@kravietz
Even if someone cut down the trees in their yard, PV is still one of the best sources of energy:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/16/mediocrity-is-the-enemy-of-the-solution/
@mithrandir @kravietz
Definitely worth investigating to some extent. Scaling properties on solar are hard to beat, but small self-contained nuclear batteries could be competitive.
@mithrandir @kravietz
Per the link I dropped, problem with NEW nuclear is it takes like 15 years to bring it to completion. So shutting down nuclear prematurely is probably a bad plan, but spinning it up right now is kind of a case of too-little-too-late. New solar deployment is up within a year.
Also scaling properties. Every solar panel built makes building the next one cheaper. True too of reactors but not many of them are (ever) made so scale doesn't happen.
>New solar deployment is up within a year.
Indeed, it is quicker to build the plant, but the plant also takes up more space (with exceptions -- those towers outside Vegas are wonderfully compact, idk how much power they put out though), and you have to build it somewhere where you get sunlight/wind reliably enough that the plant is worth building. For a lot of cities that means the plant has to be far away, which leads to high line loss.
OTOH solar and wind are eminently the best strategy for power in rural and low-density urban areas, where the cost of land is cheaper and also it makes more sense to spread out power production. A small town would probably be better served by nearby solar and wind farms than a faraway nuclear plant.
The article you linked seems to be making an argument that *nothing* besides wind, solar, and waves should be invested in. That just seems shortsighted to me, especially when so many proposed power sources are still in their infancy.
>Every solar panel built makes building the next one cheaper.
Huh? You mean that it's easy to mass produce them, right? There is not an infinite supply of silicon, and the fixed marginal cost of the production process remains the same until you change the production process.
@mithrandir @kravietz
1. "Naive" economies of scale, bigger more efficient factories, better processes.
2. R&D-based economies of scale: more people buy PV, more competition, more R&D investment --> higher efficiency, longer lasting PV made with cheaper materials and processes.
Same story as batteries. It's not govt research that's driving these curves, it's competition.
~
@lain @mithrandir @kravietz
Batteries. Buy a phone, buy a Tesla, push dat curve.
Because PV is actually made mostly of mined resources, as this friendly ad from Australian Mining (!) demonstrates
@kravietz @lain @mithrandir
A PV cell is mined and then runs 10 years. A cm3 of gas is mined and then burned within a couple of hours.
Also I prefer the Australians, they don't try to invade Europe every chance they get.
I don't think anybody supports fossil fuels in this thread, so this argument is irrelevant.
The problem with PV is specifically what you described - it runs 10 years, and then you need a new one.
Per 1 W of energy mining requirements are much higher for PV than other sources.
Then you need a whole lot of them due to low surface power density.
Then you need even more due to low capacity factor.
And then you need storage.
@mithrandir @lain @kravietz
Love how they have this little black sliver "Geological repository". Cost of storing the waste 100,000 years is way higher than that, but I guess that's close to the cost of giving it to the Mafia to dump off the coast of Somalia.
@cjd Thatās the problem most people have with nuclear power, after the elephant in the room, dirty bombs all over your country. Itās hard to convince a people who couldnāt hold their country together for 300 years that thereās a good plan for the next 10,000 years. (Did you write 100,000 on purpose?) @mithrandir @lain @kravietz
But it's based on three fundamental misconceptions:
1) that only nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste
2) that it needs storing for 100'000 or 10'000 years
3) that radioactive waste is the *only* one that needs safe storage for a long time
> mean small amounts like for medical purposes
This is the funny part: nuclear industry is so regulated, that anything anything used anywhere in a nuclear plant or X-ray machine is "nuclear waste". Most of these drums shown in scary German movies about leaky storages are filled with old gloves, clothes, tools, parts of machinery and all that crap that is "radioactive" only by legal definition. In terms of volume it's a lot, but in terms of emissions, it's nothing.
@kravietz Thereās a mountain in Idaho with tunnels full of drums of nuclear waste. After a few decades, the drums were leaking and the tunnels were caving in on top of them. They canāt get anyone to go in there to fix it, and they canāt get anyone to let them dump it anywhere near where they are. It aināt old gloves. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
@epic @lain @mithrandir @kravietz
I grew up nearby to the Rowe Yankee powerplant which was in decommissioning all through my childhood. I remember when they pulled the reactor and drove it out of there, lots of people protested for some reason but allowed the truck to pass, my parents took me to see the spectacle.
They're still keeping some waste on-site because they judged it safer than transporting it.
@epic @lain @mithrandir @kravietz
That was in decommissioning from 1992 until 2007, and there were a good number of people employed there. It's hard for me to imagine how a nuclear power project posts a bond big enough to pay that kind of bill since they're very likely to be bankrupt when they have to clean up...
@epic @lain @mithrandir @kravietz
If you want to drill oil, you need to post a bond large enough to plug the well if you disappear or go bankrupt. I have a hard time imagining how you would conceivably post a bond big enough to pay for taking a nuclear plant apart.
The other thing is if you've got an old powerplant which *should* be shut down, if you're a business you have a perverse incentive to keep it running as long as possible.
Keep running -> make money
Shut down -> massive cost
@epic @lain @mithrandir @kravietz
The other thing is insurance... How do you insure against the risk of everything 30 miles in every direction becoming uninhabitable.
What kind of insurance company is going to offer that?
I think the answer is they don't actually have the coverage to pay the cost of a meltdown and if it happens they walk away and make it the state's problem. Clean energy until it isn't.
How do we exactly insure today against the actual deaths of hundreds of thousands of people of air pollution caused by burning coal and biomass? How do we insure about catastrophic effects of climate change causes by burning fossil gas?
@kravietz @cjd @epic @lain @mithrandir
"I don't think anybody supports fossil fuels in this thread, so this argument is irrelevant."
> stored at the reactor sites themselves
I explained above. After 60 years of nuclear power plants operations there's not enough actual nuclear waste to economically justify long-term geologic repository. This is the only reason why it's now being stored in plants. Storages are being built in France, Finland etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
> check the comma key on your keyboard
This is the 1000's separator in Europe :)
@kravietz Probably the fastest word with nine characters I can type on my keyboard is wikipedia. I havenāt figured out how to get Duck-Duck-Go to add -wikipedia to my searches and I donāt want to even pollute my mind with their synopses on the search page, much less click on it. Might just as well ask the nuclear salesmen or CNN.
Youād be surprised, if you do that, what a dearth of information there is on the web. They are a monopoly with all the validity of google, twitter, facebook, etc. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
> the big problem with solar power is its disposal too
Yes, some types of PV panels on abandoned solar farms have contaminated ground with cadmium.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/solar/the-mounting-solar-panel-waste-problem/
But it's not a disaster or reason to cancel all PV projects, stupid people contaminate environment with stuff all the time and we just need to deal with it.
@kravietz That article says what Iāve heard. Doesnāt sound very much like clean energy to me at all. As for recycling it, the article says, āSolar panels can be recycled but the cost of recycling is generally more than the economic value of the material recovered,ā so itās toxic trash when done with. I donāt know why everyone thinks itās the catās meow. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
> crazy toxic like nuclear waste
Nuclear waste is not "crazy toxic". There are plenty of much more toxic things around and we are literally bathing in ionizing radiation every day, we evolved in an irradiated world. Here's a good scientific explainer on that:
@kravietz @epic @lain @mithrandir
Not really worth arguing about. Nuclear power is dead everywhere except China, and when China melts down it'll be dead there too.
Dead?! Are you living on the Moon? Because in Europe there's a whole lot of operational reactors and new in constructions. As of today nuclear power provides 25% of all EU electricity and 50% of low-carbon.
@kravietz @epic @lain @mithrandir
New projects, or just old ones from the 80s ?
Finland 2005, France 2007, UK 2018, Russia 2010, Belarus 2014 - and these are only those under construction (actually Belarus went into production this year)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors
Also worth mentioning ITER that goes first plasma in 2025
@kravietz @epic @lain @mithrandir
Looks like all of Germany's reactors were 60s and 70s era, France's are all 70s and 80s and are still being operated -- though questionable how dangerous these old beasts become.
