No country will be truly coal-free until they are a net energy exporter and they do not import any goods that use coal-based energy in their supply chain. Europe has de-industrialized which means it has effectively exported its coal burden.
Being coal-free is possible. Being fossil-fuel free is harder. Most of Irish energy comes from Natural Gas and Oil - the former is what supplanted Coal, not Wind.
In 2026, coal now provides 0% of the mix while wind provides 30% or more. Peat burning has also been fully phased out while oil (Tarbert) is in the process of being shut down while Moneypoint has been converted to oil but only participates in the capacity market - i.e. as an emergency/backup source - and so barely registers in the mix.
And even if coal was supplanted one-for-one with NG, it would still be a net win - by halving the CO2 intensity of generation as well as being far more flexible, scalable and much cheaper to deploy.
There is absolutely no good reason to burn coal for electricity or heat in this day and age. If we had sane global leadership, every coal power plant left would be treated as a WMD and be bombed harder than that Iranian fuel depot.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
They have more coal power plants planned and your data hickup worked out during recensions and covid.
- China is also decommissioning older plants.
- These new coal plants aren't running 24x7
- Peak coal usage is likely to be very soon in China (this year even according to some); after that coal usage flatten and start declining; all the way to a planned net zero in the 2060s.
The newer plants are designed to be more efficient, more flexible, and less polluting than the older ones. They are better at starting/stopping quickly/cheaply. Older coal plants used big boilers that had to heat up to build up steam before being able to generate power. This makes stopping and starting a plant slow and expensive. Because they consume a lot of fuel just to get the plant to the stage where it can actually generate power. The more often plants have to be stopped and started, the more wasteful this is. With the newer plants this is less costly and faster.
This makes them more suitable to be used in a non base load operational model where they can be spun up/down on a need to have basis. This is essential in a power grid that is dominated by the hundreds of GW of solar, wind, and battery.
This means that global consumption will decline too which coincides with both factories and power plants shutting down
https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn
Their existing grid uses coal because they have coal, just like the US uses gas because it has gas. And obviously as old coal plants are retired they're going to build new ones. They don't use the new plants for additional capacity. As they add more solar and storage, which they're building a lot of, they're going to absolutely crush the coal burning too. It's literally a national security issue for them.
China is more electrified than most Western nations and getting more so faster than Europe or the US:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-as-a-share-of...
Source? Does that take into account full life cycle (including manufacturing)?
This even compares cars built in an unrealistic 100% coal grid, and fuelled on 100% coal grid. Driving 14k miles a year for 10 years a Tesla Model 3 built under those extreme conditions beats a gas Fiat 500
But look at the data. They are building clean energy solutions at a faster rate than any other country on the planet - by a huge margin. Scaling clean energy solutions is what we need, and it has to be done alongside the gradual phase-out of coal and gas.
The population of China has been decreasing since 2022.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=population+of+china+is+decr...
Setting that aside, China has also dramatically pushed the electrification of their transportation sector like no one else. Considering BEVs and other electric modes of transport require less primary energy than fossil fuel equivalents, this checks out.
And if your minimum unit size is 1GW then you lose the flexibility to roll out the tech incrementally - the average modern coal plant requires 3 to 5 weeks per year for scheduled downtime for maintenance - so your first 1GW coal plant requires a bunch of other generation sources to cover demand during these periods.
Solar and batteries are the obvious solution for rural electrification: scaleable, cheaper/simpler to deploy - no large scale civil engineering involved, trivial to "operate", effective without the support of big transmission systems and it's possible to buy everything off-the-shelf.
Coal requires transport and extraction which are both pretty expensive processes.
In my home town of ~300 people, there was just a couple of houses which used coal for heating. That's because sourcing and transporting coal was quiet expensive.
Electric heating was much more common. Even the old expensive baseboard resistive heaters.
When we talk about extreme rural areas, what you end up finding is solar and batteries end up being the most preferred energy sources. This has been true for decades. That higher upfront cost is offset by not having to transport fuel.
It's why you'll find a lot of cabins in pretty remote locations are ultimately solar powered. This is long before the precipitous price drop of solar.
