7 ms·

I always find that argument flawed, because we could also have started investing much earlier into renewables too. Carter installed solar panels at the white ho

by j-pb 3y ago

I always find that argument flawed, because we could also have started investing much earlier into renewables too. Carter installed solar panels at the white house, Reagan tore them down. Wind turbines today don't have that much magic sauce and could have been developed much earlier. Let's not kid ourselves, Nuclear Plants are mediocre as a carbon-fee energy source, but really great if you want a nuclear arsenal, and france wanted one.

janmalec 3y ago
I know this is the internet but you have no idea what are you talking about. Nuclear power has nothing to do with nuclear arsenal as the spent fuel from modern reactor is not viable weapons material. There are many countires that have peacefull nuclear power programmes and no nuclear weapons and there are also countries that heave nuclear weapons or even their own nuclear weapon program, but no nuclear power. France has nuclear because oil was expensive and they didn't have many other alternatives like the Germans.
- Kon5ole 3y ago
  >Nuclear power has nothing to do with nuclear arsenal That's not true. Once you have the expertise and infrastructure to handle nuclear fuel and waste you can also relatively easily reprocess the fuel to create weapon-grade material. It's certainly much harder if you start with solar panels and wind turbines! :) Likewise if you have the facilities needed to create nuclear weapons, it makes sense to make some money on the side making electricity as well.
- j-pb 3y ago
  __modern__ reactors are build to be rarely opened and burn off as much plutonium as possible. But that's obviously not how the french nuclear program started. Only doing nuclear research for military purposes is frowned upon by your neighbours and makes you look suspicous, and only having a civilian program is super complex and expensive and doesn't even make you untouchable. Luckily building the infrastructure for a nuclear arsenal goes hand in hand with building the infrastructure for civilian uses, so you have a buy one, get one free situation. >> The National Assembly approved the initial nuclear energy plan for a five-year term on July 24, 1952. The plan sought to build two experimental reactors at the Marcoule nuclear site, and construction began in 1955. Shortly thereafter, the construction of a third reactor commenced. In addition to generating electricity, these reactors would produce plutonium in sufficient quantities to support a civil advanced reactor program and potentially a military one, at a cost three times lower than highly enriched uranium.[69][70][71] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_France%27s_civil_nuclear_program#The_deployment_of_the_nuclear_program_(1952-1969) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_France%27s_civil_nu... >> In 1957 Euratom was created, and under cover of the peaceful use of nuclear power the French signed deals with West Germany and Italy to work together on nuclear weapons development.[18] The Chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer told his cabinet that he "wanted to achieve, through EURATOM, as quickly as possible, the chance of producing our own nuclear weapons". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
  - janmalec 3y ago
    I agree. Prehaps my wording that civilian use has nothing to do with military was too strong. There were other examples of civial programs in the past (like RBMK) that complemented military use very well. I'm frustrated because this argument is used to bash nuclear power, but never other energy sources. In general it helps to have developed technology and energy abundance to develop military tech and any technology can be missused. Civilian nuclear power is not needed to have a weapons programs, it can help tho.
kortilla 3y ago
Solar and wind still have no path to stability. The point is that we already had proven technology back then. Even now after massive coordinated effort on wind and solar, we have to burn gas/coal all over the place to handle generation sags at night and when the wind slows.
- cauch 3y ago
  > Solar and wind still have no path to stability. This is a surprising assertion. I keep seeing it, and each time, when I dig, it turns out it is from someone who does not really know what they are saying and fall for naive ideas such as "but we don't have energy at night and without wind", while in practice, dunkelflaute appear to be as rare as unexpected shutdown of a nuclear plant anyway. I'm working in the energy sector and I see that solar and wind are considered as a very valid solution. They have disadvantages, but in practice, it's far from being the end of the world, it just makes thing more complicated, but not more than all the other complications that exist for any other sources. Maybe I'm in a bubble, so it would be great if you can show that what you say is not coming from someone who has no idea.
  - palata 3y ago
    > I'm working in the energy sector and I see that solar and wind are considered as a very valid solution. I would assume that people working in solar and wind believe in it... could it be a bubble? Jean-Marc Jancovici has really great insights about that. I would recommend looking at them, that's very interesting!