Also worth noting these timelines. Every year of construction is a year of additional debt you take on, this is probably one reason why solar projects are able to raise money easier than nuclear.
It's not "questionable" at all. They are inspected and their licenses extended for another 20 years. A boiling water reactor can safely operate for 80+ years. That's hell of a return on investment, especially if you count CO2 emissions avoided.
@kravietz @cjd @epic @lain @mithrandir Operating for 80 years isn't sufficient information to determine ROI. You also need to include initial capex, opex, profit, etc.
@mlg @cjd @epic @lain @mithrandir
Assuming you're doing it for profit.
@kravietz @cjd @epic @lain @mithrandir every generation project would like to assume it operates at a profit for the full lifecycle. Energy market can change, more cost effective generation can come online, demand can be reduced (customers trade their 100w incandenscent for 5w led, their 500w desktop + CRT for a 50w laptop + LED monitor etc). everything about the grid is evolving, the history of energy policy walks a balance between overregulation and underregulation failures
So you probably understand why I'm a bit surprised when you say "dead" about a single source that provides *half* of all low-carbon and non-intermittent energy in EU, so the same amount as all solar, wind, hydro.
And this should be even more surprising when you compare CO2 emissions of "renewable" Germany with France or Sweden (both largely nuclear):
@kravietz Carbon schmarbon. Weāre carbon-based life forms. The root of the carbon scare is control and taxation. @cjd @lain @mithrandir
@kravietz Oh, I donāt want to watch an hour and a half about how everythingās bombarding us with rays. Iād probably get sick and think I had the Rona. Iāll save it though, in case I ever wish Iād watched it. Thanks. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
Nuclear waste is not ācrazy toxicā. There are plenty of much more toxic things around and we are literally bathing in ionizing radiation every day, we evolved in an irradiated world.
My brother was a truck driver for a long time, then got a degree in radiology and became an x-ray technician. The hospital had a mobile CAT-scan unit that went all over the US. He proposed that they pay him 1-1/2 times his wages and he would do both, so he did that for years. He made more, the hospital paid less.
After that he went into inspecting nuclear power plants for a few years. None of them ever failed tests and his badge never turned colors. He was never around more radiation than is deemed safe by all standards.
One reason two people werenāt needed for the mobile CT unit was because he was a giant of a man. Where normally the truck driver would help the tech move frail or overweight patients onto the bed of the CAT-scan machine he could move them alone without hurting them.
He slowly faded away until he is now on permanent disability. He can hardly see where heās going, hasnāt much coordination, and is as thin as a rail. He really shouldnāt have to eat food because he carries a little briefcase around with him chock full of pills he has to take multiple times a day for I donāt know how many types of cancer.
It doesnāt matter how much radiation weāre constantly bombarded with. We shouldnāt add to it the most deadly form of energy ever created. Trading carbon emissions for nuclear radiation has to be one of the worst ideas ever imagined. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
Sorry for your brother, but there's nothing in this story that indicates any relation between his health and his work in nuclear power plants.
By making this type of irrational fears drive your energy policy you're actually exposing yourself to sources of energy that *actually* cause way more deaths.
The graph doesnāt show the relationship between how much of each type of power is used. If nuclear serves 10 people and gas serves 100,000 people, you canāt say nuclear is better because 1 died from it and 10,000 died from gas.
The graph must be deaths in the industry. The graph doesnāt show whether the people killed by nuclear were too close to a failed reactor. That just shows why no one wants nuclear power anywhere near them.
The concrete problems are dirty bombs and waste storage, and concrete solves neither.
When we werenāt even yet at war on our home soil, I would say donāt build dirty bomb sites all over the place. Even if you post security guards all over plants 24/7, they wouldnāt be expecting one and a terrorist could easily through, and then thereās bombs dropped from above.
Saying the waste storage problem is solved because weāre just not going to do anything about it, just to leave it in concrete in the plants along with security 24/7 for thousands of years, is not feasible.
