Growth in german wind capacity is slowing. Soo… then the plan is to keep on with lignite and gas? Am I missing something?
Installed Wind Capacty - Germany
Don’t import Reddit’s extremely ignorant takes on nuclear power here, please. Nuclear power is a huge waste of money.
If you’re about to angrily downvote me (or you already did), or write an angry reply, please read the rest of my comment before you do. This is not my individual opinion, this is the scientific consensus on the issue.
When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.
If you’re about to lecture about “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, save your keystrokes - the majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable. Again, this isn’t my opinion, you can look it up and find a dozen sources to back up what I am writing here.
This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream of thorium fusion breeding or whatever other potential future tech someone will probably comment about without reading this paragraph.
Again, compared to nuclear, renewables are:
- Cheaper
- Lower emissions
- Faster to provision
- Less environmentally damaging
- Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
- Decentralised
- Much, much safer
- Much easier to maintain
- More reliable
- Much more responsive to changes in energy demands
Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. It is 100% worth researching for future breakthroughs. But at present it is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.
Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on nuclear power should be spent on renewables instead.
Wow I’m surprised to see people are actually downvoting you and arguing about this. It’s common knowledge that the cost, impact, and build-time of new nuclear plants makes them a poor choice for energy. Not only is wind/ solar cheaper, it’s faster to build.
Redditors are unbelievably brainwashed in this topic, and a lot of Redditors moved over to Lemmy. I have dragged this metaphor to water countless times before, and when I suggest that they could consider drinking, they just arrogantly declare that I don’t understand the facts around liquids, that I don’t have any basis for my claims that they should drink it, and that by arguing that people should drink more water, I somehow supporting Coca-Cola.
It’s also common knowledge that the more often you build something, the lower its price tends to go as that knowledge spreads. It’s part of the reason it’s so expensive to build trains in the US and so cheap in South Korea and Spain.
This famously isn’t true for nuclear power. It just keeps getting more expensive.
The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526
And this research was done before Fukushima, which increased costs even further.
This is just more reasons to prioritise the already cheaper renewables, isn’t it?
I feel like climate change makes this a yes and situation.
It is not a yes and, because urgency favors renewables even more. If it wouldn’t be for bureaucratic and political hurdles, from planning to operation is about 2 years for onshore wind and solar sites. For things like retrofitting a small solar plant on a residential or industrial building it can be as short as three months and for balcony solar power as a small hobby project it is as little as a day of planning + the delivery time + a day of installation.
Nuclear plants on the other side take minimum a decade, more likely two decades and that is despite strong political and bureaucratic support that is needed to get it going at all. Otherwise with citizens protest it would stay in court indefenitely.
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Also worth noting are the centralization and security risk aspects of nuclear
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by these. Can you expand on that? (I mostly mean the centralization, but also looking for clarity on what you mean by security)
For centralisation - large areas of the grid are dependent on a few locations, so if there is an issue with one or two areas, the entire network can fail. Say for example if there is an earthquake which disables two nuclear power plants, that could cause massive issues with the grid.
If you have many small power sources distributed across a larger area, it significantly mitigates the issue - the loss of even dozens or hundreds of wind turbines would be able to be handled much more responsively.
Nuclear is uniquely disadvantaged at having very bad responsiveness to demand. Renewables are extremely good at that, coincidentally.
For security, I’m sure you can imagine many scenarios, but nuclear waste is a potential target for creating dirty bombs for example.
First off appreciate the good faith response. It’s more than I’ve come to expect when I ask (probably) dumb questions requesting further explanation.
Coming from an American perspective, I’ve only recently realized just how badly centralization affects the grid. It’s definitely a strong case for rooftop solar.
But focusing on nuclear, I do think we’ve missed the window where building top-to-bottom nuclear generating facilities would be advantageous, but in the effort to bridge from our heavily fossil fuel based electrical grid to a completely renewable, I think that SMRs are a reasonable solution. I especially like the notion of converting old infrastructure (i.e. old abandoned coal plants) into SMR power plants.
You seem to be knowledgeable and have opinions. What’re you’re thoughts on SMRs to help bridge the growing energy need?
Unfortunately simply using renewables alone is t enough to decentralize them. Lately Texas has been having near energy shortages and part of the problem is a few unexpected central outages at fossil fuel plants, but another is the vast majority of wind turbines are built in one sunset of the state, so if wind is low there it can (and has) cause massive decreased in available energy, far larger than a couple traditional large scale nuclear plants when other parts of the state are under fire warnings because of high wind and dry conditions. Of course this isn’t an issue with the technology itself, but rather a problem with implementation. The issue isn’t with what was built, but the lack of building more across the state (or joining one of the two larger grids to further decentralize power production over a broader area)
Anyways, another issue with security is centralized power production make a good target for disruption. And if you have the side effect of causing a meltdown…
Man, the US is a total mess. Why does Texas have a separate power grid? If the US invested in renewables and energy infrastructure they would easily become the #1 renewable energy producer in the world. They have so many ideal geographical features it’s absolutely crazy how much they’re going to waste.
Ironically, I seen the claim that the original reason was because the US grid was outdated and Texas wanted to do better. Probably back when people who called themselves “conservatives” actually cared at little bit about conserving the environment (at least in some self-interested ways). Of course it didn’t work out that way.
No clue why the rest of the US is divided into two grids.
Nuclear is uniquely disadvantaged at having very bad responsiveness to demand. Renewables are extremely good at that, coincidentally.
Can you explain to me how you adjust renewable to the demand ? How can you increase the amount of sun or wind in the evening when there is a peak of demand?
For the nuclear you can go from 100% to 20% or the opposite in less 30 minutes. It can also follow the load and have a variation of 5% in 30s.
100% to 20% in 30 minutes, huh? Even if that’s true - I doubt even a quarter of all nuclear power plants in use today can accomplish that - all wind turbines in the world can go from 100% to 0% in a matter of seconds, with no human intervention.
Wind turbines are actually surprisingly complex machines with many ways to control the power generation, for all important metrics: voltage, power, frequency, etc.
Essentially the main variables at play are rotational torque and rotor speed, and there’s a lot of ways to control those variables. For example, the rotor can be rotated to face the wind at the ideal angle, or the pitch of the blades can be tweaked. There are also components quite like those you’d find in a car - brakes, clutch, gearbox, etc. which control the rotor speed and rotational torque. All of these systems are intelligently controlled and responsive, and allow very fast response to changes in demand or weather conditions without human input.
Solar panels, similarly, can be angled - commercial solar farms are usually motorised. This is mostly done so the panels can track the sun, making them much more efficient, but it also means they can be angled away from the sun, if need be, to reduce output. In reality, this isn’t really done, because it’s easier to control wind - solar provides baseline power and wind builds on top of that and adds responsiveness.
It takes a lot of money, planning, and technical know-how to build a nuclear power plant, especially a safe one. It isn’t like a new nuclear company can just pop into existence, and start offering reactors for sale.
Traditional nuclear reactors are, therefore, a technology that requires a lot of centralization to implement. Only nation-states and huge corporations can assemble the resources to construct them.
Compare that to wind or hydro-electric power. You can build a generator with some wire and magnets yourself, so you could call them more decentralized.
This might be changing with modular reactors, I don’t know.
- Citation Needed
You can have this copy/paste from like 5 minutes of googling. You can also run your own study yourself by just googling “average kwh price nuclear” and “average kwh price wind” and see how it looks. You can also google “average co2 eq emissions total lifetime nuclear” and likewise for wind/solar PV. This is extremely simple stuff, guys. I am basically saying, “lentils are cheaper than steak” and you’re asking for citations.
2022 Electricity ATB Technologies and Data Overview, annual technology baseline:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
Wow look isn’t it crazy how nuclear is the most expensive one?
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report: “Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build. When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant.”
Differences in carbon emissions reduction between countries pursuing renewable electricity versus nuclear power, published in nature energy: "We find that larger-scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to associate with significantly lower carbon emissions while renewables do. "
This chart is from the “Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems,” I wonder whether they might be a wee bit biased. It also puts the “consequential cost to health, environment and climate” of nuclear as higher than coal, which is bananas, and their data on lifecycle carbon emissions from nuclear comes from a noted anti-nuclear group (and the article even admits as much).
“When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant.” Cool, let’s start building a whole bunch of them right now and then worst-case in 20 years we’ll have too much electricity.
“In the next 10 years, nuclear power won’t be able to make a significant contribution” I appreciate your optimism but we are deeeeeefinitely not going to come anywhere close to phasing out fossil fuels in power generation in 10 years; we’re not even going to be done with fossil fuels on days that are particularly sunny in the solar cell areas and particularly windy in the wind power areas.
Why would we waste money on nuclear when we could build renewables instead? It makes NO sense. Renewables are cheaper and cleaner.
Because nuclear is pretty cool whereas renewables are less awesome. Think about it, the nuclear symbol ☢️ is much more interesting and cooler than the renewable ♻️ symbol. We all know this is what really matters.
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Well now you’re back to arguing about new construction instead of keeping existing plants running.
Also, we can build both. Surely you appreciate that there are other factors slowing the speed of the energy transition besides the availability of capital, and that while nuclear has its own roadblocks, many of them are different from + don’t overlap or compete with those standing in the way of renewables.
Capital (money) and capital (political) are the only roadblocks between us and a 100% renewable future. So no, there’s no value to wasting either of those on nuclear when they could be more wisely proportioned to renewables. Pretty much the only resource that nuclear consumes that isn’t consumed by most renewables would be uranium. I’m willing to just go ahead and say we can leave that one in the ground.
They’re really not, and if you think that then you need to read more. And “political capital” isn’t some big fungible pool of quatloos, it’s a lot of little tiny stupid slow fights.
The Fraunhofer ISE is a reaseach institut with a focus on solar. It is very well respected and I would be very suprised if they where biased here.
Not my optimism, that’s a quote from an industry expert, actually. But sure, whatever you say.
and this is a short intro to why a (60%/40%) split between renewables and nuclear may be the most accessible fossil free solution, and why the value of adding more variable renewables to a grid falls sharply the closer you get to 100%.
Also, the last article you posted is paywalled.
I hate when people say “stop importing it from Reddit” like half of us didn’t migrate from there.
What the fuck did you expect to happen? Reddit didn’t believe that. The users that participated in the site did.
