With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
Because of the war against nuclear plants. Our green party shut down nuclear plants in favor for renewable energy. But as predicted, renewables don’t meet our demands. So the green party started building gas plants to compensate instead of keeping nuclear running.
So why? Because of green idiocracry that demand the impossible of green energy (at this moment) and nuclear = evil
It didn’t, at least not in the way you think. The headlines of the past few days show the aftermath of the last decades: industry contracts that were made in the last century and the political heritage of a generation of politicians who are no longer in power.
Coal is being phased out and that’s not changing. It cannot change substantially anyway; there is only so much coal in the gound. Recent political decisions moved to keep most of it there. For technological, political, economical and industry related reasons this won’t be a fast process unfortunately.
One of the roadblocks of our transition to a sustainable energy supply is how much money (and in our capitalisic society, therefore, power) the industry itself holds. Coal lobbies will work hard for you not to think about them too much. Nuclear lobbies will work hard for you to blame those pesky environmentalists. A game of distraction and blame shifting. This thread is a good example of how well it’s working.
Our resources are limited. This is true for good old planet earth as well as our societies. We only have so much money, time, and workforce to manage this transition. And as much as I’d love to wake up tomorrow to a world with PVC on every roof, a windmill on every field, and decentralised storage in every town center, this is just not realistic overnight. We’ll have to live with the fact of our limited resources and divert as much as possible of them towards such a future. (And btw, putting billions of dollars in money, time, and workforce towards a reactor that will start working in 10-30 years is not the way to do this, as much as the nuclear lobby would like you to think that.)
Actually I thought it’s maybe because our crazy “friend”, who recently decided to show how it never actually left from behind the red curtain, had no problem shelling multiple nuclear power plant sites. Just saying.
Tf you mean stopped
- a German
Obligatory: we didn’t stop.
There’s also good reasons to have a fistful of generation plants with coal or natural gas.
To put it simply, nuclear is clean, far cleaner than just about anything else we have. If you compare the waste product with the energy produced… It’s just not an argument that nuclear loses versus something like coal. Where coal puts out its waste mainly in the form of smoke, nuclear waste, like discarded nuclear power rods, are a physical and far more immediately dangerous thing. The coal waste kind of blends in, and lobbyists have been throwing around “clean coal” for a while… Although coal use has gotten a lot more efficient and produces less waste than before, it’s still far more than what nuclear could do. “Clean” coal is a myth, it’s just “less bad” coal, with good marketing.
Regardless, coal and natural gas fired plants can ramp up and down far quicker than nuclear possibly could. Where nuclear covers base demand and can usually scale up and down a bit to help with higher load times, to cover peak demand, coal and natural gas can fire up and produce power in a matter of minutes. With nuclear, they have to ramp up slowly to ensure the reaction doesn’t run away from them, and to ensure all the safety measures and safeguards are working as intended as the load increases. It’s just a fat more careful process.
The grid is hugely complex, and I’m simplifying significantly. But from the best of my understanding, nuclear can’t react fast enough to cover spontaneous demand. So either coal or natural gas needs to exist for the grid to work as well as it does.
Wind is unpredictable and solar usually isn’t helping during the hours where the grid would need help with the demand. The only viable option is with grid scale energy storage, which can hold the loads while the nuclear systems have a chance to ramp up.
There’s still far more coal fired plants in the world than we need for this task alone, so there’s still work to be done… But I suspect coal use will diminish, but not be eliminated from grid scale operation for a while.
Aren’t most base-load nuclear plants typically paired with an energy storage solution like a gravity battery to habdle burst loads?
To my knowledge, apart from very new battery-based systems, the most common energy storage used for grid scale applications is pumped hydro, and even that is pretty rare… Either you need geographic features that make it viable, which is relatively rare in proximity to all the geographic features you would need for a nuclear plant, or you need to build such structures which is insanely expensive.
The main issue with grid scale anything, is that until very recently, most energy companies have been living on insanely long timelines, far longer than most industries. Infrastructure, when built, almost always has multiple decades of lifespan if not longer. Most energy storage tech that’s old enough to be considered for the time that many of the nuclear were built, did not have multiple decade lifespans and would need full or at the least the majority of their working material replaced within a decade at best. For an industry where a new facility will last 50+ years, that’s not a good investment. The only long term solution that would last is pumped hydro. This is changing and new grid-scale storage tech is reaching a high level of development, aka, almost ready for large scale production.
