While the grandparent post is clearly misguided or willfully misleading, there is a thing in Germany about artificially expensive electricity for domestic users, which subsidizes price cuts for industrial users, and subsidies to the otherwise unprofitable coal industry.
Any fuel price that does not fully cover the externalities of extracting and burning said fuel is artificially low rather than artificially high. Right now, the price of hydrocarbon fuels is artificially low everywhere on Earth. Even in the EU.
> Right now, the price of hydrocarbon fuels is artificially low everywhere on Earth. Even in the EU
Just to provide some context to Americans: the typical price of gasoline in the EU is currently about 1.5 euro/liter, which translates to more than 6.6 dollar/gallon.
> They have no one to blame for that but themselves. Voting for various flavors of globalist socialists election after election and no one has the guts to organize a referendum to exit the EU and put an end to that madness.
There was actually a country that did that. You may have heard of them, they are called the United Kingdom. Their exit from the EU has also been known as an absolutely unmitigated disaster, causing them endless amounts of losses for essentially zero benefits.
Billions of people can't afford the effects of artificially cheap energy. Just make everyone pay a tax to clean up the pollution whatever they're making is causing.
> What's disastrous is that millions of people can't afford artificially expensive energy to heat their homes and commute to work.
Do you think it would be more affordable to relocate some populations and rebuild a few cities after floodings, droughts, famines and wildfires caused by that cheaper fossil energy? 'Artificial' depends on your definition of who is paying, and when.
The people of Madagascar would probably contend both "when" and "if", but they don't have time to discuss climate change, they are busy trying to find food.
Closer home, in California, there are 3000+ families who don't need affordable heating anymore, their home burned down due to climate-change related wildfires just this year.
Not going to stop you in whatever you're doing, but ironically socialists tend to dislike the EU because it is primarily a common market. The reason most of the EU's leftists don't support a Brexit-style exit is that it's economic and geopolitical suicide unless your country's economy is already fully self-sufficient (i.e. if all imports and exports were shut down the country would still flourish).
Also socialists tend to be against globalization (i.e. creating a unified global market) because it strengthens multi-national corporations, which are harder to reign in than local companies (see Apple, Google and Facebook preferring to pay EU fines rather than sticking to the regulations meant to rein them in).
But you didn't say they support globalization, of course, you said they support globalism, which just incidentally happens to be a right-wing dogwhistle for the Jewish conspiracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalism
But I'm sure that's entirely accidental.
EDIT: Interesting. Not complaining but it's curious to see my comments go from slowly increasing positive scores to max negative. HN voting is certainly following interesting patterns and not at all in line with its own guidelines (obviously).
Coal, oil and nuclear received gigantic subsidies and reseacrh funding over the course of five or more decades. The support given to renewables is laughable in comparison.
Gas is a bridging technology which will facilitate industrialized economies' transitions to carbon-neutral electricity generation. It should be treated as such in its own right.
The gas infrastructure currently deployed is already far sufficient to serve that purpose. It is a good argument for not tearing it down, but not for building more. Conflating these two has been a great success by the fossil fuel industry.
> Silvia Pastorelli explained that companies “have been consistently over-estimating the need for gas and basically, ENTSOG members have received something like, just short of 90% of the EU’s gas infrastructure subsidies which is a lot of money, and the fact that they basically can decide gives them lots of power.”
> But according to Global Energy Monitor’s (GEM) report, ‘Gas at a Crossroads‘, the EU already has a large excess of gas infrastructure. The EU gas import capacity is nearly twice as high as EU gas consumption – according to the report, “The utilization rate in 2018 was ~60%, with ~40% spare capacity.” And GEM’s survey found €117 bn in new EU gas projects are in development, including €52 bn for gas pipelines, €12 billion for LNG import terminals, and €53 bn for gas-fired power stations.
In some European countries, the gas infrastructure currently deployed is probably sufficient to support the transition to green energy. In others - generally poorer Eastern European ones that are currently dependent on coal - it really isn't. The controversy is over whether the EU and those countries' governments should help change that.
Which is exactly what's gonna happen to the permafrost in Siberia, yet that's apparently "good" for Russia? Why wouldn't it also be good for the US in Alaska?
Or could it rather be that this "Climate change good for Russia!" talk is just the same old American jingoism merely adopting modern environmentalism?
Why would Russia be the only country for which climate change is "good"?
Sure, except for all the flooding, forest fires, droughts, etc.
Climate change doesn't simply mean some areas get warmer. Climate change means the entire climate system changes. Air streams and water currents shift, ground water evaporates or rises, and so on.
If everything changes it is very hard to say who benefits and who loses and how much. In some places there will be more, in others less. Some places will have more droughts in others less.
On avg no country is better placed for overall warming then Russia, except maybe Canada.
Paradoxically climate change can also cause more severe winters despite an overall net warming effect.
Being better placed because most of your territory gets extremely cold a lot of the time doesn't mean climate change would provide a net benefit to you. This isn't Civ, you can't just reload a save file if your strategy doesn't work out.
Heck, the best strategy for Russia would be to break up large international trade blocks by destabilizing their political structures, especially in Europe, to be gain more leverage and make it easier to expand its territory further into southern Ukraine. And incidentally with Turkey provoking NATO, the UK leaving the EU, Trump being president and the rise of far-right anti-EU sentiments in other EU countries that matches what happened for several years prior to the pandemic, whether with their influence or without.
It's far more likely Russia having little interest in averting climate change is for the same reason as with everybody else including the US: it's a long-term process requiring intense international collaboration putting anyone fully committing to it at a competitive disadvantage if anyone else doesn't join in. Economically it's a game of chicken.
EDIT: I guess I struck a nerve with some people? I'm not arguing that Russia is manipulating the political climate of EU countries or the US. I'm arguing that if you want to engage in conspiracy theories like Russia intentionally accelerating climate change for strategic benefit, there are better strategies that are more plausible and don't require rolling the dice on whether your entire country will go up in flames (or drown) in ten years.
Oh yeah, melting of permafrost destroying a lot of their roads and tracks and releasing a lot of greenhouse gases, floods and droughts in areas where people actually live and farm, damage to mines, pipelines, industrial sites.
No problem though, everyone will just pack up and move north east. /s
Except for the methane gas that's trapped in the frozen permafrost in Siberia. Once released it will start a positive feedback loop to supercharge our messing up of the atmospheric chemical makeup.
Possibly, but not entirely obviously. European Russia (as well as Ukraine, and I expect, but have not explicitly heard, Belarus) has reams of arable land suitable for many crops (if not all, e.g. you need relatively hardy varieties of grapes) with extremely good soil (something that current biotech can’t really reproduce, only create subpar workarounds for, or so biologists tell me). It’d already be enough to feed the rest of Europe if not more, if only the Soviet Union had not repeatedly and systematically burned out any trace of initiative or entrepreneurial spirit in the agricultural workers. There is now some development (if with a strong criminal tang to it), but the Russian village is, to put it bluntly, dying. You could call it “flyover country”, I guess, except there’s hardly any local air traffic, etiher.
It’s not hard to see: board a (non-express) train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, get off on a small station of your choice somewhere in the middle, the kind that has a couple of platforms if that, then take one of the (cheap) local taxis to a random local settlement that’s not on the railroad. Stay there for several days. The people you’ll see will be fundamentally lovely, but most will be one or more of over 60, deep into the bottle, or only there until they can leave for what passes for a larger settlement. (Stay away from the local disco, though, and don’t expect anybody to speak anything but Russian.)
Or at least that’s how I learned it.
All of this is to say that the main thing keeping Russian agricultural development down is disintegrating infrastructure and a horrid business environment, not an inhospitable climate.
(If you’re wondering why I’m overlooking the enormous three fourths of the country that are known under the unassuming name of the “Asian part”, the simple answer is—with apologies to the wonderful inhabitants of Novosibirsk and many other places—not that many people live there; 20% of the already pretty sparse population, in fact. So if you’re looking at all of those humongous tracts of land and thinking what life would be like if they were used for agriculture, think again. The problem is not that it’s cold there on average, necessarily, even if it is in many parts—the problem is that it’s very continental there, and there is no friendly neighbourhood body of water to even things out. Wikipedia tells me Novosibirsk and Omsk are about as far north as Ontario and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, while Chita and Irkutsk are even further south. There’s also only the one railroad, with a rugged 4x4 your only hope of getting to most other places, and the soil sucks. If it thaws out, which would of course be disastrous in terms of greenhouse gases, it would still suck, only in a more squishy fashion. Can’t farm it, can’t quarry it, can’t build upon it, which is why people hardly ever do. My God, it’s full of empty space.)
As a final note, looking at Russia as an adversary ... serves to tickle the fancy of the powerful arseholes here, of course, but looks kind of silly to me TBH. There’s a lot of good people and interesting stuff happening, but the population is half that of the US and the GDP is less than a tenth. I mean, come on. Not in third world territory, yet, but getting there, definitely. Russia is not an all-powerful boogieman, except in the fever dreams it has on its sickbed. Even if it still contains enough spite to ruin your day repeatedly (as well as enough brilliance to carry the world forward for years).
