Energy Saver

I honestly believe that Putin's goons infiltrated the rest of Europe via the environmentalists, among many other groups. Why else would the Greens be so adamantly against Nuclear, the one power source that is both the safest per petawatt/hour and produces the least emissions, and instead force Europe to import even MORE oil and gas from Russia?

@CorruptUser safer and less emissions than renewables?

@dragonsson Yes. Nuclear power is the safest and cleanest energy source we have. Renewables require has natural gas power plants on standby because their have very inconsistent power output. A passing cloud can take out an entire county's power grid. As such, there are a lot of CO2 emissions associated with renewables, especially since Germany has been relying on coal for energy over the past year.
Secondly, renewables are pretty bad for the habitat. Solar panel farms require A LOT of room, eating away a lot of the already shrinking wildlife habitat. Wind farms also suffer from the same problem, and are also very destructive for big and rare birds. Each year in the UK tens of thousands of bats are killed by wind turbines.
And lastly, every single year, rooftop solar installations kill more people than all nuclear accidents combined, maybe with the exception of Chernobyl, since the death toll for it is a bit speculative. But Chernobyl is the exception, not the rule. If you have to point to an incident that happened nearly 40 years ago at an ancient reactor type caused by the plant personnel bypassing all safety measures and deliberately placing the reactor in a very dangerous condition, then you really don't have much of an argument.

The only obvious solution is that nuclear power ticks absolutely all the checkmarks, and is the absolute best energy source we have, from any point of view.

@Cris It's pretty sad the Fukushima incident was also not caused by anything inevitable, like the tsunami, but just petty greed and negligence. The tsunami merely brought the corruption to daylight for everyone to see. Tepco had been notified of the potentially dangerous flaws at the facility, but to save yens and boost profits, the company ignored any criticism. Backup measures hadn't been tested or maintained for real in years and obvious design issues were never fixed. Even the effectiveness of the embankment had been questioned because all experts knew a tsunami hitting Japan could easily be higher than it. Nothing in the Fukushima disaster was the fault of nuclear power, everything was the fault of businessmen blinded by greed.

@Louhikaarme And despite all that, the grand total fatalities caused by the Fukushima disaster is 0. It's interesting to see how demonized nuclear power is when the worst nuclear accident of this century caused absolutely no fatalities.

@Cris You're exaggerating about the problems with renewables there... but the problems with nuclear have also been greatly exaggerated.

@Draxynnic I'm not exaggerating. You can look up how many birds get hit by wind turbine blades. 1.17m in the US alone, and up to 100,000 in the UK. And even though people like to say "Cats kill more birds than that!", cats only hunt small, common birds like pigeons and swallows. Turbines hit big, rare birds, like eagles. 138,000 birds get killed by solar power in the US every year, with Ivanpah alone incinerating 6000 birds mid air.

80,000 bats get killed by wind turbines in the UK every year.

The Benban Solar Park generates 1650MW of power, and uses up 37sqkm. Turkey Point nuclear power station uses less than a tenth of that space, but generates the same power. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa In Japan uses a fifth of that space and generates almost 5 times more power. It's clear that solar plants use up a lot of space. When Ivanpah was being built, the local turtle population had to be relocated. From what I've seen, those turtles did not survive in the end.

So what exactly am I exaggerating? Any of these things can easily be researched online.

@Draxynnic

Renewables still need to be manufactured, mined, replaced, etc. Everything has costs, but the difference being that nuclear produces so much power that it's basically the same as wind and 1/4th that of solar per petawatt/hr. Source: https://impactful.ninja/energy-sources-with-the-highest-carbon-footprint/

Everything comes at the cost of people dying during transport, construction, mining, etc. When looked at by petawatt/hr it ends up killing far fewer workers than solar or wind.

When nuclear is done safely, the main real advantage of renewables over nuclear is that they don't use much water, which is important in some countries and less so in others. Plus, nuclear waste, but that's more of a political issue than an actual disaster; nothing prevents us from shoving the waste in abandoned mines beyond politicians.

