𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

I think they’d nominate Newsom over Clinton tbh.

It’s only an Oxford comma if it’s from the region of Oxford. Otherwise it’s just sparkling interpunction.

Sure, most countries that already made it use hydro. But Denmark is already up tp 80% without hydro, and the UK and Germany are already nearly halfway there without any meaningful hydro. And there’s still so much solar and wind that can still be installed. They’re nowhere near their maximum production capacity yet.

100% from renewables is clearly feasible and achievable. Of course it takes time and investments, but nuclear energy will takre more time and investments to get going again.

We’re nowhere near the potential capacity for energy production from renewables, and already we’re capable of doing 100% renewable power production.

Potential capacity is really not the issue.

We should be able to build them cheaper and faster, not slower and more expensive. And there are countries in the world, that can get it done cheaper, so why can’t we?

It’s because we stopped building them. We have academic knowledge on how to do it but not the practical/technical know-how. A few countries do it because they’re doing a ton of reactors, but those don’t come cheap either.

Renewables will not cover your usage.

False. Multiple countries are already able to run on 100% renewables for prolonged periods of time. The bigger issue is what to do with excess power. Battery solutions can cover moments where renewables produce a bit less power.

Turing the wheel of the car like crazy when they on a straight road.

Just drive like Nicholas Cage drives.

PayPal passes most billing information to the store where you purchased from. Card info is excluded, but in most cases PCI compliance checks ensure that card info is stored securely (or not at all).

Here’s my hot take: people aren’t switching to far right parties all that much. In a moderately healthy democracy, up to 30% of voters are often protest voters. They are unsatisfied with the current state of affairs and vote for whoever promises the largest upset of the status quo that they could see as potentially benefitting them.

Often the media then likes to massively overinflate their popularity, artificially enhancing their electoral success. But it’s also often short-lived. If you look at Dutch elections, you’ll find that a group of voters went for LPF, then PVV, then FvD and then PVV again. Each time it’s broadly talked about as the “rise of X party” but almost every time nothing truly materializes.

In the US you see a hardcore group of approx. 30% of voters vote for Trump religiously. Then there’s a smaller group of moderate Republicans that dislike the Democrats enough to end up voting for Trump too. They don’t like Trump but he’s “ok enough, and better than Obama/Clinton/Biden/Sanders etc…”.

In France, Le Pen got around 30% of the vote. She didn’t perform dissimilarly to the last presidential election results, it was more noticeable that the other parties got much smaller than they were. But whether or not Le Pen can actually take the crown remains to be seen.

Religious fruitcake it is.

Netherlands actually didn’t change much. PVV got +5, but FvD (a worse PVV) lost 4. And the VVD (where Wilders came from originally) also lost 1, so it kinda cancels out. Same goes for the left parties which went from 9 to 8, but that seat went to a progressive center party.

Overall very little has shifted here. And it seems at the European level the same coalition will continue too.

Yup, they shut it off for a couple of hours during exams so students won’t cheat.

Or at least, won’t cheat using the internet.

Elected judges really isn’t all that common in the world. To me (Dutchman), electing judges/sheriffs sounds wild. Police does their own hiring, same goes for the judicial system. Judges decide who gets to be a high court judge, there’s no politics involved at all. That to me sounds like a massive violation of the trias politica.

Merkel and Schroeder gambled on Russian gas imports as a holdover to transition from the aging nuclear plants and coal plants towards renewables. They did so because according to Merkel “it made sense at the time” and she did not really see the larger geopolitical picture. When Russian gas suddenly dried up due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they had to delay the closure of several coal plants to keep the power on.

So they’re trying to replace nuclear and coal with gas.

The nuclear plants in Germany were too old and too expensive to maintain. At some point a reactor is just end-of-life. They get operational issues causing semi-frequent shutdowns. The reliability issues become a problem that skyrockets the costs further.

Closing a nuclear plant like that puts enough money back in the budget to afford a faster transition to renewables, which ultimately closes down the coal plants faster too. It’s about the big picture, it’s not as simple as simply saying “we’ll do less coal” or “we’ll do less nuclear”.

