from the some-plants-are-much-bigger-(and-dirtier)-than-others dept.
5% of Earth's Power Plants Create 73% of the Energy Sector's Emissions:
A group of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder analyzed 2018 data from 29,000 fossil fuel power plants in 221 countries and located the top emitters in the world.
They mapped plants by their carbon dioxide emissions and identified the top 10 "worst-of-the-worst" power plants, which are clustered around Europe, East Asia, and India.
The world's "super-emitters" have a few qualities in common: They are all coal-powered, they are primarily located in the global north and they all operate inefficiently for the amount of energy they generate. Focusing policy responses on mitigating the handful of the worst offenders would go a long way to curbing the climate crisis, the authors find.
[...] Emissions from electricity generation would fall by 17 to 49 percent if these plants were updated for efficiency, offset by carbon capture, or shut off entirely.
Switching from coal and oil to natural gas would be a start, the authors say. Grant notes that he and his fellow researchers "also embrace renewables," but are also wary that "some countries are not yet ready or willing to adopt that strategy." Though widely cited by the industry as a "bridge fuel," many environmentalists are now ditching the notion that natural gas is a clean alternative to other fossil fuels. Many believe shutting off fossil fuel power plants and switching to renewables is the only way to curb emissions enough to meet the International Panel on Climate Change's 1.5-degree warming restriction recommendation to limit the worst effects of climate change.
Journal Reference:
Don Grant, David Zelinka, and Stefania Mitova. Reducing CO2 emissions by targeting the world's hyper-polluting power plants - IOPscience, Environmental Research Letters (DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday July 29 2021, @02:38PM (23 children)
Who can say what it takes to limit the warming to 1.5 degree?
Or, no matter what we do, if we actually aren't past the point we are able to arrest the warming in that range?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @03:38PM (22 children)
Translation: "Oh... I don't know what to do, therefore, I must do nothing"
Doing nothing is not useful.
Doing what all climate scientists have been telling us to do, for the past +20 years, is what we must do. They are the ones who can (and did) tell you what it takes to limit the warming. But did we listen?
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday July 29 2021, @03:51PM (9 children)
The translation above says more about the translator than the original author.
The consequence of what I said is:
Now, as a homework for the inept translator: read again my initial comment and see if it is in any contradiction with the consequence above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @04:14PM (8 children)
GP here, while I will acquiesce about being maybe a bit too snarky in my post, your counter-snark was uncalled for.
I re-read your original post and did not find what you told me I would find. You may have expressed yourself sub-optimally initially. However, this has now been clarified, so thank you, I appreciate it!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:19PM (7 children)
Let's dwell a little bit in the snarkyness, 'cause it just happens that I am in the mood for it.
My homework was
So, mate, see? I did not tell you what you will find, I told you what you will not find - that is, a contradiction. Honestly, I think you will have to agree with me so far.
---
What we have here are
One on top of the other, there are at least two possible continuations to the initial questions (yes, there could be more than just two continuations).
---
So, some matters for you to ponder on (if you just hate the homework term)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @06:10PM (6 children)
You're a deeply unpleasant individual.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:02PM (5 children)
But he's not wrong.
You don't get to ignore the message because it hurts you in the feelz.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:28PM (4 children)
Piss off, goblin.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:53PM
Is this what passes for intelligent debate these days? Nah, hand in your nerd card at the door please.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @01:17AM
LOL
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday July 30 2021, @01:35AM
No :) Eat your liver, puke it back up, and eat it again.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Saturday July 31 2021, @07:08AM
Azuma wins: FATALITY
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Redundant) by ChrisMaple on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:45PM (6 children)
"Doing what all climate scientists have been telling..." (emphasis added)
So not a single climate scientist says something different? Are you defining "climate scientist" as someone who agrees with you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @06:39PM
Are you a pedantic idiot? Rhetorical question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @07:28PM (4 children)
No, but I also don't consider Global Warming deniers climate scientists. That doesn't cover the whole spectrum of who we're talking about here, but it's the answer to your question, no?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @07:34PM (2 children)
"Global warming denier." That's religious language, not scientific language.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:32PM (1 child)
Projection like usual.