Probably not for Russians (the ordinary people), since it will likely bring more extreme climate. And in general it's quite hard to predict what will come.
The Russian elites (politicians, oligarchs) could however benefit significantly - opening of north passage -> better access to ocean for the navy; better access to natural resources; and other powers will suffer more, so Russia could get relatively more powerful. I think this is part of the reason why we see climate denial from the disinformation sources...
Where the permafrost melts it'll be a giant horrid swamp not particularly useful land. Not to mention every established interest will be stressed by the chaos of climate change from losing land directly to the economic chaos that big migrations and flooding/storms/droughts will cause.
We can’t just ignore the fact that a carbon problem will not be solved by releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. We have half a dozen sources of carbon free energy. The EU is right here. Including gas power in the green book is laughable.
You should read the article. The EU administration and most countries don't want to include it but some countries (FR, PL, CZ) want to do so. The EU however has to find a position that bridges these views in order for the legislation to pass through both ttje European Parliament and the Council (=27 governments). The result is likely either a compromise in the middle (s.g. phase-out clauses) or a pay-off of some kind (e.g. additional funding programme for the countries most affected by the ban).
This is the collision between imperfect (but working) versus perfect (but not working).
It's more important to get emissions down now than to aim for a perfect standard that no one has yet reached, and doesn't appear reachable any time soon.
The emissions matter, not the goals of activist NGOs.
Sure, and if you ask German conservatives lignite is practically green energy too.
From an environmental point of view the biggest mistake was to cut down on the development and production of nuclear plants because now it's too late to just bet on pivoting to nuclear if we still want to reach literally any of the climate goals.
But more fossil fuels are not the answer. The most effective way to cut emissions at this point is to reduce energy use, but there is no economical incentive for the industry to do so and you can only go so far by shaming consumers.
There is political capital in talking about overconsumption. There is no political capital in talking about overproduction.
EDIT: The original slogan for recycling was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" but you there's no money in reducing (not "buy electric" or "buy low-energy" but literally not buying) or reusing (not "buy second hand" or "buy refurbished", literally using what you already have).
What do you mean by "all the professionals?" There have been a lot of studies on this. There are plenty of lobbyists and politicians who would like you to think it's not a problem, but climate scientists are well aware of it.
Aside from that, we need net zero by 2050 and building new gas plants that will last longer than 30 years is not helpful for that.
"We need net zero by 2050" is completely arbitrary.
New gas plants ARE helpful for cutting emissions if you compare it to the most likely alternative (eg coal).
It's only NOT helpful if you compare it to utopia. If you could reliably assume that there will be net zero otherwise, then you wouldn't need to worry about these gas plants would you? They'd be shuttered soon anyway.
Yes it is fairly arbitrary. With a bit of googling, looks like a fair number of climate scientists call it "too little too late"[1] and "a dangerous trap" on the grounds that we can't put things off that long[2].
Combined with the benefits of gas being much less than advertised due to leakage, it seems reckless to build new fossil plants of any sort, since we have alternative energy sources that don't emit at all. That's not utopian, it's just the rational direction to take right now.
Even if gas leaks were not a thing, this pulls away resources from greener technologies. If we start building gas power plants it’ll take almost 50 years before they can be retired, and emitting even reduced CO2 for 50 years is not an option we have. Counterintuitively it may be better to keep burning coal for 20 more years in old plants and then switch to fully renewable (or nuclear)
EU has a massive problem of dysfunctional regulations, this just adds more to the mix.
As the obvious example, the EU leader in solar is Germany, while solar is almost non existent in Spain. Spain by contrast has a lot of wind turbines in spots with poor/mediocre generation availability.
Its sadder everyday that somehow humanity has failed to become a nuclear society. All our problems could have been solved decades ago but we are still nowhere near a solution.
I can never understand why attacks by "activists" do not result in dozens of arrests and convictions for multiple years of prison every time they happen. Isn't it basically what any sovereign law says?
This is the first time I’ve heard of that. Which countries specifically won’t prosecute for randomly attacking and lightly injuring someone standing on the sidewalk or in a public park or some other gathering place?
It's not about not prosecuting at all[0]. The sentences just are either fines or suspended prison sentences, so people stay out of prison, which I remarked about in my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28653514
[0] Which may happen if the state thinks it cannot prove the allegation or the act was so minor, it would be a waste of everybody's time. But the "case dropped because too minor" doesn't usually happen in assaults, but more for non-violent things like riding the bus without a valid ticket or illegally downloading a few songs.
Yeah. In Germany it starts with regular assault/battery ("Körperverletzung"). This is a fine up to 5 years imprisonment. But if you do the assault in a group or with a weapon or really any tool or it's a "sneaky" attack or the way you do it life-threatening it them becomes a "dangerous" assault ("gefährliche Körperverletzung") which has a prison sentence of 6 months to 10 years (3 months to 5 years for "less severe" cases) but it never ends in a fine.
If you slap somebody, you'll likely get a fine, which is issued as "so and so many day's rates" (Tagessätze), which means e.g. you can get a fine of "20 day's rates" i.e. you'll have to pay the equivalent of 20 days worth of income, calculated based on your monthly net income divided by 30 days and capped at 1 EUR to 30000 EUR per day.
A prison sentence can be issued as a suspended sentence if it is 24 months or less, which is up to the discretion of the judge(s). You only have to go to prison if you receive another prison sentence for another crime in a time frame specified by the judge, or if you violate any of the additional requirements a judge may issue. If I remember correctly about 70-80% of all prison sentences below 24 months are issued as suspended sentences, and only a tiny fraction of people end up going to prison because the suspension is lifted later for some reason.
However realistically even the "dangerous" variant quite often ends in a light sentence of a couple of months which is then usually issued as a suspended sentence. This depends on what happened, the level of involvement and previous criminal history if any and whether you confess and show remorse. However, the suspension of a sentence is usually contiguous on you paying everything you owe, from damages for pain and suffering to the court fees.
(Actually, on a serious note, the person going there with the sole goal of stirring up the protest is more likely the one to be the terrorist, no? I'd say taking away that sign and even potentially removing the person is actually de-escalating. But you should obviously let the police do that.)
Clearly violent attack that should not be tolerated in our society run by political goal of causing fear and terror in others. I hope the perpetrator rots in jail for years...
But if you try to take over a mainly also anti-nuclear demonstration with your messaging and stir up "the mob" with that, you probably should not call somebody taking away your "Nuclear against climate-change" sign an "attack by a no-nuclear climate mob"
The demonstration is pro-climate protection. If the majority of the attendants is too dumb to see that nuclear mist be one of the pillars to protect the climate, that does not make it „anti-nuclear“.
What mob? It's one guy that violently took a sign from a woman (at least that's what can be seen in the video) and broke the sign. Nobody was hurt and the victim didn't even press charges. Most people seem to be minding their own business and getting out of the way.
So not much to see there. Except a way for people that disagree with the protestors to reinforce their stereotypes or the daily fix of anger over nothing for tabloid readers?
Are you out of your mind? Somebody violently grabbing the banner of a peaceful protestor is just one step away from physically assaulting that protestor.
If you don't see the obvious red line crossed there, you are completely detached from reality and want to protecter the attacker just because he happens to claim to be green (but hypocritically so, if he is also against nuclear energy).
Incredible, really.
Finally, yes it is a mob as nobody from the bystanders did anything to stop the attacker, tacitly agreeing with what he did.
I guess I must be out of my mind. I didn‘t realize I implied all of that in my previous.
Now to the part of your comment that is on-topic:
> Finally, yes it is a mob as nobody from the bystanders did anything to stop the attacker, tacitly agreeing with what he did.
The bystanders did exactly what bystanders do. They stood by. That doesn‘t make them agree with the attacker.
What would you habe done if you were there? I know I don‘t have the reflexes and fighting skills to stop this from happening. And I bet she had her friends helping her afterwards so there wouldn‘t have been any need to get involved.
Green Parties the world over are anti-nuclear and have been since the 80s.
Considering how much harm to the environment has come by the hand of green parties, I'm beginning to wonder if they aren't lobbied by fossil fuel companies.
Dunno about parties, but multiple eco-focused organisations are paid at least in part by oil & gas. Greenpeace actually founded a gas-providing energy utility in Germany (Greenpeace Energy, recently renamed Green Planet Energy to… avoid headlines about Greenpeace selling gas, despite those headlines being true). Other orgs got more direct funding from oil & gas players e.g. FoEI was literally founded with an oil baron's donation, and Sierra Club got millions recently from drilling & fracking company Chesapeake Energy.
Both Greenpeace and FoEI were actually founded by Sierra Club members who thought Sierra was not anti-nuclear enough. After a while, Sierra's platform changed to be more anti-nuclear (its current position).
And don't discount funding from Russia, that goes really well with both Russia's destabilisation goals and anti-coal campaigns leading to higher dependence on Russian natural gas.
