9 ms·

> Nuclear is clearly green. We should repaint radiation warnings in green, to indicate that. > Gas is more interesting. At 500g/kwh it's on higher side normal

by drran 5y ago

> Nuclear is clearly green. We should repaint radiation warnings in green, to indicate that. > Gas is more interesting. At 500g/kwh it's on higher side normally. So there must be more to this. Nord Stream 2.

jevoten 5y ago
How about instead of "radiation bad", we look at more objective metrics, like deaths/CO2 per kWh: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy And instead of comparing nuclear to a magical zero-pollution/emission, flawlessly safe, always-available power source, we should compare it to what it actually gets replaced with.
- dathinab 5y ago
  Or read the article and see that most gas plants will not be labeled as green. Still a bad choice.
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  Renewables are what you should compare nuclear with. And by your own stats they win even there. Framing it as a contest versus fossil fuels is building a strawman nowadays.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    Go on, then, compare away. Both in terms of deaths/kWh and CO2/kWh, nuclear is equivalent or better than most renewable you could name. There are arguments against nuclear, but these aren’t them.
    - Gwypaas 5y ago
      Yep. So close you can call it equal, unless future deaths from groundwater pollution where to happen from leakage. So lets discount that and focus on the side which allocates capital and brings projects to completion. The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH.
      - kergonath 5y ago
        > unless future deaths from groundwater pollution where to happen Surely you have a risk assessment for this, or can point to holes in the existing ones? No industry is clean by definition and at the moment both wind turbines and solar panels depend on local industry in China, which is quite bad even by European standards and also runs on coal. And then there is the insanity of cutting down forests to put solar panels. > The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH. They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage. But that’s not really relevant as I am not arguing against renewables. Both renewables and nuclear have different profiles, different advantages, and different use cases. And a combination is much cheaper than using only either. The thing is, though, that by saying that nuclear is as bad as fossil fuels, we contribute to expanding our use of fossil fuels in the future, which is orders of magnitude worse than all the nuclear accidents that ever happened or are likely to happen. There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity.
        tcfhgj 5y ago
        > There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity. It can be as long as this plan is not realized: gas is good for storing renewable energy over longer periods of time. Germany needs some way of compensating fluctuations of renewables over longer periods of times
        drran 5y ago
        > They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage. Hey, nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by government, and it badly needs batteries for storage too. For example, insurance for nuclear stations is provided by government for free, because its price is sky-high. If we include cost of insurance into the price of nuclear energy, its price will be too high for economy. Nuclear can support base load only. For day-to-day management, a hydro, gas, coal, or batteries are necessary. Nuclear is not an option to reduce CO2 emissions substantially without hydro or batteries. We use nuclear power for decades already.
  - jevoten 5y ago
    And yet fossil fuels are still funded, and even subsidized, instead of nuclear. By all means try and get 100% of power from wind and solar, but we're not there yet. And until we are, and they can provide the required baseload power, it's not a strawman at all.
    - Gwypaas 5y ago
      Yes, fossil funding and subsidies should have been removed some 30 years ago. At least. Can't argue with that. Baseload as a term does not exist on the producer side. Simply by chance the cheapest sources of energy were the most inflexible ones. This is coal and nuclear, they therefore got coined as "baseload" power generation. Today they aren't cheapest anymore and unsurprisingly suffer. On the other hand, a base demand exist on the consumer side, that is true. But due to electricity being electricity it does not matter how it's met. Nuclear doesn't produce any other better kind of electricity. That's the gear strength of it, it is fungible.
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        Electricity transmission is costly, and that's assuming there's the infrastructure in place to do it, which, more often than not, is not the case. This idea that electricity exists as a fungible resource on a global market is totally false. In practice, switching too quickly to reliance on renewables has resulted in poor people seeing their electricity bills skyrocket and greater demand on coal plants when renewables fall short and nuclear plants are no longer running to provide base power.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  If you include the deaths that nuclear waste will cause during the tens of thousands of years it remains radioactive it wouldn't be so positive. But of course we can't look into the future. But we do know safe storage for such durations is not yet figured out. It's externalising the problem to the future. Just like CO2, but on a much longer timeframe. Still not very ethical though IMO.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Given that we have maybe 10 years at best to make sure there will still be livable conditions for humans on most of the world's land area 100 years from now, worrying about radiation that could kill people thousands of years from now is simply absurd.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      What led us to climate change is going for short-term benefit and leaving the problems to the future. We shouldn't repeat that mistake even though we'll be long gone by the time the problems come to light. And really we're already too late to prevent most of climate change. Especially because we won't replace fossil with nuclear in 10 years time.
      - heartbeats 5y ago
        > What led us to climate change is going for short-term benefit and leaving the problems to the future. We shouldn't repeat that mistake even though we'll be long gone by the time the problems come to light. That's how anything works, though. You replace the giant bleeding wound with a bandaid, and then you take it off and there's a scab, and then the scab goes away and you have a scar. It's always about replacing something with a lesser problem. For the past few years people have been trying to replace fossils with imaginary clean power, and it hasn't exactly gone great.
  - warble 5y ago
    Nuclear is on par with solar as far as safety. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

by drran 5y ago

jevoten 5y ago

How about instead of "radiation bad", we look at more objective metrics, like deaths/CO2 per kWh: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy And instead of comparing nuclear to a magical zero-pollution/emission, flawlessly safe, always-available power source, we should compare it to what it actually gets replaced with.

dathinab 5y ago
Or read the article and see that most gas plants will not be labeled as green. Still a bad choice.
Gwypaas 5y ago
Renewables are what you should compare nuclear with. And by your own stats they win even there. Framing it as a contest versus fossil fuels is building a strawman nowadays.
- kergonath 5y ago
  Go on, then, compare away. Both in terms of deaths/kWh and CO2/kWh, nuclear is equivalent or better than most renewable you could name. There are arguments against nuclear, but these aren’t them.
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    Yep. So close you can call it equal, unless future deaths from groundwater pollution where to happen from leakage. So lets discount that and focus on the side which allocates capital and brings projects to completion. The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      > unless future deaths from groundwater pollution where to happen Surely you have a risk assessment for this, or can point to holes in the existing ones? No industry is clean by definition and at the moment both wind turbines and solar panels depend on local industry in China, which is quite bad even by European standards and also runs on coal. And then there is the insanity of cutting down forests to put solar panels. > The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH. They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage. But that’s not really relevant as I am not arguing against renewables. Both renewables and nuclear have different profiles, different advantages, and different use cases. And a combination is much cheaper than using only either. The thing is, though, that by saying that nuclear is as bad as fossil fuels, we contribute to expanding our use of fossil fuels in the future, which is orders of magnitude worse than all the nuclear accidents that ever happened or are likely to happen. There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity.
      - tcfhgj 5y ago
        > There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity. It can be as long as this plan is not realized: gas is good for storing renewable energy over longer periods of time. Germany needs some way of compensating fluctuations of renewables over longer periods of times
      - drran 5y ago
        > They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage. Hey, nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by government, and it badly needs batteries for storage too. For example, insurance for nuclear stations is provided by government for free, because its price is sky-high. If we include cost of insurance into the price of nuclear energy, its price will be too high for economy. Nuclear can support base load only. For day-to-day management, a hydro, gas, coal, or batteries are necessary. Nuclear is not an option to reduce CO2 emissions substantially without hydro or batteries. We use nuclear power for decades already.
- jevoten 5y ago
  And yet fossil fuels are still funded, and even subsidized, instead of nuclear. By all means try and get 100% of power from wind and solar, but we're not there yet. And until we are, and they can provide the required baseload power, it's not a strawman at all.
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    Yes, fossil funding and subsidies should have been removed some 30 years ago. At least. Can't argue with that. Baseload as a term does not exist on the producer side. Simply by chance the cheapest sources of energy were the most inflexible ones. This is coal and nuclear, they therefore got coined as "baseload" power generation. Today they aren't cheapest anymore and unsurprisingly suffer. On the other hand, a base demand exist on the consumer side, that is true. But due to electricity being electricity it does not matter how it's met. Nuclear doesn't produce any other better kind of electricity. That's the gear strength of it, it is fungible.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      Electricity transmission is costly, and that's assuming there's the infrastructure in place to do it, which, more often than not, is not the case. This idea that electricity exists as a fungible resource on a global market is totally false. In practice, switching too quickly to reliance on renewables has resulted in poor people seeing their electricity bills skyrocket and greater demand on coal plants when renewables fall short and nuclear plants are no longer running to provide base power.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
If you include the deaths that nuclear waste will cause during the tens of thousands of years it remains radioactive it wouldn't be so positive. But of course we can't look into the future. But we do know safe storage for such durations is not yet figured out. It's externalising the problem to the future. Just like CO2, but on a much longer timeframe. Still not very ethical though IMO.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Given that we have maybe 10 years at best to make sure there will still be livable conditions for humans on most of the world's land area 100 years from now, worrying about radiation that could kill people thousands of years from now is simply absurd.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    What led us to climate change is going for short-term benefit and leaving the problems to the future. We shouldn't repeat that mistake even though we'll be long gone by the time the problems come to light. And really we're already too late to prevent most of climate change. Especially because we won't replace fossil with nuclear in 10 years time.
    - heartbeats 5y ago
      > What led us to climate change is going for short-term benefit and leaving the problems to the future. We shouldn't repeat that mistake even though we'll be long gone by the time the problems come to light. That's how anything works, though. You replace the giant bleeding wound with a bandaid, and then you take it off and there's a scab, and then the scab goes away and you have a scar. It's always about replacing something with a lesser problem. For the past few years people have been trying to replace fossils with imaginary clean power, and it hasn't exactly gone great.
- warble 5y ago
  Nuclear is on par with solar as far as safety. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy