Probably plagiarized at least half of the statement. This lady is a caustic influence in the unity of the EU and frequently abuses her power to overreach beyond the mandate of her office. Worse still, her only claim to fame was being Merkel’s bestie in the sausage fest that was the CDU in Merkel’s days and the french found her so useless that she was accepted as a compromise solution. If we don’t reform our political establishment we’re doomed to be ruled by idiots who failed upwards.
Except that it wasn’t according to people actually invested in researching energy matters.
The strategic mistake was and still is, when her party throttles solar and wind in favor for fossils (on a national level) or when they hinder transitioning to EVs.
They’re sabotaging decentralization and renewables wherever possible and make up stories about sunsetted (nuclear) or future (fusion) technologies.
And sleeping on battery technology.
I’d say both are mistakes. Nuclear has a long-term implementation process due to how long it takes to build. Of course solar and wind (and other clean technologies that we’re not even aware of yet) will be the future but there are times where those technologies fall short (cloudy day, no wind). That’s where nuclear could be a base-line option to help us until we find a permanent solution. I know it comes with it’s own challenges but it’s still infinitely cleaner than coal or anything like that.
Of course fusion looks really promising but that technology still needs a lot of time in the oven before it will be usable on a large scale. Nuclear has been proven to work.
Except that nuclear cannot be throttled and is no base line option.
Wind, solar, batteries and gas play well together in central Europe. Other countries have other resources, like water.
In addition hydrogen is complementary for heavy industries and can be produced when all batteries are filled up.
Nuclear can be throttled, we do it all the time.
In electricity generation, it typically can’t be throttled reasonably in a way that allows quick reaction to changing demand. Most reactors’ power output is regulated by changing the chemistry of the coolant, which can only be done gradually, Using quicker control rods for everyday power adjustment rather than only for shutdown and startup, is avoided to avoid uneven, and therefore inefficient fuel burn. While it could be done, it would make nuclear power even more uneconomical than it already is by forcing more frequent shutdowns for fuel changes.
Nuclear load following is routinely done in France. You can see more details here: https://www.nice-future.org/docs/nicefuturelibraries/default-document-library/france.pdf
Like solar, batteries can compensate for the difference between supply and demand.
Batteries don’t scale well at all.
But only if connected to a nuclear power plant?
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that the other options are better. I’m just saying that nuclear can be a good temporary step in between to buy us time to perform the complete transition. And I get what you’re saying about hydrogen but with the issues surrounding drinking water I don’t know if we should really lean on that too much.
The core difference here is: if we speed things up we can increase wind and solar and battery storage in the blink of an eye. Take a look at China’s new capacity.
Nuclear not so much. Combined with the follow up questions of end storage or even getting the cheap uranium (Russia) there is no real reason to debate.
It’s hardly viable as a temporary step when the time to bring a new one online is 20 years. The economics are already bad today and have been trending to be worse every year, while renewables and batteries are trending in the complete opposite direction.
The time for transitionary measures has passed. Renewables and batteries are here today. All we need to do is build it.
New reactors take decades to build. We need to have energy autonomy and move towards net 0 now. We can’t wait for shiny new reactors, which will be ready in 2050, if we start planning now.
Of course fusion looks really promising
Fusion reactors have been constantly 30 years away for deacades.
All nuclear power programmes are really just a reserve of know-how, equipment and manpower to maintain the capability of keeping or developing a nuclear weapons programme. The electricity generation does work, but it really is more of a fig leaf to make the massive expenses and the inherent risks of running nuclear reactors more palatable to the general public. Of course having a relatively weather independent baseline electricity generation capability is a good thing, too, but as all thermal power stations, nuclear power stations aren’t completely weather independent either, as they do rely on large quantities of water for cooling.
Most of the comments here do not understand how democracies work. The green transition has cost Europe hundreds of billions to date in just direct subsidies and investments. Hundreds of billions more in indirect costs. Voters were told it would result in lower energy bills, but bills continue to skyrocket all over Europe. So they feel lied to now. Unless politicians make energy prices considerably cheaper, fast, voters are going to vote for cheaper production methods: gas and nuclear. Nuclear is better for the environment so it would behoove us to get ahead of this. If activists somehow prevent nations from building nuclear, the victory will be entirely pyrrhic. Voters will kill any more green transition investment and go right back to what they know is cheaper.
For posterity, with more costs imputed (volatility, futures pricing, grid restructuring, storage, etc.), LNG is much cheaper than either solar or wind. Also no particulate pollution. In fact, if we were to go 100% renewables (solar and wind) or 100% nuclear, nuclear would be 4-5 times cheaper, and LNG would be up to 14 times cheaper.
