Denmark’s wind farms generated 140% power needs on July 9

[salm]

Salm, if you say "a functioning 100% renewable system is better than a nuclear system," and ignore the problems of actually making the renewable system function, you are in the territory of dreaming, not of engineering.

It's like saying "a working flying car is better than a normal car," while ignoring the fact that given the current state of technology it is a LOT easier to get the normal car to work than to get the flying car to work.

It´s more like saying that a working electical car is better than a working car with combustion engine.

[Purple]

That´s fine. Other countries should improve nuclear technologies and technologies dealing with its waste. If the Energiewende doesn´t work it is very good if idiot proof nuclear power is available.
I see no reason why the world should invest only in a single technology.

For the same reason why we no longer use horse and buggies on our roads and steam engines on our railways. If a technology is better than the alternatives than investing in it instead of those alternatives nets more benefit.

[salm]

That´s fine. Other countries should improve nuclear technologies and technologies dealing with its waste. If the Energiewende doesn´t work it is very good if idiot proof nuclear power is available.
I see no reason why the world should invest only in a single technology.

For the same reason why we no longer use horse and buggies on our roads and steam engines on our railways. If a technology is better than the alternatives than investing in it instead of those alternatives nets more benefit.

So there can never be two competing technologies next to each other? I don´t think your analogy with the horse and car works for this situation.

<edit>Or actually your analogy does kind of work. We just don´t know if nukes are the horses and renewables the cars or vice versa. Perhaps Blueray and hd dvd would be a better analogy. Or it will turn out that nukes are just CDs.</edit>

[Purple]

We know that ultimately atomic energy has the potential to be very safe (barring degrees of negligence bordering on malevolence) takes up far less space and resources, causes far less environmental damage if handled properly and is much easier to scale up. The only thing renewables have as far as advantages go is that they are more hip and popular with the greentards.

* Note. I am not saying everyone who supports renewables is bad. I support them as a backup/additional source at times. Just that there is a vocal crowd of people who would support them no matter what and in spite of sanity and logic if need be.

[salm]

Meh, already addressed, so whatever.

[blowfish]

I live less than 20km from one of the oldest reactors in Germany (now shut down and chronically unsafe beforehand). I would very much prefer not having a Fukushima every couple of years.

If Germany still has nuclear reactors by the time I'm moving out of my current apartment, I'll make it a point to buy a house next to one (probably cheaper than elsewhere)
Unless you mess up the evacuation and overdo the exclusion zone like Japan did, you can probably just stay put and continue living where you currently are. No wait, who am I kidding it's Germany, everyone would freak out even more badly than the Japanese and the botched evacuation would kill hundreds of people even though nobody except the village next to the reactor would actually have been in enough danger to justify evacuation.

Don't forget we wouldn't be expecting to have a Fukushima every couple of years, but even if we did, localised damage is more manageable than continuing to disperse crap forever.

The same thing was said by the German nuclear energy industry before they got caught repeatedly lying about "new designs."

Buy a newer model of American or Canadian or whatever reactor that's built to be passively safe (i.e. will shut itself down if everything around it breaks and nobody shows up to fix it for days). In a few years, the small modular reactor demonstration plants will hopefully be built so you can just order a couple from the factory and have them shipped in one piece. Being small, they'll even be easier to cushion against earthquakes. In addition, standardising to one design would allow you to properly license one or two for every generation of nuclear power plant and evaluate them thoroughly instead of signing off on a bunch of one-off builds.

Yes yes, and in theory just storing nuclear waste in rusty barrels and then forgetting about it for two decades should not happen either. But it does.

Aside from the mess in the Asse, most of the barrels that rusted through above ground literally don't matter since they're for low to intermediate level waste. Low level waste is pretty much everything that is radioactive at above background level including slightly irradiated concrete from old reactor buildings, radiomedical waste, and the trash can contents from the safety zone in the power plant just to be sure. Lower level waste, except maybe the stuff that's borderline intermediate, could go straight into a normal landfill with no issues. In order to actually produce health problems, you'd still have to crack open a shitload of intermediate level waste barrels - if someone says "5 megabequerel released" that sounds scary, but considering even strict food safety standards allow up to several hundred Bq per kg it's not that much unless you insist on rolling around in the stuff.

