Turns out you can dial your global thermonuclear war to taste (extra crispy, life extinct-y).
Today I learned the United States' #nuclear#war targeting (Major Attack Option 1) was once designed to avoid attacks on the russian government so as to permit negotiations.
Major Attack Option 2 expands to include Russian #government installations, making talking down the conflict less possible.
Likely still like this, #russia needs to stop pretending nukes are toys.
#RenewableUK nuclear, wind and solar industries call for urgent action to jumpstart grid decarbonisation
The Nuclear Industry Association, RenewableUK and Solar Energy UK, representing Britain’s three leading zero-carbon power generators, are calling for urgent action to build new wind, nuclear and solar capacity and for a binding target of 100% grid decarbonisation by 2035.
@kravietz Let's leave out the nuclear, please. It's neither safe nor efficient - & it's far more expensive than the renewable alternatives, @Peternimmo.
"I want my daughter to live with energy security and stability. I want her to enjoy the technology centric life we live. To do this we need to consider nuclear as a clean, reliable and stable energy source. Otherwise we will need to cut our energy use significantly… forever."
Nick Cater in the Oz is impressed by #nuclear power in Finland, which has built one new plant this century, and has none currently under construction or even in planning stages.
OTOH, Finland has 7GW of wind, and much more is planned https://www.both2nia.com/en/news/almost-7-gw-wind-power-finland
@johnquiggin even a few years ago, the interest in nuclear made some sense, but with the learning/price/deployment curves on wind, solar, and batteries, and the very extended timeline for any nuclear deployment… it’s rare you see such committed sunk cost fallacy.
Second of the three European EPR ( Evolutionary Power Reactor) #nuclear projects - #France#Flamanville - will be shortly connected to the grid. The projects caused many controversies due to long delays… but they are getting completed:
🇫🇮 Olkiluoto 3 ✅ connected in 2023
🇫🇷 Flamanville ✔️ finished, will be connected by end of 2024 : 🇬🇧 Hinkley Point C 🕓 will be completed by 2027
The moment these projects get connected, they start delivering gigawatt-hours of low-carbon electricity to the grid, which is desperately needed for #ClimateChange prevention and mitigation.
Each of these has been criticised for delays (which is factually true but unfair) and “huge cost” (which is unfair and untrue).
Talking about the total investment cost in case of clean electricity sources that may live up to a century is a popular manipulation but what matters is LCOE.
It’s the cost of investment and operations divided by value of electricity produced over its life time. In case of nuclear power LCOE is quite low, in the range of $60/MWh because the relatively big initial costs is divided by decades of delivery of huge amounts of power. This is exactly the same case with very costly off-shore wind farms (e.g. the Doggerbank project) or huge solar farms (e.g. Ouarzazate in Morocco).
The reasons for delays are… complex. This article[1] by Joris van Dorp is probably the best explainer to why exactly Hinkley Point C was delayed so much. It’s a mix of reasons, starting from “first of kind” scale of the project to prohibitive and often absurd safety requirements lobbied after Fukushima by countries who saw an opportunity in replacing EU nuclear by Russian fossil gas. And they were absurd, for example because you don’t get earthquakes and tsunamis on the La Manche Channel.
And the reasons are complex, for example due to general UK attitude to funding infrastructure projects - they exclusively opt for private funding, which means the investors need to get a direct financial profit. Most people see the absurdity of private ownership of UK water utilities (which leads to no investments in the network and dumping of sewage into rivers by underregulated companies) but nobody sees the same absurdity in funding the electricity grid (which is in turn overregulated).
Hmmm weird, because now you seem to very much believe in the current decarbonisation plan involving further increase in renewables and fossil gas which may be in unspecified future replaced by hydrogen?
Another bit of Brexit related attempted policy cherry-picking comes unstuck.
The UK would like to continue to be part of the world's largest nuclear fusion experiment (based in the EU).... but the EU is now insisting that this can only continue if the UK rejoins the bloc's Euratom research scheme.
Once again the UK hopes it can knit together a bespoke research collaboration, but it seems the EU has lost patience with such 'special arrangements'.
The True Extent of US Spy Satellite Capability https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6uPjTTGHzE
A little bit on satellites that detect missile launches... as Annie Jacobsen mentions in 'Nuclear War A Scenario' #Nuclear
if i noticed something when talking with outspoken pro-nuclear people it's that you really can't trust anything they say. they are intellectually bankrupt, will use all kinds of shady argumentation tactics, ad hominems, and can't even be bothered to write their own arguments (instead using AI for that)
@kyonshi Humans are amazing as long as they can be held responsible for their actions. Notice how both nuclear meltdowns happened in countries where the political elite is much more entrenched than in the west. And while our politicians can get away with way more than they should, they wouldn't be able to get away with irradiating large swathes of their own country.
