I did not berated you, I corrected you. If being corrected feel like being berated to you, maybe fact check yourself before commenting
Waryle
joined 1 year ago
I brush it off because nuclear has exactly the same problem. Worse, actually. We know what happens when you build solar, wind, and storage: on average, things get built on time and in budget. We also know what happens when we build nuclear: it doubles its schedule and budget and makes companies go bankrupt. One is way easier to scale up than the other.
No, just no.
We know what happens when we build nuclear:
- We invest 140 billion.
- We build more than two reactors a year for 25 years.
- By building up skills and an industry with projects, you can even put 1 plant and 4 reactors in the same place in less than 7 years from a vacant lot (Blayais power plant) .
- We decarbonize almost all of its electricity in two decades.
- It runs smoothly for more than 50 years.
- You don’t rely on fossils and the dictatorships that sit on it anymore.
- We become the biggest electricity exporter of Europe for decades, and the biggest of the world most of those years too
It's called France.
We also know what happens when we want to do without nuclear when we don't have hydro-electricity:
- We invest two trillion of euros.
- 25 years later we have 60% renewables, but we're still burning coal and gas.
- so we are still one of the most polluting electricity in Europe
- We're always at least six years away to get out of coal.
- We don't have a date to get out of the gas because we have no idea how we're going to build enough electricity storage to make renewable to work
It's called Germany.
Take this [map] (https://app.electricitymaps.com/map)
- On the top right corner, click on "Country"
- On the bottom left corner, click on "Yearly"
Can you tell me how much green countries do you see which does not rely on hydro and/or nuclear?
The answer is: >!not. A. Single. One. Even after trillions of euros invested in it worldwide, not one country managed to reduce their electricity carbon print without nuclear or hydro.!<
If all the paperwork was done and signed off today, there wouldn't be a single GW of new nuclear produced in the US before 2030. Even optimistic schedules are running up against that limit.
Why this arbitrary date? In five and a half years, there would be no power plant, but if you launch 15 1GW projects in parallel, maybe it will take 15 years to build because of legal recourse as well as a shortage of engineers/technicians because people have been told for 30 years that nuclear is Satan and we want to stop. But after 15 years you have 15GW of nuclear.
But how long before we find a solution for storage? How much will it cost? Is it even possible to store so much energy with our space constraints and physical resources?
The debates and even this thread are filled with "we could totally go 100% renewables with political will and investments". No you could not, that’s called wishful thinking. In reality you can’t force your way through technological innovation by throwing money and gathering political will, or else we would skip renewables and go straight to nuclear fusion.
On thing that money and political will can help with, on the other hand, is to speed up and reducing costs to build nuclear. But somehow, you act like nuclear is inherently too slow to build, before an arbitrary date that you forget conveniently when we're talking about renewable storage. It's called hypocrisy and double standards.
React to demand in minutes? Cute. Because most energy storage works by being pulled by demand directly rather than reacting to it, things change almost instantly.
I just proved that your theory is wrong by bringing up empirical data gathered over a whole country, why do you keep insisting?
France made a record year last year, with 320TWh of nuclear power produced for a total of 434 TWh of electricity, while being the top exporter of electricity of Europe.
I don't know how they got to 1000TWh of nuclear a year, I suspect weed.
In Germany, we've got a location with 47,000 cubic meters: https://www.bge.de/en/asse/
Read your link: 47 000m³ of low and intermediate radioactive waste.
Low radioactive waste is objects (paper, clothing, etc...) which contain a small amount of short-lived radioactivity, and it mostly comes from the medical fields, not nuclear plants, so even if you phase out of nuclear, you'll have to deal with it anyway.
This waste makes up for the vast majority (94% in UK for example) of the nuclear waste produced, and you can just leave it that way a few years, then dispose of it as any other waste.
Intermediate radioactivity waste is irradiated components of nuclear power plants. They are in solid form and do not require any special arrangement to store them as they do not heat up. This includes shorts and long-lived waste and represents only a small part of the volume of radioactive waste produced (4% in UK).
So you're mostly dealing with your medical nuclear waste right here, and you can thank your anti-nuclear folks for blocking most of your infrastructure construction projects to store this kind of waste.
They just need to be scaled up at this point.
"We totally can go to Mars, we have engines, they just need to be scaled up at this point"
Scaling up is almost the entirety of the problem that needs to be solved, you can't just brush it aside like this.
Check my comment that shows the scale of the problem
No traditional power plant can match demand exactly, and large amounts of power are wasted as a result
Absolutely false. Power consumption is very stable and previsible, plants can react in minutes, and the surproduction is small enough to be stored or exported.
The French electricity system operator, RTE, provides all the information on this subject:
That’s some nice fanfic you wrote but I don’t think we should base our real world decisions on your little ideas.
Point the flaws in my logic, debate my ideas, or just leave. Don't waste your time making another reply if you can't keep respectful, I won't bother reading it.
It’s very easy to find this information so I can only assume you’re arguing in bad faith, but regardless, here are a few starting points for your research. You could also maybe just search it yourself instead of wasting my time and yours with your ridiculous example of a single hydroelectric dam.
Asking for sources and data to support a disputed claim is the basis of scientific debate. Becoming aggressive and disrespectful after such a mundane request is much more revealing of who is debating in good faith here.
TLDR : The study does not support the claim made in the title. It just says that it will be economically feasible. When asked about if its physically possible, they just throw some vague techno-solutionism, and even admit that 100% renewable will may never be actually possible
A request must be made to access this article, I highly doubt that you made one and actually read that report, so I won't waste my time either.
This report does not even relate to our debate at all, it theorizes multiple scenarios for 2050, does not tell if it's feasible and how, and none of these scenarios are 100% renewables anyway. This is out of subject.
I'm not going to bother to keep going, it becomes obvious that you just took random studies whose title seemed to support vaguely your points , hoping that I'm as bad-faith as you and I that I won't open them.
Your statements are based on void and you become aggressive when asked for explanations. I take back what I have above: don't bother to answer at all, I'm just going to ignore you from now on.
You know what uses even less fuel and produces even less waste
That's false, solar and wind power consume considerably more resources than nuclear and therefore produce considerably more waste than nuclear power.
What's more, because of their low load factor and intermittency, they require oversized capacity, storage devices and redundancy, further increasing their footprint.
at the same or cheaper cost
Only if you don't account for oversizing the capacity, the storage and redundancy induced by the wide adoption of solar and wind power.
Please provide those "studies and researches" that backup your claim, because a simple calculation shows that the world's largest WWTP, Hongrin-Leman (100GWh in capacity and 480MW in power, over a 90km² basin) contains just 10% of the capacity needed and only 0.7% of the power required for a country like France to last a winter night (~70GW during ~14h of night).
So we'd need “only” 10 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of capacity, but 142 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of power. In other words, we'd need to flood at best 8.5x the surface area of Paris, and at worst the entire surface area of the Île de France department, home to 12 million inhabitants. And that's just for one night without wind (which happens very regularly), assuming we rely on solar and wind power.
Then we need to find enough water and enough energy to pump it to fill the STEP completely in 10 hours of daylight, otherwise we'll have a blackout the following night.
Wind and solar power cannot form the basis of a country's energy production, because they are intermittent energies, and the storage needed to smooth out production is titanic. These energies rely on hydroelectricity, nuclear power and fossil fuels to be viable on a national scale.
The government does not decide for the cost of producing nuclear electricity, which has barely changed that year.
Uranium price has being multiplied by 7 in 2007, and France's electricity, which were 70-80% nuclear at the time, didn't see any increase in price. Uranium price is definitely not driving electricity price, because nuclear use so little resources and fuel, that's one of its main appeal.
And 60+ years of french nuclear produced a 15 meters-wide cube of high level waste. This is what it looks like . Does that looks like some unsolvable issue to you?
This has not being solved. There's not a single country in this world that has managed to not rely on hydro, nuclear, fossils or importations for electricity generation.
Come on, even the comment above it specifically mention waste generated by nuclear power and its management