> how much of each type of power is used
This is precisely why it's normalised per TWh of energy produced.
> terrorist could easily through
Sorry, but this is FUD. You can come up with *any* number of hypothetical and very scary scenarios that involve terrorists and hydro power dams, and technically you can get tens of thousands of casualties from these scenarios, and then call for abandoning hydro power. The truth is no terrorists ever attacked either nucler, or hydro or any power plant.
@kravietz The British dam busters in WWII bombing German dams made ingenious bouncing/rollong barrels to hit the dams. Dams are far thicker and much harder to destroy.
I have nuclear plants near me within the range of everything that died after Chernobyl meltdown. Theyāre shut down but no one know whatās in there and no one will buy a house anywhere near them. It doesnāt matter if their concern is dirty bombs or emissions. Thereās a gap between Orange County and San Diego where the land is worthless anywhere near the domes. No one wants it. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
Excuse me, there was one case - in 1982 a Green activist Chaim Nissim obtained a RPG and fired five rockets at unfinished SuperphƩnix plant in France to demonstrate how terrorists can destroy it but he didn't even scratch the concrete.
@kravietz I didnāt think anyone would do that. I mentioned the security to stop people getting inside and destroying the machinery and the security that would be needed forever to stop them, and I talked about bombing from above.
Youāre pushing nuclear in a time of war to a public who rejected it in times of peace.
@epic @lain @mithrandir @kravietz
It doesn't take terrorists to cause nuclear accidents, you have economic incentives for that.
When a plant prints money as long as it keeps running and is massively expensive to shutdown, you don't need a PhD to know that the owners are going to do whatever they possibly can to keep renewing the permit.
Homer Simpson plant safety manager is kind of in jest, but it's more real than people want to believe.
> possibly can to keep renewing the permit
And that's great news. There's nothing more beneficial for climate and for the environment than a low-carbon power plant that works for 80 years.
> cause nuclear accidents
Absolutely yes, but this applies to *every* single energy source. You got radioactive waste from rare earth mines for PV, you got cadmium contamination from PV panels, you got gearbox oil spills from wind, you got hydro dam disasters, you got pollution from new fossil gas and coal built for baseload.
This is why we use objective engineering indicators, such as deaths per kWh to compare what is less or more safe.
@kravietz @cjd @epic @lain @mithrandir
>objective engineering indicators
Those are statistics. By this reasoning, cirque du soleil extreme acrobatic stunts are "safer" than chopping a carrot in the kitchen, looking at injuries per hour.
The real engineering indicator is a something called Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and its based on a thorough understanding of system, subsystem and component levels potential failures and interactions.
@cjd @epic @lain @mithrandir @kravietz
What country do we invade in response to this terrorist attack on our infrastructure? https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/04/us/bird-poop-nuclear-power-shutdown/index.html
> pushing nuclear in a time of war to a public
I don't care about public, I care about pollution and climate change.
If you see the public being told that "Fukushima killed 20'000 of people" or "5G is causing COVID" you don't quietly affirm that "ah ok, maybe they're right", you just stand up and tell them this is bullshit.
I donāt care about public, I care about pollution and climate change.
And you think when everyoneās like China, where the people are just a herd of animals to be managed by government, everything will be better. It wonāt. Look at your own statement. You are the public, and no one can see how you donāt realize that.
Theyāre still checking and finding cancers in the people exposed to radiation from Fukushima. And the stories of 5G causing COVID is baloney put forth to discredit the fact that itās all spyware. There are trolls all over this place who exist only to make anyone stating the truth look like a raving lunatic.
Iād say that you, with your history, should know propaganda when you see it, but after this statement I think you do but use it for what it was intended.
You wonāt realize you are that public until itās too late.
> Theyāre still checking and finding cancers in the people exposed to radiation from Fukushima
I don't know who are "they" but UN has just found exactly opposite 10 years of studies:
@kravietz The UN is about as trustworthy as Wikipedia. What I stated is from specials on TV about Fukushima, how the people are dying, and how the government pays them for life, much shorter lives. It doesnāt matter if the UN says itās not happening when it is. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
@kravietz I am the public you donāt care about because your science religiosity doesnāt let you question the lies and data manipulation of people controlled by grants and lucrative positions.