Sorry but that's a lot of hogwash. The green parties mostly came from, or were closely associated with, the anti-war movements. Anti nuclear and green overlap to a large degree due to (a) the close link between nuclsar power and nuclear weapons, and (b) at least in Europe also the fallout of Chernobyl, which is now barely remembered but at the time was gigantic - e.g. enormous amounts of food had to be scrapped, people had to keep their windows closed for months, etc.
>Green Parties the world over are anti-nuclear and have been since the 80s.
>I'm beginning to wonder if they aren't lobbied by fossil fuel companies.
There was a large oil-exporting and gas-exporting country that has been aligned with Green Parties' political programs back in the 80s. USSR was known to train and to sponsor activists, academics, and publishers as part of its influence campaigns.
It helps your case that the fossil fuel exporter USSR was ran in a top-down, by-fiat fashion, rather similar to how corporations function internally.
Greenpeace in particular came about in opposition to nuclear weapons, hence the "peace" part in their name, and why they were the subject of a terrorist attack by the French government which sank the first Rainbow Warrior. People keep forgetting about the long shadow of mutual assured destruction and nuclear proliferation. This is why nobody wants to let the world's 8th largest CO2 emitting country build even a single nuclear reactor.
People who wish to allege secret funding or influence should supply some evidence. Currently the only evidence I'm aware of is the infiltration of UK environmentalists by notorious communists the, er, Metropolitan Police.
My theory is that it was mostly out of a fear of nuclear weapons. You see the same thing these days with animal right activists trying to push vegetarians/vegans diet with environmentals claims. And some of them are true, of course. But some of them are not totally true, or false, and are pushed because of their moral values.
Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs, hairy security situation in many countries and very limited ability to adapt to demand.
This is both in the night-and-day cycle meaning but also in the "we need more power in 10-years" meaning, since nuclear power plants take forever to build.
Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth, especially regarding climate change. Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others.
The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest, strong local and national (e.g. the minimum distance that wind farms need in germany, eliminating most of the possible options), opposition to new projects, strong opposition to new transmission lines, strong opposition to losing the jobs in the legacy markets (especially visible in the USA with "clean" Coal) and no burning desire to honestly consider the storage issue (both in regards to demand shifting and building of new storage facilities using hydrogen or synthetic gases and similar things).
Our problems aren't solved because solving them isn't a high enough political (and thus also economical, due to the negative externality not being financially relevant) priority around the world, not because we're not using nuclear for everything.
In France, the first nuclear plants of the current production group were contracted in 1970, and connected to the network in 1977, so that's 7 years for a pilot industrial project. Later plants were built in 5-6 years.
The kicker is that this work is highly scalable: France built over 6 reactors per year over its program.
The current issue with new generation reactors seem to be related to loss of industrial knowledge, there is no reason to think that the next built in the series would suffer from the same issues.
I think large part of it is increased scrutiny and standards. Which is entirely justified. And most of issues could be solved as said with knowledge and proper pipeline of keeping people who already gained experience from past projects on new ones.
As an amateur, I read everything I can about why the US's current nuclear construction attempts have failed, and my conclusion is exactly the reverse. The problem is a lack of scrutiny and attention to detail, poor planning, bad logistics, and general incompetence.
The NRC reviews only the safety of reactors, not if it's a constructible design. If somebody had held Westinghouse to the standard of having constructible designs, in addition to safe designs, maybe the disasters at Vogtle and VC Summer might have been avoided.
I think the problem is the compensation model. None of the people building the plant have any skin in the game. At some level the people doing the work aren’t paid enough to care enough to prevent the issues that plague new nuclear projects, or they don’t have the resources, or they don’t have any incentive to go the extra mile to ensure project success. Are there stock options and equity for the engineers and project managers? Any ambitious engineer graduating in the last 15 years probably went to tech, not utilities. I’m in the energy sector
Well, currently the French are buildin a new nuclear power plant in Finland. Construction started 2005 and it was supposed to be ready in 2009… they are still building it and _maybe_ next year it finally will be connected to the grid. So 17 years give or take.
France lost lots of construction/industrial knowledge wrt nuclear plants. It's not very surprising that new models built by inexperienced companies end up being over budget and schedule.
I wouldn't surprised for Hinkley point C to also have such issues. What I would like to know is whether the amount of issues is significantly reduced compared to Flamanville and Olkiluoto. That would be a good indication about whether the design is faulty, or whether it's the industry having teething issues.
And it was a different time, in an economy with different skills, and entirely different technologies.
What was cheap and fast 50 years ago may not be the best thing to build today. For example, the wealthy no longer build many mansions with intricate stonework and wood molding, all crafted by hand. The workforce is no longer there.
We should pay close attention to the productive capacity of today, what sort of industrial machines we have at our actual disposal.
Nobody who is talking about nuclear pays attention to what it would actually take to build nuclear like France did in the 1970s, it's just an assumption that it could be done, without paying attention to any of the details.
Further, those proposing lots of new nuclear never deal with the massive failures of current attempts, whether it's France's EPR designs at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, or Hinkley. All have been failures. What would change to get a first-of-a-kind build down to 7 years?
Nobody has answers to these questions, least of all the nuclear industry. And until somebody has a clear and detailed and knowledgeable path forward on construction, we will waste billions and billions more on ineffective nuclear when those resources could instead be out to use right away with storage and renewables.
What's a good timeline then, and what technology not emitting co2 supports it?
The countries that have started wind&solar policies a decade ago are nowhere close to a clean electricity mix. In fact, fossil plants and infrastructures are still being built in these countries.
There's a big contradiction in your two assessments here. You seem to think that nuclear can scale from almost nothing to the hundreds of reactor per year that we need in a suitable amount of time. However, even with renewable's exponential growth to hundreds of GW deployed every year today, with exponential growth continuing from today, you seem to think it's not enough.
If you plot out the growth of wind and solar deployments rate, we are just baaaarely on track to replace all of our energy services with renewable energy in the next 15-20 years.
Storage is also growing at an acceptable rate for our needs, we are producing 200GWh/ year right now, will get to 2000GWh/year by 2026, and be at 20-30 TWh/ year by 2031-2036.
In contrast, if we figure out how to build a first-of-a-kind in 7 years, then start scaling up, most of the energy transition will have already happened.
The only reason to pursue nuclear is if it seems to be cheaper than the alternatives. It doesn't look like it will be. But even if it's more expensive, getting 10% or so of our power from nuclear might lead to a cost optimal solution, so I hope the industry can pull itself together. I'm doubtful, but hopeful.
> You seem to think that nuclear can scale from almost nothing to the hundreds of reactor per year that we need in a suitable amount of time.
I cite a previous example of a country starting several new reactors per year over a couple decades, with a mean build time of 6-7 years, and ending up with an electricity production which is mostly CO2-free.
It is not me thinking, or an hypothetical scenario, it's the history of France's commercial nuclear program between 1970 and 1990.
> There's a big contradiction in your two assessments here.[...]
> However, even with renewable's exponential growth to hundreds of GW deployed every year today, with exponential growth continuing from today, you seem to think it's not enough.
There's no contradiction. You simply chose to reframe my statement to make it say something else. My point is that despite "exponential growth to hundreds of GW deployed every year", countries with a strong wind/solar policy did not manage to curb their CO2 emissions per MWh to reasonable levels.
My concern is about the time it will take before these wind/solar policies have a significant effect on electricity CO2 emissions at the scale of a country. I don't really care about installed capacity.
So my point is, if 7 years is too long, what is a reasonable timeframe for effective CO2 reduction, and where did you see policies actually achieve that?
Let's check the stats on the newest nuclear power plant built in France:
> A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial date to the end 2022.
> EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months. The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.
10 years late (so far) and 15 bil over budget (so far).
It’s impossible to say, but it’s highly likely that an alternate history where we went much more strongly into nuclear power would have yielded far more active investment and development of variations on reactors than we have today. We could be much further along the fast or thorium (or something newer) reactor timeline for instance, or have more advances in safety and speed of setup that don’t exist without much larger demand. We also could’ve irradiated much more of the Earth if things had gone wrong, but ultimately I don’t think you can use the problems of nuclear today against someone who wishes we’d been all in on nuclear for the past 50 years.
>Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs
>nuclear power plants take forever to build
That is because of overregulation in North American and Western Europe. The overregulation is because of hysteria and coal lobbyists. Nuclear is working fine in the rest of the world with more plants under construction:
> overregulation in North American and Western Europe.
Nearly all large construction projects have huge delays and go massively over budget, not just nuclear!
Weakening nuclear regulations (which ones?) will not solve the construction problem, because at best it will turn them into the other projects with big delays.
> since nuclear power plants take forever to build
Even PWR don't take 'forever' to build if you actually build a large number. The problem is that, specially in the West, we have gone to a policy where its like 'lets do a tiny bit of nuclear' and that leads to basically 1 plant being in construction supported by a increasingly small nuclear industry getting endlessly delayed because nobody working on it has ever done it before.
Learning effects in nuclear building are massive and well researched. You need to have teams that have done it before and it goes much faster.
Even the most shitty PWR could be built in 4-5 years as we have seen in France, US or South Korea.
