Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

Despite all the hate for nuclear the french solved their needs decades ago and have had a much cleaner grid for decades and will have a much greener grid for decades to come ...

I'm pretty confident that the majority would understand what Martyn actually posted, the reason it was posted and the context in which it was posted ... you yourself have argued the case for a vast build of additional capacity within the UK to meet EV demand, so "cake" & "eat it" readily comes to mind ...

HTH
Z

Just a comment on part of what you quoted. This reminds me of similar comments (under a different name) that coal has been good for us .... therefore coal is good!. Yes, of course industry and technology would not be where they are today without the coal fired industrial revolution, and France's CO2 emissions would be higher if they hadn't gone down the nuclear route.

But I fail to understand the use of words like 'hate' when we choose to revise our course, especially if the development of new technologies (like wind and PV (modern costs and efficiencies that is)) are largely thanks to the coal driven rise in our technological levels.

Also the claim that their needs were solved is also untrue. Their needs were met, if they'd been solved, then France (and the rest of the world) would continue down the nuclear route.

Again, I point out that the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. We still have bronze, and iron, and nuclear, but that doesn't mean that a RE age is wrong, it's simply technological and economic advancement, and coal and nuclear no longer cut it.

NigeWick

Martyn1981 wrote: »

therefore coal is good!

I've witnessed clean coal. I'd been a little naughty and had to wash it and put in the Guardroom coal skuttle before it was burned.

gefnew

Hi All
I think this says it all with regards re and nuclear.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45771188
regards

GreatApe

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Thanks Z.

Yes my post and the use of the word expanding referred to the future. Most of the French fleet is now pretty old, and costing more and more for extensions. Plus France has said they will be reducing the percentage of electricity they get from nuclear (which isn't 100% at the moment, especially when they buy in German lignite generation to meet peaks).

On a net basis nuclear output in France meets more than 100% of their 'normal' electricity needs. France uses some 300TWh of electricity for normal electricity needs and the use above that figure is for primarily electrified heating. The nuclear fleet produces in excess of 400TWh annually so it meets 100% of its normal electricity needs and some >100TWh of its heating needs.

The majority of Frances new build homes are electrically heated and this is fed by mostly the nukes. Also about 1/3rd of the housing stock so ~11 million homes in France are electrically heated.

So I repeat the nukes not only solved normal electricity needs but also got some way towards helping green heating of Frances homes and businesses. Of course for some of the year this heating is provided by peaker fossil fuel both domestic and imported but the majority is nuclear. And of course France is a net exporter of electricity so not only did it green its own grid it also helped its neighbors inc the UK

And they have so much spare capacity that France nukes could charge up and keep perhaps ~30 million BEVs on the road more or less the whole french car fleet

So I will say again it was a huge success. 100% of normal electricity needs PLUS ~11 million homes heating electrified, plus the spare capacity to have 30 million BEVs deployed in France without major difficulty or additional usage of !!!!!!

Argue about new nuclear being too expensive it is a valid point but dont try to argue the French nuclear fleet is not very effective at greening electricity heating and in the future transport too.

GreatApe

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Also the claim that their needs were solved is also untrue. Their needs were met, if they'd been solved, then France (and the rest of the world) would continue down the nuclear route.

France already has more nuclear power than it knows what to do with.

Its fleet (plus the hydro power in the nation) is probably capable of meeting roughly speaking

All of Frances 'normal' electricity needs ~300TWh
Electrifying BEVs ~120TWh
Meeting the heating needs of ~16 million French homes ~150TWh
Total combined would be ~570TWh demand

If its nukes can be ramped up to capacity factors of the USA fleet of 92% then its 63GW of nuclear capacity would produce ~508TWh and its hydro ~65TWh = ~570TWh

I make that roughly ~100% of electricity needs ~100% of transport needs and ~50% of heating needs which is much further than any other country is even going to get close to within a decade and they had all this sorted out decades ago (excluding a few lucky small populations and large hydro nations).

EDIT: With the use of heat pumps perhaps close to 100% of normal electricity needs plus 100% transport plus 100% heating too

GreatApe

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Their needs were met, if they'd been solved, then France (and the rest of the world) would continue down the nuclear route.

Already explained re France nuclear fleet plus its relatively smaller hydro is capable of ~100% of electricity ~100% of transport and ~50% of heating. That's almost everything solved and much much closer to any other nation going down the windy road

So why doesn't or didn't the world go the same way as France with heavy nuclear?

Well first of all BEVs still dont exist in any significant volume, had the world gone to BEVs decades sooner it would have made nuclear even more compelling.

But most importantly the world rightly or wrongly did not and mostly does not place any cost on fossil usage and effluent. Existing infrastructure is always cheaper to run and coal and gas plants and coal mines have lives measured in decades and visible jobs and lobby groups. The nukes in the USA were built in a time when electricity demand was booming. Once demand flat lines then more or less nothing else gets built whatever is existing then becomes what is used until the cost of something new is below just using something old. Same reason we dont all upgrade to a new car every year even if the new model is cheaper and safer we just keep using existing cars for 15-20 years or until they completely give out. Even if a brand new super efficient diesel or petrol car was invented today it does not mean its a great idea for you to go buy one compared to just continuing to use your five year old ford.

