> Perhaps they're more common in the richer parts of the country where a profit can be more readily turned, but not up here.
These cost about 300-400 euros in local Aldi or Lidl (yes they sell them occasionally) with inverter, ready to plug-in (800W limit). At these prices they're accessible to everyone
It sounds like German citizens are poorer than Pakistani and sub-saharan citizens. Sorry to hear the fall, Germany used to have first world per capita income.
I love how these articles pop up only after we exited couple of months long depressing, cloudy, rainy and snowy season into full blast sunshine for last two weeks or so.
Yes, this is why you get on average single digit output from solar in Sweden during the worst winter months while consumption doubles. The math comes down that on average, the expected amount of solar that can be used for consumption is around 25% for an 100% capacity installation. The period with highest production is the period of lowest consumption. Average grid prices also follow this trend, with the highest point being winter and the lowest point being summer.
Germany has slightly better numbers from being a bit more south, and they also primarily use gas for heating rather than electricity, which reduces seasons effects on consumption.
How similar is the climate of Australia with northern Europe? Countries which spend more energy on AC than heating has a much better utilization of solar.
Not terribly. Australia is located about 7km from the surface of the sun, with people crackling audibly as the walk down the street and dogs bursting into flames if they don't get to shade on time, at which point the dropbears kill them. Europe gets decent summer sun but it's pretty cloudy in winter.
I can't imagine how I and hundreds of millions of others can heat their homes during cold nights without fossils or a 30cm thick XPS insulation, about which hardly anyone talks about. I have solar on the roof and batteries and they are totally dead for 2.5 months in a row in a sunny country.
How can millions of car batteries be managed efficiently without heavy environmental damage? EVs don't scale for all even with serious infra (recycling, on spot change, fast chargers).
The only viable solution is to continue burning and burning, if we don't want to severely degrade our quality of life: now fossils, a little woodchips like Sweden and in the end biofuels, synthetic fuels and hydrogen. And let anyone use nuclear at their own taste. Solar/batteries cannot extend beyond a small window and wind is not reliable.
Absolutely correct. Now let's drop anothet few billions to make AI better and avoid such mistakes in the future. And we might lay off some more folks to make room in a budget for more AI
At some point the webpage says something like "You are deeper than the Mariana Trench" and also make a few jokes with other comparisons. I expect USA people to prefer to avoid SI units.
If the site where showing temperatures °C and °F option would be even more important. I can translate from feet and miles ($feets/3 and miles*1.5) and get a good estimation, but I can't translate from °F to °C in my head and know if I must use a hoodie or not.
It's worse than that, it's every 3 to 7 hours of fossil fuel pollution roughly equaling the total death toll of all nuclear power accidents in history (around 4000 indirectly, most from cancer resulting from Chernobyl - but there's only around 100 total in a direct way).
I think that depends on where you draw the line around the term "coal plant." There have been plenty of coal ash disasters that result in years of exclusion (for purposes of habitation, drinking water, fishing, etc.)[1][2][3][4]
Have you ever seen the common medical advice that pregnant women should avoid eating more than a few servings of seafood every week, and avoid certain kinds entirely, because they’re all contaminated with mercury? A huge portion of that mercury comes from burning coal. How’s that for an exclusion zone?
Nature would enjoy that. The economy not so much, depending on location. Around San Onofre (decommissioned now), a 30 mile Chernobyl-size exclusion zone would cover big chunks of Orange County and San Diego County. The US government recommended a 50 mile exclusion zone around Fukushima. 50 miles would cover southern Los Angeles and millions of people.
So The "worst case scenario" for nuclear power is creating a new wildlife park free from human interference [and emptying out half of Los Angeles]
If you look at net damage to the planet, fossil fuel burning energy sources kill literally 8 million+ people a year. Coal plants are vastly more radioactive than nuclear plants, and the effects of burning coal will have a vastly outsized share of damage to the planet in the long than nuclear. Its effects are just less concentrated to a single area.