Holocaust Deniers, Evolution Deniers, Global Warming Deniers....damn near 100% Christian the lot of 'em.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @02:34PM
Don't want to point fingers, but I'm quite sure most of them are of faith different than Christianity.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday July 29 2021, @10:26PM
No True Climate Scientist [wikipedia.org], eh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:53PM
Doing stupid things is actively harmful, which is worse.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Friday July 30 2021, @04:40AM (3 children)
Doing something can be much worse than doing nothing especially in climate change mitigation. For example, global economic disruptions to supply systems and energy production just to slow CO2 emissions a little.
If you're going to listen to experts, when are you going to listen to economists? We have more important things going on in the world, such as elevating almost eight billion people out of poverty, that aren't being addressed by "limit the warming".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by IndigoFreak on Friday July 30 2021, @02:03PM (2 children)
To you, hurting the economy is a terrible consequence. It's not to me. I would much rather have a worse off economy but a healthier earth. Also, the floods and wildfires definitely have a negative economic impact. So will rising sea levels, droughts, and desertification.
To your second point, we don't need to continue and pollute the earth in order pull 8 billion people out of poverty.
Overall, I just don't get your view point, which seems to be summed up like this. "We can't stop polluting our environment because people will make less money, and because some people are impoverished."
Honestly, neither one of those goals(helping the poor, keeping economy healthy) have to be mutually exclusive to environmental protection, but you are making them that way.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Saturday July 31 2021, @01:06AM
For starters, we have good evidence that hurting the economy on a global scale will hurt its participants, such as the almost eight billion humans. We don't have similar evidence that a world that is 1.5 C higher than the 1880 or so standard is less healthy. My take is that we probably could raise temperature by 5 C without hitting an unhealthy Earth.
I'll note that we do have evidence that most photosynthesis does cut out some point [nature.com] above 100 ppm CO2. I wager the Earth is unhealthy, if CO2 concentration gets that low. Fortunately, we're not heading that way at present.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 31 2021, @01:12AM
The IPCC argument clearly isn't economic because it doesn't give us options. They just push the 1.5 C cap hard, ignoring adaptation and selective mitigation (as well as the error in their own estimates). A better approach would be to give a range of temperature increase goals with the estimated costs of both the temperature limit and the effort to achieve that limit - cost/benefit analysis. That this still isn't done decades after the narratives first were pushed indicates to me the fundamental frivolousness of the whole exercise.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @03:22PM (66 children)
Tell all the pearl clutching snowflakes to go to hell. With proper oversight, nukes are clean and safe.. End of story
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Thursday July 29 2021, @03:51PM (2 children)
White House Cautiously Embraces Nuclear Power to Meet Green Goals [voanews.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:25PM (1 child)
Meanwhile, China is gonna launch its first thorium reactor in September [soylentnews.org]. Experimental stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:20PM
Note that "experimental".
Yes, we should be experimenting with thorium and other molten salt reactors also. Most current plants are close derivatives of plant optimized for creating nuclear weapons. There've been some changes to make extracting weapons isotopes more difficult, but that's what the designs are based around. (I understand the navy plants use a different design, but they generally depend on a really good heat sink being always available.) Some how the inherently safe designs never got promoted. (IIUC, swimming pool reactors were inherently safe, because if they got too hot the moderator would evaporate and they'd shut down. Well, they probably had other problems.)
The thing is, the nuclear reactors in use are not well designed for the purpose. They need to be safe against cost-cutting management and sleepy technicians. (Safe doesn't mean the accident wouldn't wreck the reactor, it means that nothing serious would happen that affected anyone outside the company and its stockholders.)
One piece of evidence that I'd need that they were using safe reactors is that the companies were obliged to assume financial liability in the event of a serious accident. As long as they insist on the right to pass the buck, I won't regard them as safe.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tork on Thursday July 29 2021, @04:12PM (51 children)
Right now that 'proper oversight' is done by people who are primarily overseeing their bank accounts.
I'd like to remind you that you put a pretty damned important qualifier in your post that yanked the teeth out of your argument, here. "Going faster than light is easy, just build a warp coil. End of story!"
