Because of comments below, I want to piggyback here.
Climate is a pretty complicated topic that is often vastly overly simplified. To the point where major mistakes are made. Remember, first (and even second) order approximations are only useful in limited regimes.
If you're in the camp of "net negative, regardless of costs" then it is silly to ignore nuclear. But people seem to confuse this as "nuclear VS renewables." We should ABSOLUTELY build as much renewable energy as possible. The issue is that the world/country/states aren't homogeneous. For example, Southern California and the entire Southwest probably needs little to zero nuclear power. There's more than enough sun and wind year around to exceed demand. But this isn't true everywhere. Where this isn't true (and where there isn't hydro availability) nuclear is a great option and it is silly to discard it as an option. You also can't just transport energy across the country without significant losses and drawbacks (e.g.s energy security, reduced priority).
So I want to make it clear that you can think nuclear is expensive and too slow but still be in this camp. This camp is just believes that you shouldn't remove a zero carbon emitter from the table. Why tie a hand behind your back? You don't have to use that hand, but it may come in handy every once in awhile.
As to carbon capture, again this is a complicated topic. Often it is overly simplified into "plant more trees." But we just can't plant enough trees and the scientific consensus is that this won't get us there. There's also plenty of natural ways to reduce carbon. Land management is broad term usually used. But soil restoration, bogs, and swamps are far less sexy than forests (which when young are actually carbon emitters). DCC still has a long way to go too, but again, why turn away from it? Use every tool at hand. Especially because we have to remember that zero emissions typically means "zero energy emissions" and that doesn't solve the other half of the problem that we have.
I know everyone is passionate about this subject (I am too) but I also encourage everyone to recognize that we have more similarities and differences. We are mostly arguing about the most efficient way to reach the goal, but mind you that if we fight too much others can use this to divide us and make us overall less efficient. Complex problems require complex solutions. Very few people here are experts in climate and if you ever talk to climate scientists they will happily tell you that their expertise is limited to their niche. It is too complex of a problem for a singular person to understand. So let's keep that in mind when we're arguing with one another. It is good to have arguments and discussions, but turning into fights is unproductive and just demonstrates how naive we all are. I'll bastardize a Feynman quote: "I think I can safely say that no one understands Climate Change."
> ... forests (which when young are actually carbon emitters).
Can you expand a bit on that, since it doesn't match my understanding? Where does the carbon come from that young forests emit?
My understanding is:
A tree is a carbon sink, i.e. it captures carbon as long as it is growing (the carbon goes into its organic matter). Once it stops growing it has a constant amount of organic matter, a constant amount of carbon, and no net exchange of carbon. That is until it burns, or decomposes, or parts of it are eaten by animals, or whatever.
The same, but on a larger scale, goes for a forest, or any ecosystem really: when total organic matter increases carbon is captured from the atmosphere; when total organic matter decreases carbon is emitted.
Still to my understanding, young forests are forests that grow pretty rapidly and are therefore excellent in capturing carbon.
Sure! I'm actually glad you asked, because this is a perfect example of first order thinking giving you the wrong answer. Your understanding is actually (almost) entirely correct! The problem is that a forest is an entire system, and not just the trees. Talk about missing the forest for the trees :)
So a singular tree grows more aggressively when young, but you also have to consider that the tree respires and that it drops matter to the ground which microbes decompose and respire CO2! But the overall system changes once a forests get larger and there is canopy closure. Once we consider the entire system (or at least more of the system) we reverse our conclusion and find that young forests are NET carbon sources (despite individual trees being carbon sinks) and that old growth forests are NET carbon sinks. PBS Terra does a good explanation of it so I'm linking it here[0].
Also, with that said, we should add some information about land management. After all, logging cycles and maintaining old growth forests is part of land management, but it is far from the whole picture. Forrest Fleisch (ironic name) frequently writes about this so I'll just leave one post here[1] and allow you to dig in more.
I hope this clears things up. I'm not an expert so I don't have all the answers myself. But this is what I've gathered from conservationists and those studying forests. And in all fairness, the prevailing theory was that of the first order until relatively recently when we could actually measure the entire system. So old information can be holding us back, but also I think this demonstrates that we as the public understanding can significantly lag that of the scientific consensus. While I agree we should challenge experts this also demonstrates the importance of relying on them.
That twitter link talks about other complex effects, so let's focus on the PBS video. I'll have to find out more about the research, but just from the video things don't make sense.
If a young forest is a net carbon source, they question remains: where does that carbon come from? Was there carbon stored in the soil that is released? If not, the carbon balance doesn't make any sense. As with anything, change in mass over time equals flow rate in minus flow rate out. If biomass increases, stored carbon increases as well, so flow rate in is larger than flow rate out. That means we have a carbon sink.