I highly doubt that anything nuclear will ever be considered cheap. On paper maybe, but then reality kicks in and projects suddenly take a decade or two longer than planned. Then we have to import fissile material, likely from Kasachstan, who have Putin’s shrivelled little dick so far down their throats. Nuclear will also never be insured. And these Microblocks everyone talks about as the next hot shit? None of those have been built yet. It’s a concept on paper.
Nah. I’m not sold on this.
Nuclear has been tripping over it’s own dick for 40 years. Solar is now the more viable option.
I disagree. Next to hydropower (which is limited by geography) it has been the champion of non-fossil electricity generation so far. Still, the fossil fuel lobby is a powerful foe.
Simply put, we should invest in all non-fossil options, and where solar is geographically viable, it is great. In other places however, where peak electricity demand coincides with the coldest, darkest parts of the year dispatchable production is strictly necessary, which is where nuclear shines.
There is also wind, which works really well in a lot of those darker / colder countries
For sure, wind is an especially good complement for hydropower, since the latter can store the surplus when it’s windy and release it when it’s not. Still, wind generation can, like other variable renewables, slip to nigh 0 production from time to time, at which point there must be enough dispatchable capacity to cover the supply/demand gap. Otherwise you get rolling blackouts in the middle of a -20°C winter. Not great.
Here’s a showcase of one such day in my country this winter. Average temps below -20°C (which means demand is very rigid due to heating needs) and the wind died down completely in the morning across all of Scandinavia & northern Germany, which meant there wasn’t room to import either. Winter prices on electricity ranged between 10-60€/MWh back when our nuclear plants were in full operation. Half have been shut down in the past decade due to political pressure from the green party.
Expand Graph
Well but what to do with the waste?
I think in general it is a good source for energy, but unless we find a solution other than storing it somewhere in the earth, we should not use it.
You build breeder reactors or use any of the non-uranium designs that were ignored by countries because they didn’t have weapons grade byproducts.
There are ways to deal with the waste, the problem is always politics/greed as it cuts into the profits. Same is true for other energy sources btw, with coal we happily shoot the waste into the atmosphere and pretend nothing’s wrong with that.
Yeah 100% agree with you.
Unfortunately it is always the issue with greed and maximise the profits.
But that’s why I don’t really believe in the usefulness of Nuclear as a energy source. The idea behind it is brilliant, but the way we use it is not. I am no expert in this field, just my personal opinion.
Isn’t it basically a non-issue?
Afaik so little of it is generated that we can comfortably store it for thousands of years.
It can also be used in manufacturing later, like in making depleted uranium APFSDS penetrators (for your mom - sorry)
Also, I believe it’s literally harmless, isn’t it? If properly sealed of course. Afaik it just produces heat for a very, very long time…
Depleted Uranium is not waste from nuclear reactors, it’s waste from nuclear fuel production through uranium enrichment. It’s very pure U238, the uranium isotope you end up with after you extract all the easily fissionable U235 from natural uranium, which is a mixture of different isotopes, with U238 being the most abundant.
A good part of the waste from reactors can’t be used for manufacturing anything useful, if it could, it would be. Nuclear fuel reprocessing does extract the materials useful for further use from spent fuel, but that’s small amounts, and creates a fair bit of extra waste itself, because the processes involve a whole lot of complicated and interesting physics and chemistry. The majority of the spent fuel assemblies (materials turned radioactive from Neutron flux, Fission products) are good for nothing (unless you want to make spicy paper weights which remotely* taste like metal) and will be anything from mildly to highly radioactive, some of them will be for tens of thousands of years.
* remotely as in “from a distance”
Might be, but I personally don’t feel comfortable it being stored. What if it leaks. Not my problem, as I will be dead by then, but still we will leave it for future generations.
I have seen the chaos building the Hinkley reactor and the costs, so my personal opinion there are cheaper ways of producing energy.
Might be, but I personally don’t feel comfortable it being stored. What if it leaks. Not my problem, as I will be dead by then, but still we will leave it for future generations.
The long term storage of the long lived highly radioactive components of spent reactor fuel is not solvable IMO, because the time needed to store until safe (tens of thousands of years) exceeds the life span of all known human civilisations and will take much longer than the age of the oldest known writing systems, so there is no known way of preserving the knowledge of a storage site and its associated dangers.
