https://www.yahoo.com/news/switzerland-votes-phase-nuclear-energy-121710224.html
Swiss voters have backed government plans to replace the power from ageing nuclear reactors with renewable energy.
A total of 58.2 per cent of voters supported the phaseout of nuclear energy in a binding referendum on Sunday. Under the Swiss system of direct democracy, voters have the final say on major policy issues.
The plan will provide billions of pounds in subsidies for renewable energy, ban the construction of nuclear plants and decommission the country’s five existing ones, which produce about a third of the country’s electricity.
[...] The move echoes efforts across Europe to reduce dependence on nuclear energy and has been in the making following Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011. Germany has announced it will close all nuclear plants by 2022 and Austria banned it decades ago.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:20AM (16 children)
... to see that the left still has its anti-science (nuclear power, GMOs, and vaccines bad) contingent.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:38AM (1 child)
I blame Mr. Einstein:
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F [wikipedia.org]
-- https://daily.jstor.org/albert-einstein-the-anti-racist/ [jstor.org]
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein [wikipedia.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:21AM
Give all your money to SoylentUtopia and trust super-intelligent Philosopher-God-King NiggerCommando will decide how to redistribute the wealth and who among us shall be conscripted into staff jobs.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Lagg on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:43AM (5 children)
Favoring renewable energy is anti-science?
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:09AM (4 children)
No, pay attention:
Seem familiar?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:15AM
Nuclear energy is a science; coal is a technology; renewables are a sad.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:37AM (2 children)
1879: "Mr.Benz, that internal combustion engine is a waste of time.
Everybody knows that steam is the thing."
1885: "Mr.Benz, that horseless carriage will never replace real horses."
Stand in the way of progress, denying the future, and you're liable to get run over.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by scarboni888 on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:01PM
1895: "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" – Lord Kelvin, British Mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @08:23AM
- Nikola Tesla, over a century ago
(Score: 2, Troll) by kaszz on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:45AM (4 children)
There certainly are nuclear technology that can be safe and efficient. The problem is people, especially the type of the MBA, PHB, sales, marketing, managers etc. As long as they are in the loop, it won't be safe. And then screening of engineers that "I'm just going to test.." Chernobyl.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:53AM (1 child)
Since Capt. Obvious [soylentnews.org] hasn't weighed in I'll mention that the RBMK designs had significant flaws that contributed to the seriousness of the disaster--among them the inadequate containment structure and the positive void coefficient--and that they were created in a planned economy in which concerns about sales and marketing ought not to have pertained.
http://insp.pnnl.gov/-profiles-reactors-rbmk.htmhttp://articles.latimes.com/1986-08-23/news/mn-15781_1_design-flaws [pnnl.gov]
http://articles.latimes.com/1986-08-23/news/mn-15781_1_design-flaws [latimes.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient [wikipedia.org]
I don't think you meant to use Chernobyl as an example of harmful sales or marketing practices, but you seem to be saying that one engineer unilaterally decided to do a test. I've heard otherwise:
-- http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/cause/ [chernobylgallery.com]
-- http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/appendices/chernobyl-accident-appendix-1-sequence-of-events.aspx [world-nuclear.org]
It seems not to have been the "hold my beer" situation you depict (perhaps in jest?) but it was bad enough.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:45AM
The point isn't the reactor but the behavior.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:20AM (1 child)
Hmmm, so in this reactor design the MBAs, PHBs, et al., are actually inside the loop? Are they used strictly for heat transfer or can they also drive a turbine? This sounds like a promising area of research.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:35AM
Redacting testing protocols, skipping on maintenance, not buying proper equipment, keeping to small staff or uneducated, wrong priorities etc.. The usual.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:24AM (2 children)
I haven't noticed that nuclear power is either left or right.
Are you saying that nuclear power is "good"? I don't really think you can make a case for that. Nuclear power is better than no power. Our civilization would have to be rebuilt to cope with no power. Nuclear power is arguably better than coal power, at least it's not dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere 24/7/365. But, it's hard to make a case that nuclear is "good". The US, Russia, and Japan each has a history of nuclear accidents. The accidents are far to damned serious to shrug off. The next accident COULD cost a million lives, and make an entire state uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
Nuclear power is not the best of all possible alternatives. The best alternative really is renewable. We don't yet have the technology to harvest power reliably out of the air, but it's coming. Solar panels have been around for most of my life now. The first ones were little more than novelties, really. Big, clunky, ugly panels that could keep a lead-acid battery charged, most of the time, unless you had three or four cloudy days in a row. Today, they are getting more efficient, and a lot less ugly. Not to mention, a lot cheaper. Whether it takes another twenty years, fifty, or a hundred years, one day, renewables will be about all there is.