To give you an idea of how ridiculously strict the characterisation of low level waste is: if you brought a piece of granite (containing trace uranium) into a nuclear power plant, it would go into a low level waste barrel for being too radioactive. For that matter, if you brought a tritium light bought on amazon or get your thyroid checked by the doctor, you'd shut down half the nuclear power plant by setting off every Geiger counter in sight

Actually, we do have earthquakes along some prominent fault lines. Guess what our genius nuclear industry did? Built a nuclear reactor directly on top of a fault line. Then they were all suddenly surprised about a fault line being there (meaning they were too stupid to do proper research). EDIT: Worse than I remembered. They tried to run the reactor without having it secured for potential earthquake. It took several years and court cases to force them to secure it. Then they couldn't secure it and it had to be shut down.

Oh and four more reactors are currently at risk as well. See this. (2 page article in German).

I see a lot of ifs and maybes in that article. Even Fukushima, being an ancient power plant even corrupt TEPCO was actually planning to have retired by now, survived an earthquake an order of magnitude beyond its original shitty design before the water level rose above its hilariously undersized tsunami wall. If we built new power plants somewhat proofed against earthquakes, I wouldn't be particularly worried.

In this case, no, because I think a functioning 100% renewable system is a lot more desirable than a functioning economy running on nukes.
In order to find out if it is possible to create a functioning system relying on renewables somebody has to try it out. Therefore these fools are very useful.

Considering that renewables have a larger physical footprint, require more resources, a shitton of additional area and/or resource intensive storage in the form of biomass powerplants that typically turn out to be an ecological nightmare and tons of hydro which by ruining the natural water regime of river catchments equally tends to be an ecological nightmare anywhere that has less rivers than Norway - I'd actually prefer an all nuclear power grid to an all renewable grid. You can get away with sane levels of storage if you go somewhere like 1/3 to 2/3 renewable, but the rest should still be nuclear.

[salm]

Considering that renewables have a larger physical footprint, require more resources, a shitton of additional area and/or resource intensive storage in the form of biomass powerplants that typically turn out to be an ecological nightmare and tons of hydro which by ruining the natural water regime of river catchments equally tends to be an ecological nightmare anywhere that has less rivers than Norway - I'd actually prefer an all nuclear power grid to an all renewable grid. You can get away with sane levels of storage if you go somewhere like 1/3 to 2/3 renewable, but the rest should still be nuclear.

I´d like that as well but nuclear and renewables don´t work well together because of the long times it takes to switch nuclear power plants on and off.

As for the rest: I´m optimistic that a lot of these problems will be solved in the future because there is political and financial will to do so.

[Thanas]

Buy a newer model of American or Canadian or whatever reactor that's built to be passively safe (i.e. will shut itself down if everything around it breaks and nobody shows up to fix it for days).

I've actually talked to the guy who was in charge of the East German nuclear plant program, they had just a design like that. After reunification our nuclear energy industry rejected it due to it being a different design than the ones already in place.

So no, I don't see there being such a quick fix.

Aside from the mess in the Asse,

But it is not aside from the mess in Asse. It is everything, including Asse. And I don't trust somebody who has been lying for over 50 years to keep things safe now.

I see a lot of ifs and maybes in that article. Even Fukushima, being an ancient power plant even corrupt TEPCO was actually planning to have retired by now, survived an earthquake an order of magnitude beyond its original shitty design before the water level rose above its hilariously undersized tsunami wall. If we built new power plants somewhat proofed against earthquakes, I wouldn't be particularly worried.

You can say that, but there will not be a new power plant in Germany for the foreseeable future and I do not trust the old designs (you know, the ones who were proven to be unable to withstand an earthquake, or otherwise the plant built alongside a fault line would not have been shut down).

tons of hydro which by ruining the natural water regime of river catchments equally tends to be an ecological nightmare anywhere that has less rivers than Norway -

You are exaggerating.

Besides, it is not as if storage technology isn't already making leaps and bounds.

[Broomstick]

My point was that unlike barrels the design of atomic reactors has advanced to make them more difficult to ruin through human error.

