RT @gretathunberg
Germany is opening a new coal power plant this summer. It’s run by Finnish state-owned Fortum.
Swedish state-owned Vattenfall is already operating new coal plants in Germany.
Everyone involved claims to be “climate leaders” but this is the opposite of leadership.
This is failure. https://twitter.com/fridayforfuture/status/1262314065843695617
@gretathunberg This is because Germany dismantled its nuclear power plan.
I'm sorry, but this is just reality hitting home. If you are anti-nuclear, you're pro-coal.
cc @kravietz
@drq
That's a false binary.
Germany also dismantled its solar power plan, and significantly dampened the wind power development. If it had not, one coal plant would be easy-peasy to replace. And that's not even taking into account all the gas plants which exist but are rarely used.
Building coal plants today is in direct contradiction to any plans to protect the climate.
@Mr_Teatime Solar is never going to replace nuclear. Nor is wind. Thy are not as reliable, not as controllable, and nowhere even near its energy density.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gg9_zTlg4M
See this? This is the insides of the Electric Arc Furnace. This is the technology that lets us melt steel without using coal or gas. It is used to recycle scrap metal into useful material. Waste into new things. Every given moment the temperature inside this giant arc welder must exceed 1800 degrees centigrade when in operation.
I can see households be powered by solar or wind, probably. I want to power mine with solar and wind myself when I get a suitable one someday. I can't see solar or wind powering heavy industries like this anytime soon, save for maybe a Dyson sphere. And the stuff people use must come from somewhere, it has to be made by someone, and powered by something. I'd rather it be powered by electricity, than by coal or gas.
And we already have a way to do it.
One of last year's Omega Tau Podcast episodes was on energy storage, I recommend it (and apologize for having no time to dig it up right now...). The biggest new thing I learned was in the introduction: If we had a proper Europe-wide grid, we would barely need to store wind energy at all, because the wind is always blowing somewhere.
That furnace, by the way, still consumes a tiny fraction of nationwide electricity production. No problem.
@gretathunberg @kravietz
not that it didn't look impressive, and not that removing nuclear plants wasn't removing capacity from the grid ... but:
1: to "normalize" output from wind and solar, we could adapt consumption, build a bigger grid, install some storage ... and if all that combined fails, the next best thing are power plants which can adapt output by the minute. Not nuclear...
2: Unless someone comes up with a good idea for nuclear waste disposal, it's another time bomb.
@Mr_Teatime @drq @gretathunberg
You also might be unaware of that, but we are storing extremely toxic waste in underground storage - mercury, arsenic, cyanides. This is in Germany:
https://www.kpluss.com/en-us/our-business-products/waste-management/underground-disposal/
And unlike nuclear, they don't lose toxicity over time. They'll stay there forever.
Have you seen Greenpeace freaking out about these? 🤔
@kravietz
1: wow, I was not aware. I'm actually not quite sure how I feel about this, and what the safety regulations around it are.
2: We've now strayed very far from the topic. We can't debate here whether nuclear power is a good idea -- but I maintain there is no binary choice between climate protection and phasing out the use of fission power plants.
It wouldn't be smart to remove them before removing coal power, but beyond that...
@drq @gretathunberg