Of course, if you were serious today about doing this, you wouldn't use 60s PWRs anyway and if you use modern reactors you don't need to do a massive civil engineering project. Ironically in many way the civil engineering is gigantic part of the cost, not the nuclear itself.
> Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth
Well of course 'all' problems would not be solved, but the fact is we could have had clean energy for 40 years had nuclear continued and new types of reactors had come along.
It's my opinion, and I know most people don't agree that if you have real mass manufacturing of nuclear reactors, it would actually be viable to competitively produce green fuel. Maybe some subsidies or tax on non green version to push it faster.
I would have favored making all cars into FFV (Flex Fuel) and having a 5%-80% methanol requirement (increasing every few years). That methanol could then increasingly be made with nuclear power as your capacity grows.
Today we have lithium batteries for most of transportation so that is no longer as relevant as it would have been if we had done this in the 90s. I still a good idea for aviation and other needs of chemical energy.
> Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others.
Power is still a huge issue for countries, if we had mass produced reactors, exporting them in those countries is a very viable option to get green energy to those people at a cheaper rate then coal they are actually building.
If emerging countries could call the US and say 'we like 50x500MW reactors' deployed over the next 10 years. They would very much want to do it.
> The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest
The same could be said for nuclear as well.
> strong opposition to new transmission lines
Renewables break the traditional local production concept for power and force an ever increasing amount of energy transportation. Because of non uniform wind and weather patterns and lack of economically viable storage you compensate by transporting energy.
I much favor having nuclear reactor, say 500MW units being deployed everywhere where it makes sense as close to consumption as viable. And for places this makes no sense also having a much smaller 100MW reactor type that you can deploy in shipping containers everywhere needed.
Reliable base load close to consumption combined maybe a few heat batteries (or hydro if available) can is the perfect solution. In theory modern reactors could be load following quite well, but its really a question of what is cheaper, lower utilization or energy storage.
This is exactly how Ontario (Canada) and Sweden have a green grid.
> not because we're not using nuclear for everything.
In my opinion part of the political problem is because what is attempted is so difficult and puts so many changes on people. Simply deploying nuclear reactors in the same location current coal plants are leads to basically no change in the overall gird.
Its literally build whatever number of 500MW mod...
>Even PWR don't take 'forever' to build if you actually build a large number. The problem is that, specially in the West, we have gone to a policy where its like 'lets do a tiny bit of nuclear' and that leads to basically 1 plant being in construction supported by a increasingly small nuclear industry getting endlessly delayed because nobody working on it
And then we even think in terms of reactors, not power plants. So you get a permission for a reactor. As you only get one you want to buy the biggest one you can get. Which likely meant the newest theoretically available. Instead of two or three more mature and sensible designs, likely costing less in long run.
There is really no question what so ever that nuclear is a far, far faster way to scale clean energy.
Compare the countries that had real phases where they build a lot of nuclear and it easily beats any renewables.
If Germany had gone all out on nuclear for the last 20 years, they could easily be finishing 5-6 nuclear plants a year, and likely get the construction time down to 4-5 years even if you built old school PWRs. Germany would be shutting down coal plants and end up 100% clean far earlier then their current way of doing.
If you however figure out a newer type of reactor (as we should have long ago) you could likely build 5x as many. The limiting factor in PWRs (outside of money) is the extremely complex construction of the reactor vessel. These have to be 'thicc' and are hard to weld, only few places in the world can do it.
Despite that insane reactor vessel France and the US managed at reasonably high production rate.
However if you go to something like a molten salt cooled reactor, or a molten salt reactor of some kind you have no pressure and thus no 'thicc' reactor vessel. These can be constructed incredibly quickly.
If you actually put a challenge with a fix amount of money to produce 100GWh of 100% clean highly reliable electricity setting up a assembly line of reactor production and develop traveling build teams that set up site. Then show up with a huge truck and dump the reactor into the site.
Doing that with renewables is an unsolved problem unless maybe in countries where you have a massive amount of hydro.
Thank the gods, Canada has finally changed its regulations (and the US is slowly doing so too) so actual real progress has been made on commercial molten salt (and other) reactors. Terrestrial Energy, Moltex Energy and a number of other companies are deeply engaged in the process of getting these reactors threw licensing now. These reactors are often more 10x smaller for the same output of energy and thus far cheaper to build.
I used to think nuclear was the way forward, and I kind of still do, but it's understandable why it isn't prevalent. It's all about magnitude of loss/failure. Traditional power plants are much safer and failure isn't nearly as catastrophic as with nuclear. If a nuclear plant fails, look at what can happen - you can lose an entire city indefinitely - Chernobyl.
The potential for loss is much higher with nuclear power.
There are certainly high risks with nuclear power, but accidents with a large loss of life also happen with other energy production methods. Also, a big accident like Chernobyl sounds horrible, but people forget that burning coal produces a lot of pollution (including radiation!) that over time kills much more people.
I wonder if we were to count total loss of life in maintenance and installation of solar, wind and hydro. How much worse would nuclear do. At least per energy produced.
The worst case for hydro at least is immense, possibly multiple millions death in some cases.
As of 2020, nuclear energy's death toll (including Chernobyl and Fukushima) was roughly the same as the combined death toll of solar and wind (resp. 0.07, 0.02, and 0.04 deaths per TWh): https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Hydro is also surprisingly low at 0.02, though failures are absolutely catastrophic I guess they tend to be out of the way and fairly local: so a dam failure will take out a village at once, and do extensive geological-scale damage, but not much more.
Hydroelectricity has inflicted orders of magnitude more damage. Yet nobody seriously proposes removing hydroelectric plants, they are by far the most effective form of renewables.
Nuclear contamination can be cleaned. The majority of the Fukushima exclusion zone has been cleaned and reopened. There's no motivation to do this in Chernobyl because the town of Chernobyl only existed to support the nuclear power plant.
> Nuclear contamination can be cleaned. The majority of the Fukushima exclusion zone has been cleaned and reopened. There's no motivation to do this in Chernobyl because the town of Chernobyl only existed to support the nuclear power plant.
And somewhat oddly he Chernobyl Exclusion Zone literally shows that nuclear accidents are good for the environment, as human activity turns out to be way worse for wildlife than elevated radiations.
> The potential for loss is much higher with nuclear power.
This isn't true. Fossil fuels kill much, much more people per Kwh than nuclear [1]. But much like airplanes vs car accidents, fossil fuels kill constantly and widespread in small amounts, while nuclear kills very rarely in high amounts.
We are really really close to a solution, and for the one thing that nuclear is hyped to provide--clean electricity--we have cheaper and easier and more scalable solutions than nuclear.
The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity.
It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today.
It's time to stop mythologizing the technology, stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine. It's a theoretically cheap heat source, but when you add in the engineering to capture the heat to boil water, it's not so cheap in reality, and there's been no innovation on making the engineering more elegant or cheaper in decades. In fact, if anything, it's gotten less elegant, more expensive, and even harder to build.
There is nothing cheaper and easier and more scalable than nuclear for baseload gigawatt generation, especially when you actually account for the insane amount of batteries required to make wind/solar/etc viable as a baseload technology. People point at solar panel progress and always conveniently stay silent on the big battery problem (the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc)
Nuclear did and does work out. It was not overhyped and it has delivered as expected. I would argue that solar is overhyped and has continually underdelivered. Anyone who has installed a solar system on their house has seen the significant issues with it.
Nuclear remains the best way to replace coal/gas electricity generation for baseload power, to generate enough energy to power industries and cities, and is cleaner than filling a city with atrocious rare earth batteries that are required to paper over the problems with other inconsistently generating technologies.
It is what it is, but if nuclear isn't the future, then coal isn't going anywhere.
Interpreting Chinese policy can be difficult foe an outsider, but the most likely reason seems to be the politics dominance of coal interests combined with inertia from plans made a long time ago.
The coal capital expenditures into coal will likely be underutilized over the next 30 years, but that happens when there are massive plans that are set in motion over the course of many years without adjustment.
I think a bigger question is, do we have enough "political capital" to pay for nuclear energy?
Even if our politicians all agreed to it, across counties even, what are the odds that they would get ousted before the reactors are built and delivering cost efficiency energy.
> the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc
These are all trivial compared to nuclear's construction problem.
But I've never heard that batteries are not "scalable," when they are actually one of the most incredibly scalable technologies out there. Want a few watt hours? No problem. Want 10GWh? No problem. Want to distribute a MWh at every distribution station across a country? No problem.
Batteries scale as small or large as we can conceive.
> atrocious rare earth batteries
There aren't rare earth elements in batteries. It's been funny to watch "rare earth" become a synonym for "harmful" because this does not seem to have any basis in fact that I can understand.
> coal isn't going anywhere
Coal is already a dead man walking. Most of its use in the US is uneconomic, and loses money for utility customers. Bad financial agreements, executive incompetence, and misaligned economic incentives between utilities and their customers are the only reason its still on the grid.
