This page shows that some countries produce electric power in cleaner way than other.
This projects only one point of view, and congratulations for countries that are shifting towards green sources.
But, title is misleading: This map doesn't show consumption or total production.
Moreover an option "Show wind" emphasis that countries with less green electricity poison other countries. Which is false. From this map it looks that Europe suffers from Estonia and Poland being there. If we'll consider total production from http://world.bymap.org/ElectricityProduction.html we have following data:
- Estonia: 12900000 (tons / year)
- Poland: 108750000 (tons / year)
- Germany: 228717000 (tons / year)
Without having total numbers there, my feeling is that this page tries to manipulate.
Author of the electricityMap here. The point of the app is to display how much CO2 is emitted when you consume from your power plug (hence the consumption point of view, and hence why we emphasise intensity and not volume). We're trying to give people an idea of when it is the best time to consume electricity, and what strategies are best to decarbonise rapidly.
Total volumes are also interesting (the climate cares about total volumes), but if you want to look at strategies you have to look at per kWh values (coal in a small volume is still a bad strategy).
has 1170g/kwh as value. While it might also not the "right" value it probably is closer to reality.
Don't get me wrong, I really like the page and what you did and being myself tangentially involved with the european energy market I know how hard it is to get good values for all the different countries as emissions differ on a per powerplant basis even with same fuel type and even when all the specs are identical because their load profiles are different.
The high CO2 emission comes from the mineral content of the oil shale. Since the oil shale has to be heated to 1100C, the emissions include a significant amount of CO2 from CaCO3 → CaO + CO2.
I love that you want to help people understand carbon consumption. Some points:
1. Volume, not intensity, warms the globe.
2. If you have "no data available" for China, Saudi Arabia, Texas, ... you are missing a plurality of emissions.
3. As I write just after sunrise in California, it shows reddish. California is also, at the decade scale (the scale that matters) a leader in de-carbonizing.
You are measuring the wrong things and showing them in the wrong way to achieve your worthy purpose. I believe you should start over.
I disagree. Nations are kind of arbitrary from this perspective. Physics doesn't care about the lines we put on our maps.
Per capita is better, but the best statistic is probably per capita weighted by GDP per capita and other indices of development. This would show the most efficient countries that are getting the most value for the least emissions.
The top ones seem like they could be outliers due to some distorting economic effect (e.g. huge exports and low per capita GDP) but among them you have the familiar European nations that are often cited as models of good governance: Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, etc. The USA is toward the middle of the pack. China is near the bottom.
This matters more because it shows the politically reasonable path that we might take, and because more development usually correlates with lower birth rates. Any path that reduces development will tend to increase birth rates, negating any benefit. The development / birth rate correlation holds across cultures, religions, and ethnic groups. (I find the fact that it holds even in majority conservative Muslim and Catholic countries surprising, but it does.)
CO2 per kWh focuses purely on the issue of attained performance of electricity production - which is the main matter for production technology to concentrate on.
Dividing by GDP flatters the view of wealthier nations, and GDP itself is not a real measure of wealth or benefit to self and others. The purely technical measure of CO2 per kWh avoids argument of who is most/least beneficial by examining where production is performing best.
We need to get rid of GDP as a measure of progress. There are better measures like genuine progress Indicator. A measure that improves with pollution, disease and war must not be used for the sake of all.
Well that's depressing - Queensland currently sitting at 3rd last. Given our agriculture is also a massive emitter (beef cattle the biggest earner), we are really not pulling our weight.
Oh hey, I live in Tasmania currently sitting at number two with 22g of CO₂ per kWh.
Tasmania got lucky historically with something like 25 hydroelectric power stations, and more recently three wind farms.¹ Where as Queensland only has six, and most of them quite small.²
Is there a way (or would you consider adding a way) to view historical data so it's possible to see how the map has changed, e.g. over the last 24 hours?
We face a crisis that we can never stop talking about, 'climate change'. There is a easy and simply model to follow to make a massive impact on this problem, but somehow for reasons of pure bias, ignorance and misinformation we do not do this.
Nuclear power could have and should have solved this problem by now. Nuclear power was on track to replace older energy technologies faster then any earlier energy transition.
But somehow we failed, mostly because of the anti-humans, sometimes called 'environmentalists' who declared war on nuclear above even coal. They declared their goal in terms of anti-nuclear as 'increase regulation to a point where nuclear becomes unprofitable' and they have largely succeeded.
Since then the environmental movement has grown, and the problem they fight have grown, but they never went back and ganged their totally flawed assumptions about nuclear and they continue to spread outright lies and misinformation about nuclear energy.
I would not blame them alone, but the reality is the whole population now basically believes most of these lies, its tragic. The left often accuses the right of being anti-science but in reality most anti-GMO, anti-Nuclear people are form the left.
