That is common human behavior, not corruption of what would be 'good' behavior otherwise.
The only difference to academics is that normal people don't try to create a consistent theory. We merely pick from whatever is available in to our moralistic toolbox.
Seriously though, I just want some reactor construction to spin up with non ancient reactor designs, to replace some fossil fuel plants. PBR[1] sounds good to me... but what do I know? There are experts who can decide this.
These are the kinds of anwsers that makes me think you haven't thought through this much.
There are very clear plans for going 100% renewable. See Marc Z Jacobsens studies for instance. I wouldn't mind some nuclear power myself. But there just doesn't seem to be a clear plan about what approach to take. We don't have time to just dabble in various new reactor technologies.
To me it seems we could either build old simple reactors that we don't really trust anymore. I wouldn't mind, but it's not realistic. Or try to get Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors down in cost. But will it help? Will it be worth the investments? I guess we should at least keep existing nuclear engineers employed.
Seems to me that the only barrier now to just going all-in on renewables is energy storage. The next next few decades will be aaaaall about energy storage and transformation technologies anyway.. so there's an argument to be had that it's a good thing to just go all in on energy storage R&D. That kind of expertise will be critical to decarbonizing transportation, fertilizer and metal production anyway. Better energy storage makes it easier to decarbonize across all sectors. There's excellent network effects. Better nuclear only helps decarbonizing the grid, but that's just a part of our challenge.
Nuclear is not going to power every country anyway. That ship has basically already sailed with solar+energy storage. It's just the simplest way to get up and running with electricity if you don't have a grid, and as technologies improve, developing areas will just continue to scale that up.
The big X factor is advanced geothermal energy. I think once the fossil fuel industry sees the writing on the wall, a lot of engineers from that sector will go into geothermal. If just one of them manages to succeed getting the cost down, and drill deeper, what's the point of nuclear fission?
And then there's the fact that nuclear directly contributes to global warming by directly heating up the planet. Much less than greenhouse gases, but surprisingly much. That's extra heat we can't really afford in the coming decades. Rivers are going to end up being at the edge of ecologoical collapse due to global warming... and we're going to dump MORE heat into them?
It doesn't seem like pure renewable is the minimal cost, maximum speed solution. Storage is expensive however you cut it, and there is already infrastructure in place to operate nuclear plants that would be wasted if they were slowly retired.
What do you do with old fusion research and the oil drilling industry? Maser drill holes under coal plants, and pipe it to their turbine! Oh and you run the maser with the existing infrastructure at the coal plant. Its almost too good to be true.
In the US we're replacing nuclear plants with renewables at a 6:1 ratio.
The only people who think we need more nuclear power plants is the nuclear power industry and the politicians they're heavily lobbying to stay relevant.
> The only people who think we need more nuclear power plants is the nuclear power industry and the politicians they're heavily lobbying to stay relevant.
And also quite a few energy experts and the people who listen to them. The US nuclear industry's major players are bloated cronies satisfied with ALARA and other idiotic policies that keep them alive by preventing competition.
If ALARA weren't in place, nuclear would be thriving and competitive (and still safe!).
CAISO penned a series of increasingly urgent press releases on how catastrophic closing diablo canyon would be for grid stability when it's closure was imminent.
1)Global. Proliferation risks aren’t as relevant to me as solving the reliance on fossil fuels. West+China probably needs to prove out wide scale usage of it first though.
2) However much is necessary to create a stable grid with as minimal an amount of electricity coming from fossil fuel usage possible. I do prefer renewable to nuclear, but I think society scale energy storage isn’t going to be a solved problem in a reasonable time frame. If we only need 20% nuclear to phase out most fossil fuel plants, great. I don’t know the exact point where experts expect that renewables without storage would stop being able to create a stable grid without the existing plants.
3)Ideally MSRs, but given they’re still not completely proven out it’s probably best to start building traditional immediately and switch if the currently in production MSR plants do in fact work out.
4)Start nationalized at least, since they’re more expensive than private ownership allows but necessary for the public good (also, yeah, don’t really want private ownership of traditional reactors). If MSRs work out and economies of scale kick in a little as we build out more plants, maybe private ownership will be viable at some point.
2) 200% of current demand, to account for the rise in demand caused by climate change
3) whatever we can build now
4) Only governments genuinely have the ability to build nuclear reactors without any outside intervention or help. Even when they are built supposedly privately there's government involvement to make sure radioactive material isn't diverted or dumped. I can't imagine anyone but the most extreme libertarian wants private unregulated nuclear reactors.
Most of them don't really want nuclear, they just push it as an excuse to do nothing right now (at least here in Norway). Yes, more nuclear is probably good. But planning, permissions, building and getting a reactor up and running probably is 15+ years most places. We need power before then. So we can't stop building wind farms, solar etc. in the meantime. Which is really what they want to achieve where I live: avoid wind farms, so grasping at everything.
Yeah, while the fossil fuel lobby used to fight against nuclear, I'm pretty sure they're indirectly using nuclear to fight renewables right now.
For them, either renewables will cut into their business right now.. or they can argue we should build nuclear instead.. which could either lead to nothing getting built, or that nuclear gets built in 10-15 years. Either way, they delay the threat to their business. So it's a win for them either way. I don't think they have high hopes to fight off renewables or nuclear forever. So whichever is slower is better.