Simply put, if you think about the technology that was available when these facilities would have been built, around 50-80 years ago for many, energy storage wasn’t something that people really thought about, you either had live delivery of energy (from generator to device in micro-seconds) or primary cell batteries, like alkaline. Without much in-between, and most of what was there wasn’t grid-scale, not even close.
Sure, there are newer reactors than that, but a remarkable number of nuclear energy facilities are many decades old, most of the viable grid scale energy storage tech has been developed in the past decade or so.
To be clear, nuclear plants usually have conventional generators, often diesel, but that energy isn’t for export (for sale to customers), it’s used to restart the pumps and power the facility for a cold start of the nuclear generation systems. And that’s about it. 50 years ago, you didn’t have viable energy storage for the grid, everything was generated as it was used, when the load increases, fire up more generation capacity. So base load was handled by plants that needed to run 24/7 like nuclear, since it’s difficult or impossible to turn them off, and they would ramp up when demand increased, and any gap would be filled by plants that can go from off to making energy in minutes, like coal and natural gas.
To summarize, with the exception of pumped hydro, nothing is capable of handling that much power for the grid. We’re not talking a few minutes of energy storage, this is more like an hour+ as reactors heat up and more turbines come up to speed. The only energy generation that can meet that demand that quickly is coal/gas-based plants and pumped hydro, with pumped hydro being so difficult to build, coal and gas are used. Of the gas-powered plants, natural gas is the most economically viable.
This is changing, but the infrastructure in use is usually significantly older than the technology you’re mentioning.
Out of necessity probably. In Germany for example they’re turning off nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal because nuclear is dangerous apparently. However you still need to produce the power somehow to run the country. Not even the most hardcore climate activists want to sit in a dark, cold apartment with no power.
Germany is not replacing nuclear plants with coal. They are replacing them with renewables and the plans to phase out nuclear are 10 years, respecitvely 20 years old, but thanks to nuclear lobby meddling they went back on phasing them out and then back on going back again because of Fukushima. So because of pro nuclear we got less renewables and more coal than if we just had sticked to the initial plan in the first place.
They’re burning coal to produce the energy they otherwise would have done using nuclear so I don’t think there’s anything wrong about what I said. If you turn off a nuclear power plant you’re going to need to produce that energy by some other means. They’re not building new coal plants to replace nuclear but they’re continuing to use/reopen coal plants that shouldn’t have to be used anymore. Germany is the world’s 4th biggest coal consumer.
“Replacing” implies that there is usage of coal plants, that before weren’t used. And that is not the case. In the first half of 2023 the share of both lignite and normal coal went down by 21 and 23%, while the share of renewables increased.
So renewables took up the slack, not coal. If you want to say, that the nuclear plants could be replacing coal plants, that is a different argument, but that does not imply the reverse relationship.
At least 20 coal-fired power plants nationwide are being resurrected or extended past their closing dates to ensure Germany has enough energy to get through the winter.
While this all isn’t necessarily directly linked to the phasing out of nuclear energy and is more related to the war in Ukraine it still shows that Germany is continuing to use coal plants it didn’t intend to anymore.
Germany is firing up old coal plants, sparking fears climate goals will go up in smoke
Germany to reactivate coal power plants as Russia curbs gas flow
Energy crisis fuels coal comeback in Germany
Germany Reopens Coal Plants Because Of Reduced Russian Energy
Yes. And as you see these articles are from 9 month before the nuclear plants were phased out. But since Germany didnt start the war in Ukraine i don’t think it can be considered a failure of the German energy policies in general. And incidently, if it wasn’t for the resurgence of nuclear in the 2009 government, the original plan to expand renewables that was formulated with the decision to phase out nuclear power by the 2002 government, would have made it much easier for Germany to react to the Ukraine war.