    - cauch 3y ago
      I'm not working in solar and wind. Some of my colleagues are writing reports that recommend more nuclear in some cases, and less nuclear in other cases (I say "some of my colleagues" because I'm not personally working on generation, even if I sometimes peer-review their work). It is very telling that your first thoughts was "if someone says that in the sector, it's not what they say, then, surely this person is wrong somehow". It shows the level of bias. As for Jancovici, I find him very disappointing on solar. In one hand, he says very interesting things on economics and history. On the other hand, my colleagues and I are just looking each other with total surprise when he talk about solar: it looks like he never worked on the subject (but he did). In fact, few decades ago, he was saying that solar has no future, with predictions that are factually BS, proven by the fact that what he predicted never happened (and not because of a fluke, just because it was unrealistic). It feels like he chose a side and got emotionally invested in it, and now he just denies the reality. He may have been confronted to intellectually dishonest people, and now each time there is just neutral facts, he may be systematically concluding that it is impossible for it to not be something from intellectually dishonest people. It's a bit sad, I'm not sure if he is doing more good than bad: he is informing people on some aspect, but he is also spreading a lot of harmful stereotype (for example, in some places, solar is really an essential element for decarbonisation, there is just no other way that is not mathematically absurd, but these conclusions are labelled "ideological" by people having done zero study, "because Jancovici said that only ideological people promotes solar"). Just to be clear: my colleagues and I are paid the same (or even more if we have to be paid again for another study when they choose a bad option), but I just feel it's not good for society that there is so little rationality.
pfdietz 3y ago
Carter installed solar thermal collectors for heating water, not PV. They were torn down because solar thermal hot water kind of sucks. You don't see it much these days.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  Solar thermal is used successfully all over the world (though more away from the poles). It's beginning to be eclipsed by solar PV now but that's 4 decades of carbon and pollution free heat it has provided on a massive scale.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    I understand in the US it's cheaper to put up PV and drive a heat pump water heater with it.
rayiner 3y ago
> I always find that argument flawed, because we could also have started investing much earlier into renewables too. Nuclear power was “shovel ready” by 1960. The unpredictable fundamental research was done and the “investment” that remained was to build power plants. The majority of France’s power was nuclear by the 1980s. Solar was not shovel ready in 1960. Perovskite solar cells were invented in 2009. The battery technology necessary to support grid-scale solar also wasn’t close to commercialization. By the time the first commercial lithium ion batteries were demonstrated in the late 1980s, France already had a majority renewable grid based on nuclear. The utility of nuclear for weapons is a plus, not a minus. That meant a lot of the fundamental research in nuclear had already been done and paid for by militaries. If clean energy was the goal, it was a no-brainer to leverage that work that had been doing and was going to be done anyway. But the environmental movement has always been unfortunately susceptible to being hijacked by other liberal causes.
- dctoedt 3y ago
  > Nuclear power was “shovel ready” by 1960. The unpredictable fundamental research was done and the “investment” that remained was to build power plants. Shovel-ready, perhaps. But consistent-safe-operation-ready? Highly debatable. (Source: In the 1970s I was a Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified among other things as [chief] engineer officer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise during three years of sea duty there. I became convinced that the then-existing pressurized-water-reactor designs simply weren't safe around populated areas because of the possibility of cascading human error — see, e.g., Three Mile Island and Chernobyl — and the potentially-catastrophic nature of a black-swan event. Relatedly, I'll be interested to see what the cause of the loss-of-power accident was aboard the container ship that dropped the bridge in Baltimore.)
  - rayiner 3y ago
    We know it’s safe enough because France has had a majority nuclear grid since the 1980s, and they’re not dead. They have reactors built in the 1960s that are still running. To my knowledge, the US Navy has never had a major nuclear meltdown either. Undoubtedly there would be deaths from accidents. But people die. Way more people were killed by the tsunami that caused the Fukushima meltdown than by the nuclear accident. Every few decades the US will see an influenza-type event that kills 100,000+ people. Nuclear wouldn’t come close to that.

