Comment on Bill Gates Says China Is Outspending the World on Nuclear Power
turdas@suppo.fi 3 days agoThat’s what I was comparing it to. The lifecycle emissions of nuclear plants are similar to solar panels and geothermal energy, and higher than hydro and wind power (though not by so much that it would really matter): docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem. The amount of long-term waste produced is minuscule: the US powers about 70 million homes with nuclear energy, which generates about 2000 metric tons of high-level waste – 30 grams per household, about the volume of a marble (and keep in mind these are US households which consume 3 times the power of other western households). Storing it away permanently is… well, not easy, but relatively easy: just do what Finland does and put it underground. The main difficulty with it has always been scaremongering and NIMBYism.
solo@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
The link you provided talks about something more specific than what you just said. It’s about the Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Electricity Generation. This means that the decommissioning of a nuclear plant for example is not taken into account for these emissions, and it is well known that decommissioning a nuclear reactor can easily take several decades (example from world nuclear news)
The links I added above about France tell another story.
turdas@suppo.fi 3 days ago
No it doesn’t. And yes, it does account decommissioning of a nuclear plant. See table 1 on page 3.
The first link you posted says that a solution is already in the works, and would you look at that, they’re doing exactly what I said should be done: building an underground storage facility.
On the other hand, Greenpeace’s idiotic and anti-scientific stance on nuclear is nothing new, and their activism on that front is quite possibly funded by the fossil fuel industry (they do not disclose their donors) like that of many other anti-nuclear groups. Some of the other work Greenpeace does is OK, but you would do well to not trust anything they say on nuclear.
solo@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
If I got this right, in table 1, p3 they claim that to decommission photovoltaics creates 7 times more CO~2 ~ (more precisely g CO2e/kWh), than decommissionning a nuclear plant for decades, as shown above. It made me wonder how they arrived to these measurements. But the link to the study for the nuclear is dead (see Heath, Garvin A., and Margaret K. Mann. 2012). So this claim cannot be verified.
Having a solution in the works, is very different from what you said, which was: Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem.
Bye-bye now
turdas@suppo.fi 3 days ago
Nuclear is incredibly energy dense and reactors have a very long lifespan, so it makes sense that decommissioning it would be cheaper than solar panels. The 1.6 GW reactor in Finland has an operational lifespan of at least 60 years, whereas solar panels currently last 20-30 years. Given that they last half the time and that a 1.6 GW solar installation would be absolutely massive (something like 40 km²), it stands to reason that solar would create more CO2e/kWh to decommission.