Declaring a bunch of people to be "anti-human" because you don't agree with them is insulting.
The backlash against nuclear comes from four points and a meta-point:
1) Weapons proliferation. The standard fission cycle is just too convenient for this (after all, that's why it was developed) and so an international infrastructure needs to be developed around restricting this. See Iran for example. This also prompted a lot of opposition from people who didn't want to live under the threat of their cities being nuked.
This also turned into lethal fights with the environmental movement (the French government sank Greenpeace's ship Rainbow Warrior with a terrorist bombing that killed a photographer, over the question of nuclear weapons testing). A difficult bit of bad blood to bury.
2) Huge scale and persistence of accidents. Chernobyl affected agriculture in the whole of Western Europe, and took decades for an adequate final containment to be built. Bhopal was bad - and possibly worse in effects! - but at least the area isn't a permanent wasteland.
Pebble bed reactors were deemed the promising future, until one of them jammed. It's now unfixable and practically impossible to decomission: (wikipedia) "There exists currently no dismantling method for the AVR vessel, but it is planned to develop some procedure during the next 60 years and to start with vessel dismantling at the end of the century."
3) Waste disposal. A forever problem. I'm old enough to remember Greenpeace fighting it being dumped at sea, but the problem of where we put it remains.
4) Cost overruns. A systematic problem in the industry. Doesn't affect renewables to anything like the same extent.
5) The meta-point: systematic lying about the effects of all of the above. That this happens to overlap with the era of discovering that all sorts of previous advances (CFCs, tetraethyl lead, DDT, asbestos) had nasty side-effects which were also lied about or minimised is not a coincidence. Nuclear advocates take the arrogant position that they don't need to win trust.
Yeah, his wording is quite strong, but isn't it even more insulting to have your very existence declared problematic?
Let's be honest here, some environmentalists really do see too many humans as a problem. I mean, it's phrased in terms of too many people doing too many things and owning to much stuff, which all implies there's to many of us. The next logical question is "ok, so which one of us will have to go"?
Your points are mostly valid, but they were all solvable, had people wanted to solve them. The reality is that today there are jurisdictions (Ontario, France) that produce clean, safe, affordable, carbon-free energy because they built and maintained their nuclear plants. But the anti-nuclear crowd did not want to solve issues, they had one aim, which they achieved, and now we have a far bigger issue.
The uncomfortable fact remains is that if the rest of the developed world looked like Ontario, climate change would be a far smaller problem. And what bothers me personally isn't that the anti-nuclear left fucked up so badly in the 70s - after all climate change was barely on anyone's register back then. What bothers me is that even today after we see these facts staring at us plainly in the face, they still won't admit they fucked up.
This bothers me because even today they won't let you call yourself an "environmentalist" unless you sign up to their very specific implementation of environmentalism.
> isn't it even more insulting to have your very existence declared problematic?
A few loons might hold this view, but overall it's an extreme straw man to argue that this represents a majority view in environmentalism.
Pointing out that our existence tends to generate negative externalities that might be very harmful to us in the long run is not anti-human. It's pro-human in that the ultimate goal is to avoid those long term negative consequences. Too many humans might indeed be bad for humans in the long run because too many humans might produce too many negative externalities.
Is it anti-well-being to advocate living below one's means to save for the future? Saving implies spending less right now to realize a potential future gain. The environmental movement argues the same, but from the angle that we should spend less right now to avoid future losses.
I've often found it intellectually inconsistent for conservatives to oppose environmentalism, since it really reduces to a form of fiscal responsibility. If conservatives are worried about the national debt they should also be worried about the buildup of excess CO2 in the atmosphere and ocean. That's another kind of debt being passed on to future generations. I sometimes wonder if our high monetary debt load and our high environmental debt load might not be directly related. Keynes' famous quote "in the future we are all dead" could turn out to be accurate in a way he did not anticipate.
Indeed there are probably a few loons who hold this view explicitly. But there are large numbers that hold this view implicitly - ie, they would never say they want fewer people, but if you actually followed their their preferred course of action, fewer people would be required.
I should note that I'm not a conservative and I also find their lack of concern for the environment to be at odds with their own interests and ideology, but what I'm talking about is slightly different. To be an environmentalist doesn't mean sharing some goals, it means having to sign up to a very specific set of views, which ostensibly lead to that goal. Being anti-nuclear power is one of those specific views you have to hold, so being pro-nuclear puts you at odds with most environmentalists, even if both sides of the view lead to the same goal (less CO2 in the atmosphere).
We're on a finite planet and numbers are increasing rapidly. Very few countries have a reducing population - Japan, and well, that's about it. At some point the solution has to be fewer people.
Looking at the world's pressing problems with loss of species, diversity, soils, climate change etc; all are hugely exacerbated by numbers.
Even if we were to perfect interstellar or interplanetary travel we're unlikely to be sending billions.
