This is the highest carbon intensity for Germany in comparison to France in "percent talk" I've...

[NNadir]

Last edited Sat Feb 26, 2022, 04:49 PM - Edit history (2)

...personally seen over the last few months of monitoring the Electricity Map

As of this writing, (1:21P US EST, 7:22 PM Munich time 02/26/22) Germany's carbon intensity is 491 g CO2/kwh as compared to France's 57 g CO2/kwh. In the "percent talk" utilized by proponents of so called "renewable energy" to disguise it's inability to address climate change, the German carbon intensity is 861% higher than France's.

It is not so much, by the way, because Germany is all that much higher than usual; I have yet to see them over 600 g CO2/kwh, but because France - during the shut down of the 4 Civaux type reactors after inspectors found a fault in their emergency shut down borated water pipes France is typically running close to 100 g CO2/kwh - is lower than usual.

Why is France running lower than usual? It's because France, which during the Holland administration drank the "wind is green" Koolaid, is producing significant wind power right this minute. France is producing 10.3 GW of wind power, at this minute.

Germany is producing, with far larger wind capacity, 2.03 GW of wind energy, a capacity utilization of 3.17%. (French wind capacity utilization for its wind plants is correspondingly 55.52%.

Does the lower carbon intensity of France because the wind is blowing suggest to me that I should stop criticizing the wind industry?

Sorry, it doesn't.

When the wind isn't blowing in France, the French, like the Germans, burn gas. There seems to be a gas problem in Europe, including a problem in that country that's been funding Putin for years, Germany. The 4 Civaux type reactors should return to service this spring, bringing 6 GW of reliable continuous power into the French grid, thus producing more power in four buildings than all of the wind turbines in Germany are producing in the entire country.

Now the Germans can't get gas, except from the Scandinavian gas producers in Denmark and Norway and as a result they're burning coal, dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere and driving climate change.

German coal mined internally is largely lignite.

It's time to refer to the Lancet paper by which I estimate coal based mortality:

Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.

Here's table 2:

While I've been writing this post, the German carbon intensity has risen to 498 g CO2/kwh, with 25.3 GW of power coming from coal.

Over a 24 hour period this amount of coal would amount to 607 GWh of energy. German domestic "coal" is largely lignite, but they may be importing bituminous or anthracite coal from other countries.

The 24 hour death toll would thus be for lignite, about 19 deaths per day, which would annualize to roughly 7200 deaths per year among Europeans.

For bituminous or anthracite coal, the toll would be about 15 deaths per day, which would annualize to roughly 5400 deaths per year among Europeans.

Were the power now being produced by coal in Germany produced using the nuclear plants Germany shut because of the widely held German opinion that "nuclear energy is 'too dangerous,'" the Lancet table suggests that the death toll would have been far less than 1 for 607 GWh of nuclear power (0.032 deaths) annualizing to 11 deaths, less people than will die today in Europe from German coal waste dumping into the planetary atmosphere.

There is, of course, another matter. It would appear that Germany relying on Russia for gas, and sending them lots of Euros, when the wind isn't blowing, has also ended up killing people; we don't know how many yet.

If I sound angry, it's because I am.

[Miguelito Loveless]

1. This is one area we agree

Nukes are safer than coal/gas when looked at objectively. I just don’t understand your pathological hatred for solar and wind generation.

[Ghost Dog]

2. I think NNadir deplores inefficiency. Nt

[Ghost Dog]

3. Can you say how many of the nuclear plants Germany shut down

could be, technically and economically, quickly restarted?

[NNadir]

4. I have no idea. Presumably Germany has lost its nuclear professionals, its engineers, etc.

They may have destroyed nuclear infrastructure, removed critical equipment from plants.

They never forgot how to mine and burn coal though, and they won't.

[Ghost Dog]

5. Yes, in spite of the greenwashing there is no hope now of preventing

runaway global heating and biospheric consequences without rapid new nuclear development. Governments are told by their elites and related economists that GDP (but not per capita, heaven forbid) is after all the most important factor.

[Finishline42]

6. Nothing about building nuclear power plants is rapid

except the cost overruns.

The US has about 100 nuclear plants producing 20% of our electricity. Do you really thing building 200-300 new plants is going to happen? 2 in South Carolina were shut down half way thru construction not too long ago.

