Ten EU countries call on Brussels to label nuclear energy as green:
[...] Tapping into Europe's ongoing energy crunch, the countries make the case for nuclear energy as a "key affordable, stable and independent energy source" that could protect EU consumers from being "exposed to the volatility of prices".
The letter, which was initiated by France, has been sent to the Commission with the signature of nine other EU countries, most of which already count nuclear as part of their national energy mix: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania.
Nuclear plants generate over 26% of the electricity produced in the European Union.
"The rise of energy prices have also shown how important is it to reduce our energy dependence on third countries as fast as possible," says the letter, as seen by Euronews.
Over 90% of the EU's natural gas come from foreign importers, with Russia as the main producer. This great dependency has been credited as one of the main factors behind the rise in energy prices.
"Supply tensions will be more and more frequent and we have no choice but to diversify our supply. We should pay attention not to increase our dependency on energy imports from outside Europe."
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday October 16 2021, @01:03PM
As glow-in-the-dark kind of green.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Gaaark on Saturday October 16 2021, @01:38PM (11 children)
Just previous to this article, France has decided to ban plastics blah blah, but Nuckuhlar is green.......
I fart in your general direction.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Touché) by BsAtHome on Saturday October 16 2021, @01:58PM (2 children)
You are emitting a greenhouse gas by doing so! Not very green of you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @02:03PM (1 child)
But very French. [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday October 17 2021, @02:37PM
Yeah: its been modded flamebait when its actually humorous... maybe modded flamebait by the French???
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday October 16 2021, @04:17PM (7 children)
In Europe the Green Party actually has some power, unlike the US. Banning plastic packaging is a GOOD thing. Nuclear isn't "green" because of the radioactive waste, but nukes don't contribute to global warming.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday October 16 2021, @04:32PM (6 children)
In Europe, the Green Party is aligning itself with many conservative parties. I think their "Green" thing is a lot of propaganda. They are hardly "liberal" in the classic sense.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 16 2021, @08:53PM (3 children)
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday October 16 2021, @09:05PM
:-) You must be the finance minister
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @09:30PM (1 child)
People keep saying this, but it's not really true. European conservatives might tend to be more "left" fiscally, but they also give the craziest of the US right a good run for their money on social issues. They are generally more authoritarian as well, which is often considered to be a conservative trait.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 16 2021, @10:51PM
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Sunday October 17 2021, @04:47PM (1 child)
There is no "the Green Party" in Europe. There are green parties in the individual countries. In general, green parties tend to be left leaning in Europe and their political clout is limited as a general rule.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday October 17 2021, @06:21PM
Unfortunately it is being compromised by politicians that just want want a seat to sell influence. The "Green" label is extremely fractured with more concern about financial markets than the environment.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Touché) by PiMuNu on Saturday October 16 2021, @02:05PM (2 children)
...after all, the EU is a democracy, isn't it?
ROFL
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday October 17 2021, @07:31AM (1 child)
Mod as troll, but don't respond...
As I have said before, the EU is run by an oligarchy of technocrats nominated by member states. Its a very indirect form of democracy.
MEPs can refuse to endorse policies, which is good to an extent but in reality a very limited power. There is no effective president.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday October 17 2021, @02:40PM
Yup: my post above is a Monty Python rip that got modded flamebait. The people with a sense of humour must have the weekend off.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Saturday October 16 2021, @02:35PM (6 children)
While in a country like Germany ~50% of electricity is from renewables in a good year, it is only 20% of total primary energy needs. If Europe wants to be carbon neutral in the next 30 years, there is no way around nuclear.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SparkyGSX on Saturday October 16 2021, @03:53PM (5 children)
And where does the other 50% of Germany's electricity come from? Right after the fukushima disaster, they abruptly shut down all nuclear power plants and started burning massive quantities of brown coal, the absolute worst kind of fossil fuel known to man.
I completely agree that nuclear is the only viable option for the mid-term. For the short term, because it takes time to build nuclear powerplants, we should look into reducing demand, and where we must use fossil fuel, use natural gas instead of oil and coal, as it is the least damaging of the fossil fuels.
For the long term, we should develop better alternatives to our current nuclear plants, like Thorium reactors, fusion reactors, and improving wind and solar technologies, and grid-level storage.
What we should not do, is invest another single euro into "green hydrogen". There is no such thing, hydrogen is energy storage at best, and a rather crappy one at that. Hydrogen is currently made from natural gas, which is inefficient and polluting, and generating hydrogen from "excess renewable energy" is something we can look into if we ever actually have excess renewable energy.
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got
(Score: 4, Informative) by Cyrix6x86 on Saturday October 16 2021, @05:39PM (2 children)
>And where does the other 50% of Germany's electricity come from? Right after the fukushima disaster, they abruptly shut down all nuclear power plants and started burning massive quantities of brown coal, the absolute worst kind of fossil fuel known to man.
Germany imports its nuclear energy from France.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday October 17 2021, @09:53AM (1 child)
That's true, but Germany is very aggressive about moving away even from that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 17 2021, @11:07AM
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday October 16 2021, @11:47PM
I’ve seen various articles the past few years saying that Europe are building or investing in massive solar generation plants in Northern Africa, eg Morocco and Algeria with undersea cables. I can’t find links now but it’s where they’re going.
