kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

@InternetEh

Cold shuts not only thermal power plants

https://www.forbes.com/sites/salgilbertie/2021/02/15/texas-outages-put-reliability-of-renewable-energy-in-the-spotlight/

@laufi @michiel

> an open question, demanding research

That's a very clever eristic trick, probably learned by decades on academia 😂 You are basically postponing this discussion until never, rather than for example provide a reliable source to demonstrate otherwise.

I would again refer to this lecture by prof. Geraldine Thomas and you will be surprised how well researched it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOvHxX5wMa8

@laufi @michiel

But Mayak has nothing to do with nuclear power, it's a plutonium processing facility for Russian nuclear weapons program.

And if we look back to 50's (when the massive Kyshtym leak happened) then it would be fair to compare it against 1976 Banquiao dam disaster which killed tens of thousands and contaminated thousands of hectares of land.

That's precisely why we count the mortality per TWh.

@laufi @michiel

It depends on how you define it. How about mortality per kWh?

But coal is literally the most deadly source of energy in use, yet we happily use it, and extend its usage for decades to come.

Don't we care about all the people killed by burning coal? Or 60'000 killed by a dam disaster in China in 1976?

Of course we do, but we also need 24/7 energy so we make compromises 🤷

@laufi @michiel

So at the end of the day it's never choice between "clean" and "dirty" but between "more and less dirty". Therefore the only objective comparison is between specific engineering metrics, which are well described for all energy sources:

* lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions (how much CO2 per kWh)
* surface power density (how much area taken per kWh)
* capacity factor (how much time it works)

And then eventually you can look at price (LCOE).

@laufi @michiel

It's not politicians, it's us. People generally want everyone to be vaccinated... but guess what happens to a politician who proposes that local vaccination is slowed down to share some of the doses with a less privileged country?

@laufi @michiel

The problem with these debates is that it's presented as an opposition of "clean wind and solar" versus "dirty coal and nuclear" (fossil gas is somehow forgotten thanks to PR efforts of Gazprom, see below).

Nothing in advanced engineering is clean.

PV, wind, coal and nuclear all require thousands of tons of steel, alloys and rare earth metals. All mining releases toxic waste, including radioactive - especially rare earths, which are often co-mined with uranium.

@laufi @michiel

Careless storage is bad and this is precisely why we have the whole state supervision.

However, toxic waste is byproduct of any industrial process.

Want to manufacture PV panels, plastic windows, insulation foam and a billion of other advanced goods?

They all release toxic waste that has to be dealt with.

The only alternative is to outsource their production to less economically privileged countries where waste will be simply buried or dumped into rivers.

@laufi @michiel

1) Forget "nuclear". Industry produces thousands of tons of toxic waste, which needs to be stored. So you need storage anyway and a single nuclear power plant produces around 30 tons per year, a tiny fraction.

2) Nobody says you need a storage in Germany - that was the whole point of EU, wasn't it? Send it to France, Finland or Russia for storage.

Germany has no problem with outsourcing fossil gas extraction to Russia an after all.

@laufi @michiel

The reason there are no protests is because the waste, be it chemical or nuclear, are generally safe there for millions of years.

Even if there are leaks (as in Asse), they happen at depths of hundreds of meters underground (950 m in case of Asse), the amount of leaks is tiny and it never reaches surface.

And again, this applies equally to chemical and nuclear waste, with the exception that the latter loses toxicity over time.

@laufi @michiel

There's also other highly toxic waste, just as this chemical waste kept in K+S mines. It way more dangerous than even high-level nuclear waste.

Why there are no protests, no alarming articles?

@laufi @michiel

So as you can see, any news mentioning the topic of "radioactive waste" needs to be treated with extreme caution.

First, people don't understand that nuclear plants are not the only source of waste. Medicine and industry produce them just as well.

Not to mention coal mining, oil and gas mining, rare earth metals mining - basically anything you extract from the ground and concentrate usually contains uranium, radium, europium etc.

@laufi @michiel

Are you suggesting that because Germany is unable to find *any* safe site for radioactive waste it's going to cancel all X-ray and radiation therapy for cancer in future as well? Because this was the waste that was kept in Gorleben and leaked.

https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-storage-site-report/a-43399896

@laufi @michiel

I'm however intrigued why did you raise the topic of Gorleben? 🤔

@laufi @michiel

Source URLs for what exactly?

Jacobson was linked here https://social.privacytools.io/@kravietz/105737976717771278

IPCC is, well, IPCC, picture taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emissions_of_energy_sources#2014_IPCC,_Global_warming_potential_of_selected_electricity_sources