- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50718425
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The statement made in the title is not the point being made by the chart.
How about a chart showing the level of carbon emissions per MW generated in France compared to those in other countries in Europe and the OCDE instead of one showing the fraction of nuclear generation in a country’s total?!
Because I’m pretty sure there are countries in Europe with little or even NO nuclear generation at all which come better on a CO2 emissions chart than France and the CO2 average emissions in most of Europe are far closer to France’s than the big gap in “amount of nuclear generation as a fraction of total” that’s shown in that chart.
And this is before we even talk about pollutants in general rather than CO2 and nothing else: the French nuclear power plants are mostly the kind that produces highly radioactive waste which remains dnagerous for over 10,000 years and ends up buried.
In fact thinking about this is making me realize that France’s bet on nuclear is making it be slower than the rest in the transition to renewables which all in all are a less polluting power generation technology than nuclear (even if nuclear waste is a tiny fraction of pollution per MW than even gas power plants).
I wonder whether the CO₂ emissions generated during mining and processing, as well as during the delivery and removal of the fuel rods, and of course the construction of the power stations, are included in these figures.
deleted by creator
Don’t forget the disposal of the nuclear waste.
Well, I was a bit surprised by the carbon footprint of nuclear after I went and did some research on this. The emissions from nuclear fuel mining and preparation are about 34g CO2e/kWh.[1](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652613007981) So less than what the article estimates for Frances grid, but not by much. I wonder if they only estimate the fuel or if the building costs are not significant over the plants lifetime.
Since when is a group of stationary power plants called a “fleet”?
Collective nouns be super random.
My guess is that each piece of generating equipment can be called into action like a ship at sea.
Almost any group of things is sometimes called a fleet.
But yeah, “nuclear fleet” almost always means something else.
Well it also gives it a completely non-functional electrical grid because half of their nuclear power plants are shut down because of the hot weather.
it’s just another part of the eternal war between the french and jellyfish.
https://www.sciencealert.com/swarming-jellyfish-just-shut-down-a-nuclear-reactor-for-the-second-time
Not half. “About 15%” of nuclear power plants were shut down due to water sources that were too warm for environmentally safe discharge.
But that’s still a significant percentage.
Yeah I was memeing a bit. Their power grid is also completely fine because it’s part of the European grid that is supplied by all sorts of electricity sources that can compensate for those nuclear plants.
Yeah I was memeing a bit
spreading disinformation, Lügenpresse
It’s not that deep lil guy
It is, your better than spreading disinformation
It shows the importance of diversifying energy production. In Quebec it’s all hydro, but sometimes the weather means the reservoirs can get low over the years. It affects production in a serious way and can take time to build up again.
Wind and solar are also affected by weather patterns in their own ways. Maybe less so or at least maybe different factors. Hedging and balancing grid production is going to be a new challenge.
Fossil fuels did have the advantage of being pretty easy to ramp up or down, whenever, for whatever reason. Some countries might want to keep around older but very efficient fossil fuel plants as backups for these kinds of events. That or waste incineration for example.
Or we could ramp up renewable production in addition to nuclear and continue to diversify
All renewables are subject to some kind of weather impacts. A challenge with the grid is adapting to spikes in demand like if it’s really cold or hot one day in particular. You cant turn up the sun or wind on demand.
We’ve been having brown outs in Canada for the first time ever in the last few years. Its crazy to imagine since our electricity is so abundant. Same with France struggling with this heat wave.
Modern Nuclear can load follow, its not as precise as peaker plants but its not too far off. Another cool thing with modern nuclear is you don’t have to directly spin the turbines some modern plants are designed to shunt thermal production to thermal batteries (large pile of salt in a tube) which can be more finely throttled allowing the exact amount of power the grid needs at any given moment to be met. They just have to throttle the reactor to keep the Salt boiling. https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-reactor-demonstration-projects
Completely false, at peak heat interruptions power generation is shuttered by 15%
Totally the fault of France.
It’s not about whose fault it is, it is about it being a thing. The weather IS to hot for a few of their nuclear power plants since rivers run dry. That will only be getting worse in the next years.
Had the Greens across Europe not been so staunchly anti-nuclear, it wouldn’t have been a thing and we would already have been way more climate neutral. Instead they tried to jump the gun and go from worst energy generation for the planet and people to quite good without having a transitional period. They aimed for perfect and idealistic, not pragmatic and efficient.
Of course the bloody conservatives and right-wingers are the main reason we’re here, but still, going “hah, it’s the lowest carbon solution we have, but because my ideals are against it, I’ll point out the extreme situations it doesn’t work in” is still petty.
Maybe that’s because their power stations don’t work in the heat and Germany is providing them with electricity generated by renewables, I dunno.
Forgotten is the decade Germany was buying nuclear energy from France because it couldn’t generate enough of its own and renewables couldn’t carry even a tiny bit of the load.
If only i could re-coal why Germany has such a high carbon intensity for its electricity production…
Not much CO2, just mountains of dangerous waste for future generations to take care of. Besides the mountain of debt of course.
Not much local(!) CO₂.
Truckloads of dangerous waste (a few lorries’ worth a year per plant), which is only dangerous if you stand close to it in the next 10,000 years or so, something that can be mitigated by how one stores it. (Keeping it under water attenuates much of the radiation, for example.) Or, alternatively, it can be reprocessed to make more reactor fuel.
So it’s less than ideal, though one has to measure the quantity of waste and the risks against the certainty of health costs of fossil fuels (which are visible in cancer statistics even when everything is working perfectly).
Would you like to source that? ALL of the High Level nuclear Waste from the planet can be fit into a 21m cube
https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-all-the-nuclear-waste-in-the-world/
Medium level waste and low level waste can be deposited in normal surface landfills. LLW is normaly considered non radioactive in 50 years MLW 200. Fun fact there are entire cities that are more naturally radioactive than what we consider MLW. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6709356/
I’d like to make an edit here later on and specify the reason that we do not put it into a 21 m cube is because it would go super critical.
This is rather disengenous given I have seen actual waste storage and it takes up way more space. All of it is not shoved in a perfect cube. It tends to be containers withing container withing containers that all are in a facitlity.
JFC I made a pre-emptive edit an hour before you spawned and explained exactly why that is that we dont jam it all into a super cube. It would fit in that cube though. However we like our waste non supercritical so we chop that big cube into many thousand smaller cubes then tipple wrap them in glass concrete and steel.
Another great way to look at this is all gold ever mined could be put into a 22m cube, however it is spread through the planet in billions of individual pieces of jewelry, coins, computers, etc.
yeah maybe something with federation but I just see a part saying you are hoping to edit in future.
I think it failed to save tldr you can avoid criticality by using safe geomety, and distance.
mountains?
mountains of disinformation
People get very silly about nuclear, even aside from legitimate cons to nuclear vs *, and this causes them to exaggerate, misrepresent, and invent drawbacks.
Nuclear-energy haters in shambles.
I think you misspelled Russian bots (look into how much their economy is tied to energy sales)