Last I checked mining and transporting coal required quite a lot of heavy industry equipment to do even vaguely economically.
If coal was cheaper and easier than other sources of energy, then the US would be building more coal power plants. But even with the Trump administration placing its weighty thumb on the scale to try and “save coal”. Coal plants are still being shutdown due to simple economics.
If existing plants can compete with renewables, to hard to understand how adding the cost of building new plants is going to change that.
The article also notes that solar and wind capacity grew significantly faster than actual generation, suggesting "unreported curtailment" (where clean energy is wasted because the grid can’t handle it). If curtailment is rising, it means the "clean energy boom" is hitting a hard infrastructure ceiling. The research assumes that if grid issues are resolved, emissions will fall further. However, if the grid cannot integrate this power fast enough, the 290GW of coal power currently under construction will be called upon to fill the gap, potentially leading to a sharp emissions rebound in 2026–2027.
Further, a major driver of the emissions drop is the 7% decline in cement and 3% decline in steel emissions, linked to the ongoing real estate slump. This is a cyclical economic event, not necessarily a green technological victory. If the Chinese government pivots to a new stimulus package (e.g. massive "New Infrastructure" or high-tech manufacturing zones) to save GDP growth, the demand for steel and cement could surge again. The research treats the real estate decline as a permanent plateau, but China’s history of state-led investment suggests that industrial emissions can be turned back on by policy shifts.
Further, the analysis focuses almost exclusively on CO2. China is the world's largest emitter of methane, primarily from coal mine leakages. Even if CO2 emissions from burning coal are flat, continued coal production to feed the coal-to-chemical industry (which grew 12% in this report) results in significant methane venting. If you account for the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of methane, the total greenhouse gas trend might look much less optimistic than the CO2-only trend.
Further, the report credits a 3% increase in hydropower for helping suppress coal. Hydropower in China is extremely volatile and dictated by weather patterns (e.g. the 2022–2023 droughts). A single dry year in the Sichuan or Yunnan provinces can force a massive, immediate pivot back to coal-fired power to prevent blackouts. The 21-month trend may be as much a result of favorable rainfall as it is of solar panels, making it fragile and reversible.
Further, the report highlights a 12% growth in emissions from the chemical industry, driven by coal-to-liquids and coal-to-gas projects. This suggests that China is not decarbonizing its economy so much as re-carbonizing its industrial feedstocks. As China seeks energy security to reduce its reliance on imported oil and gas, it is building a massive coal-based chemical infrastructure. These emissions are harder to abate than power sector emissions and could eventually offset the gains made by wind and solar.
Ultimately, China is still the largest polluter (in every sense of the word) by a large margin. It's nice to see them taking steps to curb this, but we should all remember that any environmental benefits are purely coincidental to their goals of energy independence. We should expect them to rely on a diverse mix of sources - including the 8+ "mega" coal power plants coming online every month.
To be fair, there's a large (~300mn) agricultural population in China who don't use developed country levels of energy. Nonetheless, this is still good.
I understand China has about twice the inhabitant of USA+EU but the same consumption based CO2, am I wrong?
Second, a lot of the EU stuff is already dead and only continues to exist through inertia. The median German cars and machine tools are worse than the median Chinese and they cost far more.
Third, those numbers often reflect the nebulous concept of "value added." Let's take the case of a refrigerator. Chinese company manufactures every technical part of the refrigerator and ships it to their EU business partner for €100. EU partner assembles it, fills it with foam, and sells it for €600. Most of the "value added" was in the EU! Win for the EU! Go EU manufacturing! The concept of "value added" is the basis for the entire EU VAT system and much of its economic indicators and incentives, while in the US it is almost never mentioned. This is also the source of the most hilarious comparisons (Greek manufacturing superior to the US per capita? χαχαχα)
If you want to cut through the bullshit, you have to look at actual things made. Among the US/CN/EU, who leads: Solar panels (CN), cutting edge chips (US), chipmaking equipment (EU), jet engines (US), aircraft (US), space launch vehicles (US), fighter jets (US), batteries (CN), nuclear reactors (CN), submarines (US), advanced missiles (US), cars (CN), CNC machines (CN), machine tools (CN), precision bearings and linear motion systems (CN), cutting edge medical equipment (US), gas turbines (US/EU), high voltage grid equipment (CN), telecom equipment (CN), construction equipment (US), ships (CN), advanced optics (EU), electric motors (CN), steel (CN), aluminum (CN), oil (US), cutting edge pharma (US), industrial robots (CN), wind turbines (CN), trains (CN), agricultural machinery (US/EU), drones (CN), smartphones (CN.) From that list, China leads eighteen, the US leads eleven, the EU leads two, and the EU and US are tied for two. And China is closing in fast on chipmaking. When China takes that crown, what will the EU have left?
