European Politics Thread

Speaking of alternative energy, it's funny how even wind turbines can get people mad cause they're "ruining the landscape".

Ugh, NIMBY-s not even once.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 9th 2019 at 3:31:48 PM

I mean, there are legitimate concerns about them harming some species of birds, but other than that, people tend to freak out about them for no valid reason.

Well, unless someone can figure out a way of drawing energy from the Universe directly using mumbo-jumbo and voodoo, people are going to have to live with "scenery-ruining" power plants.

Something's gotta give.

(I think wind turbines look nice. Even many rows of them. I like them as much as I do traditional windmills.)

I always get a kid-like, fuzzy-happy feeling seeing wind turbines do their thing. It mystifies me how anybody incapable of picking up.on the infrasonics can loathe them (but, I grok those who do react; I don't do well with certain frequencies of artificial light).

Edited by Euodiachloris on Feb 9th 2019 at 8:54:52 PM

Same.

Which is why beyond being repugnant that complaint is really bizarre, Wind Turbines are pretty why would anyone be opposed to them aesthetically?

(also, I'm a sucker for clear displays of industrial and scientific ingenuity and unlike factories they have the advantage of no pollution)

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 9th 2019 at 3:56:47 PM

Except for the enviromental damage that is the result of mining the uran of course... . And the waste disposal is still an unsolved problem in many countries that do not have suitable places for storage.

It might make more sense for some countries to get rid off fossil fuels first, but it was the right decision to prioritize nuclear power in Germany.

To be fair to the critics of nuclear power, not all nuclear waste can be easily processed. Plutonium and actinides can be reused if you don't mind proliferation risks, but the Big Bad Two (Strontium-90 and Cesium-137) and the Long Lived Seven (Technetium-99, Tin-126, Selenium-79, Zirconium-93, Cesium-135, Palladium-107 and Iodine-129)?

Solar and wind are both big users of rare earths, so also involve mining. Frequently mining in the same sort of geology.

Strontium-90 : 28 year halflife. Caesium-137: 30 year halflife, so both gone in a couple of centuries.

The long lived stuff is barely radioactive at all, so a waste repository which only has those left is no worse than the uranium ore was to begin with.

Edited by Izeinsummer on Feb 9th 2019 at 1:18:11 AM

There is no such thing as a completely clean energy source, just some whose drawbacks are easier to deal with than others, and I think pretty much anything is better than fossil fuels at this point.

The main point of clean energy is such that only requires a single acquisition of the machinery involved, be it wind, solar or hydraulic power, and only focusing on maintaining said machinery, which is good for the environment, cheaper in the long run, and generates jobs on the technical level.

So much to unpack…

The reason why Germany turned off nuclear plants first is simply because the greens were in governing together with the SPD in the 1990s for a brief time. The Greens were founded as an Anti-Nuclear party, that was always their big thing, so part of their coalition contact was naturally to turn off the plants. When they were out of power, the whole project did move forward in snail pace, but then Fukushima happened and, well, the pace picked up.

No, nuclear power is NOT "clean". I think after Chernobyl and Fukushima it is naive to claim this. The atom lobby keeps pushing the notion with all kind of tricks (ie there is one nuclear plant which managed to get some sort of "green" certification by having some rare plant or wildlife or whatever somewhere on their grounds). Yes, it causes less Co 2, but it is extremely poisonous in other regards.

So, regarding the gas: the level of dependence is really a question of which country we are talking about. The dependence tends to be bigger the closer you get to Russia. This is something one needs to keep an eye on, but the main objections regarding Nordstream II are actually coming from countries which are p... that Nordstream is bypassing them (hence they don't get their share of the business) or from countries which want to sell gas from other sources (the US wants to sell its own gas - which isn't really practical - France has its own terminals for liquified gas, aso).

It's a little bit like the ferryman getting p... off because you have build a bridge.

Now, regarding the use of gas: a huge percentage of it isn't even used for power, it is used for heating. Gas and Oil are still the most common heating sources. And it will take some decades to replace every heating system in Europe with, I don't know, an earth warm system or whatever passes as renewables for heating. So we won't be able to just stop using either in this specific area anytime soon.

Nuclear power has the potential to be green, provided the investment is made into new nuclear technology. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were 80s vintage, design-wise, and punishing the industry as a whole for specific accidents only ensures future reactors can't be made to be better. Just washing ones hands of it completely because of accidents is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Also, while nuclear disasters are very, very expensive, in terms of poison.. well, you can quantify these things, and the public health impact of chernobyl is the same order of magnitude of a coal plant operating as intended. Not even a chinese coal plant. A German one. (Meaning, about 4000 dead over 40 years)

Again, the accidents aren't the only problem - waste disposal is the most pressing issue.

If you don't have a permanent storage location for this stuff, producing more of it just seems ill-advised.

And frankly, I object to calling nuclear energy green - that's actually something German nuclear power companies tried some years ago because they wanted to get access to more subsidies (green energy businesses get subsidised to encourage growth), greedy buggers that they are.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Feb 10th 2019 at 11:12:26 AM

Tell that the people who lived in Chernobyl. Or the victims of Fukushima. The problem is that after a catastrophe like this, people spread out, and then it becomes hard to track what the long-term consequences are, especially regarding illnesses like cancer. In the case of Chernobyl we don't even know who was affected and how many people actually died, because of the actions of the USSR.