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @04:20PM (7 children)
Oversight is our problem. Delegate your authority more carefully on election day
(Score: 4, Touché) by Tork on Thursday July 29 2021, @04:34PM (1 child)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @07:00PM
On the contrary! But there is nobody else. Only they can fix it, nobody will do it for them. I guess it means we're stuck...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:18PM (4 children)
What about the stuff with a really long half-life? A future civilization in, say, 500-1000 years, might not know that any oversight is even needed or even know that the stuff is hazardous.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:23PM (2 children)
The stuff with a really long half-life is basically safe. More of a chemical problem than a radiation problem. Or perhaps you need to quantify things a bit more closely?
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday July 29 2021, @10:00PM (1 child)
I see your point. I suppose we're talking about waste products with a half-life short enough that they emit harmful radiation but long enough that there's still a significant amount of it left around to emit such radiation in 500-1000 years. The latter would depend on how much waste exists in one place as well, presumably.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 30 2021, @04:45AM
Also, we need to accept that future generation has to take some responsibility for their actions. I think it's a bad idea to wreck the future in order to coddle future generations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @02:30AM
You mark it the best that you can and they'll learn pretty quickly that it is dangerous. I struggle with the idea of condemning a viable approach for a very large issue that affects millions of people now because some potential archeologist might not understand it in the future and get harmed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:06PM (42 children)
Decades of uneventful nuclear power generation disprove your argument.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:26PM (13 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @06:57PM (12 children)
China also builds skyscrapers so badly that they collapse. That is a symptom of corrupt China, not something specific to nuclear power. Maybe China can't handle nuclear power. Good thing I don't live in China. I won't limit what I do in my country based on what a corrupt communist regime does. Tell me about nuclear power in North Korea to try to scare me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @07:03PM (10 children)
BuT TeH TeChNoLoGy iS SaFe!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @07:44PM (9 children)
Nothing is safe (not even poured concrete, as in buildings) in dumps like China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:00PM (8 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:14PM (7 children)
I wouldn't live in a skyscraper built in China by Chinese. Does that mean I think reinforced concrete is an unsafe technology?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:24PM (6 children)
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:31PM (5 children)
If you're referring to the condo in Miami - it was built by beaners. Or chinamen. Probably.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:38PM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @10:19PM (3 children)
The GP commenter is not the same AC as the one (me) who has been in this long-running thread with you.
The fact is that in America commercial nuclear power has a much GREATER safety record than reinforced concrete buildings. Nuclear power plant caused deaths: 0. Reinforced concrete buildings: much greater than 0. Yet, you do not demand we stop building reinforced concrete skyscrapers. Do you? Why not? Do you not care about preventing those horrible deaths by people in unsafe buildings?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @10:36PM (2 children)
> Yet, you do not demand we stop building reinforced concrete skyscrapers. Do you?
Have you stopped beating your wife? You're having to stoop pretty low to maintain your side of the debate. Nuclear technology isn't safe from human ownership, glossing over that is no better than the picture you have in your head of anti-nuclear types.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @08:31PM (1 child)
You can't answer the question because it would completely disprove your argument that nuclear is so deadly it must be banned. You approve of other things that are proven to be far more deadly than nuclear. This makes you a hypocrite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @08:56PM
Nope. So far you've just managed to prove my point.
> You approve of other things that are proven to be far more deadly than nuclear.
Nope. Your mental gymnastics might be more impressive if not for the Olympics going on right now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @05:01AM
hey does anybody remember that thing that happened in Florida recently...wasn't that an apartment building with like 10 floors or something?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:30PM (27 children)
"Uneventful", unless you lived near or worked at a plant that experienced a catastrophic failure, which is easily demonstrably more than zero.
The plant about 5 miles upwind and upstream from me is required to send me instructions for what to do if they have to hit the "everybody run" button, and the insurance costs [nrc.gov] in the US are high enough that the plants are collectively prepared for about $13.5 billion in damages. Which suggests that they don't think the risk is all that minimal.
I'm not saying "no nukes ever", but we should not assume that it's easy to keep these things operating safely, and the cost of getting things wrong can be very very high indeed.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @06:53PM (23 children)
Nuclear power plants are held to a standard that is vastly greater than any other power generation source.