At the required time scale, even picking the medium to preserve the record on is a challenge, the only half way safe bet is carving it into granite or any similarly hard rock, but even that can erode significantly if exposed to the wrong conditions during that time frame.
Writing itself, as we know it, is only roughly 5500 years old.
One famous example of an early writing system that left extensive records are ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. After the knowledge of this writing system had been lost in the aftermath of the christianisation of the Roman empire and the resulting closure of the remaining ancient Egyptian temples, it took humanity hundreds of years to decipher them again, despite great interest and effort, and was finally only possible thanks to sheer luck: The discovery of the proverbial Rosetta Stone, which carries inscriptions of the same text in Hieroglyphs, another ancient Egyptian writing system, and ancient Greek, of which only the ancient Greek could be understood at the time.
There are many other old writing systems we have records of, but are unable to read, because nobody knows how. This is how any record of a nuclear waste dump site and its dangers will most likely eventually end up. Millennia before the waste has become harmless.
Hydropower has terrible environmental consequences. Emissions aren’t all that matters in terms of the environment.
Perfect is the worst enemy of progress. Right now the highest priority must be to get rid of the fossil fuel plants, and logistically speaking hydropower is simply the best. Mostly because of the built in function of energy storage and ability to load follow, something that the other variable renewable options entirely lack.
Another benefit of hydropower is its longevity, simplicity, and relatively low maintenance needs. There are installations still in operation which (including the generating machinery) are older than a century.
I would love to say that local consecuences are better than global ones but the “local” part may actually hide a quasi continental impact.
I live in Buenos Aires, more than 1500 km away from the big hydro power plants that lay on the parana river. Sometimes Brazil has to open or close their water gates because of droughts and the consecuences are felt here pretty hard. Waves of dead fish, invasions of sub tropical species, -3 m of water almost for a complete season, camalotes (
hyacinths? We apparently locally call camalotes to some sort of aglomeration of plants that floats down the river. They usually carry snakesunder it, or so i have been told).Nevertheless, i personally prefer hydro than oil
which is where nuclear shines.
I see what you did there.
Nuclear… what? Families? DNA? Chemistry? “Nuclear” isn’t a noun, nor “digital” or “cyber”.
We have decent universal education and literacy, let’s not imitate the functionally illiterate.
The link mentions nuclear energy.
Thank you for not letting it slide.
Can we also work on mass nouns pluralized with an S (eg e-mail), missing delimiters after sub-clauses and lists (the “American Ghost comma”), and also “please bellow find following”?
Just google where nuclear fuel comes from and then think again, spoilers it’s russia.
Just google where nuclear fuel comes from and then think again, spoilers it’s russia.
Kazakhstan: US$4.5 billion (48.8% of natural uranium exports)
Canada: $3.3 billion (35.6%)
United States: $963.2 million (10.4%)
Niger: $239.5 million (2.6%)
Ukraine: $78.3 million (0.8%)
South Africa: $58.6 million (0.63%)
France: $58.3 million (0.63%)
Russian Federation: $44.8 million (0.5%)
Germany: $4.4 million (0.05%)
Netherlands: $2.4 million (0.03%)
United Kingdom: $188,000 (0.002%)
Indonesia: $164,000 (0.002%)
Switzerland: $56,000 (0.0006%)
Israel: $44,000 (0.0005%)
Belgium: $5,000 (0.0001%)
Canada is a solid partner. Australia also produces a lot, but doesn’t export much (right now). The EU is Kazakhstan’s largest trading partner, and we have great trade relations with them.
Sourcing uranium is not now, nor will it ever be, a problem.
Dude, countries don’t matter here when the actual companies are owned by rosatom.
Rosatom controls about 14 % of global uranium mining output and they don’t hold any trade secrets on enrichment or fabrication. They are a non-issue, and if they ever became an issue, they could quickly be made a non-issue.
Canada 🇨🇦
Stop googling shit badly.
South Africa has uranium.
Look at where moth Cobolt or Lithium comes from.
There seemingly is very little to no ethical mining or rare earth metals.
Luckily sodium ion batteries are now a thing and they’re perfect for grid storage.
Uranium needs to be processed first, and the major uranium processing facilities Europe has been using are in Russia and this kind of equipment isn’t something you can quickly build yourself.
European capacities are not that small.
https://fissilematerials.org/facilities/enrichment_plants.html
And can be expanded fairly easily. America, Germany and Russia all managed this in the 40s. Could also go the liquid salt route and avoid Uranium entirely. Light water reactors kinda suck.
Our main objective should be to lower barriers for people to generate their own power. When local communities manage their own grids they have faster response times to blackouts or climate events.