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Please stop posting
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Oh no, please allow me to explain. See my comment was just about how a lot of the ideas from Reddit are likely from the users who came from there. While I do not include myself in that group because I do support nuclear; you cannot deny the fact that those ideas did get carried over.
Complaining about Reddit is pointless because you aren’t addressing the root cause of the issue which is educating people.
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I’m educating you, amn’t I? Free of charge, no less.
Based on this interaction I’d rather pay someone else for it 🤣
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not with some far-off dream of thorium fusion breeding
Thorium reactors were made those in the 60s, they weren’t pursued because thorium can’t make nuclear bombs.
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ignoring the redditspeak, you haven’t addressed my point at all.
You didn’t really make a point, you randomly mentioned that Thorium reactors were made in the 60s and stated something irrelevant to do with nuclear weapons. I don’t care whether Thorium was or was not researched, nor why that may or may not have been the case - Thorium-based nuclear reactors are not at present a viable source of electricity generation.
A 2010 National Nuclear Laboratory report concluded the thorium fuel cycle ‘is likely to have only a limited role internationally for some years ahead’ and concluded claims for thorium were ‘overstated’.
Even if thorium technology does progress to the point where it might be commercially viable, it will face the same problems as conventional nuclear: it is not renewable or sustainable. And that’s A LONG way off.
“A 2010 National Nuclear Laboratory report” “for some years ahead”
It’s 2023, “some years ahead” is, y’know, now. 13 is “some.” Quite a few, actually.
Yeah, your 1960s thorium technology is way more timely.
however once its technology matures
Yeah, it’s still commercial-scale, not a “pipe dream” or “not viable with current tech.”
“not viable” is different from “impossible”, it just means that it’s gonna be too expensive and not worth doing compared to, yknow, just spending the money on renewables instead.
The article itself said it’s still counting in future tech advances. Just because the alpha test is done at full size is different than being commercial scale imo. But we shouldn’t even be judging power plants success on how well they can make profits, so whether it’s commercial scale or not should not be relevant. Unfortunately it is, but the article gives no indication that it is commercially viable with current tech. Just that it physically exists.
Nobody is saying that a thorium reactor can’t be built, I’m saying it’s a waste of money, energy, time and resources that would be better spent on renewables, and that the energy produced would be both more expensive and more environmentally damaging than the same power generated by renewables.
Based on what? And how can you possibly make that claim with any confidence if nobody’s built one until now?
nobody’s built one until now
They’ve been a technology that we’ve known about since the 1960s… we determined in the 60s it wasn’t as efficient as uranium.
We also determined in the 1960s that solar power was a pipe dream and it would never be efficient enough on a large scale to be worth investing in.
Maybe don’t use an Appeal to Antiquity.
Again, this isn’t my opinion, you can look it up and find a dozen sources to back up what I am writing here.
Although I agree with this comment, this is exactly what the covidiots said. “Just google it”. If you want us to believe your controversial opinion, you’re going to want to take the time to add the most credible sources you can find to back you up.
The difference between my comment and a COVID denial comment is that if you googled covid denial arguments you’d find that 99.999% of results refute their claims. If you do the same for my claims, you’ll find the exact same sources that I used to make my arguments on the top page of the search results. It’s not the same.
If you used sources to make your argument it’s not so hard to add them to your comment. Makes it just that much harder for people to call you out like what just happened.
You know that I didn’t decide to just find out this stuff immediately before commenting, right? It’s not like I was searching this stuff up while I was writing my comment. I have learned about this over time by reading lots of sources, and I was trying to pass along what I have learned. That’s all.
The information I shared is not under any serious debate. For example, if I told you about the theory of evolution, would you ask me to source my claims? It’s established science. While I understand that others don’t have the education, knowledge and experience that I do, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask people who are interested in discussing a topic to do the bare minimum to inform themselves?
Unfortunately I haven’t kept notes and sources of everything I’ve read throughout the course of my life, but I can remember the findings, and I knew that I could find sources to back up my claims. Which, after being pushed for sources, I provided. Thereafter, the pro-nuclear trolls just start moving deckchairs around and continue to just spread disinformation.
No one has “called me out”, what do you refer to? Which claim do you think I have been pushed on that I have not satisfactorily debunked? I’m happy to run another class if there’s something you don’t understand?
…Nuclear power is a huge waste of money…
…this is the scientific consensus on the issue.
A battery of tests were performed on the economics of mitigating the impending climate disater. These tests indicated that nuclear is a huge waste of money (p<0.05) (Blake, 2023)
Hahaha :)
I’m on my phone, dude, I’m not gonna juggle a dozen sources on this tiny screen and crappy keyboard just to prove you wrong, you’re more than capable of using Google to find the facts yourself. I challenge you to prove me wrong. You can even cite some hilariously biased source like World Forum of Nuclear Investor Funds or something, those ones are always fun because they’re like “oh with our super cool advanced new nuclear reactor that doesn’t exist, it’s as good as solar or wind for almost 150% of the cost!! :)”
And the argument vanishes into thin air…
2022 Electricity ATB Technologies and Data Overview, annual technology baseline:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
Wow look isn’t it crazy how nuclear is the most expensive one?
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report: “Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build. When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant.”
Differences in carbon emissions reduction between countries pursuing renewable electricity versus nuclear power, published in nature energy: "We find that larger-scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to associate with significantly lower carbon emissions while renewables do. "
I mean IDK if Rueters meets your rigorous standards for journalistic excellence (or why you can’t just google something so simple) but here you go new nuclear is more expensive and and worse for the environment than renewables.
I agree with you on nuclear being more expensive as all facts point that way and future nuclear technology, but i dont understand how we could transition to a 100% renewable energy sector, It would be good if you could give a citation or explanation for that. Diverse and distributed source is how we get an energy secure grid, renewables could help with the distributed source part, but when it comes to diversity the popular renewable technologies wind and solar are very limited, both of these source cant power a base load without batteries (this applies mostly to solar, but wind too has low output at night). Also there is this issue witj managing generation and demand (Nuclear too have issue with this as its not possible to quickly adjust nuclear power generation like other conventional spurce). A full renewable energy grid would depend on batteries, currently we have much limitation with batteries. Mature technologists of acid based batteries require huge areas, and lithium based ones would require rare lithium which its mining alone would cause alot of pollution, and relying on other alt battery technology itself would be a long stretch as its development and commercialisation to usable form would take years to achieve as the same case afforable future nuclear technology.
Other alt renewable energy like geothermal could help with base load (not sure, someone could correct me if this is not the case), but itsnt possible everywhere. The same goes for tidal plant as it depends on geography and specific time of day. With this scenarios if we were to move to a 100% renewable grid then, the price for energy will increase at night time in a way that i think could reach nuclear energy rate.
A 100% renewable grid would need a lot of batteries and that too could drive the price up and possibly contribute to climate change. Also solar panel manufacturing is a very intense process with a lot of carbon impact, i read this on a text during my academics (havent checked the source for this other than that).
Also solar panel manufacturing is a very intense process with a lot of carbon impact
The carbon impact mostly is energy used in production. So it’s high when you produce solar panels powered by shitty coal plants and basically non-existent when you have build them once and are constructing replacements with solar energy. (The same is true for nuclear btw and also often completely misrepresented in discussion. Nuclear plants in a country full of nuclear plants have a much lower carbon footprint. That’s not some technological or scaling effect as often claimed but the simple fact of building the reactor and enriching the fuel with energy already green)
A 100% renewable grid would need a lot of batteries and that too could drive the price up
Actually no. The grid would need batteries (but also alternatives like capacitors or fly-wheels) for short-term stabilisation, but the amount is limited. The grid also need long-term storage but here batteries are completely inadequate. Also the requirements for batteries are usually misrepresented. No, we don’t neen some bullshit Lithium-ion batteries or similar stuff requiring rare earths and other rare ressources. Those are used in handhelds where energy density is the main concern. I can perfectly build a stationary grid battery cheaply and without rare ressources as nobody cares if that building-sized installation is 5% bigger and 30% heavier than a build with lithium-ion batteries and also gets 20° hotter in operation… because it’s not a handheld.
Case in point: One of the very first things that happened in Germany the moment the new government was sworn in and long before they could actually do anything: energy companies started installing the first battery-based storage units as they now were no longer intentionally sabotaged in creating storage infrastructure for renewables. What did they use? Car battereis. Used ones that were already deposed. Dirt cheap for costs barely above the recycling value. Because the requirements in grid stabilisation and short-term storage are indeed completely different that in cars (again: energy densitiy vs. low price and car batteries with only 60% of their capacity left were completely okay for that job).
Thanks for the comment, you make some great points :) by the way, you should look into non-electrical power storage - pumped storage is the most common, 99% of electrical storage is pumped storage. Essentially, a volume of water is pumped from a low basin to a high basin, converting electrical energy into gravitational potential energy. Then when energy demands exceed supply, the water is allowed to flow back down, and the flow is used to turn a generator, converting the kinetic energy into electrical energy. It’s approximately 80% efficient. It’s less responsive than on-grid electrolytic batteries but all you need is water and simple materials, it’s easy to maintain and has a much longer duty cycle than lithium ion or sealed lead electrolytic batteries and even capacitors - which are too expensive for real on-grid storage solutions, and the benefits of capacitors (high current) aren’t really needed or even desirable for the grid.
Here a paper on the base load.
Also solar panels power amortization time is around a year, depending on cell chemistry, production and installation location.
Demand sheduling.
The current grid is run on the idea that we ramp up power plants until the current demand is met.
The future will be to make the demand flexible and follow the availability. Typical example is when to charge a car battery, but it also goes for heating and cooling applications, using power to x converters, like hydrogen production, sheduling household appliances like washing machines and industrial processes.
Doing so we can close the gap between real baseload and available renewable supply, which in turns reduces the amount of storage needed.
I wrote a larger comment addressing this, but honestly, you’d be better just googling it. It’s eminently plausible, it’s the industry consensus. Here’s a Wikipedia link for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
Some argue that transitioning to 100% renewable energy would be too slow to limit climate change, and that closing down nuclear power stations is a mistake.[122][123]
“Nuclear power must be well regulated, not ditched”. The Economist. 6 March 2021. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 31 January 2022. McDonnell, Tim (3 January 2022).
“Germany’s exit from nuclear energy will make its power dirtier and more expensive”. Quartz. Retrieved 31 January 2022.
In November 2014 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with their fifth report, saying that in the absence of any one technology (such as bioenergy, carbon dioxide capture and storage, nuclear, wind and solar), climate change mitigation costs can increase substantially depending on which technology is absent.