@Cris Nuclear power is not that clean once you factor in all the fossil fuels burned in every step of the process from mining ore to long term waste storage. Also nuclear power is notably unflexible and slow. Shutting down and starting again takes literal weeks and power output can be fine tuned by about 1.5% so it's either always on or always off.

Also, economically viable uranium ores are mostly rare and certainly they wouldn't last long if we tried to go nuclear.

The answer to the renewable conundrum is grid storage, with facilites holding terawatt/hours and acting as standup for renewables. Since batteries operate as packs, a grid storage facility could have some packs in already synchronized idle capacity, transfering their output either to other packs or the grid as clouds pass and winds slow down. And for industrial scale storage we don't need fancy lightweight lithium batteries -just look at molten metal batteries.

@BillBones Proven reserves of uranium ore are sufficient to nuclear power the whole world for a few centuries. Proven reserves of thorium could power the world for millennia.

The best answer, so far as I can see, for the unreliable nature of renewables is vehicle to grid. There are already enough BEVs to store a significant amount of energy. As BEVs proliferate, the storage capacity built into them will become enormous. That enormous storage capacity could be used to feed power into the grid when needed. There are, of course details to be worked, the most obvious one being how much the vehicle owners will be paid for making their vehicles available as grid storage devices.

@westofEden Proven reserves of oil are enough to last for at least 2 centuries at the current rate of consumption. BUT... there is always a BUT... the cost to obtain and process them is so energy onerous that they barely provide a positive energy balance today. Right now there is a ongoing scarcity of fuel oils for the very simple reason that oil refineries are refining heavy oils whsoe content of tar and asphalt is so high that the refineries quickly meet the amount of heavy distitllate they can sell/store/burn -thus they are refining less and less oil and getting less and less fuel oil from it.

Also, as oyu ignroed, uranium roes require a massive amount of fossil fuels to dig, transport, process, transport again, process again, all the way from the ground to long term storage. And that is a process that can't just be electrified, same as long haul freight. And.We.are.Running.Out.Of.Fuel.Oil. Or more exactly, fuel oil is bound to become so expensive that demand would collapse and the economy with it.

We've got to centuries worth of oil... at 200 $ barrel, or maybe 300 $ barrel, all the way to the point where we use more energy to extract it than actually get from burning it.

And uranium ores are no different. You can't get nuclear energy without fossil fuels. Actually, probably we also can't get renewable electricity without fossil fuels neither... because long haul freight already is using electricity where possible (railways) and fossil fuels everywhere else. The whole transportation paradigm of our society is built on easily transportable energy-dense power sources. Batteries are horrendously heavy for their energy storage. Battery airplanes are nonsense. Battery ships are ruinous. Battery semitrucks are bullshit. Battereis barely make sense for light-ish vehicles with short-ish ranges. Cars? Yes, probably. Vans? Might do. Semitrucks? Bullshit. Ships? No please no oh god no. Airplanes...? Seriously, do you know how much would weight the batteries storing the same energy as an ailiner's fuel tank?

@BillBones

Not true. We can extract Uranium from ocean water for about $750/kilo, and there's an effectively unlimited supply of it, but we don't do so because mined uranium is only worth $50/kilo. Each kilo of U235 produces 24GWh of electricity, and you need about 150 kilos of Uranium to produce 1 kilo of U235. So instead of 24GWh being produced for $7500 of uranium, it's $112,500 of uranium. But since 24GWh is worth about $2.4m, it's still a massive win.

@BillBones EROEI on nuclear fuels is extremely high, higher than you can get from even the most easily extracted oil. The Saudis get an energy return on their shallow wells of about ten to one; uranium or thorium offers more than a million times energy per unit mass so rather than a ten to one energy return, a uranium mine might well offer well over ten thousand to one energy return.