You are correct, but we are still using that old tech rather than entirely replacing it.

This said, I really do not see the point of your initial statement. There is after all absolutely nothing that can't be ruined by such willful negligence. So the example you pointed out really does not provide a decent argument against using atomic energy. It's kind of like saying that no one should drive automobiles because you die if you intentionally drive one off a cliff.

The difference is that very few cars more than 15-20 years old are on the road, and for the genuine antiques either they need to be made road-worthy by today's standards or are subjected to operational limitations that are actually enforced. Oh, and even a multi-car crash isn't nearly as polluting as a major nuclear accident.

Of course, it's a hell of a lot easier to replace a car than a nuclear power plant.

A lot has been done to mitigate the human factor in cars as well - alarms that tell you that you left your headlights on after shutting off the engine, for example, and anti-lock brakes as two very simple ones. Accounting for human factors is a significant safety point in a lot of technology.

[Irbis]

You can say that, but there will not be a new power plant in Germany for the foreseeable future and I do not trust the old designs (you know, the ones who were proven to be unable to withstand an earthquake, or otherwise the plant built alongside a fault line would not have been shut down).

You mean the very ones that never had serious accidents that killed anyone, unlike pretty much the entirety of other forms of heavy industry and energy generation?

Also, the very ones that would have long been replaced if not for idiocy of "green" organisations having hysteria attacks every time anyone mentions word "nuclear" nearby?

The very same organisations that would right now be calling nuclear power genocide had it been killing as much people per year as solar does (roof installers and factory workers), that is, five orders of magnitude more than nuclear power?

Do you know what is far more dangerous than nuclear power in case of earthquake or structural collapse? How about this, one of largest Polish renewable power plants - if it bursts, 4.5 million people has anywhere between 15 to 65 min to get out of the way before cubic kilometre of water creates mother of all tsunamis wiping out every single city hundreds of kilometres down the river.

I personally have 45 min to get out of the way in case it breaks, whereas if that was NPP having Chernobyl-scale explosion I'd be safe where I am. And frankly, not only dams fail far more often than NPPs, they amplify frequency and strength of earthquakes by adding significant pressure on tectonic plate (some dams actually generate small shocks by themselves). Had NPP was so dangerous time bomb, "greens" would be already having spasms, but it's just good old renewables, so it's harmless, right?

And for the record, I am not against dams. While the dam in question sunk kilometres of virgin forest it at least created biggest and cleanest mountain lake in Poland, being mostly neutral for environment, unlike the damage if the same amount of power was drawn from solar or wind.

[salm]

What do you people think about renewables in politically less stable regions?
The middle east for example. Or large parts of Aftica?
If decent renewables at a good price exist because there is a demand for it in rich countries they might be less inclined to go for nuclear technology. The Iranian nuclear program was a dispute lasting decades for example.

[Thanas]

You mean the very ones that never had serious accidents that killed anyone, unlike pretty much the entirety of other forms of heavy industry and energy generation?

Actually, there has been a suspicious uptick of leukaemia cases near some nuclear power plants. And neither Wind or solar have killed anybody.

The very same organisations that would right now be calling nuclear power genocide had it been killing as much people per year as solar does (roof installers and factory workers), that is, five orders of magnitude more than nuclear power?

Yeah, because nobody ever died constructing a nuclear power plant, or handling material for it.

[salm]

I am sure that the dangers of installing and maintenance in solar and wind energy will decrease in the future due to more experience, improved safety mechanisms and safty protocols and the use of maintenance robots and drones.

[salm]

There is also the fact that going for renewables should be seen in context. If the Energiewende experiment doesn´t turn out to be as effective as we think, it is not like it is possible to be a devastating faliure. If we don´t manage to create enough storage and other technologies required for a sustainable energy system we can allways import energy from other countries who use nukes.
So the risk isn´t all that high unless all of sudden the whole world decideds to convert to renewables at the same time.

[blowfish]

But it is not aside from the mess in Asse. It is everything, including Asse. And I don't trust somebody who has been lying for over 50 years to keep things safe now.

