Instead we get a bunch of political tricks. If we export more green energy than we import coal energy then we can pretend that that the coal did not actually get released into the air as pollution. We plant trees and talk about carbon capture, and then we discretely cut it down and turn it into biomass fuel and call it carbon neutral. Somehow that turn into negative carbon, while at the same time the old coal power plants can be reused to burn biomass and natural gas.
In the latest political debate the green party representative came with this great comeback. People who want to reduce global warming with nuclear are wrong because that side want to lower taxes on gasoline. Thus nuclear is bad.
I would like to think that this is isolated to the Swedish green party but somehow I doubt it. No one want to talk about a complete ban on burning fossil fuels for power. I don't have much hope with nuclear advocates, but the current data is hard to dismiss. Looking at EU the lowest gCO2eq/kWh emitting energy grids are Norway, Sweden, Iceland and France. Norway has more hydro than they need. Iceland got plenty of hydro and geothermal. Sweden got nuclear and hydro. France got nuclear. Every other energy grid in EU, regardless of political alignment, is dirtier. Even Denmark with it amazing investment into wind is at this moment (https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...) 400% more polluting than Sweden.
Source: Norway’s department of energy. https://www.nve.no/energiforsyning/varedeklarasjon/nasjonal-...
This isn’t just accounting pedantry: the countries they sell their renewables to use those, to (rightfully) claim green energy consumption. Norway then does the same, but based on their production.
Reminiscent of the expression “success has many parents, but failure is an orphan.”
It means that countries who actually use non-renewables to power their grid effectively subsidize the Norwegian energy market and pay a fine for their own use.
It's amazing how common the misconception that this is somehow nefarious is. I encourage you to read up on some of the published material about energy certificates, certificates of origin etc.
Energy is fungible, meaning they only sell the credits and use the green power internally. Now suddenly they use originally “green” power, never mind that the credits have been sold and someone else is doing the same.
Google “Norway green energy” to get a feel for what it looks like in the media.
There is no need for them to sell many of those credits, as evidenced by the fact that they don’t even transfer much of that power. Don’t forget that they lower that penalty by increasing supply. If they went off the market, other, domestic players would get more money for their own production. And Norwegians are lulled into a false sense of green compliance, thereby being less incentivised to root for reduction of fossil fuel consumption.
It’s a great example for the expression “having your cake and eating it, too.” If you ever need to explain that one :)
There isn't double-counting, that's the entire point of the system where "green" producers end up with "dirty" credits, because a "dirty" pays that "green" provider to take its credits in exchange, to prevent double counting.
But the notion of which sort of credit you buy and what sort of energy you actually produce are two separate things.
As an example Iceland is exempt from certain EU/EEA energy efficiency regulation because of its near-100% use of green energy, even though its power companies have something like >80% "dirty" energy credits on hand.
This is because the regulators can distinguish between a "dirty" power plant with 100% green credits on hand (i.e. they've subsidized a "green" power plant) v.s. a "green" power plant with 100% green credits on hand.
> There is no need for them to sell
> many of those credits, as evidenced
> by the fact that they don’t even transfer
> much of that power.
The electron that comes through your socket doesn't need to be generated by a "green" power plant for you to consume "green" energy, this is because electrons are fungible.
Of course we also want to shift to 100% green energy power plants, but in the meantime energy demand is also elastic. The point of the energy credit system is to shift electricity demand from areas that supply real "dirty" energy to those that supply "real" green energy.
This happens because a "green" power plant in Norway might sell its energy for 20 cents/kWh, which would be the same as a "dirty" power plant in Denmark. But if the "dirty" plant needs to buy "green" credits from the Norwegian one it might have to raise its prices to 25 cents/kWh, and the Norwegian one can lower them to 15 cents/kWh.
This would then have the effect that an energy consumer (say a factory) might move its operation to Norway to benefit from cheaper energy, or consumers would buy the subsidized Norwegian product over the Danish one.
Except for the small detail that it doesn't actually have much of an effect from a macro-economic point of view, but that's because we collectively think this whole climate change thing isn't really all that important, and thus the energy credits are relatively cheap and add almost nothing to the end-user price.
But that's the fault of political priorities, the system itself is relatively elegant and would have more of an effect if its designed was backed up by larger political commitments.
If you dig out coal and burn it in a power plant then you are producing pollution and contributing to global warming. No amount of exporting green energy changes that fact.
You are trying to dodge the question why there is a big whole in the ground where the coal once where. Someone mined it. Someone burned it. Someone bought it. Each and everyone involved are partly responsible for the harm this act caused to the environment. It is a bit like thief stealing, a fence reselling it and a customer buying it without asking questions of why it is so cheap. It is not an elegant system because in the end a crime occurred and real harm has happened.
If you want to produce green energy or run a nuclear plant then do what ever feels best, but the coal stays in the ground. No amount of misleading can hide the fact that digging it out is harmful to the planet, both on a macro and micro level, and if you fund coal mining by buying their energy then you are part of the problem.
Of course burning coal sucks, and we should replace those power plants.
But until then we can also discourage their use by subsidising clean energy at their expense. That's what this system is meant to accomplish.
It's beyond me how someone can look at what's effectively a tax on non-renewables as whitewashing those energy sources. You tax behavior you want to discourage.
A carbon tax in the energy sector helps but it is a rather inefficient method compared to simply keeping the coal in the ground. People keep finding ways to make profits from digging the coal out and burning it, and Sweden is currently a customer to those people.
The system has not been successful in keeping the coal in the ground. What it currently accomplishing in Sweden is the opposite, as Swedish use of coal energy has increased. A simple law would fix that, and it doesn't require a discussion about what energy should be subsidized. The only thing required is a stroke of the law writers pen. It is the easiest, simplest and most efficient solution in keeping the coal in the ground and the only reason people are not doing it is that people want to keep buying the energy produced by burning coal.
It's not realistic to make burning coal and other non-renewables illegal in Europe, less than 20% of the grid has been transitioned[1]. You can't just shut off 80% of the grid without European civilization as we know it coming to an end for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime there's plenty of uses of energy that can be built in one EU/EEA country or the other, or shifted between countries, and which will respond to price incentives.
E.g. a data center that's not ping-time sensitive or bulk bandwidth sensitive is probably better placed in Iceland than The Netherlands from an ecological perspective.
The impact of the energy credit system is to shift that sort of use between countries and energy providers, to the extent that their use will respond to price incentives.
