memes

I like that name for Russia.

Germany decided to rely on the cheap and abundant natural gas from checks notes, ah shit.

and shutdown a brand new reactor as well, which would still be running, more than likely.

~~You are right, but in this specific chart, they don't include things like building the facilities, mining the materials etc. They just use the CO2 released whilst producing power, which with nuclear is very low. You can click on the chart and zoom in on the data, it's pretty cool.~~ (This is wrong, see edit)

The whole Germany situation is very complex and I was just jabbing, I live very close to Germany and work in Germany part of the time so I know something about it (but probably not everything). To me phasing out the nuclear wasn't that much of an issue, but it could have been done way slower to make sure renewables filled the gap. Buying gas from Russia with the war in Ukraine is going on permanently hurt my soul.

Quickly phasing out nuclear is also a big middle finger to the countries in Europe that are looking to expand their nuclear power, but run up against long lead times. They would have gladly bought nuclear energy from Germany, which would mean way shorter lead times and prevent a lot of extra CO2 during construction of new facilities. Whilst building new big nuclear probably isn't useful in combatting climate change, getting the most out of existing nuclear would have been.

The fuel coming from Russia isn't as big of a deal to me, as there are plenty of sources around the world to buy from. With the amount of gas we've bought from the US recently, we could have easily bought some nuclear fuel as well. Now all these sources have their issues, I don't like being beholden to the US and places like Niger or Namibia can have human rights issues.

Obviously nuclear isn't the future and needs to be phased out, but in my mind this meant decades yet and not the rushed phasing out Germany did.

Edit: Just checked the source, they actually do include things like mining of the fuel, construction of the facilities, transport of the fuel etc. into the CO2 calculation. Nuclear just blows everything out of the water in terms of CO2. Only renewables come close, but in terms of CO2 nuclear is the best.

I think you mean mining fissile materials. Nuclear is not in the same category of emissions as fossil fuels that burn carbon directly...

That’s wrong, nuclear doesn’t equal zero CO2, not even close.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Carbon-footprints-of-various-energy-sources-based-on-32-for-all-energy-sources-other_fig1_308114828

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

When accounting for construction, lifetime production, decommission and disposal per mwh produced for all energy sources, nuclear still takes the lead. And it further pulls ahead when you compared land useage per mwh produced per square meter. The only place where Nuclear doesn't have a cutting edge advantage is cost per kwh, and frankly if you're putting profits over sustainability then welcome to being part of the problem that lead to us burning coal cause it was cheap.

The best possible solution for a sustainable future is baseline nuclear power to cover average usage of loads, rooftop solar on existing buildings to make use of surface area not otherwise being used for something useful, and wind turbines added to areas where wind production is viable without displacing other production needs, such as adding it to agriculture fields or low impact areas. This ideal circumstance would also have people abandoning low density housing (specifically suburban single family homes) to move to more high density housing (apartments or multiplex homes that host multiple families) to allow additional land to be set aside for ecological restoration to better balance and preserve what climate we still have and enhance carbon capture. This is obviously a goldilocks solution that will never happen because humans will be humans, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be encouraging it and taking steps to emulate it as realistically as possible.

There are no emissions from producing electric power, but tons of emissions building the plants and reactors, mining the fissile materials (which in large come from Russia, btw), transporting the materials, etc.

That's technically true, but more a consequence of fossil fuel infrastructure peripheral to the power plant itself. Switch your rail network to full electric and use more electricity in your steel manufacturing (already the predominant modern foundry production technique), you'll solve a big chunk of this problem.

After that you're talking about CO2 produced by setting concrete to build the plant, and that's functionally a push relative to any other power plant that also uses concrete (basically all of them, concrete is popular for a reason). You're also moving well below the carbon emissions targets we need to hit by 2050, so its an efficient move.

it was to stall the phaseout of coal, expand on gas relying on Russia while halting the expansion of renewables and utterly destroying the PV industry

German domestic firms were making huge margins on Russian gas imports right up until the Ukraine War broke out. That's a big problem with fossil fuels. They're still incredibly cheap to mine, with a lot of the cost coming via markups in the retail sector. There's also a huge incentive to simply import PVs from countries with dirt cheap labor costs. So.... mostly China with a bit of Canada thrown in there. Germans, like the Americans before them, no longer want to invest in industrial capital because it has a shit ROI. They want to invest in the FIRE and Tech Sectors, because they've got crazy high returns.

So more and more industrial capital keeps getting dismantled, with imports filling the gap. And nobody really seems to care about what this does to domestic security or capacity in the event of supply chain disruptions, because that's Future Peoples problem and we're making so much money right now.

Really? Because they use the figure given by UNECE, that's a pretty good source I feel? The report it comes from is also very thorough.

What sources have you seen that state a number 10 times higher? Would be interesting to see where the difference is and what numbers they give for other sources.

Lifetime CO2 numbers listed here are accurate. The only time NPPs have worse CO2 figures is when they are shut down prematurely (see: Germany.) The actual act of nuclear generation produces no CO2, and mining Uranium is difficult but significantly more efficient than than coal and when comparing the amount of silicon needed for solar to make 1mw compared to uranium needed for NPPs to produce 1mw, the uranium still has has better a better track record. Hydro is a mess with so many different designs that some aren't that impactful where others devastate entire ecosystems just by existing so it's difficult to realistically talk about it objectively.

We need NPPs, Wind and Solar if we want a dependable and sustainable power grid, but that's just one small part of a sustainable future that we desperately need to change the way we live to avert global climate catastrophe.

Accounting for mining, construction, operation, decommission and disposal, nuclear has less emission that Solar.

The political problems are entirely artificial, fabricated by the fossil fuel competitors and have been soundly disproven.

Nuclear waste is no where near the problem people assume it is. A single plant doesn't produce more than it can store onsite during it's entire operation and 100% of all the waste can actually be recycled and ran through newer generation breeder reactors to 'burn' the radioactivity and render the resulting 'waste' safe as background radiation within a decade or so in a cooling pool. The only reason this isn't already common practice is nuclear fuel is so abundant it's not as profitable to do this, It'd be the equivalent of a coal power plant halting using coal for a few weeks so they could shovel in trash from a nearby landfill until it was empty. Less overall power output for less profit.

same hidden emissions as lithium, but at a vastly smaller scale, because compared to something like coal mining, a dude with a pickaxe could supply what an entire nation dedicated to coal mining could do.

The part about the texas crisis made me think it's about why the USA is not a single grid, while Europe is one.

Iirc one big reason made the crisis that severe was their grid is separate, so they couldn't buy electricity from other states.

Also if that's the case than using screenshots from that webside is quite misleading. That site uses live data, so if the 2 screenshots were taken at the same time, one of the continents was at night, so solar panels were not working... An avarege or aggregate map should be used, not live data

At least according to this it's ~8% of the state's electrical capacity all by it's lonesome which doesn't seem too bad. By the stats on it's own wiki it's pretty active.

I've heard there's another reactor in the Willapa Hills that was constructed but never activated. Like some ghost story it still sits, unused, to this day.