Thanks for your sources which support my claims.
Some argue that transitioning to 100% renewable energy would be too slow to limit climate change, and that closing down nuclear power stations is a mistake.
So, what we have here, is two opinion pieces from business-focused news websites, vs the scientific consensus of domain experts in the field of energy production, the IEC, IEEE and countless others. Very cool, very good proof of your claims.
Germany’s exit from nuclear energy will make its power dirtier and more expensive
“Germany has committed to source 80% of its electricity from renewables by 2030”
This article contains no arguments whatsoever that nuclear is better than renewables.
Nuclear power must be well regulated, not ditched
“Nuclear power has a lot of drawbacks. Its large, slowly built plants are expensive both in absolute terms and in terms of the electricity they produce. Its very small but real risk of catastrophic failure requires a high level of regulation, and it has a disturbing history of regulatory capture, amply demonstrated in Japan. It produces extremely long-lived and toxic waste. And it is associated with the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Most of the countries outside Europe that use nuclear power have some history of attempting to develop a bomb. All these factors contribute to an unease with the technology felt, to greater or lesser extent, by people all around the world.”
This isn’t even all of the drawbacks. The advantages of nuclear power, according to that article? It’s safe (but still not as safe as renewables”, and “hey, at least it’s better than fossil fuels”. That’s not the argument. The argument has to be how nuclear is better than renewables.
We’re done here.
Very cool, very good proof of your claims.
I made no claims, I quoted from the wikipedia link you posted for us, which you may have not read yourself. You’re clearly a bigger expert than the IPCC though, so I wouldn’t even dare to make claims in your presence.
Wind tends to be higher at night (at least here in Texas), so solar and wind are good complements. The biggest issue here is in the summer right after the sun sets, but that just means having enough battery storage for a couple hours for temps to start dropping. But wind/solar are still cheaper after including storage for that amount of time by far compared to new nuclear or new fossil fuels. Only existing facilities have a comparable per kWh cost when compared to new solar/wind + storage. Even if you quadrupled the storage, it would still be cheaper than new nuclear and comparable to existing nuclear iirc. Granted cost of storage partly depends on what storage options are viable locally for small grids.
Is PV common at commercial scale solar?
I wrote a larger comment addressing this, but honestly, you’d be better just googling it. It’s eminently plausible, it’s the industry consensus. Here’s a Wikipedia link for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
Okay, now factor in environmental costs.
…which is hugely worse for nuclear? What is your point?
Nuclear power plants require eye watering amounts of concrete.
They require continuous (and ever-increasing) extraction of fissile matter such as uranium ore (a limited resource, by the way - if we used nuclear power instead of fossil fuels we would run out pretty quickly, too, all things considered).
Nuclear power also consumes (and irradiates) vast quantities of water.
They are huge nightmares for biodiversity as they are massive projects usually flattening large swathes of land.
They produce waste which is not only irradiated and hazardous but also a major security risk, so it has to be safeguarded… and/or sealed into a hole in the ground where it will remain a risk for years to come.
The building projects themselves are astronomical in scale and require huge quantities of materials to be shipped by fleets and fleets of trucks followed by a lot of industrial work. Then in a couple of decades the site has to be decommissioned which is even more work.
Estimates for the lifetime emissions (extraction, commission, operation, etc.) CO2EQ of nuclear power are commonly thought to be between 60-100g per kWh. Solar power is somewhere in the region of 20-40g per kWh, and wind is somewhere around 10-20g per kWh.
So again, no, nuclear energy is not what we want. Support ONLY renewables. Nuclear power is wasteful.
What do you know that countries with state funded labs full of scientists haven’t figured out?
Nothing? That’s my point. They HAVE figured this out. Get your head out of your ass and take an opportunity to actually learn something instead of just being aggressively wrong on the internet. The only people in the industry who think we should provision nuclear power plants are those who would financially benefit from continued investment in nuclear. Just look it up.
If renewables are the answer, why does germany still rely on lignite? If it was figured out, wouldn’t they be exporters of carbon free energy to Europe? (France is!) Instead of resisting nuclear, renewable advocates ought to go after fossil fuel subsidies. Fighting nuclear gives lignite “the green light.”
Because the last German government did everything it could to make it harder to get more renewables. Just look at Bavaria for example where the little sister f the CDU is still inpower. You are allowed to build wind turbines in very few spots
Renewable advocates famously silent and okay with fossil fuel subsidies
Because the fossil fuel industry and their lobbyists are absolutely, ridiculously, hideously wealthy, and it benefits them for it to be that way?
France lost their place as largest energy producer in the EU in 2022, because France has been having issues with their nuclear power stations.
“France usually exports more power than it imports, but structural problems with its nuclear fleet, which show no signs of improving, saw exports from the country halve compared to the previous year, while Sweden exported 16 terawatt hours”
Sweden has over 60% of their energy generation from renewables, by the way.
Take a look at this graph:
See that blue line that starts out at the top, then it drops off a cliff? That’s coal. Look at it dropping.
The yellow line that’s just below it, that’s been slowly decreasing until it sharply started dropping? That’s nuclear.
Look at my boy wind power, that little gray line, going into orbit, flying like the wind.
Solar PV is that purple line that’s trending upwards.
Oil is also slowly decreasing.
So no, you’re wrong. Stop digging your heels in and admit when you are wrong.
Lol, what am I wrong about? Nuclear is a a carbon free techonolgy that we have that can prodce the energy we need? Germany dumped nuclear to go full renewable and it flopped? France exports a ton energy to Europe? What did I say that was wrong?
I think your brain is full of ideas that came from somewhere else.
which is hugely worse for nuclear? What is your point?
Objectively not. Precious metal mining is more than a thousand times worse for the environment than Uranium or Thorium mining.
Nuclear power plants require eye watering amounts of concrete.
Sure, in the 1950s. Modern nuclear reactors can be built in existing Coal plants. Most reactor types don’t require any additional shielding besides what is already present.
They require continuous (and ever-increasing) extraction of fissile matter such as uranium ore (a limited resource, by the way - if we used nuclear power instead of fossil fuels we would run out pretty quickly, too, all things considered).
We have mined enough Uranium to power the entire world for the next 10,000 years; there is currently enough Uranium in just known mines for the next 1,000,000 years of current global power usage. And that’s just Uranium. Thorium is a viable technology with the first reactors already online for commercial use.
Nuclear power also consumes (and irradiates) vast quantities of water.
No, it doesn’t. This is just outright a lie, one I have no idea where you got. The internal loop never leaves the building, the external loop is never irradiated.
They are huge nightmares for biodiversity as they are massive projects usually flattening large swathes of land.
They have a smaller impact than solar or wind farms, by a factor of 100.
They produce waste which is not only irradiated and hazardous but also a major security risk, so it has to be safeguarded… and/or sealed into a hole in the ground where it will remain a risk for years to come.
They produce less toxic waste than Coal power plants, and all of the world’s projected nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years fits into existing facilities.
The building projects themselves are astronomical in scale and require huge quantities of materials to be shipped by fleets and fleets of trucks followed by a lot of industrial work. Then in a couple of decades the site has to be decommissioned which is even more work.
This is the exact same for renewables, worse, arguably, since wind farms have to be off shore to be efficient and cargo ships are more than a thousand times worse for the environment than any form of overland transport.
This is the exact same for renewables, worse, arguably, since wind farms have to be off shore to be efficient
From the charts I’ve seen lately, offshore is much more expensive than onshore per kwhr for wind by a large margin. If that’s the case, is offshore even valuable anymore?
Yes, given there is no ‘empty land,’ you are always destroying something if you create a windfarm on land. On the other end of this, offshore windfarms unironically create local ecosystems. If your goal is not just decarbonization, but decarbonization in order to better the health of the planet, which it should be, then offshore would be the best option.
See: Germany tearing down land wind farms in order to mine more coal. Those turbines aren’t going to be repurposed, they’re going to scrap yards.
Germany literally just shut down their existing nuclear plants and replaced them with fossil fuels.
So even if what you’re saying were true (and I’d happily sit here and punch holes in it if I thought you were actually open to an argument - anti-nuclear people somehow seem to think that you can build all the solar/wind farms and transmission lines you want without running into the same endless messy regulatory battles you get with nuclear), none of it would be relevant here because the plants were already built and already working and responsible for like 1/8 of Germany’s electrical production - it wasn’t a cost decision, it was a bullshit anti-nuclear one.
Also: the graph at the top shows the growth in Germany’s installed wind capacity in Germany leveling off - do you think that’s happening because they just don’t feel like building any more wind power, or is it possible they’re running into some limits on how much they can generate efficiently that way?
Germany literally just shut down their existing nuclear plants and replaced them with fossil fuels.
This claim is patently false.
Sorry, but this comment is so full of false information.
If you are able to read German or use a translator I can recommend this interview where the expert explains everything and goes into the the details.
Claiming that Germany is fucked after shutting down nuclear for good is repeating the talking points from the far right here. Don’t be that guy.
Given this thread is about new nuclear, I’m not sure why you are making up beliefs about what someone else in the thread believes. Personally a fan of old nuclear plants since their biggest expense (financial and likely ecological) is making them, so keeping them running is good as long as we are relying on fossil fuels.
is it possible they’re running into some limits on how much they can generate efficiently that way?
Why just speculate on it while insinuation someone is wrong about something when you could look it up? From what I can gather, it looks like administration/licensing delays, court cases, and rules limiting how close they can be to residential buildings (apparently 10 times the height of the turbine) are the main contributors to the slowdown.
Also, solar is still growing more quickly and 2023 is having quicker growth in wind than last year (which was itself an increase from the previous year), so the trend being shown may already be outdated. Granted, inflation apparently are an issue now (not when the slowdown happened, but now as the rate of wind installation is increasing). And the rate of increase isn’t enough imo, but building new nuclear instead of using the same resources to build solar or wind at this point means relying more on fossil fuels.
He is, in fact, arguing against keeping existing plants running too. (I suspected he believed this and he did indeed)
rules limiting how close they can be to residential buildings (apparently 10 times the height of the turbine)
These… don’t seem like crazy rules; I don’t know how this works in other legal systems but in the US every little podunk wind installation in a residential area is going to be tied up in years of lawsuits over this sort of thing.
building new nuclear instead of using the same resources to build solar or wind at this point means relying more on fossil fuels
I don’t think it is the same resources, that’s part of my point. I don’t think there’s a finite pool of money here; the limitations on solar / wind have as much to do with raw materials and suitable locations as anything else, if nuclear provides an additional path to getting carbon-free energy on line (and with the added benefit of not needing to worry about storage, which is going to bring its own rat’s nest of location + raw material problems once we get to it) then we ought to be encouraging it as well.