It is always painted as if the debate and political alignments would make it coal vs. nuclear. But the reality of German politics and economic interests in politics is that nuclear and coal are both on the same side and acting against renewables. It is the existing fossil lobbies and energy companies heavily invested in fossils that are against renewables. For them it doesnt matter, if they can run a nuclear plant or a coal plant longer, as either is an otherwise stranded asset form them. The argument, that we could reduce the amount of coal plants this way was only coming up, when the general debate started to acknowledge climate change as a serious danger and mitigation as necessary, so around 2015-2018. But it is not a sincere interest of the pro nuclear factions in German politics.
the problem with nuclear power is the waste. no ody wants it, nobody can agree on a place to put it. also the amount of power germany got from nuclear before shutting down the last plants was verry low.
In Finland we place it in a deep tunnel dug into the bedrock where it will be put into capsules and buried in clay. The waste however is a big issue, there’s no denying that.
Oil propaganda convinced millions of people that renewable energy sources like nuclear power or wind turbine were dangerous/ineffective.
Basically humans are stupid and don’t like change and rich people know and took advantage of it.
Nuclear just leads to more war and destruction.
Nuclear power plants used to be built from repurchased nuclear weapon factories so if anything it leads to less war and destruction
You…can’t be serious right now…can you? Or are you conflating nuclear power with nuclear bombs? Because the two are very different things.
As climate change leads to non-traditional weather, people won’t be able to farm in the same places. People will be displaced, famine will hit. Droughts will clear up water sources and fights over water rights will happen.
The only way to reduce the impact is big, non-emitting power that can run 24/7/365 and the only contender for that is hydro and nuclear. And we’ve already built hydro just about everywhere that’s feasible to do so. With a surplus of cheap energy, we can improve hydroponics/vertical farming, reduce transportation needs for food (by growing it closer to population centers), and develop a means of scalable desalination.
Nah. Nuclear will prevent far more war.
nuclear power and nuclear bombs are the same.
As long as nuclear power exists, it will be used to pursue bombs.
Not to mention that nuclear power is incredibly unsafe and damaging
There are newer models of plants that dont produce the byproducts needed for nuclear armaments. The problem is that our governments want those byproducts for nuclear armaments so the safer reactors were never built.
Coal mining kills more people per year than nuclear does. Pollution kills more people by several magnitudes than nuclear ever could. When proper safety measures are put in place it’s by far the safest form of energy. And regardless of whether people make nuclear power plants, the technology exists, so it will be used to make bombs regardless
Even if you get rid of every nuclear power plant, governments will still pursue bombs.
You’ve bought the misinformation.
You can make an explosive out of a pressure cooker, therefore everyone that buys a pressure cooker is a domestic terrorist! You’re welcome FBI
By your logic we should stop using wind power because more people have died per kWh produced than nuclear https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
We all drank the
oilkoolaidHow is nuclear renewable?
It’s renewable the same way as the sun is: Not, but it will last for a really, really long time.
Because the amount of fuel used in a nuclear reactor is exponentially less than fossil fuels.
There’s enough nuclear material on this planet to power nuclear reactors for tens of thousands of years.
Nuclear power is clean, efficient, and lasts for essentially ever
It’s an interesting take. I guess the sun is not renewable either.
Is any practically infinite (in human scales) source of energy called renewable? I am hearing this for the first time.
You are asking The Last Question It’s one of those short stories that you’ll read once and think about it occasionally for the next 20 years
I don’t understand this comment.
How is the sun not renewable?
Renewable energy means using renewable resources. Meaning things that either replenish themselves within a short enough period or things that produce massive amounts of energy over long periods of time.
Because the sun is also a depleting source of energy. I question the definition of renewable that’s all.
I would have never considered nuclear energy being renewable, but I guess a similar argument could be made.
The sun will exist for hundreds of thousands of years after humanity has gone extinct. The sun will exist for millions of years before it burns out. Humanity will thrive diminish and die before the sun dies.
It is by all intents and purposes an infinite resource for a finite species.
Technically speaking, it does not renew itself. It is being slowly depleted. You are right in saying that we can treat it as a renewable source as far as us and our technologies are concerned.
The sun will exist for hundreds of thousands of years after humanity has gone extinct. The sun will exist for millions of years before it burns out.