I see finding a place for an Endlager as a primarily political problem of not wanting to upset rich NIMBY voters, which has been solved much better in Scandinavia and particularly in Sweden. No matter how badly you fuck up the waste casks inside the Swedish waste repository (which currently houses intermediate waste afaik but is way better than other countries' ideas about high level waste storage) the worst case scenario is that you can't retrieve the stuff as easily when breeders finally get built.

tons of hydro which by ruining the natural water regime of river catchments equally tends to be an ecological nightmare anywhere that has less rivers than Norway -

You are exaggerating.

Besides, it is not as if storage technology isn't already making leaps and bounds.

Not exaggerating - the last Central European river systems with natural water regimes are being dammed up currently (yay subsidies), and sensitive alluvial forest species die off when you lose a dynamic water regime and get a dry zone/wet zone with arbitrary shifts in water level. Guess why many of these species are considered threatened in Europe - you can't have a functioning alluvial forest in standing water - and why there's subsidies for reconnecting alluvial forests to rivers after the dams have been built as a conservation measure.

In addition, battery storage is an idea I can't get behind because it needlessly uses raw materials for devices with very limited life times and there haven't exactly been major advances in pumped hydro storage beyond "build more" and "build bigger" lately. There's some smart things you can do like e.g. the water cooling/air conditioning things done in California to buffer wind and solar, but those won't suffice for a 100% renewable grid.

You mean the very ones that never had serious accidents that killed anyone, unlike pretty much the entirety of other forms of heavy industry and energy generation?

Actually, there has been a suspicious uptick of leukaemia cases near some nuclear power plants. And neither Wind or solar have killed anybody.

1) if it's the study that did the rounds five years ago, it had shoddy statistics and was purely correlational and thus lacking control for any confounding variables to boot. The only somewhat believable study on radiation doses from normally operating nuclear power plants and cancer (including leukaemia) rates that exists is the cohort study on 300000-ish nuclear power workers that came out a few weeks ago, finding a very minor increase in leukaemia rates while still using pretty generous statistics. That 12000 person village in the Elbmarsch would have required orders of magnitude more radiation exposure than it could get from a functioning nuclear power plant to plausibly cause dozens of leukaemia cases.
2) even if we were to assume that dozens (or hundreds) cases of cancers have been caused by nuclear power plants in Germany - and by extrapolation hundreds to a few thousand over Europe, that's nothing next to between 20000 and 70000 premature deaths due to coal across Europe every single year.

Yeah, because nobody ever died constructing a nuclear power plant, or handling material for it.

Sure somebody does, as happens for any type of large scale industrial project. The point is that you need comparatively little work in building nuclear power plants due to the fuel's energy density when compared to literally everything else, and especially renewables which have the lowest energy density of any existing power plants. Or I guess nobody ever died building wind turbines and turbine parts either.
There's a handy compilation of deaths per unit of energy output for different energy sources here, which largely checks out. If you're more cautious about the effects of radiation (i.e. you use the linear no threshold model instead of an S curve for the dose-response relationship), plug in an extra 50000 or so deaths for that and it's still right there with renewables.

[Thanas]

The statistic is pretty much cherrypicking, to get a true picture you would need to factor in death by wind farms in Denmark and Germany and then compare those deaths to those in the construction sector. You can't just take a world average for solar due to the different labour and safety laws. I'd be interested to see those figures for Germany.

[salm]

In addition, battery storage is an idea I can't get behind because it needlessly uses raw materials for devices with very limited life times and there haven't exactly been major advances in pumped hydro storage beyond "build more" and "build bigger" lately. There's some smart things you can do like e.g. the water cooling/air conditioning things done in California to buffer wind and solar, but those won't suffice for a 100% renewable grid.

There is research being done where pumped water is replaced by concrete blocks on trains which are pulled up a mountain.

Belgium is planing an off shore pump storage called iLand:
Link

There is research where water is pumped into large tanks under water in the ocean.

And there are large test projects running storing energy in hydrogen with very low reaction times to compensate for the high volatility in renewable energy production. They involve very large companies like Linde and Siemens.

