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Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by throwawaylinux on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @09:17AM (#30162670)
> So first up, the stat is usually fatalities per TwH, since that skews things in Nuclear's direction, not just number of fatalities which would be won by some obscure but not very successful power source.

Why wouldn't it be fatalaties per TWh? It's TWh by the way.

> Second, even with the correct metric, solar and wind are now beating nuclear and projected to continue to do so, widening the gap over time. Comparing the very start of the renewable rollout gives misleading stats as the total power generated is low, and many stats that get quoted on this are more than a decade out of date.

> You can build a wind turbine and ritually sacrifice someone on completion of the build and the fatalities per TwH is infinite as it's not generated any power yet, but with every year of operation it gets lower.

No, wind towers don't have infinite generation, require maintenance and decommissioning, and have been well around for long enough that statistics are quite well available throughout the lifecycle. People have been acting like we've been at the very start of the renewable rollout for the past 30 years, which is longer than the operating life of an average wind turbine.

> Basically the same applies to carbon output, nuclear does well, but wind/solar/nuclear have been basically tied on both metrics unless you're relying on some very, very old data.

Again I've been hearing that renewable energy will solve all this and nothing else can for the past 20 years if not more. Hundreds of nuclear plants could have been built and running in that time now.

Funny thing is it keeps getting repeated. Again, and again, and again, by people who don't understand the fundamentals. Coal was doomed, completely on the way out and destroyed by wind and even solar just a couple of years ago according to these very same anti nuclear people. Today, thermal coal prices have been at record highs for the past year. Coal production is ramping in many countries and global consumption is near record highs and will take many decades to drop. Coal plants are being built with 40 year lifespans.

Where's wind and solar? Still only make up little more than 10% of global electricity generation. Most of the stats for renewables quoted includes hydro which exceeds both of them combined.

Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by Aeolun on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @09:36AM (#30162945)
> Still only make up little more than 10% of global electricity generation

Only? Not very long ago that stat was less than a percent, if it was mentioned at all.

Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by throwawaylinux on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @09:57AM (#30163267)
Only. When was it less than a percent? 20 years ago?
Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by bryanlarsen on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @10:45AM (#30164026)
Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by throwawaylinux on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @05:39PM (#30170587)
That's not going to solve climate change is it? It's not even reducing existing fossil fuel installations let alone providing all new energy requirements. Like a real nuclear effort could have.

And "capacity" of course means something very different when it comes to the wind and solar, which makes that 2/3 not as great as it sounds.

No, the anti-nuclear luddites and conspiracy theorists have no credibility. They are dangerous climate deniers who should not be listened to. The amount of damage they have already caused may well be incalculable.

Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by bryanlarsen on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @08:58PM (#30172560)
They're building 2 nuke plants worth of solar and 1 plant worth of wind in 2022. In a single year. That'd be about $100B if it was nuclear. Given that it takes about 20 years to build a nuke, that means 60 plants being built simultaneously, total cost $2T. That would never happen.
Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by throwawaylinux on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @11:00PM (#30173530)
Who is they? And are you talking about the total generating capacity? 3 nuclear plants per year is laughable compared to what needs to be done. It's barely enough to maintain the greenhouse gas footprint let alone reduce it significantly.

And nuclear would never happen thanks to the anti-nuclear / pro-fossil-fuel "green" lobby. I'm not saying it would, I'm saying it's been killed and along with it the climate by these lunatics.

Big coal is happy though, they're making some astounding profits in the past year or two, wind turbines or no wind turbines.

Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by bryanlarsen on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @07:31AM (#30176619)
That's exactly my question. In this magical world where nuclear power regulations are similar to coal power regulations, who is going to spend the tens of trillions of dollars necessary to partially solve the climate change crisis with nuclear plant?
Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by throwawaylinux on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @07:54PM (#30186845)
The same people who spent money to provide much of France's electricity with nuclear. The ones who built Japanese and American and Russian and Canadian and Chinese nuclear plants.

The rambling anti-nuclear / pro-carbon rhetoric somehow handwaves about how you can't do that and how renewables will magically solve everything. They were wrong 50 years ago, they were wrong 20 years ago, they're wrong now. Nuclear power still provides as much electricity as wind and solar combined. Today.

Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by capitainenemo on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @10:25AM (#30163728)
I've often wondered about those % measurements of electricity generation. Because of high variability balancing wind/solar is apparently tricky since rarely is storage capacity built along with the wind/solar (I kinda wish that subsidies focused on that). So... of that 10%, how much of it is excess power that had to be soaked up wherever a place could be found to dump it, and or rapid ramping down of base generation, causing waste. It's probably a hard thing to calculate though.
Re:Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy by zuminator on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @10:28AM (#30163791)
> No, wind towers don't have infinite generation, require maintenance and decommissioning, and have been well around for long enough that statistics are quite well available throughout the lifecycle.

GP was making the opposite point that 1 (sacrificial death) ÷ 0 (TW generated from a brand new tower) is "infinite" (fatalities per TWh) which would really be undefined, not infinite, but a silly point regardless.