At no point have I said that we should shut down nuclear power plants that are still running effectively, I must request that you redact your false claims, I do not appreciate these libellous remarks. I explained reasons behind why nuclear power plants are decommissioned. I’m sure you understand that no-one believes that nuclear power plants should be built once and run forever and ever.
Nuclear has more location issues than renewable. Do you think people want a nuclear plant in their backyard?
It’s the same issues of will, money, and location that limit both. Why waste all of those on nuclear in 20 years when the grid is unstable today?
Germany literally just shut down their existing nuclear plants and replaced them with fossil fuels.
That’s completely false.
responsible for like 1/8 of Germany’s electrical production
More like 2-3%
it wasn’t a cost decision
Not exclusively, but the high price of nuclear is one of the main points in the decision
the graph at the top shows the growth in Germany’s installed wind capacity in Germany leveling off
Because the graph stops in 2022. The growth now is accelerating and even more so for solar power which OP conveniently does not show us
I’d happily sit here and punch holes in it if I thought you were actually open to an argument
If you had just said this and stopped writing then you’d have saved yourself time and embarrassment. I can dunk anytime, anywhere on whatever arguments you dream up, because definitionally if you’re arguing with me about this then you have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s a fool-in-a-barrel type of situation, really.
Anyways, enough merry-making, to the meat of your comment:
Germany literally just shut down their existing nuclear plants… it wasn’t a cost decision, it was a bullshit anti-nuclear one
Nuclear power has huge cost implications, economically and politically, which make it less viable. If Germany had built renewables instead of nuclear, would they have turned off the renewables that were producing the cheapest, cleanest energy ever known, with zero fuel costs and minimal maintenance costs? You make my argument for me.
The decommissioning of the german nuclear power plants was planned in 2011 because nuclear is a waste of resources. German scientists know this as well as I do. You’re the one arguing with them.
"Nuclear energy is also often more expensive than wind and solar power, there are no longer any real advantages with nuclear energy.” - Volker Quaschning, a professor of renewable energy at the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin. “Nuclear power plants are a hindrance to the energy transition. They are not able to run in stop-and-go mode and cannot really compensate for power fluctuations that arise when using solar and wind energy. With Germany looking to expand solar and wind power very rapidly over the next few years, now is a good time to shut down nuclear reactors to make way for renewable energy,” he said.
“In the German context, the phase-out of nuclear energy is good for the climate in the long term. It provides investment certainty for renewable energy; renewables will be much faster, cheaper and safer than expansion of nuclear energy,” - Niklas Höhne, a professor the mitigation of greenhouse gases at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
…and replaced them with fossil fuels
I think you’re referring to the emergency recommissioning of German coal power plants in response to Russian gas being held hostage over the Ukraine war? It’s not like they went “meh fuck the climate lol lets just turn off nuclear and put on the old coal burner for old time’s sake”.
definitionally if you’re arguing with me about this then you have no idea what you’re talking about
And this is why I said I don’t think you’re open to an argument. But I’m not actually trying to argue with you about this, to the extent I’m arguing here it’s for the benefit of other people reading who are perhaps a tiny bit less pig-headed than you are. Which is great, because I don’t have to actually persuade you of anything but simply to give other people an alternative perspective to yours.
If Germany had built renewables instead of nuclear, would they have turned off the renewables that were producing the cheapest, cleanest energy ever known, with zero fuel costs and minimal maintenance costs?
Yes, because they’re still tied up in anti-nuclear politics. (hardly a phenomenon unique to Germany)
“Often more expensive” “no longer any real advantages” according to a “professor of renewable energy” who doesn’t actually seem to have anything against them except that somehow he wants to “make way for renewable energy” which he somehow perceives an existing, functional nuclear plant as a hindrance to? Again, politics.
“Provides investment certainty for renewable energy” is likewise a weak / hypothetical / pie-in-the-sky argument - show me where existing nuclear power plants are actually getting in the way of new renewables.
“Replaced them with fossil fuels” natural gas is also, y’know, a fossil fuel. Even the anti-nuclear people cited in one of your articles admit that the lifecycle emissions of a gas plant are 4x as high as a brand new nuclear plant. Coal is even worse, sure, but even absent the Ukraine situation they’d be producing a lot more carbon with a very, very thin justification.
Yeah because they’re gonna be able to just whip up half a dozen nuclear power plants in response to the ukraine war quicker than they’d be able to build renewables.
Watch this, I can make you ragequit this entire argument with this one comment with like a 90% confidence rate:
Prove either of these two statements as false:
The total cost per kWh of nuclear electricity is more expensive than common renewable sources of electricity. The total amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions for nuclear is greater than the carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of common renewable sources of electricity.Either that or you can loftily declare yourself above this argument, state that I am somehow moving the goalposts, say that “there’s no point, I’ll never change your mind” or just somehow express some amount of increduiity at my absolutely abhorrent behaviour by asking you such a straightforward question? You may also choose “that’s not the question I want to talk about, we should answer MY questions instead!”
But go ahead and prove me wrong, I’ll be waiting!
I’ll cheerfully concede both of those statements, I just don’t think they result in you winning the argument.
It’s not clear that we can build enough renewables fast enough, or that we can build storage capacity fast enough when we do; you cite vague studies that suggest we might be able to do, but that’s all they are. I’d rather not bet everything on that and then discover in 20 years that we made the wrong bet.
According to the anti-nuclear group cited in one of your articles, nuclear produces about 4x the CO2 emissions of solar but 1/4 the emissions of natural gas. (1/8 those of coal) And it also assumes we can’t improve on that any, even though there is a tremendous amount of money + research going on right now on lowering CO2 emissions from construction materials like concrete and steel. (perhaps we don’t have any of those improvements up and running for in 20 years, but meanwhile those shiny nuclear plants are getting rid of 3/4 of the CO2 from the natural gas plants they’re replacing)
Ah, what a gentleman! Since you’ve been so sporting, I’ll indulge you.
It’s not clear that we can build enough renewables fast enough
You can go ahead and try to prove this statement false:
- The total time taken to provision 1 GWh of nuclear electricity is considerably slower than the total time taken to provision 1GWh of common renewable sources of electricity.
Again, I’m arguing we do both. And anyway this is a volume question, not a construction time one (enough renewables fast enough) - I’m OK with waiting 20 years for new nuclear plants if in 20 years we get a fuckton of them.
I’ll cheerfully concede both of those statements, I just don’t think they result in you winning the argument.
Obviously those points are the entire crux of the whole argument lmao.
Just so I’m clear on what you intend to say: you intend to show that the amount of energy Germany produces from wind has increased while the amount of energy produced by both coal and nuclear have decreased, the data standing as a self evident counter argument?
You’ve converted me :)
I’m really glad to hear it, thanks for being open to changing your perspective when you are presented with new information. It’s a quality which is sadly rare these days it seems!
If you are worried about the cost of nuclear energy, you don’t give a shit about the environment.
Would you like to elaborate? Renewables are a much better power source than nuclear in every single way that matters. They’re better for the environment, cheaper, lower emissions and are faster to commission. Every $1 spent on nuclear power is $1 stolen from renewables.
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They also depend on water. And as I looked recently into the world, we are drying out.
All this debate and nobody brings up that, thanks to climate change, cooling nuclear power plants will become a roll of the dice? Same as it already happened in France?
Droughts are really, really bad for nuclear power. Solar and wind don’t give a shit.
Doesn’t even matter much which technology is better on any other point. If you cannot run it, it’s worthless. Especially at times with increased power demand for example due to AC usage spiking thanks to the same heat that just poofed your cooling solution into oblivion.
Thank you. The nuclear fanboyism is crazy here and on reddit. Looking back, almost all nuclear power planta in Germany had to shut down over the last summers, because the cooling water Was either not enough or too hot. That technology has run it’s course and every potential investment is better routed towards renewable, battery capacity or green hydrogen.
In addition, the european pricing for power is defined by the most expensive source - and nuclear as well as coal are power sources that are getting more expensive, raising the cost for users. Supporting both sources for energy is madness.
And yes, tearing down windfarms for coal is fucking stupid, as is hoping that russia will keep selling us gas. Europe needs it’s own power infrastructure and has enough potential for it.
I see it here too… did you read the comments on that post? Those turbines were to be dismantled in one way or another due to their age, and the permit to mine coal in that place was given 15 years ago.
Yeah, I know, it still is a bad look, and unnecessary destruction
So what about nuclear waste? I am opposed to nuclear energy because of all the reasons you pointed out, but also because we collectively decided to dump the waste somewhere underground where they will go on radiating for a few eternities more. Do you know if this bullshit or if that’s a true concern?
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U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. Nuclear waste is solid, it’s not that difficult to store it. We get more nuclear waste leaked into our nature from coal plants.
As a reference, here is the room that Switzerland stores their nuclear waste.
So, nuclear waste is undeniably a problem,but the reality is that most of it is low-level and not that difficult to dispose of.
Other industries have much worse by-products that are more costly and challenging to dispose of. Many mineral extraction chains produce far more toxic hazardous waste than nuclear power does. Heavy industry deals with chemicals significantly more toxic and dangerous to humans.
It’s easy to be scared and to drum up fear of nuclear waste due to its longevity. That fear shouldn’t be dismissed, we do need secure facilities for high-level nuclear waste—but that type accounts for about 3% of all nuclear waste and is currently being safely disposed of in deep-level purpose-built facilities.
A far greater risk of exposure and contamination exists from any number of ongoing industrial processes—a single processing plant failure (on almost any production chain) is liable to release more toxic material into the environment and result in a greater impact on human and animal life than any risk from nuclear waste.
but that type accounts for about 3% of all nuclear waste and is currently being safely disposed of in deep-level purpose-built facilities.
Sorry, but that is just false. The only european country, that is on the track to build and operate such a facility is Finland. Their facility will be finished in a hundred years and only contain the waste of a single Nuclear power plant of a country of 5 million people. Also it is sheduled to cost around a billion Euro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
In Germany there is the plan to designate a spot to build a facility by 2040, but it is entirely uncertain, as the most likely feasible geological formations for that are in Bavaria. The state that is a strong proponent of nucelar power, but rejects to store any of its waste. It is NIMBYism by the pro nuclear faction par excellence. So we dont know, if by 2040 we will just have found a spot for a facility and can begin the planning process for it.