So what is your solution? Anyone who doesn't hold the view that the planet needs fewer humans, in the foreseeable future, is simply ignoring the problem.
The numbers are increasing, but leveling off. High fertility rates only exist in a few regions of the world (Africa, South Asia) and even there they are falling rapidly.
The "solution" broadly speaking is higher intensity - of energy, land, everything. If you have compact energy sources (nuclear) powering compact food production (high-yield agriculture, some vertical farming) feeding people living in compact cities (higher density, more ridesharing), then it's doable. You can already see lots of signs of this in the developed countries.
This will still require lots of adjustment from people, but asking them to live in duplexes, share rides and eat less meat is much more doable than asking them no you know, not exist.
That may buy a little time, but unless or until the numbers actually start falling it doesn't actually solve the problem.
It's not asking them not to exist, I can't foresee compulsory euthanasia camps, it's merely asking them to limit procreation. China shows it's doable - though I'm sure there's better ways to achieve limits. At least that gives our future generations a chance of experiencing some of the things that make life interesting with still functional ecosystem and wildlands.
With a 'few loons' you mean many of the founders of the environmentalist movement that are still highly respected today. These people were the founders of some of the larger organisations today.
In fact these 'loons' were invited to give talks in popular TV.
There are some of the early environmentalists who changed position and realized these issues, but the waste majority did not. See 'Russel Brand' who help start the environmental movement and has tried to tell them for years that nuclear is the way to save the world. Of course he was basically made into a traitor.
> It's pro-human in that the ultimate goal is to avoid those long term negative consequences.
No. Saying we should have less people and let more people die faster in order to delay 'perceived ' negative long term consequences, is a anti-humanist way of thinking.
> Is it anti-well-being to advocate living below one's means to save for the future? Saving implies spending less right now to realize a potential future gain.
Clearly you have not actually read that stuff. They don't want to save for the future, they thought that there were already to many people on earth and they wanted fewer.
Conservatives have made many mistakes in this as well, but not so fundamental as liberals.
This also affects the cost equation. One Chernobyl or Fukushima and nuclear is suddenly by far the most expensive source of energy, even more costly than the most expensive renewable sources.
Pre-Fukushima nuclear power in Japan was economical. Post-Fukushima Japan would have been better off building hundreds of billions of dollars worth of solar, wind, pumped hydro, and batteries, and building undersea cables to link its grid with neighboring countries. All that would have cost a lot more up front but amortized over 100 years including Fukushima it would have been a lot cheaper.
The anti-human sentiment in this context is generally referring to environmentalists who thought large amounts of clean nuclear energy would cause population growth beyond the carrying capacity of Earth wrt other resources. I doubt it's meant to be insulting.
1) Just because the fission chain reaction can be used as a weapon does not mean you should be anti-nuclear reactors. We've seen that lots of people can make nuclear bombs without having any reactors at all (just need some centrifuges) so why are we avoiding making clean nuclear energy (which has positive clean-energy attributes that mirror the destructive side) for a misplaced fear of weapons?
2) Temporary evacuations should happen in events like Fukushima and then people should be given the data on the dose rates at their home compared to scientific studies showing the likelihood of a dose rate causing them harm relative to other risks. I guarantee lots of people would choose to move home much sooner than they are if they had this information. Chernobyl is kind of another story because there was no containment on those reactors. Reactors should either have containments or be inherently stable designs. Chernobyl was neither. Still, climate change has the potential to cause much more damage than these accidents.
3) Waste disposal has several known responsible and appropriate technical solutions. We just need people to stop blanket-stating that it's a forever unsolvable problem so we can move forward like the Finns are doing [1]. Then there's deep-borehole disposal which is not developed but very promising.
4) This is what the parent is talking about; the industry has been regulated and delayed by professional anti-nuclear intervenors for decades and then they always say: "Ha! Nuclear is bad because it's expensive and always has delays!" The industry itself could certainly do better (the Japanese and Koreans had/have been building plants in record time and on budget and are shocked when they hear US contractors sue each other on a construction site), but the cost overruns are not inherent to nuclear energy. That's a social thing.
5) Nuclear advocates definitely need to win trust; the carbon-free, super-safe energy source is currently less popular than straight-up burning oil. Anti-nuclear people need to catch up on some of the latest low-dose health effect studies if we want to talk about lying. The linear no-threshold model is what we've been operating on since inception and it's very conservative. As we've gathered more data, it makes sense to re-visit such models and see where the waste is in regulation and design.
> Declaring a bunch of people to be "anti-human" because you don't agree with them is insulting.
They are in fact 'anti-human' go back and read the early environmentalist thinking. They are literally saying we should't give aid to starving people in India/China because they believe the environment would suffer from that.
Its a deeply anti-humanist and anti-science movement.