[NNadir]

8. Oh bullshit. We've been hearing how fast solar and wind energy can be built for over 50 ppm...

... in CO2 concentration increases, more thna 40 of which took place while I've listened to similar whining here, while dumbshit anti-nukes, including "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinukes, deny that the United States once built 100 nuclear reactors in 20 years while providing the lowest priced electricity in the world.

Numbers don't lie, even if people who know zero about engineering continue to lie about how fast nuclear plants can be built. The first nuclear power reactor in the United States, the Shippenport reactor was built in the 1950's, was proposed in 1953, ordered in 1954, with ground broken late in the year and came on line in 1957.

Shippingport Atomic Power Station.

This first largely pilot commercial nuclear reactor ran for 25 years without causing a single loss of life. It was built by engineers using slide rules, technology developed in the 1940's, nearly 80 years ago.

Not once, in the last 50 years of this bullshit being handed out has the solar and wind industry advocates, has the solar and wind scam produced 28 exajoules of primary energy that the nuclear industry has been producing for three decades, continuously, without interruption, without importing Russian gas, without tearing up huge stretches, thousands upon thousands of square miles, of virgin wilderness to build plastic spitting industrial parks for wind turbines while climate change surges.

Not fucking once.

And still we have apologists for this expensive failed scheme whining, "It takes too long to build nuclear plants." And let's be clear, OK. These anti-nukes, including "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes, the kind of people who whine about the insurance coverage of people dismantling plants while millions of people die, without compensation, from air pollution, are all in the position of being arsonists complaining about forest fires.

Unfortunately, much as Trumpers bought into bullshit about Covid, the reality of the disease, the nature of vaccines, too many people took these mindless antinuke (including "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinuke) assholes seriously.

Here's the fucking result, the daily measurements for CO2 concentrations recorded at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory over the last fucking five days:

February 25: 420.36 ppm
February 24: 420.85 ppm
February 23: 420.31 ppm
February 22: 419.26 ppm
February 21: 418.57 ppm
Last Updated: February 26, 2022

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2, Accessed 2/26/22 5:57 PM, an hour where wind and solar anti-nuke Germany's carbon dioxide intensity is 478 grams of CO2/kwh, 612% higher than France's 78 grams of CO2 per kwh hour.

Now, I've been writing here for more than 19 years. The carbon dioxide concentrations in the planetary atmosphere when I started writing in late November 2002 was 372 ppm. There were a lot of mindless assholes here whining that nuclear power plants "took too long to build." It doesn't take very long, I concede to tear the shit out wilderness and lace it with access roads for wind turbines, but it's taking forever to get that shit to provide significant energy.

Imagine if, 19 years ago, in the United States we'd started building 100 nuclear power plants, and were able to do so without interference from uneducated yuppie brats from Greenpeace whining and crying. Let's assume they were 1000 MWe power plants built on 1980's technology, more advanced than the technology that built the more than 100 reactors built in this country that operated here which was 1960's and 1970's technology, plants operating at a poor Rankine 33% efficiency. Today those plants would be producing roughly 3 exajoules of energy, or about 30% of what all the fucking wind and solar trash is producing on the entire fucking planet. They would be doing so without relying on access to coal, gas, and oil.

Next year, China is going to surpass France as the country with the second most number of nuclear reactors. They are turning them out rapidly.

20 years ago, in 2002, China's nuclear capacity was 5,342 MW. Today it's 50,789 MW Source: Graphic in Nuclear Power in China. (Figures can be obtained by passing the cursor over the histogram figure in the link. They have 53 operating reactors, with 18 more under construction.

Sure, they're also installing solar and wind junk, all of which will be landfill in 25 years. The reactors built in 2010 will be saving lives half a century from now, reliably.

We could have done better were it not for whiny little uneducated "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes carrying on insipidly that "it takes too long to build a nuclear reactor."

Do the people who say this kind of shit know how to read?

It's 2022. Using technology out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, people are solid printing components of nuclear reactors.

It didn't take too fucking long to go from 372 ppm of CO2 to 420 ppm of CO2 though did it, this while we listened to all kinds of bullshit in "percent talk" about how wonderful solar and wind energy are.