If you close a nuclear power plant before closing a coal one, you are effectively replacing the nuclear with coal.

That’s not how words work.

And coal use has been going up in Germany. So I don’t know where you are getting these ideas from.

Your data source is outdated. You’re looking at data up to 2022, whilst his data shows 2023-2024, which is more recent.

2022 also saw problems like the Ukraine war frustrating gas supply, forcing the use of more coal. And there was covid throwing a wrench into things as well.

Nuclear powerplants in Germany were beyond their lifespan and fixing and modernizing them was not economically feasible. Just too expensive compared to other forms of energy.

Germany certainly hasn’t been “replacing nuclear with coal”.

Nobody is pushing nuclear? Strange, I wonder why in my country numerous parties have been pushing for nuclear then (mostly right-wing pro-corporation parties with fossil fuel donors).

Here’s an article if you don’t believe me: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/03/let-the-state-build-new-nuclear-power-stations-vvd-and-cda/

There’s plenty of parties pushing nuclear. The fact that it’s hard to actually build doesn’t mean that there’s no lobbying effort being made. And even then, a lobbying effort now will only really result in a net nuclear gain in 10-20 years time when the reactors actually finish.

And for the record, “big oil” , does invest in nuclear. Chevron, Duke Energy, Eni, Shell and BP all investments in some nuclear research or nuclear company. The reason they don’t really invest much more is simple: it’s barely profitable, if at all. And renewables threaten the financial picture even more.

Money spent building nuclear is money not spent on renewables. I didn’t say you said to stop building solar, but deciding to build nuclear does mean building less solar, simple allocation of resources.

Solar energy particularly has been becoming increasingly efficient and cheap. In fact, it’s ahead of even the most optimistic expectations price-wise.

There’s been plenty of studies showing that nuclear is not theoretically required to achieve 100% fossil-fuel free energy generation. And we’ve known this since 2009: https://frontiergroup.org/articles/do-we-really-need-nuclear-power-baseload-electricity/#:~:text=Nuclear power proponents argue that,baseload power other than nuclear.

Wind, solar, geothermal, hydro and energy storage solutions are perfectly capable of providing the full energy demand whenever we require it. The only issue is building sufficient amounts of it.

In fact, nuclear is particularly bad at providing base power. The reason is that renewables are so cheap (and becoming cheaper), that one of the main issues has turned into having too much power on the grid. Nuclear unfortunately doesn’t turn off and on very quickly. Many old reactors take a couple hours to do so, and even if it’s technically possible it’s financially impossible because the reactor would be running at too large a loss. When dealing with fluctuating power (mostly caused by the day/night cycle of solar, other effects mostly even out if the grid is large enough), you need a backup system that can also easily turn on and off. Energy storage and hydrogen can do this, nuclear can’t.

Then there’s the energy security argument. 40% of uranium imports come from Russia. Kazakhstan is an alternative, but even that is largely controlled by Rosatom.

Literal fucking oil shill.

Please stay civil. I’m happy to debate you but you can keep the insults to yourself. I’m very much against the oil industry. I’m not even necessarily against nuclear as a technology (I think it’s safe and don’t think the waste will be too big of an issue, also fusion is really cool science), but I have to conclude that it doesn’t make financial sense to go for nuclear, there’s practical problems integrating it with a renewable grid and we just have better alternatives.

If you Google “is a nuclear baseload required” you’ll find plenty of articles clearly demonstrating why this isn’t true. Renewables + storage solutions can provide the base load just fine. The biggest issues have been worked out already, it just needs to be built (which is expensive, but so would nuclear be).

It’s rather the opposite. Big oil pushes nuclear because nuclear directly competes with renewables, and because nuclear is a centralised power generation solution that they can fully own, in contrast with stuff like rooftop solar or onshore wind. Shell has a share in General Atomics, BP is eyeing investments into nuclear energy.

Nuclear fusion might truly be an answer, but there is nothing that nuclear does that renewables can also do, but cheaper and faster.