Science aināt what it used to be by a long stretch.
> I am the public you donāt care about
I care about you enough to continue explaining and providing you with scientific evidence for three days, but when at the end all you can say is "IT'S ALL BIG ,PHARMA BITCHES" then it clearly means you don't care about anything I've said.
@kravietz I have no idea where that statement came from. I think you mixed up some discussions. Iām saying all your information paid for by the nuclear power industry isnāt as valid as you think it is, no matter how many PhDs theyāve got on the payroll. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
Almost none of the articles linked in this discussion comes even close to nuclear industry. These are mostly peer-reviewed scientific publications including bodies such as IPCC.
@kravietz Where does that low grade nuclear fuel come from for these new nuclear power plants? How much money is in the nuclear industry with a bunch of waste they canāt get rid of because of the pesky public you donāt care about?
All of the people paid to push what you are work for the nuclear industry, and its major problem right now is what to do with the waste. Track them down online. It always leads to corporations in trouble with waste disposal. Theyāll swear that the waste canāt be used for the new ones. Why do they all work for those companies then?
If you donāt think the money theyāve got buys politicians and government agencies, youāve got blinders on. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
If you think this applies to nuclear power exclusively, you've got blinders on
https://www.cfact.org/2019/09/15/the-solar-panel-toxic-waste-problem/
@kravietz Iām the guy wondering how youāve all been convinced to get rid of your own power, fossil fuels. @lain @cjd @mithrandir
@kravietz @epic @lain @cjd @mithrandir It's wrong to paint all nuclear critics as science denying greenpeace nuts. Unless people are keeling over from acute radiation, there are so many cases where statistics show EG certain forms of cancer rising in nearby residents while the rest of the country shows declining rates of the same cancer - but its never "conclusively proven" to be related to a nuclear facility. eg the book "The Hanford Plaintiffs"
@mlg @epic @lain @cjd @mithrandir
> so many cases where statistics show EG certain forms of cancer rising in nearby residents
This is a well known story of leukemia clustering near nuclear power plants in UK.
These clusters were a fact.
What was missed by the media hype was that they were also a fact around any other industrial facility in the country and caused by infections caused by migration of workers.
@mlg @epic @lain @cjd @mithrandir
The screenshot is taken from a *massive* report by the commission from 2016. They have researched and tested probably every single hypothesis raised by the public back then, and the only problem with this publication is that no gutter press reported about it because there is no sensationalist & scandalous stuff there to be sold.
@mlg @epic @lain @cjd @mithrandir
> all nuclear critics
Absolutely not all nuclear critics are nuts, many are simply misled.
I personally was anti-nuclear and very close to Greenpeace when I lived in Poland and almost went to protest against Temelin nuclear power plant in 90's (free bus & booze!).
I however studied chemical engineering and when I started to dissect the arguments they presented I not only failed to find the data behind it, I found exactly the opposite.
@kravietz I have spoken before with people in the industry whose job was to push nuclear power, which is nothing but a solution of what to do with the existing waste we have now.
1) that only nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste Iāve not heard of anything producing nuclear waste in the massive amounts that nuclear power or weapons do. Do you mean small amounts like for medical purposes?
2) that it needs storing for 100ā000 or 10ā000 years Those proponents never said that long-term storage wasnāt necessary, never was the thousands of years contested. Their solution was it would be encased in concrete and stored at the reactor sites themselves. I found that silly because those sites wonāt last that long either and it would be even harder to get people to accept a reactor near their home. (And check the comma key on your keyboard. I think itās on upside down)
3) that radioactive waste is the only one that needs safe storage for a long time Iāve heard the big problem with solar power is its disposal too. Not crazy toxic like nuclear waste, but must be disposed of in dumps lined with rubber or similar, like you would batteries or computer parts. What else needs long-term storage in figures like thousands of years (which was not denied by the people selling it).
@lain @cjd @mithrandir