Weird how fossil fuel companies also managed to instrumentalize solar PV too. Iirc, both Shell and BP created solar departments which they then allowed to generate a low single-digit percentage of revenue. Thus, a) generating positive media coverage and b) not endangering their fossil core business.
It’s certainly not just a German failure, though. Stellantis (i.e. at the time, PSA and especially the Marchionne-led FCA) fucked up too, as did Renault-Nissan (despite their head start with Zoe/Leaf)
If you’re generating electricity primarily from fossil fuels in the first place, their price will be linked (but higher) by design. If you’re using a merit order system, then that’s true even if just a fraction of your electricity comes from said fossil fuels. That of course ignores possibly different sets of taxes being applied to retail fuels vs. the fuels utilities are buying and taxes on electric power.
I didn’t count but the headlines seem dominated by negatives “Nein zu …”, “Kein(e) …”, “Stopp der …”, “Weg mit …”, “Kampf dem …”
Afaik, German reactors were designed to be throttled to 60% capacity, within around a week. And doing that too often wasn’t safe either. And there was no economic incentive to do so because a reactor throttled is not a reactor earning—although you have to do a bunch of extra work to throttle the reactor and you’re only conserving negligible amounts of fuel.
I am not deep enough in the topic to know whether that’s a limitation due to all the German reactors being particularly outdated. But “30 min” and “20%” sounds more like an emergency protocol to me rather than any kind of srandard procedure.
The only way to generate short-term profits from nuclear power is to take over a running reactor. But building these things takes a close-to-prohibitive amount of money in all Western countries. There must be motivations other than cost effectiveness.
“SMR” just means “small” and implies nothing about the technology used. But the quote specifically mentioned a “large-scale” reactor.
That said, if Sweden were willing to buy molten salt tech from China, it might happen sooner.
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I guess on the whole none of this is particularly surprising: Demented lifelong nazi sympathizer sings along to Nazi songs. I am a bit unclear what the lawsuit is supposed to prove though. It’s not like the RN’s past is a secret.
If Marine Le Pen was a reasonable person, I guess she might have denounced him a while ago rather than taking over the family business and sanding off some of the rougher edges.
The title says “neo-nazi band” …
Feel free to tone it down a little.
Your discussion of reservoirs/pumped hydro seems a bit one-sided too. Environmental concerns around e.g. sawing off hilltops to build a reservoir (happened in Czechia) or of destroying aquatic eco systems by sucking up/shreddering fish along with river water or drying up river beds are pretty real. Not to mention that reservoirs are already massively affected by climate change, as could be seen particularly well in China in recent years.
And yet, China is still building out solar, wind, and coal faster.
That’s despite nuclear having a lot of advantages in China:
For every country that is moving to a solar/wind-dominated future, “base load” definitely is outdated. “Base load” was always artificially propped up economically through night-time power tariffs, and propped up practically through night shifts in factories (thus continually running processes) and things like night storage heaters.
You certainly don’t need base load to keep the grid stable, you just need to be able to quickly match production and consumption.
You make it sound like the completely predictable power output of nuclear is a problem
That is a challenge, because it means you need a flat consumption curve as well – which in reality you don’t see often. I.e. you either need to waste or cheaply export energy, especially at night and over the weekend to make sure your grid doesn’t crash.
and unpredictable variation in output of the wind/solar is great.
The point is that augmenting solar/wind with (plain) nuclear doesn’t work well.
But the variability of solar/wind are a challenge as well, especially given the at times negative energy prices. Fossil, biomass, battery, pumped hydro, and H2-based power production have a huge advantage there.
Sure, if you’d wanted to put a lot of money into 30±year-old nuclear reactors, the power companies could have added storage. However, this is not the only issue of nuclear either and the societal consensus at one point was to phase the reactors out.
(Fwiw, the TerraPower reactors are supposed to store heat — except of course none have been built so far.)
No, because specific power levels need to be available at specific moments. The flat production curve of nuclear does not pair well with varying production from solar/wind. Gas sucks for climate-change reasons but at least you can regulate it up/down in a matter of half hours to react to variability of your other production. While we still had nuclear, wind parks needed to shut down more often.
In the longer run, batteries will shift solar peaks over the day and H2 will likely be used to replace methane.
Thank you for your submission! However, since this is mostly a news community, it does not fit with the theme here. I have removed it.
Maybe you want to live in an illiberal society as well? Because you seem to be advocating that kind of life for others.
Please consider creating a public news source blacklist for this community.
I privately considered that when we discussed the new rules among the mods but didn’t really fancy working on it. Links to RT will be deleted too though, so much is sure. :)
Also: you are not personally responsible for Holocaust,
I am not doing this out of a feeling of guilt.
no need to please Israel,
If Al Jazeera was simply critical of Israel I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t have written the message above about 2000~2010 era Al Jazeera either.
The issue for me is that some of their channels have started part-time dealing in complete fakery when it suits their benefactors (cf. the linked Twitter screenshot).
(On the topic of Israel though: This server, feddit•org, is supposed to comply with German law which restricts certain speech. This means e.g. speech in favor of Israel ceasing to exist is not allowed.)
just don’t vote for AfD.
That won’t happen. :)
Lots of love from Poland.
Cheers!
Wind turbines shredding birds is almost the definition of concern-trolling whereas the issues with hydro impacting aquatic life are at a much larger scale.