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New record set for world's hottest day - as scientist warns milestone is a 'death sentence'
We thank people who disregarded nuclear energy. We could’ve sliced global emissions by a lot if were not for you, but burning coal is far safer.
That’s a false dichotomy. There are more power sources than coal and nuclear.
Also electricity generation is not the only source of emissions. Car traffic, cruise ships, aiplanes, all need to be reduced and can’t just be replaced by nuclear power.
In theory, yes. In practice, nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.
Energy is not something where you can just pick one solution and run with it (at least, non-fossils, anyway). Nuclear is slow to ramp, so it usually takes care of baseline load. Renewables like wind and solar are situational, they mostly work throughout the day (yes, wind too, differential heating of earth’s surface by the sun is what causes surface-level winds) and depend greatly on weather. Hydro is quite reliable but it’s rarely available in the quantities needed. The cleanest grids on the planet use all of these, and throw in some fossils for load balancing, phasing them out with energy storage solutions as they become available.
You can’t just shoot one of the pillars of this system of clean energy and then say you never tried to topple the system, just wanted to prop up the other pillars. Discussing shutting off nuclear plants without considering the alternative is pure lunacy, driven by fearmongering, and propped up by no small amounts of oil money for a reason.
Replacing nuclear with renewables is simply not the reality of the situation. Nuclear and renewables work together to replace fossils, and fill different roles. It’s not one or the other, it’s both and even together they’re not yet enough.
So when you do consider the alternatives, moving from nuclear to the inevitable replacement, fossils, is still lunacy, just for other reasons: even if you care about nothing more than atmospheric radiation, coal puts more of it out per kWh generated, solely because of C-14 isotopes. Nuclear is shockingly clean, mostly due to its energy density, but also because it’s not producing barrels of green goo, just small pills of spicy ceramics. And if your point is accidents, just how many oil spills have we had to endure? How many times was the frickin ocean set on fire? How many bloody and brutal wars were motivated by oil? Is that really what a safer energy source sounds like to you, just because there are two nuclear accidents the world knows about, and a thousand fossil accidents, of which the world lost count already?
And deflecting to other industries is also quite disingenuous. Especially if your scapegoat is transportation, since that’s an industry that’s increasingly getting electrified in an effort to make it cleaner at the same logistical capacity, and therefore will depend more and more on the very same electrical grid which you’re trying to detract from.
nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.
Being from Germany, I have often read such arguments and at least here that is simply not true.
The decrease in nuclear power was accompanied by a decrease in fossil fuel.
Could that decrease have been larger if nuclear had been kept around longer? Possibly.
But if we are talking about building new power plants, the money is typically better invested in renewables. They’re faster to build and produce cheaper energy.
I’m not sure what the point is.
German Electricity is dirtier than France’s therefor no other sources of electricity exist beyond coal and nuclear?
That would be a weird conclusion seeing as both countries also use other power sources.
@geissi
except from countries lucky enought to get a lot of electric damn, there is no example of countries having a stable network mainly reliying on renewable energy production, because they are not stable. Doing so requires a lot of new powerlines, storage solutions, ... and at the end may still be unreliable during winter / summer peaks. Its is much easier to have a mix with the fundamental ensured by a drivable power plant and there are two ""clean"" choices: water and nuclear.
Its is much easier to have a mix
A mix of more than just coal and nuclear, right?
So other power sources do exits and we should use them?
@geissi
of course a mix including renewable, there are a lot of prevision plan on what the best mix should be and fine tuning is hard, but it always include renewable in a large way. I argue to avoid gas and coal as much as possible, and using nuclear instead. Plus renewable of course.
And that is all I’m arguing for.
The original comment said, people who disregard nuclear are burning coal, I claim you can use other energy sources as well.
Nothing more.