NREs, then NREs will be more profitable (compared to a fifty-fifty approach) and baseload will be less so. On the opposite, if you ask NRE to reduce production, baseload will be more profitable.
(in case of fossil baseload generation, favoring NREs makes a lot of sense since you save the fuel cost, but for nuclear uranium is only a minor part of the cost)
https://m.dw.com/en/french-nuclear-plants-break-a-sweat-over...
In any case nuclear is not the solution to global warming, just part of it (for electricity baseload generation where it makes sense).
Also, France has neglected building new capacity for decades.
No. The last built reactor (Civaux-2) was delivered in 1999, and the new generation architecture "EPR" reactor (which was set as the lead of a series) project began in 2004, its construction began in 2007, never stopped, and albeit costing way over its budget it isn't yet delivered.
It's not going to affect the 10m+ gas-fired furnaces, water heaters, ovens or stoves, or any of the chemical industry that use 85% of the gas. It's not going to replace even half of the gas-fired power plants that use the remaining 15%. So why is it smart, obvious, or very negative for Putin?
The economic and safety questions seem settled, so the thing that stands in the way of this step being obvious is the self-image and identity of the German Green party.
> It's not going to affect the 10m+ gas-fired furnaces, water heaters, ovens or stoves...
Not at once. But it certainly makes it easier for people to replace nat gas appliances with electric ones. If you are heating your home with nat gas and the price explodes, it would be beneficial to lower your thermostat and crank up an electric space heater to make up (some) of the difference.
I once started a bugfixing week with fixing a bug that caused around 1% of the crashes. My team lead didn't think that was either smart, obvious or very anythingatall, and said so loudly and clearly in the team meeting.
Citation needed.
These plants are running now. Are you saying the electricity they are generating is not being used? The question is what replaces those joules if they shut them down?
Nuclear is not really a replacement for gas, rather than coal, due to its slow nature. Gas power plants are used in Germany mostly for quick peak power.
See https://www.haustec.de/heizung/waermeerzeugung/waermemarkt-w... for example. There's also the chemical industry, which uses gas as chemicals, not as a source of joules.
The plants are running now, but that doesn't make them able to replace gas. Most of the gas can't be replaced by them for the reasons in my other response, but I think your question was about the rest?
The rest is because of the different traits of nuclear and gas-fired power plants. Nuclear power plants aren't adjustable, they provide the same amount of power, day and night, plodding on, with only very slow adjustments. Gas is the opposite. Gas-fired power plants are easy to adjust on very short notice, to match the unexpected changes in demand. If you try to replace quick-changing power plants with slow-changing, the network's frequency (50Hz in Germany) suffers. When demand shrinks and the slow-changing power plant can't adapt, the frequency rises above 50Hz. When demand rises quickly, the opposite happens.
Some adjustment is possible by involving other entities than just the two, so it's not quite 0%.
If you fix a bug that currently causes few crashes but would later on turn out to cause big issues, and you see that outcome in advance, then it would in fact be smart wouldn't it?
US: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/russian...
This is to prepare for Russia cutting off gas entirely to the EU, which would cause harm to Russia's O&G revenue as a result of Russia's strategic choice, not due to EU actions.
Russia is making record profits off high gas prices, there were no negative results to their energy industry from their invasion. All of the negative results were from sanctions on the rest of their economy and from freezing their USD/EUR currency reserves.