All storage facilities in Germany that were supposed to be long term, have been subject to deterioation, unsafe handling of nuclear waste and water entry with the potential to leak nuclear waste into the groundwater.
In central Europe, where 200 Million people are living in one of the most densely populated regions of the globe the issue of storing the radioactive waste is neither solved politically, nor technologically, nor is the funding secured with certainty.
It is still very much hypothetical, if, when and how the radioactive waste, that is waiting in “intermediate” storage facilities since 50 years will actually end up in a feasible permanent storage. Proponents of nuclear energy and in this case you specifically distort the facts tremendously, by saying the issue of storage is solved or even close to being solved
Also it is absurd, to claim to know the costs and challenges would be less than for other industrial wastes, because the fucking technology doesn’t exist in any larger scale implementation
Okay, so, I appreciate the discussion, but I have to address your comment as it is plainly disingenuous.
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Finland is, indeed, the only country with an currently operational deep-level storage facility. But several other such facilities are in active development across the globe. These are long-term storage facilities and their design and installation naturally takes time. Nuclear is still young, but the solutions are being worked on—the only thing hindering it is people like you who attempt to sabotage the industry and then claim it isn’t up to scratch.
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You claim “the facility will be finished in a hundred years and only contain the waste of a single Nuclear (sic) power plant”. This is a carefully-worded lie. The facility will begin storing nuclear waste this year and continue to store waste from all five of Finland’s nuclear reactors for the entire length of their life cycles, which is indeed about 100 years.
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The cost is a difficult one and can only be assessed in the context of all ongoing costs to produce nuclear power. However, the International Energy Agency’s ongoing assessment of the Levellised Costs Of Electricity—which takes into account all cost inputs for power generation of any type, from mineral extraction to ongoing maintenance, to waste storage—shows that nuclear is the low-carbon technology with the lowest costs overall.
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The reason that Germany doesn’t have concrete plans for long-term nuclear waste storage is due to years of undermining attacks on the technology from fossil fuel lobbies and oddly similar ‘Green Party’ voices. To say that a technology cannot work or isn’t viable because the opponents of said technology have successfully sabotaged it is incredibly disingenuous and deeply malicious.
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You cannot claim that the issues of any sector of energy generation are “solved politically”, nor can you claim that their “funding is secured with certainty”. Again, to claim a technology isn’t viable because you don’t want it to be and you’re helping to undermine its development isn’t a good argument. Nuclear power technology continues to advance at a rapid rate and will continue to do so providing it receives the necessary support and funding. The same goes for any emergent technology.
Your entire comment is full of the things you claim that the proponents of nuclear energy put forward. You are skewing the facts in an attempt to favour a sensationalist argument that convinces those less educated in the technology that it is scary and dangerous—which extensive research demonstrates to be untrue.
The reality is that renewable energy is unpredictable and best suited to flexible generation. Please do not misunderstand me, I fully support the development of all renewable technologies. However, when we wean ourselves of fossil fuels, we will need new baseload power plants. Nuclear is currently the best option to provide stable baseload generation.
The reality is that renewable energy is unpredictable and best suited to flexible generation. Please do not misunderstand me, I fully support the development of all renewable technologies. However, when we wean ourselves of fossil fuels, we will need new baseload power plants. Nuclear is currently the best option to provide stable baseload generation.
Do you have a source for this?
Because grids already deal with changing demand and if the generation is geographically distributed this issue could probably be solved with less storage than electrc cars are using. See this paper
I know this is odd but thank you for this discussion, I’m learning a lot of things from knowledgeable people here and not just propaganda or parrots.
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Yes, that too.
I also wonder about the nuclear fanboyism. Is it because techbros? Is it astroturfing? Or do really so many people fall for the various websites of the nuclear industry you find online? I don’t know what it is, but it is suspicious. There seem to be many more (vocal) fans of nuclear reactors than fans for renewable energy sources.
People really believe them this time when the
! LOBBY !
tells them everything’s safe now, some people just can’t get behind the idea that nothing can make this technology safe, there will always be one edge-case where the stars align and we have another meltdown.
I already know how the lobby is telling the people the wrong price per Kw/h ignoring any other costs involved, so i can get the idea how they handle security concerns.
Fuck them
Not to mention that building new plants can take a decade and costs a fortune - if you invest that money into renewables and power storages you have working power much faster.
Also OPs graphic is a real problem but it only goes until last year where we just got rid of Merkel. Her party was actively working on making it as hard as possible to work wind turbines while investing into gas from russia so with the new government the speed should finally pick up again
Of course shutting down existing nuclear reactors is a bad idea (which also happened because of Merkel) but that decision was made so long ago that the companies running those plants prepared for them to shut down for a decade and have stopped hiring people, the ones working there are on retirement contracts and they didn’t invest into future proofing the plants anymore so they were kind of falling apart
I’ve seen another video article instead that basically says sure nuclear is good on paper if:
- power plans should be 4th gen… which are non-existent at the moment (if not at the prototype stage only) and which construction in case will take decades and which costs are huge and also hard to estimates, even for France who has built a lot of nuclear power plans along the years and has probably the better know-how resources on the matter
- not everyone should go nuclear at the same time, because if everyone does:
- fuel material market price will increasingly raise due to its demand making nuclear energy production inherently less convenient as time passes and the fuel stock gets depleted, in turns shrinking the offer
- all known stock of fuel material at the current usage are estimated to run dry in 120 yrs (so immagine if you wanted to convert today a country to full nuclear power it will probably require 50 yrs and last only 70 at best), but the remaining stock will surely last a lot less if suddenly everyone should convert to nuclear energy production
The article and the video are in Italian, so I’m afraid at best you can only translate the written article to your language of choice
https://www.corriere.it/dataroom-milena-gabanelli/ritorno-nucleare-pulito-sicuro-cosa-vuol-dire/f9d58b1c-b200-11ed-8c7f-0f02d700e67e-va.shtmlGreat post and nice to see those 4th gen plants mentioned including the current project development state. Those plants were always a top comment as ‘the solution’ in discussions on Reddit. Just build 4th gen or molten salt or fusion - energy problems solved with just a few keystrokes.
Posts explaining the problems or the current state of those projects often ended up in flames.
Besides, all that Russian propaganda of „German energy policies bad“ has done nothing but spreading discord and allowing France to fuel their economy with ukrainan blood because „French energy policies are so based!!1“. Their nuclear power plants are already failing left and right due to low water levels and they want to build more as if this situation won’t get worse year by year. What’s the point of emission free power plants when they just stand around for lack of cooling water? All the while their gas imports from Russia explode to new heights, fueling Putin‘s war machine.
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Honest questions:
What’s the difference in water usage between nuclear and, Germany’s favored energy source, coal?
Hope much is drought a concern for Europe?
It is not our favorite energy source anymore, the plan is to get rid of themynot build more of them. Yes, there was an increase last year, but that was related to the gas situation with russia.
Northrine Westphalia just dumped the minium required distance for wind turbines, so we will see a huge boost of them (hopefully)
Drought is not as much a problem in Germany as it is on the southern states like France and Spain, but groundwater is going down. Everywhere. And like OP said, France had to limit the output of their reactors due to water shortages.
Wind and solar has to be the main focus as long as nuclear power is reliant on clean and sufficient water.
Of you want to know more, there is a separate wiki article just related to the European drought of 2023.
Coal power plants have about 45% energy efficency. Liginte about 30-35%, Nuclear plants also about 30-35%. All the other energy ends up using water to cool it away.
So a 1 GW nuclear plant is putting about 2 GW of heat into the water. A lignite plant the same. A 1 GW coal power plant is only putting about 1.25 GW of heat into water.
But again the problem is the false comparison being made here. The alternative to nuclear isnt coal. the alternative is renewables in conjunction with storage technologies and smarter grid management with demand sheduling.
Edit: wow nuclear shills now downvoting basic physics.
I have no idea and coal sucks and is the result of intense lobbying and corrupt politicians being bought for pennies on the dollar for the last 25 years.
The point isn’t the water usage of nuclear power, since most of it is evaporated and returned to the cycle, so I’d be surprised if it’s worse than coal in terms of actual consumption. However you need water in large quantities and the correct temperatures to be able to use it for cooling on nuclear.
If there is no water or not enough water of sufficient temperatures, then you can’t cool the plant. It’s simple as that.
Droughts overall are horrible for Europe just as much as anywhere else. We’re losing tons of valuable topsoil, forrests are dying contributing to the continual errosion. All this could lead to salination and eventual death of farmland. Crop yields are unpredictable. No country on this planet can exist for any prolonged period of time with droughts, unless it can import everything it can’t produce itself from elsewhere.
Water usage is generally a huge issue in Germany. Farmers take out far, far more than they’re allotted already and there’s almost no oversight. Large cities like Frankfurt am Main are pulling in water from surrounding areas, leaving them dry. And this isn’t even touching on the basically free use of water for our industries at large. It’s a really bad situation.
The only point where renewables would “rely” on water beyond their construction processes is either water generated power itself or energy storage (which comes down to the same).
Almost like we should’ve invested in nuclear power when it was first discovered instead of being blinded by oil propaganda saying it was extremely dangerous despite oil causing more deaths than any nuclear event in history combined, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Sure, because wind and solar are totally immune to the climate.
Getting enough wind and solar to supply the electric consumption is a roll of dice EVERY DAY.
I’m not saying that drought and heatwave don’t have a negative impact on nuclear but it would be dishonest to say that runs and solar are a more reliable solution in this regard.
So you think the weather is always the same in all of Europe? Because it doesn’t matter, if it is cloudy or snowy in one part of the continent, if other regions have sunshine and wind at the same time. On such a scale, wheatger is not that much of a deal. Especially if you have storage mediums and other sources like gas.
Yes, what you are missing is reality.
