I am vouching this comment as an attempt to get you out of the soapbox. Speaking as an EU skeptic and as someone who daydreams of convincing the wife to get some land in Crete and enjoy a meraklis life, please reconsider the tone of your posts. They are only inflammatory and do not help any kind of healthy debate.
Not only that, but they're a gate to the Middle East and the Caucaz and it has always counterbalanced Russia in the Black Sea. This is even more important now because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yes, their current president is a less reliable partner than the kemalists.
Turkey and Greece are super important for the regional stability in Southeastern Europe. Together they control most of the waterways in the region. You should view most of the Aegean along with the Sea of Crete as Greece, because it is Greek territorial waters and EEZ
I think culturally Greece will be relevant for a long time to come because of the construction of Ancient Greece as a sort of origin for “western society.”
Economically, well, you have to try something, right? I may agree in the sense that I don’t think Greece would be doing this if they were an economic powerhouse, doing great thanks to oil. But, is it bad to do something not completely altruistically?
Greece has received three international bailouts from the euro zone and the IMF worth 280 billion euros ($307.19 billion) since 2010. It emerged from its latest bailout in 2018 and has relied on the debt markets to cover its borrowing needs since.
“Greece concluded today the repayment of its debts to the IMF,” Finance Minister Christos Staikouras said in a statement. After previous early repayments to the IMF, Greece owed 1.9 billion euros in loans due by 2024, the last batch of a total of 28 billion euros the Fund provided between 2010 and 2014.
Greece will soon have the cheapest power in Europe if they run the program intelligently.
Greece has immediate access to deep ocean for cheap storage, and plenty of sunshine and wind year-round. Transmission lines out to the rest of Europe could make them a major exporter.
This is a lab test. HN gets almost daily 'lab test' breakthroughs in batteries and energy tech and yet, turning those breakthroughs into practical, engineered services remains quite elusive.
It takes a MINIMUM of 20 years to go from "lab to fab" or "science experiment in a lab to productively useful in real life". Maybe this indicates that clock has started but the requirement for that 20 years is 20 years of fully funded R&D (small R, big D) - otherwise bump the 20 years up to infinity without continuous funding.
Deep sea pumped storage? Where they use energy to pump water out of underwater concrete spheres and allow the water to rush back in to turn generators?
That is one alternative. Another is to pump air down a hose to force water out of a deep cavity. A third is to winch a float down toward a seafloor-mounted pulley. Methods that put the electrical equipment on shore are generally cheaper than the ones that put it at the sea floor.
Energy storage is mostly freshman-level physics (E = Fx, E = mgh), chemical schemes excepted. Undersea methods can often be adapted to an under-groundwater form.
The winning energy storage methods will be the cheapest ones, even at the expense of round-trip efficiency. But forms that are shippable, such as liquified ammonia synthesis, have an advantage than can overcome both higher cost and lower efficiency.
Please do read about the NuScale reactor. That one is modern, with passive circulation and cooling.
One can also build some of them on a barge and moor it over deep water just like a deepwater oil rig, where it will be protected from earthquakes. The US is currently designing one, the Russians already have one but that's not an option anymore.
Also, smaller the Greek islands are not big energy consumers. A wind farm, solar plus storage might be enough for most if them. Also use the surplus to make hydrogen and store it for burning in a gas generator. Some of them are near the shore and they're already powered by cable.
I suspect you, like many, are fixated on the idea that solar/wind power is viable as primary energy sources and therefore haven't been taking nuclear seriously.
Assuming the future successful invention and deployment of battery power storage to provide a consistent 11,000 Megawatt-hours per day (a fairly typical large city supply amount), what do you think would happen to those enormous ganged up batteries in an earthquake?
I am not necessarily pro-nuclear, but one of the big problems with Fukushima is that it didn't ventilate the hydrogen that was created during the meltdown. It was the hydrogen that created the explosion in reactor for that made it go from bad to ultra-shit.
I seem to be confusing nuclear disasters. Anyway, the explosions in Fukushima could have been prevented with hydrogen ventilation chimneys that had been standard equipment since the early 70s.