And not all nuclear plants are the same. I don’t think it’s reasonable at all to compare Chernobyl to modern reactor designs, just because they both use the word “nuclear”.
Apso not sure if you are including coal mining, and all of the deaths and negative health outcomes as a result of the industry
Most of the exclusion zone is political nonsense. And overall coal has made much more areas much worse to live in. I rather live in the exclusion zone then next many coal plants.
Also there is a single case that happened from a non-western design. When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Chernobyl's political nonsense was mostly down to the USSR wanting to deny that anything had, or possibly could, go wrong; if anything, the exclusion zone is the opposite of the western nonsense about nuclear power.
It's our unique freedom-themed nonsense, not the Soviet dictatorial-nonsense, which means we have radiation standards strict enough that it's not possible to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without first performing a nuclear decontamination process due to all the radioisotopes in the coal.
> When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Relative to coal, absolutely. But don't assume western countries are immune to propaganda on these things, nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.
Nuclear plans have objectively made power generation save and clean. When they were built in the 1960-1990s the were objectively the best and cleanest energy that saved a gigantic amount of lives.
The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm. An I do think the standards we apply are to extreme in many cases mostly dating back to this misunderstanding about radiation.
As for the locality to nuclear plants and cancer, this is as far as I know been shown in many countries and as far as I know at least can mostly be explained by nuclear plants usually being built in industrial areas that often used to have coal plants and other industry going on.
> nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.
Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context. In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.
And they don't have to be 'there' for public safety, they just need a good record on public safety and they do.
In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.
What I didn't mention, in terms of propaganda, the anti-nuclear people are way ahead of any pro-nuclear propaganda. Its not even remotely close. The anti nuclear-weapons movement an environmental movement from the 1970s spread myths that are still repeated an often with emotional attachment.
My parents who lived in central Europe during Chernobyl hate nuclear power, while believing lots of nonsense that was in the news back then.
I have heard that the anti-nuclear propaganda is funded by other nuclear states, because of the aforementioned value of reactors (and their scientists and engineers) to weapons programs.
I have no idea if that's true, but it sounds very plausible.
However, if it was true, it would make it very much easier for governments to justify big spends on pro-nuclear propaganda. I mean, the USA managed to make test-detonations into a tourism opportunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Las_Vegas#Atomic_te...
> Nuclear plans have objectively made power generation save and clean. When they were built in the 1960-1990s the were objectively the best and cleanest energy that saved a gigantic amount of lives.
Yes indeed. But that wasn't why they were built*, and that safety comes with an enormous cost. Ironically not including the exclusion zone, even with that included the amortised cost is quite small, but rather all the things that Chernobyl didn't have but should've plus all the international inspections and regulations to make sure nobody's secretly got a weapons program, either deliberately or via organised crime.
> The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm.
That's a tiny sample size, consisting of people who are in poverty (and already mostly elderly) and can therefore be expected to have unusual health outcomes. Which could be higher or lower cancer rates, depending on what else is going on. Like, cancer won't get you if you pickle your liver too hard first with moonshine.
Though yes, the linear relationship between radiation and harm is known to be an oversimplification.
> Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context.
Radioisotopes. They're really useful for a lot of stuff, but the options for making them are mostly "fission plant" or "particle accelerator". This includes but is not limited to weapons.
> In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.
The cheapest are cheap, but the average and the trend line says they're mostly now a worse option than PV+batteries. Your milage, as the saying goes, may vary, so I wouldn't be even mildly surprised if e.g. Alaska says "hydro and nuclear" given this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_electricity_genera...
> In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.
Indeed. It was terrible for the environment and general population health that we didn't have a huge roll-out of nuclear power up until the 2010s when renewables got interesting.
But unfortunately, although even the full cost (both monetary and to lives lost) of Chernobyl would, if amortised over all reactors, be much smaller than for fossil plants, the scale of that accident would have been an existential threat to many smaller nations. Arguably, it was existential damage to the USSR, even. People don't want to be subjected to someone else's game of Russian Roulette, not even when the overall odds of survival go up.
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