Nuclear energy is not clean. Less CO2 intensive, maybe, but definitely not clean. It might be good in the short term but the long term looks grim regarding nuclear waste, among other issues.
Yes CO2 is the existential threat. Even in socialist countries CO2 is produced.
Economic systems and forms of production do not make energy sources clean. Socialist and capitalist countries both ought to and must fight against CO2 production.
Socialist countries? Of course definitions vary, so which ones are you referring to?
Also neo-libs don't want any state interference on business, unless it involves bailing them out with tones of money. So which capitalist country will do otherwise with so much lobbying going on?
My argument is that we CAN manage nuclear waste. That facility shows that we CAN. Poland CAN build such a facility. Ergo we CAN.
More importantly we CANNOT manage CO2.
I asked if you were being intentionally obtuse because you tried to reframe my argument as we ARE managing nuclear waste in all places properly. Everyone knows we are not. But the good news is that we can.
your argument boils down “Humanity has not managed nuclear waste for for 100.000 years. Therefore humanity can not manage nuclear waste for for 100.000 years“
If you feel in your heart of hearts that this is your strongest argument so be it.
I don’t feel this is a strong argument at all. I believe humanity can use the Finnish model and will do well. Hell we built tombs that have remained intact for over 2000 years. Those were built with Bronze Age technology. With modern technology I believe we can do even better.
This all being said the larger issue is that we CANNOT manage CO2. CO2 is the existential threat we must face.
As for insults I don’t want you to feel insulted. I believe people who read this thread will see that I was not insulting in any way.
I would argue that the alternative to fossil fuels is “both and”.
We should use both renewable, nuclear, and other approaches as we develop them. We need to keep an open mind here. Climate change is a major threat.
You keep on acting like there is no way to manage nuclear waste. Is building out a real and complete storage facility with 100.000 year management plan “trust me bro” in your mind? Because I see it as more than that.
The Finnish model exists and is well regarded. You can’t just pretend it does not exist.
I would argue that the alternative to fossil fuels is “both and”.
You argue a lot of things, as long as nuclear waste comes out as totally fine.
The Finnish model exists and is well regarded.
Well regarded by nuclear fans, of course. Nobody is denying that. Totally unproven to work because nobody tried it, yet. That thing's construction isn't even finished. Check back in 100000 years until making further claims. I'll revoke my misgivings once it's proven to work. Until then don't pile up new waste.
Nothing is "clean". Wind/solar manufacturing are themselves polluting and would need massive amounts of battery storage to be moderately reliable that generates even more pollution. Geothermal is probably best but depends even more on location.
It's not magic, but it has advantages that are hard to beat in terms of resource usage. Renewables also have advantages, but you can't handwave away their own problems and limitations anymore than you can do so for nuclear energy.
The US produces less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool of nuclear waste per year in total, so it's not exactly hard to manage. Wind and even solar take up a lot more space than nuclear for the same energy, even if we were to consider decades worth of nuclear waste storage. Nuclear power production has about 130x higher density than wind, and needs 34x less space than solar PV.
And that's considering that the US doesn't even use their used nuclear fuel efficiently like, say, France. 96% of French nuclear fuel is recycled by them, while the US doesn't really recycle their nuclear fuel. Thanks to free market capitalism fuel recycling never got commercialized in the US, so the over of century of usable fuel we have in recyclable nuclear fuel is just wasted. It's cheaper to just buy new fuel rather than recycle, so of course companies don't recycle. American problems I guess.
If space were a big issue than nuclear would still win by a long shot even over the long-term. There's very little of it produced, it doesn't take up much space to properly and safely store for tens to hundreds of thousands of years, and the power production is extremely reliable so you don't need miles upon miles of giant batteries to store excess power just in case.
I should say up to 90-96%. It depends on the methods and the type of fuel you use. Currently widely used nuclear technology is more like 30-50% recyclable. That number is able to be increased by using more recyclable fuel technology, which is available.
French nuclear waste in total is 0.0018 km³ (three olympic swimming pools) after 8 decades of using nuclear and primarily using nuclear for 4 decades, so I'm not so sure how you imply that the "state of nuclear waste" is bad. Even with the "inefficient" ways of using/recycling nuclear, there's not a lot of waste produced in the first place.
Only ~10% of French waste is actually long-lived too, meaning after a few decades to 3 centuries, 90% of it will no longer have abnormal radioactivity. Meaning the radioactiveness of the waste just goes away on its own after a moderately short period of time and it basically just turns into a big rock.
And recycling is an abusive terminology for nuclear waste, since reusing waste creates again nuclear waste, waiting for "valorisation ultérieure" i.e. stored.
Considering that modern reactors seem to require well over a decade to be built, not really "short term", and certainly "too late" for any sort of climate related purpose of emission curbing.
I am pretty curious on how this new trend of SMR will evolve in 20 years, I can see how it can be simpler and faster to build than full scale plant. However, I am not sure you'd save by multiplying the NIMBY to deal with and the whole support staff.
The idea seems to be to have small modular units of which multiple can be installed in the needed capacity at sites of existing fossil fuel plants, not to have a lot of single units spread all over the place.
Historically, reactors were sized like modern SMR concepts once. The issue was that they were even harder to secure and ratio of effort/benefit was worse than with fewer, larger reactors. Just like all nuclear projects, SMR construction will run behind schedule and outside of cost estimates, we've already seen that with the cancelled NuScale reactors in the US.
Governments need to stop throwing money at this deadbirth of a technology.
They won't evolve. Or at least not without massive subsidies.
