The world has experienced its hottest day on record, according to meteorologists.
The average global temperature reached 17.01C (62.62F) on Monday, according to the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction.
The figure surpasses the previous record of 16.92C (62.46F) - set back in August 2016.
We thank people who disregarded nuclear energy. We could’ve sliced global emissions by a lot if were not for you, but burning coal is far safer.
Tell that to the people near Zaporizhzhia right now.
That’s a false dichotomy. There are more power sources than coal and nuclear.
Also electricity generation is not the only source of emissions. Car traffic, cruise ships, aiplanes, all need to be reduced and can’t just be replaced by nuclear power.
In theory, yes. In practice, nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.
Energy is not something where you can just pick one solution and run with it (at least, non-fossils, anyway). Nuclear is slow to ramp, so it usually takes care of baseline load. Renewables like wind and solar are situational, they mostly work throughout the day (yes, wind too, differential heating of earth’s surface by the sun is what causes surface-level winds) and depend greatly on weather. Hydro is quite reliable but it’s rarely available in the quantities needed. The cleanest grids on the planet use all of these, and throw in some fossils for load balancing, phasing them out with energy storage solutions as they become available.
You can’t just shoot one of the pillars of this system of clean energy and then say you never tried to topple the system, just wanted to prop up the other pillars. Discussing shutting off nuclear plants without considering the alternative is pure lunacy, driven by fearmongering, and propped up by no small amounts of oil money for a reason.
Replacing nuclear with renewables is simply not the reality of the situation. Nuclear and renewables work together to replace fossils, and fill different roles. It’s not one or the other, it’s both and even together they’re not yet enough.
So when you do consider the alternatives, moving from nuclear to the inevitable replacement, fossils, is still lunacy, just for other reasons: even if you care about nothing more than atmospheric radiation, coal puts more of it out per kWh generated, solely because of C-14 isotopes. Nuclear is shockingly clean, mostly due to its energy density, but also because it’s not producing barrels of green goo, just small pills of spicy ceramics. And if your point is accidents, just how many oil spills have we had to endure? How many times was the frickin ocean set on fire? How many bloody and brutal wars were motivated by oil? Is that really what a safer energy source sounds like to you, just because there are two nuclear accidents the world knows about, and a thousand fossil accidents, of which the world lost count already?
And deflecting to other industries is also quite disingenuous. Especially if your scapegoat is transportation, since that’s an industry that’s increasingly getting electrified in an effort to make it cleaner at the same logistical capacity, and therefore will depend more and more on the very same electrical grid which you’re trying to detract from.
There is massive work being done to improve large scale energy storage (big batteries) so the renewables become less and less situational. Large scale energy storage is significantly less constrained than car batteries, because weight is a one time cost. Even gravity based batteries could become viable.
Also, in response to the previous commenter, electricity generation is by far and large the main source of emissions accounting for more than half, with more than a quarter being agriculture. Transportation is 14%, and given the future transition to electric vehicles, one might argue that half of that can be tack’d on to electricity generation’s share. (Half because electric cars are more than twice as efficient at energy conversion than petrol cars. Toss in some power line losses and that’s a reasonable estimate)
All of that is great, and I’m all for it. Can’t wait for the first grids with no fossils whatsoever, once energy storage improves enough that it can take all the balancing load. When we reach that, it will mark the start of the era where nuclear is actually being replaced by renewables rather than fossils.
My point here is that switching off nuclear is premature for now. It’s a very clean source of energy once you look at the per kWh numbers and nuclear waste management solutions are actually extremely safe. (The videos where they test the containers by smashing actual trains into them are kinda fun – and those tests are done with liquid water, which is far more susceptible to leaking than solid ceramics.) Of course, if we reach a point where wind, solar, and hydro can fully replace fossils and start eating into nuclear’s share then that’s gonna be a very different conversation, and I’m fully with renewables in that situation, but we should always keep the alternatives in mind when we shut something off.