Everybody who bet on coal 10 years ago was foolish, and should lose their capital, but since that section of our economy is run on cronyism instead of capitalism, people bad at capital allocation are not losing their shirts like they should.
Even more weird: most people think rare earth is rare as in: "there isn’t a lot in the ground and it is easily depleted". Whereas in reality, rare earth means that it is less common per cubic meter of earth than other minerals. But there is plenty.
Yes, this is all important information to know. The best I can understand is that "rare earths" became associated with dependence on China (not true), which led to people being against rare earths in general. But it's tough to figure out what's going on with people's opinion on the matter, I still don't know what I said in my comment above yours that was so disagreeable.
> But I've never heard that batteries are not "scalable," when they are actually one of the most incredibly scalable technologies out there. Want a few watt hours? No problem. Want 10GWh? No problem. Want to distribute a MWh at every distribution station across a country? No problem.
Its actually massively difficult challenge both from a production and supply chain perspective.
Lithium itself plentiful but getting it into the battery is a long way. Its more like specialty chemicals, even the 'Lithium majors' have had massive problems getting new plants online and producing high quality lithium.
Battery plants are incredibly complex mass manufacturing operations and even small manufacturing problems can leave to burning cars. Scaling these is very difficult and only a few companies are really producing lithium batteries at scale.
Lithium batteries in Grid operation have never been deployed at '10GWh' so if it was 'no problem' then somebody might have done it.
The challenge of producing enough batteries (and renewables), lithium or otherwise to have a 100% reliable electricity grid (even if there are 2 weeks without wind) is gigantic and to me it actually seems far harder then just building nuclear plants.
> Coal is already a dead man walking.
Look at China, India and Indonesia and then rethink your statement.
It just so happens that US and Western Europe are not the only places in the world.
I've been listening to this rhetoric for years, yet every year, more energy problems are caused by (lack of) stable base load electricity supply, both in US and Europe, and much more in countries that heavily invested in "green" (non-nuclear) tech (e.g. Germany), than not (e.g. France).
Its really a catch-22 type thing. You increase renewables, destroying the viability of base load. That forces more short term power producers into the market, that then inefficiently burn gas to produce when renewables are off.
The gas plants are profitable because the prices you have to pay them are pretty high.
And this problem is getting worse all the time and its not really a great overall strategy.
I would argue renewables are subsides by how they use the grid. In the US renewables even get subsidies for energy they produce and sell at negative prices.
And most insane thing to me is that we think in net terms and not peak terms. That is if you sign up to buy wind or solar. You should not be getting any when there is no wind or solar.
If nuclear had delivered the "too cheap to meter" promise in the honeymoon pre-Three-Mile-Island phase, it might have affected decisions down the line.
A big example is freight rail. The service in the US shrunk over time, and was basically reduced to captive-loop "coal mine to power plant" runs by the 1980s. If the entire country had similar economics, due to cheap ubiquitous nuclear power, there would be impetus to sustain and expand the electrified network. Instead of spending the 50s and 60s on half-baked turbine locomotives that burnt tar, and building ever larger diesels, the clear answer to more horsepower was to suck down more amperes from the overhead wire.
Similarly, trolley-bus designs get more interesting when the cost gap between electricity and petrol widens.
> we have cheaper and easier and more scalable solutions than nuclear.
It is cheaper now but my suggestion is that this is not inherent.
My whole point about a nuclear society was that if existed the economics would be different.
> The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity.
Again, part of my point is that the best way to solve these problems is having cheap high temperature reactors.
These reactors are prefect in replacing gas in heat production, and be used to for example to produce hydrogen that then would get further transformed into all kind of chemical fuels and feed-stocks.
> It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today.
People have such a narrow view of this. Nuclear provided gigantic amounts of clean energy when the only alternative was coal. This by itself saved far more lives then any nuclear accident ever killed (that number is very low).
Not being able to beat massively powerful fossil industry with 60s technology in the middle of a massive anti-nuclear weapons (and thus everything nuclear) push is hardly grounds to dismiss it.
If people had given a shit about climate change in the 1970 and willing to give it the same kind of subsidies that renewables have been getting then things would be different. This would have been more expensive then coal but the public heath aspect and the clean energy aspect would have made this worthwhile 10x over.
The fact is, the reason we even started building PWR is that the military wanted them for submarines. And despite even the designers of them saying they were a bad fit for civil nuclear, the government and industry pushed forward on these designs and pretty quickly hard locked themself into these designs for everything commercial. Everything else with a few exceptions was locked into research efforts and those were reduced consistently after the 60s.
> It's time to stop mythologizing the technology
It has nothing to do with mythologizing. It has to do with simply first principles approach to problems solving. We have an energy source that is literally freely available as a waste product from mining. Existing rare earth mines already have unlimited thorium as waste stream. Natural Uranium is plentiful as well.
This energy source turns out to be 10^12 more energy dense then fossil fuels that have powered society for a century and produced highly available energy at cheap prices.
> stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine
All of this is wrong. You conclusions are only based a reactor design, not on nuclear as a whole. A modern type of reactor (some are going threw regulatory process in Canada and could have been designed in the 70s) are far, far smaller then PWR type reactors and use orders of magnitude less concrete.
There have actually been a lot of study about what makes nuclear expensive. And its mainly two things, that nuclear reactors are basically gigantic civil engineering projects that has to be done at a very high standard and to get those in on time, on budget you really need a workforce that has experience. This type of knowledge was achieved in a few cases and in those PWR were able to be build in 4-5 years reliably.
The second part of what makes it commercially not viable is that financing these projects is actually a huge problem. Because of the long time it takes to build such a first time project, you require refinancing for 10 years and that is huge part of the...
"There is absolutely no health justification for such a regulation,"
"The whole proceeding against an industry that has made invaluable contributions to the American economy for more than fifty years is the worst example of fanaticism since the New England witch hunts in the Seventeenth Century."
"no person has ever been found having an identifiable toxic effect from the amount of lead in the atmosphere today."
"Tetraethyl lead had saved the American economy billions. It made the modern automobile, the entire car-centric structure of American life, possible. A phase-down would emasculate car engines, cause octane numbers to plummet, and waste crude oil. They might as well burn the money of the American people."
148 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 89.9 ms ] threadHow is it artificially expensive? Is natural gas an infinite free resource now? Do we ignore the oil/gas subsidies?
Being the only country in the world that taxes solar self generation does not help.
Just to provide some context to Americans: the typical price of gasoline in the EU is currently about 1.5 euro/liter, which translates to more than 6.6 dollar/gallon.
There was actually a country that did that. You may have heard of them, they are called the United Kingdom. Their exit from the EU has also been known as an absolutely unmitigated disaster, causing them endless amounts of losses for essentially zero benefits.
Do you think it would be more affordable to relocate some populations and rebuild a few cities after floodings, droughts, famines and wildfires caused by that cheaper fossil energy? 'Artificial' depends on your definition of who is paying, and when.
Closer home, in California, there are 3000+ families who don't need affordable heating anymore, their home burned down due to climate-change related wildfires just this year.
Also socialists tend to be against globalization (i.e. creating a unified global market) because it strengthens multi-national corporations, which are harder to reign in than local companies (see Apple, Google and Facebook preferring to pay EU fines rather than sticking to the regulations meant to rein them in).
But you didn't say they support globalization, of course, you said they support globalism, which just incidentally happens to be a right-wing dogwhistle for the Jewish conspiracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalism
But I'm sure that's entirely accidental.
EDIT: Interesting. Not complaining but it's curious to see my comments go from slowly increasing positive scores to max negative. HN voting is certainly following interesting patterns and not at all in line with its own guidelines (obviously).
I don't think the centre-left ever had a majority in the European Parliament, and certainly not in the European Commission (i.e. the heads of state).
This is why they're considering including natural gas here, the EU is basically run by German industrialists.
> Silvia Pastorelli explained that companies “have been consistently over-estimating the need for gas and basically, ENTSOG members have received something like, just short of 90% of the EU’s gas infrastructure subsidies which is a lot of money, and the fact that they basically can decide gives them lots of power.”
> But according to Global Energy Monitor’s (GEM) report, ‘Gas at a Crossroads‘, the EU already has a large excess of gas infrastructure. The EU gas import capacity is nearly twice as high as EU gas consumption – according to the report, “The utilization rate in 2018 was ~60%, with ~40% spare capacity.” And GEM’s survey found €117 bn in new EU gas projects are in development, including €52 bn for gas pipelines, €12 billion for LNG import terminals, and €53 bn for gas-fired power stations.
Or could it rather be that this "Climate change good for Russia!" talk is just the same old American jingoism merely adopting modern environmentalism?
Why would Russia be the only country for which climate change is "good"?
Climate change doesn't simply mean some areas get warmer. Climate change means the entire climate system changes. Air streams and water currents shift, ground water evaporates or rises, and so on.
On avg no country is better placed for overall warming then Russia, except maybe Canada.
Being better placed because most of your territory gets extremely cold a lot of the time doesn't mean climate change would provide a net benefit to you. This isn't Civ, you can't just reload a save file if your strategy doesn't work out.
