In Switzerland today, a pumped hydro facility started operation
20GWh capacity
A new pumped-storage station in one of the highest and remotest parts of Switzerland will help cope with fluctuations in wind and solar-power supply. It can stabilize electricity output for the whole of Europe.
“The electric storage capacity of the reservoir surpasses that of 400,000 electric car batteries,” explains Alain Sauthier, engineer and director of the Nant de Drance pumped-storage hydroelectric plant, pointing towards the Vieux Emosson reservoir. This artificial lake was built in 1955 in the municipality of Finhaut, high in the Alps of the Swiss canton of Valais.
snip
“It is an ecological battery that uses the same water over and over. The output is more than 80%: for every kilowatt hour of electricity used to pump the water upstream, 0.8 is fed into the grid,” Sauthier explains.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/inside-switzerland-s-giant-water-battery/46915530
= new reply since forum marked as read
...the glaciers in Switzerland disappear because we bet the planetary atmosphere on replacing nuclear energy with stupid fantasies about storing trivial amounts of expensive and useless wind and solar while burning coal.
Egli, P. E., Belotti, B., Ouvry, B., Irving, J., & Lane, S. N. (2021). Subglacial channels, climate warming, and increasing frequency of Alpine glacier snout collapse. Geophysical Research Letters, 48, e2021GL096031.
Excerpts:
This mechanism of glacier retreat was first described some time ago as “subglacial stoping” or “block caving” (Loewe, 1957; Paige, 1956). There are very few documented or quantified examples of this process (Bartholomaus et al., 2011; Dewald et al., 2021; Kellerer-Pirklbauer & Kulmer, 2019; Konrad, 1998; Lindström, 1993; Stocker-Waldhuber et al., 2017). As a result, little is known about where and when collapse features form and whether or not their formation frequency is changing due to climate warming...
...The frequency of collapse features in Alpine glaciers has increased markedly since 2000. Such collapse is associated with glaciers that tend to have lower rates of longitudinal ice flux and so reduced compression and longitudinal closure. Low longitudinal flux is a consequence of glacier thinning related to a tendency for Alpine glaciers to have a negative mass balance due to climate warming. Glacier thinning leads to a longterm reduction of flux of accumulated ice into the ablation zone. Thus, the frequency of collapse at Alpine glacier margins is likely to increase as climate warming continues.
Since 2000...2000...um...2000...why does that year stick in my brain? Oh, I know. That was the year that in 1976 the anti-nuke shithead Amory Lovins implied strongly that we "could" have 16 "quads" (EJ, roughly) of solar energy in the United States. We don't have that on the entire planet, but it's the thought that counts.
It's nice to see "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinukes using units of energy, albeit the derived unit GWh. 20 GWh works out to be 72 trillion joules, slightly less energy than that contained in a single kg of plutonium, 80.3 trillion Joules.
It's a stupendous - and let's be careful to use "percent talk" - 0.000012% of the roughly 600 EJ that humanity consumes each year.
At peak capacity - which in theory can only be utilized 50% of the time at maximum, but will actually will be available for much smaller fractions of a day, it's the equivalent of an 833 MW power plant.
Earth shattering, quite literally.
What's the theory? As of this writing German coal based power output is 19.3 GW, compared to it's wind output of 16.7 MW.
Electricity Map Germany 2200hBerlin220701
Which form of German energy is this water "battery" going to store at 80% efficiency? Or are the Swiss just going to wait until the wind is blowing real, real, real, real, real hard in Germany to fill this daydream up or are they going to waste the power generated by coal?
Have a very pleasant 4th of July weekend.
...clerk who reduces all issues to money.
Energy has an external cost, the cost in destruction of human beings, flesh, etc.
This cost has more consequences than an account balance in a Swiss Bank.
As an environmentalist, I think we should pay more to make a sustainable world. I know this goes entirely over the head of antinukes, since they lack a sense of ethics.
As for the referenda, we live in times where ignorance is very popular and widely endorsed.
Suppose we didn't have a huge Greek chorus carrying on loudly about say, Three Mile Island, Fukushima and so on? Suppose we actually looked at stuff that kills people instead of shit for brains nonsense that if any radiation escapes anywhere at any time it's the end of the world?
Would Switzerland have a referendum endorsing climate change then?
Again, given the rhetoric I hear here from "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes, repeating endlessly, year after year, decade after decade, four decades in the case of Three Mile Island, three decades in the case of Chernobyl, and over a decade in the case of Fukishima the same fucking tiresome and destructive rhetoric, given the wide distribution of this rhetoric, I doubt it.
Anti-nuke rhetoric kills people, more people than have died from Covid because of anti-vax rhetoric.