Pure speculation on my part, I'll admit. But I see so many arguing for nuclear who doesn't seem to care AT ALL about climate change or preserving nature when you press them on their arguments. So I can't help think that way.
Trying to estimate the total costs of the externalities, like most economists currently suggest, is complete non-sense, in my opinion. Their methods are dubious to put it mildly [1], and they also replace the politically accepted goal with their own.
The politically accepted goal is to prevent dangerous levels of climate change. For this, we need to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050, according to the climatologists. Since there is no way to reduce emissions to zero until then (or possibly ever), we need negative emissions.
Right now, getting a metric tonne of CO2 out of the atmosphere costs about US$ 600 per tonne (with a sufficiently long or large contract). These costs may drop in the future if scaled-up but US$ 600 per tonne is the best estimate we have right now.
This is what emitters need to pay. Something around US$ 175 per tonne (+/- 75) would only buy about 30 percent of the negative emissions needed to reach net-zero. In other words, it's insufficient.
And of course this applies to everybody, not just rich people.
Yes, if we wanted to actually solve the problem, then the CO2 tax should be set at the level of the cheapest process that lets us capture CO2.
However, you must understand that even the existence of a CO2, even with a CO2 dividend is controversial, not because it doesn't work but rather people of lack of awareness and general disdain for taxes.
So having a low CO2 tax is still better than nothing.
Also, you might need to incrementally increase CO2 prices over time to make it possible for businesses to plan ahead for the next three decades. If you abruptly increase the tax you might ruin business decisions made decades ago which threatens economic stability.
The article fails to mention the costs of reducing carbon emissions. Compared to that, US$100 per tonne of CO₂ can be cheap.
The shutdown of the economy during Covid-19 provided a case study for the costs of reducing emissions by reducing consumption and production. According to the Rhodium group [1]:
> the emission reductions achieved this year as a result of COVID-19 are incredibly costly. We estimate the US will spend between $3,200 and $5,400 of lost economic output per ton of emissions avoided, depending on the shape of the recovery scenario.
In my opinion, only a market for CO2 emissions can find the least-cost solution for a net-zero society (both terms should be understood within the capabilities of human beings). As long as the revenue is actually used to pay for actual negative emissions (not offsets, or hypothetical social costs), climate change will stop (getting worse) as soon as supply equals demand, and a market clearing price is reached.
Let's say, this turns out to be about US$300 per tonne. If so, the article only demonstrates that there's money to be made using carbon capture from the air.
If Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would be burning about as much fossil fuels as it does now.
That's because without the opposition to nuclear, the motivating reason to build up renewables would have been gone, so it wouldn't have happen. Which means Germany would have continued with about 10 % (of primary energy) nuclear and the rest would have been fossil fuels.
I'm trying to get away from a DB-based CMS for some company web sites. Static generators won't do for a number of reasons, so a flat-file CMS seems like a good fit.
Currently I'm looking at GravCMS [1] as an alternative. It's free initially, but it can become somewhat expensive with many official plugins. But it's file format is Markdown, and one can combine multiple files into a so-called modular page. It has a backend for editing, forms and e-mailing of form submissions. Seems perfect for small and mid-sized company web site.
Another option I considered was Kirby [2]. Its backend UI is configurable. That's nice in theory but the documentation is somewhat lacking, in my opinion. I've used the starterpack and it took me hours to find the one command to be able to add new pages. Its content format is also custom, not Markdown. Finally, it's €100 per site.
Also, a few days ago, I stumbled upon Typemill [3] which I will check next week.
I can wholeheartedly vouch for Grav. It’s absurdly fast, easy to deploy and even easier to template for thanks to Twig.
When I was still freelancing and a project was beyond the scope of htmlcssjs, Grav CMS became my tool of choice. Their admin plug-in makes for a easy to use backend GUI and it’s configurable enough to have non-techies use it without losing sleep.
One of the newer features are the so called FlexObjects. It’s an absolutely great idea for a CMS but explaining the possibilities and technical intricacies seems moot as the documentation and Discord community are a better place to start learning. [1]
Websites built with Grav compare to SSG speeds while maintaining a different ease of use and much less time invest to roll out.
And sticking to the topic: being completely flat-file centric, those websites are a breeze to maintain and according to my albeit limited experience also a bit sturdier security wise.
> it would have been quicker if Germany had kept nuclear online no question
This is a misconception.
Germany invested in renewables because we wanted to get rid of nuclear, not to save the climate. Germany has a population of about 80 million. That's a sufficiently large sample, so one cannot expect Germans to be psychologically or morally different to any other large population in the world. And none of those countries has managed to do something about the climate in any meaningful sense. Consequently, neither would have Germany.
Without a nuclear phase out, there would have been almost no investments in wind & solar from Germany. Consequently, neither wind nor solar would look as impressive as they do now because today's prices would have been reached only in a decade or so.
The level of coal power would have been mostly unaffected.
The only difference to academics is that normal people don't try to create a consistent theory. We merely pick from whatever is available in to our moralistic toolbox.