You can't mine without using fossil fuels, yet. The whole process CAN be electrified. Electric trains are quite common, and electric trucks, such as the Tesla semi, are becoming available. If batteries ultimately prove unacceptable for long haul, there are always fuel cells using electrolytic hydrogen. Ships are probably better powered by fuel cells suing electrolytic hydrogen than by batteries, but it's electrification either way. Jet engines will happily burn hydrogen. There's nothing standing in the way of electrifying digging and processing.

@BillBones

Not true. We can extract Uranium from ocean water for about $750/kilo, and there's an effectively unlimited supply of it, but we don't do so because mined uranium is only worth $50/kilo. Each kilo of U235 produces 24GWh of electricity, and you need about 150 kilos of Uranium to produce 1 kilo of U235. So instead of 24GWh being produced for $7500 of uranium, it's $112,500 of uranium. But since 24GWh is worth about $2.4m, it's still a massive win.

@dragonsson Actually GreenPeace was supporting a company selling gas, Greenpeace Energy now renamed Green Planet Energy.
Yes, nuclear can be dangerous but it makes really less trashes than renewable, and in terms of emissions... well... look at a nuclear plant, it produces steam.
And we could still re-use the nuclear trashes if we had developed the proper technology but when environmentalists became politics they paid attention to stop nuclear research.

@CorruptUser Wasn't Putin's goons. That information operation probably started when Putin was a child.

@Draxynnic
Putin inherited the goons, but they're his now.

@CorruptUser Generally the problem that the Greens seem to have with Nuclear energy is the nuclear waste it produces, and that if something does go wrong at a nuclear plant it can go horrible wrong. (yes, the chance of a melt down is small but it exists. Of cource, some might be unrealisticly worried about it)

@MrAtoni Constructing a fission reactor is not a fast or cheap process, either.

@MrAtoni

Breeder reactors consume virtually all the waste they produce, and the Thorium reactors being designed CAN'T melt down, but you don't see Greens advocating for those. It's an argument of convenience, nothing more.

@MrAtoni That's what people say, but can it really?
The Chernobyl exclusion zone itself has as much background radiation as your average banana.
youtube.com/watch?v=9DWnjcSo9J0
True we freaked out, and ever since we've been so careful not even astounding levels of corruption, negligence and one of the worst natural catastrophes in recent history could cause enough damages for the neighbors 5 blocks away from the power plant to move.
We put that Uranium waste back where we got it from, underground. If anything Nuclear Waste is better disposed than Uranium Deposits because we choose where to put it.

You know what the worst nuclear tragedy after Chernobyl was? in 1987, Some Brazilian guy spread some radioactive dust in his daughter's room, dust he got from forcefully dismantling an X-Ray machine he stole from an abandoned hospital. 4 people died.
Fukushima hasn't killed anyone yet. There's only reports on one guy maybe getting cancer.

To get your head around how low that number is, consider even after all the efforts of the Green movements across the planet to have new energy and close nuclear,, Nuclear Power plants still generate 30% of the world's Green Energy. 30.000 TW.

world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today.aspx

The largest Dam in history generates 90 TWh and it involved a bunch of human rights violations and irrecoverably lost environment, Same as all of them. The largest wind FARM on earth generates only about 1.5 GW; I've been rising funds for a biomass generator in my city and we estimate it running merely a bunch of Megawatts. An entire city's dumpsterfire can only generate Megawatts. Which is what your average EXPERIMENTAL college Nuclear reactor does.

@CorruptUser Environmentalists have been pissing and moaning about nuclear power since the 1960's when science fiction told them that radiation would turn animals into giant monsters.

@GyreBrillig well... Russia hast nuclear power, and they have the atom bomb. And to what result? Putin is giant monster...

I wish the small, modular nuclear reactors were already in operation widely. They would help a lot of people and nations in Europe. Of course not the nuclear haters Austria and Germany, but others.

And then there's Finland, kicked back in his sauna. Sharpening his knives.

