Biden Administration Plans For Massive Expansion of Wind Farms Off US Coasts (cnn.com) 296
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Biden administration is planning to aggressively expand offshore wind energy capacity in the United States, potentially holding as many as seven new offshore lease sales by 2025. The move was announced Wednesday by US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and first reported by The New York Times. Haaland said the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is exploring leasing sales along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, in the Gulf of Maine, New York Bight, central Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, as well as offshore the Carolinas, California and Oregon. As part of that initiative, which spans multiple government agencies, the Departments of the Interior, Energy and Commerce committed to a shared goal of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore wind in the US by 2030. The Interior Department estimates that reaching that goal would create nearly 80,000 jobs.
The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:3)
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is why China can beat the US to go carbon free.
Yeah I know someone will complain that China still plans to be a zillion coal plants but in 20 years while we are still fighting NIMBY lawsuits, they will have shifted and be in a better position simply because an authoritarian approach...
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the real problem is the glacial pace of lawsuits. Moreover, the cost of litigation is relatively small (especially for large firms who have lots of lawyers on salary anyway, so may as well use them). Those two things make lawsuits a very useful tool for delaying or blocking any inconvenient initiative.
IANAL, and I haven't really been involved in any major legal issues to date (knocks wood), but I believe things can be much improved here. There should be some limit on the interminable adjournments (which are weaponized by lawyers); appeals shouldn't take years or decades; frivolous litigation, who is sure to lose but was brought up with the sole intention to hinder/delay something should be considered unethical and punished. I don't believe this would be authoritarianism; it would reduce the abuse of a system that I think is overloaded and creaking, and help bring it back in balance.
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:2)
Exactly. There are ways to fix American legalism without resorting to authoritarianism. However the point was authoritarian regimes don't have to deal with this problem which has fostered.
Frankly I am sometimes astonished by the lawsuits that succeed in China but they are also more timely. For example recently a man ran over his 2 year old with his car because of negilence. The courts still ruled the insurance company for the car had to do a significant payout of something like 80% of the coverage but I don
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a man ran over his 2 year old with his car because of negilence. The courts still ruled the insurance company for the car had to do a significant payout of something like 80% of the coverage but I don't fully know what the coverage was for or the full nature of the claim...
What is so astonishing about this case? Isn't this exactly what the insurance is for? If he hit someone else's kid with his car, his insurance would pay out. Why would this be any different because it is his kid? If he hit a tree and injured himself his insurance would still pay for his medical expenses. I'm more astonished this even required a court case to get the insurance company to pay, but as you mention I don't know any details about his coverage or his specific claim.
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who is sure to lose but was brought up with the sole intention to hinder/delay something should be considered unethical and punished.
You could adopt a loser pays legal expenses approach. That massively reduces frivolous suits. But then you also need to level the playing field when consumers take on big guys so for that you need some form of centralised representation such as industry ombudsmen... but that would be government supporting consumers and we can't have that in America - "land of the free to be curb stomped by corporations".
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't reduce frivolous lawsuits. It merely reduces lawsuits by poor and middle class.
Citation: my home nation, where loser pays. We've now had several studies by local university legal departments that all came to the same conclusion. There are high numbers legitimate grievances over small and medium sized conflicts (for example, property conflicts, rental agreement conflicts etc) that should have gone to court from the weaker party's perspective (they had a case with very good chance of winning) that don't because of fear of even small chance of losing the case and having to pay expenses of the much richer party that has much more expensive lawyers. Which would drive the poor party into significant debt.
Basically, if you're not fabulously wealthy, you're going to risk far too much by suing. Unless your case is crystal clear, open and shut with significant precedence already set. And even then, you'll think twice. Costs of the opposing party will almost certainly cause massive economic damage to you if you lose, and that's a chance that poor and middle class people cannot afford to take. But if you're wealthy, you can win cases by simply threatening to take it to court, causing the poor party to concede then and there.
This is so bad that we literally had to have a governmental organisation that de facto does the lawerly work pro bono in consumer cases, because otherwise corporations could do pretty much anything to consumers, and there would be no relevant legal recourse regardless of legislation. Basically if you have a consumer complaint, you address it to the government organisation, which takes an expert panel, considers the merits of the case including your and other party's statement and issues a non-binding ruling. And long standing precedent is that if you take this ruling to court, you'll almost certainly win.
Basically you end up needing jury-rigged solutions to solve some of the worst cases of corporate excess because court of law is out of reach for most people in such a system as a path to solving such grievances.
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that don't because of fear of even small chance of losing the case and having to pay expenses of the much richer party that has much more expensive lawyers. Which would drive the poor party into significant debt.
In my country, the payment for the lawyer is determined by the value of the case. E.g. you argue over $5000 then there is a catalog fixing the price for such a case. While the loser has to pay for both lawyers AND the court costs, there is no such thing as the "more expensive lawyer".
Also if you are
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:3)
Ecofacism or ecosocialism are literally our only hope to address climate change. Pick one or reap what you sow.
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ecofacism or ecosocialism are literally our only hope to address climate change. Pick one or reap what you sow.
We could let people develop energy sources that are both low cost and low in CO2 emissions. That means people will buy it because it makes them more money. That means no government coercion required. It means a free market can be one of the options. It may be the only option.
We've seen politics wrapped up in this for far too long. Why is it that the solution requires government funding? It doesn't require carbon taxes and solar subsidies. It requires a government that takes this seriously and does what it can to balance regulations on harm to people from air pollution, CO2 emissions, and whatever else may be involved. The USA has rules that have become essentially a ban on rare earth element mining. This means we import REEs from China, and then see their CO2 emissions, air pollution, and water pollution, get carried by the wind and sea to us. We don't need subsidies to fix this. What we need are politicians that recognize that if we mined these minerals domestically then we can do so with less damage to the environment. We could change some rules on environmental protection to find some new balance on the harms done, or maybe increase the taxes on imported items that contain REEs so domestic production can make a profit.
The rare earth element problem is just one example. We don't need a larger and more restrictive government to solve this. A more permissive one would help. Mining s a messy industry and will do some harm to the environment. We can not avoid mining because ultimately everything around is is made from dirt. We can be more permissive here to avoid far more destructive practices from what we import.
Or, we do nothing and keep buying our goods from places that dump toxic shit in the sea, put children to work in mines, and burn coal to drive their refineries and factories. Because I guess that makes us better people, or something.
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:4)
We could let people develop energy sources that are both low cost and low in CO2 emissions. That means people will buy it because it makes them more money. That means no government coercion required. It means a free market can be one of the options. It may be the only option.
It's pretty hard to be cost competitive with 'just spew all your toxic byproducts into the air'
Setting a price for CO2 (and other pollutants) would be a good start towards letting the free market work things out.
I'm sure your favourite nuclear solution would love it if they didn't need to worry about safety or pollution. Government regulations are absolutely necessary. Free markets won't fix everything.
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty hard to be cost competitive with 'just spew all your toxic byproducts into the air'
This is a discussion on how solar power is competitive with coal, so problem solved.
Government regulations are absolutely necessary. Free markets won't fix everything.
There is no free market without government regulations. A free market requires a government to enforce contracts, settle disputes, provide a means of exchange, and so many other services to keep businesses honest and the free market from collapsing into slavery and armed robbery. Read the US Constitution and you will find that most of it is concerning maintaining free trade.
There is a very wide gap between a minimalist government and no government. I'm thinking you may have my post confused with some other post, or me confused with someone else. Where did I call for removal of regulations on safety or pollution? I'm asking for the rules to make sense, not for them to be removed completely. If you want to make this about solar vs. nuclear fission then that's fine. Nuclear fission has already been shown to be better than solar power on CO2 emissions, air pollution, and human deaths.
Government regulations are necessary. I'm seeing the nuclear power industry begging for regulations. As it is now the US federal government is not regulating the nuclear power industry, it has banned it. If the government were to tax CO2 emissions then that would not go well for solar power, solar power produces more CO2 for the same energy than wind, hydro, and nuclear fission.
I keep seeing a mention of a need to keep greenhouse gas emissions below 50 grams of CO2 equivalent per kWh. Why 50? For one because we know it will never reach zero. Why not 25? Why not lower yet? Or higher. Maybe it is 50 because if a lower number was chosen then solar PV might have to be ruled out. If higher then natural gas might be considered as "zero carbon" as solar. We are seeing people demand that nuclear fission be given the same legal status as "zero carbon" as solar power at various levels of government, because an honest and sane government would set a threshold on what makes the list and apply it equally.
