10 ms·

I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy sourc

by DasIch 14y ago

I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative. It's better to work on the problem now, developing knowledge that helps our economy and makes us a worldwide leader than holding it off unless we are near collapse due to oil prices or worse have to engage in a war about resources, especially since the latter is something Germany must not engage in.

lmm 14y ago
>I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative. There's one obvious alternative: Build and run nuclear power plants. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries, and the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables.
- skore 14y ago
  > We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries That's incredibly short sighted. And not just the measure of 'centuries' (even if that were true, it's still arguably just postpone the problem). Energy demand is going up, sharply, as more countries join our standard of living. We will, definitely, need technologies that are as clean as possible to meet the demand, eventually. No amount of pollution that is avoidable is acceptable at the scale we are going to witness. Which brings us to > the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables I've stopped buying this argument and I'm sick of seeing it again and again - it's complete and utter Bullshit. The only way we have come up in terms of "dealing" with the highly toxic waste that nuclear energy produces (letting alone the often brushed over but equally horrifying ecological cost of mining the fuel) is to store it away "somewhere". The kicker is: We have not figured out that "somewhere". In Germany, there is exactly one site that is being developed for this. We literally ship the containers there and they sit in a holding facility above the salt mine because we have not even figured out how to get the fuel from the shipment containers into the storage containers. Oh, and the storage containers haven't been fully developed either. This is a catastrophe just waiting to happen. Years and years of politics playing nice with (and pushing money into) the nuclear industry have produced no results that a reasonable person could support. What the government had done was basically doubling down on what is often - in this thread as well - requested: To let the market figure it out. Oh they have figured it out alright. Just not the part about it also being reasonable. Or even sane. And this is only for the waste that was produced so far. The technology and storage capacity for centuries of waste simply doesn't exist. At all. Story time: They actually did have the "solving" of this in mostly private hands for a long time - a semi-government agency (under strong, yet curiously absent oversight) conducted "experiments" on how to store the waste in a different salt mine [1]. They "experimented" with things like whether they roll or "throw down" barrels into caves. When they "noticed" that they had a problem with huge amounts of radioactive water rising up everywhere, they "solved" it by pumping it down into a deeper cavity. That whole agency was abolished and replaced and put under proper (and horrified) oversight when the extent of the disaster came to light in a huge scandal. They have been "working on" trying to clean up this mess since nineteen frigging ninety five. They haven't even figured out how to drill into the closed off cavities to get the improperly stored fuel out of there, for crying out loud! All while cancer rates are going off around the site. So yeah, great environmental impact. Go sell your snake oil somewhere else. Very few things piss me off as much as nuclear defenders selling their technology as reasonable. Zero Carbon Emissions, Woo! Give me a break. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II - the German version is a lot more in-depth: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse - the English version seems to brush over much of the issues.
  - mbq 14y ago
    The nuclear plants are not the only source of highly toxic nuclear waste -- medicine, science and industry have also a fine share, and they are often dealing with much more dangerous isotopes that are in the nuclear waste. The storage problem comes fact any attempt of reason immediately sinks in an overall panic; and the by-design scaleable long-run solution is pretty simple -- to put them from where we have mined them. Oklo reactors proved such storage can last billions of years.
    - skore 14y ago
      Absolutely agreed - but we can "solve" energy differently. Not so much for other applications. So nuclear waste in energy is completely avoidable. Not sure I understand your second paragraph.
      - ars 14y ago
        > but we can "solve" energy differently Really? How? Just about every other technology is net negative on energy, so how do you plan to solve energy?
        skore 14y ago
        Oh, ok then. I thought this was a business discussion - cost input vs. benefit output. Instead, it seems like we're arguing for what would give us the perfect energy perpetuum mobile.
        ars 14y ago
        > I thought this was a business discussion - cost input vs. benefit output It's not. It's a physics discussion: Energy produced vs pollution created.
        skore 14y ago
        Hmm, this is slowly turning into word-twisting. Obviously, "pollution created" is a negative benefit output and "energy produced" is a positive one. I guess the actual problem in our discussion is that you have a profoundly different understanding of pollution since my cutoff is pretty much at "any nuclear waste".
- DasIch 14y ago
  Nuclear technology is extremely risky and prohibitively expensive even if we ignore the cost of accidents and waste disposal covered largely by governments because not a single company controlled by sane people would ever build a nuclear power plant otherwise. That being said it is not at all clear whether there is enough uranium for a couple or even one century, especially given the massive increase in demand that we will see in the next couple of years. Even if we assume it is cheap and will last for centuries it is still not a long term solution, which is what Germany is aiming for.
  - andreasvc 14y ago
    Fortunately other nuclear fuels exists, such as Thorium. They are also less dangerous and more plentiful, therefore we should invest in them. You shouldn't equate nuclear technology with the kind of fission reactors that were developed during the cold war with the twin goal of generating energy and supplying material for nuclear bombs.
ars 14y ago
> I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand It's not that complicated. Making a solar panel costs more energy than it produces for decades. So all Germany is doing is making China foot the CO2 bill. China makes the solar panel with all the associated CO2 costs, Germany installs it and claims no CO2. Globally they are doing nothing useful, except maybe pushing the costs down. I especially find shutting down the nuclear plants stupid. The one and only technology that actually would work, and they are spurning it.
- skore 14y ago
  That's false on a number of levels. A) It's not just solar. B) A lot of the manufacturing actually happens in Germany. It's just that recently, China is spinning up the competition. Market at work. C) "costs more energy than it produces for decades". Even if that were true, it would still be a better deal. You provide no source for proof because there is none - Particularly considering technological progress, this will soon be even more laughable. D) It's not about frigging CO2. That's part of the deal, but reducing it to that is dangerously close to obfuscation. E) "except maybe pushing the cost down" - there is a gold mine of discovery and realization being brushed away with crushing ignorance there. "pushing the cost down" is quite the magic thing in the history of mankind, you know? F) "The one and only technology" - Yeah right. Tell you what, there is an article linked at the top which talks about the actual, one and only technology. It's already working and being implemented.
  - ars 14y ago
    A: Yes, and wind. Wind has a reasonably good energy ROI, but it's not possible to collect enough energy from it without covering the country in turbines, and people don't want that. Offshore is interesting, but the costs (financial and energy invested in building them) are much higher. B: Market at work, sure, but the end result is the same: They are claiming low CO2 by simply sending the CO2 to China. C: It is true - look it up if you like. It takes about 20 years to return the energy (forget about the money). And when you have: "the skies are often gray and his roofs aren't all optimally oriented" then those solar cells will never return their energy investment (they will degrade before they are able to do that). Germany is spending money to increase CO2 emissions - brilliant plan: waste money, increase CO2. > Particularly considering technological progress, this will soon be even more laughable. You make me laugh. People have been researching solar for decades, and it's always: "soon". I've seen those graphs on how the cost of hydrocarbon fuel is going up, and eventually will go higher than the cost of solar. I'm sure you've seen them too. Looks great right? You know what they forget? The biggest expense in making solar cells is energy - that exact same hydrocarbon energy who's price increase is being celebrated. When that price goes up the cost of making a solar cell also goes up. D: Maybe, but that's how it's being sold. And it doesn't help that most renewables are net negative on energy. E: The research on solar is basically finished. You can't gain any more energy from it that is already being done. The only thing left is reducing the cost. Those super special solar cells that you read about? They use hard to find elements, and we simply don't have enough of those elements on earth to create enough solar cells! Crushing ignorance indeed - you know nothing about me, or how much I know about the field of solar. I know nothing about you either, but you certainly don't sound like you know much about it except for the breathless prognostications from science rags. Photovoltaic: It's dead. It's pointless, it takes more energy to make them than they produce for a huge time. Solar thermal? Now we are talking, but no one hardly builds them since you need HUGE areas (instead of small incremental installations). You also need an excellent power grid, (but that could be done). F: No it's not working, it's just costing them money, and increasing CO2 emissions for the rest of the world. Nuclear is it - everything else is just little "feel good" incremental bits. Maybe solar thermal.
kokey 14y ago
I think you touch on a rather important point. Germany has to make these technologies work, because the alternative is having to rely on gas from Poland and Russia and nuclear energy from France, oil also from Russia and coal from somewhere not nice either. I'm not a big fan in government spending on less efficient technologies, except that in this case I believe the wars and uncomfortable partnerships that can be avoided this way will make it pay for itself.