This is also the reason nuclear will likely 'fail' in china. They started too late. Their electricity demand will probably peak close to the year 2025 and past that point building nukes will make little to no sense. So whatever they have complete and under construction in 2025 is probably where they will stop. So maybe something like 100-120GW of nuclear or about 10% of their normal electricity needs. Had they started 20 years sooner so the nukes were coming online during the time their electricity usage was booming then they would/could have built much more perhaps 3-5x as much but that is a different history not reality

To beat the existing power generators you are going to need subsidy or politics as economics wont do it. That holds true for solar wind or nuclear and since nuclear mostly does not have cheerleaders or the ears of politicians its not going to get much subsidy or politics love and so nuclear is pretty much dead worldwide

It is going to be a slow greening of electricity it will take decades some nations will go faster others slower and hopefully we can get to a position where the windy road can achieve or exceed what the french have proven possible with nuclear. 100% of normal eletircity needs 100% of transport needs via BEVs and 50% of heating needs

GreatApe

Also for those interested nuclear in the past was much worse than it is today in one very important way. The early designs and usage of plants did not take much account into rapid refuling. The result was the plants would have very long refueling outages and the capacity factors were terrible typically in the region of 50%. Think of an F1 team changing tires in 10 seconds or you or me doing it in half an hour.

The very same plants in America that were getting those terrible CFs now achieve 90-95% CF because the refueling practices got much better and trips much rarer

If the industry had worked out how to get to the >90% CF range much quicker maybe more nukes would have been commissioned in the USA (And elsewhere)

The new designs like the EPR I believe have 16 day refueling capability so in theory they could run at upto 97% CF. 18 months on then off for half a month and repeat. The USA fleet of reactors all decades old achieves ~92% CF

But perhaps the main reason the world did not have to go nuclear was simply we had masses and masses of fossil fuels and in many nations they were dirt cheap. Oil was so cheap we used to burn tons of the stuff for power generation so oil was competing on price with coal ! and some coal basins especially in the USA were ridiculously cheap.

The boom in electricity and energy demand from 1945 to about 1990 was meet with a boom in natural gas and coal production. If the capacity to ramp up gas and coal in 1945-1990 was not there then the USA probably would have built out many more reactors and probably the EU nations too.

The French having no significant coal or gas or oil (unlike the Germans with lots of coal or the UK/USA with lots of oil/gas/coal) and looking at projected energy growth (estimating in excess of what happened) thought we better go nuclear or we will be broke trying to import +5-10% additional energy per year to meet demand. The rest of the world pretty much was irrelevant energy wise in the period 1945-1990 oh I suppose apart from japan who managed to be productive enough to export a lot so afford to import a lot of the cheap fossil fuel production that was booming. They also did have quite a significant nuclear fleet but thanks to the big wave most that is now gone for political reasons more than anything else

GreatApe

So in summary nuclear works and works very well but once your electricity demand peaks there is no way to really compete against the existing already built and working infrastructure and the west is already saturated and china soon will be therefore nuclear is dead worldwide apart from a few token subsidized projects here and there

The french timed it more or less perfectly (probably by fluke) so their nukes were coming online during a time of rapid electricity demand growth. China is probably 20 years too late

The world (by which we really mean USA/EU/Russia/Japan for period 1945-1990) did not go heavy nuclear as fossil fuels were abundant enough to ramp up at affordable prices very very rapidly from 1945 to 1990 by which demand had flattened off in the USA/EU/Japan. China took over and from 1990-2015 was able to build out massive coal infrastructure at affordable cheap prices. Had china no mass coal deposits maybe it could have started its nuclear build 20 years sooner and gone to 50% nuclear rather than probably stopping at 10% or who knows maybe they would have developed a lot slower and stayed a lot poorer for a lot longer

Martyn1981

Odd news - In the US several things are happening, the current administration has been denying AGW and removing loads of environmental protection policies.

Now, they are rolling back the Obama era policies that require car sales to attain ever higher fuel efficiency standards across a companies sales.

In order to do this, they are now jumping from denial of AGW, to 'it's so bad and unavoidable now, that this policy change will only make it a bit worse.' Seriously!

There was a safety fallback in that California was able to set its own standards, and the size of the Californian market is so large that companies would have to build to their standards or lose a lot of sales (or have to build two different vehicle standards) - so the Trump admin has removed that ability from California.

The Trump administration has entered Stage 5 climate denial

If we’re already doomed to disastrous climate change, then there’s no reason to cut carbon pollution, argues the Trump administration

To date, the Trump administration has pinballed between Stages 1, 2, and 3, calling climate change a Chinese hoax, disputing the degree of human causation (100% since 1950), and claiming it’s not a threat. But the purpose of climate science denial is to obstruct climate policies, and science denial doesn’t hold up in court. Unlike in the political realm, judicial decisions are generally based on evidence.

The Trump administration wants to roll back the Obama administration’s increased vehicle fuel efficiency standards. But under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), “if a proposed major federal action is determined to significantly affect the quality of the human environment,” the agency has to publish an environmental impact statement (EIS).

And so, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was required to publish an EIS detailing how the proposed fuel efficiency rollbacks would impact the environment, including via climate change. Here, the Trump administration shifted to Stage 4 and 5 climate denial.

We’re screwed anyway, what’s the big deal?

In modeling the proposal’s climate impact, the NHTSA assumed we will follow a scenario in which Earth’s average surface temperatures will warm 3.5°C (6.3°F) by 2100. That’s surprisingly realistic – it’s a scenario in which countries follow through with their current climate policies but don’t enact any more stringent ones in the future. The problem is that the NHTSA assessment then concluded the fuel efficiency rollbacks aren’t important because they won’t have a significant impact on those hotter global temperatures:

Former_MSE_Andrea

Hi folks

We've seen some debate on this thread about the relevance of some posts to the topic.

To ensure the thread remains on topic for forumites wanting to discuss the latest news we're asking that all posts contain a link to the news you're discussing.

For the purposes of this thread the "news" needs to be within the last two weeks.

Thanks for your help with this.