Lobbyists: ‘Hey you know this whole crisis predicated on our reliance on finite, expensive resources from exploited and unstable countries?’
‘What if we did more of that but with slightly different exploited and unstable countries!’
‘Oh and increase our cancer rates by 20-50 times background rates!’
Man Capitalism is just plain evil and anyone supporting it in the 21st century is undeniably a terrible human being.
People do not want to ear this, but depending on your definition of clean, nuclear is as clean as solar, wind and batteries. No source of energy is free from death, carbon emissions and pollution. Solar, wind and batteries requires extensive mining for rare materials and carbon intensive factory production. If we check all factors again nuclear, the number are remarkably similar to solar, wind and batteries.
In a world where gas, oil and coal exists, nuclear must be put on the same category as renewable. We cannot afford to close any nuclear power plant, as closing a nuclear power plant before the last coal power plant is closed, means we are killing people. Numbers do not lie.
Based on a cursory skim through the article, it does not seem to be claiming that nuclear energy is a “dirty energy”.
Cooling towers, as depicted in the thumbnail, are not exclusive to nuclear plants. Coal plants can have cooling towers as well.Was referring no to this recent article cited in the cross posted thread: https://feddit.org/post/27922091
I’m agreed with you. The German Grüne logic doesn’t make much sense to close nuclear before coal.
However for new production, solar and wind makes more fiscal and technological sense than new nuclear.
I think even with solar, wind, tidal and perfect grid storage nuclear is still worth investing in, simply because its a useful technology to have in some space travel applications, in some cases even more useful than fusion power would theoretically be.
Everyone hates getting stuck because it turns out that one tech from half the tech-tree ago was mandatory for progression.
In the current European legislative environment yes. We lack common certification rules, standardized procurement and security standards that make sense. Nuclear in Europe is double the time to build and double the cost of nuclear in Japan. This was not always the case. France was able to decarbonized faster than any other big country in the world thanks to the rapid deployment of his fleet. If we fix that, new nuclear in Europe makes sense. We currently lack the technology and the industrial capacity to not be dependent on China for solar, wind and batteries. Nuclear provide energy when you need it, stabilize the grid and ultimately reduce the price of energy (like you see in Finland). The higher the share of renewable in the European grid, the higher the amount of batteries needed. In general one could argue that the best grid mix for lowering external dependencies and costs is 10% to 20% nuclear, and the rest hydro, solar, wind and batteries. In the north of Europe wind is a great resource, but in the most industrialized part of the south (Italian padana plain) the wind potential is very low, as the solar potential in winter when the fog would cover everything. The amount of connections to make a renewable only grid work on the European level are not trivial nor cheap, and we should do anything we can to promote and regulatory environment where the best tool for the job can be deployed.
Is there sufficient uranium mining in the EU? If not then nuclear doesn’t make the EU energy-independent.
I mean the industrial barriers to developing new nuclear energy are (AFAICT) similar to the industrial barriers to developing the production and Euro-sovereign supply chain for new battery solar and wind generation. Happy to be shown differently if you can point to me some differences that would have nuclear development require fewer physical resources, time or money.
I think some development in Small Modular Reactor tech is promising. Any in-progress or in-operation nuclear should stay the course. But if there was one technology we could choose to either ride fully into or vastly increase development alongside nuclear and other energy sources, the drastic cut in costs for renewables with battery storage seem to me like the silver bullet to the climate crisis everyone was waiting for, we just need our governments to pursue it NOW. In Italy’s particular case, tidal energy seems very suitable due to its massive coast relative to land size.
