Having been a fan of this for so long this is just sad and pathetic that we now have to consider things like rolling blackouts.
That this is a thing in Europe in general is sad.
The "anti-nuclear" camp has won, but based on what sort of logical argument? Fear? what about Chernobyl?
It is one thing to be "anti-nuclear" but they failed to provide alternatives. "WIND" or "Solar" is not going to replace 3,500 MW of nuclear power without damaging a LOT of land.
Now millions face rolling blackouts and energy shortages when nuclear could have been providing clean energy. I live within 8KM of a nuclear plant which has been running accident free 24x7 since 1971.
Now nuclear costs 3-5x more compared to renewables and is simply not relevant.
> "WIND" or "Solar" is not going to replace 3,500 MW of nuclear power without damaging a LOT of land.
If land use is what you measure impact based on a much better target is the beef industry.
Compared to what ? Energy prices have jumped 2-3x in some places so far, and it's not even winter yet. Comparing renewable prices as averages or whatever is fine if you like blackouts ?
People throw out whatever nonsense they like to support their position.
"Nuclear costs 3-5x" and as you point out, compared to what?
The cost of sitting around for 20 years debating this and not taking any action at all has lead to much worse problems - power shortages.
These "anti-nuclear" types fail to apply logic to their debate.
I asked how much power is produced by solar during the long winter months, i suspect they will not respond as it is against their view - solar is NOT viable in cold-weather climates. You need a reliable "base" system and nuclear is very well suited for this. Our plants (CANDU) can be refuelled while producing near-full power greatly reducing the need to shut them down.
The reason the temperatures fall below zero during the winter where i live is obvious.. The energy we receive from the sun has been greatly reduced.
How would solar power address the reduction in available solar energy, and the increased demand for energy for heating?
For the cost see for example:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
I sold solar panel for 10 years. Both solar thermal and PV. This is simply not true. You need to greatly oversize your panels (≥6x) and also have a passive house with a huge storage buffer (>5000 liters). In the summer you end up having to pump the waste heat into a pool. There are also maintenance costs. For PV you need huge amounts of battery storage. It's simply not economical above the 40° parallel to use solar for heating. For DHW or charging your EV it's okay, but in the winter you'll get at most 1/6 the amount of heat or electricity that you get in the summer provided that the panels are not covered in snow.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but also don't fall into the trap of what you are accusing others of doing.
In places like Germany, Wind and solar actually counter-balance each other very well. [0]
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Seasonal-cycle-of-the-ca...
10 years ago I was assured that coal was dead, killed by wind and solar, which were already cheaper than coal at $60/T, and falling. How is it possible then that 10 years on with all the vastly expanded and even cheaper and better renewables, that people are paying $430/T for coal? And it's not the remaining few legacy assets winding down as they compete for a dwindling supply of fuel, global coal production is rising, new coal power plants are being built.
I've never heard any of these people go back and reflect on what they got wrong about their predictions about coal, what they missed and where their logic was flawed. What I do hear frequently though is "nuclear is dead, renewables are already cheaper"... I'm a little less open minded this time around.
For the rest of the world that is not the case. It's very easy and fast to build a coal plant and pretty much every country has access to the raw material (independency). For the most part you don't need a specialized workforce either, which you do need for nuclear. It's also not intermittent like solar and wind and the supply chains for solar and wind wouldn't have been able to keep up anyway.
Coal extraction in the western world is making huge amounts of money and scaling up production, exactly the opposite of what the naysayers were incessantly parroting.
Coal is no different than wind and solar in terms of accessibility of plant or product. Actually renewables are significantly easier to acquire and scale and deploy in many cases -- millions of people have solar panels on their houses for example. Private, as well as municipal or county level installations are common. As are much larger ones.
> For the most part you don't need a specialized workforce either, which you do need for nuclear.
You certainly do. You can't just throw a bunch of people from the street together and tell them to run a coal mine, supply line, and power plant.
> It's also not intermittent like solar and wind and the supply chains for solar and wind wouldn't have been able to keep up anyway.
Might be zeroing in on some of the problems...
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/coal-pro...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184333/coal-energy-consu...
https://www.worldometers.info/coal/australia-coal/ Australia has consumption going down but production going up, they're selling to China and India.
I hope this clears up your confusion.
> Actually renewables are significantly easier to acquire and scale and deploy in many cases -- millions of people have solar panels on their houses for example. Private, as well as municipal or county level installations are common. As are much larger ones.
