Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla...
by JumpCrisscross on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @09:25AM
(#31002368)
> Nobody is building coal plants
Poland is retrofiting coal plants [1] to send anti-nuke Germany power. And every anti-nuke nation is spinning up new gas turbines.
Voters’ sensitivity to power cuts and price spikes is more vicious than their preference for green energy. This sets the rules of the game plainly: anti-nuke states, invariably, burn more fossil fuels.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-05/poland-sh...
Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla...
by ncmncm on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @11:00PM
(#31010745)
States that shut down nukes burn more fossil fuel after.
States that build new nukes instead of solar and wind also spend on fossil fuel for all the years until their nukes are done. When the nukes are finally done (if ever), they displace a lot less fossil fuel than the solar and wind would have, for the money.
Nobody is building coal plants. They are being shuttered just as fast as renewables can be brought online. Starting nukes steals funding from that for construction projects which will deliver no power for a decade. We burn coal in the meantime. The coal steals even more dollars, the whole time, and the nuke displaces much less coal when it does come online, if ever. Often, it wouldn't.
Money is fungible. Dollars spent on a nuke, and on coal the whole time it is being built, is dollars not spent on wind turbines that displace coal immediately as each comes online, and displace more than the nuke could.
This is a very stark difference, and no amount of logic-chopping can change it.