And, THAT is a "good thing". All the power you want or need, with zero pollution. No crap running into the sea, nothing blowing in the wind, then falling on your head with the rain. No poisons in the ground, waiting to be harvested with your garden vegetables. And, best of all, no radiation mutating your kids and the wildlife into unrecognizable creatures from your worst nightmares. Just clean, pure energy, at your fingertips.
Maybe I'm a little overly optimistic, but I think you'll admit that "the best of all possible worlds" would have zero pollutants from any energy source. That isn't happening in my lifetime, and probably not in any Soylentil's lifetime - but that doesn't mean it can never happen.
Salutes to all the people who are helping such a future to happen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:36AM
In my opinion there is an astroturfing campaign in effect to try to frame nuclear as a standard right wing view. I generally post on more conservative sites to try to keep myself balanced, and have noticed a sharp spike -out of nowhere- amount of pro-nuclear propaganda, for lack of a more nuanced term. It's also generally framed in a sharply partisan fashion, "leftists are anti-science"/anti-energy, etc. There's 0 basis in reality for the position, but I think the number 1 rule of American politics is that frame things in a political fashion and people turn into mind-blanked followers.
At the same time there is an intentional misinformation campaign about renewables being propagated. For instance cloudy days are supposed to drop the output of solar percent to near 0%, even under optimal conditions a solar panel might be enough to keep a flash light turned on, etc. The entire rhetoric is trying to formulate some sort of a machismo 'nuclear is for men', 'renewables are for soy latte sippin' tree huggers.'
(Score: 2) by Alphatool on Tuesday May 23 2017, @11:09AM
No, it really couldn't. There is no mechanism that could possibly kill more than a few thousand people from an incident at a nuclear power plant. Even a worst case (i.e. well beyond design basis) accident or sabotage is highly unlikely to cause more than 100 fatalities. Once you start looking at a realistic accident in a western nuclear power plant then everyone walks away unharmed. The plant might never restart, but everyone who worked there or lived nearby would be absolutely fine.
If you don't believe me, there has been lots of research on what can happen (e.g. here [candu.org], here [inl.gov] or here [nrc.gov] as a starting point, but there is plenty of detailed information in the scientific literature and also in publications from regulators if you want to find out more) and we also have thousands of reactor-years experience to look at. In all of that time there have only been 3 major nuclear accidents at power plants - Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Chernobyl killed less than 100 people, Fukushima killed 0 but hurt a handful and everyone was fine at Three Mile Island. All three incidents were tragic in their own way and nobody should ever die at work, but in the scheme of industrial accidents they're a long way down the list.
Chernobyl and Fukushima both have exclusion zones around them, but the zones are political constructs rather than actually being uninhabitable areas. Worst case, living there might slightly increase your risk of cancer - a far smaller increase than comes from smoking - and with active decontamination and dose minimization programs even this potential increase in cancer risk could be avoided. I won't provide references for this part, but if you really doubt it you can go visit the exclusion zones and see for yourself. If they were truly uninhabitable this just wouldn't be possible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:29AM (1 child)
At least, the Swiss have the best kind of landscape when it comes to storing renewable energy. And they're really good at digging caves and tunnels to hide that mess from view. But there's a whole season that's not highly friendly to Solar, and wind has to be carefully located...
I suspect the French nukes will be happy to supply for shortfalls, like they often supply the UK and Germany.
(Score: 1) by aim on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:35AM
What's often missing in making this assessment is climate change. There's much less water/snow coming down these past years than was the norm. This not only affects hydro power (and drinking water!), but also makes for less cooling available for the nukes (which have to run at lower power or have to be entirely turned off - already happened several times for french nukes), or for hydro-based storage facilities. I also read that current hydro in Switzerland (60% of their own production, the nukes are most of the other 40%) doesn't cover costs, so it's not exactly surprising they're keeping their (mostly already quite old) nukes running as long as (in their own estimation - and I do have high esteem for swiss engineers) sufficiently safe. Sensibly, one of the main approaches is power savings, e.g. by renovating existing buildings.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:34AM (5 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:44AM (4 children)
from the article:
...and yet it passed somehow. Smells fishy to me!
