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We do not have to limit ourselves to just one source. Blocking nuclear in favor of some sort of pie in the sky global power network and huge renewable infrastru

We do not have to limit ourselves to just one source. Blocking nuclear in favor of some sort of pie in the sky global power network and huge renewable infrastructure is common for some reason. We can use any and all power sources that are clean.

Scea91 7y ago
I completely agree with you. My argument was not against solar. It was against ‘solar only’. Of course, there are other renewables and if some country has an option to use solar + hydro then they do not need nuclear. But not everyone has that option. Disclaimer: I am a layman in this topic and not energetics expert, this is my understanding of the state but please feel free to correct me.
rob74 7y ago
> We can use any and all power sources that are clean. I completely agree with you on that. Of course, the disagreement hinges on whether you can consider nuclear power "clean"...
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  There's enough data today to show that it absolutely is. No air pollution, very little CO2, almost no deaths/TWh compared to other sources. Accidents have been bad but recall that fossil while operating normally kills 3.8 million/year and causes climate change. In comparison to that nuclear is absolutely pristene. Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up kills a few thousand people per year.
  - bildung 7y ago
    > Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up Often repeated, but still wrong: Germany also phased out coal.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      "Is in the process of phasing out", maybe, but it's absolutely not phased out yet. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      Incorrect. Here's some live data for you to gander at: https://www.electricitymap.org https://www.electricitymap.org They still run over 40 GW of coal.
      - bildung 7y ago
        Yeah, sorry, native German speaker here, I got the tense wrong. Germany is in the process of phasing out coal, just as with nuclear. https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-power-20190126-story.html https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-powe...
        acidburnNSA 7y ago
        Yup. They promised to phase coal out later and phased nuclear out today. Literalling killing a few thousand per year by air pollution while they're at it. It's a great anti-scientific tragedy of our times due to fear of radiation and inability to judge actuarial statistics correctly.
        bildung 7y ago
        I'm not at all disagreeing. The coal phase-out should have happened a) before the nuclear phase-out and b) decades earlier. Processes like these tend to be pretty sluggish, the political discussions for both date back to the 1970s. Chernobyl was a big thing in German politics, and there are still some species of mushrooms that can't be eaten in the country. The actual health problems were negligible, but this isn't how politics work.
        acidburnNSA 7y ago
  - Wildgoose 7y ago
    Although Germany do say they will phase out their Coal-fired power stations by 2038 - so another two decades to go. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/26/germany-agrees-to-end-reliance-on-coal-stations-by-2038 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/26/germany-agrees...
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Nuclear risks tend not to be straight up death; the risk is that a Chernobyl type incident would contaminate a very large area of farmland with bioaccumulative fission products, eg. Cesium-137: https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c06.html https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c06.html The risk can't be measured in "lives per year" because for most years it will be zero. The "long tail event" is something like: each reactor has a 1/10,000 lifetime chance of an incident of releasing cs137 which will contaminate a random area of Europe in which agriculture becomes uneconomic to make safe. It's a probabilistic judgement of the type that we're very bad at dealing with.
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      The numbers I'm using incorporate the UN UNSCEARs estimate of long term cancers due to Chernobyl. These are factored in. In fact, building a straight-up Chernobyl reactor that runs for 5 years and then explodes is still safer than running a regular old coal plant for 5 years. Fossil is that bad.