Your timescales are off. Even if humanity lasts a very long time, which seems unlikely, the sun will last for billions of years after humanity is gone. In one billion years the sun will have become hotter so that life becomes impossible on Earth. There will be four billion years of a lifeless Earth before the sun expands into a red giant and either swallows up or cooks the Earth. One billion years after that the sun will kick off its outer layers into a nebula and become a white dwarf. At that point it’s not reacting any more so it just gradually cools down over billions more years until it’s just a cool lump.
The sun will eventually explode.
Long after humanity has ceased to exist.
I’m quite certain we can manage to stop existing before nuclear fuel runs out as well.
It’s not big enough to explode, it’ll have a heat death
It’s close to ‘renewable’ but technically it should be called ‘low carbon fuel’.
That’s like saying air isn’t renewable…
There are processes on our planet renewing air. I’m not aware of similar processes for fission materials.
It’s renewable in the same way that solar is. Eventually the sun will die and solar won’t work just like we’ll eventually run out of fissible material.
where’s the carbon in nuclear?
The graphite neutron moderator.
The carbon expended in producing the fuel is a good example.
As with all power plants, wind turbines, solar panels, etc. there are carbon costs associated with the manufacturing, construction and transport. Remember that there’s a lot of steel involved.
Climate change ‘looming’? Dude, it’s already here.
Sad reality people doesnt want to realise/acknowledge…
Oh good, let’s quibble about semantics instead of actually discussing the meat of the problem.
First time online? But yes it’s annoying.
Meat? I … I’m vegan!
/s
It’s not about semantics. It’s abut the fact that it’s already too late and people are still not doing anything. Why do people still mind coal? Because our civilization is not ready to deal with climate change. Nothing serious will be done about it.
It’s never really stopped.
But from the actions of those in power it seems they’re just plowing through climate change and making money whilst they can. Imagine the decision is we’re fucked anyway so let’s get mine whilst I can and see if it helps me survive.
Over here (Australia) we never stopped. Our coal lobby is simply too influential with our government.
Will renewables ever be viable in countries like the UK or Ireland, where there isn’t actually a whole lot of land for things like solar and wind?
There is tonnes of sea around the UK and Ireland and the UK are operating among the largest offshore wind farms. Also the offshore wind is generally stronger and more consistent, which is why they continue to expand their capacities. The UK is currently at 14 GW and Ireland is trying to catch up, now planning a 3 GW farm.
Wind turbines can be located off shore. Energy can also be harvested from wave action.
Renewables are already viable in the UK and making up an ever increasing percentage of electricity generation. Additionally, the time when it’s windiest in the UK is also the time when electricity demand is at its highest.
Using coal for electricity in the UK is now rare. Coal only made up 1.5% of electricity generation in the UK in 2022. Just ten years ago coal generation was nearly half.
Seriously? I didn’t know it was anywhere near that low. That’s great assuming they haven’t just replaced it with gas or something similar, although gas is supposed to be better than coal.
There’s tons of land for wind in the UK, the issue is Nimbys that don’t want them spoiling their view.
And it kills birds despite household cats being genocidal murderers.
Studies show that wind turbines kill a fraction of a percentage of the total bird population. Not ideal, but ultimately negligible.
Yes, but it would require government spending and in the UK we currently have theives and billionnaires in charge who don’t even think kids should be able to eat at school.
Again? Did we stop?
It doesn’t look like anyone has mentioned metallurgical coal yet. Even if you don’t burn it for energy, the carbon in steel has to come from somewhere and that’s usually coke, which is coal that has been further pyrolised into a fairly pure carbon producing a byproduct of coal tar.
Metallurgical coal only makes up for rather small part of coal mining, around 7% of all coal production goes towards it, and while the process produces more GHG than just burning it for power it has a less profound impact because it’s just smaller. It’s also one of the places where we can’t really find an alternative, to produce steel you need to use bitumen coal because they have more carbon and less volatiles than charcoal.
On top of that steel is extremely recyclable meaning that any steel produced can be reused pretty much 1:1 with only a small amount of energy needed.
You can make really pure charcoal if you use plant fiber, like waste coconut husks. I guess it’s just a cost issue?
