People throw out whatever nonsense they like to support their position.
"Nuclear costs 3-5x" and as you point out, compared to what?
The cost of sitting around for 20 years debating this and not taking any action at all has lead to much worse problems - power shortages.
These "anti-nuclear" types fail to apply logic to their debate.
I asked how much power is produced by solar during the long winter months, i suspect they will not respond as it is against their view - solar is NOT viable in cold-weather climates. You need a reliable "base" system and nuclear is very well suited for this. Our plants (CANDU) can be refuelled while producing near-full power greatly reducing the need to shut them down.
The reason the temperatures fall below zero during the winter where i live is obvious.. The energy we receive from the sun has been greatly reduced.
How would solar power address the reduction in available solar energy, and the increased demand for energy for heating?
Surely the main issue with winter in more northern regions is the significantly reduced period of the day for which any solar-generation is even possible. During the daylight hours there's still more than enough total insolation to heat the small amount of air we need to inside our houses, but you obviously need some form of storage (or incredibly good insulation, arguably a form of storage too) to ensure buildings can remain a comfortable temperature throughout the day and night. From a purely technical feasibility point of view, there's always sufficient insolation somewhere/somewhen to provide all our energy needs, but whether it's practical or economical compared to alternatives such as nuclear is worth doing the sums on.
> During the daylight hours there's still more than enough total insolation to heat the small amount of air we need to inside our houses
I sold solar panel for 10 years. Both solar thermal and PV. This is simply not true. You need to greatly oversize your panels (≥6x) and also have a passive house with a huge storage buffer (>5000 liters). In the summer you end up having to pump the waste heat into a pool. There are also maintenance costs. For PV you need huge amounts of battery storage. It's simply not economical above the 40° parallel to use solar for heating. For DHW or charging your EV it's okay, but in the winter you'll get at most 1/6 the amount of heat or electricity that you get in the summer provided that the panels are not covered in snow.
That would seem to be essentially agreeing with my point - there's enough insolation but it's not necessarily economical to capture it with home PV systems.
Coal has been at all time record highs the past couple of years (well before Russia Ukraine war), and it's not even close. Like 3x previous record highs and more like 6x usual prices.
10 years ago I was assured that coal was dead, killed by wind and solar, which were already cheaper than coal at $60/T, and falling. How is it possible then that 10 years on with all the vastly expanded and even cheaper and better renewables, that people are paying $430/T for coal? And it's not the remaining few legacy assets winding down as they compete for a dwindling supply of fuel, global coal production is rising, new coal power plants are being built.
I've never heard any of these people go back and reflect on what they got wrong about their predictions about coal, what they missed and where their logic was flawed. What I do hear frequently though is "nuclear is dead, renewables are already cheaper"... I'm a little less open minded this time around.
I think you're mixing things here. The western world, the part of the world that bet on renewables, has reduced their dependency on coal.
For the rest of the world that is not the case. It's very easy and fast to build a coal plant and pretty much every country has access to the raw material (independency). For the most part you don't need a specialized workforce either, which you do need for nuclear. It's also not intermittent like solar and wind and the supply chains for solar and wind wouldn't have been able to keep up anyway.
I don't think I'm mixing things up, I think you are.
Coal extraction in the western world is making huge amounts of money and scaling up production, exactly the opposite of what the naysayers were incessantly parroting.
Coal is no different than wind and solar in terms of accessibility of plant or product. Actually renewables are significantly easier to acquire and scale and deploy in many cases -- millions of people have solar panels on their houses for example. Private, as well as municipal or county level installations are common. As are much larger ones.
> For the most part you don't need a specialized workforce either, which you do need for nuclear.
You certainly do. You can't just throw a bunch of people from the street together and tell them to run a coal mine, supply line, and power plant.
> It's also not intermittent like solar and wind and the supply chains for solar and wind wouldn't have been able to keep up anyway.
> Actually renewables are significantly easier to acquire and scale and deploy in many cases -- millions of people have solar panels on their houses for example. Private, as well as municipal or county level installations are common. As are much larger ones.
You missed my point. You need a lot less materials for the same amount of power in a coal plant and digging for coal is easier to scale up.
I guess it's about time you back up your claims with some sources, your memory from a decennium ago might not be as accurate as you think.
Here is the IEA World Energy Outlook from 2010. The presentation is simplified, check out page 11 in [0] for example. As you can see the OECD numbers go down, but the China, India and other developing market numbers go up. Giving us a total increase. You can check out the more in depth IEA report here [1].
Sounds like sealioning TBH. No, you can easily refresh your own memory if you've forgotten about it. Coal mines infrastructure and generation everywhere were being called stranded assets, "killed by renewables". Your claim that it was just in the west doesn't make sense because mines in western countries export to China and India etc.
Why the intellectual dishonesty? Why do you try to discredit what I say, backed by sources, when you rely on nothing but your own fallible memory to back up your claims? Just back up your claims with sources, it's really not that hard.
> Your claim that it was just in the west doesn't make sense because mines in western countries export to China and India etc.
If you check the previous links that I posted, you will see that coal production in the west has reduced as well.