It is relatively ineffective in the larger scheme of things, just like our buildup of renewable energy is proceeding at a relatively slow pace. But that's not an argument against the systems in place per-se, just like some country setting their VAT at 1% isn't an argument against VAT structurally.
The EU/EEA agreement doesn't have explicit tax-raising powers, so it's really not the case that a simple law could do the same thing. This system is effectively a way to create a new EEA-wide tax through a back-door mechanism.
Any national tax policy wouldn't be as effective, because individual countries in the EEA market can't or aren't going to enact law that mandates that some of their companies move abroad because their own energy market isn't renewable enough.
It also gives individual consumers a way to vote with their money to increase the buildup of renewables.
As an example, I live in Amsterdam where (as far as I know) I have no choice but to consume electrons sourced by burning fossil fuels[2].
However, I have opted to pay extra to buy "green" (wind and solar) energy, but the energy that comes out of my power plugs as I type this comment is still sourced from burning coal/gas.
Am I just participating in a gigantic sham? No, because what I'm doing is buying the production of energy capacity corresponding to my own use for use elsewhere on the power grid. So I'm taking part in reducing the overall demand for fossil fuels, and thus doing my own small part in reducing pollution.
By the way, from a cursory glance the current Swedish carbon tax is at best around 1/4 per-ton of the cost of sequestering that CO^2 back into the ground.
If that's the case of course it's not really all that effective, but just like in the case of the energy credit system the problem there isn't with the very concept of the system of a carbon tax (which is probably the single best way to deal with the overall problem), but with the value that tax is set at.
1. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Good thing the Swedish energy grid is not made out of 80% coal and other fossil fuels. It is a strawman argument to talk about shutting down 80% of the whole European energy grid in the context of the Swedish energy grid.
> As an example, I live in Amsterdam
Netherlands power grid only utilize 5% nuclear power. It has no hydro. If you made fossil fuels illegal than that would indeed make civilization as you know it coming to an end. Your power grid is wholly depended on fossil fuels for keeping the light on. Even if more wind farms and solar plants was built the coal would continue to burn during still nights.
It would not however be very hard to change that. A nuclear plant, or if you prefer an experimental battery dam would solve the issue quite fast. Just a simple matter of money and political will. Given the knowledge and experience in flood control it would even be quite suitable placement batteries, pumping in water when wind production are high and the price is cheap, and producing energy when the wind is still. At most 10-20 years, and faster if the incentives were right.
Putting pollution in the sky is not morally defenseable just because you paid a higher markup on the power bill. The markup should only exist to incentivize people to invest, and the cost should be increased until it accomplish this. Since people like to claim that nuclear is currently unprofitable, the solution then is pretty simple. Raise the tax on coal energy so that even just buying coal energy during still winter nights is still more expensive than building the nuclear plant. At that point it is no longer unprofitable to run the nuclear plant. If wind+solar+battery is cheaper then go with that, just as long as the coal stay in the ground.
But for Sweden it would just be easier to ban fossil fueled energy as we have enough hydro and nuclear to get us through still winter nights. It would however force a choice between wind+solar+battery vs nuclear, rather than the current wind+solar+coal vs nuclear. The later is unacceptable from an environmental perspective.
(I will note that a law banning fossil fuel is indistinguishable from a carbon tax that is high enough to make it more profitable to build non-polluting alternative to burning fossil fuels. The fact that people still burn fossil fuel is thus a proof that the tax is not high enough).
Yeah, it would be if we were discussing Sweden's energy grid. You're commenting in a subthread about the EEA-wide energy credit system in general. You're the one who brought up Sweden in the context of an unrelated point.
But even if we were only discussing Sweden the same point would apply, there's that 20% of the grid that's still being transitioned. The energy credit system is a way to shift power demand to the other 80%, to the extent that such demand is say location and not capacity-limited within Sweden.
> A nuclear plant, or if you prefer an experimental battery dam would solve the issue quite fast. Just a simple matter of money and political will.
Sure, and if someone made me emperor of Europe that's one of the things we'd be running a Manhattan-level project to accomplish.
But to present that as a counterargument to energy credits is to miss the point, these are different issues. Even in such a scenario it's still going to take some years to transition the grid due to manufacturing and logistical issues.
In that time period you'd want to give consumers in the EEA-market a price incentive to build their factory next to a solar plant instead of a coal plant. The energy credit market is a way to work towards that.
To say we should do away with energy credits entirely because, and I'm really not sure I understand your argument, but you seem to be saying that they're they're morally indefensible or not an elegant solution?
Anyway, that's going to result in needless pollution while we build up renewables. Now who's taking a morally indefensible position?
I'm not claiming sainthood by electing to pay a slightly higher energy price. Could I do more? Yes. I am saying that you're fundamentally misunderstanding how price incentives and elastic demand factor into the equation.
It's not the case that my local coal plant is running at 100% capacity all the time, and by electing to buy "green" energy I'm making the coal product more expensive than the renewable product.
Thus while I keep the lights on with coal, me and a bunch of other people in the are area doing our part to shift new demand for energy out of the area. There's going to be a price point where e.g. someone thinking of installing a server rack that consumes as much energy as me and all my neighbors elects to install it near a "green" plant, not near a coal plant.
Do you feel similarly about other harm mitigation that's part of public policy? E.g. do you think because we should switch to near-100% electric vehicles the EU's increasingly strict regulations on catalytic converters is pointless? That's what the energy credit system is, it's a transition and harm reduction mechanism.
> I will note that a law banning fossil fuel is indistinguishable from a carbon tax that is high enough to make it more profitable to build non-polluting alternative to burning fossil fuels.
No it's not. Even if fossil fuels were prohibitively expensive for energy production we'd still have things like airplanes that are going to be paying for the energy density in fossil fuels way past the price point where a proposed CO^2 tax matches the cost of cleaning up the pollution involved.
For someone who speak about off-topic, since when did we, the article or anything in this thread talk about the transport sector? A few other sectors we also never talked about is space travel, the military, and agriculture.
The claim is that a law banning fossil fuels in the energy sector is indistinguishable from a carbon tax that is high enough to make it more profitable to build non-polluting power plants alternatives to power plants burning fossil fuels.
> Anyway, that's going to result in needless pollution while we build up renewables
How is keeping the coal and natural gas in the ground going to cause needless pollution? Nonsense.
> It's not the case that my local coal plant is running at 100% capacity all the time, and by electing to buy "green" energy I'm making the coal product more expensive than the renewable product.