More than likely it’s a cost issue, coal is artificially cheap thanks to several countries subsidizing the coal industry like Germany, USA and Australia.
There’s also I guess the practical question of how much plant fiber per ton of metallurgical coal is needed, i.e. how land would be dedicated towards ‘producing plant fiber’ for the steel industry.
Coconut husks are free with the coconuts, which is why I mentioned them. Without explicitly breaking out my highschool chemistry, I’m guessing you get about a third the mass of carbon from cellulose.
If it’s a whole 7% of the coal mined, though, that is a pretty significant amount. I assume we’ll have to find less agricultural ways of fixing CO2 at some point, because it is kind of a shame to use prime agricultural land to make industrial feedstock. NASA already has a device that can turn it into CO electrically, I guess.
How much of that carbon is emitted Vs embedded in the steel matrix? 50%?
I’m not actually sure. I imagine it depends on how exactly it’s mixed in.
The green alternative would be to go back to charcoal (or “biochar” if you want to sound fancy), but it might be a bit more expensive.
So that’s where the name coke comes from! TIL!
Coal is just Cola with the letters swapped around.
In my country, because of a decades long fearmongering and disinfomation campaing that destoyed the nuclear energy industry. So now we’re stucked with coal to keep the power running at night and during winter.
Well, nuclear energy is expensive anyways and the amount of uranium on this world seems quite limited.
It’s just not the technology of the future. In the long term we should use regenerative energies that are way cheaper.
Well you didn’t google any of that.
Nuclear power plants are expensive to build but the cost of running one especially when adjusted to the amount of electricity it produces is not significantly more than running any other power plant. Also uranium is not considered to be a gobally scarce resource.
That’s also what I believed. But turns out nuclear is the most expensive kind of energy.
Here’s a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k
(Seriously, watch it)
The high cost is largely explained by the fact that there’s no “standard model” for nuclear power plants but instead they’re all designed and built from scratch which can make them really expensive. Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland is the world’s 8th most expensive building at whopping 12 billion dollar cost to build. The original price estimate was 3 billion. Many of the buildings on that list ahead of Olkiluoto 3 are also nuclear power plants.
This however isn’t some inherent probem about nuclear power itself but rather the way we do it. It doesn’t need to be that expensive.
Yeah, I’m still not convinced. If current state of the art makes it 5 times more expensive than current state solar or wind. Your explanation needs to be more than ‘but we choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be’.
Sure theoretically this might not be an inherent problem. But the same applies to renewable. I’m not sure if solar or wind are close to something limiting their efficiency or cost of production. There might be new technology advancing both of them. We can talk about this and look for more information. But it’s a very hypothetical discussion. As of now in the real world, there are real-world power plants and if no-one can demonstrate to bridge that big gap in economic efficiency… Maybe there’s something to it…
And apart from that. I’d argue that there are some inherent problems. For example mega-projects having issues with their budget. That’s a very interesting topic but inherent to big and complex projects for several reasons. Also a nuclear plant and all the infrastructure around it is inherently more complex and more expensive than for example a wind turbine and what we need to assemble a bit of steel tubing, wings and a bit of copper. (Broadly speaking.) I think it’s a combination of factors. But I’d be surprised if the future holds something increasing the economic efficiency of nuclear (fission) power plants by that factor.
(Edit: Those numbers from the video are for the US. But 5 times more expensive is huge.)
We don’t choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be. It’s by nature always going to be more expensive to build one of something instead of what the cost per unit is going to be when you make many.