We buy solar PV from China, where rules on safety and pollution are quite lax, while we have a near complete ban on nuclear fission power in the USA. People arguing for this nuclear ban to continue so we can continue to buy solar PV from China are ignoramuses or shills, which one are you?
There are no options for energy that produce no pollution, emit no CO2, and cause no human deaths. The best option on those metrics is nuclear fission. A government that is serious about CO2 emissions and human deaths would be building nuclear power plants, not solar PV or offshore windmills.
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This is a discussion on how solar power is competitive with coal, so problem solved.
It's a discussion about wind...
Offshore wind would be cheaper than coal if coal had to pay for its pollution
It's also about markets not working without the relevant incentives to solve a problem we want solved.
A free market would happily pollute 100x more if there was profit in it.
The Market is solving the problem of making the most money, not keeping the air and water clean. Would you be happy if the free market made coal cheaper, but even more polluting? No nuclear/wind/solar just cheap polluting coal
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Free markets won't fix everything.
Free markets are constructs that don't just naturally appear. The more or less natural state is warlord-ism and unstable dictatorship. In order for a free market to appear you need to have laws and an agreement to enforce them. These can be as simple as the laws which allow money and enforcement of ownership, however they are still laws. The free market for food only works because most food that you can see you can safely buy, which requires lots of regulation and controls.
In terms of carbon, free market
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:4, Interesting)
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What do you mean by 'natural'? Isn't our social evolution into ever more tolerant, kind & fair societies natural?
I mean "more likely to happen if nobody manages to intervene" / "what tends to happen when we flatten society, reset and try to start again". I think more fair & kind societies work together better and then can win in longer term competition, ending up expanding into the other areas either by example or by integration so in that sense I agree with you. I'm not convinced that's inevitable, though. People may have to fight for it.
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Of late...no
I mean, people are pushing the opposite of natural when spewing things like boys and girls are interchangeable, there is no difference between the sexes in any way, etc, you can be whatever sex/gender you feel like at the moment and everyone has to "know" and address you as such, etc.
This is just recent shit people are actually pushing and trying to enforce and teach our young
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Aww hell.
Let "future" people worry about that.
Not my problem now.
Free markets fail to price externalities properly (Score:5, Insightful)
We could let people develop energy sources that are both low cost and low in CO2 emissions. That means people will buy it because it makes them more money. That means no government coercion required. It means a free market can be one of the options. It may be the only option.
We've seen politics wrapped up in this for far too long. Why is it that the solution requires government funding? It doesn't require carbon taxes and solar subsidies.
Such sources exist, at the moment I write this in the UK for example wind is generating 8.90GW or 26.27% of the country's 33.87GW demand. Like Nuclear, wind sells into the market at any price because it's a perishable asset, use it or lose it. Huge interconnectors swap it for Nordic Hydro power and French Nuclear power depending on the time of day. Unfortunately for your argument this didn't just magically come into existence, it required boot strapping, that is what subsidies are for, when major coal mines were opened many of them got tax breaks, etc.
See energy markets can never truly be free for one simple reason, the populous gets angry when they flick the light switch and it doesn't come on. The Texas winter storm was a classic example of this, generators hadn't been winterproofed as a cost cutting measure. If this meant minor inconvenience and slightly higher prices that would have been fine but instead the grid came close to collapse and it killed people. Ultimately a real-world energy market has some things you simply cannot allow to happen that are not driven by natural market forces, you have to induce them. For example there are projects like pumped hydro needed to balance and stabilise markets which require massive capital investment and aim to maintain grid stability. Their existence is a strategic imperative not just a market one, you have to artificially price that into the market or they simply won't get built.
Incidentally carbon obligations especially tradeable ones are as near a free market solution as you're going to get. They fix the market's failure to put a price on an undesirable externality rather than regulating it. It means you can pollute, but you cannot gain an unfair competitive advantage by doing so.
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We could let people develop energy sources that are both low cost and low in CO2 emissions. That means people will buy it because it makes them more money. That means no government coercion required. It means a free market can be one of the options. It may be the only option.
Why would your magic only work on low CO2 energy sources?