Aircraft:
Airbus seems to be leagues ahead of Boeing, not just in the civilian market, but also in military aircraft. Just look at their competing modern military tankers: the Boieng KC-46 is a worse plane than the Airbus A330 MRTT, but had huge cost overruns and delays.
EU is also at the cutting edge in helicopters, in fact 3 of the 5 new classes of manned helicopters introduced by the US military in the 21st century are from the EU: the MH-139, UH-72 and TH-73.
Submarines:
The Swedish Gotland and Blekinge class, and the German type 212 are both ahead of anything the US has. Wrt. bigger submarines, I don't think there's enough public information to argue that the French Triomphant-class is worse than the US Ohio-class
Advanced missiles:
The IRIS family, MBDA MICA and MBDA Meteor are cutting edge, European air-to-air missiles. MBDA also has a set of modern long, medium and short range anti-shipping missiles: the Otomat, Exocet and Marte. And that's on top of the evolutions of the Saab RBS 15 and Kongsberg/Diehl/Nammo 3SM. And the Swedish Saab NLAW anti-tank missile has been very successful with Ukraine in the past four years.
Cutting edge medical equipment:
Medical equipment is a huge field and very diverse and specialized, so it's easy to miss the areas where the EU is cutting edge. Just some examples I know of:
Siemens and Phillips are still top dogs in MRI machines. Three of the top five hearing aid companies are Danish: Demant, GN Store Nord and WS Audiology[0]. German Karl Storz is _the_ world leader in urology equipment. Danish Ambu is _the_ leader in single use endoscopes. Finnish Planmeca is a leader in dental equipment and their subsidiary Planmed one of the top 3 mammography companies in the world. Danish 3Shape and German exocad are more-or-less the only choices in dental implant CAD/CAM. Just to give a few examples
High voltage grid equipment:
Europe has been constructing a lot wind farms, many of them off-shore, and a decent amount of high-voltage, international electricity connections in recent decades. Most of that has been with European-made equipment. Some of the companies manufacturing that in Europe: Danish NKT, German Siemens and Swiss/Swedish Hitachi Energy (formerly ABB Power Grids) are three I know on top of my head. And then there are companies like Alstom that makes all the infrastructure around electric rail.
Ships:
European navies use warships built in Europe and I've seen nothing to suggest they are worse ships than Chinese warships. So the technology and shipyards are there to produce cutting-edge merchant ships, it's just not cost-effective.
Electric motors:
I've seen nothing to suggest Chinese motors have surpassed anything Swiss/Swedish ABB or Simens motors can do. And there are a ton of smaller, specialized motor manufacturers, e.g. Danish Grundfos that makes specialized motors for pumps.
Steel, aluminum:
The EU is self-sufficient in steel. A quick list of major companies producing steel in Europe: Spanish Acerinox, Luxembourgish ArcelorMittal, Austrian Voestalpine, German ThyssenKrupp, Italian Riva Group, Finnish Outokumpo, German Salzgitter, Swedish SSAB and French Vallourec.
Wrt. aluminum, the EU isn't quite self-sufficient. But ~75% of the imports are from Norway, Turkey, Iceland and Switzerland. So it depends on your definition of Europe.
Oil:
Oil is a commodity. You don't really gain anything technologically from producing it yourself, on the contrary it's seen as almost a curse, re:Dutch disease and so.
