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   Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares 🦝🐙🇱🇧🧯 (jeffcliff@shitposter.club)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 23:48:19 JST Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares 🦝🐙🇱🇧🧯
   this is wild
   
   > @AssaadRazzouk
   > “Renewables will overtake coal to become the world’s largest source of electricity within 3 years, the IEA data shows”
   > Make that 2 years maximum: It’s IEA data - and solar is now the cheapest source of electricity in history
   https://carbonbrief.org/renewables-will-be-worlds-top-electricity-source-within-three-years-iea-data-reveals/
   https://twitter.com/AssaadRazzouk/status/1698808702675866015
   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 23:48:15 JST 翠星石

     in reply to

     • sj_zero
     @sj_zero >deal with materials that can be turned into weapons of mass destruction
     Many materials can be turned into weapons of mass destruction via chemistry.
     
     > there's a risk of big disasters that can permanently make a chunk of a country uninhabitable
     It's more of a temporary thing.
     
     Chernobyl was pure stupidity, with a poorly designed reactor in a flammable casing that wasn't a containment dome.
     
     Nature is going pretty well around Chernobyl, as urbanization is a hell of a lot more deadly to animals than the deadly radiation from an unconfined, melted down nuclear reactor.
     
     As for Fukushima, that was a very old reactor complex that was meant to be built on the top of a cliff.
     
     They decided to built it into the cliff and didn't check the tsunami record and so didn't build a high enough sea wall (a reactor across the coast had a high enough sea wall and was fine), so the cooling system failed.
     
     Despite multiple hydrogen explosions, the reactor containment vessels are still intact.
     
     I think 1 guy died from leukemia that probably was caused by his work cleaning the reactor?
     
     Of course an excessively large area around the Fukushima area was evacuated, killing a few old people who couldn't take the stress of the move.
     
     >can hurt people in a massive region so there's a massive regulatory burden.
     People are convinced that nuclear power stations can explode like a nuclear bomb, so there's a massive regulatory burden.
     
     Even spicy fallout from a nuclear bomb is only so bad and the effects decay with time (see Hiroshima).
     
     >Coal is really inexpensive
     It seems inexpensive until you realize how much coal needs to be actually bought.
     
     For the same amount of electrical generation, coal releases far more radiation than a nuclear reactors, as all coal has a certain amount of radioactive material in it and a huge amount of coal is burnt - part of the radiation is released as radioactive gas (if I remember correctly) and the rest goes into the fly ash.
     
     Coal plants can dump the fly ash wherever they want to really, whether that's into a landfill or into roads - it's very radioactive, it's just that the radiation is diluted.
     
     Nuclear power plant "waste" is intentionally kept concentrated to maximize the power density and so it can be treated and used again, it's just cheaper to mine more Uranium, so "waste" tends to be kept around while it cools down and then it's either re-processord or placed into suitable underground disposal and forgotten about (or sometimes dumped straight into the middle of the ocean and then nothing happens).
     
     
     When it comes to the total death toll for humans and other animals for large scale power generation, I'm pretty sure Nuclear power has the lowest death toll per TWh.
   • Embed this notice
     sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 23:48:16 JST sj_zero

     in reply to

     • Iridium Zeppelin
     Problem is that we live in reality, and have to solve problems in reality. If you need to spend a bunch of money to actually solve the problem then that's the actual cost.
     
     Nuclear is really inexpensive except you need to deal with materials that can be turned into weapons of mass destruction and there's a risk of big disasters that can permanently make a chunk of a country uninhabitable and can hurt people in a massive region so there's a massive regulatory burden. So it's not really inexpensive.
     
     Coal is really inexpensive except you need to deal with getting ahold of industrial scale coal to burn and they're massively polluting in both local and global ways so there's a massive regulatory burden and the regulation doesn't even cover those externalities. So it's not really inexpensive.
     
     Solar is at its cheapest for one hour a day about 1/3 of the year, and people need power all through the day and night and all through the year, and you need to both massively overbuild your plants to meet electrical needs in the limited time you're generating each day and you need massive energy storage to deal with the majority of the time that you're not getting the energy. So it's not really inexpensive (might be useful for some applications, however! Some places really need an energy boost when it's brightest and hottest).
     
     You used the word "Convenience" which implies that it's optional, the word convenience often is implied to be optional, but sometimes convenience is mandatory and life or death. Like a hospital is ideal if you get hurt, but if you're in the woods far from civilization and get hurt, a first aid kit is convenient and if you don't have something convenient you might die because you're in the woods -- you can't carry a hospital with you! In the same way, if we want to stop most emissions we'll need to deal with home heating. Home heating is mandatory. If you can't heat your home in winter in many places then everyone dies, and that isn't hyperbole. If people can't heat their homes with electric, then they're likely to use fossil fuels such as natural gas or fuel oil. Therefore, if we care about carbon emissions, we should care about actually inexpensive electricity.
     
     All this is borne out by the data that around the world, on virtually every continent, in many different countries, hydroelectric electricity leads to some of the lowest electricity rates for individuals. That's backed up by the data showing some of the lowest electricity costs on earth are the highest hydroelectric usage. Even within the same country, proportion of hydroelectric power is directly predictive of the electricity costs for consumers. In Canada, the price of electricity is directly inversely correlated with the amount of hydroelectric generation in use, with British Columbia, Quebec and Manitoba having the lowest rates in the country and using all renewables driven primarily by hydroelectric, followed by provinces like Ontario that use some hydroelectric, trailed by provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan that rely mostly on fossil fuels. Norway had a period where electricity prices for consumers were below zero for an hour recently and has the lowest electricity prices on earth compared to incomes. Continuing on with reality here, 73% of Norway's homes are heated with electricity according to statistics Norway from 2014 (Proving my previous thesis once again that inexpensive carbon-neutral electricity helps eliminate fossil fuels used for home heating) There's also regions in China and south America with high levels of hydroelectric production.
     
     Of course you do have to be careful with hydroelectric, it isn't the best bet everywhere. To give a great example, Ethiopia is building a massive dam, and it's likely to cause a war because it will reduce the water flow through the Nile river having large effects on Egypt. Therefore you need to make sure if you're using hydroelectric you balance the environmental, social, and geopolitical consequences of building hydroelectric facilities. In places where it's practical and reasonably low impact, however, it's the top choice where you can do it because unlike most alternatives, it has a century-long track record of success.
     
     tl;dr: Jeff has one line denials and unsubstantiated excuses. I've got a globe and a century of data. And a wall of text.
   • Embed this notice
     Iridium Zeppelin (bananarama@mstdn.social)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 23:48:18 JST Iridium Zeppelin

     in reply to

     • sj_zero

     @sj_zero @jeffcliff Solar is indeed the cheapest source of electricity. It's not convenient, but it's cheap. The expensive part is the convenience.

   • Embed this notice
     sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 23:48:19 JST sj_zero

     in reply to
     "Solar is the cheapest source of electricity"
     
     that's false. It's fake. It's a lie. It's a non-truth.
     
     If it was true, then the places with solar would have the cheapest electricity on earth, and that's not true at all. The places with the cheapest electricity on earth are all hydroelectric.
     
     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo