Waryle

While true, how is that any different to the arguments that were used for TV?

Television is bad because it is a passive activity, but it is less harmful than the continuous ingestion of micro-videos. But I don’t see what it has to do here.

Additionally, Lemmy is a social network in the same way that Reddit is. Is this not also dangerous?

What’s the connection? I didn’t mention Reddit.

As has been the recommendation for practically everything for the four decades I’ve been on this earth, moderation is key. Instead of hating new media, either regulate it (if the evidence is truly that great) or treat it with healthy moderation.

This would be to ignore the particularly addictive nature of this kind of content. It would be like comparing apples to Snickers: both are sweet, yes, but one is much more problematic.

Let’s be blunt here. Most of the people in this thread aren’t worried about health

That could be a point, but I’m pretty sure that if you ask anybody, the main reason given would be that it makes you stupid. But I can agree that this opinion would not necessarily be based on anything other than the eternal contempt for novelty as video games or manga were, for example, before they became popular.

ITT: People in their mid-twenties or later, who feel superior to those that like one form of media over their preferred media.

You’re just waving away an important fact, which is that shorts and their equivalents are notoriously known for killing attention spans and disrupting the management of dopamine in the brain, causing depression in particular.

We are no longer simply in the traditional custom of the elderly who despise the activities of the younger generations, we are talking about health.

Hexgears and of course lemmygrad.ml are of the same kind

Come on, even the comment above it specifically mention waste generated by nuclear power and its management

I did not berated you, I corrected you. If being corrected feel like being berated to you, maybe fact check yourself before commenting

I brush it off because nuclear has exactly the same problem. Worse, actually. We know what happens when you build solar, wind, and storage: on average, things get built on time and in budget. We also know what happens when we build nuclear: it doubles its schedule and budget and makes companies go bankrupt. One is way easier to scale up than the other.

No, just no.

We know what happens when we build nuclear:

• We invest 140 billion.
• We build more than two reactors a year for 25 years.
• By building up skills and an industry with projects, you can even put 1 plant and 4 reactors in the same place in less than 7 years from a vacant lot (Blayais power plant) .
• We decarbonize almost all of its electricity in two decades.
• It runs smoothly for more than 50 years.
• You don’t rely on fossils and the dictatorships that sit on it anymore.
• We become the biggest electricity exporter of Europe for decades, and the biggest of the world most of those years too

It’s called France.

We also know what happens when we want to do without nuclear when we don’t have hydro-electricity:

• We invest two trillion of euros.
• 25 years later we have 60% renewables, but we’re still burning coal and gas.
• so we are still one of the most polluting electricity in Europe
• We’re always at least six years away to get out of coal.
• We don’t have a date to get out of the gas because we have no idea how we’re going to build enough electricity storage to make renewable to work

It’s called Germany.

Take this [map] (https://app.electricitymaps.com/map)

• On the top right corner, click on “Country”
• On the bottom left corner, click on “Yearly”

Can you tell me how much green countries do you see which does not rely on hydro and/or nuclear?

The answer is: >!not. A. Single. One. Even after trillions of euros invested in it worldwide, not one country managed to reduce their electricity carbon print without nuclear or hydro.!<

If all the paperwork was done and signed off today, there wouldn’t be a single GW of new nuclear produced in the US before 2030. Even optimistic schedules are running up against that limit.

Why this arbitrary date? In five and a half years, there would be no power plant, but if you launch 15 1GW projects in parallel, maybe it will take 15 years to build because of legal recourse as well as a shortage of engineers/technicians because people have been told for 30 years that nuclear is Satan and we want to stop. But after 15 years you have 15GW of nuclear.

But how long before we find a solution for storage? How much will it cost? Is it even possible to store so much energy with our space constraints and physical resources?

The debates and even this thread are filled with “we could totally go 100% renewables with political will and investments”. No you could not, that’s called wishful thinking. In reality you can’t force your way through technological innovation by throwing money and gathering political will, or else we would skip renewables and go straight to nuclear fusion.

On thing that money and political will can help with, on the other hand, is to speed up and reducing costs to build nuclear. But somehow, you act like nuclear is inherently too slow to build, before an arbitrary date that you forget conveniently when we’re talking about renewable storage. It’s called hypocrisy and double standards.