The key to weather and climate limitations for solar is a wide area grid. It might not be sunny where you are but it is down the road.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @08:22AM
A lie.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @02:51PM (1 child)
so instead of finding "weapons of mass destruction" in the middle east, "weapons of mass destruction" will be found .. mostly where uranium is mined and we're back to square one? or does europe actually have thers ownZ uranium ore mines?
might be green today but another sort of "hulk smash"-green in a few thousand years. mr "johnny ooze" will be the new "john smith"?
i fear "nuclear" is the "new coal": "burn (or in this case "split atoms") X today worry about outcome ... later."
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday October 18 2021, @04:42PM
Nuclear energy is not, by any means, a panacea. Renewable energy is absolutely fantastic, and we do need to continue investing in it. We also need a right-now solution for baseload generation that works at night, in the rain, and isn't dependent on wind. Right now, today, Europe is using coal and natural gas for that. The "green-ness" (and economics) of that can be greatly improved by switching the coal plants to Natural gas. That would reduce the carbon footprint by half. Unfortunately, much of the natural gas in Europe comes from Russia, which is its own political issue.
One day we'll have grid-scale energy storage to flip the duck curve and make it a non-issue.
One day we'll have orbital solar platforms and it will be a non-issue.
One day we'll have utility scale fusion and it will be a non-issue.
Until then, Nuclear energy is a better solution than coal and natural gas. Even with a deeply cynical reading of accident statistics it kills orders of magnitude less people than coal or natural gas. People are going to die from accidents and failures, but the science says that number will be far smaller than the number of people already dying from the energy sources we use now.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by oumuamua on Saturday October 16 2021, @03:04PM (2 children)
But not in the way that first comes to mind. It was a disaster for climate change. It ended the 'nuclear renaissance' and caused many countries to close existing nuclear plants and/or cancel plans for new plants. And here are the results for Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @03:26PM
It lead to safety reassessments of older plants and modern reactors have passive safety systems, massively reducing the likelihood of a core melt. The problem of public perception is a lack of effective communication from the industry.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Monday October 18 2021, @07:58AM
Nop. And to the simpletons who modded this insightful: you should check the sources quoted. I would normally also add that you'd better off on another site -- hooters.com or such something -- but it is Monday and I haven't finished my third cup of coffee yet.
The "scientific paper" quoted in the wikipedia fragment above is no such thing: it's a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, here [nber.org]. Basically, that paper assumes that all of the nuclear power was replaced by coal (in Germany). Odd that -- it's like NordStream I and II never happened, nor that renewables account for a base load of 44% (in 2019) over there.
The paper is the result of a seminar with the University of Texas/Austin and the University of Wyoming (question: what energy source is mainly used in both those states?). It is not peer reviewed, nor submitted for review to the Board of Directors at NBER, which is required for official publications.
Here's a money quote of that paper, right there in the Abstract:
I hope I don't think I need to make clear to readers that those 12 billion dollars quoted are not exactly based on solid grounds, nor that there's a truckload of apples and oranges associated with that last sentence. I also hope that the original writer repents, puts on a cloth made of nettles (a bit of rough wool mix-in allowed, I'm not inhuman) and crawls to Santiago De Compostela on his bare knees, begging for forgiveness every 50 meters, but I do have some doubt about that.
Finally, as a last cookie: a serious look [iea.org] at Germany's EnergieWende.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @04:23PM (4 children)
but if it is just to Greenwash the public into thinking it is organic like plastic wrapped bananas, well then, the cover up only will breed further distrust.
What does the SCIENCE say?
or is this just more political bullshit?
If it looks like shit and smells like shit...it probably IS shit.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday October 16 2021, @05:01PM (3 children)
Or a McDonalds hamburger..... just sayin'! ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @06:34PM (2 children)
Careful. McDonalds lawyers tried to destroy these folks who simply made factual statements about the company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday October 16 2021, @10:39PM (1 child)
Bring. It. On.
From Wikipedia
Also (from the "What's wrong with McDonalds" poster)
So.....really it's an eighth pounder????
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Troll) by vux984 on Sunday October 17 2021, @08:41PM
80% of an avocado is water and that's a "super food". Hell, 60% of MY mass is water too. So I guess I really weigh under 100lbs? Or are we saying I should get paid less because I'm mostly just water?? Is that the argument being made here? What IS the argument being made here?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 16 2021, @04:28PM (7 children)
The nuclear power industry should be hiring bounty hunters. Just like computer hackers, they can while away the time, researching all the ways that nooklar can go wrong. Fukushima might have been prevented, as well as Chernobyl. In both cases, the finest minds in the industry made rather basic screwups. We need people looking at all those basics, to make sure we aren't building yet another disaster.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday October 16 2021, @06:13PM
were poisoned by economics. Corruption is the only real issue in nuclear energy, and every other shortage we suffer
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @06:14PM
Fukushima was an old GE 'export approved' reactor that was known to be unsafe even by 1960's standards, that was then left to rot by the very people who should have been maintaining it. Everybody involved, from initial design until the final stupidity, not only screwed up but did so knowingly and deliberately. With that as the baseline even the safest reactor is going to fail because the people in charge will make it fail to line their own pockets. This problem isn't limited to the nuclear industry, but the inevitable consequences of criminal mismanagement are more severe than other endeavours. I'm not saying that nuclear can't be done right, or that we don't need it, but that this is why we can't have nice things.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @07:20PM (1 child)
I live within the nuclear accident air-raid siren radius of a nuclear power plant. It was built directly on top of a fault line. It is also at an elevation where it would be inundated if there were a tsunami as large as the largest tsunamis in the fossil record for the area (which have occured regularly every few hundred years, and we are currently past due). I wouldn't be surprised if this poor location was cheaper than better alternative sites that were passed over.
