Three DOE National Labs (ORNL, ANL, INL) Report on the Conversion of Coal Plants to Nuclear Plants.

[NNadir]

6. Well, rather than read and reread my responses, people could find things out for themselves.

I do.

As for the claim that solar and wind cut into the use of fossil fuels, one would think that after trillions of dollars squandered on them the rate of accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going down, but the opposite is true. The accumulation is accelerating.

I derived a crude quadratic equation reflecting this rate here:

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

As of this writing, I have been a member of DU for 19 years and 240 days, which works out in decimal years to 19.658 years. This means the second derivative, the rate of change of the rate of change is 0.04 ppm/yr^2 for my tenure here. (A disturbing fact is that the second derivative for seven years of similar data running from April of 1993 to April of 2000 showed a second derivative of 0.03 ppm/yr^2; the third derivative is also positive, but I'll ignore that for now.) If these trends continue, this suggests that “by 2050,” 28 years from now, using the language that bourgeois assholes in organizations like Greenpeace use to suggest the outbreak of a “renewable energy” nirvana, the rate of change, the first derivative, will be on the order of 3.6 ppm/year. Using very simple calculus, integrating the observed second derivative twice, using the boundary conditions – the current data - to determine the integration constants, one obtains a quadratic equation (0.04)t^2+(2.45)t+ 419.71 = c where t is the number of years after 2022 and c is the concentration at the year in question.

Anyone who wants me to be impressed will show me data that gives different boundary conditions. However they don't because they can't.

Of course, fossil fuels were never the focus of the wind and solar scam. The goal was to attack nuclear energy, which has been successful in Europe, in particular in Germany with the result that energy poverty is arising because the Germans can't get Putin to take more of their money to use to kill Ukrainians.

I note that, in contrast to the Germans, most of the former USSR's former client states are embracing nuclear power. (The report linked cites Polish literature.)

One would think that if solar and wind were so damned quick to build, half a century of cheering for them and throwing huge sums of money at them would have led to them producing more than the roughly 11 exajoules they produce each year, and something like the roughly 30 exajoules nuclear, even with its infrastructure being defunded, has been producing each year for decades in an atmosphere of vituperation and selective attention.

As for my responsibility to answer questions, including deliberately loaded questions, I read for myself, find out things for myself, and it's not my job to teach the anti-nuke community how to face reality. Experience teaches that they won't do it anyway.

I'm an autodidact. Anyone can be one if they spend the time.

Rather than badger me, I wonder if anti-nukes can look in the mirror and see if they're wearing any clothes.

Anti-nukes don't answer the question "If used nuclear fuel is so 'dangerous' how many people have been killed by the storage of used nuclear fuel in the 70 year history of commercial nuclear operations?" even though they report so called "nuclear waste" to be a big, big, big, big "problem." When they act this way, I wonder if they're insane.

Why is it my job to answer them about anything?

They also can't explain why after all this "wind and solar are cheap" poor people can't afford electricity in Europe, why Germany's industries are shutting down and people are being laid off.

Crippling’ Energy Bills Force Europe’s Factories to Go Dark

Manufacturers are furloughing workers and shutting down lines because they can’t pay the gas and electric charges.

(Ref: NY Times, 9/19/22)

The planet is on fire. People have died all over the world from extreme heat. Rivers have disappeared. Glaciers that are the source of fresh water for billions of people are melting and disappearing Crops are failing from heat and a lack of water. Huge ecosystems are collapsing.

And I'm being asked to count beans on coal to nuclear conversions?

Should I include the payback for people not being killed because coal isn't burned because coal was replaced by nuclear?

The cost of rivers flowing because nuclear power produces reliable and constant power without driving climate change by relying on fossil fuel plants to start up?

How about the cost of forests not burning, also because nuclear plants don't need to fire up coal plants like the Germans do when the wind isn't blowing?

How about the cost of having water to irrigate crops also because nuclear plants don't drive climate change?

How about the cost of treating people disabled by air pollution, because nuclear plants can contain their by products on site indefinitely?

I linked a report. Anyone can read it. It's not my job to inform people whose main concern is the cost of the "clean up" of Three Mile Island and isolate it from the cost of the FACT that solar and wind are unreliable and inordinately expensive.

All the nickel and diming in on this issue frankly disgusts me.

A nuclear plant, no matter how much it costs, is a gift to future generations. This was true in my lifetime. My father's generation built the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant, which came on line in 1969 and was generating electricity for me at a low price until 2018. It operated for 49 years without killing anyone. It could have gone longer, but bean counters determined that burning dangerous natural gas and dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere was cheaper.

Again, for whom?

My son is on the front lines of nuclear engineering. It seems quite likely he may interact with some of the people who wrote this report, since the nuclear research community in the national labs is relatively small and his advisor holds a joint appointment to one of those labs. I'm not going to bother him with, "An anti-nuke wants to know..."

Anyone who wants to find out about external costs, the costs to the environment and to living things, including but not limited to human beings can do so. I did. Anyone who wants to talk about construction costs and construction costs only, using selective attention and ignoring the costs of the redundant systems on which the short lived solar and wind junk depend is entirely missing my point, and there's no real value in discussing anything with them. They don't hear what they don't want to hear. They may as well be on a different planet. I, by contrast, am living on the planet that's regrettably burning because of irrational fear and deliberate ignorance.

Am I being clear?

No?

I couldn't care less.