React to demand in minutes? Cute. Because most energy storage works by being pulled by demand directly rather than reacting to it, things change almost instantly.

I just proved that your theory is wrong by bringing up empirical data gathered over a whole country, why do you keep insisting?

France made a record year last year, with 320TWh of nuclear power produced for a total of 434 TWh of electricity, while being the top exporter of electricity of Europe.

I don’t know how they got to 1000TWh of nuclear a year, I suspect weed.

In Germany, we’ve got a location with 47,000 cubic meters: https://www.bge.de/en/asse/

Read your link: 47 000m³ of low and intermediate radioactive waste.

Low radioactive waste is objects (paper, clothing, etc…) which contain a small amount of short-lived radioactivity, and it mostly comes from the medical fields, not nuclear plants, so even if you phase out of nuclear, you’ll have to deal with it anyway.

This waste makes up for the vast majority (94% in UK for example) of the nuclear waste produced, and you can just leave it that way a few years, then dispose of it as any other waste.

Intermediate radioactivity waste is irradiated components of nuclear power plants. They are in solid form and do not require any special arrangement to store them as they do not heat up. This includes shorts and long-lived waste and represents only a small part of the volume of radioactive waste produced (4% in UK).

So you’re mostly dealing with your medical nuclear waste right here, and you can thank your anti-nuclear folks for blocking most of your infrastructure construction projects to store this kind of waste.

They just need to be scaled up at this point.

“We totally can go to Mars, we have engines, they just need to be scaled up at this point”

Scaling up is almost the entirety of the problem that needs to be solved, you can’t just brush it aside like this.

Check my comment that shows the scale of the problem

No traditional power plant can match demand exactly, and large amounts of power are wasted as a result

Absolutely false. Power consumption is very stable and previsible, plants can react in minutes, and the surproduction is small enough to be stored or exported.

The French electricity system operator, RTE, provides all the information on this subject:

Real-time consumption and production by region

Real-time forecasting and consumption

That’s some nice fanfic you wrote but I don’t think we should base our real world decisions on your little ideas.

Point the flaws in my logic, debate my ideas, or just leave. Don’t waste your time making another reply if you can’t keep respectful, I won’t bother reading it.

It’s very easy to find this information so I can only assume you’re arguing in bad faith, but regardless, here are a few starting points for your research. You could also maybe just search it yourself instead of wasting my time and yours with your ridiculous example of a single hydroelectric dam.

Asking for sources and data to support a disputed claim is the basis of scientific debate. Becoming aggressive and disrespectful after such a mundane request is much more revealing of who is debating in good faith here.

https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/news/2022/08/researchers-agree-the-world-can-reach-a-100-renewa

Relevant critic here

TLDR : The study does not support the claim made in the title. It just says that it will be economically feasible. When asked about if its physically possible, they just throw some vague techno-solutionism, and even admit that 100% renewable will may never be actually possible

https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.apenergy.2020.116273

A request must be made to access this article, I highly doubt that you made one and actually read that report, so I won’t waste my time either.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-05843-2

This report does not even relate to our debate at all, it theorizes multiple scenarios for 2050, does not tell if it’s feasible and how, and none of these scenarios are 100% renewables anyway. This is out of subject.

I’m not going to bother to keep going, it becomes obvious that you just took random studies whose title seemed to support vaguely your points , hoping that I’m as bad-faith as you and I that I won’t open them.

Your statements are based on void and you become aggressive when asked for explanations. I take back what I have above: don’t bother to answer at all, I’m just going to ignore you from now on.

You know what uses even less fuel and produces even less waste

That’s false, solar and wind power consume considerably more resources than nuclear and therefore produce considerably more waste than nuclear power.

What’s more, because of their low load factor and intermittency, they require oversized capacity, storage devices and redundancy, further increasing their footprint.

at the same or cheaper cost

Only if you don’t account for oversizing the capacity, the storage and redundancy induced by the wide adoption of solar and wind power.

Please provide those “studies and researches” that backup your claim, because a simple calculation shows that the world’s largest WWTP, Hongrin-Leman (100GWh in capacity and 480MW in power, over a 90km² basin) contains just 10% of the capacity needed and only 0.7% of the power required for a country like France to last a winter night (~70GW during ~14h of night).

