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Potato Salad posted:...Especially when that graph shows exactly what started happening under recent greenwashing politics in Germany. I really don't get what you are arguing there. Are you saying that the one month where the greens were part of the ruling coalition in 2021 caused that blip? I think you are overestimating the speed of politics massively there. I do agree that turning on all those coal plants is bullshit, and the support for fossil gas was the main reason why I didn't vote for them in the last election. But, I do think that the current rise in coal use is mostly a result of decisions made by the previous government. The current nuclear shutdowns were decided by the Merkel government which was elected on a pro-nuclear platform and kept being supported by all pro-nuclear lobbyists, all pro-nuclear protestors and all pro-nuclear voters. And so was the previous decision that prolonging the life of existing Npps was more important then building newer Npps when there was more pro-nuclear attitudes in the early years. I know it has become fashionable to declare that if the greens would stop protesting against coal digs that would cause the free market to build nuclear plants and stop climate change within a month. Which is the current state of mainstream pro-nuclear "activism". I am kind happy that they haven't shown up itt specifically. Like i have said before, I mostly blame austerity politics for the lovely state of energy generation in Germany. With the Greens being used as a scapegoat, especially since 2014, and people who fall for that being idiots.
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Feb 9, 2023 14:47
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Finding graphs for the investments into renevables and especially nuclear is harder then I thought. Found this one for nuclear subventions, though I am not sure if the source is trustworthy, despite finding it linked from a bundestag summery. "https://green-planet-energy.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2020-09_FOES_Kosten_Atomenergie_Stand_final.pdf" Would you say that the blip at the end means that the current coalition is more pro-nuclear then the previous government? I don't because I believe politics move slower then that, but you seem to disagree.
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Feb 9, 2023 15:00
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It's a simple confusion between "this is the thing we should be doing, it is the best option, it works well with the things we are already doing." and "we expect our world leaders to do the best thing even though we know its been heavily propagandized against and the average person is completely against it due to misinformation." I would say I strongly hoped, but never 'expected'. freezepops posted:More nuclear power does not necessarily mean less greenhouse gas unless you ignore the time it takes to build a plant and when emissions are released. Nuclear power has similar emissions as wind, but a lot of those emissions are in the constructions of the power plant. It is very possible that a mad dash to build nothing but nuclear would actually mean far more CO2 is in the atmosphere than a renewable energy investment if global warming hits a tipping point prior to nuclear power's reduced emissions have had time to make an impact. We may already be past the date where we could spam nukes and save lives. We should probably still have ever tried. Renewables are nowhere near heating NYC through a winter. A ridiculous district nuclear heating system might.
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Feb 9, 2023 15:23
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https://twitter.com/GlenneDrover/status/1626892814884941825 i don't understand australian politics but for some reason south australia is way ahead of the curve, is the same people rolling out those hundred+ megawatthour battery farms
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Feb 20, 2023 23:38
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South Australia does not have any organic power source apart from solar and wind. It does have the world's largest uranium mine but Australia does not have the industrial capacity to build nuclear power stations even if Australia wanted to. Australia is also a relatively rich country so being efficient about capital and ongoing costs is not nearly as necessary as nearly any other country you could name. A surprisingly large chunk of Australian electricity is rooftop solar which would have a crazy cost per kw/hr installed compared to industrial generation but is hidden in housing costs and to a lesser extent government subsidies. South Australia also has the added benefit of being hooked up to a massive dispatchable power supply of the interstate connectors. Western Australia is more interesting as a test case of complete renewables as WA is a standalone grid that has the twin pressures of coal power being an absolute basketcase soon to be discontinued and that gas supply from the North is starting to hit limits on what can be pumped down without expanding the pipeline.
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Feb 21, 2023 09:03
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MightyBigMinus posted:https://twitter.com/GlenneDrover/status/1626892814884941825 Well that's neat but looking at the chart, it's mostly imports and natural gas the moment the sun isn't shining at peak. I could put a single solar panel on my balcony and also be 100% renewable.
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Feb 21, 2023 11:01
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Was there ever any exploration into using green energy to synthesize gas as a store of energy? If you could source the carbon from the air/capture and recycle it then burning the fuel would only cycle carbon in the air, not increase it, making it carbon neutral. Of course it would depend on being able to source carbon from the air and an efficient-enough process for synthesizing the gas so I have no idea if it's viable. But I also don't think I've even heard of anyone trying it so I'm curious.