We could let people develop energy sources that are both low cost and extremely polluting That means people will buy it because it makes them more money. That means government coercion is definitely required. It means a free market can't be one of the options. It can't be the only option.
If you wan't markets to do anything useful. You either need regulations to stop pollution. Or you need to force a price for pollution into the market.
Markets won'
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Ecofacism or ecosocialism
those are 2 radically different ideas
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:2)
That is their point, that one of the radical extremes is inevitable.
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Genocide is the only solution to the problem of losing about 3-10% of total GDP growth out of ~300% growth by the end of the century.
You can't make this shit up.
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What you need is effective government.
The problem with the US, like many countries with two party systems, is that hyper-partisan politics make resolving difficult problems like climate change almost impossible. Countries that have coalition governments and a plurality of parties in contention for power have tended to do much better.
Having said that, the Biden administration seems to be quite weak and it's very disappointing that he hasn't made more effort to get things though. As much as I hate playing int
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Don't worry, the current administration is fucking things up plenty well at a good pace so far.
And as far as the actual powers go for the President of the US, constitutially he is fairly weak....he cannot make legislation, he
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Having said that, the Biden administration seems to be quite weak and it's very disappointing that he hasn't made more effort to get things though. As much as I hate playing into that partisan politics, he does have the power to get things done but doesn't seem to want to exercise it.
That's because the Democrats want to be weak. They don't want to govern, and I say this as a leftist. They want to say the right words, scrupulously follow the rules and norms when their opposition does not, and righteously lose. Then they move slightly to the right, and raise funds based on a few social issues like abortion ("If you don't vote for us, who will protect Roe?").
The Democrats' role is to discipline the left and keep them from actually accomplishing anything because that's how the capital th
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We really have extremely little authoritarianism when compared to other countries. Sure, we don't let convicted pedophiles run preschools, and so forth, but overall rules here are not onerous. Except to those who wish to blame all problems on a current administration. For example, almost everywhere requires you to wear clothing, you can get arrested for being naked in public, and yet some people freak the hell out by being asked to wear a mask when shopping in s tore. That freaking out is not because of
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but I think it is reasonable to acknowledge that the reason centrally planned econonomies failed in the past might have primarily been due to a lack of technology (e.g. information available was insufficient to make effective decisions).
I vaguely recall that it also used to be the case that at least in the 1950s and before, the Soviets actually shunned effective planning methods. Something about Marx envisioning a situation where any random factory worker could do administrative tasks. As we've come to know, things like linear programming and such are really a stuff for specialists, not for a welder randomly assigned. Plus, as you say, you may need good computers and data for all that.
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China still plans to be a zillion coal plants
China canceled or suspended dozens of coal projects a few months ago.
China is rolling out more solar and wind than any other country.
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:2)
I wasn't speaking towards you ShanghaiBill. We know better how China is progressing in this regard.
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When PRC stopped importing coal from Australia a few months ago to "punish Australia for being hostile", it caused a massive internal coal shortage in China. Coal prices went through the roof, and factories had to be temporarily closed and have to be operating at severely limited capacity to this day because of electricity shortage. At the same time, they also temporarily suspended a few construction sites, coal plants among them, for the same reason. Not enough electrical power, because there's not enough
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:4, Interesting)
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No, it's not why China can go carbon free faster than the US.
China is a dictatorship, remember that. If President Xi says "Nuclear plant goes there!" a nuclear plant gets built there. Don't care if it's in your backya
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Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:2)
Care to back up your claim by proving any single one of those statements to be false?
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If anyone thinks that ecofascism is an unpopular movement, this post provides excellent piece of evidence to contrary.
And if someone doubts how genocidal they are at the extreme, Brenton Tarrant should provide an excellent example.
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I live in China and have all my organs.
Then your lack of a spine is congenital? There's people standing up to the Chinese government. They have a spine, or something. Enough people stand up to the government and it will fall.
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No, it's indoctrinated out of most people, and beaten out of the rest. The Party has nearly total reach, and if it can't reach you, it can reach your family. Nothing removes the spine like having to listen to your mother getting gang raped in prison because you dared to say a wrong thing at a wrong place at a wrong time.
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Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:2)
people should tear down their government when it ceases to represent the people. it's a last resort and has significant repercussions.
Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:2)
I hope socialized healthcare can help and anonymous European who pulled a muscle patting himself on the back.