Further south, a nuke plant recently went through upgrades, but they had immediate cooling system failures after the upgrades because they used the wrong tubing (no doubt trying to cheap out). The plant, shutdown instead of doing the work over again-- it had an approved extension for operation conditioned on the maintenance that the operators failed at.
It doesn't seem the folks building and maintaining nuke plants have the slightest fucking idea what they are doing, or else their level of greed is too great to trust them to safely build and operate nuke plants (at least in the US).
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday October 17 2021, @02:44PM
Move.
Move now.
Just sayin'. :}
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @05:07PM (2 children)
It's not hard to classify nuclear as green, though: while in normal operation, the only gas released into the atmosphere is water vapour, and a nuclear meltdown usually leads to large rewilding projects because humans abandon large areas of previously fertile land. So I fail to see under what condition nuclear energy contributes meaningfully to global climate change. Are you thinking of the concrete used in the construction of the facility?
Fukushima could obviously have been prevented with 20/20 hindsight, but so far we haven't invented 20/20 foresight. If you have, please list the large-scale disasters of the next ten years and your obvious solutions to prevent them from happening. Maybe we can solve world hunger too? Chernobyl could have been prevented by just keeping the damn humans off the controls, nothing more was needed.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 17 2021, @06:23PM
Fukushima could have been prevented using just plain old hindsight.
Japan's history with tsunamis is written in stone, for those who are capable of reading. No matter how the facts are spun, it was stupid to put a nuclear reactor in the flood plain. Far better to put the plant a mile further inland and/or fifty feet higher, and pay the costs for doing so.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 17 2021, @06:55PM
Also, read wikipedia - not one, but TWO tsunami studies were farted off and ignored. So, Tepco was being told, in no uncertain terms, that they were facing a disaster.
That, despite the fact that the study was historically valid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#2000:_Tsunami_study_ignored [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday October 16 2021, @04:38PM (1 child)
But with human corruption, all bets are off, doesn't matter what you use.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @05:09PM
Don't forget, money is green too.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Saturday October 16 2021, @05:38PM
The great thing about nukes is that if they're well built, you can set them up and they'll run well for decades or even longer producing valuable electrical power.
The problem with nukes is like everything else, the operator will skimp on routine maintenance whenever they can get away with it, because whichever boss does that looks good in the next quarterly report and any problems that result from that will likely get passed on to somebody else. Regulatory agencies can potentially help reduce that problem, but will probably not catch everything.
And that leads to the next problem with nukes, namely that when they foul up, they foul up big-time. With mistakes that can involve body counts and monetary damages well beyond what the operator can afford to and is willing to pay out.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday October 17 2021, @04:10AM
The article mentions neither fission nor fusion by name so it is unnecessarily unclear about which they mean, except for the mention of waste. That gives a clue that they conflate all nuclear power with fission. While fusion power has remained a decade off in the future for almost as long as fission power has been around, the funding for it keeps getting cut. It is to the point that research funding for fusion [stanford.edu] is so low, at least in the US, that it is almost guaranteed not to progress. So while true that fission is the only one of the two available at the moment, it is not the only one that could be available, especially if the research were to receive proper funding.
A quick, and clean, way to fund fusion research would be to pump all those fossil fuel subsidies [forbes.com] into it and other renewables. Yep. If you followed the Forbes link there, you'll see that the subsidies are the sole reason that fossil fuels turn a profit globally. Pull the plug on that and you'll clean the air and save money at the same time. Invest some of that money in fusion and superconductor research and it will eventually pay off at an astronomical scale. Put the rest into existing renewable technologies research, such as various forms of solar and a variety of types of wind turbines.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @06:37AM
There are reactors which work well and there are reactors which produce a lot of waste.
The thing which is not green is the business model of selling reactors. Today it's like: the plant buys reactor, pays for it, pays for the fuel and pays for the spent fuel recycling. This is an absurd that needs to be changed.
Having access to various reactors, like in a reactor-building company, makes the recycling much less costly as it is recycled in these reactors. The final fuel life is not limitless, but is drastically extended in various devices.
For example, if a country starts their nuclear power project with (quite difficult to build) sodium reactors, they can re-process fuel spent in water reactors in these reactors later. More - these devices can produce plutonium which can be used for e.g. smaller non-reactor generators or even sold - many countries need it for their nuclear projects as it is one of the best fissile material out there.