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Feb 21, 2023 12:00
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Phigs posted:Was there ever any exploration into using green energy to synthesize gas as a store of energy? If you could source the carbon from the air/capture and recycle it then burning the fuel would only cycle carbon in the air, not increase it, making it carbon neutral. Of course it would depend on being able to source carbon from the air and an efficient-enough process for synthesizing the gas so I have no idea if it's viable. But I also don't think I've even heard of anyone trying it so I'm curious. Direct Air Capture (actually seawater I think is the easier to be electrically efficient way to collect carbon from the atmosphere although scale/filtration is huge issue and area of ongoing research) is what you are talking about. The USN looked at using that method to create jet fuel from (surplus) nuclear power and estimated a cost per liter of roughly equivalent to buying fuel and shipping it to the aircraft carriers. It didn't really do anything for the logistics as carriers need resupply every few days anyway for weapons, food and parts. So for that use, a greener way to have fuel at the cost of a more complex aircraft carrier with even more people on it. For commercial applications, one issue is these plants are still expensive enough that you want to run at full capacity, not cycle up and down with availability of non-dispatchable power.
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Feb 21, 2023 12:37
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Phigs posted:Was there ever any exploration into using green energy to synthesize gas as a store of energy? If you could source the carbon from the air/capture and recycle it then burning the fuel would only cycle carbon in the air, not increase it, making it carbon neutral. Of course it would depend on being able to source carbon from the air and an efficient-enough process for synthesizing the gas so I have no idea if it's viable. But I also don't think I've even heard of anyone trying it so I'm curious. There was some research about that even experimental facilities. But, it is somewhere near fusion on the readiness scale. Many people have bad feelings about that because it was being hyped a lot by the silver bullet crowd who were arguing that no other climate action is needed. Though they seem to have moved on. Having plants suck the carbon out of the atmosphere and harvesting them and turning them into syn-gas with green energy makes more sense. Sadly that sector is a hotbed of greenwashing scams, where you use fossil fuel to generate "carbon neutral" biofuel. On the other hand the technologies will have to be developed anyway, because it can provide gas for the industrial processes where it is not replaceable by electrical energy.
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Feb 21, 2023 12:59
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its wayyyyyy beyond fusion because you can do it with basically off-the-shelf equipment right now, today first you buy the solar/wind power to run the machines (~$25/MWh) then you buy the electrolizer to make the hydrogen (~$4/kg) then you buy/make the co2 scrubber, say you license one from climeworks (~$500/tonne) then you run them through some standard industrial chemical poo poo (~50% efficient?) and voila, you've made e-methane I don't actually know how to do that resulting math but my understanding is it comes out somewhere in the vicinity of "5 - 10x the cost of fossil gas" like, if we can get wind/solar down to $15 and electrolizers down to $2 and co2 capture down to $100 and efficiency up and up.... then it still won't really work unless we ban/tax/bomb natrual gas production
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Feb 21, 2023 14:58
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China are already doing massive quantities of coal to methanol conversion. It's reached an extremely mature stage with widespread thermal application. But for E-fuels from renewable energy, the bottleneck is the intermediate reaction that creates the feedstock, either hydrogen or carbon monoxide. There are a lot of companies trying to do this with electrolysis but it's still expensive. There was a report from a couple of years ago about it which is quite interesting: https://www.irena.org/publications/2021/Jan/Innovation-Outlook-Renewable-Methanol
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Feb 22, 2023 14:15
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Interesting article on using boreholes to permanently store nuclear waste. Since it's using off the shelf oil&gas technology, it's cheaper and we know it works. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/could-deep-boreholes-solve-our-nuclear-waste-problem/ As always the devil is in the details but it looks like they're doing a test to find out.
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Feb 27, 2023 19:10
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Itll give the oil and gas guys something to do when we destroy their jobs so sure why not dig a
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Feb 27, 2023 19:26
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What I don't understand is why the waste needs to be retrievable for 50 years. The whole point of burying it in a deep loving hole is so it stays there.
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Feb 27, 2023 19:59
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Harold Fjord posted:Itll give the oil and gas guys something to do when we destroy their jobs so sure why not dig a It'll also give them an incentive to not do it very well, not sure I'm a fan of the plan, why not just reprocess?
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Feb 27, 2023 20:02
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mobby_6kl posted:As always the devil is in the details but it looks like they're doing a test to find out.