Re:The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:5, Funny)
The Vineyard Wind project, already has at least 4 lawsuits apposing it. A few more months there could be more.
This problem will fix itself within the next few decades. Since rising seal levels will shift the location of shore-front properties so far inland, all the newly minted beach house owners won't even be able to see the wind farms.
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Wind farms would hardly put a dent in rising sea levels. Only Nuclear can provide enough 24/7 power to eliminate CO2 completely.
Why do you claim that? There's massively more wind available that we could ever use. There's plenty of land and more or less indefinite sea. Production is completely possible. Most importantly, wind, even offshore wind which is the most expensive type, is massively cheaper that Nuclear so, for the same amount of money available you can go much further much faster in building out wind power. Maybe some future, yet to be developed Nuclear solution will be cost competitive and when that comes it's worth in
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Wind farms absorbing the wind contribute to warming and affect climate patterns.
You honestly believe that? Where do you get these ideas from?
Wind farms use up a crazy amount of space compared to Nuclear for the energy they produce.
The land isn't "used up". It's still there and where I come from we tend to use it for agriculture.
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Don't you worry about wind cancer getting into your crops?
Not at all, we take a concentrated solution of invermectin, hydroxychloroquine and excrement from a male bovine animal which we spray liberally on the crops after picking them. This completely solves the problem.
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Re: The jobs right now are for lawyers. (Score:2)
Create 80000 new jobs... (Score:2, Informative)
Except no one wants to work anymore
Re:Create 80000 new jobs... (Score:4, Funny)
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Of course they do. Some people love working so much they work three jobs just to make ends meet.
Then where the fuck are they, because none of these 3-job people seem to be in my area. We're bombarded in ads here for jobs at meat packing plants, warehouses, and factories. All of them offering pretty good wages for this area, benefits, and even cash bonuses for signing on. These places are basically begging people to ask around if they know anyone that would be interested. No one wants to work these jobs. Everyone wants to work from a laptop at home, or in an office, or many simply don't want to work at
Re:Create 80000 new jobs... (Score:5, Insightful)
* for poverty wages
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In the report I read there were also a lot of people that retired early and won't return, and that was across many salaries
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I retired early. COVID made me realize the dream of working from home, and when my company was unwilling to accommodate this, the gonzo stock market made my dream of not working at all a reality.
Off-shore wind farm business plan (Score:2, Interesting)
Off-shore wind farms are easier to construct at scale, as heavy equipment can be carrier by a few ships instead of thousands of trips by truck. The best profits to be had is when building a massive project.
Once it is built, the transmission line and the turbines themselves are very costly to maintain. This is where profit is lower, the best thing to do is end your involvement with the project immediately after it generates powers. Hopefully having collected as many government grants and tax incentives as po
Re:Off-shore wind farm business plan (Score:5, Interesting)
Citation for those costs?
I seriously doubt they are much compared to other forms of generation like coal and nuclear, given that offshore wind is price competitive with them (without subsidies).
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The most important part however is the fact that winds are more stable off shores than on land in most places. It means off shore wind is somewhat less spiky and easier to integrate into the grid.
Re:Off-shore wind farm business plan (Score:4)
Steps you can take to reduce but not eliminate the [well known] repair costs of off-shore wind turbines include rust protection (in German) [fraunhofer.de], mechanical force, corrosions, biofouling. And Operation and maintenance (O&M) activities typically represent a big part of the total costs (e.g. 25–30% of the total lifecycle costs for offshore wind farms). [springer.com]
If I had to cite sources for every post instead of assuming that we live in a world where information is readily available in seconds, then I might not support it. You're free to ask me how I came to my conclusions. But accusing me of "making shit up" is a disingenuous argument. You could have taken any of the following actions:
* looked it up yourself and moved on with your life. (perhaps many people who read and didn't comment already did this)
* provided counter evidence or sources (such as that land and offshore are the same cost)
* asked for clarification
* challenged my assertions and demand sources, without resorting to accusations and ad hominem
By 2025?? (Score:4, Insightful)
While Biden may no longer be in office by 2024? And we all know that if Trump returned, he will immediately dismantle everything Biden built.
This unending flip-flopping is going to send America down the drain.
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As long as the flip-flopping is profitable for big media and corporate lobby pushers, it'll continue.
