Growth in german wind capacity is slowing. Soo... then the plan is to keep on with lignite and gas? Am I missing something?
Installed Wind Capacty - Germany
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Don’t import Reddit’s extremely ignorant takes on nuclear power here, please. Nuclear power is a huge waste of money.
If you’re about to angrily downvote me (or you already did), or write an angry reply, please read the rest of my comment before you do. This is not my individual opinion, this is the scientific consensus on the issue.
When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.
If you’re about to lecture about “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, save your keystrokes - the majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable. Again, this isn’t my opinion, you can look it up and find a dozen sources to back up what I am writing here.
This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream of thorium fusion breeding or whatever other potential future tech someone will probably comment about without reading this paragraph.
Again, compared to nuclear, renewables are:
Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. It is 100% worth researching for future breakthroughs. But at present it is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.
Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on nuclear power should be spent on renewables instead.
Okay, now factor in environmental costs.
…which is hugely worse for nuclear? What is your point?
Nuclear power plants require eye watering amounts of concrete.
They require continuous (and ever-increasing) extraction of fissile matter such as uranium ore (a limited resource, by the way - if we used nuclear power instead of fossil fuels we would run out pretty quickly, too, all things considered).
Nuclear power also consumes (and irradiates) vast quantities of water.
They are huge nightmares for biodiversity as they are massive projects usually flattening large swathes of land.
They produce waste which is not only irradiated and hazardous but also a major security risk, so it has to be safeguarded… and/or sealed into a hole in the ground where it will remain a risk for years to come.
The building projects themselves are astronomical in scale and require huge quantities of materials to be shipped by fleets and fleets of trucks followed by a lot of industrial work. Then in a couple of decades the site has to be decommissioned which is even more work.
Estimates for the lifetime emissions (extraction, commission, operation, etc.) CO2EQ of nuclear power are commonly thought to be between 60-100g per kWh. Solar power is somewhere in the region of 20-40g per kWh, and wind is somewhere around 10-20g per kWh.
So again, no, nuclear energy is not what we want. Support ONLY renewables. Nuclear power is wasteful.
Objectively not. Precious metal mining is more than a thousand times worse for the environment than Uranium or Thorium mining.
Sure, in the 1950s. Modern nuclear reactors can be built in existing Coal plants. Most reactor types don't require any additional shielding besides what is already present.
We have mined enough Uranium to power the entire world for the next 10,000 years; there is currently enough Uranium in just known mines for the next 1,000,000 years of current global power usage. And that's just Uranium. Thorium is a viable technology with the first reactors already online for commercial use.
No, it doesn't. This is just outright a lie, one I have no idea where you got. The internal loop never leaves the building, the external loop is never irradiated.
They have a smaller impact than solar or wind farms, by a factor of 100.
They produce less toxic waste than Coal power plants, and all of the world's projected nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years fits into existing facilities.
This is the exact same for renewables, worse, arguably, since wind farms have to be off shore to be efficient and cargo ships are more than a thousand times worse for the environment than any form of overland transport.
From the charts I've seen lately, offshore is much more expensive than onshore per kwhr for wind by a large margin. If that's the case, is offshore even valuable anymore?
Yes, given there is no 'empty land,' you are always destroying something if you create a windfarm on land. On the other end of this, offshore windfarms unironically create local ecosystems. If your goal is not just decarbonization, but decarbonization in order to better the health of the planet, which it should be, then offshore would be the best option.
See: Germany tearing down land wind farms in order to mine more coal. Those turbines aren't going to be repurposed, they're going to scrap yards.