It is encouraging that energy from wind and solar sources are increasing at a rapid rate in the US.
National wind and solar capacity grew 16% compared to 2021. All told, renewables generated enough electricity to power 64m American households. The report comes as the Biden administration starts to make billions of dollars available for renewable energy projects. The administration has committed to decarbonizing the grid completely by 2030 and getting the US to net zero emissions by mid-century.
…In the past five years, the share of wind energy more than doubled from 15% to 34%. Over that same time, gas production has fallen from 49% to 34%.
…The US generated 683,130 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity from solar and wind last year, according to Climate Central’s findings, up from 588,471 GWh in 2021. The report shows that solar generation is understandably highest in the summer, while wind energy peaks in spring and fall.
Interesting, so-called ‘red states’ (i.e., states that are reliably Republican) led the way.
Climate action has often been stymied at the local and federal levels by Republican leaders. But the new report shows Iowa and Oklahoma – all of which have Republican governors and majority Republican state legislatures – led the nation in wind power production, while California and Florida were the largest producers of solar power. Texas is a leader in both solar and wind power.
I say ‘surprisingly’ because Republicans are big supporters of fossil fuels and ridicule efforts to switch to renewable sources. Recall how when there was a major power outage in Texas in the winter of 2021 (the event that caused Ted Cruz to flee to Cancun), right-wingers quickly (and falsely) blamed the problem on windmills when it was the natural gas plants that mainly failed to meet the increased demand.
The places where wind and solar produce plenty of energy are not the same places that need a lot. Hence a key issue to be addressed in increasing the supply of renewable energy nationwide is the need to build more and better transmission lines.
Experts agree that the biggest step to increase wind and solar capacity is building more transmission lines.
“It’s extremely important to build transmission lines, because there is more wind energy generation than could be connected to the grid,” Khan said. Wind turbines and solar farms are generally built in rural areas far from where the highest electricity needs are, and require transmission lines in order to supply municipalities with power. “Currently the grid cannot handle all the renewable energy that already exists in Texas, and if we do not have transmission lines to support the renewable energy that feeds to the grid then it’s useless.”
Building transmission lines is not just an engineering issue. It is also a political one since they require approval from all the local communities that they pass through and any one of them can stymie the process for various reasons, be it ideological, aesthetic, fears about radiation, or just simply nimbyism. And of course, power companies that use fossil fuels are strongly backing opposition efforts.
For the past six years, energy companies and Maine residents have been in a fierce stand-off over the construction of a 53-mile power line extension that would deliver 1,200 megawatts of renewable hydroelectric power from Canada to Massachusetts, which is enough to power approximately 1.2 million homes.
For two-thirds of the distance, the electricity would follow a transmission line corridor which already exists. But without the 53-mile, 54-foot-wide extension, the $1 billion construction project is a at an impasse.
The power line has already received all of its state and federal permits. But in a state-wide vote in November, Maine voters rejected the project. Now, the constitutionality of that referendum vote is being battled out in court and will be decided this summer, according to Anthony W. Buxton, the lawyer representing the power companies that want to complete the transmission line. If the Maine court system rules that the referendum vote was unconstitutional, then the energy companies involved can continue construction.
…Incumbent energy companies have of business on the line. In Maine alone, power companies have spent collectively $94.5 million lobbying both for and against the extension through investments in political action committees, according to spending data shared with CNBC by the Maine Ethics Commission, an independent state agency responsible for monitoring Maine’s campaign finance laws.
“This battle is the Lexington or Concord of the existential war to defeat global warming,” Buxton told CNBC. “If fossil fuel interests can block 1,200 megawatts of fully permitted, renewable hydroelectricity to help New England reach zero carbon, our future is hot and bleak.”
Battles similar to the one in Maine are being fought in communities across the nation.
The existing system of transmission lines is insufficient for the large-scale deployment of clean energy that the country needs to meet its decarbonization goals to combat global warming.
As the battle in Maine exemplifies, however, building transmission lines is a complicated task which can get stuck in fierce local siting battles. A study published in June in the journal Energy Policy found 53 utility-scale wind, solar, and geothermal energy projects that ended up being delayed or blocked between 2008 and 2021 due local opposition. Those projects represent approximately 9,586 megawatts of potential energy generation capacity.
Improving transmission line infrastructure in the US would “unlock” the capacity the United States has for deploying renewable power says Jim Robb, president of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a not-for-profit regulatory organization that oversees the reliability of the electric grid.
Where one stands on this issue depends upon how serious one thinks the climate crisis is and how important renewable energy is to stop global warming.
Meanwhile the two big nukes in Georgia, which are billions over budget, and way behind schedule -- just pushed back their schedule again. Due to dropping costs for solar and wind, nuclear is pricing out of the market. I get distressed that government’s attitude seems to be a lot of “hey we’ll have nukes by 2040…” when that’s increasingly unlikely.
Let’s wait for fusion!
We’re on track for +3C and emissions are still rising year over year. Now climate scientists are concerned the planet’s albedo is changing critically due to ice melt. Oh, boy.
Paging GerrardofTitanServer…
@Rob Grigjanis:
Yeah, I almost didn’t say anything for fear of getting textwalls.
And this just showed up in Pocket earlier:
An activist group is spreading misinformation to stop solar projects in rural America (npr)
Basically a Republican-backed group started by a George W. Bush staffer and assisted by a Trump defender has been helping support ‘grassroots’ campaigns against any local renewable power installation, including cases of ranchers trying to create solar power stations on their own land because they can make more money that way than by raising cattle. Score one for the party of ‘limited government’ (but only when the government is trying to work against their interests).
Here in central NY state, there are plenty of “grassroots” folks screaming about PV and wind turbine installations. Funny how they all have identical lawn signs. There is a proposal for a sizable (800 acre) PV farm coming in about 5 miles from where I live. It is a rural area that bike through regularly so I am very familiar with it. It’s all back roads and a lot of fallow farm fields. The company is offering 30 year leases to interested farmers and property owners, and appear to have everything they need right now, and none of this was done with eminent domain. None of this will be visible from any of the major roads nearby. This has not prevented a core group from complaining about it loudly. At one town meeting, one of them told me that we can’t install PV there because we’ll need that land in another 20 years to grow crops. Seriously. And with a straight face. I should add that one of the reasons that land is fallow is because it’s not very good farm land and farmers could not make a go of it. Most farming in this county is dairy farming, not orchards or vegetables. There is a lot of clay in this area and very few crops like it, but cows seem fine with whatever weeds pop up.
It does not matter if PV and wind can now produce electricity at lower direct cost than coal or natural gas. It certainly doesn’t matter that it does so with between 2% and 8% of the total lifecycle carbon emissions (according to national research labs). It doesn’t matter that they are quiet and clean to operate, and that they can be co-located for multiple land uses (cows don’t care if they graze under turbines, also look up “agrivoltaics”), while simultaneously avoiding pipelines or rail lines to supply them with fuel, and have no waste products (coal ash is not anyone’s friend).
None of those things matter. What matters is that solar and wind have been identified as “liberal” things, and thus, must be shunned and stymied at all costs.
Interested parties may also be interested in the “grassroots” campaigns to stop wind turbines on land situated along the south shore of Lake Ontario, particularly the area between Niagara and Rochester. This is a notoriously conservative district and they have managed to stop at least one project of which I am aware. In a darkly funny bit of related news, this area was the site of a coal-fired power plant until very recently, shutting down in the past year or so. Just where do these folks think they’re getting their electricity from? I assume it doesn’t matter to them where it comes from or how it is derived, so long as it’s located nowhere near them (but, they will also complain about the transmission lines that deliver said electricity).
Capitalism confuses me. You’d think power companies would be all over a power source that only requires upkeep once built instead of one that requires upkeep and the constant feeding of fuel.
Tabby@7- I think jimf hits the nail on the head. Conservatives are so driven by contrarianism that they will act in profoundly self-destructive ways. Not getting vaccinated, for example. I go back and forth between thinking they are primarily motivated by bigotry and greed, or motivated by hatred of the liberal values of equity and justice.
I suspect they were suddenly very quick on the uptake when federal grants became a possibility. Looking from afar, it has struck me that those states are gluttons for ‘free’ money.
#7
Many of them are expanding into renewable generation, while retaining the gas/coal generation they already have. Why abandon such expensive infrastructure that turns a profit, when you can just do both?
Holms:
Is it not obvious?
Because once a market is saturated, any further product will remain unsold, which means it will generate no profit.
If saturated, sure. But power demands are going up rather than down, and they still make profit with what is installed.
Dunno about demand, but transmission congestion is a thing.
cf. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/24/australian-renewable-energy-struggles-to-hit-grid-with-one-solar-farm-wasting-half-its-yearly-output
Perovskite solar cells are much cheaper than silica , and their long-term stability and performance is rapidly avvägning.
A problem is energy storage, but I read promising articles about battery research almost every day.
@ ^
For the benefit of English speakers:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/avv%C3%A4gning
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-01/rooftop-solar-to-overtake-coal-as-australias-main-power-source/102033740
Having too much solar is not a problem. You actually want the capacity curtailed on a sunny day because if you don’t, when conditions are not ideal for PV, you will not have enough production. And modern inverters can ramp up or down very quickly to meet demand.
Storage of excess PV production is the next obstacle to overcome.
[related]
The proportions for Australia can be seen here, by time period and jurisdiction: https://opennem.org.au/energy/au/
PS
Electric vehicles are basically batteries on wheels.
@Rob
Sigh. I still have nothing but wonderful things to say about you, even if you disagree with me on this topic. You’ve always been kind and patient and honest, and I appreciate that. I assume you don’t want to have this conversation again. (I don’t even remember clearly your position in this matter, and I don’t want to strawman you.)
@Marcus
I still respect you, but I stopped posting at your place because you implicitly asked me to stop, and because I found that you didn’t respect the truth and you basically wanted to create a little echo chamber. You favor cronies who share your opinion instead of someone like me who is willing to go to bat, citing overwhelming academic, and where relevant, historical sources. You’re a coward.
So, you want a rebuttal to all of the bullshit that you just raised without a wall of text? How about a “go fuck yourself, you pompous twit”? Or how about this -- Just listen to the scientists instead of the special interest groups (e.g. Greenpeace) funded by fossil fuel money.
@John
You should still die in a fire for your repeated, flagrant disregard for honesty, integrity, and the truth. I have no time for anything you say except to remind you of this.
Gerrard, if cared you look at the link to National Energy Market tracker I provided @16, you might note that, mirabile dictu, over the last year 35.5% of all energy consumed in Australia was from renewables. Of that, 4.4% was hydro.
(Not too shabby)
I stopped posting at your place because you implicitly asked me to stop, and because I found that you didn’t respect the truth and you basically wanted to create a little echo chamber. You favor cronies who share your opinion instead of someone like me who is willing to go to bat, citing overwhelming academic, and where relevant, historical sources. You’re a coward.
No, Gerrard, you stopped posting after several of us showed you were blatantly misrepresenting ALL of the scientific publications you yourself had been been citing, and we showed this by quoting your sources directly. All of your sources advocated a balanced approach to energy provision that included both nuclear and renewables, and you repeatedly claimed they supported your demand that everyone go 100% nuclear. You lied about what your sources said then, and you’re lying about how we responded to you now. You’re a liar.
If you don’t feel like restarting that argument yet again, that’s fine. But be honest and grown-up about it, and don’t combine a flounce with a blatant and unnecessary lie.
Raging Bee
Pretty easy to tell that you didn’t read most of it, because most of it wasn’t even arguing about climate change, nuclear power, etc., so why don’t you shut the fuck up instead of blatantly lying and make shit up about stuff that you clearly know nothing about? Sometimes you’re better than this, and sometimes you’re just a blind partisan hack. You can be better.
John
Didn’t read a thing. Go die in a fire.
Raging Bee
I might not have been clear. You clearly didn’t read what happened between Marcus and I in more than one thread on his blog, aka not here. So, stop making up stuff about it when you never read it.
I’m not talking about “what happened with Marcus,” I’m talking about what happened with you and other commenters responding to your bullshit claims.
I see. So, without even seeing the conversation, without even knowing what the conversation was about, without even knowing who I was talking to (it wasn’t Marcus), you’re just going to automatically assume that I’m wrong. Have you seen the many arguments I’ve had against creationists and anti-abortionists and such on FTB?
I tried to give some charity to you, but every time I extend the olive branch, you piss on it. I’m going to stick with what I said before: Go fuck yourself.
It is amazing to see all those new nuclear plants coming online in the fight against carbon dioxide emissions.
Oh wait, Vogtle is delayed again (it was supposed to start operating in 2016) with costs now projected to be more than $30 billion.
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-power-co-southern-climate-and-environment-business-3b1d6c65353c6a65b1ccfddede753ab7
We would be more fucked than we already are if we sat on our hands while waiting on our resident radioactive racist’s heroes riding to our rescue.
Our friend here just doesn’t fucking get it.
Tuatara
It’s a self fulfilling prophesy. Because you believe that, government regulations are changed to make nuclear power plants slow to build and costly to build. But cost was never your main concern. It’s an argument of convenience.
I just don’t know how you think you know better than the climate scientists. How did it become that Green NGOs like Greenpeace who are probably funded by fossil fuel money are suddenly more reliable than UNSCEAR, WHO, IPCC, and the consensus of credible scientific experts? I just don’t get it.
Just a for example, we have Dr James Hansen, who has spent more time studying climate change than anyone here even knew about it, who was warning the public about climate change in US congress testimonials before most people here even knew about it, and you believe it when he and countless other climate scientists tell you that climate change is real and a threat, but you don’t believe them when the same people say we need lots of nuclear power to fix it, saying that “believing 100% renewables can replace fossil fuels worldwide is almost as bad as believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy” (approx, but pretty close to exact). I just don’t get it.
The conservationist movement, aka the environmentalist movement, has fallen off the path. They care more about sticking it to “The Man” than they do about the environment. That’s how Germany is building new coal power plants and expanding coal mining while retiring nuclear power plants. That’s what Green ideology gets you.