So we’d need “only” 10 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of capacity, but 142 Hongrin-Léman stations in terms of power. In other words, we’d need to flood at best 8.5x the surface area of Paris, and at worst the entire surface area of the Île de France department, home to 12 million inhabitants. And that’s just for one night without wind (which happens very regularly), assuming we rely on solar and wind power.

Then we need to find enough water and enough energy to pump it to fill the STEP completely in 10 hours of daylight, otherwise we’ll have a blackout the following night.

Wind and solar power cannot form the basis of a country’s energy production, because they are intermittent energies, and the storage needed to smooth out production is titanic. These energies rely on hydroelectricity, nuclear power and fossil fuels to be viable on a national scale.

The government does not decide for the cost of producing nuclear electricity, which has barely changed that year.

Uranium price has being multiplied by 7 in 2007, and France’s electricity, which were 70-80% nuclear at the time, didn’t see any increase in price. Uranium price is definitely not driving electricity price, because nuclear use so little resources and fuel, that’s one of its main appeal.

And 60+ years of french nuclear produced a 15 meters-wide cube of high level waste. This is what it looks like . Does that looks like some unsolvable issue to you?

This has not being solved. There’s not a single country in this world that has managed to not rely on hydro, nuclear, fossils or importations for electricity generation.

interesting idea, though Chernobyl and Fukushima were both gen2s 💀

The reactor that exploded at Chernobyl was an RBMK model, not a PWR. This implies major design differences from French PWRs, including:

• A positive temperature coefficient, which means that an increase in core temperature leads to an increase in reactivity, which in turn leads to an increase in core temperature, and so on, implying instability and the possibility of a runaway. French PWRs are designed with a negative temperature coefficient, so an increase in core temperature leads to a decrease in reactivity, and vice-versa, physically preventing the runaway that caused Chernobyl.
• A flaw in the shutdown system: graphite rods were used to reduce reactivity during reactor shutdown. On the one hand, these graphite rods descended too slowly into the reactor core, and on the other, they physically increased the reactor’s reactivity when they were first inserted, before reducing it. In fact, it was irradiated graphite that burned and radioactively contaminated the whole area around Chernobyl, not uranium or anything else. On french ones, there is simply no graphite, nothing inflammable nor any rods of any sort, it’s water that’s used to stop the reactors.
• There was also no containment vessel.

Two things to note: the USSR knew about these defects years before the Chernobyl disaster, but the scientists who raised the alarm were neutralized. The other is that the explosion and fire in the reactor were caused by the failure of inexperienced technicians to follow procedures, under pressure from senior management, because the plant was to be visited by a high-ranking official the following day, and therefore the tests they were running at the moment had to be completed at all costs.

Chernobyl exploded because of the USSR’s cult of secrecy and appearance, causing incompetence and corruption.

For Fukushima, it should be noted that Fukushima Daini, although closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, but with better safety standards, was only slightly damaged and even served as a refuge for tsunami survivors.

For Daichii, same thing as Chernobyl, we have a very long list of failures and even falsifications by TEPCO dating from 2002, and even more in 2007, with alarms sounded on all sides by seismologists and scientists of all sides, and the government did not react.

We must understand that these are not disasters that happened out of nowhere, that we could never have predicted, and even less that we could never have avoided. It was a very long succession of bad choices by the incompetent and corrupt.

But despite all this, the Fukushima nuclear disaster caused no deaths, and Chernobyl only killed a few thousand people at most. Nuclear power, in its entire history, has killed only a fraction of what coal kills each year.

I guess it could be made more safe cheaply with modern electronics and software (seeing IoT/“AI”/boeing software engineers in a nuclear facility would freak me the fuck out though)

It has already been done, and without AI/IOT or anything of that kind. For the French REPs, this resulted in the implementation of additional testing protocols (I know that they tested accelerated aging over 10-20-30 years of parts like cables, for example), addition of generators, renovation and improvement of industrial parts, etc.

Both Chernobyl and Fukushima could’ve been avoided/reduced in effect with good failsafe software imo.