How we stop our nation's destruction being profitable is a question I wish someone had the answer to. As a late forties dude just trying to live out what's left in peace, it's a conundrum that's baffled me most of my adult life.
Quoting Fox Mulder (Score:2)
Re:Stupid waste of money, go nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't need to fast track small modular nuclear reactors to solve this. We could be building 3rd generation nuclear power plants that the NRC already approved. Some were deemed safe in the 1990s, some more recently in 2005 or so. This is technology that exists and can be deployed today. Issues of costs and build time will only be resolved with experience, and the only way to get experience is to start building them.
I'm not saying don't try SMRs. We can do more than one thing at a time. Build 3rd generation nuclear power, work on SMRs and other 4th generation nuclear power. Build some more hydro, onshore wind, geothermal, or whatever else may prove to be low in cost and low in CO2 emissions.
The Biden administration is not taking CO2 reductions seriously. I don't know who this Brandon person is that people are talking about but he seems to be popular now and has solutions. Let's go Brandon!
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Who is going to pay for these reactors? I don't want too, there are much cheaper alternatives.
I really don't want to throw my money at 4th gen stuff, so far all of those have been disasters of one kind or another.
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This will end up being like California rail, endlessly delayed and never built.
You want to help reduce CO2 ASAP? fast-track small modular nuclear reactors [..]
All probably in a matter of years if you really throw out a lot of regulation surrounding them.
So, the regulation that will, presumably, choke the build of the offshore windmills is ok, but the one stopping the build of new nuclear power stations can be thrown away?
Apart from not being very realistic it is also wrong.
Building a nuclear power plant takes much more time than building a wind farm. Even if you would get approval to build a new nuclear power plant today there is no way that you would have electricity on the grid by 2030...
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This will end up being like California rail, endlessly delayed and never built.
You want to help reduce CO2 ASAP? fast-track small modular nuclear reactors, get one built next to every city of any size.
I can't see NIMBYs liking nuclear reactors next to every city and more than they like offshore wind or new rail links
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This will end up being like California rail, endlessly delayed and never built.
Because of naysayers who won't shut the fuck up, mostly.
You want to help reduce CO2 ASAP? fast-track small modular nuclear reactors
You used to be an interesting troll. Now you're just another boring one. There are lots of reasons why they won't work. There are per-unit inspection and maintenance costs on nuclear reactors that make SMRs a total wingnut idea. It just makes sense on no level.
Is CO2 reduction really important or not?
It is, and the cheapest way to do it doesn't involve nuclear, which is convenient because you can immediately tell when someone isn't serious about combating climate change because they babble ab
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Every story about energy has a long post by you, explaining why everything except nuclear sucks. The speed with which you post them suggests that they are mostly copy/paste.
Of course, you are completely wrong. You talk about costs. Yes, offshore wind is more expensive than onshore wind... But it's still a fraction of the cost of nuclear.
Then we get to the tired old "we can build new reactors that consume waste" stuff. If such things were commercially viable they would have been built. Fact is, every single
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Malicious mind at work: "We penalize nuclear as much as we can at every stage. Then we add things like priority to sell to wind and claim that this is not a subsidy. Then we conclude that wind is cheaper than nuclear with a straight face".
Re:That's going to cost more than other options (Score:4, Interesting)
In the UK onshore wind has been profitable without any subsidies for a few years now.
Besides, considering the unlimited subsidy that nuclear gets, it's hardly fair to compare nuclear with anything else. Even with the subsidy, the cost is extremely high.
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Malicious mind at work: "I will lie that in UK, wind doesn't get preferential seller treatment, even after being called on it. I will also lie to an even more extreme degree, going as absurd as stating that subsidy nuclear gets is unlimited".
There are Chinese propaganda accounts on this site right now who are less malicious in their propaganda, and more truthful than you are being right now.
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There's an interesting article about how, in the UK, even offshore wind is now paying out more than it gets in subsidies: https://www.carbonbrief.org/gu... [carbonbrief.org]
You can read the paper it is based on here: https://sci-hub.tf/10.1038/s41... [sci-hub.tf]
As it notes, projects in Germany and The Netherlands are already subsidy free.
By the way, Hinkley Point C gets preferential treatment. As well as the insane spot price it gets, it has a guaranteed buy on everything it produces.
