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.
To be honest, I don't know. But we're getting into more details here than necessary.
Any coal plant built today signals intention to dig up and burn coal for the next x decades, therefore it's not compatible with sensible climate policy. Nuclear power has its own issues, and I don't think any amount of nuclear energy is going to save us, either. Because no single measure is enough, and because it creates other problems for which we have no solution.
@gretathunberg @kravietz @drq
@Mr_Teatime @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
You're absolutely right here. We should be adding more wind and solar, as much as possible, but since 100% is not possible, for baseline we should use nuclear which is zero emissions, rather than gas and coal.
Decarbonization is the priority now. In 30 years we might have nuclear fusion which is zero emissions and does not produce any waste, or some other completely new technology.
1: Nuclear power plants are not a very good match for intermittent sources because it can't vary its output very fast.
2: a large enough grid would require very little storage because there always wind (and tides, and water, and sun, and ...) somewhere.
3: the consumption side of things does not have to stay the same, either. How much energy could be used opportunistically, and why can't we effing decrease energy consumption already?
@Mr_Teatime @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
> Nuclear power (...) can't vary its output very fast
Modern nuclear plant - 20 minutes
Modern gas plant - 10 minutes
Is that not fast enough?
> a large enough grid would
We don't have large enough grid, just as we don't have large enough storage, power-to-gas, hydrogen - or clean nuclear fusion for that matter. We may have them in 30 years, but that's pretty much when we should have *already* decarbonized the energy sector.
IPCC 2019:
@Mr_Teatime @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
We don't know yet how to build any of these on industrial scale. We have a number of research tokamaks (also Russian word BTW) running plasma like ST-40 in UK (check on YouTube) and ITER is going "first plasma" in 2025 but this is still part of research. We're now a decade away from first production fusion reactor. Pretty much the same for power-to-gas and hydrogen.
@kravietz
"We don't have a large enough grid" ... who said we did? We had almost no wind power 20 years ago, and now we do!
You want to build fission plants -- oh, but we don't have those plants either.
We need to build one, is what I'm trying to say here.
@loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq