Greta is very scientifically minded and rational, unlike how the media likes to portray her. They use the emotional sound bites and almost never show her referring to paper after paper.
To those of you who propose 100% renewables + storage. In cases with no access to hydro power. How much energy storage do you need? How does it scale with production/consumption? What about a system with 100TWh yearly production/consumption?
EVs with VTG. Problem solved. More importantly, energy production (solar plus wind) and storage (batteries) are completely decentralized, which is a huge security improvement for the grid. It amazes me that a platform that is decentralized doesn't beat the drum for the same for energy production and storage.
Is there any more in-depth analysis to show how many EVs would be needed to make this feasible, how this would work with time of day use of power from commutes vs generation from solar power, how long the grid could stay powered this way, impact on consumers range, etc? I think the concept seems simple at first but would it actually be resiliant relying on just EV batteries? A cloudy week could see everyone run out of power, for example.
Normally I'm not a "lesser of two evils" type, but nuclear is such an immensely lesser evil compared to coal and oil that it's insane people are still against it.
I spoke with a far left friend of mine about this. His position essentially boiled down to the risk of a massive nuclear disaster outweighed the benefits. I said what about the known disastrous consequences of coal and oil? Didn't really have a response to that. It doesn't make sense to me. I'll roll those dice and take the .00001% chance risk or whatever.
Yeah, nuclear is to fossil fuels as planes are to cars, safety wise. Sure it's a huge deal when an accident occurs, but that's because accidents are drastically more rare.
Nuclear is fantastic and would have been even more fantastic 30 years ago. But it's 2023 and renewables are getting better every day. There's just no real reason to not invest primarily in green energy sources, especially when the track record on nuclear waste management is abysmal. People will say "oh but the resources, oh but the storage, oh but the blah blah blah". We act like these things can't be done, but they are being done all over the place. While the US argues about whether solar is viable, China has almost produced more solar panels in a year than the US has ever produced. And they are planning to try and deliver to other countries with less productive capacity as well.
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, "It's not as bad as a nuclear disaster" isn't exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It's not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
I mean it's not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn't 100% safe or risk-free, but it's hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn't be discounted.
The problem is its potential for harm. And I don't mean meltdown. Storage is the problem that doesn't seem to have strong solutions right now. And the potential for them to make a mistake and store the waste improperly is pretty catastrophic.
"Nuclear waste" sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.
You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I'm not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should've prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with "ugly windmills" or "solar farms" or "dangerous nuclear plants."
It's all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could've halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we're still arguing about this.
At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We're too evil to survive.
Yea both are horrible. But we can get off fossil fuels and walk away. We can't with nuclear. It'll always be with us and doesn't solve that we need fossil fuel for other things.
Jets and ships are still going to need fossil fuels.
Which is why I think the best thing we could be doing right now is focusing on improving how energy is store. With the right advancement we could solve a lot of these problems with the right battery.
By not picking, you are picking fossil fuels. Because we can't fully replace everything with solar/wind yet, and fossil fuels are already being burned as we speak.
Except that powering the world with nuclear would require thousands of reactors and so much more disasters. This doesn't even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.
It also doesn’t help that people got brainwashed that solar energy and heat pumps will solve all our problems. I don’t have enough space to install so many solar panels to provide power to heat pump during the Eastern European winter and even if I did, ROI will be longer than their expected lifetime. And we still use lead during production, and no one wants to recycle them. These geniuses here import broken solar panels and dump them into the ground and cover them, call that recycling. FFS, nuclear waste disposal is less scary than this uncontrolled shit.
Don't you love it when you get heavily downvoted but no-one is brave enough to challenge your point of view?
I mostly agree with you. Solar is good if you own a house, with a roof and have thousands in disposable cash to invest, but that's not most people.
Heat pumps can't be run on your solar power alone and if your house isn't well insulated, they can be extremely inefficient, ending up costing you substantially more than sticking with gas or oil. And that's not getting in to the other short comings of heat pumps which I believe is a separate debate.
As many people in this thread have said, the best time to invest in nuclear was thirty years ago, but the next best time is now. Give us tonnes of cheap, carbon free electricity to throw in to a heat pump and then they make sense.
8 years to build, not 30. Instead we are building many many more coal and gas plants. What a terrific alternative. Fallacy of renewables without storage is done. It’s never going to happen.
Even if you discard everything else, this section seems particularly relevant:
The long lead times for construction that invalidate nuclear power as a way of mitigating climate change was a point recognized in 2009 by the body whose mission is to promote the use of nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Nuclear power is not a near-term solution to the challenge of climate change,” writes Sharon Squassoni in the IAEA bulletin. “The need to immediately and dramatically reduce carbon emissions calls for approaches that can be implemented more quickly than building nuclear reactors.”
Wealer from Berlin's Technical University, along with numerous other energy experts, sees takes a different view.
"The contribution of nuclear energy is viewed too optimistically," he said. "In reality, [power plant] construction times are too long and the costs too high to have a noticeable effect on climate change. It takes too long for nuclear energy to become available."