Link, sorry German

Research and prototypes exists. Political will exists. Financial will exists. What more could you hope for? If we only did projects as large as the Energiewende if every single technology required has already been researched and every possible bump in the road has been taken care of we´d never get anything done.

[blowfish]

The statistic is pretty much cherrypicking, to get a true picture you would need to factor in death by wind farms in Denmark and Germany and then compare those deaths to those in the construction sector. You can't just take a world average for solar due to the different labour and safety laws. I'd be interested to see those figures for Germany.

To a large extent, the deaths will be from resource extraction in addition to damages in the area where the power source is operating (especially for fossil fuels). If you look at German wind/solar (or nuclear) there's also going to be a proportion of deaths coming from resource extraction that are the same for any installation on the world built by a particular manufacturer. Anyway, the point isn't "Renewables will kill you" but "even if we are cautious about health effects from radiation, nuclear is much less dangerous than everyone thinks and compared to fossil fuels has already saved 1.8 million people worldwide. Stop worrying".

There is research being done where pumped water is replaced by concrete blocks on trains which are pulled up a mountain.

Which I guess is great, but will still require you to build a ton of train tracks (the potential energy in millions of tons of water is larger than in a few hundred tons of concrete you can fit in a train, unless you lift the stuff implausibly high).

Belgium is planing an off shore pump storage called iLand:
Link

There is research where water is pumped into large tanks under water in the ocean.

I think these are actually good ideas, because they are big and simple enough to keep working for a long time and actually matter.

And there are large test projects running storing energy in hydrogen with very low reaction times to compensate for the high volatility in renewable energy production. They involve very large companies like Linde and Siemens.

Link, sorry German

You lose 50% of energy due to needing to hydrolyse 2H2+O2 from water and then burning it again. Given the energy is CO2 neutral that's not too bad but it means you have to overbuild renewable capacity quite a bit which is uses up money as well as resources and land area. Therefore it's probably going to be limited to buffering very quick changes in renewable output and not for the bulk of the energy.

Research and prototypes exists. Political will exists. Financial will exists. What more could you hope for? If we only did projects as large as the Energiewende if every single technology required has already been researched and every possible bump in the road has been taken care of we´d never get anything done.

I don't think the Energiewende is a worthy endeavour in the first place. According to our government it will cost half a trillion euros, or 15 billion euros per year. Even taking into account the cost overruns in many nuclear power plant build projects, we could have afforded two state funded nukes per year that could have directly eaten into coal or gas power plant market share, or 3-4 heavily subsidised ones, and have a completely CO2 neutral power grid.

[salm]

I don't think the Energiewende is a worthy endeavour in the first place. According to our government it will cost half a trillion euros, or 15 billion euros per year. Even taking into account the cost overruns in many nuclear power plant build projects, we could have afforded two state funded nukes per year that could have directly eaten into coal or gas power plant market share, or 3-4 heavily subsidised ones, and have a completely CO2 neutral power grid.

I could live with a purely nuclear solution as well if they seriously started to clean up the problems they are having with corruption and idiocy.

However, unless something truely extrardinary happens and enormous numbers of people change their minds about nuclear energy in short time this is fairytale thinking.

Now, since you can´t have nukes, would you rather have the Energiewende, continue with fossil or something else?

[Borgholio]

There is research where water is pumped into large tanks under water in the ocean.

I'm curious how this works. Doesn't water storage need gravity to pull the water out of the tank and through the turbines? How does it work if the water is stored downhill?

[salm]

There is research where water is pumped into large tanks under water in the ocean.

I'm curious how this works. Doesn't water storage need gravity to pull the water out of the tank and through the turbines? How does it work if the water is stored downhill?

I uses water preassure.
You install tanks at the bottom of the ocean at 600 or so meters. When you have no wind and sun and need power you open the valve and the tanks fill up. The water running into the tanks runs a generator which produces power. When you have wind and sun and have too much power you pump the water out of the tanks again.

Link

[Simon_Jester]

Salm, if you say "a functioning 100% renewable system is better than a nuclear system," and ignore the problems of actually making the renewable system function, you are in the territory of dreaming, not of engineering.