You missed my point. You need a lot less materials for the same amount of power in a coal plant and digging for coal is easier to scale up.
Here is the IEA World Energy Outlook from 2010. The presentation is simplified, check out page 11 in [0] for example. As you can see the OECD numbers go down, but the China, India and other developing market numbers go up. Giving us a total increase. You can check out the more in depth IEA report here [1].
[0] https://www.oecd.org/berlin/46389140.pdf [1] https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/1b090169-1c58-4f5d-...
Why the intellectual dishonesty? Why do you try to discredit what I say, backed by sources, when you rely on nothing but your own fallible memory to back up your claims? Just back up your claims with sources, it's really not that hard.
> Your claim that it was just in the west doesn't make sense because mines in western countries export to China and India etc.
If you check the previous links that I posted, you will see that coal production in the west has reduced as well.
> If you check the previous links that I posted, you will see that coal production in the west has reduced as well.
You keep blathering about things that don't address anything I wrote. Go back and actually read what I wrote and have a think about what you're actually trying to say about it before you try again.
Coal production in (at least some) western countries, e.g., USA has actually started to increase in the past year or so in response to demand.
That's what I claimed, I'm happy you agree. This claim did not extend towards the rest of the world (so not like you claimed), the consensus among experts was that they would be increasing their coal consumption. This is also what happened.
> Coal production in (at least some) western countries, e.g., USA has actually started to increase in the past year or so in response to demand.
I don't think anyone missed the gas crisis.
It did ,because western countries export coal to the rest of the world.
Look if you can't admit you were parroting that coal was killed by renewables without any understanding of commodity boom/bust cycles or energy demand trajectory the world that's quite understandable it's difficult to face reality, but you don't have to keep at it.
As I said, coal production and consumption in the west has gone down. Coal plants and mines have closed. The trend is downwards. Do you really refuse to accept this when it's what the data says? This is quite worrying I must say, is there some ideological bias at play here?
> Look if you can't admit you were parroting that coal was killed by renewables without any understanding of commodity boom/bust cycles or energy demand trajectory the world that's quite understandable it's difficult to face reality, but you don't have to keep at it.
Coal is being killed by renewables, nuclear, hydro, gas, ... in the west. Whatever is cheaper tends to win out in the end. All you have to do is look at the data, I even linked it for you. Although it's experiencing a hiccup right now due to the gas crisis. It will obviously take a bit longer for the rest of the world to catch up, even without the current crisis.
You were wrong if you were reciting the popular prayer "coal is dead, killed by renewables" a few years ago. Hopefully you come to understand that and reflect on what that means for the credibility of the kind of sources you get your information from, and what that means for your ideas about nuclear and other things too.
Did you not claim:
>"coal is dead, killed by renewables." was said by people around 10 years ago and that this referred to the entire world?
I'm assuming people aren't just random Twitter users but actual reputable people.
I have provided a reputable source from 2010 that said that total coal consumption would rise and that this increase is due to an increased usage in the developing world. This is true today, see [0] so the prediction was on point. All you have to do is show us that a reputable source has claimed that coal was dead and that this referred to the entire world. Somewhere around 2010. This would settle the debate.
> You were wrong if you were reciting the popular prayer "coal is dead, killed by renewables" a few years ago. Hopefully you come to understand that and reflect on what that means for the credibility of the kind of sources you get your information from, and what that means for your ideas about nuclear and other things too.
Don't you think it would be really weird if I was supposedly reciting something that I say wasn't claimed in the first place? The claim you mention refers to the west and no real energy expert worth his or her salt would have claimed that this would be the case for the entire world. It's simply not possible for the developing world to do that. It wasn't possible in 2010, when the costs for renewables were much higher than they are now, and it isn't possible now.
I think the International Energy Agency is quite a reputable source? They do research and advice policy makers all around the world.
Also I'm a bit confused... My ideas about nuclear and other things? I'm not following here, what do you mean? And what does it have to do with the topic at hand?
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
They were just led astray by misinformation from special interests, and they were wrong.
The same people have also been claiming that nuclear is dead, killed by renewbales. Their credibility speaks for itself.
No need to reply with apologetics, or arguments about something I didn't say.
Renewables are more reliable. $10 will get you one watt of nuclear which will be off 10-40% of the time. $10 of solar + wind + storage will get you at least 1 watt every hour of the year in and at least 1W of variable power even in Germany or Canada at any scale from micro generation to 100s of MW.
As an example, in my zone, if someone provided 1x energy at 7pm, and I repaid that by providing 3x of that energy at 3am, I would still earn a profit of about 25%.
The price prognosis for tonight is even lower, so I could trade 1x for 6x and still make a nice profit from the price difference.
what does "beef" have to do with converting land to wind farms?
perhaps you could respond back with how solar panels are not actually very environmentally friendly? They produce a lot of toxic chemicals to manufacture.
Tell us, to replace 3,500 MW of nuclear power, how many acres of land must be converted to wind/solar? what is the environmental/social impact of doing this?
How much power is produced in a cold / dark winter via solar/wind vs nuclear.
Of course, they have cows, for milk, for the cheese industry that they do have. But raising dairy cattle has only a fraction of the impact that beef cattle do (as you're not constantly slaughtering them and feeding up new ones.)
We're seeing the hidden cost of renewable energy now, aren't we? Cheap because it's supplemented with natural gas to provide base load. If the politicians actually cared about the climate, they would be adamant about supplementing with nuclear, which is far far more energy dense.
We should definitely spend our money on a system that will provide 1W of baseload 60-80% of the time and require gas for the rest, rather than a wind+solar+storage system that will provide at least 1 watt 100% of the year and average 2-5W depending on location.
Boring but sensible answer:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
> Russia is one of the world’s biggest producers of oil, gas and coal. Continuous reliance on fossil fuels and delays to clean energy transition benefit Russia.
> Following on from this the Commission has put forward an additional proposal to speed up transition to clean energy sources by amending the directives on the Energy Performance of Buildings, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy[3].
For the build price of 1 watt of nuclear plant which will be at best 90% available (but more likely 60-80) you can get a solar/wind mix at retail micro generation prices further from the equator than 90% of the population with zero hours of producing less than 1 watt (much of which is dispatchable too) and 1 additional net watt of variable energy. Allow for the same availability as a nuclear reactor and the price is a fraction. Then for just the running costs of an already built nuclear you can pay the whole thing off before the reactor even opens. Give it five years and the LCOE of solar will be less than the fuel costs.
The solution was to stop wasting billions on nuclear and subsidizing fossil fuels and actually invest in renewable tech half a century ago.
Solar energy density is such that just covering structures and open paved areas in any region with less than 10k people per km^2 can cover average primary energy (not just electricity). It's far less than cattle grazing land or land used for fuel ethanol to greenwash the auto industry. The land use is a complete non-issue.
Well, let's see. Wind uses negligible land if incorporated onto farms, so I'll assume it's all solar.
Nuclear capacity factor (fraction of the time it's operating): 0.9, call it 100%.
PV capacity factor 0.2
PV nameplate panel production per square metre 200W
PV land coverage fraction (access paths beside PV panels take up space) 0.5
Total land needed for PV to deliver equivalent power:
3 500 000 000 / (200 * 0.2 * 0.5) = 175 000 000 m^2 = 175 km^2.
Switzerland's population is 8.5M. Assuming it is 80% urbanised and 20 m^2 per person in cities (less than in Dhaka, 8.9M / 306 km^2): then Switzerland's cities take up 136 km^2. In reality, probably several times this figure.
So the land area is probably less than Switzerland's cities.
If Switzerland wished to accelerate the development of two-layer PV cells, increasing production per area by 50%, then the bulk of the 3.5GW could be provided by rooftop solar in cities.
In reality a mix of wind and PV would be used. Wind is highly compatible with pastoral farming, leaving 90% or more of the land area it "occupies" free for grazing.
The real challenge at present would be sourcing enough storage for the daily usage cycle.
Now, damage. Covering land with inert PV panels does indeed change the soil ecology, but not irremediably. Remove the panels, and the soil would be back to normal inside a decade. Contrast with coal mines and ash piles, and uranium mines. And, as above, the PV could all be on rooftops, which have already damaged the land. Get rid of the buildings!
TLDR: the "LOT of land" is not much, really, and the damage is minimal.
Like you say, wind can be co-located on farms or other areas that are not otherwise economically useful, with minimal environmental obstruction. Something on the order of 99.99% of the acreage occupied by windmills can continue to be used for other purposes. Solar panels can also be efficiently and thoughtfully located.
Of course, they can also be located poorly as well but it's not something that's like definitionally baked into the technology, it's a matter of having good policy about siting.
It's quite well researched, and for someone who was also wondering why there is European aversion towards nuclear power, it showed me that it's not that simple. Nuclear power is quite inconvenient and not as magical "free energy" as it seems.