You can either build renewables to replace fossil fuels in the next years (and if the build-up doesn’t work as fast as you want to then it will takes a a few years more to reach zero), getting less and less every day. Or you can build new nuclear reactors and just keep burning coal full steam for 5 years, 10, 15, probably 20. And then you reactors are finally online, but electricity demand has increased by +100% (and further increasing…) so you burn more coal for another 5, 10, 15, or 20 years…
The exact same thing happens btw right now in basically every single European country that promotes nuclear. Because nobody is building enough capacities to actually cover the minimal required base load in 2-3 decades (electricity demand until 2050 will raise by a factor of 2,5 at least - because most countries today only cover 20-25% of their primary energy demand with electricity but will need to raise that to close to 100% to decarbonize other sectors; so we are talking about about a factor of 4-5, minus savings because electricity can be more efficient). They just build some and pretend to do something construtive, while in reality this is for show and they have basically given up on finding a solution that isn’t let’s hope the bigger countries in Europe save us.
For reference: France -so the country with optimal conditions given their laws and regulations favoring nuclear power and having a domestic production of nuclear reactors- announced 6 new reactors with an option for up to 8 additional ones and that they would also build up some renewables as a short-term solution to bridge the time until those reactors are ready. That’s a lie. They need the full set of 14 just for covering their base load for their projected electricity demand in 2050 and that’s just ~35% of ther production with the remaining 65% being massive amounts of renewables (see RTE -France’ grid provider- study in 2021). Is this doable? Sure. It will be hard work and cost a lot of money but might be viable… But already today the country with good pre-conditions and in-house production of nuclear reactors and with a population highly supportive of nuclear can’t tell it’s own people the truth about the actually needed investments into nuclear (and renewables!), because it’s just that expensive. (Another fun fact: The only reason why their models of nuclear power vs. full renewables are economically viable is because they also planned to integrate huge amounts of hydrogen production for industry, time-independent export (all other countries will have lower production and higher demand at the same time by then) and as storage. So the exact same thing the usual nuclear cult here categorically declares as unviable when it’s about renewables.)
is it true that in reality we can only build renewables OR nuclear? i feel like that’s not reality.
I’m reality, the world is burning and both techs will mitigate. instead of resisting nuclear, renewable advocates ought to go after fossil fuel subsidies
Really the entire goal should be both renewables and nuclear. Nuclear provides a reliable baseline that isn’t dependent on weather conditions, is incredibly safe, and will last a long time at the cost of large upfront construction costs. Renewables are great for main power generation and can be used for small scale or large scale power generation and built quickly, but they need the weather to be optimal to generate optimal power. They also need to be mantained and replaced more often, which can be covered by that baseline nuclear provides. Since we don’t have advanced enough power storage to use renewables exclusively due to their drawbacks, nuclear would be great for replacing coal and oil power plants to supply it when the renewables aren’t able to do all of the work.
at the cost of large upfront construction costs
You forgot the large costs of operating, the large costs of maintaining, the large costs of nuclear waste disposal and the large costs of deconstruction of nuclear plants.
Yeah, other than that it’s a great viable way for few very large companies to make great guaranteed profits as the tax payer will take care of the risks.
I honestly thought operational/maintenance costs were lower per unit of power in nuclear than wind/solar. Is that incorrect?
No that claim isn’t backed up by any sources I could find. Sounds fringe attitude to me. It’s a good thing that people study this as their job and advise the legislative branch because it’s complicated. When I looked up the levelized* cost of energy I had a hard time finding sources that agreed with each other. In particular, the nuclear societies were skewing the data, but the same with certain German think tanks claiming the exact opposite. Debate all around. Hydro FTW.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/wang-k2/
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants
In reality we can’t build nuclear at all since we will have no water. Ask the French if you need details…
Maybe if you beg China really hard they’ll sell you molten salt reactors https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3224183/china-gives-green-light-nuclear-reactor-burns-thorium-fuel-could-power-country-20000-years
I would love to say we can build renewables and nuclear. But let’s look at the actual reality: Not only are most countries with a nuclear plan lacking proper amounts of renewables (because for more than a decade an anti-renewable streak was part of nuclear lobbyism - see the amount of people here or anywhere else hallucinating about “expensive renewables” when their own model of electrity generation needs those renewables (and even some storage) to be viable), it’s even worse. Most of these countries aren’t even able to build nuclear on the proper scale they would need.
So no, there is no technical reason we can’t build both.
But real-world experience right now shows us that most can’t even get the proper build-up of nuclear alone done. Explaining to their heavily desinformed voters why they need to build massive capacities and also need to build even bigger amounts of renewables seems to be indeed impossible right now.
The other thing is time frame. If the already agreed upon climate goals give you a remaining co2 budget for another 6 or so years, you can indeed not start building nuclear now. That would have been a wonderful idea a decade or even longer ago.
There is actually only one undisputable thing we need to do right now: build up renewables and massively so. To stretch out the remaining budget (via constantly reducing CO2 emission quickly) to 1-2 decades and use that time to a) either build up storage and infrastructure or nuclear base load. The difference is that the infrastructure and storage can be build in steps alongside renewables while the nuclear base load would need to start today. And most countries seem unable to do it, with the deciding factor being costs. Costs they would also mostly need to pay now in advance.
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Nothing you said other than expenses is an argument against nuclear. If anything, the take from you argument is that we should construct even more nuclear, not less.
Yes, nuclear taking too long to build is not argument, it just means we should have started building them already.
If that’s your take why is exactly nobody doing it? Oh, yeah. Because nobody has a clue how to actually pay the massive (and mostly paid in advance) costs.
Yet a lot of countries are proudly planning to build nuclear soon™ instead of those silly renewables, when what they actually would need to do is building much more nuclear than they are planning right now while also building massive amounts of renewables.
You are not actually wrong. Building more nuclear right now is an option. Building-up storage and infrastructure instead is the other viable one. Building massive amounts of renewables is needed in both cases.
The moment you show me countries starting nuclear in proper amounts right now, while also building and planning the needed increase in renewables alongside I will cheer for them. (For reference: energy demand increasing by a factor of at least 2,5 with ~35% production capacity needed for a solid base load means your minimal goal for nuclear capacities right now should be ~100% of todays demand…)
But as basically no country seems to be able to manage that investment the only option is storage and infrastructure. Is it costing the same in the end? Maybe? Probably? We don’t know actually as decade long predictions for evolving technologies are not that precise (just look at the cost development of solar in the last decade for example). We know however that this is a constant investment over the same time renewables are build up to provide 100% coverage (PS: the actual numbers would be 115% to 125% btw… based on (regional) diversification of renewables and calculating losses through long-term storage).
Again: I’m not against building nuclear (and renewables!) right now, if that’s your plan. I am however very much about the bullshit that is going on right now, where it’s more important to show how smart you are by building some nuclear capacity (with the math not adding up at all) while laughing about others building renewables and spouting bullshit how it’s just a scam to burn fossil fues forever.
Contrary to the popular narrative between building up renewables and storage and building just some nuclear capacities and some token renewables -if at all- it’s not the former countries that are running on ideology with no actual real world plan.
As already said above: I totally support France’ plan for 14 new reactors build until 2050, with a lot of renewable build-up at the same time. Because that’s a workable plan. But that they already have problems publically justifying the bare minimum requirement of 14 reactors and the renewable up-build is a symptom of a larger problem. And basically every other country planning new nuclear power right now isn’t even close to this scale and just living in a fairy tale world… or just providing an token effort while hoping for other bigger countries to solve the issue for them in the end.
I completely agree that more countries should be following France’s lead in simultaneously building lots of renewables and nuclear plants. Unfortunately the anti nuclear crowd are very vocal in a lot of countries so everyone spends all their time arguing about whether to invest in nuclear or not instead of just getting on with it.
Funny how you completely ignore basically my whole comment.
Countries being anti-nuclear and going for a storage solution are not the problem as they have a workable plan.
Countries like France are not the problem as the same applies there.
The problem is there are basically no pro-nuclear countries like France. Only ones trying to bullshit their way out of the issue with talk about their nuclear plans when those plans are completely insuffcient. It feels like nuclear nowadays is the new homeopathy - just do a little bit of symbolic action and then firmly believe in it and all will be well. And to confirm your believe for everyone to see talk shit about renewables as they are “obviously just a scam for ideologically damaged idiots fearing nuclear”…
Yeah, that’s one of the most funny things to me in this debate. People are calling of all kind of radical measures to combat climate change, but when it comes to nuclear power somehow “too expensive” is a valid argument.
And the worst, is all the other decisions in Germany lately. They stopped nuclear completely and replaced it by coal. Right now they are tearing down wind turbines, to mine for coal in that spot etc.
So all the arguments talking about “nUcLeAr iS eXpEnSiVe” are missing the point in Germany by a magnitude that is hard to grasp…
Ontario Canada constructed 20 reactor units between 1965 and 1994. While the CANDU units are no doubt different from the designs used by France, 14 in 26 years is certainly achievable. This does not mean renewables should be disregarded, but both options should be pursued.
We must do both. I don’t see why people keep claiming they are mutually exclusive. Let’s build nuclear. Let’s build wind, solar, hydro. We should protest increases in fossil fuels, but it’s irrelevant specifically what green energy people are betting on to replace it
You literally have no idea what you’re saying.
This is an interesting take, and I learnt from it. Would you mind sharing one or two of your references?
I had a heated discussion the other day on this topic, and I wish to know more.
On the other hand, I don’t really understand your statement that nobody is seriously building reactor lately.
China has started building new reactors. They are not planning but effectively doing it. Am I missing something?
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/30/how-china-became-king-of-new-nuclear-power-how-us-could-catch-up.htmlChina is building new nuclear plants, but they are building way more coal plants as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/china-coal-plants-climate-goals-carbon
Yes, basically. Germany completely folded on nuclear to appease pretend environmental groups that actually know nothing about the environment and then went all in on coal again while pretending they were going all in on renewables. But now that even the renewables numbers are flat-lining, they have to keep up the charade by continuing to make negative comments about nuclear.
They’re helped along by idiots like Blake elsewhere in this comment section. Because, sure, new nuclear is expensive, but that’s not the problem here. The problem was shutting down all the nuclear they already had.
Compared to nuclear, renewables are:
- Cheaper
- Lower emissions
- Faster to provision
- Less environmentally damaging
- Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
- Decentralised
- Much, much safer
- Much easier to maintain
- More reliable
- Much more responsive to changes in energy demands
Why would anyone waste money on the worse option? An analogy: you need lunch and you can choose between a nutritious and tasty $5 sandwich from an independent deli or a $10 expensive mass-produced sandwich from a chain. The independent deli is tastier, cheaper, more filling, and healthier, and it’s easier for you to get since it’s on your way to work. Why would you ever get the $10 sandwich?