Wind and solar isn’t going to solve the issue untill we come up with a way to store energy on large scale. When you plug in an appliance that electricity is not taken from a reserve but it’s produced for you in real time. Wind doesn’t blow and sun doesn’t shine according to how much electricity is needed at each moment. Finland produces all its electricity basically by hydro, wind and nuclear power. When it’s windy we have excess electricity and the prices drops to negative and we got to sell it abroad but when it’s calm the opposite is true. This wouldn’t be the case if we could somehow store that excess energy.
cost per unit
We’re talking about effective cost of the resulting power, altogether. All things included. (Except for nuclear waste, which is a topic for a different discussion and difficult to quantify.) Just comparing one aspect wouldn’t be fair.
store energy on scale
Yeah, and science and investors are way ahead of politics. There are several concepts already available or already in place somewhere. Several promising ideas and projects that need funding. Storage facilities that aren’t able to store energy because Bavaria is not willing to run cables across the country. It is a complex topic that also needs individual solutions. For example depending on geography you could have dams and pump water. Or one of the concepts that work everywhere. Infrastructure and cunsumer get more advanced/intelligent. You could charge your car automatically during periods where renewable is abundant. You can fine-tune factories, maybe have the large heat pump of an office building vary temperature a bit when there is a Dunkelflaute. Some countries just get geothermal power for free because of their location… You can put those storage facilities close to energy generation or close to the consumer. And as supply and demand changes prices, it’s also well aligned with the way our economy (and capitalism) works.
We should really hurry up and put in the effort this needs. Because we really need those storage facilities. And I’d like energy costs to come down again, and CO2 emissions also.
And if I remember correctly, the current natural gas power plants are the ones that can react to supply and demand the most quickly. But this seems not to be a good idea anymore, now that we have enough problems with the natural gas in central europe. I (personally) would be happy if there was an alternative.
I haven’t heard any scientist in the last years tell something different from renewable plus storage is the way. Not unless some miracle happens and we get fusion reactors or something. But it’s still unclear it that’s going to happen.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k
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Right, but that’s why people are talking about nuclear as a bridge technology, not as a permanent solution. Whether or not we can make it pencil out before smashing through all of the critical tipping points in global temperature averages is not something I’m qualified to have an opinion on, but I’m credibly informed that we might at least want to give it a serious look.
At one point in the future I’m sure we can look back, do the calculations and see if that had been a good bridge or an expensive thing for the taxpayer to deal with the dismantling and long time storage.
As of now I think the time of that bridge technology has come to an end anyways. We now have efficient renewable energies available. And concepts for energy storage. I think we should invest in that instead of putting the money into a thing of the past.
Nuclear is no more expensive than renewable. The amount of uranium is limited, but it’s not the only fuel for nuclear.
Sure it is. The World nuclear status report 2021 for example says it’s five times more expensive than wind energy.
And sure there are other fuels for nuclear. But I think most of them are even more limited?!
The paper doesn’t account account for availability. Nuclear has over 90% availability, which means for 1MW of power installed, you get on average over 0.9MW of power to use. Renewable are far below that, between 40 and 60% iirc. Which means you need to double the cost for a defined output. And that doesn’t consider batteries.
Unless the document talks about that, please point me to the right chapter then.
Damn. I shouldn’t have linked auch a long PDF. What are you talking about? I’m referring to the diagram (and text) on page 293. The annual Levelized Cost Of Energy.
It’s not only calculated on sunny days. They take the annual energy output for the calculation. Availability and everything included or these numbers wouldn’t make any sense.
And yes, we need batteries. But the nuclear plants also need other (faster) plants alongside. And this match isn’t a close call. With a 5 fold increase in being economical, we have plenty of money to spare to afford some batteries and hydroelectric dams.
I was looking at the building cost. Looking more into the Wikipedia article, it seems to account for availability. But the numbers are very speculative still, there is a crazy variation both for the specific data points and for the studies. Another big factor is the interest rate for investment which can double the cost of nuclear energy depending on the assumption.
Another thing that bother me is the speculative nature of these things. No photovoltaic power plant ever went through its whole lifespan. No significant energy production was made with variable renewable. Whereas nuclear was used for 70 years now. Yet the speculation makes it like nuclear will be expensive and unreliable and renewable will be cheap and reliable when the actual history is the exact opposite. Technology advances obviously, but still. I don’t consider renewable to be a tried and tested technology that scales while nuclear is.
Idk. Solar cells have been around for a while, too. Wind turbines are kind of simple devices. I bet an engineer can predict their maintenance cost and lifespan fairly accurate. Hydroelectric power plants have been around for more than 100 years. Electric cars have been invented before the combustion engine took off. Nuclear power has been around for some time. But you can’t use that as an argument and simultaneously argue about using thorium which large scale deployments are still hypothetical.