Heck, the best strategy for Russia would be to break up large international trade blocks by destabilizing their political structures, especially in Europe, to be gain more leverage and make it easier to expand its territory further into southern Ukraine. And incidentally with Turkey provoking NATO, the UK leaving the EU, Trump being president and the rise of far-right anti-EU sentiments in other EU countries that matches what happened for several years prior to the pandemic, whether with their influence or without.
It's far more likely Russia having little interest in averting climate change is for the same reason as with everybody else including the US: it's a long-term process requiring intense international collaboration putting anyone fully committing to it at a competitive disadvantage if anyone else doesn't join in. Economically it's a game of chicken.
EDIT: I guess I struck a nerve with some people? I'm not arguing that Russia is manipulating the political climate of EU countries or the US. I'm arguing that if you want to engage in conspiracy theories like Russia intentionally accelerating climate change for strategic benefit, there are better strategies that are more plausible and don't require rolling the dice on whether your entire country will go up in flames (or drown) in ten years.
No problem though, everyone will just pack up and move north east. /s
It’s not hard to see: board a (non-express) train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, get off on a small station of your choice somewhere in the middle, the kind that has a couple of platforms if that, then take one of the (cheap) local taxis to a random local settlement that’s not on the railroad. Stay there for several days. The people you’ll see will be fundamentally lovely, but most will be one or more of over 60, deep into the bottle, or only there until they can leave for what passes for a larger settlement. (Stay away from the local disco, though, and don’t expect anybody to speak anything but Russian.)
Or at least that’s how I learned it.
All of this is to say that the main thing keeping Russian agricultural development down is disintegrating infrastructure and a horrid business environment, not an inhospitable climate.
(If you’re wondering why I’m overlooking the enormous three fourths of the country that are known under the unassuming name of the “Asian part”, the simple answer is—with apologies to the wonderful inhabitants of Novosibirsk and many other places—not that many people live there; 20% of the already pretty sparse population, in fact. So if you’re looking at all of those humongous tracts of land and thinking what life would be like if they were used for agriculture, think again. The problem is not that it’s cold there on average, necessarily, even if it is in many parts—the problem is that it’s very continental there, and there is no friendly neighbourhood body of water to even things out. Wikipedia tells me Novosibirsk and Omsk are about as far north as Ontario and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, while Chita and Irkutsk are even further south. There’s also only the one railroad, with a rugged 4x4 your only hope of getting to most other places, and the soil sucks. If it thaws out, which would of course be disastrous in terms of greenhouse gases, it would still suck, only in a more squishy fashion. Can’t farm it, can’t quarry it, can’t build upon it, which is why people hardly ever do. My God, it’s full of empty space.)
As a final note, looking at Russia as an adversary ... serves to tickle the fancy of the powerful arseholes here, of course, but looks kind of silly to me TBH. There’s a lot of good people and interesting stuff happening, but the population is half that of the US and the GDP is less than a tenth. I mean, come on. Not in third world territory, yet, but getting there, definitely. Russia is not an all-powerful boogieman, except in the fever dreams it has on its sickbed. Even if it still contains enough spite to ruin your day repeatedly (as well as enough brilliance to carry the world forward for years).
The Russian elites (politicians, oligarchs) could however benefit significantly - opening of north passage -> better access to ocean for the navy; better access to natural resources; and other powers will suffer more, so Russia could get relatively more powerful. I think this is part of the reason why we see climate denial from the disinformation sources...
But what are they gonna do about it? The Russophiles in the West are already climate change denialists and nobody takes them serious
The EU is the one considering including it...
It's more important to get emissions down now than to aim for a perfect standard that no one has yet reached, and doesn't appear reachable any time soon.
The emissions matter, not the goals of activist NGOs.
This cuts emissions, that's why it qualified.
Results > ideology.
From an environmental point of view the biggest mistake was to cut down on the development and production of nuclear plants because now it's too late to just bet on pivoting to nuclear if we still want to reach literally any of the climate goals.
But more fossil fuels are not the answer. The most effective way to cut emissions at this point is to reduce energy use, but there is no economical incentive for the industry to do so and you can only go so far by shaming consumers.
There is political capital in talking about overconsumption. There is no political capital in talking about overproduction.
EDIT: The original slogan for recycling was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" but you there's no money in reducing (not "buy electric" or "buy low-energy" but literally not buying) or reusing (not "buy second hand" or "buy refurbished", literally using what you already have).
The argument reminds me of "sceptics" who appeal to "the effect of the sun cycles", as I'd climate scientists wouldn't have thought of that.
Aside from that, we need net zero by 2050 and building new gas plants that will last longer than 30 years is not helpful for that.
New gas plants ARE helpful for cutting emissions if you compare it to the most likely alternative (eg coal).
It's only NOT helpful if you compare it to utopia. If you could reliably assume that there will be net zero otherwise, then you wouldn't need to worry about these gas plants would you? They'd be shuttered soon anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
Combined with the benefits of gas being much less than advertised due to leakage, it seems reckless to build new fossil plants of any sort, since we have alternative energy sources that don't emit at all. That's not utopian, it's just the rational direction to take right now.
[1] https://www.ccag.earth/newsroom/net-zero-by-2050-is-too-litt...
[2] https://theconversation.com/climate-scientists-concept-of-ne...
Results > ideology
Snark aside we have already have low/no emission energy alternatives. Nuclear, wind, and solar. No need to pretend that gas is part of that group.
As the obvious example, the EU leader in solar is Germany, while solar is almost non existent in Spain. Spain by contrast has a lot of wind turbines in spots with poor/mediocre generation availability.
[0] Which may happen if the state thinks it cannot prove the allegation or the act was so minor, it would be a waste of everybody's time. But the "case dropped because too minor" doesn't usually happen in assaults, but more for non-violent things like riding the bus without a valid ticket or illegally downloading a few songs.
If you slap somebody, you'll likely get a fine, which is issued as "so and so many day's rates" (Tagessätze), which means e.g. you can get a fine of "20 day's rates" i.e. you'll have to pay the equivalent of 20 days worth of income, calculated based on your monthly net income divided by 30 days and capped at 1 EUR to 30000 EUR per day.
A prison sentence can be issued as a suspended sentence if it is 24 months or less, which is up to the discretion of the judge(s). You only have to go to prison if you receive another prison sentence for another crime in a time frame specified by the judge, or if you violate any of the additional requirements a judge may issue. If I remember correctly about 70-80% of all prison sentences below 24 months are issued as suspended sentences, and only a tiny fraction of people end up going to prison because the suspension is lifted later for some reason.
However realistically even the "dangerous" variant quite often ends in a light sentence of a couple of months which is then usually issued as a suspended sentence. This depends on what happened, the level of involvement and previous criminal history if any and whether you confess and show remorse. However, the suspension of a sentence is usually contiguous on you paying everything you owe, from damages for pain and suffering to the court fees.
You can't just get away with attacking people.
(Actually, on a serious note, the person going there with the sole goal of stirring up the protest is more likely the one to be the terrorist, no? I'd say taking away that sign and even potentially removing the person is actually de-escalating. But you should obviously let the police do that.)
Disclaimer first: Me = Pro nuclear.
But if you try to take over a mainly also anti-nuclear demonstration with your messaging and stir up "the mob" with that, you probably should not call somebody taking away your "Nuclear against climate-change" sign an "attack by a no-nuclear climate mob"
So not much to see there. Except a way for people that disagree with the protestors to reinforce their stereotypes or the daily fix of anger over nothing for tabloid readers?
If you don't see the obvious red line crossed there, you are completely detached from reality and want to protecter the attacker just because he happens to claim to be green (but hypocritically so, if he is also against nuclear energy).
Incredible, really.
Finally, yes it is a mob as nobody from the bystanders did anything to stop the attacker, tacitly agreeing with what he did.
Now to the part of your comment that is on-topic:
> Finally, yes it is a mob as nobody from the bystanders did anything to stop the attacker, tacitly agreeing with what he did.
The bystanders did exactly what bystanders do. They stood by. That doesn‘t make them agree with the attacker.
What would you habe done if you were there? I know I don‘t have the reflexes and fighting skills to stop this from happening. And I bet she had her friends helping her afterwards so there wouldn‘t have been any need to get involved.
Considering how much harm to the environment has come by the hand of green parties, I'm beginning to wonder if they aren't lobbied by fossil fuel companies.
Both Greenpeace and FoEI were actually founded by Sierra Club members who thought Sierra was not anti-nuclear enough. After a while, Sierra's platform changed to be more anti-nuclear (its current position).
And don't discount funding from Russia, that goes really well with both Russia's destabilisation goals and anti-coal campaigns leading to higher dependence on Russian natural gas.
That seems like a statement that the claims are false, not a request for evidence.
See here: https://www.h2-international.com/2019/04/01/joint-effort-to-...
Greenpeace Energy was founded in 1998, started selling gas in 2011, and purchased that first electrolyser in 2018[0].
As of 2020, the gas they were selling was about 1% hydrogen[0], 99% fossil imports. In 2021 the major change was to add 10% biogas to the mix.