Nuclear power is extremely expensive, even for SMRs, and most of the projections don't even account for the waste management, which will cost money for at least several decades (assuming you just dump it somewhere "safe").
There's simply no economic incentive, unless you hope to be subsidized forever and leverage the nuclear bros.
I think we should wait and actually see the real time frame first. Regular reactors seem to take way over a decade to build now and eat up a lot of money.
They've been doing it in the UL for some time. Note that their SMRs there are relatively-large, getting up towards conventional reactors in size -- they're putting more emphasis on the "modular" and less on the "small".
Article doesn't really specify which Rolls Royce it's referring to, and most people don't know there's two completely different companies called Rolls Royce, but im assuming this deal is being done with Rolls Royce Holdings; a major aeroplane engine /aerospace/defense company.
It has nothing to do with the car company; Rolls Royce Automoted Ltd.
The Polish government is supporting a plan from Rolls-Royce to build nuclear power plants in the country.
Rolls-Royce SMR said in a statement that it welcomed the announcement by Polish industrial group, Industria, to progress the approval of an application for a Decision Principle to build Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) power plants in Poland.
"A Decision in Principle is the first step towards deployment and requires opinions from several separate government departments.
Environment Minister, Paulina Hennig-Kloska, said the investment would be in the public interest and align with Poland's energy and climate policies.
The decision allows Rolls-Royce to advance commercial and technical talks on deploying its SMR power plants in Poland.
Alan Woods, Rolls-Royce SMR’s Director of Strategy and Business Development, also welcomed the move.
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News websites often A/B test different headlines to see which one brings most clicks. In other words: Most online news articles have several different headlines associated with them.
The tortuous and often explosive undertaking came to an end on Tuesday morning, as member states gathered to give the very final green light to the five regulations that make up the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, an all-encompassing overhaul that seeks to ensure all countries, regardless of location, shoulder their fair share.
Among other things, the New Pact envisions stricter rules to expand the screening of applicants, carry out health and security checks, speed up examination procedures and provide counselling free of charge.
Its main novelty is a system of "mandatory solidarity" that would give governments three options to manage asylum seekers: relocate a certain number, pay €20,000 for each one they reject, or finance operational support.
For the bloc, the path to the finish line has been all but easy: the idea of having a common, predictable rulebook to handle the irregular arrivals of asylum seekers has been on the table since the 2015-2016 migration crisis, which turned the issue into political dynamite and bitterly split countries into opposing camps.
Western and northern countries demanded stronger accountability and enforcement at the external borders while eastern states resisted any initiative that resembled a relocation quota.
Donald Tusk, who has vowed to reset Warsaw-Brussels ties after eight years of tensions under the hard-right Law and Justice (PiS) party, has maintained his predecessor's official line, denouncing the New Pact as "unacceptable" for his country.
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I'm no expert, but from what I've read, particularly solar has gotten extremely cheap over the past 15 years. You do need storage capacity and other energy generation methods to go along with solar, so the true cost is a bit complexer.
But yeah, I assume this rapid change is happening now, because renewables are simply cheaper than other energy generation methods.
The drop in fossil fuel generation was driven by wind and solar growth as well as the recovery of hydropower.
Wind and solar growth as well as the recovery of hydropower drove the fall in fossil fuel generation and increased the share of renewables in the electricity mix to a record 54 per cent.
Solar and wind have stepped up as the main players, proving they are ready to take on their role as the backbone of the modern clean electricity system.”
Seven coal fired power stations closed in the country at the end of March 2024 after their shut down was postponed due to the energy crisis.
Despite rising demand, fossil fuel electricity generation still fell as renewables displaced them from the mix.
“From 2016 to 2023, coal fell by over 300 terawatt hours and there was a similar rise in wind and solar over that period,” she explains.
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High levels of immigration have failed to enhance the economy and have worsened the housing crisis in the UK, according to a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS).
It argues that about 89% of the 1.34 million rise in England's housing deficit over the last decade has been due to net migration.
The report calls on the Government to implement limits on legal immigration to alleviate excessive pressure on British infrastructure and public services.
"The changes we propose today would finally return numbers to the historical norm and deliver the highly-selective, highly-skilled immigration system voters were promised," Mr Jenrick said.
However, other European countries, including Germany, take a different line, according to a recent study by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg.
IAB reported that 90% of workers in this group paid social security contributions, and the median gross hourly wage for arrivals in 2015 was €13.70, despite any difficulties that might arise at the beginning.
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Michelle Roverelli, the head of communications for the European Broadcasting Union that runs the show, said ticket holders are only allowed to bring and display flags representing countries that take part in the event, as well as the rainbow-coloured flag.
The Geneva-based EBU reserves the right “to remove any other flags or symbols, clothing, items and banners being used for the likely purpose of instrumentalising the TV shows,” she told the Associated Press in a text message.
Martin Österdahl, the contest's executive supervisor, told TT that “these rules are the same as last year. There is no change.”
They've never allowed political protests. Nothing is different vs any other year. This headline sure is inflammatory, though
It's so annoying, really. I'd call myself pretty left-leaning (especially compared to the US political spectrum), but there are just so many inflammatory posts on Lemmy that exaggerate just for the sake of it, making anything but a circle jerk impossible.
The headline of this post leaves not much to do except hating the EBU because apparently they are actively trying to suppress any support for Palestine - except they aren't. It's the same rules as every year and nothing really changed.
We could discuss if this is a good policy or if the ESC should be more political or whatever. But headlines like this kill any nuance.
The Finnish act windows95man has been talking about protesting to the Finnish media, but we don't really know how yet. He also mentioned that there may be other acts with him.
euronews.com
Heiß