by DasIch 14y ago

lmm 14y ago

>I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative. There's one obvious alternative: Build and run nuclear power plants. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries, and the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables.

skore 14y ago
> We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries That's incredibly short sighted. And not just the measure of 'centuries' (even if that were true, it's still arguably just postpone the problem). Energy demand is going up, sharply, as more countries join our standard of living. We will, definitely, need technologies that are as clean as possible to meet the demand, eventually. No amount of pollution that is avoidable is acceptable at the scale we are going to witness. Which brings us to > the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables I've stopped buying this argument and I'm sick of seeing it again and again - it's complete and utter Bullshit. The only way we have come up in terms of "dealing" with the highly toxic waste that nuclear energy produces (letting alone the often brushed over but equally horrifying ecological cost of mining the fuel) is to store it away "somewhere". The kicker is: We have not figured out that "somewhere". In Germany, there is exactly one site that is being developed for this. We literally ship the containers there and they sit in a holding facility above the salt mine because we have not even figured out how to get the fuel from the shipment containers into the storage containers. Oh, and the storage containers haven't been fully developed either. This is a catastrophe just waiting to happen. Years and years of politics playing nice with (and pushing money into) the nuclear industry have produced no results that a reasonable person could support. What the government had done was basically doubling down on what is often - in this thread as well - requested: To let the market figure it out. Oh they have figured it out alright. Just not the part about it also being reasonable. Or even sane. And this is only for the waste that was produced so far. The technology and storage capacity for centuries of waste simply doesn't exist. At all. Story time: They actually did have the "solving" of this in mostly private hands for a long time - a semi-government agency (under strong, yet curiously absent oversight) conducted "experiments" on how to store the waste in a different salt mine [1]. They "experimented" with things like whether they roll or "throw down" barrels into caves. When they "noticed" that they had a problem with huge amounts of radioactive water rising up everywhere, they "solved" it by pumping it down into a deeper cavity. That whole agency was abolished and replaced and put under proper (and horrified) oversight when the extent of the disaster came to light in a huge scandal. They have been "working on" trying to clean up this mess since nineteen frigging ninety five. They haven't even figured out how to drill into the closed off cavities to get the improperly stored fuel out of there, for crying out loud! All while cancer rates are going off around the site. So yeah, great environmental impact. Go sell your snake oil somewhere else. Very few things piss me off as much as nuclear defenders selling their technology as reasonable. Zero Carbon Emissions, Woo! Give me a break. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II - the German version is a lot more in-depth: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse - the English version seems to brush over much of the issues.
- mbq 14y ago
  The nuclear plants are not the only source of highly toxic nuclear waste -- medicine, science and industry have also a fine share, and they are often dealing with much more dangerous isotopes that are in the nuclear waste. The storage problem comes fact any attempt of reason immediately sinks in an overall panic; and the by-design scaleable long-run solution is pretty simple -- to put them from where we have mined them. Oklo reactors proved such storage can last billions of years.
  - skore 14y ago
    Absolutely agreed - but we can "solve" energy differently. Not so much for other applications. So nuclear waste in energy is completely avoidable. Not sure I understand your second paragraph.
    - ars 14y ago
      > but we can "solve" energy differently Really? How? Just about every other technology is net negative on energy, so how do you plan to solve energy?
      - skore 14y ago
        Oh, ok then. I thought this was a business discussion - cost input vs. benefit output. Instead, it seems like we're arguing for what would give us the perfect energy perpetuum mobile.
        ars 14y ago
        > I thought this was a business discussion - cost input vs. benefit output It's not. It's a physics discussion: Energy produced vs pollution created.
        skore 14y ago
        Hmm, this is slowly turning into word-twisting. Obviously, "pollution created" is a negative benefit output and "energy produced" is a positive one. I guess the actual problem in our discussion is that you have a profoundly different understanding of pollution since my cutoff is pretty much at "any nuclear waste".
DasIch 14y ago
Nuclear technology is extremely risky and prohibitively expensive even if we ignore the cost of accidents and waste disposal covered largely by governments because not a single company controlled by sane people would ever build a nuclear power plant otherwise. That being said it is not at all clear whether there is enough uranium for a couple or even one century, especially given the massive increase in demand that we will see in the next couple of years. Even if we assume it is cheap and will last for centuries it is still not a long term solution, which is what Germany is aiming for.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  Fortunately other nuclear fuels exists, such as Thorium. They are also less dangerous and more plentiful, therefore we should invest in them. You shouldn't equate nuclear technology with the kind of fission reactors that were developed during the cold war with the twin goal of generating energy and supplying material for nuclear bombs.