I don't understand the research results for mature forests either. How can they be a carbon sink when the amount of biomass is constant?
Something doesn't add up. It could be my understanding of things. I'm going to try and find some time to delve deeper in the research.
Edit: it looks like the video mainly talks about disturbed forests, where trees are planted again to regrow the forest. It's not explicitly mentioned though, just silently assumed, and that creates lots of unnecessary confusion and misunderstanding. A disturbed forest likely still has relatively large amounts of biomass in the soil, that get released. That is not what I call a young forest though, which is what we were talking about here. A young forest doesn't have a lot of pre-existing biomass.
Not OP but planting a man-made forest is bound to require a lot of carbon up front; you’d need to transport people, plants, etc, to the forest-site, and would possibly need prepare the land for planting using machines (which again need to be transported, need logistics to transport fuel, etc)
I am not sure about the "a lot of carbon up front" part.
Compared to the industrial, man made carbon capture plants madness, the cost of transporting young trees, people and water would be nothing. The main "problem" with the forests approach is that some very important people won't be making huge money off of it.
I'm sure there are examples of places where neither Wind, Solar nor Hydro is viable. But looking at the EU, it doesn't seem to be the case here and (without looking very deep into it) I'd expect that to transfer to the vast majority of the world. Especially with HVDC for continental-scale electricity transport and the introduction of grid-based storage in the form of P2G (or something else), it's possible to even things out. There are almost no countries which are deploying as much renewable energy as possible, even with current grid-tech. And then it does quickly become a "nuclear vs renewables" issue.
Looking around in the EU, many (often more to the right, as opposed to the greens that often occupy more the left side of the spectrum and tend to be anti-nuclear) don't particularly want renewables and see great potential in nuclear instead, using it to dismiss the "green crap". Countries that push more heavily for nuclear seem to neglect renewables and countries investing in renewables often care little for expanding nuclear.
The grid deployment & economic characteristics of nuclear & renewables (solar, wind, not hydro) also clash, with them not playing very nice with each other resulting in the need to throttle one or the other without any reduced costs. Both also need some sort of storage if they're the major electricity provider. France heavily depends on pumped hydro for this purpose.
Maintaining existing nuclear capacity is very reasonable, but looking at how old the reactors (in the EU and America) are means that it's likely we'll have to replace the majority in the next 10-20 years. France is already having major issues (partially due to age) [1] and isn't expanding renewables enough. It's investing billions in new nuclear plants instead, which (at least based on the last decades) are going to take much longer than planned, be much more expensive and will some of them will not be finished.
Thus I expect nuclear energy to play a very small role in 2050.
I think this take generalizes for most of Europe, North America and richer non-asian[2] countries. Poor countries are unlikely to build a lot of major nuclear capacity due to price issues and concerns from the major global players about security (combined with lower expectations for grid reliability and an expected slower phaseout of fossil-fuel power plants).
To your last paragraph: While it's true that this can be used to divide, inefficient solutions that are unlikely to work are also used as distractions from doing something (and giving the illusion of solving the problem). Looking at E-Fuels, which are getting pushed as a reason to continue selling conventional gas vehicles to the masses or "Clean Coal" (carbon capture at the coal plant) to continue operating coal plants unchanged. Focusing on banning single-use plastic bags as a green action (which does have benefits but does not reduce emissions in most cases) and buying ineffective carbon offsets to quickly "greenify" your company without investing much in reducing emissions. There are many "solutions" offered that won't help (serving as reason to not do more) and at least in part I see some advocacy of construction of new power plants "in the future"™ (when it's not my financial/political/hot topic issue anymore) as doing the same. Not all, many are genuine, but some.
[2]: South Korea & China have seen less difficulties with building nuclear, but haven't been without. I don't know enough to say if these difficulties will lead to a major decline nuclear construction in combination with renewables are continually getting cheaper.
There's your problem. Europe doesn't generalize, and that's my entire point. Nowhere does. Europe benefits from warm winds. Often London is warmer than NYC despite being the significantly further north. The benefit here is lots of wind and far milder climates. It is the reason Europeans frequently don't have air conditioning (changing) but most Americans do. The US is warmer on average but also, generally, has larger seasonal swings in temperature. Hydro power is also notoriously non-homogeneous (especially considering environmental factor). For example, a significant part of the US (the part almost no one lives in) is a giant desert.
> Countries that push more heavily for nuclear seem to neglect renewables and countries investing in renewables often care little for expanding nuclear.