And it is frankly stupid to use an energy source which produces toxic waste which will continue to poison our planet for million of years. No matter HOW well you try to store it, studies have shows that you can't do it 100% secure. Not to mention that especially in countries with a dense population, you run out of storage space sooner than later.

So, no, Nuclear power is NOT a good thing

.....I feel this is getting way off topic.

U.S. Envoy To Germany Says Mechanism To Trade With Iran 'Disrespectful' To Washington

In case anybody forgot, it's the same guy who wanted to empower European far-right movements.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Feb 10th 2019 at 1:25:46 PM

No, I haven't forgotten that the current ambassador to Germany does such a terrible job that we would rather have Trump continuing to forget to send us a new one.

Oklo was a naturally occuring nuclear reactor that happened in when the earth first acquired oxygen, and the formation of uranium ores started happening. The waste it produced was left were it was created - that is, an orebed that had boiling water running through it (Boiling, because the reactor ran for a stupidly long time. None of the waste Oklo produced still exists, because it all decayed long ago, but the things it decayed into -while not radioactive - are very distinct.

It stayed where it was. While immersed in a flow of boiling water. This is a pretty strong hint that just burying it in a random pit would, in fact, suffice. That is not what we are doing. KBS-3 - the method the swedes and finns are using, first turn the waste into glass. Glass is, of course, not soluble, and also extremely durable. Then the glass is put into copper barrels.

Copper has been found in its pure metal form in orebeds billions of years old, which means copper does not dissolve on any timescale. Then the copper barrels are bedded down in clay - this is mostly to make sure nothing sharp will ever touch the copper, but sure, it is another impenetrable barrier - Water does not flow through clay. All of this is done in a shaft bored several hundred meters into bedrock. Which is it is planned to eventually back-fill when the place is no longer in use (hah. Prediction. People will still be showing waste down there in 400 years when they start pulling the first canisters back up for reprocessing back into fuel.)

Waste is a solved problem. That is a solution. It is also politically solved, since these are actually being built.

The liquidation workers of Chernobyl are both organized, and have been the subject of followup studies. Their general state of health is terrible, but that is because they are mostly Ex-Soviet men over the age of fifty - Their mortality and illness rates are entirely in line with their cohort. That is, it is bloody terrible, but the demon Vodka is to blame, not Chernobyl, radiation not generally leading to liver-failure or freezing to death due to being drunk in Russian Winter. The people standing at the dragons maw and holding the fire hoses died in months, but the much larger cleanup after? Those workers are as fine as anyone in the former soviet union is.

Fukushima, it is not me who need to apologize, it is you, because the all dominating cause of death from that is not radiation - it is Fear. The evacuation killed people. The entirely unnesessary screenings for thyroid cancer predictably caused people to wind up having entirely healthy thyroids removed (.. when you biopsy it afterwards and its not cancer, you cant really put it back in, you are just left there with egg on your face and a patient who now needs medication for the rest of their life..)

Further, the effects of fear has far greater reach than radiation does. I mentioned that a German coal plant will predictably kill about a hundred people a year? Well, that means the german nuclear phaseout is killing, oh, about a thousand people a year by keeping ten coal plants open.

Edited by Izeinsummer on Feb 10th 2019 at 5:11:03 AM

Honestly, those arguments sound a little bit like what the climate change deniers come up with. Next you'll be claiming that Chernobyl is save to live at and that one should explore it without protection gear...or that the radioactive material stored in the past isn't toxic anymore.

In the end Germany chose the more deadly coal and gas over nuclear out of fear and a refusal to admit to begin wrong, it kinda has to live with that decision, which is more than can be said for those who died unnecessarily because of Germany’s commitment to gas/coal over nuclear.

I get preferring renewables to nuclear, but this weird facination with gas confuses me, I keep expecting the German government to claim that natural gas is actually good for the environment because it’s ‘natural’ and that the CO 2 it emits is healthy for people.

Someone has really eaten up the propaganda. Even die-hard defenders of nuclear energy usually do not defend Chernobyl and Fukushima to that extent. The company in which my father works helped building the sarcophagus that is supposed to shield Chernobyl for the next decades. He did not work on it, but he learned some rather unsavory aspects of the aftermath that proved challenging to the project. Let us just say that there was a lot of stuff still lying around, that was not safe, and will not be safe to handle for generations.

Edited by Zarastro on Feb 10th 2019 at 3:55:50 PM

Bringing up Chernobyl and Fukushima when discussing nuclear power has always been nothing more than uninformed nonsense.

Chernobyl demonstrated that nuclear power is dangerous if the authorities who maintain it are hopelessly corrupt and negligent.

Fukushima demonstrated that building nuclear power plants in the way of natural disasters is a bad thing.

To treat either as normal risks of nuclear power is disingenuous and illogical, France is not (last time I checked) a nuclear wasteland.

If someone thinks nuclear power fails a cost-benefit analysis, in the long run, that's one thing but the idea that we should move away from it when fossil fuels are dominant (such as what happened in Germany) is absolutely moronic and contrary to any asserted desire to maintain environmental and sustainability standards.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 10th 2019 at 10:04:28 AM

Is there an environmental thread? 'Cause I think this debate is more fitting to one.