@CorruptUser Calling the Greens Putin-infiltrated because they are against nuclear is quite a wild take. Heck, most of the European nuklear industry is highly dependent on Rosatom. Even more so than the European gas and oil industry is. And nuclear lobby organisations in Europe are literally run by people on the payroll of Rosatom.
Examples: Major mines in Canada and Kasachstan are owned by Rosatom, and Rosatom still provides a lot of the nuclear fuel in Europe. The German re-enrichment plant requires from Rosatom to operate. The French EFT cooperates with Rosatom when building plants. It's a total mess.

And lets not get startet on the safety in case of military conflict. The German plants were never designed to withstand heavy impacts. They also were never retrofitted after 9/11. Too expensive. Not even a smoke machine to obstruct the plants in case of attack.

Even the conservative and neoliberal parties in Germany don't plan to build any nuclear plants. It's all about getting the most out of old plants. For them it's just a culture war thing to have some anti Green talking points after messing up German energy supply big time. The conservatives have been the ruling party for 16 years. Instead of investing nuclear, they had a second nuclear exit that cost the taxpayer billions. One of the many reasons why the topic of new nuclear plants in Germany is soooo dead.

And by now its simply too late anyways. New nuclear plants in Europe take 15 years to build. And that was before Russia's Ukraine invasion, which causes a lot of new problems for European nuclear industry. If you are serious with reducing carbon emissions by 2035, then they simply have nothing to contribute.

Disclaimer: A German Green working in solar. ;)

@Naga Minor corrections:

> And lets not get startet on the safety in case of military conflict.
> The German plants were never designed to withstand heavy impacts.

They were designed to withstand passenger planes (of the era) crashing into them, which I would call a "heavy impact". They certainly were not designed for an outright military attack - and probably never could be, because a systematic military attack can wipe out nearby auxiliary systems until the core's cooling fails.

> Not even a smoke machine to obstruct the plants in case of attack.

The only military equipment needing visible light to aim properly is the one with two legs but no hi-tech helmet/visor. Radar and IR work through usual smoke, and artillery routinely fires at targets they don't have any visual of. Those smoke generators aim at scenarios like 9/11 (manually flown aircraft having one chance at hitting) or Breitscheidplatz (kamikaze truck, preferably a tanker, a la Los Alfaques), not outright warfare.

@JoB It's a minor point, but I would disagree on the plane safety. The first Boeing 747 flew in 1969. The three remaining German nuclear plants were started in 1982 (Emsland, Isar 2, Neckarwestheim 2). They were never designed to withstand a jumbo jet crash, and probably wouldn't. They were certified against a crashing Phantom fighter jet. (See "Gutachterliche Stellungnahme zu den Auswirkungen von Flugzeugunglücken und von gezielten Flugzeugabstürzen auf Atomkraftwerke".)

But you are perfectly right that smoke generators would have been only of limited protective value. To my knowledge, they never got installed. Even though such a system is rather inexpensive. Simply because nobody has been willing to to spend any additional money on German nuclear plants for decades. Just like right now, nobody is willing to pay for the periodic safety review which has now been overdue for 3 years.

And you are perfectly right. Disabling a nuclear power plant and risking a core meltdown is simple with military means. I don't thing you even need a systematic attack. A big enough explosion that breaks the containment and damages the cooling systems should do the trick. And the plants in Germany don't have core catchers to prevent the molten core from reaching and contaminating the phreatic water supplies. Which is one of the reasons why they would probably fail the next periodic safety review anyways.

This is also a nice implicit safety feature of wind turbines and solar: Even if somebody blows them up, they are pretty much non-toxic.

@JoB as an artilleryman a nuclear plant would be an easy target, because much like churches, power plants are map accurate, so you could just take coordinates from any map, punch them into the computer or calculate them using tables and fire away without anyone being even close (but the west don’t operate that way, need eyes on target). But to emphasize, it would be easy to militarily destroy any power plant in the world that isn’t defended.