You don't have to come up with sources to everything obvious, that's an intellectually dishonest way to argue. Obviously people were calling coal mines in western countries stranded and dead assets, if you weren't paying attention and don't think that is the case, then it's actually on you to provide evidence for this extraordinary claim.
> If you check the previous links that I posted, you will see that coal production in the west has reduced as well.
You keep blathering about things that don't address anything I wrote. Go back and actually read what I wrote and have a think about what you're actually trying to say about it before you try again.
Coal production in (at least some) western countries, e.g., USA has actually started to increase in the past year or so in response to demand.
> Obviously people were calling coal mines in western countries stranded and dead assets, if you weren't paying attention and don't think that is the case, then it's actually on you to provide evidence for this extraordinary claim.
That's what I claimed, I'm happy you agree. This claim did not extend towards the rest of the world (so not like you claimed), the consensus among experts was that they would be increasing their coal consumption. This is also what happened.
> Coal production in (at least some) western countries, e.g., USA has actually started to increase in the past year or so in response to demand.
> That's what I claimed, I'm happy you agree. This claim did not extend towards the rest of the world (so not like you claimed),
It did ,because western countries export coal to the rest of the world.
Look if you can't admit you were parroting that coal was killed by renewables without any understanding of commodity boom/bust cycles or energy demand trajectory the world that's quite understandable it's difficult to face reality, but you don't have to keep at it.
> It did ,because western countries export coal to the rest of the world.
As I said, coal production and consumption in the west has gone down. Coal plants and mines have closed. The trend is downwards. Do you really refuse to accept this when it's what the data says? This is quite worrying I must say, is there some ideological bias at play here?
> Look if you can't admit you were parroting that coal was killed by renewables without any understanding of commodity boom/bust cycles or energy demand trajectory the world that's quite understandable it's difficult to face reality, but you don't have to keep at it.
Coal is being killed by renewables, nuclear, hydro, gas, ... in the west. Whatever is cheaper tends to win out in the end. All you have to do is look at the data, I even linked it for you. Although it's experiencing a hiccup right now due to the gas crisis. It will obviously take a bit longer for the rest of the world to catch up, even without the current crisis.
Read what I wrote and respond to that or not at all. You can't goad me into "admitting" something I'm not arguing against, because I'm not in some religious anti renewable or pro nuclear or coal cult.
You were wrong if you were reciting the popular prayer "coal is dead, killed by renewables" a few years ago. Hopefully you come to understand that and reflect on what that means for the credibility of the kind of sources you get your information from, and what that means for your ideas about nuclear and other things too.
> Read what I wrote and respond to that or not at all. You can't goad me into "admitting" something I'm not arguing against, because I'm not in some religious anti renewable or pro nuclear or coal cult.
Did you not claim:
>"coal is dead, killed by renewables." was said by people around 10 years ago and that this referred to the entire world?
I'm assuming people aren't just random Twitter users but actual reputable people.
I have provided a reputable source from 2010 that said that total coal consumption would rise and that this increase is due to an increased usage in the developing world. This is true today, see [0] so the prediction was on point. All you have to do is show us that a reputable source has claimed that coal was dead and that this referred to the entire world. Somewhere around 2010. This would settle the debate.
> You were wrong if you were reciting the popular prayer "coal is dead, killed by renewables" a few years ago. Hopefully you come to understand that and reflect on what that means for the credibility of the kind of sources you get your information from, and what that means for your ideas about nuclear and other things too.
Don't you think it would be really weird if I was supposedly reciting something that I say wasn't claimed in the first place? The claim you mention refers to the west and no real energy expert worth his or her salt would have claimed that this would be the case for the entire world. It's simply not possible for the developing world to do that. It wasn't possible in 2010, when the costs for renewables were much higher than they are now, and it isn't possible now.
I think the International Energy Agency is quite a reputable source? They do research and advice policy makers all around the world.
Also I'm a bit confused... My ideas about nuclear and other things? I'm not following here, what do you mean? And what does it have to do with the topic at hand?
Look, gullible know-nothings actually believed and could not stop themselves from parroting endlessly that coal mines and infrastructure around the world were dead, killed by renewables. Renewables were cheaper, coal was dead -- that was the complete story in their minds.
They were just led astray by misinformation from special interests, and they were wrong.
The same people have also been claiming that nuclear is dead, killed by renewbales. Their credibility speaks for itself.
No need to reply with apologetics, or arguments about something I didn't say.
People throw out whatever nonsense they like to support their position.
"Nuclear costs 3-5x" and as you point out, compared to what?
The cost of sitting around for 20 years debating this and not taking any action at all has lead to much worse problems - power shortages.
These "anti-nuclear" types fail to apply logic to their debate.
I asked how much power is produced by solar during the long winter months, i suspect they will not respond as it is against their view - solar is NOT viable in cold-weather climates. You need a reliable "base" system and nuclear is very well suited for this. Our plants (CANDU) can be refuelled while producing near-full power greatly reducing the need to shut them down.
The reason the temperatures fall below zero during the winter where i live is obvious.. The energy we receive from the sun has been greatly reduced.
How would solar power address the reduction in available solar energy, and the increased demand for energy for heating?