Cutting edge pharma:
If there's any category of company that's permanent fixture of EU stock indexes, it's pharma. To give just one example, Biontech, developer one of the two main Covid vaccines, is German.
Wind turbines:
In wind turbines Danish Vestas is number one and Spanish/German Siemens Gamesa is number two. The Chinese are catching up fast, but they're still behind.
Trains:
Spanish Talgo, French Alstom and German Siemens are all world-class EU train companies. Stadler is world-class, but Swiss, so it could also count. Then there's Hitachi Rail Italy (formerly AnsaldoBreda). As a Dane, I'm unwilling to call anything related to AnsaldoBreda "world-class", but the driverless trains they have supplied to the Copenhagen Metro meet the mark.
So I'd argue that there's at least 10 more categories where the EU is at least tied.
0: the last two are Swiss Sonova and American Starkey.
I think that determining a leader is usually far more clear cut. The EU and its bureaucratic-media apparatus love to find abstractions and subjective ways to discuss and measure things, but in reality you can measure production in objective terms. The EU is about 3-5% of global shipbuilding tonnage vs. China's 50-70%. Similarly, China produces 54% of the world's steel and 59% of the world's aluminum; the EU produces 7 and 4% respectively. China has 72% of the wind capacity installed and 4 of the 5 top turbine manufacturers. They similarly dominate numbers for trains (track laid, total HSR track, rolling stock built) and electric motors (market share of drone motors, motor components, EV traction motors, for industrial electric motors the EU and US are at about a quarter of the world market vs. China at 35-40%.)
There are a few areas where things are more subjective. Medical equipment, pharma and high-voltage, I could see a case for current EU ties and I appreciate your perspective.
Aircraft is certainly for the US, though. The EU really only has Airbus and Leonardo. Nobody would disagree that the US wins by far for: fighters, stealth, UAVs, transport, business jets, experimental, VTOL, long range bombers, and yes, helicopters. You cannot compare the US (over 2,000 Black Hawks in the Army alone) to the EU (100 Black Hawks) - the EU has a lot of lightly armed utility helicopters, the US has a massive array of everything from stealth, attack, logistical etc. Yes, sure, Leonardo can design a cool light utility copter, but that is infinitely easier and far less significant than an attack or stealth helicopter. The EU's attempts at serious helicopters (NH90, Airbus Tiger) are mostly a joke. Unless you want to count the AW129? War breaks out, how many of those can Italy send? ...4?
The picture with submarines is similar. The US has an expeditionary nuclear submarine force that can operate around the globe. The EU can do minor regional things, poorly. The Gotlands are cool, but they are small and the Swedes made three (3) of them - thirty years ago.
>Oil is a commodity. You don't really gain anything technologically from producing it yourself
The benefits in peacetime may be limited to dollars, sure; in wartime it is life or death. I am no huge fan of oil but in 2026 it still makes up most of our energy and most of the things around us. I also don't see anyone seriously accusing the US economy of Dutch disease.
>As a Dane, I'm unwilling to call anything related to AnsaldoBreda "world-class"
Hah, +1 for the chuckle :) I am Dutch... ask us what we think of AnsaldoBreda!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Creek_flood
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_coal_slurry_spil...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_water_crisis
Have you ever seen the common medical advice that pregnant women should avoid eating more than a few servings of seafood every week, and avoid certain kinds entirely, because they’re all contaminated with mercury? A huge portion of that mercury comes from burning coal. How’s that for an exclusion zone?
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-ha...
So The "worst case scenario" for nuclear power is creating a new wildlife park free from human interference.
So The "worst case scenario" for nuclear power is creating a new wildlife park free from human interference [and emptying out half of Los Angeles]
Apso not sure if you are including coal mining, and all of the deaths and negative health outcomes as a result of the industry
Also there is a single case that happened from a non-western design. When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
It's our unique freedom-themed nonsense, not the Soviet dictatorial-nonsense, which means we have radiation standards strict enough that it's not possible to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without first performing a nuclear decontamination process due to all the radioisotopes in the coal.