It's like saying "a working flying car is better than a normal car," while ignoring the fact that given the current state of technology it is a LOT easier to get the normal car to work than to get the flying car to work.

It´s more like saying that a working electical car is better than a working car with combustion engine.

Why?

More generally, the point is that you can't just decide to ignore the difficulty of making a system work, when you decide that system is 'better' than the one you have. Sure, it would be 'better' for me to live in a mansion than to live in my apartment, but if I can't afford the mansion, it doesn't matter.

Building a 100% renewable energy economy, without importing electricity form another country's DIRTY NUKES or fossil fuel power plants, and with making due allowance for the extra cost of storing surplus energy for days when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining at full strength, is going to get very costly. Costly on a scale where you have to seriously think about what else you could have done with the money if you were willing to go nuclear.

I´d like that as well but nuclear and renewables don´t work well together because of the long times it takes to switch nuclear power plants on and off.

Unless I am badly wrong, building nuclear plants is competitive in terms of cost per megawatt of generating capacity relative to wind, and superior to a number of other renewables. In which case it certainly ends up making sense to use nuclear power to generate a 'base load' and rely on stored energy from renewables to carry you through the peak demand periods.

You'd need the energy storage system anyway in a 100% renewable economy. And unlike the renewables, you CAN ramp up power production from the nuclear reactors in an emergency, even if it does take time to do so.

You mean the very ones that never had serious accidents that killed anyone, unlike pretty much the entirety of other forms of heavy industry and energy generation?

Actually, there has been a suspicious uptick of leukaemia cases near some nuclear power plants. And neither Wind or solar have killed anybody.

Did those "suspicious upticks" come with any measurable increase in radiation levels around the plant? Because if not, then I don't believe there's a real relationship there.

You can literally walk around waving a detector to find out if radiation is leaking into the environment. It's not a secret hidden thing.

There is also the fact that going for renewables should be seen in context. If the Energiewende experiment doesn´t turn out to be as effective as we think, it is not like it is possible to be a devastating faliure. If we don´t manage to create enough storage and other technologies required for a sustainable energy system we can allways import energy from other countries who use nukes.
So the risk isn´t all that high unless all of sudden the whole world decideds to convert to renewables at the same time.

This will leave Germany dependent on foreign suppliers for electricity, probably at inflated prices.

Also, it's grossly irresponsible to say "nuclear power isn't safe because I heard a rumor, so I'll let someone else run the nuclear power plant and just buy the electricity from them!"

The statistic is pretty much cherrypicking, to get a true picture you would need to factor in death by wind farms in Denmark and Germany and then compare those deaths to those in the construction sector. You can't just take a world average for solar due to the different labour and safety laws. I'd be interested to see those figures for Germany.

If you can't take a world average of the safety of solar and wind power, that includes countries with bad labor and safety laws, and compare it to 2015 Germany...

Why is it that you CAN take a world average of the safety of nuclear power, that includes 1950s-era reactors run by ham-handed incompetents, and compare it to new reactor designs which don't incorporate the dangerous features of the old ones?

[Borgholio]

There is research where water is pumped into large tanks under water in the ocean.

I'm curious how this works. Doesn't water storage need gravity to pull the water out of the tank and through the turbines? How does it work if the water is stored downhill?

I uses water preassure.
You install tanks at the bottom of the ocean at 600 or so meters. When you have no wind and sun and need power you open the valve and the tanks fill up. The water running into the tanks runs a generator which produces power. When you have wind and sun and have too much power you pump the water out of the tanks again.

Link

Oh I see, it's sort of a reverse gravity feed then. Rather than pumping water uphill during the day and letting it drain out at night (using solar as an example), you pump water out of the tank during the day and let it flow back at night. Interesting...

[Thanas]

Why is it that you CAN take a world average of the safety of nuclear power, that includes 1950s-era reactors run by ham-handed incompetents, and compare it to new reactor designs which don't incorporate the dangerous features of the old ones?

Because work safety and ecological impact is better in Germany than say in China, whereas the nuclear power companies have proven themselves to be ham-handed incompetents, so there is no reason to give them special treatment from the other incompetents.

[salm]

I don´t have time at the moment but it appears that France just joined the Energiewende.