According to you, I’m an idiot, and yet no one has debunked a single one of my arguments. No one has even tried to, they immediately crumple like a tissue as soon as they’re asked directly to disprove the FACT that nuclear is more expensive, slower to provision and more environmentally damaging than renewables. If I’m so stupid it should be pretty easy to correct my errors?
Either that or you can loftily declare yourself above this argument, state that I am somehow moving the goalposts, say that “there’s no point, I’ll never change your mind” or just somehow express some amount of increduiity at my absolutely abhorrent behaviour by asking you such a straightforward question? You may also choose “that’s not the question I want to talk about, we should answer MY questions instead!”
Tell me how much energy it provides during night and during winter. Thats’s why. Coal plant produces more radioactive waste than nuclear power plant. And that feared CO2 too.
We need to change how power distribution works. That’s just the point. There are easy ways to store power that’s generated by day. And since we don’t just focus on one single renewable energy source, it’s not even half as bad as you’re drawing the picture here.
Edit: since this is my only comment in here, I also want to point out that the chart is rising last year, I think/hope that it will continue rising. (Until CDU steps in again because people think “Hey there last years were so terrible, everything got more pricy and so on, that’s definitely on SPD, green, FDP, not just a random situation in the Ukraine” and vote for them…)
Coal plant produces more radioactive waste than nuclear power plant.
Tell me you are totally brain-washed without telling me you are totally brain-washed.
The correct take: Coal plants without any environmental requirements 50-60 years ago release more radiation into the area in the form of fly ash (containing natural amounts of radiation like all earth around you) than the radiation escaping from a modern nuclear power plant through it’s massive concrete hull.
Or in other worlds: If nothing goes wrong and we completely ignore the actual radioactive waste produced (of which a coal plant obviously produces zero) then the radiation levels in the area around the plant are miniscule and it’s really safe. So safe indeed that just the redistribtion of natural radiation via ash when coal is burned has a slightly stronger effect.
That’s it. That’s the actual gist of the study that is from the 1970s (referencing even older data).
Just the fact that this fairy tale about coal power producing radioactive waste based on some (already then criticised and flawed) old study is still going around shows how lobbyists have damaged your brains.
The criticism is extraordinarily simple and justified.
Which is better, Renewables and Nuclear or Renewables and Fossil Fuels?
Germany could have had an almost entirely fossil free grid by now, but instead they chose renewables & fossil fuels.
Please provide a source for your claim that 100% renewable energy is not possible.
Actually you can save yourself the time, because here’s two sources which show it is possible.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261920316639?via%3Dihub
Or (as this is in the context of Germany) one of the studies even modeling different acceptance levels of renewable energy in the transitioning until 2050:
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/paths-to-a-climate-neutral-energy-system.html
I think you replied to the wrong comment by accident lol
No, I didn’t. You claimed that the choice was between either renewables and coal or renewables and nuclear. I am asking you to prove your claim that renewables are not a stand-alone option.
I am asking you to prove your claim that renewables are not a stand-alone option.
I did not claim that, I suspect that you misunderstood something.
I’ll clarify what I meant for your benefit. Germany has constructed a lot of new renewable power in the past two decades, which is great, but they prioritized shutting down nuclear power plants instead of fossil fuelled power. Because of this, they still get ~50% of their electricity from fossil fuels, which is not so great.
If they instead had prioritized phasing out fossil fuelled power plants, that number would’ve been more like 20-30%, and more crucially, they could’ve phased out their entire fleet of coal power plants. Ergo, criticism of German energy policy is entirely justified.
You replied to my comment. My comment simply stated that investing in building nuclear power plants is a waste of money that is better spent on renewables. You said that criticism of my comment was justified because Germany could choose between either renewables and coal, or renewables in Nuclear. I am asking you to support your claim. I am not inviting you to move the goalposts. If you replied to my comment and said criticism of my comment was justified and then started talking about something else unrelated to my comment then I don’t really know what to tell you?
Silverseren: Germany made a foolish choice shutting down their nukes
Blake: Renewables are a deli sandwich
The room: …?
Sorry if the analogy was too hard for you. Feel free to ignore it and address the remaining 90% of the comment which was not an analogy.
Why would I do that? You’ve made it clear that you don’t read people’s comments. Instead of reading and responding, you copy paste from thead to thread the same disjointed bullet points.
I have read absolutely every single word you have written and responded to them in kind. After your last comment, I went back over the thread from beginning to end and my conversation with you was lucid and coherent the entire way through.
I do appreciate the attempt at gaslighting, though. It’s a good feeling knowing that I’m having such a strong impact that you’re willing to try and psychologically manipulate someone.
Anyways, look, drop me a line, if you’ll send some of that sweet sweet nuclear lobby money my way I’m sure it would be a very worthwhile investment for your company or think tank or what-not. I have reasonable rates and give good results!
Are you hallucinating? What part of your comments do you think was ignored?
Because it certainly seems like you got your ass handed to you in this thread by someone who had the knowledge and could back it up with sources.
And your general framing of the issue, ommitance of the stong uptick in new renewables after the new government took power pisses me off as a german.
I’m taking about another thread in this post.
You forgot:
- Not able to provide energy during the night/calm days
- Not energy dense - require enormous amount of land that can be put to better use
- Rely on battery storage - huge fire and explosion hazard
- Need to be replaced and serviced much more often - the lack of density means that repair and maintenance crew have a lot of ground to cover
- Energy output wildly fluctuates due to weather conditions.
Renewables have their place, but they cannot sustain the entire grid. At this point, going all in on renewables means either prolonging fossil fuel usage, or condemning vast swaths of the population to brownouts and energy poverty.
Look at all of these wrong arguments. It’s so thoughtful of you to bring them all together like this.
- It’s always day somewhere. Also there’s still wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric, etc. not to mention interconnectors. Additionally, energy demand during the night is very low. Peak energy usage is at the same time as peak solar generation. The idea is that if you spread renewables across a large enough area, natural shortages of wind/sun in one area is compensated for the wind/sun being in another area.
- It’s true that it isn’t energy dense, but it’s definitely not true that it can be “put to better use”. 5% of the US is covered in parking spaces, enough to provide 8 spaces for every car. If 10% of that land was allocated to solar power it would be enough to meet the electricity demand of the entire United States.
- Doesn’t rely on energy storage. Just build interconnectors. Electrical energy can be moved from where it is greatest in supply to where it is greatest in demand. Additionally, electrochemical batteries aren’t the only choice, there are countless ways to store electrical energy - pumped storage, thermal storage, etc.
- This is outright wrong. Source your claim that nuclear is easier and cheaper to maintain than renewables. I’ll wait.
- This is the same as your first point. See 1.
You’re wrong. There are numerous studies which say a 100% renewable future is entirely possible with current technology. Since you’re incapable of googling this basic fact here’s a link for you. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
- Power lines are not superconductive, there are always losses when electricity is moved long distance
- You sidestepped my point and went on a tangent
- Again, there are losses when electric energy is converted into other types - pumped storage requires large reservoirs, and you’re basically making ineffective hydro.
- I never stated that renewables are easier to maintain than nuclear, just that the monetary and enviromental cost of maintenance is swept under the rug by anti-nuclear zealots.
- Again, renewables have a reliabilty problem that cannot be handwaved by "just move the power somewhere else.
Judging by your sneering tone, I doubt you’re going to be receptive to any further points.
- Sure, but it’s so much cheaper than nuclear, that it’s nearly irrelevant. A typical loss for 800 kV lines is 2.6% over 800 km. That means it’s cheaper to generate renewable energy 16,000km away from the point of consumption. That’s almost half the circumference of the Earth.
- You claimed that renewables would take up too much space. I provided an explanation backed up by facts and figures which clearly demonstrate that claim was false. You clearly can’t refute my point or you would have done so.
- Again, yes, but again, it’s so much cheaper that it doesn’t matter. Even with a conservative estimate, pumped storage is 70% efficient. In reality, it’s closer to 80%. This means that it’s still much cheaper to generate electricity and store it with pumped storage than it is to directly produce electricity with nuclear sources. 99% of the world’s electrical storage is pumped storage. Do you think you know better than industry experts?
- Good, I’m glad you’re willing to walk back this argument. The fact of the matter is that renewables are the cleanest, cheapest, safest source of energy available to us, and so that is what we should be investing in. That’s all that matters. Everything else is propaganda and rhetoric.
- No, they don’t. Again, this is just the same argument as argument 1. There’s no point in arguing it twice. People need to eat food, we produce food all over the world. People need to power their homes? We should produce power all over the world. It’s not a hard concept.
You didn’t provide any sources.
If you’re trying to wave your dick around you better provide more sources than Blake did above. Moving electricity long distances isn’t really losing much anyway.
It’s always day somewhere
Pretty obvious you have no idea what you are talking about. You can’t transfer power from the other side of the planet.
Nice, ignoring 99% of my comment to attack a strawman. The sun covers half the globe at any one time. I’m not suggesting that somewhere in midnight takes solar power from somewhere in midday. For example power can be moved across the US grid, which covers three timezones, which gives solar 3 hours more viability.
Not a strawman when you respond to “sometimes it’s night and solar doesn’t work” with “it’s daytime somewhere”. The natural assumption is that your intention was that day side power could be used on the night side.
Do you have anything to back up your idea that the US grid can or does actually supply power across the entire nation?
Your assumption is mostly correct - “day side power can be used on the night side”. Say that you live in a city where the sun sets at 7pm. The largest synchronous power grid in the world is in Continental Europe - from east to west, it’s approximately 5600 km, and connects Portugal (UTC 0) all the way to Turkey (UTC +3), covering three time zones. That means when the sun sets in Portugal, solar panels in Turkey are still generating power at 75% efficiency.
As you can understand, this is an entirely different claim from “we would get power from the other side of the world”. It’s a strawman because that’s the weakest possible version of the argument I made.
As for the US power grid, no, you’re right, I was totally wrong about that. I had thought that the east and west power grids were connected, but it seems that they still haven’t sorted that out yet. Thanks for correcting me. It looks like they have a project in the planning stage to make it happen (Tres Amigas SuperStation) but it probably won’t be for a while. It’s absolutely achievable, though, and pretty easily.
It would also be achievable to get a single planetary power grid, theoretically, but I think it’s practically impossible to achieve that at the moment. It would need a level of global cooperation far beyond what we have ever accomplished. Definitely a future goal for our species!