I don't know how big a problem are earthquakes but I personally don't trust my fellow Greeks to drive a car safely without killing anyone. You're talking about a country were rank incompetence runs rampant, where nothing works and nobody can get a job done properly. Everything in this country is done shoddily, in half, and while cutting corners - not for any considerations of economy or efficiency, but just so the project leaders can each pocket their share of the cuttings. Every new plan to develop this or build that, or inaugurate the other, is always introduced with great fanfare, with officials in pretty suits cutting ribbons and shaking hands and smiling for the cameras, and a month later you can see the ribbon still flapping over the rubbish-strewn derelict of the great project as stray dogs piss on its ruins.
Before those social and political, rather than technological, obstacles to progress are resolved, the last thing anyone should encourage Greece to do is install nuclear bloody reactors on our land.
You start a whole paragraph saying "you don't trust your fellow Greeks", throws the laundry list of problems with Greek society, then concludes with "before those social problems are solved, we shouldn't build any nuclear reactors on our land".
That implies that your problem is specifically with Greece having nuclear plants, and that there are other societies that are capable of managing nuclear reactors on their land. Does it not?
Do you disagree with what I wrote above, about the situation in Greece?
Because you said that "Corruption and abuse of power is not just a Greek thing".
Not "just" a Greek thing, yes? So you must think that it is a Greek thing.
Note, my comment was not only about "corruption and abuse of power", but also
about incompetence. See in my comment: "a country were rank incompetence runs
rampant". You didn't seem to disagree with that - you only commented about
corruption and abuse of power.
So which parts of all this do you disagree with? Can you clarify?
I'm sorry but I have to confess, I'm very confused by the way you choose to
communicate. If instead of attacking an opinion I didn't express, you had taken
the time to think carefully about what I acturally wrote, and made a comment
about that, you could have spared us both a lot of wasted effort. If you didn't
have time to think carefully and you just wanted to express your disagreement or
frustration at my comment, you could always just downvote my comment. But if
you're going to put time in a discussion, then put enough time in it to avoid
confusing everyone, including yourself. If I may.
> So which parts of all this do you disagree with? Can you clarify?
I agree that Greece is not the best place to build reactor plants, but I do not agree with the reasons you provided.
There are other countries that also have incompetence and corruption - endemic and systemic - and yet they still promote big enterprises, and I don't see how this is an argument against the project in itself.
Just look up at the top of the thread and the very first comment that started this conversation: "It is a country with lots of seismic activity and are in the middle of the Mediterranean."
Cool down please. You talk about Greece, where a government change can undo in record time what the previous has made. We passed the same laws over and over many times about health, education etc since the last decade. Anything that lasts more than a couple of years is in jeopardy.
I am Greek and I'd like to express a different opinion. Let me first explain the situatin here: Greece has a very large amount of coal on its mountains; because of that, the Greek Public Power Corporation used to use its own thermoelectric power plants (i.e power factories that burn coal) to power almost all of Greece. The only parts of Greece that were not powered by these coal plants were most islands because they were not connected with the main network and used diesel engines to generate power.
In any case, the thig is that this made Greece be self-sufficient on power and allowed us to pay a very small price on electrical bills (because coal is very cheap and we don't need to import it; actually the Greek Public Power Corporation owns the coal mines so it doesn't even pay for it, it only mines it).
Unfortuanately, over the last 5-10 years this has changed greatly: The EU has passed some laws that force all members to have a minimum amount of "green" power (i.e wind / sun etc). This may seem like a good thing on first sight (Greece has a lot of sun and wind) but it is very, very problematic: The "green" power is much more expensive than traditional power (needs a lot of investments in new power plants which also are much more expensive than coal) and also it is much less reliable than good old coal (you also need power at night or when there's no wind, power cannot be saved to be used later).
On top of that, the EU has also passed some CO2 laws that more or less forbid us to use our coal plants because if we keep using them we'll need to pay a very big fine for every ton of CO2 these plants produce. This resulted in a need for Greece to use imported natural gas to cover its power needs. The end result because of these two fine EU laws is that is we greeks pay the most expensive power in the EU, despite being one of the poorest countries!
So, no matter what the article says or what laws have been passed, the truth is that: Greece cannot use its own coal nor its thermoelectric power plants because the EU will not allow Greece to use it. Greece is forced to import solar panels and wind turbines from abroad (while thermoelectric power plants that have been built a few years ago have been left to rot). Greece is also forced to use imported natural gas to cover its needs (while our mountains are full of coal).