Three Mile Island's accident began on March 28, 1979. In that week the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide on this planet was 339.18 ppm as measured at Mauna Loa, 81.69 ppm lower than that reported for the week beginning June 19 of this year.
Which cost more lives? Which cost more money? Three Mile Island or climate change? Three Mile Island or air pollution? Do our money obsessed anti-nukes got a bean to count and throw my way?
Chernobyl's accident began on April 26, 1986. In that week the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide on this planet was 350.08 ppm as measured at Mauna Loa, 70.79 ppm lower than that reported for the week beginning June 19 of this year.
Which cost more lives? Which cost more money? Chernobyl or climate change? Chernobyl or air pollution? Do our money obsessed anti-nukes got a bean to count and throw my way?
Fukushima's destruction by a earthquake disaster in which 20,000 people died from seawater and few, if any, people died from radiation exposure, took place on March 11, 2011 In that week the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide on this planet was 391.46 ppm as measured at Mauna Loa, 29.41 ppm lower than that reported for the week beginning June 19 of this year.
Which cost more lives? Which cost more money? Fukushima or climate change? Fukushima or air pollution? Do our money obsessed anti-nukes got a bean to count and throw my way?
Again, to drill it into tiny minds, anti-nuclear rhetoric, whether it gets to the endorsement of the Swiss or not, kills people, more people in fact than anti-vax rhetoric has killed. If, as the Lancet report indicates, air pollution kills 6 to 7 million people per year - it may have been higher 40 years ago - air pollution killed somewhere between 250 million and 300 million people since 1979, when Three Mile Island's reactor #2 melted.
Do anti-nukes ever mention this? No. They don't. They do - I've seen it right here in this forum recently in 2022 - still carry on about Three Mile Island though.
Right here in this forum, during the invasion of Ukraine, we had anti-nukes carrying on about the shelling of a nuclear plant - which ended with no appreciable radiation leaks - while the Russians, funded with MONEY provided by Germany on the theory that nuclear energy is "too dangerous," were blowing human beings to tiny pieces with dangerous fossil fuels diverted to weapons.
There is a reason that I hold anti-nukes in contempt, and the reason is that I am more concerned with human values, and in particular the rights of future generations and the maintenance of valuable ecosystems and they are more concerned with MONEY, in particular their money.
We don't even remotely speak the same language.
This is why anti-nukes complain so loudly about the cost of nuclear plants after pushing rhetoric to be sure that they are as expensive to build as possible - again arsonists complaining about forest fires. The benefits and wealth provided by nuclear power plants will not accrue so much to the generation that builds them, but to every generation that follows.
Now if Switzerland has held a referendum to kill people and deprive future Swiss generations of their glaciers by phasing out nuclear power, this does not mean anything at all that is estimable in my view. Apparently it's OK with anti-nukes, but not me. Anti-nukes are in fact happy about it. They have proven that they are great marketeers.
History seldom records that what is popular is also wise. Human slavery was once very popular in the United States. Anti-Semitism was very popular in Germany between 1925 and 1945. Hell, invading Iraq was popular in recent times.
The confusion of what is popular with what is wise or good is known as the Bandwagon Fallacy.
In this connection, on being told that 100 authors had participated in writing the book Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein (One Hundred Authors Against Einstein), Einstein quipped, "If I was wrong, one would have been enough."
The popularity of anti-nuke rhetoric in Germany and/or Switzerland will kill people, clear and simple.
Arguably, along with the air pollution and climate deaths, the money aspect is killing Ukrainians, since the German energy program funded Putin.
The fact that solar and wind energy play a huge role in the popular imagination and are widely cited as being a means of addressing climate change has nothing to do with the reality of whether or not they can or will address climate change. On the contrary, it has been experimentally determined, at a cost of trillions of dollars, that they are completely ineffective at addressing climate change. The entire 21st century has made this indelibly clear.
If the idiot rhetoric of bean counters musing about the cost of "cleaning up" Three Mile Island - this to an arbitrary standard no other system can match in terms of damage to the environment and human cost - this does not mean that Three Mile Island was a major disaster comparable to climate change.
I don't fucking care if Switzerland has voted for national suicide. The dam lauded in the OP is not worth the carbon making the concrete for it. It's a disgrace.
Antinukes can talk all they want about money. It fits their mentality exactly. They're bourgeois materialists through and through. Experience teaches me that they have the ethical depth of slime molds, not that I wish to demean slime molds as in many ways slime molds are more interesting. Despite much rhetoric to the contrary, no amount of money can change the laws of physics, the same laws that govern energy and in fact, the health of the planet.
I'm not sure that I'll have time to address yet another intellectually dishonest or silly quibble. If I don't have a great holiday weekend.