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, agrees.
"Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build," he said. "When you factor it all in, you're looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant."
He pointed out that the world needed to get greenhouse gases under control within a decade. "And in the next 10 years, nuclear power won't be able to make a significant contribution," added Schneider.
"We should just go nuclear, renewables aren’t viable" is just the next step in the ever-retreating arguments of climate change denial. First climate change wasn’t real. Then it was real but not man-made. One of the popular tactics today is to push nuclear, because they know how effective it can be at winning over progressives to help with their delaying tactics.
So… climate change deniers want to delay action on climate change. So they push for nuclear because it has long lead times and that forestalls action?
Come on man. That’s a pretty ridiculous theory. Climate change deniers are out there yelling “drill baby drill” not going undercover as nuclear advocates.
because it has long lead times and that forestalls action
I won't profess to know for sure what their reasoning is. I suspect it's a bit of that, and also a bit of hope/expectation that the fossil fuel industry will be well-situated to pivot into nuclear in a way that they can't as easily do with renewables. The more centralised nature and heavy reliance on large-scale resource extraction is very similar. But they actual explanation isn't what's important.
What's important is the simple fact that the biggest climate change deniers are now trying to promote nuclear. If you want to refute the claim, you need to explain that better than I can.
I’m not very familiar with Australian politics or leaders so I can only go with what I see in those articles. First, I don’t see any climate change denial. I see a debate about renewables and nuclear
Why are conservatives against renewables:
They can’t meet our total energy needs.
Wind and solar products are predominantly made in China and conservatives don’t want to feed the Chinese economy or increase dependence (one thing I do know about AU is that Chinese influence is quite heavy and a cause of great concern there).
Why are conservatives pro-nuclear:
It provides baseload capacity that supports wind/solar where they are weak.
It has military applications.
It creates large infrastructure spending within AU and supports mining industry.
They believe it will rankle liberals.
Maybe you have a point that conservatives who are dead-set against renewables will throw nuclear into the conversation as a distraction which they know will not go anywhere. But as an outside observer who doesn’t have built up associations with these characters, I honestly just see rational inclusion of nuclear in the energy mix. This all seems healthy to me.
He's completely right, and I don't get why more people don't see that. As an example, here in Denmark, the leader of the far right populist party is both the one saying climate change would be a good thing since it means warmer summer weather as well as constantly bringing up nuclear energy any single time someone starts talking about climate change. It's honestly so transparent. I used to see the same thing all the time on Reddit, and now I guess it's Lemmy's turn for this shit.
Long lead times against nuclear have bee raised for the last 25 years, if we had just got on with it we would have the capacity by now. Just cause the lead time is in years doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.
Long lead times, cost overruns, producing power at a higher price point than renewables, long run time needed to break even, even longer dismantling times and a still unsolved waste problem. Compared to renewables that we can build right now.
Did you read the quote? 15-20 years, as in decades before 1 nuke plant is built. I agree in that politicians of the past should have led us to a more sustainable and resilient energy future, but we're here now.
Advanced nuclear should still be 100% pursued to try to get those lead times down and to incorporate things like waste recycling, modularity, etc., but the lead time in decades absolutely means nuclear power might not be something worth doing.
The IPCC puts the next 10-20 years as the most important and perilous for getting a hold on climate change. If we wait for that long by not rolling out emission-free power sources, transit modes, or even carbon-free concrete, etc., then we might cross planetary boundaries that we can't come back from.
Nuclear is a safe bet and bet worth pursuing. I would argue that, along with that source from the IAEA, old nuclear is note worth it.
How much concrete does it take to build a nuclear plant? Concrete production is currently 8% of global emissions, so if you have to scale up construction capacity 10x for the next decade, don't you end up destroying the environment with concrete before they are even operational?
As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world's construction capacity.
My counterpoint is that if we had "just got on with it" for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
Wrong, nuclear power plants takes a lot of time to start and nothing can scale up to infinite spending. The solution and cure to climate change is to stop endless consumerism, if you don't do that society will keep demand yet another power plant to power up some useless shit
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.
Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.
So in short:
Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.
It's crazy you got over a hundred down votes, most which are just anti nuclear reactions brainwashed into them by corporations who knew they could make more money off coal, and made nuclear out to be the enemy.
My understanding is that they eventually become unserviceable as they age, because of mechanical/structular reasons, or because the costs of servicing them is so prohibitive that they are unserviceable economically.
That they definitely have a begin, middle, and end, life cycle.
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don't get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
For what I’ve read, it’s beats nuclear tech exists and is ready to be built at scale now. Renewables are intermittent in nature and need energy storage to work at scale.
We don’t have the tech for a grid wide energy storage.
Nuclear power is neither safe nor ecologically sustainable. The waste is immensely toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The model is centralized so wealthy oligarchs own the power source and sell it to everyone else. Better to move toward distributed power generation that isn't massively toxic. Greenpeace must stay anti-nuke.
Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won't have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
They're bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