Can you give an example of such a country? France is one of the lowest emitters in Europe (even with current issues). France and Sweden draw significant amounts of power from hydro and nuclear. France, currently, is getting ~100gCo2eq/kWhr (and previously was <30) while Germany is 210. Britain is 180, Spain is 230, Portugal is 330, Italy is >300, and Poland is >500. If your concern is with France I believe you need to get your priorities straight. The majority of Europe emits multiples of times that of France and it has been this way for decades. So I'm not sure why you feel you need to pick on them. When the other countries are producing less (or even in the same ballpark) then we can talk.
My entire argument is that this heterogeneity makes the problem of choosing the right power source rather difficult. You can't just look up average (or median) prices and apply them unilaterally. Doing so comes off as extremely naive because, again, first order thinking is not helpful here. Complex problems require complex solutions.
And I need to make this absolutely and abundantly clear: I AM NOT SAYING NUCLEAR EVERYWHERE. I explicitly said we should build as much renewable as possible. I will not be upset if the total amount of nuclear power, globally, is zero. If you believe anything less, I think you gravely misread my comment. I think you may have missed this point and confused my being okay with nuclear as being a nuclear bro. So there really isn't much to argue with here (besides calling the kettle black) because I'm not nuclear gung-ho. Forgive me, but it is often frustrating that when I make the slightest argument in favor of nuclear I get responses as if I proposed a nuclear vs renewables argument. Again, I explicitly stated that this is not the case.
I don't understand your argument. The EU is significantly smaller than the US and the US has much more climate variation across its area. Moreover integrating the EU energy grids is more difficult considering they are separate countries. Still it's happening and not due to government policies, but because it is good investment to connect e.g. Norway to Germany.
In the US it could be much easier to build an integrated grid. There have been many simulations that showed one could fulfil the US electricity needs based on renewables and overprovisioning alone. Any storage makes it actually cheaper.
I don't understand your argument tbh. Europe is roughly the same size as the US and is about twice as dense. The density means that power demand is significantly higher and you need more frequent generators. The increased sparsity and climate variation of the US makes it more difficult to build a grid all together. But both the US and EU have interconnected grids so I'm not sure what you're saying here.
No one was arguing against interconnected grids. I was arguing that you don't want to generate power in California and use that power in Maine. Maybe that's the issue? While this is possible, you not only are losing a lot of power in transit, Maine would be at serious risk for power outages. Both distance and climate variation play a role here as both these factors make it easier for a grid to go down. Let's say there is a 1% chance of outage per 100 miles of grid. Well you got about 2500 miles to cross.
Also, the US is federated. I'm not sure if the politics make it any easier than in Europe. In our example Maine is beholden to at least 10 states. If something happens you know those states are demanding they get power first. The federal government (president) isn't just a dictator who can make the states act uniformly and in the best interest of the country as a whole. It's really best to think of the US as somewhere between a country and the EU itself. It was set up to be more like the EU in the first place but power has consolidated over time.
Not sure what you want to say with your list, but Nuclear shares the low carbon aspects of renewables but is by definition not one.
This is the list of European countries looking to build nuclear power announced in the last few years:
- France
- Finland
- United Kingdom
- Poland
- Hungary
- Czech Republic
Of these countries only Finland is also strongly pushing renewables. The UK is a bit weird.
> So I'm not sure why you feel you need to pick on them.
Because France is failing bad on electricity policy. Their existing electricity system is mostly made up of old nuclear plants that are nearing their end of life and will get increasingly unreliable. It's not clear how France will replace them in a reasonable time frame with new nuclear power plants (long build times are a huge issue and to few are announced to replace the existing reactors), leading to it becoming a net-importer from net-exporter (we're already seeing this happening). This is one of the factors currently driving up electricity prices around Europe and will be a major strain on the European grid. Because most nuclear power plants are old around the western world, this a worrying not just for France which bet hard on nuclear and should be very glad that it did at the time.
There are also many other countries which are basically making little effort to move away from fossil fuels for electricity and that's worse for the environment (but better for the grid). But they're obviously doing the wrong thing in regards to climate. France is not obvious.
> Complex problems require complex solutions.
Yes. But the pricing behavior of nuclear plants compared to wind and solar is extremely similar, leading to similar issues and concern. Most of the cost is capex, little opex or marginal. This makes overbuilding unattractive, especially when the capex is very high as in nuclear leading to either requiring power plants with low capex, high marginal costs (like gas), expansion of storage (historically mostly in the form of hydro) or relying on an otherwise more diversified grid to even things out. And then it becomes much easier to compare pricing as compared to e.g. gas plants.
My impression is that often the broad strokes of policy are (while informed by deep analysis) more formed by political beliefs and motivations than careful analysis. When germany started to deploy solar & wind with the goal of making them a significant portion of the power grid, this was in hindsight a good move but not supported by the facts. Both were very expensive (with no expectation of them getting so cheap) and no grid operator thought that the grid could handle more than a few percent of renewables. The move away from nuclear from the 70s onwards was also very much based on public opinion & fears, not on quantifiable data on risks. The move toward nuclear before that was also born out of hopes for very cheap electricity ("too cheap to meter") that didn't really pan out as much as hoped.
> I AM NOT SAYING NUCLEAR EVERYWHERE.
I am reading your comment as saying it's not nuclear vs. renewables, both can work in some circumstances. And I believe that due to production characteristics on the power grid, it is a nuclear vs. renewables issue in the grid. Additionally, that countries are looking at nuclear options that are unlikely to work (keepin' an eye on the historical trend for construction) will downscale expansion of renewables (if you're planning for 30% nuclear, you don't need as much renewables) and thus lead to more fossil fuel capacity renaming in use.
It's not out of the question that smaller, more modular reactors built in a big factory somewhere might be able to improve things for nuclear power plants and make them reasonable options in terms of build times and costs, but I'm doubtful.
>So I want to make it clear that you can think nuclear is expensive and too slow but still be in this camp. This camp is just believes that you shouldn't remove a zero carbon emitter from the table. Why tie a hand behind your back? You don't have to use that hand, but it may come in handy every once in awhile.
I want this "hand tied behind our back" for 3 reasons:
* It inefficiently consumes public money earmarked for fighting climate change because it demands lavish subsidies.
* Nobody builds it because they give a damn about the climate. The government is keen on it exclusively coz it shares costs with the military industrial complex.
* They refuse to pay for > 0.1% of their own insurance while running massive PR campaigns telling the public how misinformed it is about the risks.
So yeah, as far as I am concerned it needs to die.
* Humans are just not competent or trustworthy enough in general to run larger numbers of these plants safely in the long term. The excuses you hear when accidents, natural disasters, or wars happen are the point: we can't reliably guard against those scenarios, so we'd really just be committing to creating more and more Chernobyls and Fukushimas around the world as time goes on.
In fact all of your bullets are in a sense a consequence of this point: they're a result of people trying to maximize profit with a minimum level of care for the consequences.
Climate is a pretty complicated topic that is often vastly overly simplified. To the point where major mistakes are made. Remember, first (and even second) order approximations are only useful in limited regimes.
If you're in the camp of "net negative, regardless of costs" then it is silly to ignore nuclear. But people seem to confuse this as "nuclear VS renewables." We should ABSOLUTELY build as much renewable energy as possible. The issue is that the world/country/states aren't homogeneous. For example, Southern California and the entire Southwest probably needs little to zero nuclear power. There's more than enough sun and wind year around to exceed demand. But this isn't true everywhere. Where this isn't true (and where there isn't hydro availability) nuclear is a great option and it is silly to discard it as an option. You also can't just transport energy across the country without significant losses and drawbacks (e.g.s energy security, reduced priority).
So I want to make it clear that you can think nuclear is expensive and too slow but still be in this camp. This camp is just believes that you shouldn't remove a zero carbon emitter from the table. Why tie a hand behind your back? You don't have to use that hand, but it may come in handy every once in awhile.
As to carbon capture, again this is a complicated topic. Often it is overly simplified into "plant more trees." But we just can't plant enough trees and the scientific consensus is that this won't get us there. There's also plenty of natural ways to reduce carbon. Land management is broad term usually used. But soil restoration, bogs, and swamps are far less sexy than forests (which when young are actually carbon emitters). DCC still has a long way to go too, but again, why turn away from it? Use every tool at hand. Especially because we have to remember that zero emissions typically means "zero energy emissions" and that doesn't solve the other half of the problem that we have.
I know everyone is passionate about this subject (I am too) but I also encourage everyone to recognize that we have more similarities and differences. We are mostly arguing about the most efficient way to reach the goal, but mind you that if we fight too much others can use this to divide us and make us overall less efficient. Complex problems require complex solutions. Very few people here are experts in climate and if you ever talk to climate scientists they will happily tell you that their expertise is limited to their niche. It is too complex of a problem for a singular person to understand. So let's keep that in mind when we're arguing with one another. It is good to have arguments and discussions, but turning into fights is unproductive and just demonstrates how naive we all are. I'll bastardize a Feynman quote: "I think I can safely say that no one understands Climate Change."