And I don’t think those numbers are 500% off. You can double some cost and were only at 200%. And they’re not complete speculation. They took the actual numbers of the previous year. And the years before that. These numbers are the ‘actual history’.
No significant energy production was made with variable renewable
Pardon? Norway? New Zealand? Switzerland? Iceland? Sweden? Countless others I probably forgot because I’m bad at geography? The USA and China, Philippines, Indonesia all have major ‘variable renewable’. Thousands and thousands of megawatts of energy are generated this way as of today. Then there is biomass if you’re geologically not that favored by nature, but I barely know anything about that. And who says we can’t use the sun and wind? Of course we can also use those.
Thorium is one of the most abundant material on earth. Unlike lithium for example.
Yeah. But the technology is - at this point - more sci-fi than anything else. Probably nothing we need to worry about in the next few years.
And you still need to mine some non-renewable resource. It’s still nuclear and produces waste. And it seems super expensive.
There are working thorium reactor for 50 years or something. Hardly sci-fy.
Renewables need batteries to work. Which needs lithium.
Sure. Just use molten salt energy storage, hydroelectric dams or whichever of the dozens of technologies makes most sense where you are.
Combine different kinds of renewables so you get power at night and when the wind isn’t blowing. Build more then enough and if you got excess energy, maybe make some hydrogen.
Have your devices and industry ‘smart’ so it draws less power when there’s less supply.
You really don’t need to do everything with ‘normal’ batteries like in a smartphone.
The ‘working’ thorium reactors are for research. They don’t generate energy. At least if we’re speaking about generating energy for a whole country. The planned thorium reactors of the next many years also don’t generate any significant amount of energy. With that argumentation we also (almost) have nuclear fusion power plants.
A thorium power plant that contributes to the power grid and shows up in the numbers is sci-fi. I mean, it’s not impossible. It’s just lots of very expensive work left to do.
Let’s be honest though, rivers running low in summer so plants had to shut down, core material being bought from Russia and overwhelming costs for dismantling old plants together with no solution at all for final storage also did their part in it.
But we could have worked on these issues for years by now. Abandoning the entire industry also lead to slowdown in research and inovation in the field. Of course now we’re hopelessly behind.
Oor the ressources could be better spent in renewables, which are available as long as the sun exists, while nuclear will run out of fuel within the 22cnd century.
Also with nuclear Europe is entirely dependent on imports, primarily from Russia and russia-aligned countries. Being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin.
Nuclear won’t run out of fuel. But if renewable are so good, why are so many countries mining coal?
False information. There is enough fissionable material to last humans 10s of thousands of years.
Do you all have a source for that?
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
Several other studies estimate 90 thousand years. All of this is Uranium alone.
I don’t think I buy it. Like, there is a lot of uranium around the world, but most of it is prohibitively expensive to mine, the mining itself is extremely destructive, Australia has the largest uranium reserves but most of the rest is in the hands of authoritarian fuckwits like China and Russia, society’s collapsing into wars and suffering climate catastrophes around the world so the safety of nuclear plants is increasingly in doubt, it takes decades to build them…
Honestly, if we’re gonna spend decades on clean energy megaprojects, wouldn’t it be better to go with something like a space solar power station which is a lot safer and the rectennas on the surface a lot easier to fix and replace?
They’re not wrong, I think initial estimates was 500 years, but that will change as more reactors get built.
That is indeed very wrong. With extracing Uranium from sea water and recycing fuel in breeder reacots, this goes up to like 90.000 years. And that’s just Uranium, other fuels can be explored.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Theoretically, if everyone was using state-of-the-art designs of fast-breeder reactors, we could have up to 300,000 years of fuel. However, those designs are complicated and extremely expensive to build and operate. The finances just don’t make it viable with current technology; they would have to run at a huge financial loss.
As for Uranium for sea-water – this too is possible, but has rapidly diminishing returns that make it financially unviable quite rapidly. As Uranium is extracted and removed from the oceans, exponentially more sea-water must be processed to continue extracting Uranium at the same rate. This gets infeasible pretty quickly. Estimates are that it would become economically unviable within 30 years.