For #2 to add: you can just install them over a parking lot, too
Makes people happy that their car isn’t exposed to the sun/rain anymore and not removing anything from NIMBYs that fear for their car-privileges
How are renewables more responsive to changes in demand? I don’t know how to make the sun shine brighter or the wind blow harder. That seems like one of the weakest points for the case. And how much much safer are they as a function of unit of power generated?
In any case the argument between renewables or nuclear baffles me. Both are, in my view at least, an improvement over our current primary fossil fuel power generation systems.
Edit: I mistyped fossil as fissile, which while funny undercut my sentiment.
By angling the wind turbine blades, rotating the turbines, pitching the rotors, using breaks, gearboxes, etc.
It doesn’t really matter how weak this point is, to be honest. It’s just a bonus. The ultimate trifecta of “renewables are cheaper, better for the environment and faster to build” mean that renewables always win.
They’re both an improvement over fossil fuels, sure, but one is clearly the superior choice and resources are limited. It’s very important that we push for the right choices to be made to reduce the impact of climate change as quickly and effectively as possible. It’s literally one of the most important issues facing our species.
Every $1 spent on nuclear power is basically stolen from renewables. $1 spent on renewables generates 150%-200% more power than nuclear and it does it safer and cheaper. Why invest in nuclear at all.
Well I suppose there is a lot to unpack there but I want to hold to the one point. Renewables are absolutely in no way more responsive to demand. I’m not sure where you got that, but it seems clear you don’t even want to defend it when challenged.
It is in fact their Achilles heel, and regularly pointed out as the one reason why they are an incomplete solution requiring other solutions like batteries, or other storage and distribution.
Simply pitching blades cannot increase power in accordance with demand spikes. One would expect the current brake, blade pitch, and other controls to be set for current maximum generation capability given the current wind.
It’s easy to turn off wind turbines. It’s much harder to turn off nuclear reactors. That’s what responsive to demand means.
Without disputing any of your other points, you’re just dead wrong about this one. Look up dispatchability. Turbine driven power can go from zero to full multimegawatt power and back in very little time since we control the fuel. You cannot turn up the wind, nor the sun at night.
Nuclear power can be shut down very quickly, even more quickly in gen4. You have good points and you need not disrupt them by claiming renewables are good for demand response.
To clarify, I mean steam turbines but the same is true of wind turbines. Like you said, easy to disconnect them from generation. The difference is maximum power is limited by fuel rather than nature.
Again, I am talking about NUCLEAR VS. RENEWABLES. If you bring up fossil fuels once more I will just block you.
Nuclear power can be shut down very quickly
Provide a source of a nuclear power plant in operation which is capable of going from 100% to 0% in seconds.
Decentralised
I was rummaging this is probably the main reason for which they are pushed back in an excessively popular narrative in favour of nuclear: of course it is way harder to exercise capitalism when you can’t centralize power and control, with renewables instead it could probably only exist a form of cooperative enterprise with the business of managing the energy production, immagine the loath of some individuals even acknowledging some utterly leftist term such as “cooperative” even exists, let alone even works. Better.
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Go ahead and cite some sources that prove me wrong, unless you’re full of shit of course?
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Not a single one of them has addressed my claims in any way whatsoever.
All you have to do to prove me wrong is show that nuclear is cheaper or better for the environment than renewables. It should be easy to do if I’m spreading propaganda.
If you can’t or won’t do that, then your arguments can be dismissed. I have provided plentiful sources for my claims.
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Okay, go ahead and quote the exact phrases posted by other users which address the core of my argument, which I remind you, is the fact that nuclear power is cheaper, more environmentally friendly and faster to provision, than nuclear power.
Lemmy.world great arguing tactics as always
Can I follow a particular user? I just want Blake energy in my life.
Hahah, that’s sweet of you to say, thanks - I’m not usually so self-assured, but I do have a lot of opinions. Usually they’re just opinions rather than provable scientific facts though, so I don’t go quite as hard. As to your question, genuinely, I don’t know, but you can probably do something with an RSS feed? You can also add me on Discord if you want, DM me if you want my username.
Why would anyone waste money on the worse option?
Why do people have diverse stock portfolios?
Hedging and diversification is important. Unforseen consequences and unknown future conditions can screw up your long term plans for 100% renewables. The more diverse our energy portfolio is, the unknowns become easier to weather.
That is the answer for why we build and research something that is more expensive and may divert resources away from better options. To argue that there is literally no place for energy development other than purely renewable is a difficult position to defend.
Your sandwich analogy is lacking because we’re talking about far future consequences of our decision. Maybe you plan to eat the sandwich a week from today. Which do you buy? You don’t have enough information to determine which will be better in a week. Do you pick the chain store’s because it’s full of preservatives? Do you decide to buy both in case one of them gets moldy just to make sure you have anything to eat?
The consequences of developing or not developing potential viable solutions to energy requirements can be far reaching. Completely dismissing alternative options is just not rational.
I support continued research and development into nuclear power, but I oppose the construction of nuclear power plants for reasons beyond scientific research. My very first comment in my thread said as much. Perhaps you should read more closely?
I agree that diversification is important. Luckily, when it comes to renewables, we have an absolute feast of options:
- Solar photovoltaic (generating electricity directly)
- Solar thermal (heating water)
- Wind, onshore
- Wind, offshore
- Geothermal
- Hydroelectic (dams, rivers, etc.)
- Wave
- Biomass & biofuel
- Artificial photosynthesis
- Infrared thermals
- Water vapor hydrostatic charge
You say that we should consider the long term implications of our decisions, and I wholeheartedly agree with you. That is another reason to favour renewable sources. The sun is the only thing we can be 100% sure that will always be there for humanity. If it’s gone, then so are we. Likewise for the wind - it’s guaranteed as long as the sun shines and that physics continues to work as expected.
Meanwhile, nuclear fissile material is a limited resource with extremely complex supply chains involved, with huge disruptions potential at any point in the extraction, refinement, handling, shipping, use and disposal of the material. Not to mention all of the things that can go wrong with a nuclear power plant - mistakes in maintenance or operation can leave it inoperable in a way which is extremely expensive and complex to fix.
Solar panels and wind turbines are so easy to install, maintain and repair that you could do it safely by having a high school level understanding of electronics and following a 20-minute YouTube tutorial.
A thought experiment for you: Can you describe a scenario where either solar power or wind power are no longer viable sources of electrical supply, without a mass extinction event also occurring?
Why would we limit our hedging to non-world destroying scenarios? It seems we’re already on track for a mass extinction event anyway. The reason you hedge is exactly for the worst case.
Are you serious? The reason I said that is because if we’re all fucking dead it doesn’t really matter what power plant we have because no one will be around to use it…
Yes.
Germany is burning less coal this year in comparison to last year.
Tbf it’s starting to be too late, even if they were pro nuclear it’s going to take like 20 years
Better start now than wait then.
Yes pouring down money on a technology, that at best can help us mitigate emissions in 20 years, instead of investing it in a scaleable and cheaper technology now (wind, solar) is a great and reasonable strategy…
And that is entirely ignoring the debate abou the safety and waste issue of nuclear power.
100% renewables is a fiction. That’s a fact. No one is doing it. Instead we are rolling out new Gas and new Coal power plants. I hope you like gas and coal.
It’s always too late, might as well not try
You could also channel the effort into renewable energy and the the reward would be greater and faster achieved.
By the time countries that could have built nuclear power plants would complete them, they will have collectively burnt enough coal and gas to doom humankind.
So: indeed, the world leaders didn’t try seriously.
Yes, that is exactly the nuclear motto: It’s too late to match any climate goal with nuclear power not already starting counstruction many years ago… so let’s say “fuck climate goals and stop trying” and start building nuclear anyway, because it’s really cool and in 20-30 years it might solve our 10 year problem of remaining co2 budgets.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is right now.
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Scholz is right that nuclear is dead in German. Nuclear is always political and there’s no stable political majority pro nuclear. This has nothing to do with the technology. It just won’t happen.
Most entreprises, energy or else, are privately run and financed. Capitalism. Nuclear is private on paper, but no one is going to build reactors without governent support. Many industries are regulated, like banking, but they are still driven by profit motives, private interest. At least in Germany, there’s no entrepreneurial mindset behind nuclear. Rent seeking business people and lobbyists, sure. But not risk takers. The businesses lobbying pro nuclear are lead by ex-politicians and similar types who secretly want a safe government job.
Nuclear is dead and it’s not the biggest problem. The much bigger elephant in the room is that we mostly talk about renewables. Sure, renewals grow, but nowhere near the rate needed. Everyone can see this, the data is available, and we just don’t give a shit.
And don’t get me started on hydrogen. Doesn’t make sense to even consider hydrogen unless you have a huge surplus on (preferably renewable) energy.
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Exactly
Are you intentionally omitting the amount of wind being added by other countirss around Germany? There is massive increase of renewables being added to the North Sea, for example
Isn’t this article specifically about Germany?
And Germany can buy renewable energy from the Danish in thr North Sea
Yes but that’s an entirely different topic
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That’s right, better keep doubling down on coal https://euobserver.com/green-economy/157364
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For largely the same reasons. It’s a hard sell to a mining town to stop being a mining town.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
FRANKFURT, Sept 1 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he is against a new nuclear power debate in the country, in an interview released late on Friday with German radio station Deutschlandfunk.
“The issue of nuclear power is a dead horse in Germany,” said Scholz, leader of Germany’s social democrats (SPD).
Scholz’s coalition partner, the free democrats (FDP), recently demanded Germany should keep an nuclear option.
For new nuclear power plants to be built, significant time and investment would be required, Scholz said, estimating at least 15 billion euros ($16.16 billion) would have to be spent per power plant over the next 15 years.
On the widely debated topic of an industrial electricity price cap in Germany, the chancellor expressed doubt how this could be funded, naming options including taxpayer money and debt.
($1 = 0.9282 euros)
The original article contains 138 words, the summary contains 138 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Germany had huge issues with nuclear wastes but choosing coal over nuclear was very odd in terms of co2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine. Let’s see what the can achieve with renewables for 2025: for sure they’re not like Portugal, less cost compared to inland, and less sun
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Lemmy loves nuclear power and they will shove it down your throat.
No everyone pronuclear here is very exact about where to put it, though critics are quick to wrongly claim that we shove it in people’s throats.
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Tfw you find the doll spontaneously combust
lol