In America, tell me the worst outcome of a commercial nuclear power reactor accident. Are you actually worried about your nearby nuclear reactor causing you serious harm? I suppose not, if you still live there. The truth is one can always imagine something bad happening from any power source. You could have a hurricane that would rip off pieces of wind turbines and destroy your house or you; if you live below a dam, the dam could burst, etc. So the question becomes: what is commercial nuclear power reactors' safety record in America? We have decades of data at this point.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday July 29 2021, @07:27PM (22 children)
It's easy to imagine all sorts of disasters - being able to imagine a disaster is not a good measure of the danger posed by something.
The reason I brought up insurance is that it means that a team of bean-counters, probably with some engineering types advising them and a bunch of computer algorithms applied, have evaluated the likelihood of a problem and the amount of damage that problem could do. Evaluating risk is what insurance companies do. So looking at those costs gives you a good way of turning the risks into numbers you can evaluate and compare.
And on the basis of liability insurance:
* Wind turbines, as best as I can tell from some quick Googling, insure for about $12,000 apiece, and reports on places where they've been widely deployed indicate that about 0.5% of claims are liability, which means that the insurance adjusters anticipate about $600 amount of damage to somebody else per wind turbine. 1 nuclear plant is about 1000 Mw of output. 1 wind turbine is about 1.67 Mw of output, so you need approximately 670 wind turbines to equal 1 nuke plant. That means that the liability insurance pool on 1 nuke plant's worth of wind turbines is approximately $500,000.
* The $13.5 billion fund mentioned comes from approximately 1000 nuke plants in the US, so each one is insured for about $13.5 million of liability.
* That makes nuke plants approximately 27 times as risky as equivalent wind turbines.
Which, intuitively, makes sense: A flying or falling piece of wind turbine is not all that much more dangerous than a flying or falling piece of tree, and we insure against that risk all the time at pretty reasonable rates with homeowner's insurance.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @07:42PM (20 children)
I appreciate the info (I really do), but you did not answer my question. We have a history of 63 years of commercial nuclear power in America. Where are the disasters and ruined lives?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:31PM
He partially answered your question when he said that there were 1000 nuclear power plants. This tells you that the population is too small for you to expect to have encountered an unlikely risk. A better answer would require a lot more numbers, like how long each plant has been running, and what the level of small liability claims is and when has the government assumed, or said it would assume, responsibility.
FWIW, I don't believe that insurance is fully funded, or covers costs involved in shutting down a plant and doing cleanup afterwards. In at least one case the company declared bankruptcy to avoid paying for site cleanup. (I believe the one I read about was in Britain. The government had to step in. I believe they decided to fill the plant with cement and call that as good a cleanup as they could manage.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:33PM (12 children)
Three Mile Island [papost.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:12PM (11 children)
Again, what was the disaster and ruined lives?
Three Mile Island, the worst commercial nuclear power accident in the United States' history, and nobody died and nobody got sick even years later.
From the Wikipedia article at
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident [wikipedia.org]
The partial meltdown resulted in the release of radioactive gases and radioactive iodine into the environment.
Anti-nuclear movement activists expressed worries about regional health effects from the accident.[7] However, epidemiological studies analyzing the rate of cancer in and around the area since the accident determined there was not a statistically significant increase in the rate and thus no causal connection linking the accident with these cancers has been substantiated.[8][9][10][11][12][13]
Nuclear power's safety record in America exceeds by far that of all other sources.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:17PM (10 children)
You had to be there [papost.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: -1, Troll) by khallow on Saturday July 31 2021, @01:21AM (9 children)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Saturday July 31 2021, @03:11AM (8 children)
You didn't check the the link
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Funny) by khallow on Saturday July 31 2021, @04:31AM (7 children)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 31 2021, @07:04AM (6 children)
Smooth move ignoring a link like that like why don’t all know why. One can almost hear the circus music sometimes when you post. 🤡
(Score: 1, Funny) by khallow on Saturday July 31 2021, @12:21PM (5 children)
(Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Saturday July 31 2021, @04:27PM
:-) You assume much.. Oh well, at least you have confirmed why you are always so obtuse, and wrong about everything I ever posted.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 31 2021, @06:29PM (3 children)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 01 2021, @01:45AM (2 children)
There's no point for an AC to speak of reputation. What reputation for shutting down would you build up, if you were bold enough to post under a name? I bet it would dwarf any reputation I supposedly have for the same.