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Feb 27, 2023 20:02
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The Construction Physics blog (which is generally pretty great) has a three-parter on why nuclear plant costs have risen so much: https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-economies-of https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction-370 https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction-c3c
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Feb 27, 2023 20:40
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Jows posted:What I don't understand is why the waste needs to be retrievable for 50 years. The whole point of burying it in a deep loving hole is so it stays there. That's the ideal outcome, but these are immense engineering projects with a lot of uncertainties, and at the end of the day there's always going to be some risk that the site is deemed unusable after you've already started loading it with waste.
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Feb 27, 2023 20:40
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What’s the blocker to using high level waste in breeder reactors? Wiki says that they can be used to extract energy from current waste products. I get proliferation concerns but for US and other members of the nuclear club, that cat is already out of the bag. Is it just that it is cheaper to bury the stuff or are there still technical hurdles?
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Feb 28, 2023 05:05
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Capt.Whorebags posted:What’s the blocker to using high level waste in breeder reactors? Wiki says that they can be used to extract energy from current waste products. Breeder reactors are money sinks, even for nuke plants, on top of proliferation concerns.
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Feb 28, 2023 05:19
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They're money sinks since the technology hasn't been pursued that dilligently (except by Russia) and hasn't had the chance to mature. And that is not happening because they're too expensive, so basically catch 22. I don't rate proliferation as a real concern here, it's really about the money and no incentive for developing the technology.
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Feb 28, 2023 05:40
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Phanatic posted:The Construction Physics blog (which is generally pretty great) has a three-parter on why nuclear plant costs have risen so much: Just fyi I think the first link was supposed to be https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction Still was an interesting read though
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Feb 28, 2023 13:46
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man imagine in like the ~2200s when there's dozens of hundred+ year old nuke plants in the intertidal zone or where the water table moved so far in the entire structure crumbles tide comes in, tide goes out, everything (left, lol) gets cancer, you can't explain that!
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Feb 28, 2023 15:34
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The solution to pollution is dilution
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Feb 28, 2023 15:51
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MightyBigMinus posted:man imagine in like the ~2200s when there's dozens of hundred+ year old nuke plants in the intertidal zone or where the water table moved so far in the entire structure crumbles Meanwhile in the early 2100s a news retrospective runs on the time when the coal ash pond retaining walls collapsed from negligence and neglect, poisoning the water table of entire parts of certain states. No one could have foreseen this terrible tragedy.
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Feb 28, 2023 16:16
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MightyBigMinus posted:man imagine in like the ~2200s when there's dozens of hundred+ year old nuke plants in the intertidal zone or where the water table moved so far in the entire structure crumbles What is this in responce to? It seems very low effort. Does not "Human Civilization" have long term effects just from the billions of tonnes of concrete and steel we use to build our cities? The idea that some particularly bit of infrastructure 180+ years from now is going to be a problem applies equally to hydroelectric dams as rivers move and weather patterns change and so on.
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Feb 28, 2023 16:34
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Actually dams will be fine since the rivers feeding their reservoirs will have dried up due to the effects of carbon emissions from power generation known even a hundred years ago
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Feb 28, 2023 16:47
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Raenir Salazar posted:What is this in responce to? It seems very low effort. Does not "Human Civilization" have long term effects just from the billions of tonnes of concrete and steel we use to build our cities? The idea that some particularly bit of infrastructure 180+ years from now is going to be a problem applies equally to hydroelectric dams as rivers move and weather patterns change and so on. Humanity is actually one big game of cities skylines and at some point soon it's gonna go afk while putting the game speed on fastest. 200 years without infrastructure improvements here we go!
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Feb 28, 2023 17:19
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His Divine Shadow posted:They're money sinks since the technology hasn't been pursued that dilligently (except by Russia) and hasn't had the chance to mature. And that is not happening because they're too expensive, so basically catch 22. So again, if we try to solve carbon emissions/energy transition, and also generate shareholder returns, we’re turbofucked. (Edit: not criticising poster, just capitalism in general) Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Feb 28, 2023 |
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Feb 28, 2023 21:24
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I don't think they're endorsing it. I think they're just explaining why the technology hasn't matured as fast as it could in our current political and economic context.
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Feb 28, 2023 21:45
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Epic High Five posted:Actually dams will be fine since the rivers feeding their reservoirs will have dried up due to the effects of carbon emissions from power generation known even a hundred years ago "And here the Ancients built their Great Wall, likely to keep those from the feared, "Fresno" from entering their lands."