[0] although they've been feeding-in hydrogen since 2014
[1] we'll just trust that it is indeed all wind-powered electrolysis.
>I'm beginning to wonder if they aren't lobbied by fossil fuel companies.
There was a large oil-exporting and gas-exporting country that has been aligned with Green Parties' political programs back in the 80s. USSR was known to train and to sponsor activists, academics, and publishers as part of its influence campaigns.
It helps your case that the fossil fuel exporter USSR was ran in a top-down, by-fiat fashion, rather similar to how corporations function internally.
(https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by... )
People who wish to allege secret funding or influence should supply some evidence. Currently the only evidence I'm aware of is the infiltration of UK environmentalists by notorious communists the, er, Metropolitan Police.
They are. The mass hysteria about Fukushima was fueled by "environmentalists" who were being funded by the Australian coal lobby.
This is both in the night-and-day cycle meaning but also in the "we need more power in 10-years" meaning, since nuclear power plants take forever to build.
Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth, especially regarding climate change. Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others.
The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest, strong local and national (e.g. the minimum distance that wind farms need in germany, eliminating most of the possible options), opposition to new projects, strong opposition to new transmission lines, strong opposition to losing the jobs in the legacy markets (especially visible in the USA with "clean" Coal) and no burning desire to honestly consider the storage issue (both in regards to demand shifting and building of new storage facilities using hydrogen or synthetic gases and similar things).
Our problems aren't solved because solving them isn't a high enough political (and thus also economical, due to the negative externality not being financially relevant) priority around the world, not because we're not using nuclear for everything.
In France, the first nuclear plants of the current production group were contracted in 1970, and connected to the network in 1977, so that's 7 years for a pilot industrial project. Later plants were built in 5-6 years.
The kicker is that this work is highly scalable: France built over 6 reactors per year over its program.
The current issue with new generation reactors seem to be related to loss of industrial knowledge, there is no reason to think that the next built in the series would suffer from the same issues.
The NRC reviews only the safety of reactors, not if it's a constructible design. If somebody had held Westinghouse to the standard of having constructible designs, in addition to safe designs, maybe the disasters at Vogtle and VC Summer might have been avoided.
I wouldn't surprised for Hinkley point C to also have such issues. What I would like to know is whether the amount of issues is significantly reduced compared to Flamanville and Olkiluoto. That would be a good indication about whether the design is faulty, or whether it's the industry having teething issues.
And it was a different time, in an economy with different skills, and entirely different technologies.
What was cheap and fast 50 years ago may not be the best thing to build today. For example, the wealthy no longer build many mansions with intricate stonework and wood molding, all crafted by hand. The workforce is no longer there.
We should pay close attention to the productive capacity of today, what sort of industrial machines we have at our actual disposal.
Nobody who is talking about nuclear pays attention to what it would actually take to build nuclear like France did in the 1970s, it's just an assumption that it could be done, without paying attention to any of the details.
Further, those proposing lots of new nuclear never deal with the massive failures of current attempts, whether it's France's EPR designs at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, or Hinkley. All have been failures. What would change to get a first-of-a-kind build down to 7 years?
Nobody has answers to these questions, least of all the nuclear industry. And until somebody has a clear and detailed and knowledgeable path forward on construction, we will waste billions and billions more on ineffective nuclear when those resources could instead be out to use right away with storage and renewables.
What's a good timeline then, and what technology not emitting co2 supports it?
The countries that have started wind&solar policies a decade ago are nowhere close to a clean electricity mix. In fact, fossil plants and infrastructures are still being built in these countries.
If you plot out the growth of wind and solar deployments rate, we are just baaaarely on track to replace all of our energy services with renewable energy in the next 15-20 years.
Storage is also growing at an acceptable rate for our needs, we are producing 200GWh/ year right now, will get to 2000GWh/year by 2026, and be at 20-30 TWh/ year by 2031-2036.
In contrast, if we figure out how to build a first-of-a-kind in 7 years, then start scaling up, most of the energy transition will have already happened.
The only reason to pursue nuclear is if it seems to be cheaper than the alternatives. It doesn't look like it will be. But even if it's more expensive, getting 10% or so of our power from nuclear might lead to a cost optimal solution, so I hope the industry can pull itself together. I'm doubtful, but hopeful.
I cite a previous example of a country starting several new reactors per year over a couple decades, with a mean build time of 6-7 years, and ending up with an electricity production which is mostly CO2-free.
It is not me thinking, or an hypothetical scenario, it's the history of France's commercial nuclear program between 1970 and 1990.
> There's a big contradiction in your two assessments here.[...]
> However, even with renewable's exponential growth to hundreds of GW deployed every year today, with exponential growth continuing from today, you seem to think it's not enough.
There's no contradiction. You simply chose to reframe my statement to make it say something else. My point is that despite "exponential growth to hundreds of GW deployed every year", countries with a strong wind/solar policy did not manage to curb their CO2 emissions per MWh to reasonable levels.
My concern is about the time it will take before these wind/solar policies have a significant effect on electricity CO2 emissions at the scale of a country. I don't really care about installed capacity.
So my point is, if 7 years is too long, what is a reasonable timeframe for effective CO2 reduction, and where did you see policies actually achieve that?
> A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor. In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial date to the end 2022.
> EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months. The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.
10 years late (so far) and 15 bil over budget (so far).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
>nuclear power plants take forever to build
That is because of overregulation in North American and Western Europe. The overregulation is because of hysteria and coal lobbyists. Nuclear is working fine in the rest of the world with more plants under construction:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
Nearly all large construction projects have huge delays and go massively over budget, not just nuclear!
Weakening nuclear regulations (which ones?) will not solve the construction problem, because at best it will turn them into the other projects with big delays.
Even PWR don't take 'forever' to build if you actually build a large number. The problem is that, specially in the West, we have gone to a policy where its like 'lets do a tiny bit of nuclear' and that leads to basically 1 plant being in construction supported by a increasingly small nuclear industry getting endlessly delayed because nobody working on it has ever done it before.
Learning effects in nuclear building are massive and well researched. You need to have teams that have done it before and it goes much faster.
Even the most shitty PWR could be built in 4-5 years as we have seen in France, US or South Korea.
Of course, if you were serious today about doing this, you wouldn't use 60s PWRs anyway and if you use modern reactors you don't need to do a massive civil engineering project. Ironically in many way the civil engineering is gigantic part of the cost, not the nuclear itself.
> Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth
Well of course 'all' problems would not be solved, but the fact is we could have had clean energy for 40 years had nuclear continued and new types of reactors had come along.
It's my opinion, and I know most people don't agree that if you have real mass manufacturing of nuclear reactors, it would actually be viable to competitively produce green fuel. Maybe some subsidies or tax on non green version to push it faster.
I would have favored making all cars into FFV (Flex Fuel) and having a 5%-80% methanol requirement (increasing every few years). That methanol could then increasingly be made with nuclear power as your capacity grows.
Today we have lithium batteries for most of transportation so that is no longer as relevant as it would have been if we had done this in the 90s. I still a good idea for aviation and other needs of chemical energy.
> Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others.
Power is still a huge issue for countries, if we had mass produced reactors, exporting them in those countries is a very viable option to get green energy to those people at a cheaper rate then coal they are actually building.
If emerging countries could call the US and say 'we like 50x500MW reactors' deployed over the next 10 years. They would very much want to do it.
> The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest
The same could be said for nuclear as well.
> strong opposition to new transmission lines
Renewables break the traditional local production concept for power and force an ever increasing amount of energy transportation. Because of non uniform wind and weather patterns and lack of economically viable storage you compensate by transporting energy.
I much favor having nuclear reactor, say 500MW units being deployed everywhere where it makes sense as close to consumption as viable. And for places this makes no sense also having a much smaller 100MW reactor type that you can deploy in shipping containers everywhere needed.
Reliable base load close to consumption combined maybe a few heat batteries (or hydro if available) can is the perfect solution. In theory modern reactors could be load following quite well, but its really a question of what is cheaper, lower utilization or energy storage.
This is exactly how Ontario (Canada) and Sweden have a green grid.
> not because we're not using nuclear for everything.
In my opinion part of the political problem is because what is attempted is so difficult and puts so many changes on people. Simply deploying nuclear reactors in the same location current coal plants are leads to basically no change in the overall gird.
Its literally build whatever number of 500MW mod...
And then we even think in terms of reactors, not power plants. So you get a permission for a reactor. As you only get one you want to buy the biggest one you can get. Which likely meant the newest theoretically available. Instead of two or three more mature and sensible designs, likely costing less in long run.
Compare the countries that had real phases where they build a lot of nuclear and it easily beats any renewables.
If Germany had gone all out on nuclear for the last 20 years, they could easily be finishing 5-6 nuclear plants a year, and likely get the construction time down to 4-5 years even if you built old school PWRs. Germany would be shutting down coal plants and end up 100% clean far earlier then their current way of doing.
