Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

We got a whiff of that in Berlin a few weeks ago when we got some cold wind from the east. Really noticeably bad air quality when I went outside to enjoy the snow and the cold. When I checked the map, I saw that we are basically getting Poland's pollution blowing our way. Most of the time the winds blow from the west and it's fine. Berlin has a bit of traffic but not a lot of coal plants or industry. It would be better if it got rid of a lot of the heavy diesel traffic in the city. That's slowly happening. But it's not that bad here most of the time.

The point of pollution is that it stinks (literally) and is bad for your health. Pollution kills people, shortens expected life times by years, causes respiratory issues for children, etc. Those are some good reasons to do something about it. There are good alternatives to coal at this point. Mostly this is just inefficient legacy infrastructure that we pay extra for to keep going to "protect jobs". From a macro economic point of view, that stopped making sense quite some time ago. Which is why coal plants are going extinct in a lot of places.

Even gas plants are a big improvement. I think of them as a stop gap solution that might be economically risky long term. Wind, solar, and batteries are cheaper. Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean). However, gas plants are undeniably a pragmatic compromise between cost and polluting. Unlike nuclear they are easy to switch off when not needed and can act as a fallback solution when wind/solar fall short in the winter. LNG is not cheap though and that makes gas plants long term risky as renewables plus batteries marginalizes their use to the point where they are deeply unprofitable.

There's a base load argument that often pops up in these discussions. Gas plants are nice because they can be switched off. Base load is basically the type of power that is expensive to switch off. Mainly coal and nuclear. This is actually problematic in a grid with a lot of intermittent power supply (wind/solar). Dispatchability is more important. Gas power is good because it is rapidly dispatchable. Batteries act as a buffer and minimize the need for gas plants to run.

Baseload doesn't characterize power plants but demand. For PP the relevant terms are firm power/firming and modulation. Firm power is anything from hydro to thermal plants. But modulation capacity and costs are different. Hydro is extremely good in both regards. Nuclear and gas are about on par in terms of modulation speed (depends on models on both sides) but gas is cheaper to use as peaker. On the other hand gas, esp LNG is expensive and will become even more so with CO2 tax increase. Coal is slower to modulate, but very cheap to operate without co2 tax and very expensive with tax enforced. That's why coal is going away- co2 tax is making even lng cheaper than some coal units to run

Ren per unit are cheap but transition will still cost a lot, incl all relevant infra around them. Some countries can afford going faster, like Germany, others will go slower. It's hard to say now how things will pan out due to increasing geopolitical instability which can cause funds reallocation for say military or other sectors

That's completely made-up. And also - nobody "smells" pollution from Poland in Berlin. Even AI would not generate this erroneous claim.

> Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean).

And that's also made up. What is "clean" here? Radioactivity? Also if you refer to carbon cost, you have to calculate in EVERYTHING including mining and transport. So no, it is not clean - that is a lobbyist dream to claim otherwise.

Nuclear requires least mining and materials over lifecycle vs any alternative so in this regard it's clean.

It has low land footprint as a bonus point

It outputs comparable or even smaller waste volumes vs alternatives per kwh over lifecycle. Both nuclear and renewables do create toxic waste over lifecycle. For eg ren do use much more copper both internally and for the grid. Copper mining is associated with arsenic and other dangerous chemicals that must be isolated forever, otherwise you get nasty spills like recently in Africa.

To sum it up, yes, nuclear is as clean as any good ren alternative

Coal does not magically materialize either, it needs ot be mined, transported, processes and then transported some more. You'd have to account for that in order to make a fair comparison.

You may also want to take into account how localized and preventable the emissions are. In this particular case, burning fossil fules to heat up homes, already implies no expensive filtration systems, because installing them would be a private investement and one that likely makes no sense given they could equally well replace coal furnace with gas one for less the price.

What's more important is Poland has one of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Even accounting the downsides, it totally makes sense to replace the base of the energy mix with nuclear power and leave coal/gas for when there's a shortage of power. At that point moving to electical heating should make the actual, both financial and envioronmental, cost of inevitable emissions more 'efficient' and manageable. So two ghouls with one rod?

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