Just 5 years left to stop climate change

[Clarke]

Yes, Germany was concerned about the safety of Fukishima, and so decided to reduce nuclear power plant production.

Can anyone tell me when the last catastrophic earthquake hit Germany?

[Aquaplant]

Originally Posted by Dognik

You know what the funny thing is, in Germany they decided to go down with nuclear reactors, and now they got PLUS OF 20% CO2-Emmissions in 2011.

The hazards of nuclear power are a bit more elaborate than just having to deal with CO2. Suffice to say they had to compensate the reduction in nuclear power with something, and they failed at it.

Originally Posted by Clarke

Yes, Germany was concerned about the safety of Fukishima, and so decided to reduce nuclear power plant production.

Can anyone tell me when the last catastrophic earthquake hit Germany?

I'd say it was more of a political stunt than anything else.

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by Aquaplant

The hazards of nuclear power are a bit more elaborate than just having to deal with CO2. Suffice to say they had to compensate the reduction in nuclear power with something, and they failed at it.

There isn't another reliable option, and last time I checked, Germany wasn't particularly windy or sunny.

[Moco Loco]

Do solar and wind necessarily need extreme sun and wind to function?

[applejuice]

Originally Posted by Moco Loco

Do solar and wind necessarily need extreme sun and wind to function?

No. What makes Solar and Wind power "unpopular" is that they are very unreliable sources of energy. Electric Power Distribution needs to have reliable sources to deliver power at all times (what is called the baseload). In the case of solar power, it is only available when the Sun is in the sky, diminishes with cloudy days, month of the year, etc. In the case of wind, well, it is quite difficult to have a constant supply of wind. The power grid administrators will always choose a reliable source over an unreliable source and will keep the alternative sources as a system reserve, usually switching to them when the power demand is low and potential failures in generation are properly covered (power distribution is a science of its own).
That's basically it.

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by Dognik

You know what the funny thing is, in Germany they decided to go down with nuclear reactors, and now they got PLUS OF 20% CO2-Emmissions in 2011.

That's what happens when ignorant people are allowed to make decisions

Originally Posted by applejuice

No. What makes Solar and Wind power "unpopular" is that they are very unreliable sources of energy. Electric Power Distribution needs to have reliable sources to deliver power at all times (what is called the baseload). In the case of solar power, it is only available when the Sun is in the sky, diminishes with cloudy days, month of the year, etc. In the case of wind, well, it is quite difficult to have a constant supply of wind. The power grid administrators will always choose a reliable source over an unreliable source and will keep the alternative sources as a system reserve, usually switching to them when the power demand is low and potential failures in generation are properly covered (power distribution is a science of its own).
That's basically it.

Mostly true, but you're also forgetting the expense, as well as siting limitations.
There are also very limited ways to store it. One of the world's largest storage facilities is Dinorwig, which stores ~1.8GW, but if you look at the size, cost, and duration that it can provide power for, you'll know why it's completely impractical for anything other than merely compensating for demand spikes.

[Dognik]

Originally Posted by Moco Loco

Do solar and wind necessarily need extreme sun and wind to function?

There are the following problems:
- You need a mass of windgenerators to replace 1 Nuclear Plant, for example
1 Nuclearplant= 10.000 Windturbines
The same with solar systems
- Who can finance this? We have also a financial crisis at the moment
- Wind/ Solar energy also produces indirect destruction of nature
(direct: Destruction of regional ecology systems
indirect: Cheap Production, cheap materials BECAUSE OF PEOPLE NEED PROFIT)
- Storage Problems: for example building a reservoir dam destroys nature

[Aquaplant]

Originally Posted by Clarke

There isn't another reliable option, and last time I checked, Germany wasn't particularly windy or sunny.

Make motivational posters for people to save electricity?

As the numbers elude me, reliable ones that is, how in/efficient solar or wind power is, so I can't really go with any exact options. I do know however that solar and wind are rather handy ways to produce personal electricity where there is no power grid available, but I guess it might be the differences of scale once again. Industry in particular isn't known for its efficiency, even if people would cut down their personal use and whatnot.

...

What would I have to do to get a good whole night sleep? If this keeps up, you all are probably going to see a rather obvious reduction in my capacity to think properly, unless it has already started, I don't know. Usually my lack of clarity causes me to make fun of things I could probably otherwise address, and this certainly serves as an indication of such.

I guess soon I'll be reverting to the rather dull, I just agree/disagree option for my input when my brain really starts to fall apart.

[Fkeu'itan]

Originally Posted by Human No More

There are also very limited ways to store it. One of the world's largest storage facilities is Dinorwig, which stores ~1.8GW, but if you look at the size, cost, and duration that it can provide power for, you'll know why it's completely impractical for anything other than merely compensating for demand spikes.