> 1) Weapons proliferation.
First of all, the waste majority of population happens in country that already have either nuclear weapons or civilian power plants so its not all that relevant for climate change.
Second of all, civilian nuclear power has often turned out to be a good thing for anti-proliferation.
Your point about Iran being a perfect example, Iran wanted to buy a nuclear reactor from France and France would have done all the processing of the fuel. However the US in a shortsighted and idiotic move stopped this, and only then the Iranians started to develop the technical capability for the fuel cycle.
Third, no country primarily derives its nuclear weapons program from civilian reactors, that is more theory then reality.
> 2) Huge scale and persistence of accidents. Chernobyl affected agriculture in the whole of Western Europe, and took decades for an adequate final containment to be built. Bhopal was bad - and possibly worse in effects! - but at least the area isn't a permanent wasteland.
You are just spreading more of those wrong lies. Nuclear power has been both the safest and the lowest land use source of energy for a very long time.
People die of accidents in coal, gas and wind all the time. More people died in a single coal mine accident then in ALL nuclear accidents in human history combined.
For the most part these wastelands are just governments, driven by totally false scientific analysis blocking of way more land then needed.
Again, this is regulation based on scientifically invalid correlation between the effect of radiation and cancer. The science on this is long accepted.
> 3) Waste disposal. A forever problem. I'm old enough to remember Greenpeace fighting it being dumped at sea, but the problem of where we put it remains.
Again, this is very early things that were done wrong, but that is no argument for today. Also, most of this waste is from weapons production (including what they threw in the sea). In fact nuclear civilian power had to pay a fee to the government for storage, this fee has been payed an the government is sitting on billions of payed fees.
This money, every experts agrees, is enough to build a facility. The problem is political, because again, of pretty insane regulation that came out of the political battle over Yucca Mountain (a political choice in the first place).
Even without a 'final solution' its a far smaller problem then many people make it out to be. Nobody has ever died from nuclear fuel, and nobody will for 1000s of years, even if we don't put it into long terms storage.
I'm mostly against a 'final solution' for much of the material we already because it is literally full of energy. This is another one of these insane illogical things, modern reactors could eat up the waste majority of that stuff and give us green energy for a 100 years but of course development of such technology has been opposed every step on ever level.
I have heard the argument 'that would only lead to more people wanting nuclear', making it clear that the waste is just an excuse to block and oppose nuclear power on every turn.
> 4) Cost overruns. A systematic problem in the industry. Doesn't affect renewables to anything like the same extent.
The Cost overrun happens because in the last 30 years only 1-2 reactors have been built. Insane regulation, lost knowledge and production capacity have made it almost impossible to get any kind of scale back.
This is perfectly evident everywhere that deploy nuclear at a larger scale, the US in the early days, France, Korea and China. Its always cheap and a incredibly good long term investment because these reactors will last longer then pretty much all the other things you could build.
When we are talking about solving climate change, so we need something that scales and can produce a lot of power.
Any single renewables program will have less overruns, but that is irrelevant when you are talking about a whole global system. If you compare the estimated cost of transforming everything, nuclear is clearly better.
No need for much grid change for example, just replace every coal plant with a nuclear plants. Uses existing infrastructure, its simple.
> 5) The meta-point: systematic lying about the effects of all of the above. That this happens to overlap with the era of discovering that all sorts of previous advances (CFCs, tetraethyl lead, DDT, asbestos) had nasty side-effects which were also lied about or minimised is not a coincidence. Nuclear advocates take the arrogant position that they don't need to win trust.
Ok, lets look at some issues of trust.
Frist, many of the things above are agree on by pretty much anybody with education of the subject. Meaning nuclear should have educational trust.
This is however undermined because there are 100x more liberal arts (and co) anti-nuclear leftists.
Second, the nuclear industry has operated very well, both in the US and globally, with security better then pretty much any other industry in the world.
However, the lies about it being unsafe persists.
So experts agree, data agrees but you still put the burden on the nuclear advocates to show credibility, while people like Greenpeace have lied and deliberately mislead and misrepresented nuclear energy to the public.
How about the critics show some integrity for once and lets stop taking organisations as being good, just because they claim to be 'environmentalist' when infact their policies are helping to destroy the environment and the people.
Look at Germany, the amount of people that will die there from the use of coal is very high. Guess what, Greenpeace and co have fought with everything to shut down all nuclear plants when it was clearly predictable that this would lead to massively more coal production.
So its my believe that anti-nuclear people should actually answer some of those issues and do it with credibility. Nuclear is safer, it is cleaner, its more land efficient, more reliable, more long lasting and it has FAR greater chance of further advances (its 60s tech for the most part).
This battle against nuclear is not only hurting us here, but also space exploration. Our current way of doing space exploration with as little nuclear energy as possible its an downright embracing state of affairs for a technological society.