by j-pb 3y ago

janmalec 3y ago

I know this is the internet but you have no idea what are you talking about. Nuclear power has nothing to do with nuclear arsenal as the spent fuel from modern reactor is not viable weapons material. There are many countires that have peacefull nuclear power programmes and no nuclear weapons and there are also countries that heave nuclear weapons or even their own nuclear weapon program, but no nuclear power. France has nuclear because oil was expensive and they didn't have many other alternatives like the Germans.

Kon5ole 3y ago
>Nuclear power has nothing to do with nuclear arsenal That's not true. Once you have the expertise and infrastructure to handle nuclear fuel and waste you can also relatively easily reprocess the fuel to create weapon-grade material. It's certainly much harder if you start with solar panels and wind turbines! :) Likewise if you have the facilities needed to create nuclear weapons, it makes sense to make some money on the side making electricity as well.
j-pb 3y ago
__modern__ reactors are build to be rarely opened and burn off as much plutonium as possible. But that's obviously not how the french nuclear program started. Only doing nuclear research for military purposes is frowned upon by your neighbours and makes you look suspicous, and only having a civilian program is super complex and expensive and doesn't even make you untouchable. Luckily building the infrastructure for a nuclear arsenal goes hand in hand with building the infrastructure for civilian uses, so you have a buy one, get one free situation. >> The National Assembly approved the initial nuclear energy plan for a five-year term on July 24, 1952. The plan sought to build two experimental reactors at the Marcoule nuclear site, and construction began in 1955. Shortly thereafter, the construction of a third reactor commenced. In addition to generating electricity, these reactors would produce plutonium in sufficient quantities to support a civil advanced reactor program and potentially a military one, at a cost three times lower than highly enriched uranium.[69][70][71] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_France%27s_civil_nuclear_program#The_deployment_of_the_nuclear_program_(1952-1969) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_France%27s_civil_nu... >> In 1957 Euratom was created, and under cover of the peaceful use of nuclear power the French signed deals with West Germany and Italy to work together on nuclear weapons development.[18] The Chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer told his cabinet that he "wanted to achieve, through EURATOM, as quickly as possible, the chance of producing our own nuclear weapons". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
- janmalec 3y ago
  I agree. Prehaps my wording that civilian use has nothing to do with military was too strong. There were other examples of civial programs in the past (like RBMK) that complemented military use very well. I'm frustrated because this argument is used to bash nuclear power, but never other energy sources. In general it helps to have developed technology and energy abundance to develop military tech and any technology can be missused. Civilian nuclear power is not needed to have a weapons programs, it can help tho.

kortilla 3y ago

Solar and wind still have no path to stability. The point is that we already had proven technology back then. Even now after massive coordinated effort on wind and solar, we have to burn gas/coal all over the place to handle generation sags at night and when the wind slows.

