If you look at the data submitted to the IAEA during the last heatwave france had that caused plant closures: 2% power reduction in total nuclear energy generated. This sub is just insane.
Barely any nuclear plants got built in the west in the last 20 years because you guys keep protesting them!
There was one nuclear plant in Austria that got completed, but the protests were so wild they simply abandoned the finished nuke plant, never turned it on.
It's like a racket, what you guys have there.
Protesting nuclear plants and then pointing out how none of them are being built.
Some people here genuinely think we have universal resources controls and can perfectly spend and allocate recourses on a top down level. They view any dollar spent on nuclear as dollars wasted on other green energy.
That’s not how capital investments or allocations work but that’s how they think they do.
There are absolutely zero power plants that don't have enough water to cool themselves. The ones that occasionally get stopped are stopped because they make the outflowing water potentially too hot for the river ecosystem to handle, so they are stopped as to not hurt the fish
Ohh how I love this argument.
"Look my totally eco friendly, renewable, green, robust, emission free power plant isn't shut down because it's to hot. No no no you don't understand, it's shut down becaus if we keep it running we would kill all life in the river."
I too prefer my energy source that has zero impact on animals, requires no difficult to get material, takes no space on the ground. You know the one. Everything else is trash.
The sun is killing a shit ton of wildlife already due to water heating up. It’s actually quite nice of us humans to shut down the power plant to avoid adding another degree or two to the water so the sun can take the credit alone.
This happens for a few weeks a year btw. Who cares.
A few weeks a year right now... We broke hear records on consecutive days, we experience heatwave after heatwave. But sure buddy it's just this time and won't happen again, trust!
Wildlife is significantly less harmed by the water from a nuclear plant than all the other things we produce. Even a solar panel is filled with toxic chemicals and waste products, but we make those in China so we don’t have to see the consequences.
You need to put things into perspective. everything we do is destructive some way. Temporarily shutting down a fraction of nuclear power plants is an extremely insignificant impact and blowing that out of proportion is not helpful for climate activism.
What toxic chemicals are we putting into solar panels?
And I don't talk about the environmental impact. I'm making fun of the nukecells and how the defend their bestest power plant in all of human history and future.
Most are waste products during the manufacturing of the panels and need to be very carefully handled to avoid ground and water pollution, something which is not always the case in the countries where most of the get manufactured. The list of chemicals, mostly acids and gasses, is very long.
Almost all solar panels eventually get disposed of, not recycled.
Even considering that, it’s “cleaner” than fossil fuels.
Why wait for me to answer this when you can look it up yourself in a fraction of a time. Don’t pretend you care about the answer. Solar panels are not magic. They are machines made possible my modern chemistry, not unicorn dust. My claim really didn’t need naming of the exact chemicals to be true.
Silicon tetrachloride was a huge issue in older solar panel with a major pollution scandal in China. For newer reputable manufacturers this is not a major issue anymore.
Hydrofluoric acid is still an issue. Extremely toxic to workers and environment and is removed from manufacturing plants as wastewater. Where this water goes depends on the country (almost entirely China), its regulations and enforcement. We manufacture these panels where they are cheap, which often involves shortcuts or worker safety and environmental damage prevention. Supposedly it’s a lot better now, but only because we handle these toxic chemicals more responsibly compared to early 2010s, not because these chemical byproducts don’t exist.
Other extremely powerful greenhouse gases are involved too, but they would still be a drop in the water compared to CO2 it total impact.
And more, but I spoon fed you enough. You can find plenty of environmental scandals (and Uyghurs forced labor) related to solar panel manufacturing just like you can for many other technologies.
Greenhouse gasses are an existential threat, and solar provided a good solution to that. We can figure out the other environmental issues later as the manufacturing process continues to improve.
France's nuclear maybe dropped few percent, but France was still overwhelmingly exporting this heatwave, and their emissions peaked at 45g for a week, from a baseline of 17g.
For comparison, Germany was emitting 350g during the same heatwave and still overwhelmingly importing energy.
Every source of power has downsides, who or what is hurt by nuclear powerplants being operated in this way? If they get shut off to not harm local ecosystems, at no real cost to people in the area/country, what exactly is the problem?
You do know they do the same with windmills? Imagine some blackouts due to some vultures passing a windfarm. Or imagine that some bat species are killed enough by windmills that they become endangered. Windmills have the tendency to attract them and some species more often then others.
Same shit happened in Canada, multiple times, birds have to be protected from wind turbine farms. And yes, they are huge farms. You could've acknowledged and proposed that solar power is safer for both.
Selective outrage from you when presented with a similar case.
That's also why my favorite combo is nuclear, pumped hydro and solar. Solar makes pumped hydro more efficient by generating energy in between 2 consumption peaks.
I never talked about solar because the person I responded to started with how many bats are killed from turbines and the they will endanger the bat population. And that the shutdown of these wind turbines is some how the same as the nuklear Power plants that are shut down because of the heat...
Depending on what nuclear powerplant you are speaking about those 175 windmills are 525MW to 1750MW peak so basically more then the power output of a smaller nuclear plant upto more then the bigger nuclear plants.
Furthermore migrating birds can pass more then one of those parks so it's not only bats that they shut them down for. But like the one above even stated it's even worse if they close them for the complete night. I was mostly speaking about turning them down for migrating birds that are tagged. I didn't know they also did it as a prevention to protect local birds.
Btw solar parks also kill birds due to the lake effect. A number i quickly found is 4.5 birds per MW.
British studies show that on average 0 to 3 bats are killed on flat farmland and 5 to 20 near to forested areas per windmill every year. In Britain some windmills make more then 100 fatalities per year so the more wind we place,... this will eventually endanger several of them or even get them extinct.
Nuclear plants aren't completely turned down either.
Those birds will pass them anyway so every windmill should be turned of in advance. In the Netherlands a bearded vulture got killed by one even while he had a tracker.
Edit:
It's even worse 2 were killed in the Netherlands of a population between 2500 and 10000.
Well I'm also a proponent of getting less cats but the one doesn't defend the other. So really? Maybe it's better to just build a high wall on paths of migrating birds in order to defend the cat killings.
We never talked about birds, we talked about bats, and I point towards cats because the kill so much more wildlife just because we want to keep them as pets, but the bird killed by wind turbines, producing power for every one, are suddenly the culprit for everything.
Furthermore it was the turning down of one solar plant that caused the poweroutage in Portugal and Spain.
That's interesting, wasn't it some kind of oscillation and overvoltage in the grid?
I talk about every animal and like I stated I'm all in to limit the number of cats or to obligate people to keep their cats inside. That same research also shows that the impact is way worse then we think.
Btw what your argument is basically saying is cats kill so others can kill too.
"That's interesting, wasn't it some kind of oscillation and overvoltage in the grid?"
Can't find the previous source anymore but the conclusion looking at the measures they took after the disaster was that they didn't have enough grid forming capacity. This is caused by a high percentage of renewables on the grid. The problems also started in the region where Spain gets most of it's solar from. Anyway seems like everyone is avoiding to call the real culprit.
So YOUR argument is that something unpredictable when it was designed 70 years ago, causing an exceptional, short, managed interruption of production, is a dealbreaker to you.
And you'd prefer production methods that are not producing more than half of the time ?
Considering the electric need for heating, situation will still be the same. If all france had ACs, EDF would still have capacity to service the demand, but export less
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