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Comment Re:Politicians will be stupid but scientists/techn (Score 1) 356

That's a huge lie. The military has zero involvement with civilian powerplants for decades. That's typical of the anti nuclear types, they recycle lies through the decades. This was true in the 60s and 70s, the plutonium made was given credit for its military value, regardless of no operational nuclear weapons made with reactor grade plutonium (high Pu240 content, risking fizzle and/or spontaneous detonation).
Try again, this time with real data instead of made up lies.

Comment Re:Politicians will be stupid but scientists/techn (Score 1) 356

Because the general population has been scaremongered into thinking that nuclear is inherently dangerous.
Coal is dangerous. It actually kills scores of people every year.
Nuclear can be dangerous in extreme scenarios.
Some solar panels include lots of toxic chemicals. Don't let your children anywhere near solar panels.
The cost problems related to nuclear are mostly due to nuclear regulatory ratcheting.
While the anti nuclear types pretend the NRC is irresponsible, the fact is the NRC is paranoid about safety and cares very little about nuclear costs.
There are plenty of examples of the NRC creating this or that nuclear regulation, estimating that regulation will cost x to implement, and when it's said and done, it actually costs 100x (two orders of magnitude more). So instead of costing 100 million to the whole US nuclear industry, it ends up costing US$ 10 billion instead. And the NRC never learns its lesson, doing it again, again, again and again.
Nuclear professionals stated that a new nuclear reactor could be done at a tiny fraction of the current cost if there weren't any special nuclear regulations, and they could use normal coal/natural gas build procedures, in the end they could build a nuclear reactor for a few billion where if you order one today, the vendor will tell it it's a USD 10 billion project !

Comment Re:Compare the alternatives (Score 1) 384

Uranium has 2 million times more energy per ton than Uranium. So when its said and done, considering that current nuclear reactor use less than 1% of mined uranium and most uranium mines have 1-2% ore concentration, you end up having to mine 0.5% uranium ore vs coal to get the same energy.
Plus the nuclear industry is held to a very different safety standard and scrutiny, so it invests on safety not just on the nuclear plants, but throughout the whole supply chain, including mines. That's why there has been a single nuclear related death in the USA for over a decade, it was a uranium mining accident, a single death, compared to coal killing an estimated 13000 people yearly in the same USA, so we're comparing a single nuclear death for around 200k deaths from coal in the same period.
If the coal industry were held to the same standards that nuclear is held (safety wise, radiation wise, fatality wise) the coal industry would be shutdown in a heartbeat. Big Coal used all of its influence to avoid being regulated like nuclear is.

Comment Re:Subsidized? (Score 1) 267

Solar is useless in the winter, but in the winter ACs are off.
But there's heating. Which is the aspect most greenies can't account into their big plans.
I'm neither a greenie nor a radical pro nuclear.
I want both. What matters to me is getting rid of coal, yesterday if possible.
Solar and wind can help, but nuclear is actually more important than solar and wind combined. And solar really belongs on places that never get any snow/ice (due to more uniform insolation). Wind goes very well on places that have a lot of big hydro to load follow wind.
My train of though is that of the PhD climatologists that stated we need the all of the above solution. Everything that doesn't emit CO2, we need a lot of it.

Comment Re:Cape Wind Will Die (Score 1) 267

If all of europe would do "the same", we would not need energy storages, because the overproduction of state A in region a would be used to supply state B in region b ...

How the hell do you know that when region A is overproducing there would actually be a region with a shortage ? If the core problem with intermittency, you can't pray for a supply/demand match. The only advantage of such a solution is that there would be lots of energy storage everywhere, so maybe you can export you over production to another area that is also overproducing but still has energy storage left. But there will often be times when there is over production everywhere, and times when there will be shortage everywhere, except for countries that actually have a large natural baseload reserve (aka big hydro).

Comment Re:MDSOLAR IS A TROLL (Score 1) 384

There is plenty of evidence Areva EPR design was the result of lack of innovation. They designed a reactor without any major simplification, without using passive safety, just adding more and more engineered safety.
With the current level of insane nuclear regulatory complexity Areva's design choices were the touch of death. Yet, I think China will manage to get their EPRs online, showing that even with all of their extra costs ariving from their design, a huge slice of the nuclear problem comes after the reactor is designed and licensed, but actual construction starts. China has a more realistic nuclear regulatory framework, like South Korea and India. In those countries reactors are being built at 1/3 to 1/4 of the cost in the USA or Europe.

Comment Re:I have said it before (Score 1) 384

Garbage. Coal is 10000 times more deadly than nuclear power in real numbers. Coal is a continous natural disaster. Nuclear needs a serious accident to maybe kill some people. Coal causes a lot of lung cancer, black lung disease.
Coal is killing 200k people yearly worldwide.
Natural gas kills every year more people than Chernobyl is projected to kill from actual radiation/cancers. Even if you add all the suicides from telling the liquidators they were going to die anyways, that's less than 3 years worth of natural gas deaths.
Remember deep water horizon oil spill / explosion ? That was a natural gas explosion. The ensuing natural disaster was much worse than the actual nuclear part of Fukushima (people forget the Tsunami destroyed the houses).
It gets worse. There is ample evidence low levels of chronic radiation exposure doesn't cause cancer at all. Studies to formally prove that have been sistematicly defunded / cancelled.
I was exposed to radiation levels much higher than Fukushima on a monazite beach for months at end. My mom has been exposed to 10x that. It's not a secluded remote beach, its a crowded popular beach, that gets as crowded as florida's most popular beaches. Its called Guarapari in Brazil. Yes, that beach shown on Pandora's Promise. Just google: praias guarapari lotadas (Guarapari crowded beaches in Portuguese). Radiation levels are so high, one day's worth of exposure in those beaches are forbidden for nuclear workers.
That's just one example of places thousands of people are exposed to levels of ionizing radiation that are considered deadly for anti nuclear radicals.
Denver-CO, Salt Lake City-UT, every high altitude resort, in all of those places people are exposed to 10x more radiation than at sea level. Yet there are no studies that show that the extra radiation leads to higher cancers, but the anti nuclear types are allowed to claim no levels of radiation are safe. The whole logic breaks down every step of the way. Yet they are never convinced by facts, and their response is totally divorced from science. Green Peace has a total budget of above 200 million USD / yr. If they cared to actually prove anything, they could actually do the studies, yet they never to, always resorting to anecdotal evidence.
If we're going to use anecdotal evidence, there is plenty of that pointing to "environmental" groups that attack nuclear power as being funded by coal / natural gas interests. When was the last time you heard of a "sit in" in front of a coal power plant ? But they do it all the time on nuclear stations.

Comment Re:I have said it before (Score 1) 384

If the whole nuclear regulatory framework were rolled back to just pre Chernobyl regulations, nuclear reactors would be built at half of their quoted prices, or 80% cheaper than current USA / Europe way over budget projects.
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive.
It is expensive not due to actual risks, but rather due to perceived risks.
Chernobyl couldn't happen on any western reactor with existing regulations. The vast majority of measures taken after were precipitated, knee jerk reactions took to satisfy public hysteria.
The latest US NRC annual senate hearing there were quite a few regulatory measures that were estimated to cost 1% than it actually costed the nuclear industry.
Fukushima area radiation never got over slight cancer risk level, yet the public was being told a very different story by those that want nuclear to go away.
If instead of reading anti nuclear paranoia websites, you go study nuclear power and radiation facts, you will see that nuclear facts are very reassuring.
There are lots of ultra expensive, totally useless nuclear regulatory measures. Specially those that slow down nuclear construction and other procedures.

Comment Re:Cape Wind Will Die (Score 1) 267

This whole debate is pointless cause your side is always proposing solutions without accounting for the costs, efficiency, you know, math.
I would like to see an actual realistic complete plan to go 100% solar, wind, hydro and biomass in Germany. The whole cost figure.

No sites to build more nuclear reactors ? That's just pure and unadulterated garbage. Its the result of insane anti nuclear regulation that is designed to drive nuclear out of Germany, engineering and facts be damned.

In the meantime the gas pipeline from Russia has deep involvement of Gerhardt Schroeder.
And Germany's coal will continue to be burned, cause keeping those jobs is more important than cleaning up the environment.
That's the real reason for your anti nuclear bias. Politics and jobs. Energiewende is a huge jobs program.
Don't sell it to the rest of the world as a solution. It's not.

Offshore wind is not baseload. Baseload is assured power. Offshore is intermittent power. If offshore wind was baseload, you wouldn't need to bother with weather forecasts at all. Just because it doesn't go from 0 to 100% everyday doesn't make it baseload.

Are you another merchant of doubt ? The more we dive into this discussion, the more your speech breaks down. You don't know what baseload is. You don't account for the costs of your solutions.

In the meantime Fukushima area is 95% safe to return right now. Where are the radiation deaths ? By 2025 we'll be talking about the cancers Fukushima didn't create.

Did you see the fact that UK electricity frequency standards had to be relaxed due to wind turbines, from 0.1% to 1% max oscilation ?

Do you realize I know you will never concede this debate, all I care is the opinions of others, cause you have demonstrated don't actually understand the whole system.

Comment Re:Cape Wind Will Die (Score 1) 267

You can be a net exporter and still be paying more to import electricity than the exports.
The electricity Denmark imports is dispatchable, the electricity Denmark exports is renewable overproduction.
No point in arguing with you, you fail to see what's so clear. The system would break down if all of Europe did the same as Germany and Denmark. That's actually obvious to me and every electric grid professional.

Comment Re:Cape Wind Will Die (Score 1) 267

Then you have 60% efficiency each way, or 36% efficiency round trip, and that's if you use a combined cycle gas plant, which aren't cheap, and aren't load following resources, like I said, CRAZY !
Are you paid to sell this nutty solution or just misinformed ?
It is not by accident that energiewende is a lot more expensive than nuclear (yeah, even than Olkiluoto).

Comment Re:Cape Wind Will Die (Score 1) 267

Except you ignore the waste on the way back...
And you ignore the cost of the equipment to do the roundtrip conversion.
Fuel cells are crazy expensive, that's the only efficient way back.
You remind me of that Supertramp song.
Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer
Well, can you put your hands in your head? Oh no
I said, "Dreamer, you're nothing but a dreamer"
Well, can you put your hands in your head? Oh no
Your better off planning on getting tens of TWh worth of chemical batteries by then.

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