cauch 3y ago
> Solar and wind still have no path to stability. This is a surprising assertion. I keep seeing it, and each time, when I dig, it turns out it is from someone who does not really know what they are saying and fall for naive ideas such as "but we don't have energy at night and without wind", while in practice, dunkelflaute appear to be as rare as unexpected shutdown of a nuclear plant anyway. I'm working in the energy sector and I see that solar and wind are considered as a very valid solution. They have disadvantages, but in practice, it's far from being the end of the world, it just makes thing more complicated, but not more than all the other complications that exist for any other sources. Maybe I'm in a bubble, so it would be great if you can show that what you say is not coming from someone who has no idea.
- palata 3y ago
  > I'm working in the energy sector and I see that solar and wind are considered as a very valid solution. I would assume that people working in solar and wind believe in it... could it be a bubble? Jean-Marc Jancovici has really great insights about that. I would recommend looking at them, that's very interesting!
  - cauch 3y ago
    I'm not working in solar and wind. Some of my colleagues are writing reports that recommend more nuclear in some cases, and less nuclear in other cases (I say "some of my colleagues" because I'm not personally working on generation, even if I sometimes peer-review their work). It is very telling that your first thoughts was "if someone says that in the sector, it's not what they say, then, surely this person is wrong somehow". It shows the level of bias. As for Jancovici, I find him very disappointing on solar. In one hand, he says very interesting things on economics and history. On the other hand, my colleagues and I are just looking each other with total surprise when he talk about solar: it looks like he never worked on the subject (but he did). In fact, few decades ago, he was saying that solar has no future, with predictions that are factually BS, proven by the fact that what he predicted never happened (and not because of a fluke, just because it was unrealistic). It feels like he chose a side and got emotionally invested in it, and now he just denies the reality. He may have been confronted to intellectually dishonest people, and now each time there is just neutral facts, he may be systematically concluding that it is impossible for it to not be something from intellectually dishonest people. It's a bit sad, I'm not sure if he is doing more good than bad: he is informing people on some aspect, but he is also spreading a lot of harmful stereotype (for example, in some places, solar is really an essential element for decarbonisation, there is just no other way that is not mathematically absurd, but these conclusions are labelled "ideological" by people having done zero study, "because Jancovici said that only ideological people promotes solar"). Just to be clear: my colleagues and I are paid the same (or even more if we have to be paid again for another study when they choose a bad option), but I just feel it's not good for society that there is so little rationality.

pfdietz 3y ago

Carter installed solar thermal collectors for heating water, not PV. They were torn down because solar thermal hot water kind of sucks. You don't see it much these days.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago
Solar thermal is used successfully all over the world (though more away from the poles). It's beginning to be eclipsed by solar PV now but that's 4 decades of carbon and pollution free heat it has provided on a massive scale.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  I understand in the US it's cheaper to put up PV and drive a heat pump water heater with it.

rayiner 3y ago

> I always find that argument flawed, because we could also have started investing much earlier into renewables too. Nuclear power was “shovel ready” by 1960. The unpredictable fundamental research was done and the “investment” that remained was to build power plants. The majority of France’s power was nuclear by the 1980s. Solar was not shovel ready in 1960. Perovskite solar cells were invented in 2009. The battery technology necessary to support grid-scale solar also wasn’t close to commercialization. By the time the first commercial lithium ion batteries were demonstrated in the late 1980s, France already had a majority renewable grid based on nuclear. The utility of nuclear for weapons is a plus, not a minus. That meant a lot of the fundamental research in nuclear had already been done and paid for by militaries. If clean energy was the goal, it was a no-brainer to leverage that work that had been doing and was going to be done anyway. But the environmental movement has always been unfortunately susceptible to being hijacked by other liberal causes.

dctoedt 3y ago
> Nuclear power was “shovel ready” by 1960. The unpredictable fundamental research was done and the “investment” that remained was to build power plants. Shovel-ready, perhaps. But consistent-safe-operation-ready? Highly debatable. (Source: In the 1970s I was a Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified among other things as [chief] engineer officer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise during three years of sea duty there. I became convinced that the then-existing pressurized-water-reactor designs simply weren't safe around populated areas because of the possibility of cascading human error — see, e.g., Three Mile Island and Chernobyl — and the potentially-catastrophic nature of a black-swan event. Relatedly, I'll be interested to see what the cause of the loss-of-power accident was aboard the container ship that dropped the bridge in Baltimore.)
- rayiner 3y ago
  We know it’s safe enough because France has had a majority nuclear grid since the 1980s, and they’re not dead. They have reactors built in the 1960s that are still running. To my knowledge, the US Navy has never had a major nuclear meltdown either. Undoubtedly there would be deaths from accidents. But people die. Way more people were killed by the tsunami that caused the Fukushima meltdown than by the nuclear accident. Every few decades the US will see an influenza-type event that kills 100,000+ people. Nuclear wouldn’t come close to that.