(Score: 4, Funny) by kaszz on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:51AM (2 children)
Crowd sourcing without qualification at its finest.. :p
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:38AM (1 child)
Yes, because the qualification of "get people to vote for you" suddenly qualifies a person to be an authority on anything besides accumulating votes.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday May 24 2017, @02:36AM
Qualification means understanding what you vote on and the consequences it will have. Voting X because some other dude did so is bad basis for decision making.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:55AM
so a populist party makes claims which may, or may not, be true, but appeal to, well, populism (in this case, anti-renewable version)
note, too the language "too expensive", "disfigure the landscape" - as if traditional power generation is 'pretty' and 'cheap'.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Interesting) by idiot_king on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:28AM (3 children)
Nuclear is a relic of the age where destroying entire cities with a bomb and poisoning their people with radiation would win you the title of "the good guys." That's the only reason why nuclear energy was even sought after in the first place: it was research meant to produce weapons of war. Nothing else.
We're done with it. Fukushima and Chernobyl both proved that nuclear's only use is ruining land and sea.
Wind and solar only, thank you very much.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:43AM (2 children)
Nuclear . . . destroying entire cities . . . That's the only reason why nuclear energy was even sought . . . to produce weapons of war. Nothing else.
-idiot_king
I left a post on the previous page you might be interested in. Tell me, oh idiot_king - if we phase out all other sources of energy tonight, leaving only wind and solar, how long do you think you will survive? Are you comfortable ensconced on a hundred acres of arable land, equipped with horses, mules, sheep and/or cattle, and maybe a hydroelectric plant of your own? No? Didn't think so. Long story short, you will not survive if the world shuts off all of it's polluting energy sources tonight, never to be restarted. The global population would probably drop below 2 billion, within five years. Maybe lower than that. Unless the survivors found the keys, and restarted some of the dirty, ugly energy producing plants again.
You probably don't take me seriously, so, one question: How in the hell did Wal-Mart get those groceries on their shelves? They don't just magically grow there, waiting for you to come pick the containers off the shelves!!
(Score: 2) by idiot_king on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:06AM (1 child)
I'm going to overlook the overall aggressive tone of your post.
Apparently you aren't familiar with the increasing viability of new technology.
It doesn't take that long to realize that a solar roof and a few windmills more than power a single house. Increasing efficiency of things as simple as lightbulbs or complex as computers means our average consumption level goes down. This means less power load and less windmills/solar cells necessary.
On top of that, the price of these things is always dropping. The more we fund them, the better they get. Ever notice how we got better at extracting oil and coal the more we've used them? Now imagine that for sunlight and wind. The possibilities are endless. The onward march of science practically ensures this.
You don't doubt that, do you? Certainly in your own life, you've been blown away by the marvels that have been invented.
Why start doubting them now, when they are so much better than what we've had before?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:46PM
"I'm going to overlook the overall aggressive tone of your post."
ROFLMAO - that nonsense doesn't mean anything at all, now does it?
As for solar roofs and such - where you gonna get all those solar roofs? You do realize that all the solar panel manufacturers are working at capacity, and their production is spoken for, years in advance. Seriously, you can find that information for yourself. US panel manufacturers aren't even selling solar panels in the US, because their production is sold in advance to Europe. I guess maybe us Soylentils could combine our resources to open up a new manufacturing plant, to hasten the day when we can shut down the last coal powered generator. Except, we'll be going into direct competition with the existing plants for the raw materials. We'll probably end up on a waiting list.
A lot of the delay in solarizing everyone's homes is political, sure, but you can't just open up the earth, and dig up enough raw materials to supply every man, woman, and child on earth with gigawatts of energy.
Yeah, the possibilities are endless, but it ain't happening overnight. No technology in the history of man was adopted on a global scale, overnight. The internet may be an exception - that happened practically overnight. But, it took decades for Henry Ford to sell a car to half the families in America. It took even more decades for oil to reach it's zenith.
I'm not arguing against renewables, I'm just trying to make you understand that it doesn't all happen at the snap of a finger. You children or grandchildren may live to see an all-renewable world. You and I probably won't.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:38AM (2 children)
I'd like to see a ballot on a question like that be honest.
[ ] Keep our existing nuke plants while we build newer, safer ones. Status quo means little change in rates or employment.
[ ] Shutdown all of our nuke plants which represent a third of our generating capacity, replacing it with wind, solar and imported electricity. Rates will at least double, and could go higher. No energy intensive manufacturing industry will remain within our borders within a decade.