And yet the coal is still cheaper because otherwise you would not continue to buy it, and people would not build new natural gas plants unless they thought it would pay. It illustrate how well the shift of new energy is incentivized.
Naturally people will build wind power. It is cheaper than coal when it is blowing, and it makes the coal energy more expensive when burned. Everyone wins, except that the coal keep getting mined and burned and this thing called global warming is happening which people prefer to ignore.
You accuse me of not wanting harm mitigation, but that is completely wrong. I don't mind at all the wind and solar plants being built, but I can fully see the data which says that the fossil fueled pollution in the power grid is going up, not down. It pretty basic logic that when the method which claim to decrease pollution is increasing it then the method is flawed.
Denmark is a pretty good example where peak wind has been reached. At optimal condition their whole energy grid can be produced from wind. Wind farm operators want to be paid so they build farms until at peak they still get sell the energy, as overproduction is not just wasteful but costly.
How often do a wind farm produce 100% of maximum? Not often. we can make a simplify statement that on average they produce about 50%, which mean the other 50% must come from somewhere. Primarily fossil fuels.
So what is Denmark average gCO2eq/kWh? Better than some but far from competing with countries like France, and even if everyone other country in EU copied Denmark it would not be enough in order to prevent catastrophic global warming.
Within the span of the two paragraphs I quoted you went back and forth between "ban fossil fueled energy" and "a law banning fossil fuel", so I inferred that you were talking about a ban on fossil fuels for all applications.
The transport sector just made for an easy example. The same is also true for many applications in the energy sector, e.g. diesel generators on remote islands, or as backup generators. Entirely banning these fuels would be a stupid idea, we should just charge for the externalities they cause.
> How is keeping the coal and natural gas in the ground going to cause needless pollution? Nonsense.
Because as you yourself claim a complete conversion of the grid war-footing amounts of political will would probably take at least 10-20 years, meanwhile we're burning coal as we transition. If we have price incentives to not only phase out coal demand, but also to shift it we'll keep more of it in the ground.
So yes, we agree that keeping more fossil fuel in the ground generally speaking results in less pollution.
I'm pointing out that to do so you not only need to work on energy production (build power plants), but shift energy demand (taxes, energy credits etc.).
I'm basically summarizing what I understand from the PR material from the relevant EU institutions, you're making claims that would either win you a Nobel price if they were true, or at least get you on the front page of most European newspapers ("Internet man saves EU billions of Euros by getting rid of lots of pointless institutions, processes etc.").
> [...]I can fully see the data which says that the fossil fueled pollution in the power grid is going up, not down. It pretty basic logic that when the method which claim to decrease pollution is increasing it then the method is flawed.
I haven't seen the numbers you're alluding to, but I don't see how that's a violation of basic logic, it's trivial to show that all of the following can be true:
1. Fossil fuel use is going down as a proportion of overall energy use.
2. Fossil fuel use is going up in absolute terms.
3. We have some system in place (say energy credits or a carbon tax) that's reducing fossil fuel use.
You just need to have a situation where the growth in energy demand is outpacing the pace of your energy source transition.
In such a situation it would be a mistake to say "absolute use is going up, any mitigation we have in place must be doing nothing".
Maybe those mitigations are doing nothing, or maybe the situation would be a lot worse if they weren't in place.
> Denmark is a pretty good example[...]
No it's not. My point several replies above this one has been that energy credits help with the overall problem, not that they're guaranteed to solve it. Clearly an example of a problem that isn't fully solved isn't a refutation of a mechanism that's suggested to contribute to an overall solution.
This would be like saying that speeding fines aren't an effective method of helping with overall traffic safety because people still speed on public roads.
That's all I've been maintaining here. There's a common misconception about energy credits that they're not only ineffective, but that they're some sort of sham. I think that's a misunderstanding of people who don't know how they work, and you continuing to drag up examples that have nothing whatsoever to do with that point isn't a convincing counterargument.
That exchange is plainly not carbon neutral. Exporting green energy does usually contribute to reducing fossil fuel usage at destination - that cant reasonably be denied. It sounds like you believe the figures are being officially "double counted". But I'm quite doubtful that international agreements really allow for such plain mis-accounting , the idea more likely comes from the kind of confused climate skeptic literature, which imagines that climate science and whole green energy movement is a scam.
> We plant trees and talk about carbon capture, and then we discretely cut it down and turn it into biomass fuel and call it carbon neutral.
That is plainly carbon neutral. If you plant and grow trees sustainably, cut them down and burn them, it is absolutely carbon neutral. It can even be carbon negative as rootmass is left to build soil, and benefit wildlife too - depends on how intelligently its done.
If you phrase your statement more succinctly its easier to see the plain sense in it:
> We plant trees ... and then we ... turn it into biomass fuel and call it carbon neutral.
In a bit more detail:
Grow trees and turn them into fuel - that's carbon negative.
Burn the fuel - that's carbon positive.
Do both together - that's carbon neutral.
https://www.svtplay.se/video/23437510/agenda/agenda-18-nov-2...
Political debate from 2 weeks ago. Green party spoke person vs moderate party leader. It beings at 35m. The moderate describe multiple times that Sweden buys dirty coal energy when the wind is now blowing, and the green party spoke person repeats the argument of being net exporter of green energy in response.
> It can even be carbon negative as rootmass is left to build soil
Areas where we plant tree and don't cut them down has a name: nature sanctuary. There has been plenty of initiatives to plant trees in order to create official carbon sinks on the books, so how many of those are nature sanctuary?
> It can even be carbon negative as rootmass is left to build soil, and benefit wildlife too
https://www.forskning.se/2019/09/20/tradplantering-ingen-uni... https://www.svd.se/plantera-trad-loser-inte-klimatproblemen
Counting tree planting initiatives as carbon sinks when there is no planning for what happens afterward is simply wishful thinking (quote from the study).
Criticism of the green movement is not automatically climate skepticism. How many climate skeptics want a complete ban of power generated from fossil fuels in the energy grid? If the green movement just would adapt that stance then I would not care. If people want to use other technologies in a non-fossil fueled world then good, just as priority one is a non-fossil fueled world. Sweden could adapt a ban on fossil fuel produced energy tomorrow and it would mostly only be a bit more expensive (some infrastructure to Norway might be needed in order handle still winter nights).
I think its a valid argument or caveat to the undesirable coal burning. That's a spoken debate, open to interpretation and misunderstanding, not evidence of carbon trading actually being gamed.
