Germany Rejected Nuclear Power--and Deadly Emissions Spiked

[NNadir]

9. I rarely post here anymore in "renewables will save us" land, but...

...the first link is especially remarkable in its illiteracy and compels me to break my personal rule of giving up on this space, since I am a scientist as opposed to a faith based type.

So called "renewable energy" is available at random times, not necessarily at times of high demand. It happens that the highest demand periods for electrical energy in most places is in the late afternoon and early evening. It's widely known that the sun is either low in the sky or absent in the late afternoon. Nevertheless, solar energy is great.

Thus, if one is simply taking total generation figures, one is in fact including wasted energy as "production." It is not. Nor do these figures record the energy wasted by reheating boilers that were shut down for a few hours when the wind wasn't blowing and the sun wasn't shining.

The atmosphere, however, records this. We hit 415.73 ppm of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa on January 21st. It appears that so called "renewable energy" has not saved us, and isn't saving us. In fact, it won't save us, but it's good for keeping the coal industry going since steel towers for wind power are made using steel and steel is made with coal. And of course, all that asphalt for roads into wilderness areas for huge semi trailer trucks to haul those towers back and forth every 20 years is good for the petroleum industry. (Another component of wind turbines, aluminum, which depends on petroleum coke for electrodes, also "good." )

The gold standard for the types of energy produced by humanity on this planet is the IEA's World Energy Outlook, published every damn year, including most of the last half a century of "renewables will save us" rhetoric, a reactionary rhetoric that never asks why, two centuries ago, with a population that was a fraction of the current population, the world abandoned so called "renewable energy."

I report on it over in the science section where, um, scientists are welcome.

Here is the report on the 2019 WEO release.

World Energy Outlook, 2017, 2018, 2019. Data Tables of Primary Energy Sources.

For convenience, here's the table of data I assembled those reports, all of which are in my files. As a scientist data on something called "reality" is important to me:



I know, I know, "renewable energy" is growing "exponentially" over here, in the E&E forum, but in the WEO reports, in this century all that wind, solar, geothermal and tidal energy so loved here grew, in the by 9.74 exajoules in the 21st century, to a whopping 12.26 exajoules compared to the growth of coal which grew by 63.22 exajoules to at total of 159.98 exajoules and total world energy consumption, which grew by 179.15 exajoules to a total of 599.34 exajoules.

In the "percent" talk we all love so much, all the wind, solar, geothermal and tidal facilities in the world produced 2.04% of the world's energy in 2018, and grew at 5.04% the rate of world energy demand, and 15.4% as fast as coal in this century.

But don't worry. Be happy. Amory Lovins still says we can save the world with conservation, and Elon Musk still says we can save the world with electric cars for billionaires and millionaires.

Fuck poor people.

I used to write here quite a in this forum, as I recall, for well over a decade, during a fierce debate over whether or not the world would be saved by so called "renewable energy."

Then, as a scientist, I realized I was arguing with faith based people, and scientists arguing with faith based people never "win" the argument, at least in the minds of those people having, um, faith.

Fuck those who die because people accepted faith more than data.

But the OP is somewhat surprising, inasmuch as it acknowledges a bitter reality, here of all places, which is that opposition to nuclear energy kills people, real people. Of course, 1000 or so killed Germans pales in comparison to the six or seven million people who die each year from combustion wastes, both from dangerous fossil fuel combustion and "renewable" biomass combustion, many of whom might have been saved were it not for all the anti-nuclear rhetoric, which stopped in its tracks, the growth of nuclear energy, which has consistently held at around 28 exajoules per year, more than double the output of all the worlds, wind, solar, geothermal and tidal energy that's so popular here.

We're hit a figure of close 516 ppm of CO2 last week when measured at Mauna Loa. I'm sure in the faith based community we'll address that all "by 2050" when the world will be powered on 100% renewable energy as an endless parade of breathlessly posted "studies" here and elsewhere, year after year, decade after decade "show" "could" happen.

It's been great to visit old friends.

Have a nice Sunday afternoon.