I don't think environmentalists are nearly as capable of throwing a wrench on nuclear energy development as you say. Seems to me like the real issue here is that if nuclear energy is pushed as the go to modern day energy source, than global politics would be that much harder for the develop nations that "rule" the others.
The US has a very clear agenda of freezing the status quo in the nuclear weapons club, they are not accepting new entries at this time. If nations pursue nuclear technology for energy reasons, that is more than enough to get the stare down from the club.
There is even specialized cyber weaponry designed exclusively to sabotage nuclear enrichment equipment.
> I don't think environmentalists are nearly as capable of throwing a wrench on nuclear energy development as you say.
Maybe in terms of their organised political power. But their lies and propaganda have essentially become common knowledge and are basically capable of always mobilizing a group of uninformed people to protest anything.
> Seems to me like the real issue here is that if nuclear energy is pushed as the go to modern day energy source, than global politics would be that much harder for the develop nations that "rule" the others.
Its the opposite, those nations that can produce and sell nuclear power stations can gain huge leverage one everybody else.
> There is even specialized cyber weaponry designed exclusively to sabotage nuclear enrichment equipment.
Yes. That is one of the larger problems, but not a show stopper.
You can find the same bias in the pro-Nuclear crowd. It seems like the reasoning is that there is science in nuclear so it must be the best thing to use.
The biggest reason that nuclear didn't take over is of financial nature. Nuclear is simply too expensive in developed countries. This only gets worse as construction costs rise with the living standard of people.
Just look at the financial disasters Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3 and Hinkley Point C.
Meanwhile renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper.
Also look at Korean and Japanese builds that were record-breaking in terms of being on time and on budget. Nukes are hard to build the first of, but once you serialize their construction, they're quite reasonable. Especially given their unique ability to produce full-time carbon-free energy.
Renewables are indeed doing great but they're in an environment where the grids can handle the variability due to high-tech natural gas turbines. As penetrations increase towards 30%-50%, this gets much harder with wind and solar's 35% and 25% capacity factors (US average). You have to overbuild like crazy and then back it up, sometimes for weeks at a time, in either methane-producing reservoirs or massive chemical batteries. These costs aren't factored into renewable's price yet so it's not quite a fair comparison.
> You can find the same bias in the pro-Nuclear crowd. It seems like the reasoning is that there is science in nuclear so it must be the best thing to use.
Everything is 'science' in that sense so that was not my argument.
My argument is that we can measure what nuclear power is and how it works. We can measure what its effect on people are.
> The biggest reason that nuclear didn't take over is of financial nature. Nuclear is simply too expensive in developed countries. This only gets worse as construction costs rise with the living standard of people.
No its not. Nuclear was by far the cheapest energy source. They were building lots of nuclear plants
Nuclear is like everything else, larger scale and a good workforce reduces cost. However you can't have that if you don't build new plants.
> Just look at the financial disasters Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3 and Hinkley Point C. Meanwhile renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper.
In science we don't look at examples but rather at overall data. Overall data is perfectly clear, anyplace that builds many nuclear power plants gets massively cheaper.
All these western 1ofs that were built as a political compromise are of course gone be overpriced.
Look at China or Korea and you will see that there is 0 reason why the west could not do the same.
The core of the problem is game-theoretic in nature, a coordination problem, related in some ways to the tragedy of the commons.
Unless one of the entities involved goes out of their way at personal loss to fix the issue, all agents are operating optimally and yet, we're slowly headed to a minor environmental disaster on our only inhabitable planet.
Just like funding NASA isn't purely about discovery, perhaps the collateral knowledge acquired for weapon building was reason enough to invest in nuclear energy. But, now that we are (hopefully) committed to non-proliferation, maybe the federal government is less interested in fission-based energy.
I see quite a bit of anti-science / anti-fact / irrational stuff on all political sides.
For the vast majority of people beliefs are not about being right but about belonging to a group. We believe to belong. When a part of our belief system is threatened, even by fact, we perceive that as a threat to the integrity of our group and fight that threat as if it were an invading army.
I say "we" because I see zero evidence that any group of humans is above this. Take HN for example. Certain things can't be discussed here, and I'm not just talking about the usual SJW/anti-SJW/whatever or race/IQ flame bait. Try bringing up deep critiques of Silicon Valley culture or business models, or anything that might be superficially classified as "woo" or any non-dismissive discussion of the culture that surrounds it. Sites based on the Reddit model of upvote/downvote are popular because they give us an easy way to LARP our intellectual herding behaviors online.
Individually humans are quite weak, but in even small groups we become dramatically stronger. We're a highly social species that evolved to prioritize group membership over most other things because it's critical to survival. Historically being right but alone could be a death sentence while a socially popular complete loon would be fine. This is still true to a great extent. People who believe utter lunacy but are popular in some group are often healthier, happier, and wealthier.