That’s why we’re not just shutting down coal plants altogether, because there’s just nothing to replace them. Although an energy policy where you just flat out ban
renewablesfossils and tell the market that that’s the supply, now go figure it out would certainly be interesting. Very expensive and terrible for the economy, but interesting nonetheless. (Definitely the based kind of chaos if you ask me.)edit: okay, that was a weird word to accidentally replace, lol
There are more problems with nuclear energy, though. The biggest being that we burden future generations for literally thousands of years with a growing amount of waste. I am not sure why this is always missing from the discussions of people who are pro nuclear power.
It is making the same mistake again as we did before: creating a problem for future generations to solve. And in this case the problem is dire and, because of the immensely long timespan, we have no way to reliably plan ahead for so long.
Because the actual amount of waste that has to be stored for that long is minimal and can be shoved kilometers down into the earth’s crust with the same tech that’s used to extract oil. Nuclear waste storage is a great headline topic but there have been a lot of innovations in the past ~50 years.
As for lower tiers of waste (as in, less dangerous, more numerous, mostly consisting of stuff like tools used to work on the power plants, which is what actually goes in the yellow barrels usually depicted with grey goo), several reactor projects existed that actively used that radioactive waste for even more energy generation, usually targeted extremely hard by anti-nuclear activists because it would take away their talking points. The science exists, the opposition is usually political and driven by fear tactics. But this is why we store those lower tiers of nuclear waste on the surface, not because it’s the best place to put it but because it’s where we can retrieve it once we find a use for it.
And again, consider the alternative. Fossils also fuck up the environment and it’s not a good thing that they do it faster. The only way their effect would go away that fast is mass genocide of the ecoterrorist flavor, and exactly what future generations are we talking about in that case?
Spent fuel can be reprocessed in a modern reactor. Even if that wasn’t possible the storage is extremely safe.
Being from Germany, I have often read such arguments and at least here that is simply not true.
The decrease in nuclear power was accompanied by a decrease in fossil fuel.
Could that decrease have been larger if nuclear had been kept around longer? Possibly.
But if we are talking about building new power plants, the money is typically better invested in renewables. They’re faster to build and produce cheaper energy.
@geissi @b3nsn0w
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/2/11/german-electricity-was-nearly-10-times-dirtier-than-frances-in-2016
I’m not sure what the point is.
German Electricity is dirtier than France’s therefor no other sources of electricity exist beyond coal and nuclear?
That would be a weird conclusion seeing as both countries also use other power sources.
@geissi
except from countries lucky enought to get a lot of electric damn, there is no example of countries having a stable network mainly reliying on renewable energy production, because they are not stable. Doing so requires a lot of new powerlines, storage solutions, … and at the end may still be unreliable during winter / summer peaks. Its is much easier to have a mix with the fundamental ensured by a drivable power plant and there are two ““clean”” choices: water and nuclear.
A mix of more than just coal and nuclear, right?
So other power sources do exits and we should use them?
@geissi
of course a mix including renewable, there are a lot of prevision plan on what the best mix should be and fine tuning is hard, but it always include renewable in a large way. I argue to avoid gas and coal as much as possible, and using nuclear instead. Plus renewable of course.
Germany, specifically, was one of the worst offenders in this category. They do renewables at maximum capacity (like everyone else) but there’s still a massive gap to fill, and with issues of strategic dependence around hydrocarbons, the obvious answer to fill in the missing capacity was coal. Most of the time you get a mix of coal and natural gas, whichever is easier, but in Germany’s case that mix was almost entirely on the side of coal.
And without abundant hydro power, or an energy storage solution that could store a full night’s worth of energy even if the current deployment of renewables was able to generate that (which it’s pretty far from), there aren’t a lot more options. Germany’s strategy to shut off its nuclear plants out of fearmongering has been a heinous crime against the environment.
When oil companies love your green party you know you fucked up.
I’m assuming the ‘gap’ refers to the reduced nuclear capacity.
So you’re saying that Germany replaced the power previously generated by nuclear power almost entirely with coal power?
Do you have ANY statistics to support that?
The only actual increase in coal energy I know of was an unplanned short time rise due to the war in Ukraine and the loss of gas imports.