Why do PWR reactors use boric acid, as opposed to some random salt of boron? Apparently boron salts are often well soluble, from the nuclear POV we only care about boron being present, and I'd expect salts to cause fewer chemical problems due to their closer-to-neutral pH. In fact some random papers (https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/28/034/28034575.pdf) describe tradeoffs involved in maintaining pH as boric acid concentration changes.
There clearly must be some reason why boric acid is preferred over any simple boron salt. What is it?
Unstable nuclear-waste dams threaten fertile Central Asia heartland
"Dams holding some 700,000 cubic meters (185 million gallons) of uranium mine tailings in Kyrgyzstan have become unreliable following a 2017 landslide. A further landslide or earthquake could send their contents into a river system used to irrigate Kyrgyz, Uzbek and& the Soviet-era radioactive waste disposal facility showed. That event would possibly displace millions in those three countries" https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/unstable-nuclear-waste-dams-threaten-fertile-central-asia-heartland-2024-04-23/#Nuclear
This piece from Jonathan Bruegel at IEEFA makes the surprising (to me) point that, despite planning new #nuclear, the French government has taken the action needed to extend the lives of existing plants beyond 40 years, as has happened in the US. I'd be very surprised if this wasn't a quicker and cheaper option than new build, and quite possibly a cost-effective complement to renewables.
The Famous Photo of Chernobyl’s Most Dangerous Radioactive Material Was a Selfie
The Elephant’s Foot would have killed anyone within a couple of minutes.
by David Goldenberg January 24, 2016 Updated: August 10, 2022
"... This picture first came to America in the late 1990s, after the newly independent Ukrainian government took over the plant and set up the Chornobyl Center for Nuclear Safety, Radioactive Waste and Radioecology (spelling often gets changed as words go from Russian to English). Soon after, the center invited other governments to collaborate on nuclear safety projects. The U.S. Department of Energy tapped the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL)—a bustling science center up in Richland, Washington—to help..."
IEA chief Fatih Birol has criticised 🇪🇺 Europe for falling behind 🇨🇳 China & the 🇺🇸 US after making “two historic, monumental mistakes” in energy policy, by relying on Russian #gas & turning away from #nuclear power https://buff.ly/4azicZu
#Nuclear deal in tatters, #Iran edges close to weapons capability
Six years after the #Trump administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear accord, Tehran is rapidly accumulating enriched #uranium, some of it very close to weapons grade. Experts fear that a #bomb could be a short dash away.
More worryingly, #Fordow was scaling up production of a more dangerous form of #nuclear fuel — a kind of highly enriched #uranium, just shy of #WeaponsGrade. Iranian officials in charge of the plant, meanwhile, had begun talking openly about achieving “deterrence,” suggesting that Tehran now had everything it needed to build a #bomb if it chose.
Fordow’s transformation mirrors changes seen elsewhere in the country as #Iran blows past the guardrails of the Iran nuclear accord.
6 years after the #Trump administration’s controversial decision to withdraw from the pact, the restraints have fallen away, one by one, leaving #Iran closer to #nuclear#weapons capability than at any time in the country’s history, according to confidential inspection reports & interviews w/ officials & experts who closely monitor Iran’s progress.
Not only has used #nuclear fuel been stored safely for decades, it can be reprocessed into fuel for the future.
Used fuel safely stored could potentially power us for centuries, via fast breeder reactors. No more mining needed, solving the waste problem at the same time.
🤦🏻♀️ When nuclear waste is so safe stored why many #nuclear storage facilities in #Germany are closed because of the great danger of those storage facilities
And when the myth of reusing the nuclear waste would be based on reality why are the #NuclearWaste storage facilities are not being emptied🤷🏻♀️
It’s all nice propaganda of the tax money wasting #NuclearIndustry and nothing else
#NuclearEnergy as it exists now is still extremely dangerous and uncontrolled
Because Germans appear to be taken over by irrational feat with everything related to nuclear. In the rest of the world the German Energiewende is quickly becoming a sad laughing stock.
There are several reasons for this, one of them being that the OPEX of FBRs is slightly higher than with conventional plants and there's simple enough uranium around. Recycling currently happens via PUREX, which is less efficient.
3 and 4 are factually incorrect. See below graph for example.