In most (all?) of Europe, solar and wind not installed because they are green, but because they are the cheapest. One would think they are not any more expensive in Greece, in fact, solar yields should be a good deal better than in places like Germany. Not to mention cheaper than diesel. How come this is apparently not so?
There was an effort made a while ago to subsidise the installation of solar panels on peoples' land. This was a few years ago and I was abroad working, so I don't know the details.
Because this is Greece where nothing ever works right, the plan failed (though I don't know the particulars) and so you can still, today, see plots of land that would normally be planted with vegetables or cereals etc, instead covered in solar panels. My understanding is that those are not connected to the grid, their owners can't sell the power they generate and they don't even have the funds to tear them down, so they're just left there to disintegrate slowly, while the entire plan is canned due to incompetence and shoddy planning.
Like everything else in Greece, and like this new plan will inevitably end up.
All good but there's an elephant in the room called corruption. I don't think Greece will ever reduce the levels of corruption, even today the current party has 300M in dept and having major scandals that get covered by the controlled TV media.
68 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadThat is what happens when globalists and climatists from Brussels grab you by your... budgets.
Things haven't been going great for Greece since Varoufakis betrayed his voters and local politicians became agents of the EU. Sad!
Curious what you mean?
Beyond the cultural heritage, they’re a NATO member in a semi-hostile state with Turkey and, as of today, Iran.
Turkey and Greece are super important for the regional stability in Southeastern Europe. Together they control most of the waterways in the region. You should view most of the Aegean along with the Sea of Crete as Greece, because it is Greek territorial waters and EEZ
I think culturally Greece will be relevant for a long time to come because of the construction of Ancient Greece as a sort of origin for “western society.”
Economically, well, you have to try something, right? I may agree in the sense that I don’t think Greece would be doing this if they were an economic powerhouse, doing great thanks to oil. But, is it bad to do something not completely altruistically?
Greece is bankrupt. It made this cute announcement because it costs the country nothing, and should anything go wrong, it would be rescued by the EU.
From 4 Apr 2022:
Greece has received three international bailouts from the euro zone and the IMF worth 280 billion euros ($307.19 billion) since 2010. It emerged from its latest bailout in 2018 and has relied on the debt markets to cover its borrowing needs since.
“Greece concluded today the repayment of its debts to the IMF,” Finance Minister Christos Staikouras said in a statement. After previous early repayments to the IMF, Greece owed 1.9 billion euros in loans due by 2024, the last batch of a total of 28 billion euros the Fund provided between 2010 and 2014.
https://www.reuters.com/article/greece-economy-imf-idUSKCN2L...
Greece has immediate access to deep ocean for cheap storage, and plenty of sunshine and wind year-round. Transmission lines out to the rest of Europe could make them a major exporter.
I am curious about what you mean, can you please elaborate?
But pumping water and air, driving winches, and building pressure vessels are all mature tech.
Energy storage is mostly freshman-level physics (E = Fx, E = mgh), chemical schemes excepted. Undersea methods can often be adapted to an under-groundwater form.
The winning energy storage methods will be the cheapest ones, even at the expense of round-trip efficiency. But forms that are shippable, such as liquified ammonia synthesis, have an advantage than can overcome both higher cost and lower efficiency.
Most places will rely on a mix.
Current nuclear plants just dont fail in such way as to "threaten all of Europe and Africa"
I'm not against nuclear, but can we please not build them in places that present unnecessary risks?
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-hope...
Sure technology has improved and it is safer, but you know can make it even safer still? Not putting them on places with lots of seismic activity.
The death and destruction from tsunami itself was several orders of magnitude more than from nuclear station malfunction. [1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...
Because whenbyou do the math of cost benefit, it falls squarely on the benefits side.
"Not building on places with seismic activity" is.
One can also build some of them on a barge and moor it over deep water just like a deepwater oil rig, where it will be protected from earthquakes. The US is currently designing one, the Russians already have one but that's not an option anymore.
Also, smaller the Greek islands are not big energy consumers. A wind farm, solar plus storage might be enough for most if them. Also use the surplus to make hydrogen and store it for burning in a gas generator. Some of them are near the shore and they're already powered by cable.
Of all the possible places to build nuclear plants, why go put them in a place that has plenty of sunshine and tons of seismic activity?