I just. I just don’t get it. I thought that our side would be better than this. I thought that this bastion of criticality and self examination would be able to see through the rather obvious lies of Greenpeace at al and be able to listen to the scientists.
I have no beef with you Tuatara.
^
Did you forget your ridiculous accusation of racist colonialism you levelled at me for daring to suggest energy efficiency?
Did you forget that you promoted 100% nuclear as the only path forward despite your own sources stating that nuclear must be a part of the solution?
Did you forget your dragging that racist “Noble Savage” trope into the argument as one of your many personal attacks?
Did you forget your demands that we apologise to you despite all this appalling behaviour you yourself exhibited?
You may have no beef with me but it is not reciprocated at this point in time.
Ok.
…but you don’t believe them when the same people say we need lots of nuclear power to fix it, saying that “believing 100% renewables can replace fossil fuels worldwide…”
False dichotomy/strawman. NO ONE is advocating “100% renewables,” we’re just dismissing your previously stated idea of “100% nuclear.” (Did this Dr. James Hansen person explicitly advocate “100% nuclear” with no investment in renewables?)
tuatara: As I’ve said earlier, I seriously suspect that Gerrard’s ideological commitment to an all-nuclear future is something cobbled up by the fossil-fuel industry to keep everyone dependent on fossil fuels while we wait for some perfect nuclear-power solution that may, or may not, make any sort of appearance in our lifetimes…or our children’s lifetimes… Blaming governments and regulation for everything that’s wrong, attacking and trashing the environmental movement, refusing to accept solutions that are known to be working today…for serving the fossil-fuels industry’s interests, this guy ticks all the boxes. It’s a fake “environmentalist” movement created to discredit the real one. And for the people who spent billions getting people to believe global warming wasn’t happening, this would be just another ad campaign.
Gerrard is also, I’m kinda sad to say, sounding like Lyndon LaRouche back in the 1980s. Anyone else remember that lot? They were extremely technocratic, fascist, laughably pro-nuclear, and totally hateful toward the whole environmental movement. They were also credibly suspected of being a COINTELPRO front; and Gerrard’s recent blithering seems to serve the same purpose.
Gerrard is not arguing in good faith here, and his argument, whatever its origin, was not crafted in good faith.
Raging Bee
Oh come on.
Raging Bee
And as for all the rest, I have several prominent climate scientists, including the preeminent climate scientist Dr James Hansen, saying the same thing. Dr James Hansen has been studying climate change for longer than either of us has known about it, and he’s been trying to warn the public for longer than either of us have known about it. The brute fact is that the scientific consensus here is not being reported to the public because of power special interest groups.
For every liars and fraud like Mark Jacobson who writes a 100% renewables paper, there are 20 more scientists that debunk it as nonsense.
I feel like I’m shouting into the wind, but here we go again:
Quoting preeminent climate scientist Dr. James Hansen:
https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/jim-hansen-presses-the-climate-case-for-nuclear-energy/
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdf
Dr James Hansen, together with three other leading climate scientists, Dr. Ken Caldeira, Dr. Kerry Emanuel, and Dr. Tom Wigley, have written a public letter in favor of nuclear power.
Here’s the letter:
https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.html
Here’s the press conference with them at about the same time as the letter.
Quoting Dr James Hansen from the press conference:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=2041
Quoting leading climate scientist Dr. Ken Caldeira:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=121
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=3109
Quoting Dr. Kerry Emanuel:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=251
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=1297
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=1956
Quoting Dr Kerry Emanuel from another source:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/
Dozens more prominent scientists have also come out publicly in favor of nuclear power:
http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/10/25/open-letter-to-heads-of-state-of-the-g-20-from-scientists-and-scholars-on-nuclear-for-climate-change
And there you go building that stawman up again.
In addition to being a pro-nuclear shill who was given his own thread by Marcus, (and then failed at great length to convince anybody that nuclear was the solution) GOTZ spent quite a bit of time advocating for machine gun nests at the US Capitol, after it was attacked by a MAGAt mob.
Good faith?
Tethys
Yea. I think they should have killed neo-Nazis who were plausibly trying to kill the leadership of this country in order to install Trump as a fascist dictator. If you can’t shoot neo-Nazis in the middle of a violent rebellion, then when can you shoot them? Are you supposed to wait until they succeed in their violent coup to install Trump as an unelected leader for life? I remind you that there were armed and violent people in AOC’s office while she was hiding in the closet / bathroom.
Jazzlet
Which one is that?
#32 Jazzlet
If it is a strawman, it is being built by the world’s pre-eminent climate scientists, not by some dude in the comment section. Why are those scientists wasting their time rebutting this position, if there is no ‘100% renewables or bust’ position to rebut?
And yet again the stash of clippings from yesteryear has been raided.
Gerrard, once again I inform you that they are way out of date, and ever more so as time passes.
The science and technology of renewables has advanced significantly, and its position on the S curve is becoming closer to the inflection point.
John,
In addition to being wrong, go fuck yourself, and die in a fire, because of your complete lack of integrity, and because of your complete lack of shame for your constant lying. People like you, such as Amory Lovins, have been saying the same thing for 50 years. They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now. Just the cost of transmission alone makes this impossible. Just the cost of backup and storage makes this impossible. Grid inertia concerns alone raise substantial costs as well. Don’t forget blackstart capability costs as well. Solar cells and wind turbines could be free, and they would still be useless on the grid.
[meta]
Gerrard, I think your account has been hacked.
They wrote this:
Actually, the usefulness and cost-effectiveness of renewables HAVE been improving for the last 50 or so years. Read the fucking news, dude — there’s more power being generated by renewables, and greater percentages of several regions’ power supplies. I believe, as I pretty much always have, that nuclear power can and must play a major role in energy generation…but over that same 50 years I have to admit I’ve seen ever less confirmation for that belief. If the nuclear industry really wants to save humanity, they have a lot of stepping up to do, and not a heckuva lot of time to do it in.
John
I have sympathy for you, but I’m not expressing it. I chose to express only antipathy. I pity you. Die in a fire already.
Ah well, to be on-topic.
They’re certainly not free.
Yet, somehow, there’s a huge amount of investment in them world wide.
This is fact.
You can read about it here: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/b0beda65-8a1d-46ae-87a2-f95947ec2714/WorldEnergyInvestment2022.pdf
Those investors don’t share your opinion, and they literally are putting money on your claim being wrong. Presumably, you must think that’s rather weird.
I chose to express only antipathy.
Lol, needs more antipathy, and far fewer violent death wishes and fires.
The proposition that having sympathy for those one finds pitiable is best served by expressing only antipathy towards them is certainly an informative one.
I do wonder whether you are aware that you have contradicted yourself within this sentence: “I have sympathy for you, but I’m not expressing it.”
Ah well. Thank you for your expressed sympathy, and shame on you for your alleged antipathy.
(Perhaps consider that you’re not so much shouting into the wind as pissing into the wind)
I chose to express only antipathy.
And I choose to express only ennui. Take that, knave!
But suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.
Where on Earth is nuclear power doing a better job of “letting us phase rapidly off fossil fuels?” None of your eminent scientists seem to answer that.
Your crankery and repetition of claims we’ve already addressed only serve to further inflame my ennui.
Incidentally, here in Oz (https://opennem.org.au/energy/au/) there’s around twice as much rooftop solar as utility solar consumed. Of course, back in the day nobody thought that would be possible, because of the then-cost and then-efficiency of solar panels and the then-grid. It was… inconceivable!
All those people (I am one) paid $$$ for those cells as an investment.
And all those people would much rather they had been free. 🙂
(Such foolishness!)
But, why are four climate scientists who don’t have strong backgrounds in nuclear physics here talking to you today about nuclear energy? It’s because we’re scientists, and we can do the math. Alright? If we want — if we truly are sincere about solving this problem, unless a miracle occurs, we are going to have to ramp up nuclear energy very fast.
Okay — but if you really want to “ramp up nuclear energy very fast,” you’re gonna need LOTS of input, not just from people with strong backgrounds in nuclear physics, but — more importantly — also from people with strong backgrounds in designing, building and operating nuclear power plants. Perhaps their lack of such expertise is what’s making that group’s message less credible. Have they got any substantive input from such experts? What have they said about what we can actually do to “ramp up nuclear energy very fast?” None of your quotes show any sign of such consultation. Just lots of doom-and-gloom demands, with nothing said about what is, or isn’t being done to achieve this all-important goal. Perhaps some quotes about that sort of thing might loosen the grip of my ennui…?
I’ve spoken to many scientists, and by far the majority agree that nuclear needs to be part of the solution.
Pay careful attention to the words I’ve bolded: that scientist you quoted is saying nuclear power needs to be PART of the solution, not all of it. So what do you think the other part might be? These guys are dead set against fossil fuels, so I’m pretty sure that’s not the other part. So what other part could they have been thinking of?
Of course, this claim is from 2013.
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/255e9cba-da84-4681-8c1f-458ca1a3d9ca/ElectricityMarketReport2023.pdf
“Coal remains the backbone of the Chinese electricity system,
representing over 62% of the power generation in 2022, even
though the share of renewables (30%) has increased.”
“As of the end of 2022, India has an installed capacity of 410 GW, of
which 236 GW comes from fossil-fired power plants (coal, gas and
oil), 52 GW from hydro, 115 GW from renewable energy plants such
as solar PV and wind, and the rest from nuclear power plants.”
Pesky facts.
Raging Bee says
Yes, they did. They most explicitly did. France. You suck at reading. Copying from above.
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=1297
So, Seth, first of all, I very much agree with my colleague [??], 10 to 15 years is about right. To him that sounds like a long time. To me that sounds remarkable. I mean Sweden and France went — this country that we’re in went from almost no nuclear power to 80% electricity in something like 15 years.
I bet most of them are just being polite and trying to find common cause with Green environmentalists. It’s a conversation tactic. Once you convince them that nuclear isn’t that bad, and that nuclear can be part of the solution, then hopefully it’s much easier to convince them that nuclear needs to be like 80%+ of the solution.
It’s like when scientists go easy on creationists by saying that science doesn’t threaten their religious beliefs. Clearly science does threaten their religious beliefs, but these scientists are willing to fib a little as a persuasion tactic: finding common ground is a great method of being effective persuaders.
I’m sure none of them believe that solar and wind are going to be anything more than 10% or 20% of a proper solution. Kerry Emanuel at least explicitly agrees with me and says we should stop wasting money on solar, and that solar and wind “hit a brick wall” at 30%, and none of the other three scientists on the stage objected to his claims.
Can solar and wind be part of an acceptable solution up to about 30% of the total electrical grid generation? Sure. Fine. Whatever. Nuclear and hydro are going to be the vast majority of the other 70%, and it’s going to be a lot cheaper to use nuclear and hydro for something close to 100% of the solution for nearly every place compared to adding up to 30% solar and wind.
PS:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/
I was trying to argue from scientific consensus of relevant experts. If you want me to start quoting papers about the feasibility of ramping up nuclear power very quickly, I can cite such papers, but note that I don’t have such overwhelming evidence of scientific consensus of the relevant experts. But I do have a peer reviewed paper for precisely that offhand:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-really-could-go-nuclear/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124074
From the cited market report:
“Nuclear generation in the European Union was 17% lower in
2022 than in 2021 due to closures and unavailabilities. Plant
closures in Germany and Belgium reduced the available nuclear
capacity in 2022. At the same time, France faced record-low nuclear
availability due to ongoing maintenance work and other challenges
in its nuclear fleet.
[…]
France became a net importer and
the United Kingdom a net exporter for the first time in decades.”
John,
France still shows that it can be done, and Germany shows that relying on solar and wind takes more time and money, assuming it’s even possible at all (which it’s not). Your citation of hiccups and planned outages during the low demand period simply are not as forceful as you think they are. And please go jump in a fire to die already.
Wikipedia: “As of early September 2022, 32 of France’s 56 nuclear reactors were shut down due to maintenance or technical problems.[54][55] In 2022, Europe’s driest summer in 500 years had serious consequences for power plant cooling systems, as the drought reduced the amount of river water available for cooling.[56][57]”
I know I’ve made this joke before, O sympathetic one, but it’s a goodie: for you, it’d have to be a nuclear fire. Hard to find one of those.
PS https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/investors-shareholders/financial-and-extra-financial-performance/financial-results
(Électricité de France)
They’re investing in renewables, of course. They want profits.
Hey, Gerrard!
Read my lips…..
Your own sources say that nuclear needs to be part of the solution, and we here almost all agree.
We are not saying that 100% renewable is the solution. Hell, if we balance it right we can still keep some dirty coal and cleaner bio-gas plants going for grid stability (inertia). But modern grid-forming black-start capable inverters (yes these actually exist now but you wont find them mentioned in your ancient sources) and batteries are better at setting Voltage and frequency due to their rapid response.
Times have changed. You will be very surprised to learn that some very smart engineers have been busy at work because they know that we cannot afford to wait for the mythical nuclear salvation you keep banging.on about.
Gerrard is definitely being paid by someone for this, nobody has the time to be that long-winded and also have a normal job. I bet that he gets a certain amount of money per post, or perhaps even per reply (“generating engagement”). I’m jealous!
If you want me to start quoting papers about the feasibility of ramping up nuclear power very quickly, I can cite such papers, but note that I don’t have such overwhelming evidence of scientific consensus of the relevant experts.
Exactly. Which means, as I’ve said before, the rest of us should go on developing more-promising avenues of wind, solar, and maybe some hydro here and there, while we wait for the pro-nuclear lot to work their way to a consensus. If/when they actually come up with one, they can show us what they’ve got and maybe start blowing renewables out of the water; and if not, we’ll still have done what we can to fix things without them, and can keep on doing so until something changes. Sounds reasonable to me, anyway…
PS: Forget it, John, I do NOT want your radioactive ashes, or his, blowing into my back yard!
Nuclear and hydro are going to be the vast majority of the other 70%, and it’s going to be a lot cheaper…
When? I’ve been hearing that since the 1970s. And what are we supposed to do to kick the fossil-fuels habit in the meantime? You lot keep on screaming (rightly, I’m sure we all agree on this) about the existential crisis posed by continued use of fossil fuels; so shouldn’t we be seizing on presently-available alternatives while we wait for that promised all-nuclear future that still shows no sign of happening yet?