      - kragen 7y ago
        The concern about farmland contamination is not because people are farming around Pripyat and getting cancer. On the contrary, it's because people are not farming around Pripyat. Deaths per terajoule doesn't factor in the loss of the farmland. I think you're probably right that, even with frequent meltdowns, nuclear power would be less bad than coal. But I also think that we don't have a large enough number of disasters to extrapolate reliably. A hundred Chernobyls might produce much more than a hundred times the deaths from one Chernobyl — or much less.
        acidburnNSA 7y ago
        Well we just had a triple-meltdown at Fukushima where the plants actually had containment domes. Estimated deaths from radiation integrated over all time? Up to 1. The difference between nuclear's safety and fossil fuels anti-safety is astounding. They are not even remotely comparable. 4 million deaths per year from fossil, year after year. Up to 4000 total deaths across the decades from nuclear. Fossil fuels are causing over 2 long-term cancer-included Chernobyls per day every single day right now. This is an important point that's hard to get through to people.
- edhelas 7y ago
  Are solar panel and wind turbines clean ? They need to be changed often, they use lots of concrete (especially for wind turbines), they need lots of materials and have a quite low power factor (10-20%).
  - kragen 7y ago
    > They need to be changed often, they use lots of concrete (especially for wind turbines), they need lots of materials and have a quite low power factor (10-20%). How many tonnes of concrete per megawatt do wind turbines use, and how many do nuclear power plants use? Solar plants used to use a lot of concrete, but they no longer do. "Power factor" is an attribute of electrical loads, not electrical generating equipment; it describes how far the load's current consumption deviates from the perfect in-phase sine wave of, say, a resistor. Perhaps you meant "capacity factor", the ratio of average power produced to peak power produced. Typical capacity factors for wind turbines are in the vicinity of 35%, although some offshore wind farms reach 60%. Photovoltaic plants typically have a capacity factor of around 25%, though in sunny places like Arizona and California it can exceed 30%. In the US, the lowest PV capacity factors are in Maine, which averages 12%. Germany's average PV capacity factor is 10%. Natural gas peakers are around 9%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor I've already thoroughly demolished this nonsense about "need to be changed often" in the case of photovoltaic panels. I don't know what wind turbine lifetimes are. Shorter, I imagine, but they still have a much higher ERoEI than PV or in fact any other power source.
    - edhelas 7y ago
      > Nuclear power plants built in the 1970’s used 40 metric tons of steel, and 190 cubic meters of concrete, for each megawatt of average capacity. > Modern wind energy systems, with good wind conditions, take 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nuclear-power.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nu... First source I found. Wind turbine lifetimes are 20 to 25 years at the best. I agree for solar panels, they don't need lots of concrete and only loose efficiency over time. But you would need lots of them + a complete power storage system behind. So the cost and material used to have a similar power output is still order of magnitude higher.
belorn 7y ago
> We can use any and all power sources that are clean. I would prefer if we did not use use any power source that is dirty. It might sound similar but the outcome is very different. A ban against fossil fuels would prevent countries from relying on fossil fuels for base load when wind or solar can't fulfill demand.
marcosdumay 7y ago
> We do not have to limit ourselves to just one source. Well, as long as it is no coal or nuclear, no, we don't. But those two do not like to share capacity, so as much as you have them, you better use them. > Blocking nuclear in favor of some sort of pie in the sky global power network... The natural state of nuclear is blocked. It's not in favor of a renewable network, it simply is. Maybe it would be better if it wasn't, but that's not reality.