For most of human history intellectual herding behavior didn't have much impact because most of what we believed was legend and myth, not fact, and fact and logic had little bearing on our existence beyond immediate activities like farming, hunting, etc. We evolved in a setting of small tribal groups that lived off the land and the most important thing that helped us survive was group membership. Legend and myth are not devoid of information by any means. They encode moral and ethical ideas, social norms, and psychological coping mechanisms. The factual claims they make are wrong (if taken literally) but they're claims about things that ancient people had no real knowledge of anyway (creation, things long ago, the cosmos, etc.).
Unfortunately as we went down the path of science and industry we went down a path where fact, reason, and logic are increasingly critical to our survival even as they pertain to things that are very far from our individual experience. In this mode of existence our tendency to prioritize group membership over these things might be our biggest weakness. Things like "is accumulating atmospheric CO2 dangerous?" or "are GMOs dangerous?" have become cultural signifiers and thus indicators of group membership. Believing the wrong thing in a given group can lead to ostracism.
If we do experience some kind of global tragedy of the commons I will cite this as one of two primary causes. The other primary cause (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) is game theory and the difficulty of coordinating all-cooperate responses to wide scale problems where defection has potentially high short term value.
Even more unfortunately I see it getting worse as we deploy science (psychology, machine learning) to learn to exploit these tendencies to manipulate one another as part of a larger global war between nations, corporations, and pressure groups.
To criticize Silicon Valley in a way that's sometimes unpopular here -- I'd say anyone working in social media today is guilty of building systems deliberately designed to weaponize these tendencies against their fellow human beings. We're building systems designed to make ourselves collectively more irrational because it makes people click ads (or support political causes and candidates).
It’s funny how the HN crowd’s infatuation with nuclear persists, long after economics alone, ignoring outright any safety arguments, have rendered the technology obsolete.
It was the environmental crowd you hate, by the way, plus the often maligned political class, who long ago had the foresight to push for the policies that are now enabling renewables to be competitive with fossil fuels.
It’s quite embarrassing for tec people, at least the slice of the community I observe.
> It’s funny how the HN crowd’s infatuation with nuclear persists
Perhaps that a generally technically literate crowd sees nuclear, given the alternatives, in a positive light tells something.. :)
> long after economics alone,
Nuclear is under severe economic pressure mainly in the USA, but largely due to dirt cheap natural gas, not renewables. So if you're hoping for even more usage of fossil fuels, go ahead, keep hoping for nuclear to die out.
> ignoring outright any safety arguments
As we should. In terms of deaths/kWh, nuclear is about the safest energy source we have.
> It was the environmental crowd you hate, by the way, plus the often maligned political class, who long ago had the foresight to push for the policies that are now enabling renewables to be competitive with fossil fuels.
I'm a fan of renewables (to a point and where appropriate!), but lets use them to replace fossil fuels and not nuclear like Germany, m'kay?
I count myself as an environmentalist, and I think the environmental movement has done a lot of good things. But the mainstream environmentalist campaigning against nuclear (and GMO's), is just horribly, disastrously dumb.
Do you have any data to back up your drivel? Because any study of nuclear security ever done by anybody will show that nuclear is the safest form of energy.
> It was the environmental crowd you hate, by the way, plus the often maligned political class, who long ago had the foresight to push for the policies that are now enabling renewables to be competitive with fossil fuels.
Statements like this, make my literally want to shoot myself. If you only read history like a 3 year old to confirm your bias then what you said is reasonable.
It is the absolute idiocy of the environmentalist and the liberals that stopped any form of new advanced nuclear technology.
The same president who spent some money on making solar better also slashed research into the most promising nuclear technologies.
You do realize that solar and wind are not even close to the task they set out to accomplished and we are widely missing every target? That the whole third world couldn't give a shit about solar and COAL is the massively growing globally.
That is the legacy of these polices, failure and mass death. Ironically because coal contains so much nuclear material its actually more radioactive then a nuclear plant itself. In fact a coal plant would not even be allowed to exists if it had to meet the same standards as a nuclear plant.
If not for the anti-humans and their political cronies we would have had highly advanced nuclear technology far, far earlier. We might not even know what climate change because it is so irrelevant.
But thank god for those smart liberal presidents who helped us make 5% improvement on the solar panel.
With the exception of Denmark, the areas that are in the "green" either have hydro og nuclear.
I understand the issues with nuclear waste, but it seems that's the current trade-off, if you want lower CO2 emissions and don't have access to large rivers.
Even the colour scale does not really show how big the difference is between countries regarding clean energy. Germany is producing 8x more CO2/Kwh than France, Poland 16 times more and Estonia 24 times more.
I'm not sure that point revolves around the manufacturing of the car and bikes, even though that should be included.