Edit: Also the original argument was that coal and nuclear is a false dichotomy. Your own comment mentions a mix of coal and gas, mentions renewables, so clearly there are more than those two options, right?
There was a link in this very same thread (right here) that compares France to Germany. It’s a very simple case study: a country that does use nuclear pollutes 10x less per kWh than a country that actively destroyed its nuclear capability. It doesn’t get any more simple than that.
Unless your argument is that if Germany didn’t shut down nuclear it wouldn’t have deployed renewables, which I hope it isn’t because it would be a completely lunatic point to make, the situation is the same no matter how you twist the mental gymnastics. Germany’s grid is one of the dirtiest in Europe largely because of the lack of nuclear baseline, which, if it was kept, would make it one of the cleanest.
If your argument is that the renewables deployed in Germany should be counted towards replacing nuclear, then you must also accept that Germany failed to significantly cut into its fossil plants with renewables, which other countries managed to do in the same timeframe, because its entire renewable capacity had to go towards filling a gap the shutdown of nuclear left. It’s the same difference either way, and it suffers from the same fallacy that you’re pretty clearly intentionally making at this point: that you are unwilling to consider nuclear in the context of its alternatives, and are only willing to talk about it either in a vacuum, or in an idealistic situation where renewable capacity and energy storage are high enough that shutting off nuclear will not lead to an increased demand for fossils.
I’ve addressed that idealistic future in this very same comment section by the way: as soon as we reach a point where we can eliminate fossils and any renewables deployed cuts into nuclear’s share, as opposed to that of fossil plants, I’m against nuclear. But that’s not the reality of the situation yet. The decommissioning of nuclear plants in Germany was extremely premature, and harmed the environment, both with increased radiation and with gargantuan amounts of CO2 output.
Renewables > Nuclear > Fossils. It’s literally that simple. As long as we have fossils, replacing them with nuclear would be beneficial, and any decrease to nuclear capacity is a negative. If you can offset something with renewables, it should be fossils, not nuclear.
I’m saying that coal or nuclear is a false dichotomy, meaning there are other possible choices.
Comparing the carbon intensity of France to Germany does nothing to address this argument.
Your last comment then stated that Germany has replaced coal with nuclear.
Comparing the carbon intensity of France to Germany does not address this argument either.
If you want to show that Germany replaced nuclear with coal then you need to show the development of the energy mix in Germany and show where nuclear capacity decreases and coal increases.
Comparing Germany to France does not show the development in Germany.
And since both countries have a power mix with more than two energy sources, it certainly disproves that there are only two options.
Here is a map of carbon intensity of electricity generation:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity
France has 85g/kWh, Iceland has 29g without nuclear.
Does every country have the same potential as Iceland? No.
Is nuclear the only alternative to coal? No.
Your argument still boils down to the same logical fallacy that I’ve addressed already.
Germany could deploy X amount of renewables. They had a chance to replace something in the grid. They chose to replace nuclear and keep coal, which is the same difference as if nuclear was replaced with coal. You wasted your chance at shutting down coal plants and instead got rid of a far cleaner energy source, out of fear.
Also, France produces about 40-50 TWh more energy per year than Germany, which about accounts for their hydro advantage. The playing field is as even as it could be, which is why this example showcases the German energy policy’s abject failure. And sure, maybe you’ll only be pumping 10x as much CO2 to the atmosphere as the French for, say, 10-15 years – that’s a hypothetical compared to today’s reality, and even then, how will you justify that decade of environmental damage to future generations?
Even on your own map, almost every country in Europe that’s not already in a lighter category is trending clearly down. Germany is one of the very few outliers, joining the pack with Poland, Estonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. Is that really all that Germany is capable of? Or are your priorities just clearly misplaced?
You can technically power EVs with nuclear energy. But yeah airplanes and cruise ships are harder.
I’m all for getting rid of the cruise ships. Floating land-whale-buffet reef-destroying pollution devices is what they are. I’ve seen firsthand the effect they have on Caribbean islands they make their destination, and it’s never good.
Do you really think governments actually gave a shit about some deluded hippies? Nah, they were just the scapegoats the politicians used to pretend they weren’t in bed with the fossil fuel lobbyists.
I thank the oligarchs and their willing consumption enthusiasts. This apocalypse is brought to you by unchecked, insatiably greedy capitalists and capitalism.
Most environmental solutions are also being created in capitalist societies, and the richest countries (which by coincidence are capitalist) are the ones that are decreasing their emissions by a considerable amount.
Connecting capitalism to environmental changes is just communist propaganda, dunno if you did it willingly or not but that’s about it.
I take no offense to being called a communist, even though I’m a socialist. I have a great deal of pity for the sycophants of capitalism, though, cheering their own exploitation and oppression as their masters terraform the planet to be hostile towards human life in the name of quarterly profit expectations.
Your family will be burning from the global oligarch’s fine work, and you’ll be blaming the invisible communists and socialists that countries like the US used military means to decimate through global destabilization the world over to further capitalist interests. The capitalists won, are fully in charge, and have captured their own regulatory bodies in most of the world. This is the world of capitalists own making. They run the show, we are living in what the capitalists would consider their utopia, where they live like modern Pharoahs as most of the species subsists to further enrich them.
We crossed that threshold years ago, man made climate alteration is a runaway train of multigenerational suffering at best, and possibly the end of human civilization for ages at worst. Have fun cursing the dirty commies when you’re thirsty with no recourse 🤣
Ah yes, socialism, the ideology that kills countries but blame on the Americans.
Only because those capitalists societies are offloading the work that generates those emissions on to poorer countries because it’s cheaper to do it there.
Yes, the German method. We lower our emissions not by using nuclear power, but by moving our coal outside of EEA and buying it back at 5x the price!
We will be able to decrease emissions, never get them to 0. Hence maybe some CO2 extraction will be needed.
It’s cheaper and most importantly they allow it. These countries want growth, they want to attract investment, have work for the people. It’s a win-win relationship otherwise these countries wouldn’t allow it.
Way to minimise the last 40-50 years of capitalists actively working to stop any real progress on climate change. Sure progress is being made now after they figured out it was getting bad and there was money to be made in green tech. That doesn’t excuse the decades of lobbying and and actual propaganda put out by capital interests that we are all paying for now.
That you are spouting off about “communist propaganda” tells me you either grew up in the 80’s and really bought the red scare line or you bought the far right propaganda telling you to be scared of ‘CHI-NAH’ (to quote the orange traitor).
You couldn’t far wronger in this question lol
“You couldn’t far wronger in this question lol”
Sure. I couldn’t “far wronger”.
What a thoughtful and fact filled reply that furthers conversation.
Try making a point or defending your position if you want to be taken at all seriously.
As it stands why should anyone think you might be correct in your statements and not just dismiss you out of hand as a moron who is far wronger?
First, in the 80s I wasn’t even born and if the fact I don’t fall for every bull**** communist propaganda that I read in the internet makes you upset, boho I’m so sorry.
Blaming the environmental changes on capitalism it’s like calling “The Radium Girls” dumb. During the latest decades they didn’t know very well about the damages they were causing but if you check history, as soon as there was scientific evidence that something was causing harm, laws were passed in capitalist countries to remove it promptly. Look at the lead in petrol debacle, CBDs, the CFCs.
Also, even today there’s really not a good way of replacing “dirty” technologies like jet engines. Of course, the communist countries aren’t doing sh*t to solve the issue either, they’re even making it worse.
Promptly on what timescale? Geological?
It’s always too little too late. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Reality speaks for itself.
CFOs, lead on petrol were removed pretty fast considering the scale of usage being done. Lowering CO2 emissions will be much harder though since it’s required to replace technologies we’ve been using for decades.
The fact there’s so much lobbying against nuclear it’s very retarded since we could’ve lowered emissions by a lot if were not for these people. And again, the loudest opposition isn’t even capitalist, some are more leaning left and even call themselves “environmentalists”.