Realistically, with current technology we have about 80-100 years of viable nuclear fuel at current consumption rates. If everyone was using nuclear right now, we would fully deplete all viable uranium reserves in about 5 years. A huge amount of research and development will be required to extend this further, and to make new more efficient reactor designs economically viable. (Or ditch capitalism and do it anyway – good luck with that!)
Personally, I would rather this investment (or at least a large chunk of it) be spent on renewables, energy storage and distribution, before fusion, with fission nuclear as a stop-gap until other cleaner, safer technologies can take over. (Current energy usage would require running about 15000 reactors globally, and with historical accident rates, that’s about one major nuclear disaster every month). Renewables are simpler, safer, and proven ,and the technology is more-or-less already here. Solving the storage and distribution problem is simpler than building safe and economical fast-breeder reactors, or viable fusion power. We have almost all the technology we need to make this work right now, we mostly just lack infrastructure and the will to do it.
I’m not anti-nuclear, nor am I saying there’s no place for nuclear, and I think there should be more funding for nuclear research, but the boring obvious solution is to invest heavily in renewables, with nuclear as a backup and/or future option. Maybe one day nuclear will progress to the point where it makes more sound sense to go all in on, say fusion, or super-efficient fast-breeders, etc. but at the moment, it’s basically science fiction. I don’t think it’s a sound strategy to bank on nuclear right now, although we should definitely continue to develop it. Maybe if we had continued investing in it at the same rate for the last 50 years it might be more viable – but we didn’t.
Source for estimates: “Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?”, Prof. D. Abbott, Proceedings of the IEEE. It’s an older article, but nuclear technology has been pretty much stagnant since it was published.
I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed. Also i used to be a proponent for nuclear power when i was younger. But unlike the nuclear shills i am willing to accept when a technology is inferior and risky.
I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed
Funny, so do I.
Anyway, believe that “being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin” or what ever absurd things you come up with.
I was here to give my response to OPs question. Discussing energy politics with the average German is as pointless as discussing biology with an anti-vaxxer and I have no interest in it.
Which is why you immediate derail the conversation by making ad himinen attacks, instead of interacting with the arguments… No suprise you cannot discuss things, because you don’t want a discussion in the first place.
Why are you pro-coal?
i am pro renewables. It is the pro nuclear faction that tends to be pro coal too, just that they pretend they aren’t. But it is the same businesses, the same industries and the same lobbying against renewables that unit pro coal and pro nuclear.
Oor we can do both so that in the middle of winter when there’s only 6 hrs of sun (less when cloudy) we can still have electricity without ridiculously sized batteries.
Also uranium is so energy dense it can be mined and refined in Canada or Australia and shipped so, so very easily.
Australia and Canada both have very large amounts of nuclear fuel that are currently unused because of short-sighted comments like this.
Uranium city is coming back baby!
$$$
Until all coal plants are replaced there will be a need for more coal. We can’t just shut down these plants over night, the world is transitioning to cleaner energy production, unfortunately it’s just not happening fast enough.
I genuinely thought coal was phased out as an option for power, and that fossil fuels were starting it’s (very long) descent to being phased out just the same.
Fossil fuels will take way longer, but why the more recent interest in coal again?? That’s the part I cannot understand, and I don’t know where it came from
Coal is a fossil fuel, btw. Part of the problem is that through subsidies, the cost of energy is being kept artificially low in the US. We need the increase in cost to de-incentivize oil/gas/coal.
Lol nope we’re fucked
I get the feeling they’re talking about all the publicity around coal in the past few days.
Germany is dismantling windmills to expand a coal mine. A state in the US gave the go ahead to restart a power plant (and supposedly turn it into a hydrogen plant eventually) , and another state is expanding mines. Australia approved enough new mines to add another 150 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Canada is expanding exports of thermal coal. Not to mention, China and India using a bunch of coal in general.
These are all headlines I’ve seen, in like the past week. Even though demand for coal hasn’t really ceased, it seems like recently, there’s a renewed push.
Just FYI, those windmills were at the end of their lifespan and would’ve been torn down either way. I don’t support coal mining, but let’s not make this more stupid than it is.