> where we plant tree and don't cut them down has a name: nature sanctuary. Sure, or let the trees seed themselves but I said cut the tree and leave the roots (they have considerable mass and hard to harvest) Then you got a partial natural habitat, carbon sink and fuel source, you've got a mix - that's an option. Plant more trees than you need - never sure how many you'll need anyhow, call it headroom. The object is to reduce net carbon emissions as fast as possible and improve habitats as much as possible, the objectives conflict a bit and can compliment a bit, ecology is complex like that.
> Counting tree planting initiatives as carbon sinks when there is no planning for what happens afterward is simply wishful thinking (quote from the study).
So get planning - because it can work, and it could be done to some extent if you want to decarbonise -according to the IPCC at least. Whatever renewable power your country is generating, if its traded and used then it is cutting carbon, either within your country or another destination - thats not imaginative accounting, its situational awareness.
You are talking like this is all a sham, like your greens are saying they don't need to do anything more about carbon reduction because they're exporting some renewable generation - I dont believe that and expect they're actually just arguing their progress so they can make more progress. Then you say it wouldn't be too hard to just ban fossil fuels tomorrow, so are you annoyed with greens holding things up then ? That sounds like a "super green" policy, do many people believe in it? Because it wont be able to happen till then. Maybe you've got low quality green politicians carrying the banner, that can sure happen.
If I was doing some tit-for-tat argument I would ask what kind of confused climate skeptic literature says that its a valid argument for importing coal energy in 2019.
The green party used to say that the coal belong in the ground. It was one of their slogans. Being a net exporter of green energy does not make it suddenly valid to dig up the coal and burn it. The coal belong in the ground and should stay there.
> So get planning - because it can work
Claiming something to be a carbon offset in the books and telling the public misleading information is not acceptable. If they want to put things that "can work" then they can put down "could be a carbon offset" in the book rather than "is a carbon offset". Then the "could be" calculations could be compared to the factual climate change data.
> That sounds like a "super green" policy, do many people believe in it?
And there we have it. Not burning fossil fuel for power is apparently a fantasy?
But that is not true. There are countries today which operate with no or close to zero fossil fueled energy grids. Places like France does it without even calling it "super green". They just did it because they didn't want to be dependent on other nations after the second world war. Iceland just use geothermal and hydro because it was cheapest and available. Norway and Sweden could do it but doesn't for political and economical reasons.
It also a bit silly to argue that it must be done tomorrow. They could set up a goal like they did for 2020, 2030 and 2040 and so on. A lot of green politics is about putting down goals and focusing the political discussion. Banning fossil fuels in energy production has yet to be part of any such discussion, and the green party just dodges the question when ever the issue of still winter nights comes up.
It is also a bit funny that we are defining nuclear as a super green policy. Its a label that sounds like a insult but really, is it? Personally I don't care much either way as my goal is that the coal and oil stay in the ground, the natural gas don't get fracked, and the biofuel production don't get double counted and presented as a carbon offset. I just wish that the green movement would be behind that.
> it wouldn't be too hard to just ban fossil fuels tomorrow
That sounded a "super green" idea to me - with no idea myself how you thought that could be done. Nuclear ?! How can I tell to what degree your writing is to be understood as exaggeration - affordable nuclear supply by tomorrow? by next year? by next decade? When you have a rational case, you should be able to promote it with accurate rational language. Sorry but I cant tell what you are really intending or concerned about, because your case has not been coherent. Perhaps examine whether you have a prejudice towards the idea of "green" policy (sounds like an insult?) and prejudice allows one to be hyper critical while inattentive to the coherence of ones own convictions.
The green movement has harbored some prejudice towards nuclear power, but nuclear power is not more expensive now than renewable options because of green prejudice. Its just an excessively complex, resource and high level human attention demanding industrial process to safely generate large amounts of heat from radioactive materials, besides the normal expense of cooling and extracting power from concentrated heat. Sure nuclear might have not been the monster which many greens have pictured it as, also consider whether it is the affordable suppressed magic which nuclear has promoted itself as in the preceding decades while spending many billions on undercosted projects which where delayed to the point of never producing any power. That doesnt happen with wind and solar so even if they foist "misregulation" and fear on nuclear - at least they have shown that they deliver !
In the second quote the op is clearly complaining that schemes growing trees and burning them for fuel cant be carbon neutral, which is plainly false.
The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost.
> The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost.
NIMBYism is a large reason why the risks are so uncertain and the costs so high. When dozens of judges at several levels have jurisdiction to require expensive and time consuming state/federal EPA, zoning, air quality, shading, etc. reviews and plaintiffs can use delay tactics to block appeals to those rulings, you get lots of uncertainty and expense.
Dont get me wrong, i am not anti- nuclear. It just doesnt make sense to me at this point from an economics perspective. When factoring in the cost of waste management and decommissioning the power plants after the end of its lifetime, they are absurdly expensive. All this not to mention the absurd follow-up costs of having to dig out collapsed long time storage yet again. I dont see how nuclear today is not just another technology that offers a unsustainable, quick and cheap energy source that externalized the costs to the next generations. The running costs of all those waste management failures is starting to add up, and when looking at Germany, who set an exit date for nuclear power, the cost of decommissioning the power plants themselves is going to be a massive loss for the tax payer, even if everything would work as planed. Which, when looking at the history, we can be sure it wont.
I am not convinced yet that nuclear doesnt just look good on paper. Get me a realistic calculation for the actual energy price without externalizing the cleanup costs to the tax payer and we can talk. Dont factor in waste management at a fixed price the state offers and dont just assume that no meltdown cleanup will ever be necessary. But i have yet to see anyone make the argument that way, which lets me assume, that nuclear is a wonderful technology to research until someone finds out how to run plants economically viable without just externalizing costs.
I'm not saying it's not problematic, but it's minuscule compared to all forms of power. Even wind power have a serious waste problem when the blades need to be decommissioned. It's not radioactive, but it needs to be stored, and there is a lot of it.
So the question whether we should go full nuclear is, what is the real price on nuclear per kwh with what liabilities? How does it scale? I think the post i responded to first was on an excellent path if it hadnt ignored the waste management problematic. I think research into bringing down cost of power plants is a field worth researching, as well as how to drive down the price of long term storage. But first we have to actually decide on the basis of realistic data and not just hope the future will figure it out for us.
edit: My comment is coming across a bit to hostile, just so there are no misunderstandings, i dont think this societal discussion can be approached by convincing individuals on the internet who are to lazy to google themselves(meaning me), but in parliament. I wasnt really trying to start a discussion but giving my 2cents of where i think the problem in the discourse we currently have lie. And thats more the lacking factual basis in arguments on the topic then the actual costs.