Kerry Emanuel at least explicitly agrees with me and says we should stop wasting money on solar…
WHOSE money are you talking about here, exactly? Even if I agreed with you that we should make more effort to ramp up nuclear power, you’d still have to show how spending (unspecified people’s) money on solar interferes with that worthy goal. Because if it doesn’t, then there’s no need to stop doing it. Do the power companies need all those homeowners’ money, in addition to their own, to build a nuclear power plant?
And again, WHOSE money are you talking about? Homeowners putting solar panels on their roofs? Businesses or government agencies doing the same with their offices and other buildings? Local or regional authorities offering subsidies for such projects? Big banks offering solar loans? And if either of those parties were to “stop wasting money on solar,” how, exactly, would that help to facilitate any advancement in nuclear power?
Seriously, why the fuck do we have to ditch something that’s known to work in order to get more nuclear power? This is a false choice, and clearly proves the rank dishonesty of your entire pro-nuclear argument.
Tuatara
Addressed already in #50.
…
Raging Bee
Why not a lot of nuclear now? Because the Green anti-nuclear lobby won back in 1970, and they’ve been winning ever since. They have put in place so many institutional barriers to nuclear that nuclear cannot compete in the market. This includes a bunch of needless safety stuff, but moreso it includes a bunch of other regulatory measures (renewable energy portfolio standards, renewable energy credits, etc.), and other measures such as frilovous lawsuits to delay construction to drive up costs. I could go on for pages just to give a cogent summary.
California was the birthplace of the Green and anti-nuclear movements. Back in circa 1970, California government was already building or in the deep planning stages to build enough nuclear power plants to complete displace fossil fuel for electricity generation. Had those finished and not been early shut down, then even today California would have 100% clean and mostly nuclear + hydro electricity. However, Jerry Brown was elected governor (the first time, not the second time 30 years later), the man whose family had huge investments in fossil fuels, and together with the blossoming Green political movement such as David Brower at Friends Of The Earth (also started with a grant from fossil fuel money), managed to make the public be afraid of nuclear power and prefer coal. And that’s what happened. Jerry Browner shut down most of the nuclear power construction at the time, and built coal instead. (Just like modern Germany, actually.) This was not because of any technical decisions or economic decisions. It was because the Green voters were hoodwinked to becoming anti-nuclear “useful idiots” by their fossil fuel funders.
In remains the fact that the only industrialized countries that have basically succeeded in replacing fossil fuels on the grid have done so with hydro and nuclear. France and Sweden in particular. No country has succeeded without most of their generation coming from either lots of nuclear or lots of hydro. Germany in particular is a great case study where if they spent their money on nuclear instead, they’d have 100% nuclear electricity already.
PS:
So, whose money am I talking about? Our money. Our money paying the semi-private electric utilities or the goverment utilities, and our money paying tax money being used to subsidize renewables and penalize nuclear. In the US at least, renewables receive way more direct money subsidies than nuclear.
Because it’s not. That’s what the climate scientists are telling you. It is not known to work. Solar and wind are leaches on the system that provide nothing of value. They simply raise energy prices by their presence on the grid for little to no value returned. And they can do that because of all of the direct and indirect government subsidies that they receive.
Because the Green anti-nuclear lobby won back in 1970, and they’ve been winning ever since.
That sounds like a very simplistic description of the political struggles of that time and after. Just for starters, what do you mean by capital-G “Green?” The Green Party? Did a Green Party even exist in America back then, let alone a relevant one? Who the fuck are you talking about here? Because I really don’t remember “Greens” or any other bunch of “leftists,” winning such huge victories in the USA as you allege. You’re sounding like too many other right-wingers raving on and on about how “liberals” or “the Left” or “the Communists” or something totally took over America and drove all the conservatives into hiding.
They have put in place so many institutional barriers to nuclear that nuclear cannot compete in the market.
This is also standard right-wing rhetoric: Big Gummint regulation is preventing everyone from getting anything done, and regulations are to blame for everything that’s wrong with nuclear power. It’s nothing but childish wishful thinking, and — as I’ve already pointed out to you more than once — it’s flatly contradicted by nuclear industry insiders who admit they’ve caused most of their own problems — including, though not limited to, acting so arrogant and tone-deaf in public as to make the anti-nuclear movement look sensible by comparison.
Back in circa 1970, California government was already building or in the deep planning stages to build enough nuclear power plants to complete displace fossil fuel for electricity generation. Had those finished and not been early shut down
If California really had such “deep plans” (whatever that means) and all, why has no other state or corporation with less “Green” opposition tried to adapt them or make any of it work elsewhere?
So, whose money am I talking about? Our money. Our money paying the semi-private electric utilities or the goverment utilities, and our money paying tax money being used to subsidize renewables and penalize nuclear. In the US at least, renewables receive way more direct money subsidies than nuclear.
So you want us to stop spending money on renewables and spend it on nuclear power instead? That kind of implies nuclear would replace renewables, which would have absolutely no beneficial effect on the environment at all. Wouldn’t it make more sense to subsidize and build BOTH nuclear and renewables, so that BOTH could grow to replace fossil-fuels? If getting rid of fossil-fuels is the #1 priority, as you say it is, that would be the way to go. It’s like two armies working together in a pincer action: the point is for both units to attack at once, not to argue over whose turn it is.
Solar and wind are leaches on the system that provide nothing of value.
Another ridiculous falsehood flatly contradicted by the documented experience of people all over the planet.
All you’re doing is repeating claims that YOU KNOW have already been refuted and debunked here before. Can’t you at least acknowledge that these issues are — to put it mildly — more complex than you’ve admitted? ‘Cuz, mon Dieu, the ennui is so thick I need a battle-axe to cut it…
Gerrard, you have not changed your spiel for years, and you have not incorporated a iota of new information to it in all that time.
An example:
I’ve already discussed with you the folly of imagining that climate scientists are the top experts in power generation and power distribution and its economics, since their field of expertise is climate science.
(I really don’t think they claim neither solar nor wind works and add nothing of value, either)
[mutter preview mutter]
[Fixed it. -- Mano]
Raging Bee
You don’t remember? Were you alive and politically active in California in 1970?
Yes yes yes, accuse me of being a right-wing anti-government hack to to salve your cognitive dissonance even though I’m calling for massive direct government investment in nuclear power. I guess most climate scientists are right-wing hacks too.
Which nuclear industry insiders are you talking about? I’ve cited my sources. Sounds like you’re just making shit up.
Why did no other US State do it? Because the Green lobby has been amazingly successful. Soon, they took over the US federal government and the newly created NRC. They have strengthened their grip on the market ever since through more subtle manipulations, such as renewable energy credits, renewable energy portfolio standards, market merit order rules, so-called market deregulation, and so on. I know I’ve explained the details to you before, and I’m pretty sure you just don’t care.
How is this even a question. Yes. For the love of the gods, yes.
I fail to see how. I’m not suggesting tearing up renewables that have already been installed. I’m suggesting that we tear up coal and natural gas plants that have already been installed. PS: Hydro is pretty good. It has its significant drawbacks, and in my ideal world we would eventually get rid of most hydro too in order to restore the environment, but hydro would be the very very last to be replaced with nuclear. Fossil fuels come first, and existing hydro should be run for as long at least as long as is necessary to eliminate fossil fuels from electricity production.
Again, money spent on solar and wind is basically money wasted. It doesn’t get us any closer to our goal of replacing fossil fuels. The scientists have tried to explain this to you, and I’ve tried to explain this to you, and here I go again. Their interrmitency and common-mode failures mean that they’re borderline useless and valueless. They can’t replace a fossil fuel plant. You still need that fossil fuel plant for night and no wind. At best, solar and wind can allow the fossil fuel plant to reduce output when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. They’re like a dead end, or cul de sac. Any money spent on them is stranded capital, wasted investment, because they don’t serve any function in the only possible no fossil fuel endgame which is almost entirely hydro and nuclear.
Saying we should spent equal amounts of money on solar wind and nuclear is like saying we should burn half of our money, or spend half of our money building useless steel and concrete monuments to our own stupidity. I’m saying we shouldn’t waste half of our money on solar and wind.
There is not a single country that has come even close to eliminated fossil fuels with primarily solar and wind. There is not one counter-example in spite of your feverish wishes to the contrary. And again, I have quotes above of some scientists telling you this. This is not just me. This is the world’s leading climate scientists telling you that you’re the delusional one.
How long do you have to watch places like California and Germany waste so much money on solar and wind and see them fail before you admit that solar and wind don’t work? Another 50 years?
If you want evidence regarding my claims regarding circa 1970 California in particular, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Masses:_Opposition_to_Nuclear_Power_in_California,_1958%E2%80%931978
See also:
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/opinion/columns/2017/04/28/michael-shellenberger-end-discrimination-against/10761213007/
cf. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Morton%27s_demon
Again, Gerrard — climate scientists’ expertise in in climate science.
Power generation and power distribution and its economics are not climate science. Be aware of your demon.
There is not a single country that has come even close to eliminated fossil fuels with primarily solar and wind.
You’ve only cited TWO countries — not very big ones, mind you — that have come even close to eliminating fossil fuels with primarily nuclear power. (Oh, and that statement of yours doesn’t support your claim that renewables are a waste of money.)
Again, money spent on solar and wind is basically money wasted.
Again, lots of people’s direct and indirect experiences worldwide prove you wrong. And that’s really all anyone needs to say to you. Fuck off to bed. Or, better yet, get out of bed and catch up on recent developments and stop living in your past vision of the future.
John,
As have been explained to you numerous times, the IPCC reports were compiled with input from those kinds of people, and practically every example pathway contains much more nuclear power than today, and that’s in spite of the well known anti-nuclear bias in those reports. In reality, nuclear is even better than that. As I cited above, if you eliminate the false uranium scarcity from the ICPC models (again which already says we need a lot more nuclear power), then nuclear power dominates the output. That’s because nuclear power is just completely better in every way except for a 50 year campaign of lies against it from the Greens. And please die in a fire.
Raging Bee
I just need one. I just need one to show that it can be done. France shows that it can be done, and that it can be done quickly and cheaply. You’re the person who doesn’t even have one example for solar and wind. Not. A. One. I don’t know what you might be “lots of people’s direct and indirect experiences worldwide prove you wrong” except that “my feelings show you’re wrong”, which is of course nonsense. Personal experience is not a synonym for data.
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/9/11/california-and-germany-decarbonization-with-alternative-energy-investments
Well, the feelings and the reality:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electricity
(Must be because the entire planet is dominated by the Dread Greenies™, right?)
John Morales
Yea, the Greens won the political argument in most western countries based on their lies. This is my position. They, aka persons influenced or beholden to their anti-nuclear ideology, control the relevant aspects of government policy in most western countries. And die in a fire.
I’m not suggesting tearing up renewables that have already been installed.
So you’re admitting that currently-existing renewable tech is worth keeping after all?
I’m suggesting that we tear up coal and natural gas plants that have already been installed.
And replace them with…what? Lots of nuclear power plants that haven’t been built yet? Or — and this is a radical concept, but hear me out here — maybe more of the renewable tech that you just admitted is worth keeping and can be built much faster than a nuclear power plant?
But it’s not just “most western countries”, is it?
If the only reason that your purported cheap, safe, convenient and rapid build of nuclear reactors to displace all fossil-fuel usage is that the Dread Greenies™ are preventing it by having won the political argument, then that reason must be applicable world-wide.
In 2017, Germany generated 37 percent of its electricity from non-carbon sources.
First, didn’t you earlier quote a source who said renewables would never provide more than 30% of anyone’s energy? After quoting someone else saying it would “hit a brick wall” at 25%?
And second, 37% of energy already coming from non-carbon sources, means it’ll be easier to build enough nuclear plants to replace fossil fuels.
Raging Bee
We’re going in circles.
A 100% nuclear solution is much cheaper and quicker to build than a 100% renewables solution. Even 30% vs 30%, nuclear is cheaper. This is because around 30%, solar and wind start overproducing, and then you start needing massive and costly increases in transmission, storage, etc, and all of those extra costs are so much that the costs of solar cells and wind turbines don’t matter. Solar cells and wind turbines could be free and a 100% solar wind plan would still be too expensive. This is what I mean when I say that solar and wind have negative value on the grid in terms of raw economics.
You don’t accept these facts. I don’t know what else I can do to convince you of these facts. The facts are that transmission and storage are really expensive, and you need a lot of storage and transmission with increasing solar and wind. So much that it’s probably impossibly expensive.
This is what the scientists are telling you. This is what Germany is showing you in real time.
So, nuclear and hydro must be 70%+ of the solution. At that point, you might as well go 100% because adding 30% solar and wind don’t buy you anything. Nuclear can load follow demabd swings during the day, but they don’t save any fuel costs for reducing power output. In other words, adding solar wind to a grid that is already primarily nuclear doesn’t save money. You still need all of the nuckear power plants to provide the necessary reliability and uptime. Adding solar wind won’t reduce those requirements. Adding solar wind won’t reduce marginal operating costs of the nuclear power plants either.
Raging Bee
Your flaw is still to conflate and confuse all renewable technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany
Biomass and hydro are not solar and wind.
John: Yeah, CHINA kind of refutes Gerrard’s claim here. They have no democracy and no “Green” movement capable of even slowing down any project their government might decide to launch, be it the Belt and Road Initiative or mass-incarceration of Uighurs. So if nuclear power could be ramped up on a national scale, I’d at least expect China to lead the way, both to show their prowess to the world, and to reduce their own horrific smog problem. Instead, they’re the world’s biggest exporter of…wind turbines.
Also, if the pro-nuclear folks really had a workable plan to build good nuclear plants that addressed everyone’s legitimate concerns, then sooner or later enough interest-groups would have seen a possible profit of some sort (not necessarily a money profit), and would have started to chip away at that allegedly unbeatable anti-nuclear consensus. So if the anti-nuclear movement is still “winning,” despite being, let’s face it, every bit the asinine loony airheads Gerrard says they are, it’s not just because they’re being manipulated by the fossil-fuels folks, but also because the pro-nuclear coalition are still too lame and inept to offer anything better.
Oh, and Gerrard?
…the U.K.’s Hinkley Point C. German companies assisted with the design of the EPR and the reactor was explicitly planned to meet the strictest European regulations.
So now you’re admitting that even “the strictest European regulations” are NOT preventing good nuclear plants from being designed or built?
No, Gerrard, YOU’RE going in circles, repeating the same old false claims over and over.
Now you’re just playing gotcha games. European council policy is not. Clearly German government policy is, as well as Austrian government policy, and many others. And as I’ve said many many times, it’s not just the safety regulations around nuclear. That’s a big part, but far from the whole part. The many market distortions are equally or even more important story for why new nuclear is not getting built.
And you’re going to use China in this way? Seriously? Who the hell knows why the Chinese government does what it does. It’s one of the most opaque government regimes in the world, driven primarily by personal greed and corruption and not so much for the good the individual people. Your assertion that government concern for individual persons and smog is quite laughable (although it must be said that the smog is rising to the level of potential source of unrest, which is a concern for the rulers).
And China is investing heavily into nuclear R&D and nuclear construction. Ex:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-greenlights-6-new-nuclear-reactors-in-shift-away-from-coal
Why not more? I don’t know, and you don’t know either.
Which false claims? I’ll be happy to provide indisputable citations and argument for each one, one at a time, if you want.
PS:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s
Did you even google this? Of course not. You just relied on your own prejudices to guide your assumption making because by god you know deep down that you must be right because of your feelings. This is why you’re a partisan hack and not a proper skeptic. At least I fucking googled it.
Here’s an earlier quote of Gerrard’s:
The insightful cynic will note: “Now I understand all the fossil fuel ads with windmills and solar panels – fossil fuel moguls know that renewables are no threat to the fossil fuel business.” The tragedy is that many environmentalists lineup on the side of the fossil fuel industry, advocating renewables as if they, plus energy efficiency, would solve the global climate change matter.
This is a laughable misreading of fossil-fuels ads, and it’s based on that old false notion that renewable energy doesn’t work. In fact, it DOES work, and the fossil-fuels fossils know it works, and they know — as we all do — that it can and is indeed starting to displace fossil-fuels in many places (though of course not enough yet). Thus, all those pretty Chevron ads are intended to pretend they’re part of this new clean-energy movement, because they know renewables work, people want them, and they have to pretend they care too.
And no, none of this is inducing “many environmentalists [to] lineup on the side of the fossil fuel industry.” Trust me, actual environmentalists know those ads are bullshit.
It’s not just me. It’s the leading climate scientists too. Don’t accuse me of being a crank unless you’re willing to say every single one of those climate scientists is also a crank, and the IPCC reports are cranks too for not including any scenario with less nuclear power than today.
Yes, Gerrard, and China can do all that and still also make wind turbines for export. China can do both, and so can everyone else. So there’s no need for your stupid “either-or” reasoning.
Money, labor, and resources are fungible resources. Building more wind turbines means building less nuclear power plants. Building more wind turbines means delaying our implementation of the plan that will actually work.
Ahem. Gerrard, I refer you to my #41.
I know, I know. It’s only the IEA and current, not part of your stash.
Pesky facts. You know, there are tables there I can’t really quote here, but you might find it informative to see how energy investment worldwide is apportioned between different sectors.
So. China. Herewith some quotations with added emphasis for you:
“Renewable power, efficiency and EVs are leading the clean energy push
Clean energy investment is – finally – starting to pick up and is
expected to exceed USD 1.4 trillion in 2022, accounting for almost
three-quarters of the growth in overall energy investment. The annual
average growth rate in clean energy investment in the five years after
the signature of the Paris Agreement in 2015 was just over 2%. Since
2020 the rate has risen to 12%, well short of what is required to hit
international climate goals, but nonetheless an important step in the
right direction. The highest clean energy investment levels in 2021
were in China (USD 380 billion), followed by the European Union
(USD 260 billion) and the United States (USD 215 billion).”
and“There are signs of life among important new and emerging
technologies, where absolute investment remains relatively small but
growth rates are high.
• Investment in battery energy storage is hitting new highs and is
expected to more than double to reach almost USD 20 billion in
2022. This is led by grid-scale deployment, which represented
more than 70% of total spending in 2021. The pipeline of projects
is immense, with China targeting around 30 GW of non-hydro
energy storage capacity by 2025 and the United States having
more than 20 GW of grid-scale projects either planned or under
construction.”
and“Clean energy spending in emerging and developing economies (excluding China) remains stuck at 2015 levels.”
and“Investment in fossil fuels is on a rising trend […]
This increase is being led by China and India, the dominant players
in global coal markets. Coal shortages and power rationing in China
in 2021 made energy security the main priority in near-term Chinese
policy, and more than 350 Mt per year of new coal mining capacity
was brought on stream in the second half of the year.”
In short, China is leading the world in renewables investment, but is also at the forefront of investment in coal supply and coal power stations. And nuclear.
(Obs, it wants power 🙂 )
—
Still, there’s good news in that report, from your perspective:
“Nuclear investment is accelerating on the construction of new nuclear reactors in China, Europe and Pakistan, and the Power sector refurbishment, modernisation and life extension of existing reactors in France, the United States and Russia.”
Almost as if it’s seen as part of the solution rather than a panacea.
So tedious John. There can’t be one silver bullet technology, but if nuclear power is not being built worldwide (even though it is in several countries), then there must be a single reason which must be applicable for the entire world. Right. So tedious. I really should download a script to just block you already.
And die in a fire.
Gerrard:
I know you’re attempting to be sarcastic, but that’s exactly what you claim: that the only reason nuclear hasn’t taken over the world is because of the Dread Greenies™ policy capture. Because it really is a silver bullet.
Mind you, you’ve inadvertently made the tiniest step forwards there; perhaps the Dread Greenies™ policy capture is not the only reason worldwide? Might such a thing be possible?
(Food for thought, there)
Building more wind turbines means building less nuclear power plants.
Why not build more of both and less of something else? Like, I dunno, something else that doesn’t help us to achieve the #1 objective of getting rid of fossil-fuels…?
Hey Gerrard.
These co-ordinates -16.881881,123.151181 will plonk you onto one of those poverty-stricken groups you are so passionate about.
It will in fact take you directly to a PV array that my friend installed for this remote community. Along with a battery its surplus is stored in, this is the ONLY source of electricity these people have. But in your opinion solar is totally useless.
How much money do you think it will cost to build the distribution network to reach these people? Or do you expect them to move away from their ancestral lands (65,000 years) and lose their identity in the big city?
There are many remote communities in Australia and the pacific whose only viable options for electricity are renewables -specifically solar and wind- or diesel generators. Renewables work best for them, so the nasty polluting generators are being mothballed for when they are actually required (you know, emergencies).
Your plan would have these people cooking over a fire of their own dung while they wait for you to build your nuclear fantasy, and yet you call me a racist colonialist FFS.
Your dishonesty is overwhelmingly disgusting to me. You make my skin crawl like fucking scabies does.
Oh, and by the way…
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-enjoys-80-1-pct-wind-and-solar-share-in-blackout-free-summer/amp/
The graph mentioned in the article can be seen here -- https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all&interval=1M
The rest of the NEM is available publicly here -- https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m
Raging Bee
Answered already. See 89.
Tuatara
Re Australia: That’s just accounting tricks. Just look at that website for the last 1 day. For me, I see 80% of generation and consumption, approx, at 6 AM coming from non-RE sources, 33.2% import, 41.6 gas, 4.1 battery, 14.4 wind, 6.7 solar. What happens when the rest of Australia moves to solar and wind? You get electricity from about 75% gas. That’s what happens. South Australia is leeching off the stability of their neighbors, dumping excess electricity to their neighbors during the day, and taking electricity during the night. They could not survive in island mode. This is not an example of how it can work. It’s just another example of accounting tricks, treating their neighbor as an free infinite-capacity lossless battery, but that’s not the way that any of this works.
Note that evidence of easily reaching 30% is not evidence that it’s easy to reach 50%. Evidence of easily reaching 50% is not evidence that it’s easy to reach 70%, and so on. Solar and wind over a continent tend to all stop working at the same time because of night, seasons, and weather. Every incremental step is harder than the next because every next step means more and more instances where you overproduce and more and more instances where you underproduce. Handling cases of underproduction tend to require more transmission and more storage, both of which are extremely expensive.
I did say basically useless where there is a grid connection. I was very careful about my language. Please read what I write. Off grid applications with low power demand is where solar + batteries can shine. I hope you grant it’s way more expensive and way less reliable compared to places with a grid connection. Off-grid electricity usage is insignificant in the context of the climate problem. I’m trying to fix the problem of climate change.
PS:
Citations please. No, they don’t. They don’t exist. There is no such thing as a grid forming inverter that is capable of synchronization with other grid forming inverters on the grid. Not like a synchronously spinning mass will synchronize by itself with a bunch of other synchronously spinning masses. The physics simply doesn’t allow it.
The only feasible plan that I’ve seen is basically to put every inverter on the internet to allow communication for a synchronization protocol. The extra communication band allows grid forming inverters to synchronize. I hope I shouldn’t have to explain why this is a miserable idea.
>Every incremental step is harder than the previous step
Fixed
PS:
>I did say basically useless where there is a grid connection. I was very careful about my language
Upon review, I could have been more careful. My apologies. I hope you take my sincere apology. Solar and wind are basically useless on the grid. Off grid applications are different.
So, you pick an inoffensive comment to be sincerely sorry for making? But refuse to apologise for nasty accusations of racism. Fuck you arsehole.
Off-grid is where the inverter is grid forming. We install systems with mulltiple inverters in one small network, all managed by one grid-forming inverter which manages the others outputs on the AC side using frequency shift.
Get with the programme pal. It is 2023. South Oz has moved on using synchronous condensers and small amounts of traditional generation while we work on eliminating that last 20%.
No amount of arguing from you will change this fact. It is happening now.
Real.
I was very careful about my language.
God’s death, Gerrard, that’s absolutely fucking hilarious. Go to bed.
Solar and wind are basically useless on the grid.
What the fuck do you mean by “on the grid?”
Also, Gerrard, no, you haven’t already answered my question @94. Try harder, asshole.
Tuatara
I stand by what I believe to be true. I will not apologize for those prior remarks. I stand by those prior remarks.
You’re not at 80% renewables for electricity production. For a few choice days in summer where there’s plenty of wind at night, sure, but not over the whole year.
Raging Bee
I suggest you google the meaning of basic English terms like “on grid” and “off grid”.
I believe I answered your question to the extent that it is possible. I gave my reasons and underlying beliefs. You’re welcome to continue to interrogate me, and I’ll probably continue to reply because I’m a glutton for punishment. I don’t know how else to answer the question.
Yeah, well, your answer was — to put it charitably — insufficient; and since that’s the best you can do, there’s no point in demanding better.
You’re not at 80% renewables for electricity production. For a few choice days in summer where there’s plenty of wind at night, sure, but not over the whole year.
Has anyone built a nuclear plant that’s likely to do better, any time in the foreseeable future? No? Then STFU and stop trashing other people’s accomplishments that you can’t match.
I suggest you google the meaning of basic English terms like “on grid” and “off grid”.
I suggest you explain why something can work “off grid” but not “on grid.” Or did you already answer that as best you could too?
France.
What’s insufficient about my answer? I don’t get it. I understand if you disagree. I don’t understand why you think it’s unclear, vague, or incomplete. I think that spending money on solar and wind as well as nuclear is wasting money. I think we would make progress more quickly by spending all of the money on nuclear. That’s a perfectly clear and coherent answer.
For example, some US forward military bases are powered by diesel generators, supplied by regular trips of diesel tanker trucks. Does it make sense for those forward military bases to be powered in this way? Yes. Does it therefore make sense to power a residential home via a diesel generator when there’s a grid connection readily available? No. These answers are self obvious, and they answer your question as well. You’ve got blinders on. Please take them off. Please take a moment to think about something before implicitly saying something so silly like you just did.
Because I’m bored.
Equally, think about a smoke detector powered by a AA battery. That makes sense. Does it make sense to power the whole house with AA batteries that you replace when they run out of charge? No. Different application. Different context. Makes sense in one, but not the other. Why? Primarily cost. It’s quite expensive in terms of the dollar per joule to run a smoke detector off a AA battery compared to the electricity rate of a typical house grid connection, but in absolute terms it’s quite cheap to run a smoke detector off a AA battery because it’s absolute i.e. total power demands are quite small. It’s often cheap enough that no one bothers running a wire from an outlet to the smoke detector.
Similarly, if you have a lighthouse, or a small isolated community, it might make more sense, e.g. be more convenient and cheaper, to install some crazy solar plus battery setup compared to running and paying for a very long transmission line to connect the location to the electricity grid. So, you’re going to pay a lot more for electricity and/or have far less reliable electricity with the solar plus battery setup compared to the grid, but sometimes it makes sense to do so when you’re very far from an existing grid connection.
Saying that it sometimes make sense for an isolated lighthouse, forward military operating base, or isolated village to use solar does not necessitate that it makes sense for large cities to use solar.
PS: Also, of course, one uses a battery for a smoke detector in case the grid fails, but my major point remains. If electricity cost was an issue, then one would run a wire from the outlet to the smoke detector as well as having an internal AA battery backup.
Gerrard, again, it must bemuse you that investors worldwide (even in France!) are spending ever more on solar and on wind. They clearly don’t share your belief.
cf. my #41 for details.
France.
The French are building nuclear reactors in South Australia?
Saying that it sometimes make sense for an isolated lighthouse, forward military operating base, or isolated village to use solar does not necessitate that it makes sense for large cities to use solar.
Your analogies are like Hitler at an ice-rink. NONE OF THAT means wind or solar power “doesn’t work” or isn’t helpful when you’re on the grid. And actually, yes, it DOES make sense for at least some organizations, public or private, to use solar in cities while still being on the grid (especially government departments and museums, which have LOTS of roof-space to spare for it). Even if they can’t sell surplus power through the grid (and sometimes they can do so), they can still reduce their own electric bills because they buy less electricity from wherever the rest of the city get their power from. If you want to build a nuclear reactor to power the city in general, that’s fine; but in the meantime, why not let individual businesses and building-owners add solar panels to do their part?
Seriously, dude, this is all well-known to work and save lots of people money (by reducing dependence on big fossil-fuels plants, remember?); and you’re sounding sillier and sillier the more you try to pretend it’s not happening.
https://opennem.org.au/energy/wem/?range=all&interval=1y
The WA network is not connected to any other power network in Australia. It covers 2.646 million km².
2007 -- total power consumption = 13,022GWh
Total from black coal, biofuel and gas during 2007 = 12,346GWh
2022 -- total power consumption = 20,287GWh
Total from black coal, biofuel and gas during 2022 = 13,034GWh
Annual consumptionm increased by 7,265GWh from 2007 to 2022. This is a 55% increase in annual power demand.
Durung the same period, demand from black coal, biogas, and gas increased by 688GWh, which is an increase of only 5%.
The rest of the increased demand was covered by wind and solar, rising from a mere 7% of supply in 2007 to an average of 35% of supply by the end of 2022.
I fail to see how wind an solar are useless in this context. If you see zero utility in this situation, Gerrard, then you are obviously blind.
Raging Bee
They can reduce their energy bills with personal rooftop solar because of government subsidies. In a proper electricity market, they basically couldn’t. Now, if they wanted to also spend lots of money on batteries, then they could reduce their energy bills in a proper electricity market, but not solar alone.
I explained my reasoning of why I believe it doesn’t make sense to spend money on solar and wind. You disagree with my premises. As expected. My response to Tuatara here goes on to repeat my reasaoning of why I believe that.
tuatara
If your goal is 100% reduction in fossil fuels, solar and wind don’t help you get there. Solar and wind provide some help to reach 30%, maybe 50% reductions, but as South Australia shows, you have to cover the rest with natural gas. Your current path does not end at 100% reductions. It ends with ever increasing electricity bills until you hit the limits where the next incremental step of extra transmission and extra storage is just too expensive to be politically possible. Then, there is no incremental steps that lead from where you are to 100% elimination of fossil fuels. In that dead-end, that cul-de-sac, you have to back out, you have to start to abandon the solar and wind you have built, and replace it with nuclear. That’s the only path with existing technology to 100% reductions in fossil fuels.
You really haven’t looked at the figures, have you?
The NEM usage site 12-month totals for South Australia 28 Feb 22 to 12 Mar 23:
solar rooftop 17.8%
solar utility 5.1%
wind 46.3%
So, wind and solar totalled 17.8% + 5.1% + 46.3% = 69.2% of total usage over a year. Over 2/3rds of all usage.
Which exceeds 50%, no maybe about it. And it also exceeds 30%, even more.
As far as interconnection with Victoria, imports were +9.7% and exports 6%.
So, a tiny bit of leeching (you always write ‘leaches’, BTW).
(Source, the link both I and tuatara have adduced, set for SA and 12 months)
So, even now, facts right in front of your features, you ignore them and go back to your script. Tsk. Stupid pesky facts.
(I recognised the type in Mano’s recent post about an interview with a gun rights advocate. Facts matter not one whit)
PS that’s only grid usage — no off-grid usage there.
PPS and, of course, the transition there is ongoing.
More grid storage (plans for a battery at Torrens Island), more grid upgrading, and so forth are in progress.
—
In the news: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-07/copper-string-energy-transmission-line-queensland-government/102059900
(big country)
So you are saying Gerry, in one paragraph, that wind and solar dont help you get there but do help you get there.
What kind of fuckhead are you?
You really don’t fucking get it do you?
It is you calling out 100% renewables, but that is not what we are suggesting. We are merely pointing out your ridiculous assertion that renewables are useless at producing usable electricity inside a grid and at reducing carbon emissions, which real life data shows is false.
Why not do 80% renewables and 20% nuclear or 20% gas or 20% hot air from fucking Titan?
Oh wait, nuclear is illegal right now in Australia because those nasty greenies pulled the wool over the eyes of our right-wing governments. It had nothing to do with the fact that nuclear has been proven to be unsafe (Three Mile Island -- machinery fault and poor training, Chernobyl -- design flaws, and Fukishima -- unprecedented and unavoidable natural disaster) and the public have quite rightly insisted on stringent safety measures that cost extra money to implement.
tuatara, I have to quibble with you there.
Nuclear power, properly built and properly run and properly regulated is pretty damn safe. None of those failures were in the nature of the beast, rather the way the beast was not properly managed. They aren’t likely to be repeated.
No, the problem is that it’s super-expensive and takes ages to build, needs a shitload of cooling water, is it’s super-expensive and heaps to decommission, and generates a lot of waste including irradiated sites and materials.
Oh yeah, and needs a constant supply of fissiles to keep going, which need their own mining and refining and processing and so forth.
Pretty easy to Google their relative cost.
(But still, not too many people worry about a solar plant accident, do they? 🙂 )
[heaps of effort, that should be]
John Morales, yes two of those three accidents are not likely to be repeated because safety measures to prevent them are now required in most countries. My point was that it is events such as these that have contributed to the well-founded public fear of nuclear accidents (and distrust of the authorities in charge of the plants) as well as the increased costs of nuclear power plants.
The 3rd is proof that we are not entirely safe on this planet so we had better make damn sure that a 7.5 earthquake and ensuing massive tsunami is survivable. This is obviously not going to come cheap!
But yes, I agree, a properly designed, built and managed nuclear power plant should be pretty safe, though not as safe as a wind turbine or solar panel.
Well, anyway. Yeah, Dread Greenies™ have had an effect (I mean, here in Oz I was all for building nukes from the 1980s to the 2000s. But this is now, and they didn’t influence China or any other autocratic regimes.
It’s the economics and the convenience and the timeframes at hand that’s resulted in world-wide greater investment into renewables in preference to nuclear.
And, of course, in developed countries, the upgrading of the grid and the adding of grid storage and so forth are gonna be synergistic.
And then there’s this thing about EVs. Batteries on wheels, really.
20% gas means you’re not serious about climate change.
20% nuclear can’t cover 80% renewables because when you have a gap in 80% renewables, it’s often a gap of 100% for a few hours or a few days. You can’t cover that with 20% nuclear. You would need 100% nuclear to cover the gap.
Nuclear power is incredibly safe. It’s the safest and cleanest option by far. You have been misled about the dangers of nuclear power. The public has been hoodwinked.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-worldhttp://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/plutonium-bernard-cohen.htmlCoal kills a million people per year from air pollution alone. That means coal kills more people every one or two hours than have ever died from radiation from nuclear power. If you really cared about pollution and human safety, you would stop using coal as soon as possible, and then stop using solar and wind. Ex: Wind turbine lifecycle actually kill people and poisons the environment. See:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earthNuclear power in the west has killed approximately zero people from radiation. Zero people died from Fukushima and Three Mile Island and the dozens of other nuclear accidents that you can name. Again, by contrast, hundreds die every hour from air pollution. Every hour. And yet you choose coal in Australia instead of nuclear power. You choose needless human deaths and pollution.
We would be better off with a Chernobyl every year compared to using fossil fuels.
And a new Chernobyl is basically impossible because the west has much higher standards for design, like having a concrete containment structure, which is a big reason why Fukushima wasn’t so bad.
And the Fukushima reactors survived the earthquake just fine. No damage. It’s easy to design things to survive the worst possible earthquake. The problem was the lack of passive decay heat removal, instead relying on unprotected diesel generators which were taken out by the tsunami. All modern reactor designs have passive decay heat removal. Any modern reactor would have survived the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami just fine with zero damage.
You should know that there is no proven grid storage that can scale. There’s not enough lithium, nickel, or lead in estimated worldwide reserves and resources for the amount of battery that we would need. Not even close. There’s not enough free land for the pumped hydro that we would not. Not even close. Everything else is worse.
France vs Germany shows that this is incorrect. France converted most of their grid to nuclear in just 15 years, and they have cheap electricity. Germany has spent more time and money on renewables, and is nowhere close to the same level of success, and has much more expensive electricity. Ditto for South Australia -- I hear that the aggregate electricity prices are extremely high. You can say that solar and wind make electricity cheaper, but it’s contradicted by all of the available evidence. Solar and wind make electricity prices more expensive, and it’s I’ve given the reasons why.
Nuclear doesn’t require that much cooling water.
Decommissioning is only 15% of upfront capital costs. That’s cheap.
Nuclear waste is a nothing-burger. Low-level waste is never going to hurt anyone, and high-level waste is so small in amount that disposal is easy, cheap, and safe. Even high level waste is not that dangerous, having comparable toxicity to pure caffeine, and for it to hurt you, you have to grind it up into dust and breathe it in, or ingest significant amounts, e.g. grams of material, for it to hurt you.
How do we know that disposal is easy, cheap, and safe? A few billion years ago, there were natural underground fission reactors at Oklo, Gabon. The fission reactors ran on and off for millions of years, generating “nuclear waste”. We’ve done the experiment. We know what happens to nuclear waste after a billion years after burying it in a water rich environment. The plutonium moved 5 ft.
http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/oklo-reactor.htmlAgain, nuclear waste is a nothing burger that has never hurt anyone and never will.
And before you cite Hanford or some other problematic source of nuclear waste, Hanford is from nuclear weapons manufacture. It’s completely different chemically and nuclear-composition. It’s a nasty liquid that’s much harder to deal with. By comparison, high level waste from nuclear power is a solid that is easily handled and disposed. See also:
https://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdfhttps://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/Anyone who says that nuclear waste is a danger to people simply does not know what they are talking about, or they’re lying. Do you know what is a danger to people? Air pollution from coal, and pollution of the land from rare earth metal mining to make wind turbines (see earlier BBC link). Those actually kill a lot of people. Again, nuclear waste has not and likely never will hurt anyone.
Let me quote from here:
https://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/It is highly instructive to note how anti-nuclear activists seek to discredit the science here. They may well know that even using highly pessimistic assumptions about e.g. the copper canister and the bentonite clay, there is an overwhelming probability that any doses caused to the environment or to the public will be negligible. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps simply because they themselves honestly believe that any leakage results to immediately horrendous effects, they completely ignore the crucial question: “so what?”
What would happen if a waste repository springs a leak?
What would be the effects of the leak to humans or to the environment?
Even if you search through the voluminous material provided by the anti-nuclear brigade, you most likely will not find a single statement answering these questions. Cleverly, anti-nuclear activists simply state it’s possible that nuclear waste can leak – which is not in doubt, anything is possible – and rely on innuendo and human imagination (fertilized by perceptions of nuclear waste as something unthinkably horrible) to fill in the gaps in the narrative.
Whether you go along with this manipulation is, of course, up to you.
PS:
That tritium contaminated water held in storage tanks at Fukushima that everyone is freaking out about? You could drink nothing for years except for that water, directly from the tanks, and probably not be harmed. That’s how little the radiation is. People think that it would instantly kill you or something, but the reality is that it probably can’t harm you even if you tried to harm yourself with it (e.g. drinking it, swimming in it, etc.).
Um. Well, more than solar or wind, no? No cooling water needed there.
Also: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threaten-frances-already-tight-power-supply-2022-07-15/
EDF has already been forced to cut planned output several times this year because of a host of problems at its reactors -- and expects an 18.5 billion euros ($18.6 billion) hit to its 2022 core earnings because of production losses.
Such success!
The standards for river warming temperature are too strict. They don’t serve any real purpose. This is not a real technical limitation. It’s a political problem.
You don’t need that much cooling water.
I know that recent business in France nuclear has been over cost, but that’s a modern phenomenon. By contrast, during that historical period of 15 years where they converted to nuclear, things were delivered on-time, on-budget, and that’s why France has cheap electricity today.
Data here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics
Pesky facts.
Which is to say, you need cooling water.
Solar farms, wind turbines, not-so-much.
Why are you posting data that supports my claims as though it contradicted them?
I’m presenting facts — of the current variety. Not from 2013.
Here, since clicking on links is apparently too much for you, nor was the table that obvious to you:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/NRG_PC_204/default/table?lang=en
(You can sort by price on the tables there)
Basically, France is mid-tier in its prices in the EU.
So, “France has cheap electricity today.” is a bit of a stretch.
(Also, did mss my noting @56 that “France’s first offshore wind farm at Saint-Nazaire is now fully operational”?
Not a nuclear power plant, is it? Must be the Dread Greenies™)
@119:
Compared to what? I’ve not actually seen (and can’t be bothered to work out) a comparison with how long it would take and how much it would cost to build solar or wind energy generation that would generate as much as a nuclear power station. I suspect it would also take quite a while and be quite expensive. (Note: this is comedic understatement).
If only we lived on a planet whose surface was mostly covered with the stuff. If only it regularly fell out of the sky. And so on.
Well… OK. Except… it’s expensive NOW to decommission plants that are being decommissioned now. Those plants were built (mainly) in the 50s and 60s by people who, bless ’em, didn’t really know what they were doing. It’s fair to say we know a LOT more now about how to build nuclear power plants that are more easy to decommission, because it’s designed into them from the get-go. Another big point is that a lot of the power generation that we’re currently dealing with the aftermath of was of a design that was deliberately chosen to allow manufacture of weapons from the by-products. If you don’t have that on the design brief, the reactors can be much, much safer and easier to decommission.
I could go on, but just watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
“Constant supply”: a nuclear power station typically requires about 30 tonnes of fresh fuel per year.
A typical coal fired power station burns 14 THOUSAND tonnes of coal per DAY.
Yes, the supply has to be constant, obviously. But get the numbers into perspective.
Disclosure: I’m a chartered chemical engineer and I’ve been a project engineer in the nuclear industry twice in my career. I’m in favour of a transition to a combination of renewables (solar/wind/hydro/geothermal) and nuclear generation and the complete wind-down of all large scale fossil-fuel power generation. I know enough to know that fossil-fuel extraction must continue because power generation isn’t all it’s used for, but the other uses are single digit percents of the total market and don’t generally generate CO2, so they should continue at the appropriate scale.
Compared to nuclear power plants.
Well, then. Your opinions are not factually-based, are they?
(Being ignorant is not that admirable)
Yes, yes. No water shortages anywhere, planet is full of it.
Still, you do not dispute the claim, do you? They need cooling water just to operate. Fact.
Surely, in the future, it will be cheap as.
I’m sure you can come up with at least one example.
A typical solar power station burns zero THOUSAND tonnes of coal per DAY.
A typical wind power station burns zero THOUSAND tonnes of coal per DAY.
(Your point?)
Well, I’m retired, but I’m also in favour of a transition to a combination of renewables (solar/wind/hydro/geothermal) and nuclear generation and the complete wind-down of all large scale fossil-fuel power generation.
So we share that in common.
Thing is, economics.
Don’t get me started. Already been through all this with Gerrard; I’ve tried to point out that even if every single bit of electricity were defossilised, it would still require a shitload of fossil fuels for industrial purposes. Feedstock.
You almost sound like a shill for the petrochemical industry. Plastic fantastic.
(BTW,what proportion of the world’s hydrogen is produced from other than fossil fuels? Care to guess, O chemical engineer?)
Well, for a long time I’ve said that if we’re gonna suck out fossil fuels and put them in the environment, burning them is not their best use. So, no worries.
—
Nah.
If your goal is 100% reduction in fossil fuels, solar and wind don’t help you get there. Solar and wind provide some help to reach 30%, maybe 50% reductions…
Yeah, that’s helping us get there.
Your current path does not end at 100% reductions.
So when will your alternative path “end at 100% reductions?” Have any nuclear reactors built so far “ended at 100% reductions?” You’ve already admitted they haven’t, even in France.
Anyway, thanks for putting that obvious self-contradictory nonsense at the beginning of your latest text-wall, so we immediately know not to bother with the rest. Buh-bye.
@133:
You: nuclear power plants are super expensive!
Me: Compared to what?
You: Compared to nuclear power plants.
I’m not sure it’s worth even reading the rest of that post if that’s your opener.
No, I’m going to do it, it’s funny.
Not sure why you quoted the same line twice. I made the point that solar and wind are definitely much less energy dense than nuclear energy. I admitted I don’t know the figure, but considered this fact to be so obvious I didn’t need to quantify it precisely. Not for the first time I’ve wildly overestimated you. Sorry, I’ll try to dumb it down to your level in future. I keep forgetting how low that is. My bad.
If only there were some way of transmitting electrical power from one place to another. It would save the enormous expense and inconvenience of having to build a nuclear power station on every street corner and run cooling water canals to each one, and save people the hassle and expense of having to move house from dry areas to areas where electricity is available. Well, we can dream.
Leaving aside that that’s not a sentence, you betray your ignorance of the realities of decommissioning. I do it for a living. It only gets more expensive with legacy plant. Decommissioning today is always cheaper than decommissioning next year. But I wouldn’t expect you to know that, especially given that I wouldn’t expect you to know which way to sit on a toilet seat.
I’m sure you can do your own fucking research. Google “molten salt”, if you need a clue.
Again, you betray your ignorance of the realities of industry even as you admit you missed the point. Solar power stations aren’t made of thin air, and the components aren’t mined by pixies, assembled by elves and delivered by winged unicorns.
The point that sailed over your head was to highlight your ignorance of the true scale of nuclear industry resource usage (i.e. once the plant’s built, hardly any, when compared to fossil fuels… ironically, just like renewables). Thanks for reinforcing the point by not understanding it even after it was spelled out.
That ship has sailed, unfortunately. You can stop whenever you like.
You clearly missed the point of the word “disclosure”, but hey, point missing is your schtick, isn’t it? And what you sound like is someone who doesn’t really understand what the petrochemical industry is and does.
This is actually quite a common thing. Elsewhere on FtB another blogger was railing against the production of PTFE. I pointed out that PTFE is the key, indeed practically only, ingredient in Goretex, to which said person stated they’d be fine if Goretex just went away. After I condemned this vile, heartless statement for the ignorance it was, and pointed out the common use of Goretex and similar products in cardiac surgical devices (among thousands of other uses), said person admitted they’d really only thought I meant posh people’s raincoats. Most people have little to no idea how much their health and safety is predicated on the availability and continued production of advanced materials. You just take it for granted. Everyone does. Which is fine, until you start gluing yourselves to things to make it go away (who do you think made that superglue, and how?). I’m not a “shill” for the industry that pays my mortgage, but I thought it reasonable to make my dependence upon it clear so that any intelligent reader, or you, could make their own mind up how much weight to give to my contribution.
We would be better off with a Chernobyl every year compared to using fossil fuels.
“Better off” with one sizeable town being permanently evacuated every year? Do you really think that’s going to sound credible to the public you allegedly want to persuade? (And no, no one’s gonna care about your sciencey sources after hearing you talk like that.)
Quotes like this only show that Gerrard has no intention, and possibly no ability, to argue in good faith, or to actually make a credible-sounding case for nuclear power. This endless wall of bullshit is just a continuation of the old screaming-matches of the 1980s, where pro-nuclear propagandists did everything they could to discredit their critics, and only ended up discrediting themselves even more. And who do we think benefits from this same old grudge-match? The same fossil-fuels fossils who benefitted from it in the last century — who else?
Seriously, if dependence on fossil fuels is our common enemy/existential threat, then we need both nuclear and renewables TOGETHER, not divided against each other by the false choices and phony “either-or” rhetoric Gerrard is peddling here. People like Gerrard are only here to divide and neutralize us, not to offer anything constructive. It really is that simple, and that obvious.
Nuclear power, properly built and properly run and properly regulated is pretty damn safe.
I, for one, strongly agree — but we, the people, will always have to maintain 24/7 vigilance to ensure it’s done properly at every stage, at least as long as there are people like Gerrard in the nukebiz who clearly don’t care enough about proper operation because they still think they already know what’s best and all their critics are querulous hysterical ninnies.
None of those failures were in the nature of the beast…They aren’t likely to be repeated.
There I strongly disagree: without robust vigilance, they’re VERY likely to be repeated, for all the same reasons they happened in the first place.
I’ve not actually seen … a comparison with how long it would take and how much it would cost to build solar or wind energy generation that would generate as much as a nuclear power station. I suspect it would also take quite a while and be quite expensive.
You may well be right; but one big difference is that a solar-and/or-wind energy system of that scale would be built incrementally — one building, neighborhood or county at a time; and each new panel or turbine starts working and getting results before the whole system is completed. As opposed to a nuclear plant, which won’t generate one watt until the whole thing is finished.
Evacuate one small town every year, or, you know, evacuate all of Florida, because of sea level rise from runaway climate change.
I don’t know how to persuade people like you who are part of a cult who are dogmatically wed to false ideological beliefs. Chernobyl killed maybe 4,000 people from radiation. Coal kills 1,000,000 people every year from airborne particulate pollution alone, and coal mining also destroys and contaminates large swathes of land. Maybe you doubt my math skills, but 4,000 seems to be far smaller than 1,000,000.
Raging Bee.
France converted most of their grid to nuclear in 15 years. How much ore money and time do Germany and South Australia need to waste to prove that it takes more time and money to make renewables work? Germany already spent more time and money than France did, and Germany has far less success to show for it. If your goal is climate change, then nuclear power is the fastest and cheapest solution to get there. If, however, your goal is to reach 30% or 50% and then stall like Germany and South Australia, then sure, do solar and wind.
I don’t know how to persuade people like you who are part of a cult who are dogmatically wed to false ideological beliefs.
Maybe by calming the fuck down and admitting I haven’t actually stated any “false ideological beliefs,” only known facts and refutations of your own bogus and hyperemotional claims? That’d be a good start at least…
Raging Bee
is 4,000 per year less than 1,000,000 per year?
sonofrojblake @136:
Hasty comment (wife calling me to bed). Ctrl-v twice, missed it.
That’s why.
I made the point that nuclear power plants are the most expensive to build.
But yes, what I should have written is “Compared to non-nuclear power plants.”
Because hasty comment.
Misunderstanding me is not overestimating me, mate. But yes, your bad.
Oz is a tad bigger than the UK.
cf. my #117
See also https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-12-06/transmission-tower-wind-farm-biloela-prime-cropping-land-impact/101727238
By definition, decommissioning only occurs at the end of the plant’s life or when they’re too fucked-up to keep running, so they are always “legacy plant” unless technology stands still.
Heh. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/molten-salt-reactors.aspx
But the power comes from the Sun (and the wind, which comes from the Sun).
No fuel inputs.
Getting enriched uranium and thorium is a doddle?
And making hydrogen, don’t forget that. Fertilisers, etc.
So, O self-proclaimed expert, are you so sure it’s “single digit percents of the total market” (of fossil fuels)? You really think over 90% is just burned for power?
Anyway. Point was that decarbonising electricity will only account for around 2/3 of fossil fuel use overall.
PS this article is more amusing:
https://thebulletin.org/2022/06/molten-salt-reactors-were-trouble-in-the-1960s-and-they-remain-trouble-today/
Sourcing well-known anti-nuclear lobby group with a long history of lying. You’re citing cranks. Maybe I’ll go over the several lies in that article plus the many more cases of misframing and mischaracterization.
Yes. It is a doddle. It’s a small amount of mining compared to coal and compared to solar and wind. The mining is often in situ leaching which is far less destructive as well. Enriching it with centrifuges is pretty easy too. What difficulty do you see here?
Gerrard,
They need to be fuelled, unlike solar and wind.
—
Well, I was told to Google it. So I did.
Sure. Go for it.
But you’re fine with world-nuclear.org, right?
That’s a triviality, not a show-stopping difficulty.
So, if someone tells you to google for evolution, you’re going to link to The Discovery Institute?
I have not thoroughly vetted them, and I am not willing to grant their word as gospel. I’m not willing to grant any one particular source’s word as gospel. The closest that I might come are respectable international organizations, like UNSCEAR, WHO, IPCC, etc., but even then, sometimes bias and errors creep in. So, you’re asking me to assent to something, blind trust in some organization, which I will not give.
Well. https://world-nuclear.org/our-association/who-we-are/mission.aspx
They could hardly be more pro-nuclear — right up your alley.
Here: (my emphasis)
As I said, I don’t assent to blindly give absolute trust to all publications of any organization, and that the closest that I would come is for respectable international UN organizations like UNSCEAR, WHO, IPCC, etc.
UNSCEAR, eh? OK. https://www.un.org/en/observances/un-day
(My emphasis)
So they’re all for the renewable energy revolution.
What did I just say? Didn’t I just say that I won’t blindly trust any organization in order to precisely avoid this sort of gotcha? And then you try to pull it anyway? You’re just a fucking asshole John. Die in a fire.
Well, that link was the redirection from UNSCEAR, which you made clear was as good as it got for you, being a respectable international UN organization.
Your reaction to that is informative.
I reckon that you know deep down you dare not trust any reputable organisation because none of them share your stated beliefs about renewables.
Are you aware that you introduced the concept of “should blindly trust”, and then imputed it to me pulling it on you? You offered your criteria for your maximally-permitted trust, and specified entities, and I quoted one of them regarding the topic at hand.
I suppose so.
IPCC agrees with the weaker statement that 100% renewables is impossible. Unfortunately, IPCC example pathway include a lot more renewables. I’ve noted that there is a clear anti-nuclear bias in the report, and if you remove the false assumptions about uranium scarcity from the modeling, then nuclear dominates the models with very little left over for new renewables. Again, not my conclusions, but the conclusions of respectable scientists, quoted above. So, yea, I feel like the underdog, arguing from the individual scientists against a dogmatic movement that has taken over most of the big political organizations, including the IPCC. Am I conspiracy theorist? Well, if you think I am, then apparently many leading climate scientists are also conspiracy theorists. As Dr. Kerry Emanuel said above, I can do the math, and that makes me stand by my conclusions that I’ve given in this thread.
No worries, Gerrard. At least you get to advocate your position.
To circle back to the OP:
This applies to nuclear power plants, too.
There’s a lot of NIMBYism about all power plants and all serious transmission lines, not just nuclear.
The problem of transmission is ten times worse for solar and wind. Nuclear power plants can, for the most part, be situated close to where they are needed. In any serious green paper looking at a majority solar wind grid, when it’s sunny or windy on one side of the continent but not the other, the paper calls for enough transmission to pipe that power from one side of the continent to the other. That’s orders of magnitude more transmission than for a conventional grid with coal, nat gas, or nuclear. The problem is way worse with lots of solar and wind.
Well, https://nuclearforclimate.com.au/site-selection/ is a bit more specific.
(Your aussie brothers and sisters in spirit, they. Not at all astroturfy!)
I’m not sure what you’re even trying to say. Even your source says that you’ll need far more transmission for a renewables plan.
Again: There’s a lot of NIMBYism about all power plants and all serious transmission lines, not just nuclear. It’s not that obscure.
Hey, you know what does not require new transmission lines to be built?
Grid-connected solar rooftop.
(Which, as I noted, factually provides roughly twice as much electricity as utility scale solar plants in Oz)
And again John, my point that renewables require more transmission has nothing to do with NIMBYism.
Solar rooftop doesn’t require any more transmission, but.
Yet you have a problem with that, too. Anathema to you.
Yes it does John.
A proper debating partner, someone with intellectual honesty, at least tries to understand the opponent’s arguments. The goal for both of us should be to be able to make the other person’s arguments better than they can. You’re not doing that. You’re just skimming my posts for something to rebut instead of reading for comprehension. I don’t know if you’re physically capable, but that’s what an honest person with integrity would do. I know you’re not doing it, because if you were doing it, you wouldn’t have posted what you posted -- not without a preemptive rebuttal to what I’m about to say.
Do you even know what mistake I think you made? Can you even tell me what I’m about to say before I say it? In other words, are you honestly trying to understand my position, or did you just dogmatically assume I’m wrong and you’re right without even hearing me out?
The spoiler: It’s not about connecting the solar farm or rooftop solar to the nearest spot on the grid. At least that’s not primarily what I’m talking about. Again, what I’m talking about is shown in Green modeling papers. To reach the conclusion that only feasible amounts of storage are needed (e.g. a day or two), the papers model under the assumption that you can pipe power from one side of the continent to the other. For Australia, that means piping power from the northeast side, along the east coast, along the southeast coast, to South Australia, and also back the other way, depending on when and where the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
If you truly bothered to understand my argument, you would have realized that this argument equally applies to rooftop solar and utility solar farms. You would realize that the transmission from the solar farm to the nearest grid point is going to be quite small compared to having the same transmission capacity along the entire eastern coast of Australia.
Again, in a conventional grid with coal and natural gas, you don’t have the transmission capacity to handle a hypothetical where all of the coal and natural gas is in Cairns and you need to be able to pipe the power that Melbourne (and the rest of Australia) needs from Cairns. Instead, you locate the individual coal and natural gas power plants close to where they’re needed, so the transmission capacity from Carisn to Melbourne is a very small fraction of the overall power consumption on the grid. By contrast, when you have a majority solar wind grid, you need enough transmission capacity in order to generate all of Melbourne’s power requirements from solar and wind in Cairns and transmit it from Cairns to Melbourne, and vice versa.
If you don’t have this kind of transmission capacity, then all of the green modeling papers that exist go out the window, because that’s a fundamental core assumption to all of them. I can show you papers where if you don’t have this kind of transmission, then storage requirements go from a couple days to a couple weeks, from something that’s basically impossible to something that is completely impossible. It’s going to be cheaper to build that kind of transmission compared to building 4 weeks of storage. It’s still going to be extremely expensive building that kind of transmission.
Of course, I’m wasting my time talking to you, because you simply refuse to engage in an intellectually honest discussion. Instead, you’re just masturbating.
The same cycle repeats itself. We’ve been here before, Gerrard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation
Many mines in Oz are getting their own solar and wind resources set up right now.
5MW here, 10MW there, it begins to add up.
No transmission lines for those, either.
John Morales
Ok. So, first, I want to point out that you’re as far from mainstream scientific opinions as I am. I am unaware of any serious, reputable organization or scientific papers that argues decentralized solar and wind is feasible.
We have seen what happens when you lose power for a few consecutive days in the recent power outage in Texas. Even a few hours of power loss causes great havoc and chaos in a city.
Are you proposing that you will maintain the same grid uptimes with decentralized power generation!? Or are people going to die from freezing to death during the worst winter storm of the decade? If you’re maintaining grid uptime, pray tell how. You need weeks of storage. You can’t have weeks of storage. That’s impossible.
So, you think rooftop solar is not decentralised, and you think it’s not feasible.
Those millions of households in Oz that have them and are buying them probably don’t care much about the first, and definitely think they are feasible.
Voting with the wallet is a pretty good indicator of sincerity.
Well, you also claim over 30% solar and wind is impossible, though SA managed 69.2% over the last year. That’s the National Electricity Market figure, anyway.
Obs, lots of research and investment in grid storage worldwide at the moment, it being the way of the future. Of course, the more distributed the generation and the better the transmission, the less need for storage. It’s all synergistic.
[checks]
NEM data, 1 March to 8 March, all of Oz.
All “grid” figures, of course, that being the electricity market.
Solar rooftop 648GWh 14.1%
Solar utility 300GWh 6.5%
Just saying, 948GWh is not a trivial amount.
Oh yeah,
Wind 695 15.1% → (14.1 + 6.5 + 15.1) > 30
(Weird, huh?)
You didn’t even try to answer my questions. And I honestly don’t even know what you’re saying, because now it sounds like you’re embracing adding more transmission to reduce storage requirements (“Of course, the more distributed the generation and the better the transmission”). Could you stick to a position, clarify it, and defend it please, instead of shifting to whatever position is convenient in the moment?
Oh, sorry. Right, your questions.
Yes. I mean, that’s what’s happening right now, and has for years.
Like, we are living in 2023, not 2008 or 2013.
And progress is ongoing.
And people aren’t freezing to death in winter storms in Oz. Well, not at home.
And, since you seek engagement:
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2022/sep/energy.php
I see Texas relies on 10% nuclear energy.
BTW, this should make you happy, keen though they are on wind and solar, they’ve hit that limit to which you refer:
Hey Gerrard.
You start from the position of “wind and solar are useless for transitioning to a zero-carbon electricity supply”.
We provide you with real life data that shows their utility in the Australian situation.
You then admit that they are helpful to a point but then quickly squirm back to your position that they are useless because they don’t fit your ideology.
We admit that solar and wind need to be implemented with other forms of power generation including nuclear (which is incidentally the position held by your own sources) but you rebuke that with the same old bullshit argument that they do not help at all (despite your previous admission that they do indeed help).
And all this just in this comment thread!
I for one am sick of the ever decreasing circles you run. You are a dishonest time waster and I have been wrong to engage with you again.
Tuatara
I don’t think I’ve changed my position to a noteworthy degree. It’s been the same from the start. Solar and wind built today get you some of the way there, but that path does not lead to 100%, and any path that leads to 100% leaves solar and wind as stranded capital, aka as a wasted investment, because solar and wind have very little value in a grid dominated by nuclear power plus some hydro. You’re taking issue with me about whether I really believe it’s 30% or 50% or 70%. I don’t know the exact number, but I do know it’s far short of the 100% that we need.
Also, I’m just saying, I have several prominent climate scientists on my side, agreeing with my assessments. Quoting
>I think we should put much more money into nuclear and stop wasting a lot on covering the Earth in solar panels.
and
> Martikainen notes that if IPCC modelers removed the uranium scarcity assumption, “Nuclear power would end up dominating the energy supply. I have a feeling that resource constraint was introduced specifically for this reason. Modellers first did their calculations without the constraint and ended up with a result that they found distasteful.”
My position is not a quack or particularly fringe position. This is a position supported by people who generally know what they’re talking about.
We admit that solar and wind need to be implemented with other forms of power generation including nuclear (which is incidentally the position held by your own sources) but you rebuke that with the same old bullshit argument that they do not help at all (despite your previous admission that they do indeed help).
That’s because he’s not in this to bring a plausible proposal to the table and get consensus to make it happen. He’s in it for exactly the opposite purpose: to set nuclear and renewables advocates against each other so we can’t get a consensus on any sort of progressive change.
Seriously, whatever our own opinions are, we all understand that nuclear power is a hard sell these days. So anyone who really wants to sell it needs to try to turn at least some of its current enemies into allies; and from a progressive-political perspective, it makes sense to work WITH renewables advocates for the clear common goal of ending dependence on fossil fuels. So when someone like Gerrard keeps on insisting that we have to support nuclear power at the expense of renewables, that’s a sure sign that he doesn’t really want either nuclear or renewables to succeed at all. It’s divisiveness, destructiveness and bad faith all the way down with this clown; and his relentless ennuigenic repetition of long-debunked ignorant assertions only prove he has no intention of being honest. We’ve already proven — again — that Gerrard is being dishonest and deranged; nothing more can be gained by wasting any more time with him. It’s like trying to convince a Nazi that there’s really no Jewish Conspiracy.
Also, I remember hearing that more than 50% of people now think global warming is a real problem that needs to be dealt with. So that’s a majority against fossil-fuels. So how does a reactionary minority fend off a hostile majority? By doing everything they can to keep the majority divided against each other, and thus unable to unite for any common goal that inconveniences the reactionary minority. That’s what Republicans have been doing to the rest of America — and the free world — at least since the 1970s: customers vs. workers, “traditional” women vs. feminists, whites vs. blacks, LGB vs T, “Christians” vs public school and other secular institutions, and on and on. And that’s exactly what Gerrard is trying to do here: set the enemies of fossil fuels against each other. Same reactionary Retrumplitarian gaslighting games, different issue area.
Raging Bee
The primary obstacle to fixing climate change are not the climate change deniers. It’s the people promoting solar and wind; they are the primary obstacle to fixing climate change. Not me saying this -- this is straight from Dr James Hansen -- quote above. If you think I’m deranged, you must think most climate scientists are also deranged. How’s that cognitive dissonance for ya?
I’m not arguing in bad faith. Neither is Dr James Hansen. If it was possible to fix this with a combination of renewables and nuclear, I’d be all for it. However, I’ve seen that most renewables advocates hate nuclear more than coal, and I see that when renewable advocates get in charge, they replace nuclear with coal and natural gas. The first ones to be divisive were the renewable advocates who gained political power in California, in Germany, in Australia, etc. Nuclear power is outright illegal in Germany and Australia. How’s that for divisiveness?
Oh no, the citizens of other countries decided they preferred their tax dollars not build any nuclear power because it’s costs outweigh its benefits, and the tedious AI shill has decided that’s divisive?
Mano, just close the comments. Nobody will mind.
Tethys, nobody should mind if he doesn’t, either.
(Exhorting the blog host is not something I do)
—
And, given the topic drift (or, should I say, debouchement), I found this of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIQE-EUpMa8
(At least it’s up to date)
The primary obstacle to fixing climate change are not the climate change deniers.
Obvious liar is obvious. Thanks for proving my point. Now fuck off to bed.
So, Dr James Hansen and Dr Kerry Emanuel are obvious liars. Ok.
Maybe I should have embedded the video. You’d mostly quite like it, Gerrard.
Seems pretty much right to me.
They opined best as they knew back in the day. Things have changed.
This you definitely don’t get: they are climate scientists, not energy industry experts. Yet you grant them that expertise.
Ah, well. Again:
(Exhorting the blog host is not something I do)
You do however fail to notice that the blog host doesn’t appreciate this endless and pointless buttal. Subtlety is quite lost on literalists.
Mano is well within his power to ask me to stop. I’ll stop when asked. I don’t go back to Oceanoxia or Marcus’s blogs because they told me that I’m not welcome.
Not in any significant way, no. Transmission still costs the same. Hydro storage is still the same. Batteries are still way too expensive to be relevant.
Tethys, Mano has made it clear he’s not fussed about it, rather he himself does not indulge. He knows where I stand, I know where he stands. So far, so good.
(BTW, “but you do X” in response to my “I don’t do Y” is an acknowledgement)
[PS I suppose I should add I got the “buttal” reference.
Literalist or no, my short-term memory is fine]
Gerrard, dunno if you remember I’ve stood up in the past for your right to express yourself in the face of other commenters appealing to have you gone.
I have sympathy for you, too.
In the news: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64903202
… is it just me, or is anyone else amused that it needs to run emergency diesel generators to provide electricity to keep it safe?
I suppose the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency could be wrong.
It’s an old design. Most newer designs have passive decay heat removal for at least a few weeks, sometimes a month or two.
#187 John
Most large generators need a source of power in case of disruption, and cannot black start.
Thanks for the video, John, but while I agree with most of it, I did notice a few omissions that I, at least, consider glaring. First, Hossenfelder forgot to mention that people are afraid of nuclear power, not just because of accidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island (the latter of which she didn’t mention), but also because of the stupid, clumsy and tone-deaf behavior of the nuclear industry and its advocates — which could easily have sunk nuclear power politically more than the coverage of the accidents themselves. And her second HUGE mistake was in dismissing regulation — because if the people are leery about nuclear power, and the advocates are against any of the regulations that might make it more trustworthy, then that’s really not going to make nuclear power an easier sell.
Also, dismissing concerns about nuclear waste disposal as a “red herring” was another tone-deaf mistake. Yes, I’m sure it’s safe to have a permanent waste-disposal site nearby, IF everything is designed, built and managed properly — but we can’t just take it for granted that everything will be done properly, can we?
Yeah, but the funny bit is that their very purpose is to generate electricity.
Raging Bee, sure. But then, they are physicists, and sociology is not their forte.
But they both think it’s pretty green, overall.
If it were to be done at all, it would take much more effort to not do properly.
Encasing, vitrification, that sort of thing.
Deep burial in geologically-stable ground.
Probably easier to do than to fake.
[I mean, they did point out that radioactivity is easily detected. Physicists!]
They did also conclude that combinations of wind, solar, nuclear or hydro should be used as approptiate, where appropriate and practicable. Like you wouldn’t build a $10 -- $20 billion nuclear plant on Tarawa (because they couldn’t afford it to start with), but you would build a decent size solar array with batteries on the land North of the runway.
Again, there were underground natural nuclear reactors at Oklo, Gabon. It happened a few billions years ago. They ran for millions of years. We have done the experiment of disposing nuclear waste underground with zero artificial barriers. In a natural underground water rich environment, the plutonium moved 5 ft.
It sounds tone deaf because you believe blatant falsehoods about the scale of the danger. Nuclear waste is never going to hurt anyone, even if disposed of in the most grossly incompetent way.
See here for what happens when a nuclear waste repository leaks: aka nothing.
https://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/See here for the real scale of the danger of plutonium and high level nuclear waste. It’s dangerous only if you grind it into dust and breathe in milligrams of material, or ingest approx a gram of material. With any sort of burial disposal, no person is ever going to ingest that large amount of material from indirect exposure.
http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/plutonium-bernard-cohen.htmlAgain, combine that with the knowledge that most of the nuclear waste only moves 5 ft over a billion years in a water rich environment, and nothing is going to happen.
Nuclear waste is not this infinitely dangerous substance that is harmful no matter how diluted. Homeopathy is not real. Nanograms of material is not harmful. Even milligrams of material is not harmful. There simply is no plausible pathway for a person to get exposed to that amount of material from buried nuclear waste. That’s what the paper above shows.
Mmmmm… Radithor.
So… four deaths? Resulting from negligence, burglary and a bunch of other criminal activity? That’s your example of why waste from nuclear power generation is a major problem?
I mean… really? That’s the best you’ve got? Is it all you’ve got?
Also Kyshtim (sp?) in 1950.
Also, give it up and go to bed, Gerrard. NONE of the “information” you’ve dumped here proves we can’t, or shouldn’t, have a balanced policy of expanding use of both nuclear and renewables. Your hateful axe-grinding reaction to this perfectly sensible notion (both scientifically and politically/economically so) only further proves you’re arguing in bad faith and working to sabotage any real working consensus for cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels.
So before we get to the 200 mark here, maybe you should go back to the LaRouchies, or the API, or whoever might be paying you to disgrace yourself as you have, and either resign or tell them to give you some more plausible talking-points. You’re not fooling anyone here.
The point at issue is what is the predictable, unavoidable waste arising from nuclear power generation, and how hard is it to deal with. Answer, “not much”, and “easy”. Kyshtim is not great example because it’s an isolated event, not a systemic feature, it’s from over 70 years ago, and despite that is still the third worst thing that ever happened since nuclear power began. It’s also hard to quantify its effects precisely because of the time lag and the secrecy.
Kyshtim. Accident from a nuclear weapons material site. Not an accident from nuclear waste disposal from a civilian light water reactor. Please try again.
The Goiânia Accident. A radiotherapy source, tir medicine. Again nothing to do with waste disposal from a civilian light water reactor. We’ll have this with or without nuclear power. This is unrelated to nuclear power. Please try again.
No one has ever been harmed by nuclear waste from a civilian nuclear power plant. It just has never happened. And very likely it never will.
Mmmmm… Radithor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137#Incidents_and_accidents
Gerrard, nuclear waste is nuclear waste, and radioactive materials are radioactive. How do you imagine the Caesium-137 is made?
We’ve been over this before.
You want to think that stuff is perfectly safe, go for it.
But you aren’t going to convince anyone who knows anything about it.
And part of the reason the damn things are so very expensive to build and to operate and to decommission is the nuclear waste management requirements.
And do you know what? Not a single one of those deaths from that long list of accidents was nuclear waste from a civilian nuclear reactor. All of them were weapons manufacture waste, or accidents at reactors (and not from waste removed from the reactor), or radiotherapy sources.
All you know about it is lies. Coal pollution is a million times worse than nuclear waste, but you have this ridiculous double standard where you don’t seem to care about the million lives per year lost to coal air pollution, but you worry about these mythical deaths from radiation from nuclear waste from civilian nuclear power.
https://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf
That’s the reality of what we’re dealing with. It’s stored in massive concrete casks which will survive for thousands of years against corrosion. They’ve done tests of hitting it head on with a train locomotive at full speed; the train locomotive disintegrated and the concrete cask had a scratch. You could spend your entire life sitting on one of these concrete casks with fresh fuel in it and not be harmed. No one is ever going to be harmed by this stuff. We can bury it if you want to make it even more safe, (or deep ocean floor burial for something even safer), but the concrete casks are already safe enough.
I would much rather live in a house surrounded by these casks than I would want to live anywhere near a coal power plant, or the fly ash waste ponds from coal power which sometimes overflow their dams and destroy whole towns, or the open pit mining for coal that destroys the entire landscape.
Well, I know all that you have told me.
All lies, by your own words.
Anyway, feel free to edit the Wikipedia article on waste to correct all the lies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
That would be because coal pollution was historically spewed out in great big gobs into the environment, unlike nuclear waste products.
More to the point, your whole point hitherto was to diss wind and solar, your bugbears, and now suddenly it’s the coal.
Part of the reason that “Encouraging increase in wind and solar power generation” is a thing. No fuel, no waste.
Right. It’s so very safe, so very benign, that it’s stored in massive concrete casks which will survive for thousands of years against corrosion. (!)
That’s because you’re attacking nuclear for being unsafe, in spite of it being a million times safer than something that is already in widespread use in your country. Therefore, your standards are objectively fallacious. If this was really about public safety, we should be shutting down as fast as possible and replacing it with anything else, including nuclear. However, Australia has a law that forbids nuclear power, but the law allows coal power. That’s so fucked up. Lots of people die from coal power. No one has ever died from radiation (or heavy metal poisoning) outside of a nuclear power plant from a nuclear power plant accident in the west (aka excluding Chernobyl), and no one has ever died from radiation (or heavy metal poisoning) from nuclear waste from civilian nuclear power anywhere. Again, you have this absurdly high safety standard for nuclear which is completely misaligned for the safety that you demand from anything else. If you applied the same thing to any other industry, that industry would have to shut down for not being safe enough.
I skimmed it. I see nothing objectionable. I see nothing that contradicts anything that I’ve said here.
You did read the part that after 500 years, you could stand 2 meters from the unshielded fuel assemblies for your entire life and probably be fine, right?
I’m not saying that it’s safe to touch or ingest no matter what. Clearly it’s dangerous if you eat large amounts of it (a few grams), or be within a few dozen meters or whatever of fresh unshielded fuel assemblies.
My point is that any sort of remotely objective analysis will show that it’s a trivial concern compared to other dangers in our lives, such as natural gas pipeline explosions that blow up whole neighborhoods, or fly ash pond floods that destroy whole towns, or the millions that die every year from coal air pollution, or the vast cities and landscapes in China that are horribly contaminated by the rare earth metal mining for renewables, or the slave labor responsible for mining cobalt and for making most of the solar panels in the world (Uighur slave labor in China accounts for about half of all solar cells made in the world).
This concern about nuclear waste is completely misplaced. Natural gas pipelines are a far bigger threat to public safety from the explosions that happen once a year or so around the world.
Solar and wind production, operation, and disposal kill far more people than nuclear power, including Chernobyl, has ever killed. Attacking nuclear for its perceived lack of safety is simply delusional.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth
Not even slightly.
Me @119: “Nuclear power, properly built and properly run and properly regulated is pretty damn safe. None of those failures were in the nature of the beast, rather the way the beast was not properly managed. They aren’t likely to be repeated.”
But I know all that, and you’ve just asserted all I know is lies.
It follows that you think the article is all lies, and that what you’ve told me is all lies.
John
The wikipedia article, as far as I can tell, makes no concrete statements about the danger of disposal to human health. You have. You are wrong. The wikipedia article, from my skimming, is not wrong.
And none of the things that you cited thus far have anything to do with nuclear power, again being nuclear weapons manufacture related, or radiotherapy related, or something other than nuclear waste from civilian nuclear power plants. You don’t have a single example because there isn’t one.
Gerrard, your imagination is fevered.
Quote one such statement I’ve made, if you truly believe that claim.
These two quotes seem to be the best examples from this thread:
In this context, you are calling it a significant problem, or even a blocking problem. It’s not. But it seems you have no problem with coal or natural gas, which are far more dangerous.
Again, you’re saying that civilian power plant nuclear waste disaposl is a significant concern, something other than “perfectly safe”, and you’re basically wrong. Here, it’s not the exact words that you said which I object to. rather, I object to the nuance and framing. When nuclear power is safer than coal, natural gas, hydro, solar, wind, and every other form of electricity generation, your framing here is just wrong. When civilian power plant nuclear waste has never harmed anyone, you’re just wrong.
PS: Decommissioning costs are a small portion of upfront capital costs. Nuclear waste disposal costs are even smaller. Nuclear power is primarily expensive because the plant to turn nuclear fuel into heat (and electricity) is big and complicated and expensive to make.
PPS:
It cannot be put under the nuclear power column because the examples that you cited would still exist with or without nuclear power. People still would have built nuclear weapons without nuclear power. People still would have built reactors for radio-isotopes for medical purposes without using nuclear power for electricity generation. Again, thus, describing these as “nuclear waste (from nuclear power)” is simply wrong.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/tokaimura-criticality-accident.aspx
Oh look! Another example that is not someone being harmed by nuclear waste from a civilian nuclear power plant. Instead, it’s a reactor accident. Yes, those have harmed people. Most famously Chernobyl, but there are others. Except for Chernobyl, no one outside of the plant was harmed by an accident, but there are a few where people inside the plant were harmed, like Tokaimura Criticality Accident 1999.
Can you even read English? Are you a chatbot?
The context was the cost of nuclear plants, and that the cost of waste managent (you know, like those “massive concrete casks which will survive for thousands of years against corrosion”). I keep telling you it’s about economics, and it is a significant problem because it adds a lot of cost. An ongoing cost.
Same with your second quotation. Cost, including the cost of regulation.
For the umpteenth to the umpteenth time (always devolves down to this) I am not personally against nuclear power, nor do I consider it particularly unsafe if done properly. Your beef with me is that I also have no problem with solar and wind generation, and that I realise that it’s a lot more doable than you think it is.
No zero-sum thinking for me, no basing my opinion on dated technologies and ways of thinking. But nuclear power plants? No problem with those.
Look at the utter waste of resources involved in the current war in Ukraine.
They could be spent building the infrastructure to sustain a fully renewable Europe, instead. So the $$$ and the resources are there, just not used.
The world is still not serious enough. Stupid, really, but that’s humanity for you.
No idea what you’re talking about. They’re dirt cheap. You keep talking about the potential dangers and extreme costs of nuclear waste disposal, and I keep telling you that you’re wrong with sources, and you keep responding with non-sequitir replies about reactor accidents or radiotherapy sources or whatever.
Radioactive materials don’t know whether they are waste or not, they just radiate.
And they kill. Demonstrably.
Just an oopsie, no biggie.
You’re not very reflexive, are you? 🙂
If someone builds a massive space laser weapon powered by space solar panels, and uses it to kill some people, and I include deaths from that in the category “solar power” to argue that solar power is unsafe, would you be upset?
Again, we were discussing nuclear power, and the radiotherapy source accidents that you cited would exist with or without nuclear power, and the nuclear weapon waste that you cited would exist with or without nuclear power.
You’re being wholly unreasonable to include all things radioactive under the umbrella of “nuclear waste from civilian nuclear power”. Extremely unreasonable.
I mean, hell, doesn’t Australia have a nuclear reactor for medical isotopes? I know it has modern medical infrastructure including radiotherapy sources, as you have already cited. These sorts of things have nothing to do with whether or not Australia uses nuclear power.
https://www.ansto.gov.au/products/nuclear-medicine
Yea. Australia already has nuclear reactors. They just don’t have any nuclear reactors for electricity generation.
I can see you’re struggling; here: to build a nuclear power plant, one needs a viable design, then permits, then finance, then a site, then construction, then running and fuelling and maintenance (including waste management), then at the end of life (unless it becomes otherwise necessary) decommissioning and remediation. That is, I referred to the waste management aspect of the costs.
Now you claim it’s dirt-cheap to do the waste management part, and therefore hardly adds to the cost of the plant. Alas, it’s another instance where investors don’t agree with you.
See, how it works (this should make you feel vindicated) until very recently, fossil fuel plant operators could pretty much externalise their waste, but for a long time now nuclear plant operators had to pay for managing theirs. Around 10% of the cost of producing electricity, IIRC. Not insignificant.
—
In passing: https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us
Look, you want to think nuclear waste is rather safe stuff, I can’t stop you.
Meanwhile, in the real world:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/
Skimmed
https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us
Stopped when it started talking about Hanford, a nuclear weapons waste facility.
Again, you are framing the issue as though we must spend huge amounts of money or else someone will be hurt. Even if it was 10%, 10% of the total cost is pretty cheap. It’s not 10%. That 10% or 15% number that is commonly cited is for cleaning up the building, and not just for disposal (e.g. burying) of the nuclear waste. The correct framing is that it’s cheap and easy to dispose (e.g. bury) the nuclear waste in a way that is virtually guaranteed that no one will be hurt.
This is about the broader conversation that many people have this mistaken idea that buried nuclear waste is somehow dangerous if it leaks, which is not true, or that a leak would be catastrophic to the environment, which is definitely not true. Many people also have the mistaken idea that handling nuclear waste in a way that protects the public and nature is particularly expensive, which is also not true. Dry cask storage is extremely cheap, and that’s good enough. Burying it in deep boreholes would also be cheap, and overkill in terms of the cost to benefit ratio, but still cheap.
Please stop perpetuating this myth that disposal of nuclear waste is expensive or that disposed nuclear waste is somehow dangerous. Once the nuclear fuel assemblies get out of the cooling ponds and into dry cask storage, they’re never going to hurt anyone, and putting them in dry cask storage is extremely cheap.
Certain people don’t have a plan because the Greens rely on this being an unsolved issue, and they have used their extensive political clout to make sure that there is no solution to it. However, in reality, we could and probably should just leave it in above ground dry cask storage. We should do that because it’s extremely cheap, extremely safe as a permanent disposal method, and because we’ll probably want to harvest the nuclear “waste” later in order to use it as cheap nuclear fuel in next generation power reactors. There, I just solved the nuclear waste problem.
First, Gerrard, the point is not where the nuclear waste came from; the point is that it was mismanaged. And when nuclear waste is mismanaged, yes, people can be hurt by it.
And second, since when did “Greens” have “extensive political clout?” Still trying to blame “Greens” for your side losing a debate y’all thought you were entitled to win?
It matters very much where it came from if we’re going to attribute it to specifically “downsides of using nuclear power”. You and John are both being absolutely ridiculous on this position. It’s like attributing all deaths from tanks in warfare to the internal combustion engine and saying deaths from tanks in war is a downside of using cars ad buses for transportation. It’s obscene logic.
Gerrard, you:
“Even high level waste is not that dangerous, having comparable toxicity to pure caffeine, and for it to hurt you, you have to grind it up into dust and breathe it in, or ingest significant amounts, e.g. grams of material, for it to hurt you.”
I refer you to my #201.
(Not that dangerous my arse)
“With great power comes great responsibility”
It matters very much where it came from if we’re going to attribute it to specifically “downsides of using nuclear power”.
Not really — either way, if it’s mismanaged, people are likely to get hurt, contrary to your rock-chewingly-stoopid assertion that it’s virtually harmless.
It’s like attributing all deaths from tanks in warfare to the internal combustion engine and saying deaths from tanks in war is a downside of using cars ad buses for transportation.
Your analogy is like Hitler at an ice-rink. Again. You really need to go to bed and take more time to deal with this asinine pointless grudge of yours. Remember when Brezhnev said “Zionism is making us stupid?” Your one-track axe-grinding about nuclear power is doing the same to you. Get help.