"Greens caused gigatons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the coal and gas burning that went ahead instead of #nuclear. I was part of that too, I apologize." (Stewart Brand, 2009)
@kravietz This statement is telling the tale hat nuclar power is saving C02. But you need a lot of energy (which is from coal, oil and gas) to prepare the fule rods.
You need a lot of energy too to mine coal, gas, oil as well as rare earth metals required for manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines.
This is all quantified already - overall CO2 intensity of wind farm is 15 gCO2e/kWh, most of which is infrastructure, while nuclear is 5 gCOe/kWh *including* infrastructure, fuel and waste management.
@kravietz I have to admit that I'm not an export o this topic. But the graphs you showed are not really trustworthy for me. Esp. the second one might be from Vattenfall (and thus biased) as it is title "… Vattenfall …".
Also on could admirably argu about whether the "decommissioning" really uses that less C02 - given that you actually recommision and not only burry it in e.g. Asse.
@kirschwipfel As for decommissioning - yes, you *could* argue. But when arguing let's present *data* rather than baseless whataboutism.
@kravietz "Don't trust any statistic you did not forge yourself." Without deep knowledge about which decommission scenario has been evaluated, this it hard to take as granted. And if the figures are from Vattenfall: They are biased for sure.
@kirschwipfel So you are not an exper, don't know anything about costs of decomission but you already know nuclear is *not* an option. Sorry, but this is very much a religious approach.
> solar and wind are not options
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying: 100% solar/wind are not an option.
> radioactive contamination
The photo shows nuclear waste storage in Switzerland. There's a man walking around in the middle. And there are ~200 nuclear reactors running in the world for the last half century without any contamination.
> killing mankind by CO2
If we don't limit CO2 emissions within a few decades yes, this will be true disaster.
@kravietz In contrast: This is "Schachtanlage Asse" in Germay. Lots of contamination already leaking in the underground water.
(I'm no 100% sure this picture is actually showing Asse, but it is matching was has been reported about Asse since many years.)
The contamination from Asse is minimal and at depths like -900 m that are never reaching any surface waters. Asse stores low- and medium-activity waste. For example, the largest leak found was 240 kBq/l which is roughly natural (!) radioactivity of a group of 60 people (from K-40 isotope).
One of the main causes for Asse problems was anti-nuclear lobbying, which hindered any attempts to properly develop and secure the storage and eventually led to its closure.
@kirschwipfel Back to the solar/wind: they are absolutely fantastic but they have two disadvantages.
First, they are intermittent - they don't always produce energy when we need it, and sometimes they produce too much when we don't. They need storage or intelligent grid.
Second, solar/wind have small energy density - you need to occupy 70 km2 for a 400 MW wind farm and it will only work at 40% on average, so you need 2x that really.
@kirschwipfel The latter is also reason why solar/wind are so expensive in terms of natural resources needed for construction. You need ~120 wind turbines with 100 m wings to replace one 400 MW power plant running nuclear, gas or coal. You need *a lot* of steel, concrete and rare earth metals for construction.
Current global rare earth metals production is 180 kt per year. To go 80% renewable we would need 5400 kt per year. Where do we take it from?
We need clean energy without CO2 *today*, because if not we will likely face extinction my mid-century.
There's a lot of stupid lobbying out there (e.g. in Poland for coal mining) but the root cause why solar/wind are not working *today* are science and engineering.
@kravietz
You basically say: solar and wind are not options. This might be true - I'm not into this topic yet. You are into this, so I'll accept it for the sake of this discussion.
But due to its adherent risks, nuclear power is not an option either.
So we end up with either killing mankind by CO2 (coal, gas, solar, wind) or radioactive contamination (nuclear). Sound like choosing between pest and cholera, don't it?