That said, perhaps that's actually a problem with the coal plants rather than nuclear standards: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4
> When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Relative to coal, absolutely. But don't assume western countries are immune to propaganda on these things, nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.
The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm. An I do think the standards we apply are to extreme in many cases mostly dating back to this misunderstanding about radiation.
As for the locality to nuclear plants and cancer, this is as far as I know been shown in many countries and as far as I know at least can mostly be explained by nuclear plants usually being built in industrial areas that often used to have coal plants and other industry going on.
> nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.
Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context. In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.
And they don't have to be 'there' for public safety, they just need a good record on public safety and they do.
In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.
My parents who lived in central Europe during Chernobyl hate nuclear power, while believing lots of nonsense that was in the news back then.
I have no idea if that's true, but it sounds very plausible.
However, if it was true, it would make it very much easier for governments to justify big spends on pro-nuclear propaganda. I mean, the USA managed to make test-detonations into a tourism opportunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Las_Vegas#Atomic_te...
Yes indeed. But that wasn't why they were built*, and that safety comes with an enormous cost. Ironically not including the exclusion zone, even with that included the amortised cost is quite small, but rather all the things that Chernobyl didn't have but should've plus all the international inspections and regulations to make sure nobody's secretly got a weapons program, either deliberately or via organised crime.
* Even just plain simple diversity of energy supply is good, as per another comment I made on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47309196
> The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samosely
That's a tiny sample size, consisting of people who are in poverty (and already mostly elderly) and can therefore be expected to have unusual health outcomes. Which could be higher or lower cancer rates, depending on what else is going on. Like, cancer won't get you if you pickle your liver too hard first with moonshine.
Though yes, the linear relationship between radiation and harm is known to be an oversimplification.
> Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context.
Radioisotopes. They're really useful for a lot of stuff, but the options for making them are mostly "fission plant" or "particle accelerator". This includes but is not limited to weapons.
> In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.
The cheapest are cheap, but the average and the trend line says they're mostly now a worse option than PV+batteries. Your milage, as the saying goes, may vary, so I wouldn't be even mildly surprised if e.g. Alaska says "hydro and nuclear" given this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_electricity_genera...
> In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.
Indeed. It was terrible for the environment and general population health that we didn't have a huge roll-out of nuclear power up until the 2010s when renewables got interesting.
But unfortunately, although even the full cost (both monetary and to lives lost) of Chernobyl would, if amortised over all reactors, be much smaller than for fossil plants, the scale of that accident would have been an existential threat to many smaller nations. Arguably, it was existential damage to the USSR, even. People don't want to be subjected to someone else's game of Russian Roulette, not even when the overall odds of survival go up.
For that matter, it has killed many, many more than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan!
That is, nuclear power plants only kill people by radioactivity in the case of an accident. Coal power plants do it in normal operation. As well as coal dust having a PM2.5 dust problem which kills people.
Make it about nuclear vs coal because people say coal is better than nuclear because it's not scary radiation, and it actually is.
> "Both are bad"
Nuclear generates more power from a Kg of fuel, with less CO2 pollution and fewer deaths. It's not bad, but even if it was bad it's not "both sides", it's much less bad.
[yes coal disasters also kill hundreds of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster ]
I don’t think nuclear is the answer to things. But replacing every ounce of coal used for fuel with nuclear would still be a win.
I think that the last time I checked, when you take into factor the CO2 emissions and everything, Nuclear is the best source of Energy.
> I don’t think nuclear is the answer to things
I think that I am interested in seeing thorium based reactors or development with that too. That being said, Nuclear feels like the answer to me.
Feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong but I don't think that there is any better form of energy source than nuclear when you factor in everything.
No economy on the planet needs 24/7 peak power production. The times humans work correspond nicely with the times the sun is out.
Yes I agree but their extraction at scale is still very C02 Expensive.
> No economy on the planet needs 24/7 peak power production. The times humans work correspond nicely with the times the sun is out.
With Nuclear energy, let's face it. If you have a nuclear plant running, the input is just some uranium which we have plenty of. Thereotically we have no problem with running at peak power production.