When a nuclear plant releases radiation into the atmosphere we call it a major fuck up. When a coal plant releases dangerous pollutants (including radiation) into the atmosphere we call it normal operation.
> A typical dry-storage cask holds 10 tons of spent fuel and costs about $1 million–$2 million each. (The CASTOR is at the upper end of that range.) This translates to a cost of less than one-twentieth of a penny per kilowatt-hour—about 1 percent of the cost of generating nuclear power.
They last for anywhere between 30-100 years and I assume to be be processed and put into new casks after that. So "less than one-twentieth of a penny per kilowatt-hour" every 30-100 year.
Note this is for the worst of the waste. There is still low level waste and long lived waste that need not be stored in dry casks. It still doesn't sound as problematic. I think the main issue is finding a site and protecting the casks/waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act#Nucle...
As far as I know, nuclear is the only energy source that pre-pays for waste disposal.
And we are far from just storing that stuff cheaply in a safe and secure storehouse we have moronic ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine where we have to dig out old longterm storage.
What are you comparing it to? Are you factoring in economic costs of continuing to release carbon into the atmosphere?
(I don’t want to excuse lazy/bad accounting... but traditional power plants don’t factor in the cost of the carbon they release, so basically everyone is ignoring long-term costs.)
We are currently looking for a replacement that doesnt externalize costs through environmental damages. I dont think nuclear is an alternative here today from a price point, and looking at the few times pro nuclear people talk about waste management costs, they dont seem to think so either. They mostly tend to give the same answer you did, which isnt an answer. Even if we were to decide today that nuclear would be the lesser evil, we cant do that without a cost overview. We have to at least understand what follow up costs we are leaving the generations after us and look what alternatives we have at that price point. And i dont think many taxpayers understood that Fukushima was an actual liability of more then half a trillion dollars and to how much that adds up to for nuclear all together.
And again, we are in an emergency situation with fossil fuels, and sure, we can talk about how much it would cost in liabilities and actual damages to switch completely to nuclear. It might be worth it for all i know. But if you arent even gonna give me an approximate cost to the taxpayer i will assume you are trying to scam me out of money. Unless we can have an honest discussion on a societal level about the realistic costs on taxpayers its an absolutely horrible idea to build even one more nuclear power plant. While i would love for the German nuclear power plants to run till the end of their planed lifetime to not waste the initial investment into relatively safe reactors, not allowing the building of new ones is the right decision as long as the costs are not transparent. If we should have learned anything from fossil fuel and all the other horrible side effects of technological development, we should at least have learned to make a proper technology (consequences) assessment (Technikfolgenabschätzung) and deliberately act on actual data instead of doing stuff that seems without alternative.
Because they don't need to. Power generation plants of any reasonably modern design don't generate lots of waste, just spent fuel rods that can be reprocessed and a tiny amount of non reusable radioactive material that needs to be stored until it's less radioactive.
All the mess regarding storage sites like Yucca Mountain relates to waste from bomb production, not from power plants.
Even if we had a storage facility like that operating in the US, spent fuel assemblies from power plants wouldn't be permanently interred there, that would be a waste.
The point is that your house or car would be outrageously expensive too if the engineering cost of the design was amortized over very few units.
The capital costs of any traditional power plant are massive, and fix high costs of goods sold for the life of the plant. This Canadian effort may find a way to build more smaller units, which will be great if they succeed.
Solar and wind are disruptive because the cost to add a marginal unit of generation is near zero. A marginal add of a natural gas power plant in my US state is nearly $100M and several years. Nuclear is probably 10x that.
I understand why nuclear is an appealing technology. Its magical in a way, but it doesn't make sense when engineering a power grid today. It is an awful business with high fixed costs getting disrupted by smaller, cheaper, lower friction alternatives. Again, in my state, New York, despite higher than average rates, nuclear operators like Excelon claim to be losing money operating old plants, and NY ratepayers will be providing $7-10B in subsidy over the next 10-12 years.
This is easily false. When you look at historical nuclear powerplant construction via the NRC, you see a flatline of new reactors starting 1979: Three Mile Island accident year.
In fact, Ford and Carter (a nuclear engineer himself) banned reprocessing of spent nuclear fuels even before that! Due to nonproliferation concerns (NPT had been around since 1970).
The USA kept building nuclear weapons through the 80's, so where were those "subsidies" for civilian powerplants?
The answer is the strong anti-nuclear movement in the 80's society that was the culmination of several different political, disaster, and cultural events. Not because we stopped building nukes in the 80's (we didn't stop).
Edit: One of the defining features of the US's civilian power fleet of reactors is exactly because of its adherence to non-proliferation, independence of military, and economic viability of "standing on its own two legs". Contrast the PWR designs with the power+breeder designs of the RBMK, the Soviet design to accidentally produce power while also producing weapons grade materials. This is why, in contrast, in the USA the reactors at national labs and military sites are so secure and secretive, and why the fuel used in US civilian powerplants are very tame in comparison: only the military is subsidizing it's own reactors for its own weapons grade fuel.
A: US Government enrichment facilities built to support nuclear weapons programs. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
One could argue that the mines were subsidized by the federal government (so they could enrich and breed nuclear-grade materials), but that is a far cry from GP's claim that "Once the direct subsidy of nuclear via the military's nuclear weapons buildout went away, new plant construction... went way", which is incomparable to the degree of subsidization as the USSR and their dual-use for RBMK reactors (why else design a reactor with a positive void coefficient).
EDIT: I'm not sure whether you're really concerned about the buildout of nuclear powerplants or the evolution of the USA's policy with regards to the nuclear fuel cycle, but I hope I addressed both.
EDIT2: Also: The "big 3" enrichment locations that the military used would also sell to civilian nuclear powerplants. But that's a far cry reason to "subsidize" the construction of nuclear powerplants. This "fuel subsidization" goes on today (MOX fuels) and the American monopoly of uranium enrichment has been broken since 1970 with the formation of Urenco, so the commercial civilian powerplants have always had other places to purchase from (if a regulatory hassle). There's really not a lot of strong evidence that the mining and enrichment of uranium for nuclear weapons somehow subsidized the construction of civilian nuclear powerplants.
Can you elaborate here? Solar and wind are relatively cheap, and falling, but a long way from a near zero marginal cost. According to a quick Google, the capital-weighted costs of solar, hydro, wind, geothermal and some newer natural gas plants are similar.