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Penalize Nuclear? It's the only form of power that's ever been permanently subsidized,
You mean other than coal and gas where the incurred costs of global warming (not to mention vast amounts of local pollution for coal) are subsidized by everyone else. Nuclear has explicit subsidies, other things often have implicit ones.
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If nuclear power was profitable, it would get built. But it isn't.
I agree. We had decades of people working very hard to keep nuclear fission power from making a profit. This comes with frivolous lawsuits. This comes with politically appointed regulators not allowing permits to build. With no permit to build the cost to build is effectively infinite. Since the Carter administration Democrats had a majority, or a large enough minority in the Senate to filibuster, which gave them the ability to stop nearly every nuclear power plant from getting a permit and/or ability
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So why is nuclear power the only thing that environmentalists have supposedly been able to block?.
Because it is easier to generate fear around nuclear power, what with its inherent association with nuclear weapons and its alienness to everyday experience. Even though coal power is far more dangerous, for example, people understand it better.
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There is no need to generate fear. Nuclear is so expensive it fails in the market all by itself. It only ever gets built because of lobbying, and with massive subsidies.
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There is no need to generate fear. Nuclear is so expensive it fails in the market all by itself. It only ever gets built because of lobbying, and with massive subsidies.
It's only so expensive because of the fear-powered anti-nuke lobby.
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It's not that. Look at Hinkley C, the government resolved all the opposition issues before even putting out the contract. Still ended up being the most expensive object on Earth. No British company would touch it, in the end the contract went to EDF and some Chinese investors, even only after the government granted it a lifetime guaranteed spot price well above the going rate. And the usual free insurance etc.
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You missed the 'supposedly'. As the link shows, they haven't really been able to block nuclear plants; most of them self-cancel, because IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE.
You've got cause and effect backwards. They have been able to block nuclear plants, by using fear to lobby for regulations that make nuclear plants too expensive.
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Lawyer and court fees.
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Containment, Planning, and Risk were all evaluated over 40 years ago, the minor fixes that were needed for those designs are in. This industry has very little reason to go past a 1970 PWR design othe
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Surely if frivolous lawsuits and politically-appointed regulators and filibusters were that effective, lots of other parts of the green agenda would be in place.
We don't see more windmills and solar power because they can't make a profit. It's easier to block permits than create a legal guarantee for making a profit. Solar power has grown at the pace of subsidies, if solar power could make a profit then it would not be so limited in growth. Onshore wind makes a profit without subsidies which is why it has grown faster but that growth is limited by other market forces that affect profit.
The link lists dozens of reactors that were canceled after a permit was issued.
Yes, I know, that's why I mentioned other factors like frivolous lawsuits.
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For me to believe you would mean that the federal government is paying people to build windmills they'd build anyway. Why subsidize what is already profitable?
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The levels of subsidy for offshore power in Europe are tiny and dropping all the time. Some of the latest projects will operate with zero subsidies. /s /s /s
If we can do it why can't the USA after all, aren't they supposed to be no 1 in everything under the sun?
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Because no one here gives a flying fuck about windmills....floating or otherwise.
If there was widespread interest and we wanted them, we'd have them.
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For me to believe you would mean that the federal government is paying people to build windmills they'd build anyway.
The article says the exact opposite. The federal government will offer to lease federal waters to wind power developers. The wind power developers pay the federal government.
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For me to believe you would mean that the federal government is paying people to build windmills they'd build anyway. Why subsidize what is already profitable?
To get things done sooner. To help with economies of scale to make it even cheaper. To do more.
Financing isn't free even if the result will be profitable. No need to wait for the profits to finance the next phase of the rollout. You can do more at the same time.
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https://babylonbee.com/news/gi... [babylonbee.com]
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Ya, just like the former alleged president who recently gave a speech in Iowa that lasted over 1 and 1/2 hrs., just to prove he is dictatorship material.
Re:"The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:4, Funny)
GOTO: "Why do Republicans have such violent fantasies?"
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Re: FUCK BIDEN! (Score:2)
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Should not be down modded. It's a serious point: hurricanes are likely to rip the props to shreds. The Biden administration, like many previous ones, has no coherent plan for anything. They just careen from one thing to another grabbing the first thing that they think satisfies their base.