You are also forgetting that Sun can be blocked during times of rains and Wind is unpredictable as well.
If you can work with solar panels only that's really really great. Unfortunately that's not how the world works or how I see it function :(
You are forgetting that markets operate after work and the late night culture and so many other things. You need lights at energy and quite a decent bit. You are also forgetting that if we ever get Electric vehicles then we would need energy during late night as well.
A lot of energy in general is still needed during nights and would we be still burning coal for that?
With all of this, I am not sure why you'd not like Nuclear?
We already have wires that cross continents to smooth out supply variations. It's exceedingly rare you get no sun and no wind over entire continents for an extended period.
> You are forgetting that markets operate after work and the late night culture and so many other things.
I'm not forgetting it, they just use less power.
You can see this easily in charts of supply/demand throughout the day: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook#section-net-demand-tren...
> A lot of energy in general is still needed during nights and would we be still burning coal for that?
Again, batteries.
I can be wrong but you would probably lose tons of efficiency even within High Voltage DC lines if everyday late night we take energy from different countries. Also this is getting outside of topic of discussion for me because one of the reasons we want Nuclear or Green energy in general is also the environmental plus the sovereign plus the long term affordability plans.
Another point from your first comment but if we run peak production in nuclear say in a country A, then the country A can also give power to Country B at late night similar to what you are proposed for solars.
> Again, batteries.
Once again, within my first comment I raise issue of battery. You mention a comment and I respond and then we get to batteries again.
I have no problem with solar at all without batteries but batteries really flip the equation in terms of environmental concerns.
My question is plain and simple, Why not Nuclear? I understand, I am not against Solar. Although environmentally, I feel like battery is a valid concern.
I am just saying that long term, Nuclear seems to be the better/best option. Why not Nuclear? That is a question which it seems that you may not have answered and that's a discussion worth having as well In my opinion too.
We can agree on this, correct?
Nuclear power is expensive, enough that “what about night” is solve by building extra solar and batteries. Also, renewables wreck the economics of base load power that needs to run all the time to pay back loan, but can’t compete with solar during the day.
Yes. Because they're the answer here.
> Also this is getting outside of topic of discussion for me because one of the reasons we want Nuclear or Green energy in general is also the environmental plus the sovereign plus the long term affordability plans.
Good luck with nuclear sovereignty, if that's your concern. How many uranium mines are in the UK?
> Why not Nuclear?
/me gestures at the last 50 years of historical evidence
"Why not try nuclear" is like "why not try communism?" for physics nerds. We have tried it.
I can't speak about UK but considering how cheap Uranium is, can UK not do cost analysis. Uranium is abundant material compared to Oil/Coal.
> /me gestures at the last 50 years of historical evidence
> "Why not try nuclear" is like "why not try communism?" for physics nerds. We have tried it.
Maybe, but I think that, I can speak about the problem within US which I can better explain but US had nuclear fearmongering attempts and Senators passed laws which increased regulations on it to the point that some regulations contradict past regulations.
Nuclear power plants being built on loan in such a flimsy regulatory market was what lead to the downfall essentially within US
Nuclear fearmongering and lobbying efforts from Oil Industry as they are one of the most strong opposers of nuclear energy[0]
Once again, how do I explain this but nuclear produces 3.2x less carbon emissions than Solar[1]
We are able to build hydropower plants, we are able to launch spaceships into moon and outer space. It's definitely possible to build nuclear if lobbying effort decreases.
I'd say that its our dependence on Oil and Coal which have been the problem. I have nothing against solar and that is something that I am saying from the start. At some point we should look towards transition towards nuclear as well. To give up on that would simply not be ideal.
[0]: https://climatecoalition.org/who-opposes-nuclear-energy/
[1]: https://solartechonline.com/blog/how-much-co2-does-solar-ene...
Wait until you hear how cheap and abundant sunlight and wind are!
Economically useful uranium deposits are only proven in a handful of countries.
> We are able to build hydropower plants, we are able to launch spaceships into moon and outer space. It's definitely possible to build nuclear if lobbying effort decreases.