No. Fukushima Daichi’s walls were just not meant to handle more than a 5 meters wave. It took a 14 meters high wave right in the face.

I kinda doubt we’d be able to make gen2s cheaper than gen3s (at least in small capacities) though, because their production lines and designs would’ve been long shut down/forgotten

The industrial fabric has been crumbling for a long time, that’s for sure, but at least the designs are much simpler, and we have thousands of engineers working on gen IIs and can contribute their expertise. We don’t have any of that on the gen IIIs.

Pretty much every nuclear reactor that’s recently been built has been crazily over budget and significantly late. It seems it is usually a decade later than planned.

If you look at the EPRs, well, we can thank the Germans who co-developed the project, and pushed for excessive requirements making the design complex, such as the double containment and the system to make maintenance possible without shutting down the reactor. Requirements that the French didn’t need or want, but which were accepted as a concession to keep the Germans in the project, before they slammed the door anyway.

Even Okiluoto and Hinkley Point can be regarded as serial entries, so different are they from Flamanville, and so much work had to be done to simplify them.

Let’s scrap the EPR design, go back to Gen IIs for now, since we know they’re reliable, safe, cheap and easy to build, and move straight on to Gen IV when it’s ready.

Anyway, the beginning of construction is a highly misleading timeframe. There’s a long process before construction even starts. Not unique to nuclear reactors.

You still have nuclear power plants, you don’t even have to start from scratch. But yes, NIMBYS are a significant problem, but renewables are already facing this problem too, and it’s going to intensify greatly with the amount of space it takes to build wind turbines, solar panels, and the colossal amount of storage it takes to make them viable without fossil, hydro or nuclear power.

I dislike nuclear reactor discussions because of similar arguments. E.g. “new technology” fixes some problem, while ignoring the drawbacks

I’m talking about Gen II reactors like the 56 that make up France’s nuclear power fleet, which are tried and tested, safe, inexpensive, efficient, and have enabled France to decarbonize almost all its electricity in two decades. I’m not into technosolutionism, I’m into empiricism.

If someone says that it’ll take 15 years then the person didn’t solely mean the actual construction. They mean from wanting it to having it working.

Okay, so the 4 Blayais reactors, totalling 3.64GWe (equivalent to almost 11GW of wind power, but without the need for storage or redundancy) were connected to the grid 6.5 to 8.5 years after the first public survey, made before the project was started.

I’m not claiming that every reactor project will be built so quickly, but we have to stop pretending that nuclear power is inherently slow to build. It’s the lack of political will that makes nuclear power slow to build, and it’s not an unsolvable problem.

Gen II reactors are the reactors design which has been built between the 70’s up to 2000, it has nothing to do with SMRs.

My point was that there’s no reason to insist on a ridiculously complex reactor design such as the EPR (which is a Gen III reactor), and that we can simply go back to the proven designs of the second generation for two or three decades, until we finish developing the fourth generation, which has real arguments.

Building nuclear takes on average something like 15 years

Building EPRs, yes. Not Gen II reactors, which could be built and running only 4-5 years after the beginning of the construction.

Germany’s coal will be shut off by 2035 anyways.

Only to be replaced by gas, which is still far from being carbon free.

Besides, Germany already has a huge problem because no one can figure out where to put the nuclear waste they already have

No one can agree on where to put nuclear waste. This is not some unsolvable problem, it’s just anti-nuclear that opposes every solution given by scientists.

but we certainly have technology that does the job.

Absolutely not if we’re talking about nation-wide energy storage. The world’s largest STEP, Hongrin-Leman, Switzerland, which occupies a considerable amount of space, has only a capacity of 100 GWh, which represents less than 1h15 of the winter night consumption of a country like France which consumes 70 GW at that time.

It would take 10 to sustain one night without wind, as you can have several each year. Then we would have to fill them entirely in one day for the next night which is impossible.

And that’s just for the problem of capacity, such a STEP generates less than 500MW of power, so it would actually take 140 STEPs of that size to provide enough power.

And we’re talking about today, where most cars and heating are still fossil-fueled and need to be replaced by electric.

Unless you find a technology that is now a miracle, running a country on solar and wind without hydro-electricity or nuclear is science fiction.