Not just Germans btw. Danes are the same. Being anti-nuclear is considered a standard leftist view here and the fight against nuclear power was considere one of the 1980's environmental movement's greatest wins. Being pro-nuclear is coded as a right-wing message around here that you mostly have to trigger the left.
Nuclear power is literally more expensive at this point than renewables. No, you can't keep using the shitty, cracking, deadly waste producing nuclear plants of the past, not even the power companies want that, and building new ones takes over 10 years, not counting all the planning and beaurocracy you have to go through. And to become CO2 neutral after all the excavation, construction and mining necessary takes another decade. Nuclear power plants are MASSIVE engineering undertakings.
Meanwhile modern windmills can be mass-produced right now and take like 5 years depending on their placement to be both cost and CO2 neutral. After that it's LITERALLY free energy for a good 30 years. And they become cheaper and bigger and more efficient every single year. And btw if you ever pull out an article or a calculation that is older than a year for any comparison, you are dealing with OLD data. They have become far more efficient and flexible in their placement and will likely continue to do so.
The anti-nuclear protests were completely right. Stop playing the people who wanted a safer world without nuclear waste and incidents against the modern climate movement.
TL;DR: Wheels on windmill go brrrr, nuclear power is not a short term solution and never has been.
Nuclear and renewables are complementary technologies, renewables are a much more volatile source of energy. Also, when people say renewables are cheaper they're not counting the total lifecycle of things like wndmills and solar panels.
Jesus Christ you're so uneducated it's ridiculous.
So you've got a point nuclear power is considerably more expensive than renewables but that was never the argument. It has always been more expensive than renewables, who possibly thought it wasn't, that's literally never not been the case, even 30 years ago.
The reason to use nuclear power is a base load. Renewables cannot generate the necessary level of energy demand in their entirety with the reliability that we need. It's called base load Google it.
So you need something to provide constant reliable sources of energy, so you've got two options either we build a Dyson sphere and have solar panels all over it, or we have nuclear power stations. And I think you'll agree that a dysons sphere might be a bit beyond us at this point.
Eh. Fission is in fact a terrible power source. Eternally deadly leftovers, critical failures have the potential to devastate whole regions of the planet for decades or more.
Mining and refining the fuel is similarly harmful to the environment as processing coal.
It is also not much cheaper than to go for the actually best solution called renewables. Wind and solar are both reasonably cheap at this point, and for example China was recently in my news feed for building an insane amount of solar in the last year (something like more than the U.S. in the last 10 years combined).
Obviously this is the correct choice for the future, likely paired with fusion power, which when it eventually works, comes with all the advantages of nuclear fission and none of its drawbacks or dangers.
Meanwhile Germany has more than twice the renewables than the US (and still more than their renewables and nuclear combined), and is set to quit coal entirely by 2038. Still too slow, but how about instead of shilling the dangerous¹ technology that is nuclear, you start pointing fingers at those doing next to nothing to change for the better?
¹ not necessarily during regular operations to regular people. But since Germany doesn't have uranium it would introduce foreign dependencies, nuclear power plants are high value targets both for terrorism and state warfare, as seen in Ukraine. There is no safe way to store nuclear waste long-term. Mining of uranium is furthermore massively harmful to workers and the environment.
The UK hit zero coal in 2020 without even trying. 2038 is actually a piss take. If you used nuclear like France and China you would be able to do it much sooner lol.
Oh, it's bullshit, don't get me wrong. But nuclear is not changing that, the UK has less than 10% as well.
Besides, nuclear power station take a minimum of 20 years to construct, so even if we reversed course, we wouldn't have them running until the 40s. Contrast that with less than 5 for most renewables. Nuclear is also really expensive, so we could instead invest the money into a better and more flexible grid.
Nuclear is not the answer to climate change. Let existing plants run until coal is gone, then shut them off in favor of renewables.
What barrels ? Nuclear waste is stored in massive concrete and steel cylinders and burried deep underground. It's not the green goo inside barrels everyone seems to imagine
Nuclear plants are uneconomical and produce nuclear trash we dont have the storage for. It was the best decision we could do shutting them down. Lemmy and reddit are so far into nuclear power propaganda they dont even see the actual mistake we made. It was not to shut down nuclear. It was stopping investing in our very successful solar tech.
Also, coal production has been doing nothing than falling since we made the switch. Renewables have been the major energy source 2023, for the first time, and are only prosepected to grow, while Germany is transitioning away from coal. One of the main reasons for the increase in coal in 2022 were the outages of frech nuclear plants...
After coal-fired power plants in Germany ramped up their production in 2022 due to outages of French nuclear power plants and distortions in the electricity market caused by the war in Ukraine, their share in electricity production fell significantly in 2023. Due to the drop in exports of coal-fired power and this years favorable wind conditions, electricity generation from coal-fired power plants in November 2023 was 27% below the generation in November 2022.
You can look at the graphs here to see how coal is already back to where it was pre-shutdown.
And as can be seen here, Germany has been able to cover their baseload only with renewables more and more. This is expected to increase, as renewables are growing and battery technology advances.
Germany is still entirely dependent on Russian LNG, so not sure what you're talking about there. Also, seems like you conveniently forgot that Germany imports electricity from France where most electricity production is done using nuclear power
And while Germany has been an importer from France in general, this switched in 2022 when France nuclear reactors had to be shut down due to a record warm summer, showing how nuclear is not fit to withhold the stresses of the climate crisis upon us.
While up to a dozen EU countries have received Russian LNG since February 2022, the key importers remain Belgium, Spain, and France, which together account for 88 percent of the EU’s Russian LNG imports during the last 10 months.
Last summer France imported large amounts of electricity from neighbours. Dry hot summer make rivers run dry which causes reactor shutdowns while demand is high because of airco. More solar in the french mix woild have filled the gap.
There is no 1 single magic bullet in the energy situation. It's an energy mix and always will be a mix. Nuclear is not the one magic fix it all today solution.
Nobody is advocating for any silver bullet here. I think there needs to be an energy mix from different sources. Nuclear and renewables complement each other. It's also worth noting that China is already experimenting with thorium reactors that use molten salt for coolant and don't need water.
All the comments about the nuclear reactor disasters remind me of a Vsauce video called Risk. . Michael talks about a hypothetical world where "one cigarette pack out of every eighteen thousand seven hundred and fifty contains a single cigarette laced with dynamite that, when lit, violently explodes, blowing the user's head off. People would be loudly and messily losing their heads every day all over the world but in that imaginary universe the same number of people would die every day because of smoking that already do".
Nuclear disasters are messy, but affect less people than coal plants operating normally.
I read the first few comments thinking they were being sarcastic, but reading further they genuinely seem to view...whatever the heck this guy is doing...as some kind of heroic stand against wokeness or something. What.
Edit: Also, if I were to include a content warning about reading the comments, what do you think would be a good thing to warn for specifically? Cause they seem to be hating on pretty much everything LGBT related.
What bullshit. A stable man isn't effected by another mans sexual preference. Allowing that which you disagree with to control your mental state is the definition of powerlessness. If you looked at this and thought it was humor you are being molded into an asshat... Oh, i see I am on the weak ass men sub here, the echo chamber to pound your gorrila chests...
Share Funny Videos, Images, Memes, Quotes and more
Oldest
This magazine is not receiving updates (last activity 0 day(s) ago). Subscribe to start receiving updates.