How many people value the green egoboo and virtue signaling enough to check that second box if it is honest?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:24PM (1 child)
So why wouldn't you include a third option to keep the nukes but replace with renewable? You wouldn't be committing a certain logical fallacy [wiktionary.org] would you?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday May 23 2017, @08:05PM
Explain how your phrasing differs in actual effect from my second option. Both have an end state of decommissioned nukes, no replacement nukes and a lot of very expensive to build and operate alt energy supplemented with imported peak power from places who didn't decommission their nukes. Problem is everyone in Europe is in a panic to switch off their nukes.... somebody hasn't thought this through because it is a classic NIMBY situation in that everybody admits on some level that nukes have to be connected to the grid while everyone is saying THEY are too Holy and too valuable to allow one near them.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:13AM
Votes to phase out: 58.2%
Turnout: 42.3%.
Kinda annoying how yahoo scattered those two.
World nuclear news' article on it [world-nuclear-news.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:29AM
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale#Level_5:_Accident_with_wider_consequences [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:46AM
Renewables are great!
They really are. They reduce the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, and SOx and NOx, and other nasty by products of combustion, and also reduce the burning of fuels contaminated by persistent organic pollutants (e.g. dioxins) and heavy metals. I'm all in favour of making renewables more efficient, and reducing the environmental effects of power generation.
However, we still do not have 'grid-scale' electrical storage. There is no battery (or other storage) technology available that can store the Gigawatt-hours of power needed to run a modern economy. Sure, some batteries are used for peak shaving and provision of power to remote areas that are dependent (in the main) on diesel-fired electrical generation - this is great, but nowhere near enough. Improvements in the cost-efficiency of battery-based storage can't come fast enough.
This lack of grid scale battery storage means that renewables need some method of 'filling in the gaps' (this is the 'intermittency problem*). Note that hydro power, while good, doesn't scale - there's a lack of suitable mountains, and hydro facilities are not exactly environmentally benign**. This is currently done by having gas-fired power stations (which are quick to spin up) available . Burning gas is better than burning coal, as some of the energy comes from production of water rather than carbon dioxide, so you do have a lower environmental effect than if you didn't use renewables - but it is not the cheapest method of providing power. Ideally, you use nuclear to provide power to meet the base load and renewables, topped up with gas and whatever electrical storage you can afford to deal with the demand peaks. If you don't use nuclear, you either use coal, or a vast amount more gas. Not using nuclear inevitably means burning more coal and hydrocarbons.
Don't get me wrong. I love renewables. It's just that the reality is that they really are not the complete solution now, and it will probably be some time until they can be. Until then, coal and/or nuclear and gas will be needed.
*The intermittency problem is gone into a lot of detail, using Germany as a reference, here: http://www.powermag.com/renewable-intermittency-is-real/?pagenum=1 [powermag.com]
**There are lots of schemes for storing energy: this document gives an overview, and is still not completely comprehensive: http://www.iea.org/media/freepublications/technologyroadmaps/AnnexA_TechnologyAnnexforweb.pdf [iea.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:47PM (1 child)
How long must a "renewable" resource run to offset the carbon generated in mining and processing the rare earths used in its construction? Show your work.
Extra credit: Contrast your analysis with mean time to failure for the renewable system analyzed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:59PM
>Q to all the watermelons posting in this thread
>How long must a "renewable" resource run to offset the carbon
>generated in mining and processing the rare earths used in its construction? Show your work.
Oh, break-even analysis. This article looks pretty sweet.
http://www.powerfocuseng.com/downloads/P1-1030r1-SolarThermalBreakEvenAnalysis.pdf [powerfocuseng.com]
>The break even analysis is conducted in such a way that the quotient in years, is equal to the time required to have saved, recovered, or offset spending equal to the capital investment deployed. A simplified version of the equation is shown below to illustrate the two drivers in the analysis. Where t is the number of years required for an annualized return of A to equal the initial investment of P.
Also: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy10osti/46909.pdf [nrel.gov]
Seemed a good read.
>Extra credit: Contrast your analysis with mean time to failure for the renewable system analyzed.
We passed that hurdle some time ago, we've got pv installs slated for 30 some-odd years. You tend replace an inverter in 10-20 years or so.
The most important thing is to keep the panels clean. It might knock 10-20% off of the output, if not shut it down alltogether. Also, the new stuff is intended to be very hailstone resistant.
PS: I am not a watermelon, I am a meat popsicle.