@Nizzemancer
The saving grace is that an enemy that deliberately fires at a nuclear power plant has to be suicidal. It would be a Pyrrhic victory, since they would not have any use of the land afterwards, and would likely pollute their own as well. Even Russia would not be stupid enough to fire at Ukranian nuclear plants, because the wind would carry the fallout back to Russia - and it would piss off enough countries that they'd probably get a few ICBMs thrown their way as an extra "thank you".

@Eikka More precisely, with the prevailing wind direction being Eastbound, the fallout from destroyed Ukrainian NPPs would first-and-worst hit the parts of Ukraine that Russia claims to be theirs now, then a couple smaller ex-USSR nations, then the South of Russia itself, then the North of China - then going over the Pacific towards the USA and/or essentially dispersing all over the Northern hemisphere. "Pyrrhic" promises to be an understatement there.

@Eikka So you are saying that blowing up nuclear plants is a perfect terror move? I doubt that Putin at this point cares about casualities. Especially if a plant in western Europe would explode. Russia already lost about 120k soldiers, and the Chernobyl death toll is probably less than 60k globally.

We already had a civilian airplane shot down, as well es targeted assasinations in western Europe, without repercussions. Open invasion of Ukraine. Weaponisation of gas supplies and refugees. A blown up gas pipeline. I doubt the Russion regime at this point cares about a nuclear power plant melting down in France because some "totally rogue overzealous patriots couldn't stand the NATO aggression against Russia any longer" or somesuch. They might consider this a rational move if they think this this might not trigger NATO article 5 and would convince more people that Ukraine is not worth the cost.

And that's only Russia. There are enough other actors that might want to do maximal damage to European countries.

@Naga

15 years to build a new plant? Over here, it only takes 5 years, assuming politics don't get in the way. Honestly though we don't need more nuclear plants so much as we need to replace the ones we have. Only 8 Gen-III's in existence? Pathetic.

@CorruptUser Haha. Toshiba, a gigantic Japanese corporation, almost went bankrupt when it tried to participate in the American nuclear power market. Westinghouse Electric Company, through which Toshiba operated in the USA, a very traditional American nuclear plant manufacturer, actually went bankrupt. So, pardon me for not believing you, but until otherwise proven, the US nuclear power plant market is a nonfunctional financial disaster.

Finland's got all the saunas to keep him warm.

@marxistautist I'd join him

@marxistautist Iceland is coming in after enjoying a nice skiing trip... the house is fully lighted with electric lights, the heat inside the house is a nice 18° - 20° C and they are going to have a nice shower after dinner... and sleep with open windows... this is thanks to our great-grandparents who put up hydropower plants "everywhere" for electricity and use of hot water to heat our houses.

By the way... how long have you been "That Age" ? For me it has now been 4 years...

@bubba If you're asking about the 420, since I made the account, so a good 3 weeks.

The problem is not that they're using too much energy. The problem is that, despite being warned about it, renewables are simply not capable of sustaining a country, especially during the winter when people need energy the most. Germany in particular was told not too long ago that relying on Russian gas was a very big mistake, but they laughed in that person's face. And as a result, over the past year Germany has been burning huge amounts of coal to try and keep up.

@Cris That's probably not it. Here in NZ, we're 82% Renewable, with a goal of getting to 100% over the next decade or so.

It can be done if you want to do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_New_Zealand

https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/nz-embracing-renewable-electricity-future

@WarmKiwi well it's easy to do in NZ, with roughly the same size as the UK whilst having only 5 million people versus UK's nearly 67 million. Also, NZ has more mountains (stronger rivers for hydropower) and much better solar coverage.

(comparing UK because I know UK better than Germany, but the gist applies, Germany much more population density than NZ, much less space for windfarms in the sea and so on )

I'm not dissing NZ, well done for heading to 100% renewable, we all should. But it's not that easy in Europe and the only other non-polluting alternative currently is nuclear.