I don't think there was ever a direct subsidy of civilian nuclear power for weapons production. The ways in which military reactors are run to produce fuel for weapons is different than that of power plants. There are dual use technologies involved, shared R&D costs, and so on, but there is no direct subsidy of civilian nuclear power the way you are implying.
> The capital costs of any traditional power plant are massive, and fix high costs of goods sold for the life of the plant.
I'm pretty sure you are in fact missing the point. The costs of building a modern nuclear plant include a huge amount of one-off engineering because we build so few of them. If we swapped the numbers of units built of coal and nuclear power plants, the cost structures would (probably close to) swap as well, which was the original parent of this thread's point.
Look, I'm not here to advocate for nuclear power. I think renewables + batteries are likely to win on economics in the near future, but with some major challenges (building enough batteries for the long tail of intermittent production lapses seems really difficult to me).
But that doesn't argue against the fact that we shot ourselves in the climate change foot by not prioritizing nuclear over coal power for decades, and I think a big part of that is based on a mistake ("nuclear is expensive") is because of this inability to amortize costs over more units.
edit to add: I think your singling out of capital costs is a strawman of the original comment ("Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost."). It's unclear whether you are including certification and engineering costs in "capital costs", but the intention of the original point was to include those costs.
Most subsidies are not direct and called "subsidy". But as long as nuclear weapons production was a priority, the US had an more of an incentive to research decommissioning, funding final disposing sites, have more people study nuclear engineering, creating job opportunities for nuclear engineers to build up an ecosystem, funding basic research in the area, researching and providing the logistics for transporting waste to disposal sites etc.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2016/7201-costs-decom-npp....
A lot of this report seems to indicate that estimating future decommissioning costs is hard. The costs are estimates, often created by those with a financial incentive to keep the estimate low. In 50 or so years time the reality of decommissioning might be very difficult.
On the waste aspect: "The cost of managing spent nuclear fuel ... is not always included in the cost of decommissioning, but is often treated separately. This is even more the case for the final disposal of fuel or related waste, which is a major source of costs in waste management, particularly for high-level waste."
Our failure to invest in nuclear the past several decades was a huge mistake that future generations will rightfully scorn us for.
It justifies fear.
Moreover the waste management problem is not solved.
During the last decades more and more citizen are less and less willing to pay for nuke plants.
In democracies imposing is pretty difficult, and IMHO it's a good thing.
In the same timeframe wind, and even more during the last decade, solar plants costs quickly declined, and even more so nowadays.
Meanwhile nuke specialists experienced in building and running plants retire.
https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/May/Renewable-power-...
Nobody can pretend that nuclear plants aren't dangerous. The argument is that a Fukushima somewhere in the world once every 20 years would be substantially less dangerous than a coal fired plant in every country operating for 20 years. And it doesn't seem to be likely that we get a Fukushima every 20 years. So why is Fukushima used as a reason to use coal plants??? The logic is barely coherent, and even then only assuming that someone has no understanding of the background risk they face every day.
I've lived in a coal mining region. I would have statistically better health outcomes if I had lived next to Fukushima.
EDIT And you linked the Fukushima outcomes page - it says that even only considering Japan the lives saved from not using coal probably outweighed hypothetical maybe-deaths from Fukushima that cannot be detected. Footnote 75.
> Moreover the waste management problem is not solved.
It is kinda difficult to describe a scenario where nuclear waste causes much more damage than say a tailings dam failure at a heavy metals mine. Or a gas leak in a built up area. Or a bad wildfire. There is not a lot of nuclear waste and there is a lot of desert out there if it comes to it.
People have largely been ignoring the waste for 40 years and that strategy is working pretty well.
Wind might be a solid par technically. It does kill more people than nuclear though; that is a big negative. Better displaced than dead.
There isn't an option here that is obviously better. It would be pretty sensible to loosen the environmental restrictions on new nuclear plants, protect them from NIMBYs and then leave it to the market to go with whatever is cheapest. Could be anything, I have no particular horse to back as long as the race is fair; although I would like to see more nuclear because it just looks to me like the technically best option.
As for Fukushima, more died as a result from it being shut down than in the disaster: https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/07/was-shutting-japan...
Furthermore, it lead to a surge in imports of dirty fuels. More coal and oil.
As for Fukushima there are many hypothesis about the real impact until now, and even more for the future. Believing the effects are already fully known is at best 'weird'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
Thinking that we can only replace fossil fuel with nuke is not even funny, as solar and wind soar. In Europe solar and wind already produce as much electricity than nuke plants, and sail around while nuke plants are shutting down.
Storage is indeed a challenge, and the real choice is between our capacity to lower nuke-induced risk (waste, disasters...), which seems low after decades of efforts, and on the other hand our capacity to further enhance existing other energy 'sources', which are progressing at a very fast pace.
You highlight that storage is a challenge, but it’s the entire blocker at this point. Until storage is solved, solar/wind do nothing more than displace some peaker plants.
I dont think so. We may have a common competitor yet also be in competition. Solar and wind have very complimentary output patterns (combining two variable sources produces a less variable source even without the modest degree of anti correlation which is present between wind and solar). Nuclears output pattern really begs to be constant, it never wants to ramp down because there is almost no savings, whereas solar and wind can clash but also leave each other demand windows.
You have no "base load" once such competitors are involved because half the time they are bidding for all of the load. Separating off a base load deal is then an artificial arrangement. Your supplier who can only economically supply a certain level is no help when your renewables fall short, and they are an expense when your renewables surge and offer cheaper power. Once renewables are in the mix you want economical dispatch-able supply. That means batteries for frequent sub-daily power deficits, and existing fossil moving to carbon neutral fuels for less frequent deficits.
There is no effective nuclear construction industry today that can stop renewables getting big in the mix, and the bigger renewables get into it, the less attractive "base load" power purchasing contracts become for buyers. There is talk about making nuclear competitively dispatchable with molten salt reserviors - that's just a nuclear plant and molten salt battery. The battery is the economical part. Nuclear will continue to be an expensive side project for many governments which can afford it, sometimes completing a project, sometimes giving up as they do after multiple cost increases and delays, but it is practically finished in competitive industry by the arrival of advanced solar and wind.
Even in 'all-nuke' France 7 to 11% of the powergrid is produced by fossil-fuel plants.