There was a study, that sadly eludes me, that suggested that if you need to travel more than 2km to do you grocery shopping, then it would produce less CO2 to get in your car and drive, compared to walking.
The reasoning is that you need to consume some amount of food to generate the energy required to walk to the store and back. The amount of CO2 used to generate that food, and the additional CO2 you exhale, would be larger than what a modern car would produce, traveling the same distance.
I believe that the same argument that would make multiple people in an EV carpool more environmentally friendly than bikes. But that's also the case with regular cars.
> Wouldn’t there be more CO2 involved in producing the car compared to a few bikes?
Crazily enough there's generally less CO2 involved in producing the car than having each of a few people ride bicycles a distance equal to a typical car's life-cycle mileage.
Here's my math:
For lack of a better source I'm using Renault's own environmental assessment for the Fluence Z.E[0], which puts its production-related emissions at ~8 metric tonnes of CO2. Over 150k km (which is not a lot for a car, but we want a number achievable by a cyclist over their lifetime) that results in ~53.3g/km of CO2.
As for driving let's assume that a fully loaded EV requires 200Wh/km to move around - In France that amounts to 10.6g/km[1].
So overall we have a well-to-wheels footprint of 63.9g/km.
Now here's the fun part:
A typical Vegan will be responsible for 1.5 metric tonnes of CO2 annualy @ 2600kcal daily, so 1kcal = ~1.57g of CO2 - This is the most environmentally friendly diet. Cycling can vary greatly in intensity[3], but let's say 250kcal/h at 10km/h is a reasonable estimate.
Given these figures a single vegan on a bicycle going 10km/h is responsible for 39.25g/km of CO2. According to some sources[4] my numbers aren't that far off.
CONCLUSION (caps for visibility):
Two vegans on bicycles having a 17km commute are responsible for 78.5g/km, while the same two vegans in an EV in France produce only 63.9g/km. Bump that to four vegans and we're getting awkwardly close to a typical combustion engine car's emissions.
Meanwhile environmentally conscious(heh) meat-eaters should probably stay off bicycles, eat less and carpool in a compact car.
You're absolutely right and I wouldn't suggest anybody to ditch their bike in favor of a car just because one factor supports this notion.
But this exercise shows one thing: when it comes to reducing our carbon footprint personal transport is actually a relatively low hanging fruit. Same for electricity really.
Food seems to be the hard problem here. I heard somewhere that a safe level of emissions is one metric tonne of CO2 per capita annually. Vegans do 1.5t.
Maybe it will get lower once transportation is cleaned up? I don't know.
EDIT: To be clear - my original write-up was a little bit in jest. This one is my serious position.
This is orthogonal to your point, but: people usually limit their commute by bike to, say, less than 5 to 10 km one way. On the other hand, people think nothing of commuting 50 to 100 km one way by car.
The problem with nuclear waste is exaggerated. It can be safely stored in warehouses, there's no need to bury it. The fuel rods are solid, so there's no risk of leakage. Dry cask storage containers are made of steel and concrete, they stop all the radiation and can withstand plane crashes and earthquakes. You can't steal the fuel, it's too heavy to load it on a truck, and even if you found a suitable vehicle, you need to convoy it when they're shooting at you…
Our current solutions to short-term storage are perfectly adequate long-term solutions. And we don't even need to store it that long, because soon we'll need it to produce fuel for next generation reactors.
The real problem with nuclear waste management are impossible and unnecessary safety requirements.
The cost of waste management is already included in the cost of nuclear energy. The cost of energy storage is not included in the cost of renewables, thus they may appear as cheaper, and indeed they are – for now – because we currently don't need energy storage. But as the renewables penetration rises, the cost of energy storage will skyrocket: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-re...
That is wrong. The only reason nuclear is expensive is because low volume production and build.
In fact, the money needed for waste storage has long been accumulate by a fee in the US and is literally on the bank account of the government .
There is already enough money to build a facility.
The problem is all political.
> At this point it makes more sense to invest in solar, wind power and energy storage capacity to reduce CO2 emissions.
No its actually not. Countries that try to reduce CO2 with these methods are pretty slow and struggle heavily. Even worse, the larger part of your overall grid depends on these the more difficult it sill be to balance the grid.
Furthermore, any sustained drop-down in one of these can shut down part of the country.
Why do we keep claiming that climate change is a existential problem but then we are like 'we can't do the easy solution because nuclear waste is slightly problematic'. Guess what, I much rather deal with nuclear waste in 100 years then with the result of climate change.
France showed the world 50 years ago that it is a pretty easy thing to have low CO2 electricity and had other countries adopted this, we would be in a better situation.
Germany is the perfect example, had they done their 'Energiewende' towards nuclear they would be closing their goals by now.
Solar & wind + batteries isn't enough, you also need a stable source of energy to compensate when the production is going down (those are not stable sources), if you are a country without good hydro possibilities, your only option for that is nuclear.