There’s actually a news article from the March 1912 edition of Popular Mechanics warning about how ‘the furnaces of the world’ are ‘burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year’, and how ‘when this is burned, united with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly.’ They conclude that adding 7 billion tons of CO2 per year ‘make(s) the air a more effective blanket for the earth and raise its temperature’ and that ‘the effect may be considerable in a few centuries’. Their only mistake was underestimating how much CO2 future generations would put in the atmosphere. They estimated a few centuries for 7 billion tons of CO2. I’m wondering what they’d make of 43 billion tons.
Capitalists ignored the clear warnings from scientists about pumping CO2 into the atmosphere for over a century because it wasn’t economical for them to do something about it. It was always somebody else’s problem. Until it wasn’t. Where do you live? New York, that has recently had some of the worst air quality in history thanks to Canadian wildfires? Or Denver, where it was our turn in April and May? Or when we got the horrible DECEMBER wildfire that burned into Boulder? Man, wildfires in fucking December. NOW it’s fashionable for Capitalists to at least pretend to care about the environment, but shit, if there could be a dollar made burning down the last forest, you fucking better believe that capitalists will gleefully play a Captain Planet villain while they do just that.
Edit: A fun link: https://bigthink.com/the-present/1912-climate-change-prediction/
That dude is impervious to facts.
He wants to blame it all in Commies or some other harebrained idea.
Yea, they (the capitalists) have known full well for at least two decades the damage they were causing.
Way longer, friend. They knew, covered it up, and used their power to dissuade legislators when others realized it as well.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
Holy shit you are delusional if you believe any of that. A simple google search on climate science coverup by fossil fuel companies (like Exxon, Shell, and BP) in the 70’s is just a single example and it would take you almost no effort to learn. That you haven’t even done the very LEAST you could to not be embarrassingly wrong, should serve to let anyone reading anything you comment on to simply dismiss your ramblings as misleading at best.
You need to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself if maybe you got this wrong since myself and MANY others have pointed out the various things you are just factually incorrect on.
I’m not holding out hope though, I am willing to bet you will just double down in your fantasy instead of facing reality. Feel free to prove me wrong, little would please me more.
Exxon has known the damage they were causing since at least the 80s and have spent absurd amounts of money alongside their competitors lobbying governments and paying scientists to keep the status quo. We had at least some evidence that burning fossil fuels was going to cause global warming at the turn of the 20th century.
What you’re saying isn’t entirely false, but it sure is bending over backwards to be nice to the capitalist societies that caused this problem. Also there aren’t any communist countries causing this problem, China is every bit as capitalist as the US in how their economy functions these days, they’re communist in name only. You’ve been influenced by capitalist propaganda friend.
Exxon’s research predicting the effects on climate were in the 70s. They knew about the dangers of leaded gasoline in the 20s, but suppressed that for decades too.
Humanity caused this problem, not capitalism. It’s not like commies never burn CO2 to keep things running.
Again oil companies will always protect their businesses at all costs, specially since they invested billions into exploring new oil sources. If governments are letting themselves being so influenced by lobbies, the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the politicians.
Thank the good old Green Party of Germany! Restarting all those coal plants and shutting down nuclear reactors!
Yeah, I’ll take a source for this one. Coal power generation has not increased in Germany whereas the Green party’s policies in 1998 led to the first large scale deployment of solar energy in the world.
God, that’s so depressing. I genuinely don’t understand how we - any of us, in any country - are supposed to be okay with these political mechanisms filled with incompetent, out-of-touch, self-interested codgers. I’m not willing to take action, but when our entire world is being picked apart by the public sector and sold for parts by the private sector, what are we to do?
Lobbies. The German “green” party if fully funded by Russia, which has a vested interest in keeping coal, but especially nat gas (which despite the CO2 emission is still labelled as “green”) being the primary source of energy.
While lobbies are extremely powerful, I don’t understand how I, personally, am supposed to support the lobbies that represent my interests. Donating to PACs? I’m just not wealthy enough to make it make sense.
I think its a bit too late for that. 40% of wealth is owned by the top 1%, and even if the remaining 99% own 60, most of that wealth is not available, but used for everyday necessities. So no, you cant outbid our out PAC billionaires anymore. Too much trickle up economy has been going on for too many years