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NNadir

(33,525 posts)
Sat Jan 27, 2024, 01:02 PM Jan 2024

Nuclear Power to Recover from Fukushima Foolishness, On Track for New Records in 2025.

This note came in through one of my Nature Briefing News Feed emails: The link therein refers to the Financial Times of London, which is behind a firewall, but the excerpt points to a recent IEA report.

The IEA link is here: Electricity Reports Executive Summary, IEA

Excerpts:

By 2025, global nuclear generation is forecast to exceed its previous record set in 2021. Even as some countries phase out nuclear power or retire plants early, nuclear generation is forecast to grow by close to 3% per year on average through 2026 as maintenance works are completed within France, Japan restarts nuclear production at several power plants, and new reactors begin commercial operations in various markets, including China, India, Korea, and Europe. Many countries are making nuclear power a critical part of their energy strategies as they look to safeguard energy security while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At the COP28 climate change conference that concluded in December 2023, more than 20 countries signed a joint declaration to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050. Achieving this goal will require tackling the key challenge of reducing construction and financing risks in the nuclear sector. Momentum is also growing behind small modular reactor (SMR) technology. The technology’s development and deployment remains modest and is not without its difficulties, but R&D is starting to pick up...


After Fukushima, where few, if any people died from radiation released in the natural disaster, came a period during which nuclear generation declined owing to a festival of ignorance and fear that killed people by driving climate change and air pollution.

There is a lot of the usual praise in the article for so called "renewable energy" which continues to soak up vast sums of money for no result in rates climate change. I have no use for the rhetoric, but in 2023, continuing into 2024, we are beginning to see the tragic results of this unsustainable affectation.

The growth of nuclear energy is not fast enough to save what is left to save and to restore that which can be restored, but I expect that the scales are falling off the eyes of humanity in general and antinukes are finally being seen for the absurd poor thinkers they've always been. In my opinion antinukes have killed a lot of people by their appeals to selective attention, fear, and ignorance, but it's nice to understand a recovery is on the way.

Tripling nuclear capacity is not enough. It needs to grow by one order of magnitude at least, and do so quickly. Hopefully that sinks in sooner rather than later.

Reality bites.

Have a nice weekend.

6 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Nuclear Power to Recover from Fukushima Foolishness, On Track for New Records in 2025. (Original Post) NNadir Jan 2024 OP
Nice phrasing..."a festival of ignorance and fear..." Thanks for your continuing posts. c-rational Jan 2024 #1
I wonder how many people know where the largest nuclear power plant in the USA is? Barry Markson Jan 2024 #2
So, trillions of dollars to boil water. Kid Berwyn Jan 2024 #3
If one has even a modicum of scientific or engineering knowledge... NNadir Jan 2024 #4
But, what I wrote is true. Kid Berwyn Jan 2024 #5
Donald Trump is an example of a person who likes to confuse ignorance with truth. NNadir Jan 2024 #6

Barry Markson

(211 posts)
2. I wonder how many people know where the largest nuclear power plant in the USA is?
Sat Jan 27, 2024, 01:55 PM
Jan 2024

Well, it's 35 miles from our winter home in the Phoenix metro area in the middle of the Sonoran desert.
The plant is totally cooled by "waste" water from the surrounding communities.
Every time we flush the toilet we're cooling the reactor.
Its been helping crank our air conditioner and heat our pool since 1988 without incident.




https://www.maricopa.gov/1002/PVGS#:~:text=Palo%20Verde%20Generating%20Station%20(PVGS,the%20community%20of%20Wintersburg%2C%20Arizona.

Kid Berwyn

(14,909 posts)
3. So, trillions of dollars to boil water.
Sat Jan 27, 2024, 03:47 PM
Jan 2024

Gee. If only there were a simpler way to turn a turbine? Without nukes, we wouldn't have all the problems, deadly waste without end, "carbon offsets" needed to mine uranium and pour concrete, for examples, or finding a secure place to store the waste materials that doesn't need to use cat litter, and all the limitless list of problems to worry about, let alone have the taxpayer subsidize. Oh, and the plutonium.

NNadir

(33,525 posts)
4. If one has even a modicum of scientific or engineering knowledge...
Sat Jan 27, 2024, 05:58 PM
Jan 2024

...one can appreciate the ignorance of people who've been issuing stupid slogans for decades.

If one has no such knowledge, one can produce stupid slogans.

I note that there are very few of the antinukes producing this tiresome tripe who give a rat's ass that Germany boils water using coal.

Nor do they give a rat's ass about the trillions squandered on solar and wind junk driven by mining, the destruction of wilderness and back up by coal and gas.

What antinukes' trisome sloganeering and ignorance has done has left hundreds of millions of air pollution deaths and a planet in flames from climate change.

My experience of these dangerous fools is that they are classic Dunning Kruger types, almost Trumpian in scale, so ignorant as to be unable to grasp even on the surface the scale of that ignorance.

Happily, the educated world is sweeping this ignorance aside.

Even now, this late, this dire, antinukes have no sense of decency.

None.

Have a nice weekend

NNadir

(33,525 posts)
6. Donald Trump is an example of a person who likes to confuse ignorance with truth.
Sun Jan 28, 2024, 07:20 PM
Jan 2024

In general, we often hear from people who espouse ignorance who nonetheless like to make statements claiming authority from "science." Hell, there is a whole group of people who run around shouting about "creation science" and for that matter, a religion called "Christian Science" that has no connection with science.

I would not qualify a person who obviously understands neither finance or engineering to assert a "truth," particularly when one has not a shred of knowledge about what a Brayton cycle is, or the long practiced history of Brayton cycles.

My son is working on a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and I assure you he would not have been admitted to it if he didn't know what a Brayton cycle is.

Now we have an antinuke talking about "truth" who clearly doesn't have the slightest clue what a Brayton cycle is and yet comes here to make silly assertions about both science and the purpose of nuclear engineering.

I have have often written on the subject of process intensification in this space in the Science forum. Brayton cycles are a key component of process intensification procedures. I can write about these things because I know what science is and, consequently, whether a person with whom I'm speaking knows what it is.

I see lots of folks who are clueless about science here, some honest about it, but wish to know more - which is fine, even great - and some who make assertions about science despite their obvious cluelessness. Most of the latter are antinukes.

I have a very clear vision here, and only remark on it to point up that antinukes know nothing at all about nuclear energy other than they hate it, just as antivaxxers know nothing about immunology other than that they hate the technology.

Seven British nuclear reactors have operated on Brayton cycles, one of them, still operating and still saving lives from the fear and ignorance of antinukes who give neither a fuck about climate change or air pollution, has been in operation since 1983.

Antinukes are nearly always the equivalent of antivaxxers or creationists discussing, say, molecular biology, except antivaxxers can never aspire to the number of people killed by antinuke ignorance.

The death toll from antinukism is roughly 19,000 people per day according to a publication widely accessed by scientists concerned with human health, and the health of the planet, something, again, about which antinukes couldn't care less.

It is here: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).


Climate scientists have also weighed in on the fear and ignorance spread by ignorant antinukes:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

As for bourgeois brats whining stupidly about nickels and dimes, I note that there are none who give a shit about future generations. All of the wind and solar crap they've been using to greenwash a fossil fuel dependent world will be landfill in 25 years or less, a liability to those generations. The Vogtle nuclear reactors will be operating as the 22nd century dawns, saving lives and producing clean energy for generations otherwise left with the ruins of this generation's extreme and contemptible ignorance.

Have a swell week.


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