Was I demanding a pointless link from fustakrakich? Funny how the narratives get so ridiculous. Surely you must run low on straw all the time, with the straw man building you entertain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 01 2021, @05:02AM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 01 2021, @11:57AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:34PM
Just looking at history in America might not be enough to predict risks. Especially since you seem to ignore near-misses
Its like saying 'I have a history of pulling the trigger of my revolver five times, why am I still alive?' while playing russian roulete......
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday July 29 2021, @09:45PM
The Three Mile Island meltdown had a cost of about $1 billion and 15 years of work to clean up the mess, and while there turned out to not be any health effects there was a reasonable question about them.
I agree that's not a Chernobyl, but it's also not nothing.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday July 30 2021, @04:54AM (2 children)
Chernobyl was badly-designed and the operators took foolish risks; Fukushima was basically the victim of a freak 1000-year tidal wave when they only designed it for a 100-year one (or whatever the numbers were).
There were a few other disasters over the years, but if properly managed, nuclear is pretty safe.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday July 30 2021, @04:57AM (1 child)
And I believe they don't generally operate nuclear reactors for more than like 60 years anyway, so designing it for 100-year probabilities doesn't sound unreasonable.
It also annoys me when people talk about Chernobyl and Fukushima in the same breath (mea culpa), considering that Chernobyl was like 3x the fallout of Fukushima. But they were both off the top end of the disaster scale so people hear "category 4" and say "oh they were the same."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday July 30 2021, @06:47PM
It's worth mentioning here that the nuke plant near me is about 10 years past its planned end-of-life, and they still haven't stopped using it. Indeed, they recently got a big pile of money from the state government to keep operating it.
So whatever you plan for, sheer inertia is likely to keep the plant operating longer than you planned.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 30 2021, @11:46AM
Maybe those disasters haven't happened yet. Nuclear power is thought to have a long risk tail.
For example, consider what would have happened in Fukushima, if the radiation levels early on in the accident had gotten high enough that emergency workers couldn't have survived near the reactor without heavy shielding. They briefly had to abandon [archive.org] the effort to control the reactor meltdown. Imagine if they had to give up, even with suicide volunteers, and be forced to let the meltdown run its course. Could be a much higher radiation release.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:55PM
Maybe my perception is warped, but isn't this liability insurance fund completely dwarfed by the money in circulation available to pay for it, considering it's for an insurance footprint of *all* plants in the US?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday July 30 2021, @04:49AM (2 children)
So I guess by this logic, we should shut down the airline industry too, because there has ever been a plane crash?
Nothing like this is ever 100% safe; nuclear plants are just more spectacular when they really fuck up. I'd be interested to see a graph of "fatalities vs miles travelled by passenger airliners" vs "megawatts of power delivered by nuclear plants over X years compared to nuclear contamination".
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday July 30 2021, @06:38PM (1 child)
I crunched the numbers based on insurance requirements and payouts above comparing nuclear to wind, and reached the result of nukes being about 25-30 times more dangerous than wind per Gw generated. If you want to perform similar calculations for other kinds of power generation, you're absolutely welcome to do so, but I don't have the inclination to do your homework for you.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday July 31 2021, @05:20PM
I wasn't asking *you* to do it for me, Mr. Snippy. Just a general musing.
Insurance numbers doesn't seem like the best metric to use for that either, although maybe the easiest to find, so you do you.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:00PM (2 children)
Will you offer your own backyard to store the nuclear waste ?
I thought so.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @07:08PM
If it still produces enough heat for a 10kw generator, yeah! Even if not, I take the free warm water to keep the snow off my driveway
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 30 2021, @11:49AM
A lot of people probably would, if they were getting paid for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:42PM
Nuke the power plants? In India? OK by me, I guess.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by amamandaa on Friday July 30 2021, @02:18AM (6 children)
You can assert that because you have dozens or hundreds of nuke plants with 100 year histories of safe operation. Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island were all rogue plants that lacked your unique oversight.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @08:26PM (5 children)
Three Mile Island did not kill anyone or even make them sick decades later. It had ZERO health effect on anyone. See the Wikipedia article I linked to earlier. The worst accident in the US, Three Mile Island, resulted in ZERO physical harm to the population. Let that sink in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30 2021, @09:41PM (4 children)
So, "Murica #1", right? Somehow, that's less reassuring than you seem to believe. Do you have 100+ years history that helps to prove that any particular design is truly safe?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 31 2021, @01:30AM (3 children)
Should we care about people who aren't reassured by a good track record merely because the country involved is the wrong sort?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 31 2021, @02:08PM (2 children)
If TMI has a "good" track record, then Chernobyl and Fukushima surely get "passing" grades. We can find all manner of disasters and near disasters that didn't kill anyone, but they are still disasters.
If you are just arguing that the US was lucky with it's nuclear plant disaster, then I'll have to agree with you. We were much luckier than Soviet Ukraine or Japan.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 01 2021, @02:26AM (1 child)
Are you going to be the one in this thread claiming that TMI has a "good" track record?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 01 2021, @05:51PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @03:27PM (16 children)
would be interesting to see real numbers, not percentages, like how much gigawatt installed capacity those 5% acctually represent?
i am not pro-nuclear but if, for the time being, like the next 20 years, we could offset 75% carbon pollution (for electricity generation) with a reasonable amount of nukes, so we can build factories that churn out solar panels and inverters and windmill blades so that we have made enough "renewable harvesting machines" that can in turn power the very same factory that made them (and turn off the nukes again), maybe i could see a use.
but we need real numbers not percentages. if 5% is beyond 100 gigawatt (15-20 nukes) i fear it's a lost cause anyways (the build out of renewable energy harvesting machines consumes energy which is not renewable at this point and would have to expand at a pace not seen or felt today. so, game over.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @03:42PM (8 children)
so just to be clear, as is, we see the climate-cliff, we step on breakes but it will not be enough to arrest the momentum. offsetting those 5% with nukes would be like adding ABS to the breaks while breaking.
but ofc there's no guarantee the nuke output will not be used for "other stuff" short of building the nuke with a big fence around it and then declaring a industrial park inside this for renewable technology factories energy requirments only (yes, yes, you get a coffee making machine)..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 01 2021, @02:28AM (7 children)
Do you have evidence that there is a climate-cliff?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 01 2021, @04:58AM (6 children)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 01 2021, @12:01PM (5 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 01 2021, @03:51PM (4 children)
(Score: 3, Funny) by khallow on Sunday August 01 2021, @05:43PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 01 2021, @08:05PM (2 children)
Ask him, not me. Good luck, given your credibility right now.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Sunday August 01 2021, @08:15PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 01 2021, @08:25PM
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday July 29 2021, @04:00PM (6 children)
Upstart provided a helpful link to the report in question. [iop.org] It's open-access and contains all the numbers you are interested in.
Here's the summary (sorry too lazy to format it nicely):
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @04:20PM (5 children)
lemme fetch my other mobile so i can see the numbers and the calculator on those 'em tiny screens:
so *type*type* "oh, its polnish notation, start again" *type*type* "we assume that mega-watt, so.."
38'653 Megawatt of the dirtiest off-set via nuke-industrial-park-apollo-manhatten-style uhmm... err... solution would wipeout 75% of carbon emissions FOR electricity production?
76 x 500 megawatt nukes, sheesh.
how long to get all solarpanels made so they can first make themselfs and then last long enough to off-set the nukes too?
seems insurmountable :(
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 29 2021, @04:32PM
"well that's quite the hole you dug there Jonny.
don't be so fast to dig a second one.
unlike the first one that killed canaries, the second one is gonna make glow in the dark.
how are you gonna sleep at night?"
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday July 29 2021, @04:45PM (2 children)
There are a couple options that don't require a full plant replacement:
Retrofitting them to run off natural gas is the cheapest way to reduce (but not eliminate) the emissions.
Or install carbon capture and storage [energy.gov] to mitigate the emissions.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:35PM (1 child)
I'm not sure I believe that "carbon capture and storage" will work. Some of the plans look reasonable, but others seem to just say "We'll store it deep in the ground under pressure, and when it leaks nobody will be able to trace it to us. (Or, "Well, it won't leak for a few years, and by then I'll be on a different job.".)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 01 2021, @08:19PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 31 2021, @01:34AM
What's insurmountable about it? That's not very many nuclear reactors.