This could be alleviated thanks to decentralized production (small units). Granted, this is theoretically true for nuclear and solar/wind alike, however civilian practical small solar/wind units do exist, nuclear units don't.
Many write just as if nuclear plants may really solve our climate-related problem. They neglect that gridpower is a small portion of the total energy (about 17%), therefore a fully 'cleanly'-produced gridpower (by whatever method, nuclear and/or other) lets us, on the sole 'energy' side of the matter (there are other ones), with at the very least 60% of the climate-related problem at hands.
Yeah, they're not 100% nuclear. In any case, their results are far better than countries who eschewed nuclear.
France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity [compared to Germany].
French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. As such, according to the prevailing economic wisdom, French electricity should be far more carbon intensive than German's. And yet the opposite is the case.[1]
So it seems France made a good decision. Their electricity is both cleaner and cheaper...
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...
The French public financial auditing institution (la Cour des Comptes) published in 2012 that public nuke investments are opaque, and that it costed around 228 10e9 euros, plus nowadays 3.4 10e9 euros per year for the sole maintenance. Nuke risk is what it is, and even financially it is not sound. Read there, starting folio 269: https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/Rappor...
It is so expensive it cannot be hidden anymore. Electricity in France is absolutely not cheap, its price there is average in Europe. Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Germany now pays in order to solve the problem.
France isn't completely dumb and a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") states that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it.
However those are only words, until now.
Meanwhile... Germany solves its problem.
Comparing France and Germany when it comes to industrial and technical problems is not fair, as Germany is so far ahead we don't see them anymore (and yep, I'm French, but facts are facts).
So 228B€ for 50 years of 85% of the electricity consumption, and decarbonised. When with the push for renewable, it will cost 121B€ for currently 5,1% of wind and 1.9% for solar. Currently nuclear electricity is bought 42€/MWh by the useless competitor thanks to the ARENH, when wind cost us 89.4€/MWh and solar 294€/MWh and are not dispatchable, uncorrelated with consumption, intermittent, and will also add 30B€ to the grid because of the decentralised organisation. Also renewable made us build a gaz plan in Landivisiau because Brittany opposed the Plogoff nuclear plant and renewable are unreliable.
Also you failed to mention, that what droved the rise in French electricity is solely because of the renewable.
Germany didn't solve it's problem its electricity is still heavily carbonated.
https://i.imgur.com/zatyuXX.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EK2NouwWkAERV5V?format=jpg&name=...
https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2018-04/20180418...
https://www.cre.fr/content/download/19506/file/Annexe%201_CS...
https://www.cre.fr/content/download/19600/file/Calculs%20Tar...
Nope. Nuke plant did not provide 85% during those 50 years. It even doesn't today (only about 71%). In 1971 approximatively approx 5% of the French gridpower was produced by nuke plants. Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrie_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fr... How exactly do you think it may have produced 85% of the gridpower for 50 years? This is inept and misleading.
Moreover 228B€ is an estimation, the report states (folio 270) that the information is not available, mixed up with all other activities of EDF. The real cost may be superior. Everyone is free to interpret such opacity as good or bad sign.
Even worse, the report explicitly states that it completely neglects the first batch of R&D, when civilian and military domains where not clearly separated, which was a major effort. Source: (folio 36) https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/Rappor...
Therefore a fair part of fundamental research isn't accounted in those 228B€.
Also: nuke energy is not (completely) decarbonised. Fuel extraction, transport... aren't.
> When with the push for renewable, it will cost 121B€ for currently 5,1% of wind and 1.9% for solar.
This 121B€ budget is not spent, as it starts in... 2018, ending in 2047! Putting it in front of the production right now is at best 'disingenuous', it is in fact a huge lie. You can't read the future, you can't know what renewables will produce in the 2019 to 2047 timeframe and afterwards, therefore there is no conclusion to draw, no way to consider this investment as a bad one.
> Currently nuclear electricity is bought 42€/MWh by the useless competitor thanks to the ARENH
Only 100TW (about 1/4 of the production), sold by specification at a price equal to the nuke official production price. Given the credits nuke engulfed and the decades of monopoly, this is a very low-key counterbalancing measure.
> when wind cost us 89.4€/MWh and solar 294€/MWh and are not dispatchable, uncorrelated with consumption, intermittent, and will also add 30B€ to the grid because of the decentralised organisation.
Germany chose this horrible wind/solar/biomass path. Poor Germans, they don't know that those challenges have no solution, that they are doomed to fail. You should inform them. An EPR or two may save them!
> Also renewable made us build a gaz plan in Landivisiau because Brittany opposed the Plogoff nuclear plant and renewable are unreliable.
A transition costs. At its very beginning nuke was engulfing huge amounts of money without producing anything significant during the 1950-1970 period.
After 70 years, right now, nuke isn't a newborn, however new projects are very (very!) overbudget and late (Olkiluoto, Flamanville).
> Also you failed to mention, that what droved the rise in French electricity is solely because of the renewable.
Source?
> Germany didn't solve it's problem its electricity is still heavily carbonated.
This is a work in progress. At least do they really search for an elegant (non polluting but also not risk-inducing) solution, instead of raising the risk by letting aging plant run after their planned end-of-life date.
French vs. Germany, on an industrial challenge. Lemme try to guess who will win...
That's a fair point, but it doesn't change the argument, the cost is over a long period with a big part of the electricity mix.
>This 121B€ budget is not spent
But locked in with feed in tariff form the pre-2017 poorly functioning 5.1%/1.9% mix. You seems to think that more solar and wind will come with that, no new solar panel and wind turbine will be build with that.
https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/huet/2018/04/19/la-cour-des-comp...
>this is a very low-key counterbalancing measure
No this is a useless way to create an artificial competition, and a disgusting way to kill a company, when EDF OA is forced to buy solar and wind, uncorrelated with usage, at an expansive price.
>Germany chose this horrible wind/solar/biomass path. Poor Germans, they don't know that those challenges have no solution, that they are doomed to fail. You should inform them. An EPR or two may save them!
They have coal, lot of coal and only a plan to close them in 2038 and to replace it with russian fossil gas when France will have the latest closed in 2022 and since long barely used them.
>Source?
Look on your electrical bill the CSPE line, and Turpe because of decentralised renewable.
https://www.uarga.org/downloads/Documentation/2019_09_12_Sou...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contribution_au_service_public...
http://www.leparisien.fr/economie/les-prix-de-l-electricite-...
> Lemme try to guess who will win...
France already won in decarbonising its electricity. Why would Germany win all industrial challenge, what are you a German supremacist ?