People died this summer from heat in British Columbia. That didn't take too long either, did it?

It would be really, really, really, really useful if people shouting the kinds idiotic mantras described in here about what is and is not "too long" for the entire length of this century would just crawl into corners, stop talking about subjects about which they clearly know nothing, and just crawl into corners and play video games.

[Finishline42]

11. The one thing that China shares with France and we never will

Is that the Government is building and operating their nuclear power plants. And of course in China their gov't doesn't ask for permission.

We on the other hand have a myriad of fiefdoms that build and operate our plants. There were lots of problems within the construction industry that resulted in safety issues and cost overruns. They certainly contributed to their demise.

There were a number of existing plants that were scheduled to close but the infrastructure bill came to the rescue...

The Department of Energy (DOE) will spend $6 billion on a program designed to keep nuclear power plants from closing, according to a notice of intent published last week.

The department's Civil Nuclear Credit Program is backed by funding from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law in November. The program will allow owners and operators of commercial U.S. nuclear reactors to competitively bid on credits to help continue their operations amid economic hardship.

Applicants will have to prove that their reactor faces closure for economic reasons and that closing the reactor would lead to an increase in air pollution because of power production from other sources. Applicants must also be approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for safe operation.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-to-offer-6-billion-to-keep-struggling-nuclear-reactors-online/618919/

[Finishline42]

7. BTW, California at 3pm is at 138g

With 65% of their energy being produce by renewables - most solar.

Their GNP is also 87% that of Germany.

[NNadir]

9. One of the things apologists for the failure of so called "renewable energy" to address climate...

Last edited Sat Feb 26, 2022, 09:15 PM - Edit history (1)

...change do is to cherry pick data to pretend that their useless crap functions all the time, which it doesn't.

How about we cherry pick the period between February 3 and February 9 of 2022 and look at all the wind turbines in the whole fucking State of California using the graphic CAISO data, and, if we give a shit - usually "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes don't give a shit - download the available *.csv files: CAISO supply page. The so called "renewable energy" graphics are at the bottom of the page. All day today, the industrial wind parks spread over 1500 square miles, have seldom produced even half as much power as Diablo Canyon produces on a 12 acre footprint.

Granted, the solar future electronic waste is producing three times as much as Diablo Canyon now as of this writing (4:05 pm PST), but despite the representations of people who apologize for this crap, the sun goes down. Normally, if one looks at this data, which I do, one learns that the wires connecting this stuff drains about 50 MW of power all night. Today's graphic shows a lot of variability in the solar output, more normally it's a roughly Gaussian figure.

The graphic for so called "renewable energy" has a date pulldown menu in the upper left hand corner. I invite "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes to look at the blue line representing wind power output of all the industrial wind parks in the State of California to report how many times these industrial parks, again spread over 1500 square miles of wrecked land were producing as much as the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant was producing on a 12 acre footprint.

We're over 420 ppm concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmospheres. This reminds me of a remark made by Phyllis Gardner, a clinical pharmacologist at Stanford University describing Elizabeth Holmes in a video about Theranos who kept insisting that the technology she was describing would work, despite Gardner's clear statement that it would never work. "Excuses are like assholes; everyone has one."

What is the latest excuse for the failure of so called "renewable energy" to address climate change after a more than 3 trillion dollar expenditure between 2004 and 2019? Let me guess. Ronald Reagan? George W. Bush? Donald Trump?

Someone spent that money in spite of these people, like... um...let's see...oh I know... the Germans. How are the Germans doing without sending Euros to Putin for gas?

Got another excuse, or am I just supposed to be impressed with a snapshot of California's carbon dioxide intensity on a Saturday afternoon in late February?

Let me know.

[eppur_se_muova]

10. Hmmm .... time to start looking for signs of rethinking things in Germany ...

Is their new Chancellor as opposed to nuclear power as his predecessor ? Is there any push for reopening plants, particularly from industry (I don't expect it from activists)?

When I hear the word "lignite", I cringe. I can't help but be reminded of the Soviet-Area acid rain forest die-offs of the Black Triangle:


Lignite produces far more NOx and SOx (contributors to acid rain) than higher grades of coal. And because it produces less heat/mass on burning, more of it must be burned.