If you however figure out a newer type of reactor (as we should have long ago) you could likely build 5x as many. The limiting factor in PWRs (outside of money) is the extremely complex construction of the reactor vessel. These have to be 'thicc' and are hard to weld, only few places in the world can do it.
Despite that insane reactor vessel France and the US managed at reasonably high production rate.
However if you go to something like a molten salt cooled reactor, or a molten salt reactor of some kind you have no pressure and thus no 'thicc' reactor vessel. These can be constructed incredibly quickly.
If you actually put a challenge with a fix amount of money to produce 100GWh of 100% clean highly reliable electricity setting up a assembly line of reactor production and develop traveling build teams that set up site. Then show up with a huge truck and dump the reactor into the site.
Doing that with renewables is an unsolved problem unless maybe in countries where you have a massive amount of hydro.
Thank the gods, Canada has finally changed its regulations (and the US is slowly doing so too) so actual real progress has been made on commercial molten salt (and other) reactors. Terrestrial Energy, Moltex Energy and a number of other companies are deeply engaged in the process of getting these reactors threw licensing now. These reactors are often more 10x smaller for the same output of energy and thus far cheaper to build.
The potential for loss is much higher with nuclear power.
To get a perspective of how nuclear accidents compare with those of other energy production methods, have a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
The worst case for hydro at least is immense, possibly multiple millions death in some cases.
Hydro is also surprisingly low at 0.02, though failures are absolutely catastrophic I guess they tend to be out of the way and fairly local: so a dam failure will take out a village at once, and do extensive geological-scale damage, but not much more.
Nuclear contamination can be cleaned. The majority of the Fukushima exclusion zone has been cleaned and reopened. There's no motivation to do this in Chernobyl because the town of Chernobyl only existed to support the nuclear power plant.
And somewhat oddly he Chernobyl Exclusion Zone literally shows that nuclear accidents are good for the environment, as human activity turns out to be way worse for wildlife than elevated radiations.
This isn't true. Fossil fuels kill much, much more people per Kwh than nuclear [1]. But much like airplanes vs car accidents, fossil fuels kill constantly and widespread in small amounts, while nuclear kills very rarely in high amounts.
[1] https://youtu.be/Jzfpyo-q-RM?t=376
The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity.
It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today.
It's time to stop mythologizing the technology, stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine. It's a theoretically cheap heat source, but when you add in the engineering to capture the heat to boil water, it's not so cheap in reality, and there's been no innovation on making the engineering more elegant or cheaper in decades. In fact, if anything, it's gotten less elegant, more expensive, and even harder to build.
Nuclear did and does work out. It was not overhyped and it has delivered as expected. I would argue that solar is overhyped and has continually underdelivered. Anyone who has installed a solar system on their house has seen the significant issues with it.
Nuclear remains the best way to replace coal/gas electricity generation for baseload power, to generate enough energy to power industries and cities, and is cleaner than filling a city with atrocious rare earth batteries that are required to paper over the problems with other inconsistently generating technologies.
It is what it is, but if nuclear isn't the future, then coal isn't going anywhere.
This is very important for the heavy industries yet opponents of Nuclear still pretend that solar and wind can cover it.
They are fine with Nuclear as long as it is in China.
https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/commentary-china-is-buil...
The coal capital expenditures into coal will likely be underutilized over the next 30 years, but that happens when there are massive plans that are set in motion over the course of many years without adjustment.
I think a bigger question is, do we have enough "political capital" to pay for nuclear energy?
Even if our politicians all agreed to it, across counties even, what are the odds that they would get ousted before the reactors are built and delivering cost efficiency energy.
These are all trivial compared to nuclear's construction problem.
But I've never heard that batteries are not "scalable," when they are actually one of the most incredibly scalable technologies out there. Want a few watt hours? No problem. Want 10GWh? No problem. Want to distribute a MWh at every distribution station across a country? No problem.
Batteries scale as small or large as we can conceive.
> atrocious rare earth batteries
There aren't rare earth elements in batteries. It's been funny to watch "rare earth" become a synonym for "harmful" because this does not seem to have any basis in fact that I can understand.
> coal isn't going anywhere
Coal is already a dead man walking. Most of its use in the US is uneconomic, and loses money for utility customers. Bad financial agreements, executive incompetence, and misaligned economic incentives between utilities and their customers are the only reason its still on the grid.
Everybody who bet on coal 10 years ago was foolish, and should lose their capital, but since that section of our economy is run on cronyism instead of capitalism, people bad at capital allocation are not losing their shirts like they should.
Its actually massively difficult challenge both from a production and supply chain perspective.
Lithium itself plentiful but getting it into the battery is a long way. Its more like specialty chemicals, even the 'Lithium majors' have had massive problems getting new plants online and producing high quality lithium.
Battery plants are incredibly complex mass manufacturing operations and even small manufacturing problems can leave to burning cars. Scaling these is very difficult and only a few companies are really producing lithium batteries at scale.
Lithium batteries in Grid operation have never been deployed at '10GWh' so if it was 'no problem' then somebody might have done it.
The challenge of producing enough batteries (and renewables), lithium or otherwise to have a 100% reliable electricity grid (even if there are 2 weeks without wind) is gigantic and to me it actually seems far harder then just building nuclear plants.
> Coal is already a dead man walking.
Look at China, India and Indonesia and then rethink your statement.
It just so happens that US and Western Europe are not the only places in the world.
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
The gas plants are profitable because the prices you have to pay them are pretty high.
And this problem is getting worse all the time and its not really a great overall strategy.
I would argue renewables are subsides by how they use the grid. In the US renewables even get subsidies for energy they produce and sell at negative prices.
A big example is freight rail. The service in the US shrunk over time, and was basically reduced to captive-loop "coal mine to power plant" runs by the 1980s. If the entire country had similar economics, due to cheap ubiquitous nuclear power, there would be impetus to sustain and expand the electrified network. Instead of spending the 50s and 60s on half-baked turbine locomotives that burnt tar, and building ever larger diesels, the clear answer to more horsepower was to suck down more amperes from the overhead wire.
Similarly, trolley-bus designs get more interesting when the cost gap between electricity and petrol widens.
It is cheaper now but my suggestion is that this is not inherent.
My whole point about a nuclear society was that if existed the economics would be different.
> The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity.
Again, part of my point is that the best way to solve these problems is having cheap high temperature reactors.
These reactors are prefect in replacing gas in heat production, and be used to for example to produce hydrogen that then would get further transformed into all kind of chemical fuels and feed-stocks.
> It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today.
People have such a narrow view of this. Nuclear provided gigantic amounts of clean energy when the only alternative was coal. This by itself saved far more lives then any nuclear accident ever killed (that number is very low).
Not being able to beat massively powerful fossil industry with 60s technology in the middle of a massive anti-nuclear weapons (and thus everything nuclear) push is hardly grounds to dismiss it.
If people had given a shit about climate change in the 1970 and willing to give it the same kind of subsidies that renewables have been getting then things would be different. This would have been more expensive then coal but the public heath aspect and the clean energy aspect would have made this worthwhile 10x over.
The fact is, the reason we even started building PWR is that the military wanted them for submarines. And despite even the designers of them saying they were a bad fit for civil nuclear, the government and industry pushed forward on these designs and pretty quickly hard locked themself into these designs for everything commercial. Everything else with a few exceptions was locked into research efforts and those were reduced consistently after the 60s.
> It's time to stop mythologizing the technology
It has nothing to do with mythologizing. It has to do with simply first principles approach to problems solving. We have an energy source that is literally freely available as a waste product from mining. Existing rare earth mines already have unlimited thorium as waste stream. Natural Uranium is plentiful as well.
This energy source turns out to be 10^12 more energy dense then fossil fuels that have powered society for a century and produced highly available energy at cheap prices.
> stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine
All of this is wrong. You conclusions are only based a reactor design, not on nuclear as a whole. A modern type of reactor (some are going threw regulatory process in Canada and could have been designed in the 70s) are far, far smaller then PWR type reactors and use orders of magnitude less concrete.
There have actually been a lot of study about what makes nuclear expensive. And its mainly two things, that nuclear reactors are basically gigantic civil engineering projects that has to be done at a very high standard and to get those in on time, on budget you really need a workforce that has experience. This type of knowledge was achieved in a few cases and in those PWR were able to be build in 4-5 years reliably.
The second part of what makes it commercially not viable is that financing these projects is actually a huge problem. Because of the long time it takes to build such a first time project, you require refinancing for 10 years and that is huge part of the...
"The whole proceeding against an industry that has made invaluable contributions to the American economy for more than fifty years is the worst example of fanaticism since the New England witch hunts in the Seventeenth Century."
"no person has ever been found having an identifiable toxic effect from the amount of lead in the atmosphere today."
"Tetraethyl lead had saved the American economy billions. It made the modern automobile, the entire car-centric structure of American life, possible. A phase-down would emasculate car engines, cause octane numbers to plummet, and waste crude oil. They might as well burn the money of the American people."
Larry Blanchard, Ethyl’s executive vice president
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-sc...
What about Nord Stream 2? I bet they will find enough money and political influence to justify it