I thought the 5-year performance was rather interesting. Despite the relatively poor performance in the last year, our overall performance compared to prior to COVID was quite good. Were the economists right, and spending during the pandemic helped Canada?
GreyEyedGhost
joined 2 years ago
There have never been lung issues caused by inhaling very small dust particles, right?
There are strong indications that natural gas isn't better than coal, particularly with respect to climate change. Methane, which is the primary component of natural gas, is 10 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2 is. So it's better if we burn it, right? Well, not necessarily. There are a lot of leaks with natural gas distribution, and we have only recently started tracking them. Research papers about the amount of methane released through leaks, and satellites to accurately detect methane leaks from space really only started coming out this year, but the results don't look good.
The short answer is, if you believe in climate change, then there are no fossil fuels we can afford to keep using. Transitioning away from all of them as fast as possible is the only sensible approach.
I'm pretty happy about that. It's warm enough.
Here's a list of industrial disasters. Take your pick of the ones that count as engineering or negligence (and Chernobyl was at least as much negligence as engineering) and tell me how many you get to.
Of course, we haven't discussed what kind of risk we're talking about. And is it better to have thousands of low-impact high-risk activities or one or two high-impact low-risk activities? Because, make no mistake, nuclear has cost less in human lives per unit of energy than any other power generation method we have. And hydroelectric has as profound an impact on the environment as nuclear fallout, it just tends to make some nice beaches and fishing so it isn't negative, right?
Chernobyl was a ridiculous level of negligence on the part of the technicians working at a plant with a very unsafe design.
Fukushima was a reasonably safe reactor design with terrible (and noted as such decades before the meltdown) site designs which could be described as "designed to fail".
You could argue that lessons have been learned from both of those, and Three Mile Island, and safer designs are the result. Or you could argue that Fukushima clearly shows that people shouldn't be involved in such high-risk projects because they will cut corners that will inevitably lead to disasters. If the second is your stance, take a look around. There are plenty of projects with similar risks in other fields all the time.
Fair enough. As you said, none of these are net producers of electricity if your thermodynamic system is big enough to count as closed.
Look up fly ash storage ponds. That's just normal coal usage. Then look up fly ash spills. Then look up how much radioactive material is released into the atmosphere each year from burning coal. Compare that to the estimated amounts of radioactive material released into the environment from all the nuclear plant accidents, and tell me we still wouldn't be better off switching all coal off and using nuclear.
Now, we don't really have to do that, because we have other options now. But we definitely should have used more nuclear 50 years ago, just for the reduced cost of human lives.
Producing acid batteries, or any batteries isn't power generation. It's turning chemical potential (which was generally produced in an energy-consuming process) into a storage device for electrical potential.
Induction is just changing the properties of your electricity, not generation.
While this is true, it is also true that fines that are small relative to your wealth essentially mean those activities come with a convenience fee for the wealthy. Having fines that scale with income or similar maintains the severity of the infraction for people of all incomes.