No matter how favorable the odds, why play those when there are places that could be even better?
Assuming the future successful invention and deployment of battery power storage to provide a consistent 11,000 Megawatt-hours per day (a fairly typical large city supply amount), what do you think would happen to those enormous ganged up batteries in an earthquake?
https://battlebornbatteries.com/lithium-ion-battery-puncture...
No, absolutely not. I said in the first comments, not against nuclear. What I am against is pushing for unproven designs facing avoidable risks.
it has been standard from the late 60s.
In Fuertaventura wind is almost base load power because you have >10 kt most if not all of the time.
Before those social and political, rather than technological, obstacles to progress are resolved, the last thing anyone should encourage Greece to do is install nuclear bloody reactors on our land.
Corruption and abuse of power is not just a Greek thing.
You're just trying your best to misinterpret what I actually wrote.
That implies that your problem is specifically with Greece having nuclear plants, and that there are other societies that are capable of managing nuclear reactors on their land. Does it not?
Do you disagree with what I wrote above, about the situation in Greece?
Because you said that "Corruption and abuse of power is not just a Greek thing". Not "just" a Greek thing, yes? So you must think that it is a Greek thing.
Note, my comment was not only about "corruption and abuse of power", but also about incompetence. See in my comment: "a country were rank incompetence runs rampant". You didn't seem to disagree with that - you only commented about corruption and abuse of power.
So which parts of all this do you disagree with? Can you clarify?
I'm sorry but I have to confess, I'm very confused by the way you choose to communicate. If instead of attacking an opinion I didn't express, you had taken the time to think carefully about what I acturally wrote, and made a comment about that, you could have spared us both a lot of wasted effort. If you didn't have time to think carefully and you just wanted to express your disagreement or frustration at my comment, you could always just downvote my comment. But if you're going to put time in a discussion, then put enough time in it to avoid confusing everyone, including yourself. If I may.
I agree that Greece is not the best place to build reactor plants, but I do not agree with the reasons you provided.
There are other countries that also have incompetence and corruption - endemic and systemic - and yet they still promote big enterprises, and I don't see how this is an argument against the project in itself.
I understand now your disagreement. Out of curiousity, what is the reason you don't think Greece is not the best place to build reactor plants?
Greece can do it!
Scotland also plans big wind park.
There are houses that already run on 100% renewables (summer solar generated hydrogen)
In any case, the thig is that this made Greece be self-sufficient on power and allowed us to pay a very small price on electrical bills (because coal is very cheap and we don't need to import it; actually the Greek Public Power Corporation owns the coal mines so it doesn't even pay for it, it only mines it).
Unfortuanately, over the last 5-10 years this has changed greatly: The EU has passed some laws that force all members to have a minimum amount of "green" power (i.e wind / sun etc). This may seem like a good thing on first sight (Greece has a lot of sun and wind) but it is very, very problematic: The "green" power is much more expensive than traditional power (needs a lot of investments in new power plants which also are much more expensive than coal) and also it is much less reliable than good old coal (you also need power at night or when there's no wind, power cannot be saved to be used later).
On top of that, the EU has also passed some CO2 laws that more or less forbid us to use our coal plants because if we keep using them we'll need to pay a very big fine for every ton of CO2 these plants produce. This resulted in a need for Greece to use imported natural gas to cover its power needs. The end result because of these two fine EU laws is that is we greeks pay the most expensive power in the EU, despite being one of the poorest countries!
So, no matter what the article says or what laws have been passed, the truth is that: Greece cannot use its own coal nor its thermoelectric power plants because the EU will not allow Greece to use it. Greece is forced to import solar panels and wind turbines from abroad (while thermoelectric power plants that have been built a few years ago have been left to rot). Greece is also forced to use imported natural gas to cover its needs (while our mountains are full of coal).
Because this is Greece where nothing ever works right, the plan failed (though I don't know the particulars) and so you can still, today, see plots of land that would normally be planted with vegetables or cereals etc, instead covered in solar panels. My understanding is that those are not connected to the grid, their owners can't sell the power they generate and they don't even have the funds to tear them down, so they're just left there to disintegrate slowly, while the entire plan is canned due to incompetence and shoddy planning.
Like everything else in Greece, and like this new plan will inevitably end up.