@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.

@gretathunberg @kravietz

@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.

@gretathunberg @kravietz

@drq

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

@drq @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

> nuclear waste disposal

When you learn the actual facts (which I did last year) it seems like the problem has been long solved, it's just Greenpeace wants us to believe it's not.

Look, an average nuclear plant produces ~27 tons of waste per year.

Then 96% of that is recycled back into nuclear fuel (MOX).

Then only the remaining 4% (1 ton) is actual "waste". It's vitrified (turned into glass), packed into containers and stored safely.

@kravietz We have this "debate": Germany wants to give us its UF6 so we could upcycle it.

Only we have the tech to do this effectively, because we (somehow) didn't wreck our nuclear industry with all other ones and Russian (actually Soviet) nuclear engineers are fucking heroes.

Germany did, and it has all this spent fuel lying around ever since, and they don't know what to do with it, and we do, so they gave it to us.

The Greenpeace loonies immediately jumped at it. "Boohoo, Russia is not a nuclear landfill".

WTF are you talking about. They are literally giving us free fuel, you illiterate pricks.

@Mr_Teatime @gretathunberg

@drq @Mr_Teatime @gretathunberg

Well, their reaction is quite obvious - because Germany has sent for recycling something that Greenpeace claimed will be deadly poisonous for billions of years. Germany and Russia have thus stolen their favourite scare 😂

And yes, Rosatom does really cool engineering these days, including the RITM-200 modular reactor, and has very good safety record.

@kravietz Yeah.

But also, that's just Uranium. For all its energy density, we don't have a lot of it, to be honest. But there's also another route - Thorium.

We have A LOT of it. And it's fertile - meaning you can make fissile material out of this fairly easily.

And it uses MSRs - molten salt reactors - that are even more safe, because they don't require as much automatic control as uranium reactors do: there is no "meltdown" (the salt is already molten), and the salt freeezes very quickly if the power to the plant is lost.

I wonder what it has in store for us.

@Mr_Teatime @gretathunberg

@kravietz And by "A LOT", I mean...

6 parts per million by weight in Earths crust, making it 41st mosе abundant mineral. And there's only one isotope of it found in nature, how convenient.

It's lying around like dirt, because it's basically literally dirt. It's a natural byproduct of rare-earth mining, which we had no idea what to do with until recently.

For comparison, Uranium is 4 parts per million, and only 0.72% of it is active, fissile.

@Mr_Teatime @gretathunberg