Scea91 7y ago

I completely agree with you. My argument was not against solar. It was against ‘solar only’. Of course, there are other renewables and if some country has an option to use solar + hydro then they do not need nuclear. But not everyone has that option. Disclaimer: I am a layman in this topic and not energetics expert, this is my understanding of the state but please feel free to correct me.

rob74 7y ago

> We can use any and all power sources that are clean. I completely agree with you on that. Of course, the disagreement hinges on whether you can consider nuclear power "clean"...

acidburnNSA 7y ago
There's enough data today to show that it absolutely is. No air pollution, very little CO2, almost no deaths/TWh compared to other sources. Accidents have been bad but recall that fossil while operating normally kills 3.8 million/year and causes climate change. In comparison to that nuclear is absolutely pristene. Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up kills a few thousand people per year.
- bildung 7y ago
  > Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up Often repeated, but still wrong: Germany also phased out coal.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    "Is in the process of phasing out", maybe, but it's absolutely not phased out yet. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Incorrect. Here's some live data for you to gander at: https://www.electricitymap.org https://www.electricitymap.org They still run over 40 GW of coal.
    - bildung 7y ago
      Yeah, sorry, native German speaker here, I got the tense wrong. Germany is in the process of phasing out coal, just as with nuclear. https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-power-20190126-story.html https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-powe...
      - acidburnNSA 7y ago
        Yup. They promised to phase coal out later and phased nuclear out today. Literalling killing a few thousand per year by air pollution while they're at it. It's a great anti-scientific tragedy of our times due to fear of radiation and inability to judge actuarial statistics correctly.
        bildung 7y ago
        I'm not at all disagreeing. The coal phase-out should have happened a) before the nuclear phase-out and b) decades earlier. Processes like these tend to be pretty sluggish, the political discussions for both date back to the 1970s. Chernobyl was a big thing in German politics, and there are still some species of mushrooms that can't be eaten in the country. The actual health problems were negligible, but this isn't how politics work.
        acidburnNSA 7y ago
- Wildgoose 7y ago
  Although Germany do say they will phase out their Coal-fired power stations by 2038 - so another two decades to go. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/26/germany-agrees-to-end-reliance-on-coal-stations-by-2038 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/26/germany-agrees...
- pjc50 7y ago
  Nuclear risks tend not to be straight up death; the risk is that a Chernobyl type incident would contaminate a very large area of farmland with bioaccumulative fission products, eg. Cesium-137: https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c06.html https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c06.html The risk can't be measured in "lives per year" because for most years it will be zero. The "long tail event" is something like: each reactor has a 1/10,000 lifetime chance of an incident of releasing cs137 which will contaminate a random area of Europe in which agriculture becomes uneconomic to make safe. It's a probabilistic judgement of the type that we're very bad at dealing with.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    The numbers I'm using incorporate the UN UNSCEARs estimate of long term cancers due to Chernobyl. These are factored in. In fact, building a straight-up Chernobyl reactor that runs for 5 years and then explodes is still safer than running a regular old coal plant for 5 years. Fossil is that bad.
    - kragen 7y ago
      The concern about farmland contamination is not because people are farming around Pripyat and getting cancer. On the contrary, it's because people are not farming around Pripyat. Deaths per terajoule doesn't factor in the loss of the farmland. I think you're probably right that, even with frequent meltdowns, nuclear power would be less bad than coal. But I also think that we don't have a large enough number of disasters to extrapolate reliably. A hundred Chernobyls might produce much more than a hundred times the deaths from one Chernobyl — or much less.
      - acidburnNSA 7y ago
        Well we just had a triple-meltdown at Fukushima where the plants actually had containment domes. Estimated deaths from radiation integrated over all time? Up to 1. The difference between nuclear's safety and fossil fuels anti-safety is astounding. They are not even remotely comparable. 4 million deaths per year from fossil, year after year. Up to 4000 total deaths across the decades from nuclear. Fossil fuels are causing over 2 long-term cancer-included Chernobyls per day every single day right now. This is an important point that's hard to get through to people.
edhelas 7y ago
Are solar panel and wind turbines clean ? They need to be changed often, they use lots of concrete (especially for wind turbines), they need lots of materials and have a quite low power factor (10-20%).
- kragen 7y ago
  > They need to be changed often, they use lots of concrete (especially for wind turbines), they need lots of materials and have a quite low power factor (10-20%). How many tonnes of concrete per megawatt do wind turbines use, and how many do nuclear power plants use? Solar plants used to use a lot of concrete, but they no longer do. "Power factor" is an attribute of electrical loads, not electrical generating equipment; it describes how far the load's current consumption deviates from the perfect in-phase sine wave of, say, a resistor. Perhaps you meant "capacity factor", the ratio of average power produced to peak power produced. Typical capacity factors for wind turbines are in the vicinity of 35%, although some offshore wind farms reach 60%. Photovoltaic plants typically have a capacity factor of around 25%, though in sunny places like Arizona and California it can exceed 30%. In the US, the lowest PV capacity factors are in Maine, which averages 12%. Germany's average PV capacity factor is 10%. Natural gas peakers are around 9%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor I've already thoroughly demolished this nonsense about "need to be changed often" in the case of photovoltaic panels. I don't know what wind turbine lifetimes are. Shorter, I imagine, but they still have a much higher ERoEI than PV or in fact any other power source.
  - edhelas 7y ago
    > Nuclear power plants built in the 1970’s used 40 metric tons of steel, and 190 cubic meters of concrete, for each megawatt of average capacity. > Modern wind energy systems, with good wind conditions, take 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nuclear-power.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nu... First source I found. Wind turbine lifetimes are 20 to 25 years at the best. I agree for solar panels, they don't need lots of concrete and only loose efficiency over time. But you would need lots of them + a complete power storage system behind. So the cost and material used to have a similar power output is still order of magnitude higher.

belorn 7y ago

> We can use any and all power sources that are clean. I would prefer if we did not use use any power source that is dirty. It might sound similar but the outcome is very different. A ban against fossil fuels would prevent countries from relying on fossil fuels for base load when wind or solar can't fulfill demand.

marcosdumay 7y ago

> We do not have to limit ourselves to just one source. Well, as long as it is no coal or nuclear, no, we don't. But those two do not like to share capacity, so as much as you have them, you better use them. > Blocking nuclear in favor of some sort of pie in the sky global power network... The natural state of nuclear is blocked. It's not in favor of a renewable network, it simply is. Maybe it would be better if it wasn't, but that's not reality.