Nuclear energy seems to have been mostly opposed by the same people who want green energy. We can have the best of all worlds, no need to slow down on renewables, but there was some serious hesitation on nuclear up until recently. I'm glad that's changing.
The fact that the Green party in Germany is against nuclear power is all you need to know that these people are not serious about climate change.
If your goal is to de-carbonize the economy as quickly as possible, then anything better than natural gas or coal should be good enough. Then, when the last gas plant and the last coal plant have been closed, we can talk about closing down nuclear plants if and when solar PV and wind ramp up to the appropriate levels.
That is what Australia is doing, as it adds more wind and EV production, coal plants are being closed 1 by 1 in an orderly fashion.
Instead in Germany, they did it in reverse and found themselves in a position of weakness when Russia invaded Ukraine.
> That is what Australia is doing, as it adds more wind and EV production, ..
but not (just to be clear) adding nuclear.
There's a solid Australian national science report that's extremely clear that within Australia nuclear makes zero economic sense (for many dull pragmatic reasons).
Largely due to a total lack of at home nuclear experience and talent, a very long run up to any nuclear return, and a booming renewables industry that's growing so fast the race will be over by the time nuclear can deliver anything.
Also, to be clear, there is one side of the political aisle that is championing nuclear .. less as a solution, more as a distraction from their chronic AGW denial and lack of any other strategy.
Their "plan" in a nutshell is "just continue in as we are" until {insert <magic> happens} and "eventually nuclear".
This is less a roadmap and more fairy dust and wishful thinking.
I never said they added nuclear power. I said they close coal plants as they add solar PV and Wind.
I am not advocating for Australia to build nuclear plants. I am simply saying that they are trying to organise the transition properly by not removing coal plants too early.
It was uncertain what you intended re: nuclear with your comment, particularly with the German preamble.
I merely sought to clarify what the actual situation in Australia was for the benefit of third party readers who may have taken an unintended implication from that.
Solar/wind is great if you have practically unlimited, life- and disaster-free deserts to capitalize. Sucks otherwise.
Which is probably why renewables are highly regarded in specifically Australia and US, but not nearly as much elsewhere; stripping vegetations off mountainsides and farmlands to install mega-solars is just man-made disaster, not a positive decarbonization effort.
It can be in places like in the middle of Australia, obviously.
> stripping vegetations off mountainsides and farmlands to install mega-solars
I'm really curious: who is proposing to do that? Ok, there are some solar projects that are installed in fields where you could construe that they could be otherwise used for food production, but guess what? They can still be used for food production - as pastures (https://ruralsolarstories.org/farm-friendly/solar-pastures).
> I'm unsure what planet you're from with that comment.
Let's put it this way: there's that much variance in population density on this planet.
Around myself, personally owned roof is a luxury. A parking lot is a 5-story building if not 5-stories structure directly below a building. On the other hand, to some others, solar panels as sheds in a ranch is just a fancy shed that they're going to need anyway.
Rooftop solar for one household on a midrange under-$1m 50-story mega-condo with 20 rooms per floor reduces power draw of the building by 1/1000th. Outside the mega-city is mountain ranges and water sources. The rest 999/1000th of power has to come from there if it can't be sourced in-city, which means stripping mountains to bare soil and covering lakes in mega floats and dealing with environmental releases all the time, or alternatively just finding a valley in the mountains and building massive metal cans to boil rocks could work too.
Might sound like a William Gibson parody, some places are just like that. Some parts of his works are effectively just portrayals.
> Solar/wind is great if you have practically unlimited, life- and disaster-free deserts to capitalize. Sucks otherwise.
Bit more complex than that: the UK is north of the Canadian-US border and has parts at the same latitude as southern Alaska, has fantastic wind resources, and somehow is managing to do not too badly with PV either.
> stripping vegetations off mountainsides and farmlands to install mega-solars is just man-made disaster, not a positive decarbonization effort.
Human imagination doesn't handle the huge numbers involved very well, maths is necessary.
If we did what you're describing (which we don't need to because PV doesn't have to be in a contiguous sheet and rooftop PV can supply a non-trivial percentage of demand, and also a poor choice geographically, and you wouldn't want to because geographical diversity is good), then the EU could get 133% of its needs from Slovenia, which is one of the smaller countries in the union (only three are smaller), and that's already accounting pessimistically for capacity factor: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=area+Slovenia+*+1kW%2Fm...
If you put a 3m wide strip of PV on or by the side of the EU road network (not rail, not airports, not car parks), that would also meet 96% of current demand by itself. And for the US, that same number with the same assumptions about capacity factor and width would be 87%.
Where PV doesn't work is dense city-states like the Vatican, because rooftop PV is only a "non-trivial percentage of demand" not "all of demand".
What most people fail (or don't want) to see is how long-term decisions about nuclear power are: the three remaining reactors that were finally shut down beginning of 2023 were operated for 10+ years knowing that they will be shut down, so maintenance was deferred, personnel planning was done accordingly etc. If Germany would decide that it wants nuclear power back, it would probably take at least a decade until it has an operational nuclear reactor again.
I don't care about who closed the last nuclear plant. I care that the Greens who are for the de-carbonization of the economy advocated for the removal of nuclear energy and because they needed more energy anyway, they simply decided with the government in power to buy it from Russian oligarchs instead.
They did not have to do this. They could have stopped building new nuclear plants, keep maintaining the ones they had until such a time as the PV and Wind production could replace all the power generated by the nuclear plants and then start decommissioning them.
But they followed ideology instead of logic and ended being at the mercy of Russia and had to scramble to fix that problem in the last few years when this could have been avoided.
In the meantime, they now import a lot of electricity from France which ironically is generating it with, you guessed it, nuclear power. How about that?
Your posts smell bad of the common standard, troll induced, irrational green hate. Die G-grüÜÜüuNnnNeEnn!Discussing nuclear energy is interesting but not at this level...
> In the meantime, they now import a lot of electricity from France
How much of the total is it, 1% or something? That is not "a lot".
Weird that you're praising Australia which has a legal ban on nuclear.
And has a right wing party that is trying to stop renewables rollout with some vague plan to do something with nuclear in a decade or two even though Australia is near perfectly situated in terms of land and resources to take full advantage of the renewables revolution.
The point of my comment was that whether you are trying to move from coal or nuclear or gas, you need to do it in an orderly fashion and not act on ideology like the Green party did.
Instead, they decided to close the nuclear plants without having a back up besides Russian gas. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
That's a fair concern but it seems the tech has matured a lot and it's at least as safe with maybe the dangers of unforeseen natural disasters like what happened with Fukushima.
Solar is still being held back by battery tech, at least for scaling properly from my limited understanding. Then there is the problem of efficiency in places with less sunlight like a lot of northern cities. I think it will definitely be the best option for sunny places once there is cheap and dense batteries.
Land, land, land. There are no readily available, flat, unused land to put up all the solar panels in most developed countries, especially without massive environment consequences.
US is an exception to that, nowhere near the mean.