This is the "well we haven't tried real communism" argument again.
I was going to ask you 3-4 questions but then I searched them upon myself and I do think that the results are more (positive?) than I thought.
Solar could feed world's energy needs by 0.3% and I think that Excess Solar could be used for green Hydrogen etc. too when needed for burstable energy source and smart grids in general to fix the ramp-up/ramp-down problem
I think one of the only things that I was sort of worried about mainly was the fact that Batteries produce lots of Co2 emissions and harm to the planet when mined but it seems that they have lifespan of about 10 years and can be carbon negative 3-4 years.
I don't know, I go through waves of doubt over Solar. I might need to learn more about Solar because I feel like I can just agree to whatever side I hear the recent data's from. Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics it seems.
But I feel like although solar is right direction too, we probably need smarter grids and just improvements within grid infrastructure in general too. Another point about Solar could be that there can be a more personal adoption of it whereas I can't build my own nuclear power plant so I do agree with you.
I'd still say that there is a lot of greenwashing in the Climate Change community to treat wood-chips and trees as fuel source and all the problems that stem from that with timber industry.
So although there are short-comings in Solar given its intermittent nature. I do agree that unless Govt.s create nuclear, it could be a good bet for personal actions/ even Govt.s to diversify at the very least from Oil.
I still think that though there is something wrong where People are wrongfully worried about nuclear. India for example had 3% of its energy coming from Nuclear and I looked at wiki and we planned even more but anti nuclear protests started happening after Fukushima Disaster :(
I am still really interested about Thorium Reactors and the race towards building it though. They are mostly disaster-free and Indian in particular has quite a large reserve of Thorium (25% of the world supply). The govt. is working on making 100GW to raise thorium's ratio in energy to almost ~10% estimate from 3% till 2047 which would still be impressive given that total energy would skyrocket as well till then.
India has true chances of being Energy Independent long term if it focuses on nuclear and Solar both rather than focusing on Solar given any advancement in Thorium reactor will be huge for us. For reference Coal : Thorium power ratio for same mass is 1:3.5 Million and its even more efficient than Uranium.
Also Thorium cannot be used for Nuclear Bombs in the sense of a fission unless you drop it at someone complete point blank but at that point its worthless compared to missiles so we can genuinely share this technology all across the world.
Thorium Reactors long term feel the future to me. So maybe I am too bullish on Thorium.
Solar is nice but atleast personally, Investments in Thorium Reactors could make India Energy Independent given 25% of the supply. We also recently found a huge jackpot in lithium and other minerals in Kashmir recently so I suppose long term India can be sovereign in manufacturing batteries for Solar production as well.
There is such a massive possibility in nuclear especially more so for India and general consensus also being within Scientific community that nuclear energy is cleanest forms of energy. The Combination means that, I'd want my govt. to take some risks in nuclear research/projects given how big the reward can be and that's also why I vocally support Nuclear. Much more than Solar. But I'd say that any govt. has their own risk profile and maybe Solar can be boring but works technology for Energy Independence so I just hope that Solar & Thorium both show some good numbers long term as well. So it isn't as if I am anti Solar as much as I am very pro nuclear energy long term.
Relevant Video: Thorium Reactors: Why is this Technology Quite So Exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSFo_92cJ-U
Is there any particular reason why you think Nuclear is bad in all honesty as its worth having a discussion here? Why do you feel Nuclear Energy is a hazard?
I understand if you feel Chernobyl or any event makes it sound dangerous but rather, Please take a look at this data on the number of death rates per unit of electricity production[0]
Oil is roughly 615x more deadly than nuclear. Nuclear, Solar and Wind (the renewables) are all less deadly and are 0.03,0.02 and 0.04 respectively and nuclear is a reliable source of energy source which can be used in actual generation.
Nuclear is very much a green energy. I'd like to hear your opinion about it.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Even within Chernobyl Disaster, it was a series of mistakes which led to the full scale disaster IIRC so it isn't as if a single mistake
Also Thorium based Nuclear Reactors wouldn't have this issue from what I understand as in the idea of explosions or anything,
> Nuclear plants are great if they actually happen to get built
I get this part but shouldn't this mean that people should be more vocal about support for Nuclear. We are vocal about support for Solar, might as well be vocal about support for Nuclear and Solar both too?