There's natural gas for that. Sure, it's pretty CO2-intensive, but with enough overprovisioning of renewables and some storage it will rarely be used - if at all.
If we're going to have any chance of hitting the 2C climate targets, electricity production must be more or less completely emissions-free by mid-century (preferably ASAP). So, any non-trivial amount of natural gas usage is out.
Also, there's the rough rule of thumb saying that when variable sources (like wind or solar) approach a fraction of total generation in the grid equal to the capacity factor of said source, system integration costs start to rise rapidly (because that's, at the latest, the point where you'll start needing large amounts of storage, curtailment, or long-range transmission). Thus, in most grids wind+solar will unlikely see much larger than 50% of total generation without massive extra investment and/or breakthroughs in storage costs.
So basically an incredibly complicated solution that barely even solves the problem an requires overlap capacity.
And your counter argument is 'nuclear plant' are inflexible? What? Nuclear are not actually inflexible specially new ones compared to those we build 50 years ago. Furthermore nuclear industry has finally again started to innovate and the next generation of reactors will be able to be fully load following.
What is actually inflexible is solar and wind, that about the most inflexible technologies that exist.
Ok, here's another counterargument: nuclear is currently losing in terms of economics with renewables + gas and this problem is only going to get bigger.
Yes renewables get pushed forward to the term of 100s of billions in subsidies globally. Germany is a perfect example, insane amount of money and they are not even close to solving the problem.
Nuclear in west fails because of regulatory issue, and this is totally clear if you look at the history of nuclear construction.
> That ship has sailed already.
That's just a dumb attitude. Gas had many ups and downs. Wind did as well. Even coal.
Saying nuclear is dead because currently in the west or the US its not growing as fast is wrong.
China will be building 100s of nuclear reactors and they are very interested in starting to sell these globally.
I frequently hear this argument, and my first reaction was to agree with this. However I don't think that creating a flexible grid that can handle the erratic generation and consumption of power is as easy as it sounds. My gut feeling is that the devil is in the details, and it may take much longer than non-experts think (most of who I presume think that simply slapping energy storages to a system with varying input-output rates solves everything). Unfortunately I'm not an expert in this field, and I'm not even sure what the field of engineering is called that deals with large energy grids.
This doesn’t show CO2 emissions. It just lists each country generation type and what that generation type produces per kWh. Where is the actual volume of CO2 per hour or per day?
This site would show 1 family on a little island with a coal furnace as worse than an entire nation burning gas.
You can see the total generation for each country by clicking on the country, then hovering the mouse cursor over, for instance, the "origin of electricity over the last 24 hours".
So you can see that e.g. France at the moment generates (or uses? This calculation might be slightly off due to imports/exports...) 51.5 GW with a carbon intensity of 44 gCO2/kWh. Which means that currently France in total emits about 44 x 1e6 x 51.5 / 1e6 = 2266 metric tons of CO2 per hour.
By comparison, with the same kind of calculation Energiewende poster boy Germany generates 64.6 GW with a carbon intensity of 375 gCO2/kWh, leading to total emissions of 24225 tons of CO2 per hour. Ouch!
EDIT: As pointed out by the author below, you can click on the "emissions" tab and see total CO2 emissions (per minute though, not per hour) directly if you don't want to do the above calculations yourself!
Hi,
electricityMap author here. When clicking on a country, just click "Emissions" and then you will see total volumes (tCO2/h) instead of intensity :)
>Nuclear power is sometimes described as being free of greenhouse gas emissions, and that’s true of the nuclear fission reactions themselves. But here is a list of all the stages of the nuclear power cycle at which greenhouse gases are emitted: uranium mining, uranium milling, conversion of uranium ore to uranium hexafluoride, uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, reactor construction, reactor decommissioning, fuel reprocessing, nuclear waste disposal, mine site rehabilitation, and transport throughout all stages.
>During these stages, greenhouse gases are emitted directly (for instance, by trucks) but also indirectly (such as through the use of materials such as steel and cement, which are manufactured using emissions-intensive processes). [0]
I would hazard the site simply doesn't want to be disingenuous at all, and provide the facts, which I applaud! I do not consider this an argument against nuclear power per-se, as stated: it is still much lower carbon than burning FF directly as the plant's power source.
But, title is misleading: This map doesn't show consumption or total production.
Moreover an option "Show wind" emphasis that countries with less green electricity poison other countries. Which is false. From this map it looks that Europe suffers from Estonia and Poland being there. If we'll consider total production from http://world.bymap.org/ElectricityProduction.html we have following data:
- Estonia: 12900000 (tons / year)
- Poland: 108750000 (tons / year)
- Germany: 228717000 (tons / year)
Without having total numbers there, my feeling is that this page tries to manipulate.