On a more fundamental viewpoint I think that subsidies are always at best inadequate, especially because they establish such vicious circle (subsidizing leads to a problem apparently solved by... subsidizing).
This 121B€ budget will be invested ('till 2046) to dynamise applied renewable energy. It has to offer some benefit to anyone investing and therefore accepting the risk inherent to any new and quickly developing tool, it is about long-term effects. You quote a blog, which is an immediate interpretation, not the intent and even less the (future) result.
Yes, Germany chose to kick out the bad nuke habit as fast as possible, maybe indeed too quickly for the short-term sake. On the other hand France tried to act slowly... and now its renewables program, not very ambitious, already is wayyyyyy behind previsions.
Yes, establishing new production sites implies new connections, and therefore investments. Connecting a new nuke powerplant also costs. Yes, connecting renewables globally cost more given that nukes needs less sites (intensity). However renewables don't blow up, don't produce hot waste, are easy to decommission, create jobs, create know-how and product which are more and more marketable (much more than nuke plants!)... Total lifecycle cost+risk is key.
France is indeed right now more efficient than Germany when it comes to decarbonizing gridpower production. However this is a snapshot, while the whole subject is a process. There is no finish line, and if in a pair of decades may Germany lead on all accounts, free of nukes and continuing to be a leader in a growing renewables market. Then we will once more conclude that they adopted an industrial approach much more adequate than ours, as in many other sectors.
The huge powergrid it implies isn't very different from the one nuke powerplants already need (given that many cannot sit nearby huge cities), that both wind and solar in such a wide area not producing enough is a rare occurrence.
Transporting energy far away causes losses, but we already do it, and who cares if its TCO is very low (solar and wind are progressing quickly), and its production not dangerous?
Add geothermal, hydroelectric, and biomass, then better global efficiency and energy savings.
Then a pinch of very small complementary units (already available).
... and we are better set for so many more scenarios, at a globally lower cost and without any serious risk.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJuknaqXkAAwbWn?format=jpg&name=...
Also nuclear is 20% of the marginal electricity (the one that varies).
http://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/aen-infos-suivi-c...
https://www.tmrow.com/static/c90a14e6fe7e73b4c60963818f9041e...
https://www.tmrow.com/blog/marginal-carbon-intensity-of-elec...
"Not enough flexibility" isn't specific to renewables.
We just need moar nuclear plants and we can eliminate the few remaining coal and gas plants.
If we put the money we put into building nuclear plants into energy storage, then that would likely change pretty quickly.
We could lose 90% of the human population and be back to the numbers of when the US became a country.
The nukes and communists share the No True Scotman's defense: the prior failures weren't true communism, err, nuke power. If only we had clapped louder, Tinkerbell would fly.
Maybe only Tennessee was more pro nuclear than Washington. Alas. Incompetence, corruption, delays, and cost overruns aborted the nukes under construction, which then killed all hopes of building more nukes.
For decades, WPPSS (pronounced "Whoops!") was the punchline for local jokes about government, waste, bureaucracy. My favorite was a two-billed baseball hat that said "WPPSS", kinda like this: https://www.villagehatshop.com/photos/product-alternate/gian...
--
https://www.historylink.org/File/5482
"Several factors combined to ruin construction schedules and to drive costs to three and four times the original estimates. Inflation and design changes constantly plagued all the projects. Builders often got ahead of designers who modified their drawings to conform to what had been built. Safety changes imposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission increased costs too,
but the biggest cause of delays and overruns was mismanagement of the process by the WPPSS.
The directors and the managers of the system had no experience in nuclear engineering or in projects of this scale. System managers were unable to develop a unified and comprehensive means of choosing, directing, and supervising contractors. One contractor, already shown to be incompetent, was retained for more work. In a well-publicized example, a pipe hanger was built and rebuilt 17 times. Quality control inspectors complained of inadequate work that went unaddressed."
(Attempted emphasis mine.)
> In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics.
This is a huge misunderstanding.
It was the "green energy" people who first fought nuclear power. Go look throughout the country where nuke plants have been taken down. It's because they were leaking and polluting and were ticking time bombs.
The greens have been fighting against nuclear power since day one.
There is an underground current of manipulation in online conversations trying to make nuclear power look green. It has only one element of green, that is low carbon, everything else about it is the absolute worst of all power sources.
I hope to never see anything but fusion nuclear power come back, and all fission power fade away.
Pretty blatantly false. Nuclear kills fewer people most, if not all other sources of power, per unit of energy generated.
There are significant pollution issues from mining and burning coal and from manufacturing solar panels. Hydro produces ecological disruption on par with non other. Wind power has significant and downplayed effects of wildlife.
The comparison of these factors is complicated and 'best' depends on what you specific environmental agenda is, but your rhetoric is flat out false.
The nuclear waste is so tragic and horrific and the effects so egregious I can only imagine you are grossly misinformed or a paid troll.
More horrific than the millions killed by air pollution?
This is not to say that nuclear waste isn't a significant problem and one we can do a much better job dealing with, but spreading blatant misinformation does not do anything to help anyone.
Gulf war syndrome is another example of head-in-the-sand behavior of the public regarding nuclear waste caused diseases.
Indeed, while I don't have specific numbers to prove this, I highly suspect that the health risks of non-nuclear toxic waste (by products from chemical plants and manufacturing) outweigh those of toxic nuclear waste and the release of these chemicals are often far less regulated than nuclear waste.
In terms of nuclear waste disasters, the Marshall Islands is the most significant example (that I know of) of a nuclear waste problem that the US needs to step up and address. [0]
[0] https://www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-te...
I not saying that nuclear is the future, but it is a important amd relativly safe source that we can use as stop gap to limit our use of more dangerous power sources while we fight global warming and find safer and cleaner sources of energy. We need to consider all of the risks of our power sources and not spread misinformation and fear.
I would argue that the effects on US soil, the leaks into the Columbia river from Washington are incomparable to the Marshall Islands. But I feel we may be moving the goal posts in our discussion.
I think you mean "terribly inflexible regulations".
In the US a Democrat at the federal level who doesn’t support green energy will be sentenced to the gas chambers. That’s more than half of the House of Representatives and nearly half of the Senate. It has a strong chance of being the next presidency as well. If nuclear were actually supported by green energy people there would be a new plant going up in every state.
In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics.
But the green energy people are an easy punching bag for the nuclear advocates who are simply unwilling to face up to the reality of why nuclear keeps failing to take off.