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Mar 1, 2023 06:13
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It's not so much that they care about the environment, it's just that they hate people and want them to die: https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2023-02-27/norway-protests-target-wind-farm-on-land-used-by-herders
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Mar 1, 2023 16:45
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Phanatic posted:It's not so much that they care about the environment, it's just that they hate people and want them to die: Who're the orgs pursuing this angle? The article refers to "Young Friends of The Earth Norway and the Norwegian Sami Association’s youth council NSR-Nuorat," but I don't know enough to evaluate either.
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Mar 2, 2023 09:09
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Discendo Vox posted:Who're the orgs pursuing this angle? The article refers to "Young Friends of The Earth Norway and the Norwegian Sami Association’s youth council NSR-Nuorat," but I don't know enough to evaluate either. Greta and friends. Phanatic posted:It's not so much that they care about the environment, it's just that they hate people and want them to die: While I agree there are a lot in the green movement with the desire you describe. Social performance and native lands is a real issue that is not going to go away just by steamrolling the locals with centralized edicts - whether it is wind or a big road project or some mine. It will eventually come back to bite. One of the big issues that wind always has had just handwaved away by proponents is the obvious opposition that people would have to vast tracts of land being within visual or hearing distance of a windmill. It is part of why offshore wind is so attractive (as well as generally more continuous wind).
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Mar 2, 2023 09:28
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Does anyone know what's up with France? The nuclear output is like 10GW down and they're importing basically that amount instead now.
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Mar 8, 2023 10:32
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There are strikes all over the country to protest retirement age increase, including at EDF. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-nuclear-output-hit-by-strike-edf-2023-03-04/
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Mar 8, 2023 12:04
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freezepops posted:More nuclear power does not necessarily mean less greenhouse gas unless you ignore the time it takes to build a plant and when emissions are released. Nuclear power has similar emissions as wind, but a lot of those emissions are in the constructions of the power plant. It is very possible that a mad dash to build nothing but nuclear would actually mean far more CO2 is in the atmosphere than a renewable energy investment if global warming hits a tipping point prior to nuclear power's reduced emissions have had time to make an impact. This is a point I've not seen discussed here or anywhere else a lot, but I did some basic research a few years ago about this and a basic problem is that a nuclear plant, from decision to emission net zero point, needs roughly 30 to 40 years to actually become beneficial to the environment. 15 to 20 years build time plus 10 to 20 years of production. If you consider that in carbon intensive countries like china, german, the US etc. this would mean roughly 20 years of unmitigated high emissions while the plant is built, the emission savings per power unit are looking way less favorable. This is of course not proper on a plant level, but if you look at an entire systems transformation, it's pretty bad. Renewables need roughly 5 years in bureaucratic nightmare countries like here (germany) for the construction, solar need way less, but a wind turbine is energy positive in less than 9 months. Overall building a large amount of renewables to replace baseload fossils seems way more efficient and cheap. I'm not ideologically against nuclear, but especially in recent years I've found less and less actually convincing arguments why they are preferential to renewables in 90% of the use cases for new production. As an aside, france found new technical issues during maintenance of multiple power plants which will increase maintenance time further. https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/u...d0-7ce0023f8bb4
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Mar 9, 2023 09:22
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Serious question with no snark: do those numbers change with a standardized vs bespoke design? If you’re able to just throw down a proven design for the 5th/50th/500th reactor, do you come out better because you’re not constantly reworking it?
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Mar 9, 2023 09:47
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goatsestretchgoals posted:Serious question with no snark: do those numbers change with a standardized vs bespoke design? If you’re able to just throw down a proven design for the 5th/50th/500th reactor, do you come out better because you’re not constantly reworking it? I'm not in any way qualified to give a proper answer to this but standardization almost always leads to quicker and more efficient build times. Though I vaguely recall reading somewhere recently that for some reason standardization made nuclear plants more expensive in history? Found this article that touches on it a bit, tldr seems to be that the unique local requirement for each plant take on the lion's share of construction costs. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/
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Mar 9, 2023 10:02
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that Vogtle 3 has finally reached initial criticality and may be power generating in May-June 2023, only 7 years late and $16 billion over budget than a projected 7 year construction time for $14 billion (so double budget and double construction time). https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsvogtle-unit-3-achieves-criticality-10661953
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Mar 9, 2023 14:17
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