And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues.
Right. One thing I've rarely heard emphasized is that, while nuclear power is not at all the same as nuclear weapons, it's still infrastructure that can be repurposed from one to the other. A world where nuclear is the predominant base load power source is a world where nuclear weapons are more accessible due to the proliferation of sibling technologies.
I don’t understand what you mean by “no learning curve”. Do you mean that the learning curve is particularly steep for plant operators?
We make too few nuclear power plants for them to have a noticeable learning curve, and recently each subsequent one ends up more expensive than the latest, notably because of safety regulation. Korea and I think China had the best success in that regard (and France in the 80s) by being able to make real series, but you don't really see those now except maybe China.
More here: https://ourworldindata.org/learning-curve
And people are (mostly irrationally) terrified of it, which matters in democracies.
When multiple systems are combined the percentage of things filtered out is:
Pollutant Typical removal Dust / particulate matter 99–99.9%+ Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) 90–98% Nitrogen oxides (NOx) 70–90% Mercury 80–95%
I will happily trade 10 unit of energy for just a single unit of energy, assuming I get to decide when I give the 10 units and when I can demand the 1 unit. A lot of profit in the European energy market can be made by such a "bad" deal.
The date when a country energy grid is free from fossil fuels, like coal, is when the grid has no longer any demand during the year for producing or importing energy produced by fossil fuels.
Noah also tries to refute the perception that manufacturing is in decline in the US, but he doesn't adjust per-capita and doesn't account for the obvious fact that major US exports are looking more and more like raw materials and less like finished goods, while imports are the other way around. Aircraft and ICs used to compete for top spot on the US export list. Since 2008 it's petroleum and oil.
But: EU is the only effective player in the world that drives energy policy outside its borders, by being a massive market with regulatory power regarding its imports.
If you look at three figures: energy use per capita, emissions per capita, and GDP per unit of energy/emissions, and include imported consumption, the EU's are all trending in a positive direction for many years now.
So stating the EU has de-industralized and its progress on shutting down coal is therefore 'fake' and misleading because it imports its industrial consumption from other countries to which it has simply offloaded its emissions, isn't true.
If major advanced economies are able to move their entire grid away from coal, it means the entire grid globally can move from coal.
"Ah", the critics say, "but manufacturing is so much more complex!"
Really? These are not countries without manufacturing. They have data centres stacked with the latest generation of Nvidia chips, electric rail, major capital cities, populations of millions...
... and of course, China agrees and is trying to move towards decarbonisation of their grid.
Yes, it'll take time, but it'll take even longer if you never start.
I mean, the UK proudly trumpets that they're coal-free, while entertaining a new coking coal mine.
Electric power—469.9 MMst—91.7%
Industrial total—41.9 MMst—8.2%
Industrial coke plants—16.0 MMst—3.1%
Industrial combined heat and power—10.1 MMst—2.0%
Other industrial—15.8 MMst—3.1%
Getting down to 6% of our current coal use would be amazing. So much lung cancer and asthma would be prevented.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php
Even if some of that replacement is with gas it still helps. Gas emits about half the carbon per kWh.
This is generally overstated. Emissions imported or exported via trade are significantly smaller than domestic emissions for almost every country. In the EU vs China case, accounting for imported/exported emissions basically changes which of the two is doing better, but emission levels are pretty close to begin with (US is already doing significantly worse than China either way).
For China, we are talking about ~1 ton/person/year from trade (in favor of China), while local emissions are at ~8 tons/person/year [1].
You make a valid point, but looking at the actual numbers it turns out that this makes (surprisingly) little difference.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
The whole conversation about clean energy is polluted by the complete misunderstanding of the general population of how energy demands are balanced. Saying you're replacing coal and gas with wind is just nonsense. It's one solution to a bigger problem. The big problem is how to balance your grid across peaks and troughs and that requires a diverse set of clean energy solutions, with wind being one small part of it.