ars 14y ago

> I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand It's not that complicated. Making a solar panel costs more energy than it produces for decades. So all Germany is doing is making China foot the CO2 bill. China makes the solar panel with all the associated CO2 costs, Germany installs it and claims no CO2. Globally they are doing nothing useful, except maybe pushing the costs down. I especially find shutting down the nuclear plants stupid. The one and only technology that actually would work, and they are spurning it.

skore 14y ago
That's false on a number of levels. A) It's not just solar. B) A lot of the manufacturing actually happens in Germany. It's just that recently, China is spinning up the competition. Market at work. C) "costs more energy than it produces for decades". Even if that were true, it would still be a better deal. You provide no source for proof because there is none - Particularly considering technological progress, this will soon be even more laughable. D) It's not about frigging CO2. That's part of the deal, but reducing it to that is dangerously close to obfuscation. E) "except maybe pushing the cost down" - there is a gold mine of discovery and realization being brushed away with crushing ignorance there. "pushing the cost down" is quite the magic thing in the history of mankind, you know? F) "The one and only technology" - Yeah right. Tell you what, there is an article linked at the top which talks about the actual, one and only technology. It's already working and being implemented.
- ars 14y ago
  A: Yes, and wind. Wind has a reasonably good energy ROI, but it's not possible to collect enough energy from it without covering the country in turbines, and people don't want that. Offshore is interesting, but the costs (financial and energy invested in building them) are much higher. B: Market at work, sure, but the end result is the same: They are claiming low CO2 by simply sending the CO2 to China. C: It is true - look it up if you like. It takes about 20 years to return the energy (forget about the money). And when you have: "the skies are often gray and his roofs aren't all optimally oriented" then those solar cells will never return their energy investment (they will degrade before they are able to do that). Germany is spending money to increase CO2 emissions - brilliant plan: waste money, increase CO2. > Particularly considering technological progress, this will soon be even more laughable. You make me laugh. People have been researching solar for decades, and it's always: "soon". I've seen those graphs on how the cost of hydrocarbon fuel is going up, and eventually will go higher than the cost of solar. I'm sure you've seen them too. Looks great right? You know what they forget? The biggest expense in making solar cells is energy - that exact same hydrocarbon energy who's price increase is being celebrated. When that price goes up the cost of making a solar cell also goes up. D: Maybe, but that's how it's being sold. And it doesn't help that most renewables are net negative on energy. E: The research on solar is basically finished. You can't gain any more energy from it that is already being done. The only thing left is reducing the cost. Those super special solar cells that you read about? They use hard to find elements, and we simply don't have enough of those elements on earth to create enough solar cells! Crushing ignorance indeed - you know nothing about me, or how much I know about the field of solar. I know nothing about you either, but you certainly don't sound like you know much about it except for the breathless prognostications from science rags. Photovoltaic: It's dead. It's pointless, it takes more energy to make them than they produce for a huge time. Solar thermal? Now we are talking, but no one hardly builds them since you need HUGE areas (instead of small incremental installations). You also need an excellent power grid, (but that could be done). F: No it's not working, it's just costing them money, and increasing CO2 emissions for the rest of the world. Nuclear is it - everything else is just little "feel good" incremental bits. Maybe solar thermal.

kokey 14y ago

I think you touch on a rather important point. Germany has to make these technologies work, because the alternative is having to rely on gas from Poland and Russia and nuclear energy from France, oil also from Russia and coal from somewhere not nice either. I'm not a big fan in government spending on less efficient technologies, except that in this case I believe the wars and uncomfortable partnerships that can be avoided this way will make it pay for itself.