Which is why I say time, and time, and time again that we *need* to decrease demand. This is a part of the issue with many problems we have in the world. It's the same with the food crisis, the population (soon-to-be) crisis, the water crisis, the oil/fuel crisis, the CO2 crisis, the energy crisis generally... We assume that we need to find new ways of supplying increasing demand, which is far, far more difficult than finding ways to decrease demand.

Constructing hundreds of thousands of nuclear power plants is environmentally harmful, dangerous and expensive. Turning off your computer, or any appliance at the switch when you're not using it (perhaps getting rid of it altogether, if you find that a possibility...) isn't.

[Theorist]

Originally Posted by Dognik

There are the following problems:
- You need a mass of windgenerators to replace 1 Nuclear Plant, for example
1 Nuclearplant= 10.000 Windturbines
The same with solar systems
- Who can finance this? We have also a financial crisis at the moment
- Wind/ Solar energy also produces indirect destruction of nature
(direct: Destruction of regional ecology systems
indirect: Cheap Production, cheap materials BECAUSE OF PEOPLE NEED PROFIT)
- Storage Problems: for example building a reservoir dam destroys nature

Just a question, but when you say 10.000 wind turbines, do you mean ten, or ten thousand? Cause here ten thousand is 10,000, but I know in Germany, ten thousand is 10.000. Just curious, but I'm guessing you mean ten thousand

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by Fkeu'itan

Constructing hundreds of thousands of nuclear power plants is environmentally harmful, dangerous and expensive. Turning off your computer, or any appliance at the switch when you're not using it (perhaps getting rid of it altogether, if you find that a possibility...) isn't.

You don't need ten thousand of them, though. Perhaps you don't need even one thousand, but I'd have to do the math. France runs 80% of their country on 60.

[Moco Loco]

I'll just leave this here.

Hazard evaluation
The current process for evaluating the seismic hazard for a nuclear plant is set out in Règle Fondamentale de Sûreté (Fundamental Safety Rule) RFS 2001-01, published by the Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety, which uses more detailed seismotectonic zones.[31] RFS 2001-01 replaced RFS I.2.c, published in 1981, however it has been criticised for continuing to require a deterministic assessment (rather than a probabilistic approach) that relies primarily on the strongest 'historically known' earthquake near a site.[32] This leads to a number of problems including the short period (in geological timescales) for which there are records, the difficulty of assessing the characteristics of earthquakes that occurred prior to the use of seismometers, the difficulty of identifying the existence of all earthquakes that pre-date the historic record, and ultimately the reliance on one single earthquake scenario.[32] Other criticisms include the use of intensity in the evaluation method, rather than spectral acceleration, which is commonly used elsewhere.[32]

[Fkeu'itan]

Originally Posted by Clarke

You don't need ten thousand of them, though. Perhaps you don't need even one thousand, but I'd have to do the math. France runs 80% of their country on 60.

Alright, but where are you planning on dumping your stuff afterwards? I know you have said much of it can be recycled, but it still has an after product nonetheless.

And maybe i'm being paranoid, but i'm not particularly liking the idea of having a number of potential nuclear disasters sitting idly around the place. It may not happen often, but things like Fukushima and Chernobyl will happen, no matter how well you think you can prepare for them. It's just the law of averages. Especially when you have a higher number of plants (as we're going to need, if we're going to do this thing globally.)

[applejuice]

I think, considering increasing demand, the fundamental problem in power generation is that most of it depends on thermal machines. The impossibility of getting efficiencies higher of 60% (the best of cases) in transforming heat into another class of energy is the real problem. The remaining 40% (and, of the 60% heat transformed into electricity, a significant amount is also, eventually, dumped as heat at the end of the process) of heat gets dumped into the atmosphere and that seems to be unaccounted in the climate change debates (most of the attention goes to the CO2). We are yet to develop the technology that will allow us to get rid of heat as a "prime matter" to generate electricity, or transform it to electricity at much higher efficiency: 80-90% should be the target.
This is interesting: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/a...leaf-0930.html

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by Fkeu'itan

Alright, but where are you planning on dumping your stuff afterwards? I know you have said much of it can be recycled, but it still has an after product nonetheless.

SPAAAAAAACE!
...Or the existing storage facilities. The waste from a few recycling cycles is not only much less for the energy it produces, but also becomes safe much faster.

And maybe i'm being paranoid, but i'm not particularly liking the idea of having a number of potential nuclear disasters sitting idly around the place. It may not happen often, but things like Fukushima and Chernobyl will happen, no matter how well you think you can prepare for them. It's just the law of averages. Especially when you have a higher number of plants (as we're going to need, if we're going to do this thing globally.)

I am reliably told that Chernobyl can't happen with modern reactor designs, and only happened in the first place because both the engineers were idiots and everything could go wrong did.

Also, law of averages doesn't work when you're filtering things through the media.