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Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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The arguments of Greenpeace against nuclear power have nothing to do with age though. It's too expensive, which takes money away from e.g. wind and solar, with less carbon-free energy in the end for the money spent and more fossil fuels being used as a consequence. And still produces nuclear waste. Just develop batteries, hydrogen and the likes for storage. And ban or tax the use of fossil fuels. This debate is not over yet, not by a long shot, and climate will remain in the news as long as we live, I'm afraid.
Nuclear power isn't expensive. It's launching a cutting-edge industry with a lot of inertia and not giving it the time and means to pay for itself that's expensive.
And don't even get me started on the Levelized Cost of Energy. These studies give a big advantage to renewable energies, since they only take into account the cost of building, maintaining and dismantling a given energy plant.
That's roughly 100% of the cost of a nuclear power plant, whereas most of the cost of solar and wind power will be found in the solutions that need to be put in place to compensate for their lack of controllability, such as redundant power plants, dams and other forms of storage of considerable size, which are therefore never counted in these cost estimates.
At present, we don't even have the technical means to have enough storage to afford 100% wind + solar in a country, so we're completely unable to estimate how much it would actually cost.
The reality is exactly the opposite: France has been producing most of its electricity with nuclear power since the 70s and 80s, and has had its electricity almost entirely decarbonized since the 90s, for a total cost of less than 150 billion euros for the nuclear industry between 1960 and 2010, according to a report by the Cour des Comptes.
Germany, on the other hand, which has been anti-nuclear and pro-renewables for 20 years, with 40% RE, produces 9 times more carbon with its electricity mix.
The entirety of high level radioactivity waste produced by France for 60 years (containing 90%+ of the radioactivity).
You can see the contradiction here: how can we claim that renewable energies are cheaper when we have yet to develop solutions to make them work on a national scale?
We're still a long way from having the technology for batteries that can power entire countries for hours or days on end, and hydrogen means we'll have to oversize our power plants several times over to make up for its inefficiency.
Thanks to French nuclear power, we have proof that it is possible to produce safe, inexpensive nuclear power that can be deployed in two decades. Almost all of France's current nuclear fleet was built between 1970 and 1990, providing 70%-80% of French electricity production for almost 40 years, at a rate of 2 reactors completed per year at a cost of 1 billion per 1000MW unit.
We're still waiting for a working example of a country that runs on wind and solar power without huge hydroelectric capacity or nuclear power for backup.
Why the fuck would they put all their nuclear waste in a cube and leave it by the sea in Marseille. Those french morons.
A bad mouth could argue that it wouldn't make Marseille dirtier
Well, your view is not unbiased, perhaps it's difficult to do here, given the limited amount of writing room. And in a discussion it seems to be obligatory to only mention the parts that are favourable to one's personal outcome, somehow. But still. Even though you seem very convinced on the pros of nuclear, others still beg to differ. Like this research shows. Money remains an important driver of the whole issue, and money being spent on nuclear cannot be spent again on wind turbines or batteries. Unbiased information is difficult to get online however, most websites on the matter have preconceived ideas that they present. Nuclear waste also concerns medium and low level waste, which are a lesser problem, but still a problem in larger quantities. And high nuclear waste remain radioactive longer than homo sapiens has been around, so although the quantity is not a lot, its longevity makes up for it, so it remains quite a problem for which no final solution has been found. As I wrote earlier: the debate is not over just yet, otherwise it would not be newsworthy every time again. Strong opinions on both sides do not make up for it, usually a strong opinion is not backed up by knowledge and facts alone, but also on feelings and emotions, otherwise it would not be a strong opinion. Which makes the discussion more difficult.
I reject your premise.
I agree that we do not have the storage capacity to maintain the supply-shaping model we currently use.
However, we do have all the technological tools necessary to shift to demand-shaping as our primary model for matching supply and demand. Basically, we can move the times that we use most of our power to the times that power is easy to generate.
How?
For example, the typical risk period for a power grid is during winter nights, when people come home and turn on the heat, cook and do their chores, or relax watching their TVs or playing videogames. How can we postpone such a power usage to another time?
We don't.
The most efficient traditional generation comes when we can perfectly flatten out demand curve. When there is no variance, we can meet 100% of our demand with cheap, efficient, baseload generation. When we have some variance, we meet our minimum demand with baseload generators, and everything above that minimum is met with expensive peaker plants.
So, what we have done is provided extremely cheap power to heavy industry (steel production, aluminum smelting, etc) over night, when regular demand is low. This raises our minimum load, and lowers our maximum, but it increases night-time consumption. To meet that with solar requires storing power when it is produced, and releasing it overnight.
But the only reason why we need it overnight is because we drove them to those overnight hours. When we have them run during the day, we don't need to store that power first.
We don't have to shift all of our consumption to daytime hours. We have plenty of excess nuclear generation capacity available for residential needs after we shed those heavy, industrial loads.
The short answer is the fossil fuel industry and those who support it desperately want to encourage any kind of infighting among any and all people concerned with the climate; Greenpeace itself has been funded massively by the oil and coal industries throughout its lifetime specifically to oppose nuclear power. It's news now because as we look towards energy generation over the next 50 years we can either have large amounts of LNG and coal power plants while we pretend there's enough Lithium on Earth to support a renewable-based grid, or we can essentially eliminate 100% of natural gas, coal, and oil-based power plants in the next 15 years and work towards renewable grids with post-lithium power storage over the next 150 years. That latter scenario would nearly eliminate the global coal and natural gas industries, and severely harm the oil industry. So the more 'division' they can sow to delay a decision in either direction, the better it is for them.