@WarmKiwi Only about 5% of New Zealand's energy comes from solar and wind, which is what we're talking about. Very few countries have access to geothermal energy, and most hydro capacity either has already been used, or would involve huge environmental destruction. This is why, when Germany says they want renewables, they are talking about solar and wind, and so is everyone else. Geothermal and hydroelectric power have been included in renewables only quite recently, because their proponents can point to countries like New Zealand and say "Look! They're getting a massive 82% from renewables! Let's all switch to solar and wind!" So I don't see how you can give New Zealand as an example of why Germany is on the right track, when they only have 5% wind and solar.

@WarmKiwi
Norway even has 100%, as has Iceland, IIRC. Over 100%, in fact, as they export electricity. The difference is one of potential water and geothermal power (easy and cheap) vs population density. Germany does have - and has had for quite a while - somewhere around 5% water power. If Germany had the same population density as Norway or New Zealand, that would cover somewhere between 50% and 100% of their needs, but, thanks to the much higher pop density, they need more electricity than water can reasonably provide. Wind and solar are expensive and take a long time to build up, and of the fossile options, gas is the cleanest. Hence the choice for gas. (Nuclear is impossible due to politics)

'@WarmKiwi' Depends entirely on the country. Solar is great when you always have sun. Useless as a primary solution in scandinavia and many other parts of the world.

@Cris
Just say his name: Trump. Trump warned Germany and they laughed in his face.

@nsinger998 You think that was Trump's original idea? Millions of people have been warning against the dependency on Russian energy for years, well before even the annexation of Crimea.

Besides, Trump has purposefully made himself a clown. It's only polite to laugh at anything a clown says. You'd hurt the clown's feelings otherwise.

probably unpopular oppinion here, but the EU Sucks.

@vlexitrokxh Yeah, the EU sucks in many ways, but it's still a whole lot more useful than the UN, which is utterly useless waste of money for anything but granting nice jobs to washed out politicians.

@Louhikaarme there i'd disagree both useless or worse than useless.

@Louhikaarme The EU only looks like its useful because its newer than the UN. The EU hasn't completely worn out its welcome like the UN has, but it's far more efficient at becoming universally disliked than the UN ever was. Globalists need to realize that you can't make a perfect system with imperfect parts.

@GyreBrillig The USA is also pretty useless. It should split a few ways: Some states should become totally independet countries. Hardcore Democrat states should form a new federation resembling something like the European countries . Hardcore Republic states should form another federation, even more corporate and every man for himself, like Trump wanted. After that folks outside of the USA wouldn't anymore need to wonder when the USA will have another civil war. It's so strange Americans are forced to live in the same country with groups of people they hate the most in the world.

@Louhikaarme Or we could go back to federalism, like we started with. Restrict the federal government to just the minimum core responsibilities that it is supposed to have, and let the states get back to managing most things according to the will of their people. If California wants to have mandatory sex change operations and Vermont wants to have full communism...more power to them. Just leave the rest of us in the normal states alone.

@Dorsai i would add to that "domestic" sovereign tribal nations, of the indigenous people reffered to in treaties have the right to determine their destinities regardless of the history with the united states which would warrent the application of the right of peoples to say go fuck yourself to any would be oppressor.

@vlexitrokxh EU-->Euro-zone, no border checks, no import taxes, etc pretty handy

EU and various governments might talk about saving energy but actually aren't willing to do it. Simply because money, they cut energy use = they cut taxes they gather. Also they cut or turn negative economic growth...

Well, Denmark dont have to deal with -30°C.

@Lidonious Neither does Germany

@InDeathWeReturn

Well, I aint making excuses for Germany. They shut down their Nuclear plants and started burning brown coal like never before. Hard to justify anything they are doing energy-wise.

@Lidonious But you said "Well, Denmark dont have to deal with -30°C" like that excuses Germany in this situation. Denmark at least still hits the double negatives

@InDeathWeReturn

I was just talking about Sweden. Sorry for not making that abundantly clear. We good?

people like to blame this or that on Europe's energy crises but it is not just one thing, it's multiple things the biggest being Europe refusing to import Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine

@AmericanButterfly "refusing to import Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine " that's a good reason