As with everything, politicians are at least 15 years too late in their thinking.
No shit you monster.
- shutting down safe (in Germany) nuclear power plants before the end of their lifetime was a mistake
- not planning new nuclear plants was in the in-between lands, to be decided by experts (I am not one) whether they would be needed for a transition to green energy
- turning back on the “turning back” on nuclear fission(!) energy now would be an even bigger mistake
I despise this corrupt monster so much.
- Yes
- New plants are way to expensive. It’s non longer economical to build those.
- What?
New plants are way to expensive. It’s non longer economical to build those.
It was never economical. Nuclear power was heavily subsidised for other reasons than electricity generation. Any country that runs a sizable nuclear industry for power generation does have the capability to develop a nuclear weapons programme in relatively short order. (Usually a matter of months)
It’s basically nuclear deterrent light.
Any country that runs a sizable nuclear industry for power generation does have the capability to develop a nuclear weapons programme in relatively short order.
This is false. Sweden does not have a nuclear programme and does have a sizeable nuclear energy sector.
What?
Was that so hard? Backing out of the exit = planning new fission plants now - that would be bad. As you seem to agree in 2.
I said that because she’s a corrupt monster who is likely to come up with a “hey, let’s build more nuclear power plants” next.
Ah, OK. True. I just wasn’t sure which backing out referred to which
Do we really need to call politicians “monster” here?
Not politicans in general, but this person? Well deserved imo. Are you following for how much shit she is responsible? Alternatively psychopath would work.
You know, if you keep the discourse civil, people will start listening more to you. If you just spew hatred and insult people, nobody will listen to the point of your argument.
You know, if you keep the discourse civil, people will start listening more to you.
Empirically untrue.
Calling v.d.L. a psychopath is not an insult, it’s an observation of her personality.
Nuclear seems like a good idea for the future - in cross ocean shipping. Sails have too many limitations and nobody has any ideas for what else could even work (at least not that I’ve seen, everything fails the sniff test). It has only been done in air craft carriers and submarines (and maybe ice breakers?) that I know of so this is more the only idea I can come up with that could work. It needs a lot of effort to make is work in the real world though.
If(!) we get solid power supply going on dry land, maybe hydrogen & fuel cells…
If Germany hadn’t shut down their nuclear power plants their energy mix would now be mostly coal, some nuclear and very little renewables. There was some political will to replace nuclear power with renewables, there still is not that much political will to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Gas-Kathi wants more gas after all and is trying to sabotage renewables again.
I would bet that the same interest groups have made Merkel switch off nuclear power as the ones who let Gas-Kathi stick to gas. If Germany hadn’t shut down those plants those interest groups wouldn’t exist and there would be cheap energy from nuclear, solar and wind.
I’m so happy the Netherlands is going to build 4 of them - yes, solar and wind is cheaper, but Nuclear provides a stable base that doesn’t exist with solar and wind, and we are going to need that stable base.
Actually, we’re not going to need that. There are plenty of papers on how this is a myth.
It’s wasn’t a mistake. You got played. Corrupt politicians and activists canceled investment in nuclear to push Russian gas.
Getting rid of all nuclear industry was a strategic mistake, but not in terms of electricity generation. Using nuclear energy to generate electricity has never been and will never be economical.
It was a strategic mistake to ditch that gigantic reserve of know-how, equipment and trained personnel, which could have been used for pursuing a military use of nuclear energy, which unfortunately has proven to be necessary due to an ally turned enemy.
This. It makes sense for France and UK to maintain a few nuclear power plants and maybe even build one or two new ones because they are part of the military supply chain for nukes. For the rest of the EU, don’t waste money on new nuclear plants.
Well, unfortunately it seems to be prudent for preferably the EU itself, or its members, to pursue nuclear deterrent, thanks to the USA turning from a somewhat reliable ally into an enemy. The UK isn’t a member of the EU anymore and has proven not very trustworthy either, and France alone doesn’t have a very big nuclear deterrent. Also, it would just be fair to share some of the risks and burdens associated with maintaining such a necessary evil.
In fact, I highly doubt that any country that ever ran a large scale nuclear power programme did so because they actually believed it was an economical way of producing electrical energy. It has always been a know-how, equipment, and manpower pool for maintaining the ability to build a military nuclear programme in short order. Of course that tends to be not very palatable for the public, so it was preferred to tell them the lie of a clean and economical electricity source instead.
It was a strategic mistake to ditch that gigantic reserve of know-how
Germany and the Netherlands have what is needed to build bombs.
