> "Germany went the renewable path and their annual energy sector emissions are about 300 million tons of CO2."
Not really. They held on hard to gas and coal power. Of the latter, a disturbing amount is still based on lignite or brown coal, which is more accurately described as "somewhat combustible dirt".
Germany is not nearly as dedicated to green energy as they would like the world to think. They shut down their nuclear sector due to fear, and primarily replaced it with more fossil energy.
I do agree that nuclear power is something we should be more positive towards, but that does not invalidate renewable energy sources.
> They shut down their nuclear sector due to fear, and primarily replaced it with more fossil energy.
The Wikipedia article [1] on Germany's energy production suggests that fossil fuel sources have fallen slightly and the reduction in nuclear has been replaced with renewables.
> If you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions effectively, you must support nuclear power.
Very strong statement but no evidence whatsoever.
Germany's a bad example, we're (that is: the government during the last 16 years) doing a lot to keep really old crappy coal power plants running and slow the transformation towards renewables. And still, 50% of the electricity is produced by renewables.
The irony is that Germany approaches the problem completely backwards by starting with the hardest part first. Once Germany is done with all the hard parts progress will speed up dramatically.
I'm surprised why this path isn't discussed as a viable option forward, especially given how much attention is given to hydrogen, despite mountains of likely insurmountable engineering challenges that surround H2.
Production of natural gas is a somewhat inefficient, but infinitely scalable battery for renewables.
My cynical take is that there's no hype to be generated around power-to-natural-gas, and people hyping up hydrogen don't want the public to know that most of originates from breaking fossil fuels.
This path is in fact being discussed. Power2Gas for seasonal storage is a key part of all plans for decarbonization that I'm aware of. There are already a number of demo P2G plants in operation.
> Power2Gas for seasonal storage is a key part of all plans for decarbonization that I'm aware of
That's my understanding, too; amongst the technocrats and field-experts, power-to-gas is taken very seriously. However, amongst the public and the press, even the pop-science press, it's scarcely ever mentioned. Hydrogen, batteries, biofuels, carbon capture, and even fusion all enjoy vastly more attention. I cannot think of any explanation that wouldn't be cynical or sinister
I think the reason is a lot similar: any time we strip the oxygen from C20 that's carbon capture, and we aught to rebury the stuff.
These biofuels only look good when one forgets we need to put a lot of carbon back into the ground, and the latter is already one of the most expensive parts of the transition.
biofuels for air transport make sense, simply because there might be no alternative, and in conjunction with basically limiting air travel to trans-oceanic routes. But it absolutely doesn't make sense for electricity generation.
> Nuclear power is introducing lots of long-lived fission products into environment by slowly poisoning our biosphere.
Nuclear waste from power generation is solid. A typical plant products 3 cubic meters of solid waste per year, which is stored on-site in cooling pools. Compare that to hundreds of thousands of tons per plant of radioactive fly ash just spewed into the atmosphere and millions of tons of CO2. You're going to need a citation for the "108 contaminated sites that are unusable." Also a thousand acres is a little over a square mile; again, which I doubt. That is absolutely not how waste is managed in the US, and leaks like that do not happen.
And if you want to talk about slowly poisoning the biosphere, stop with the anti-nuclear hype and start talking about microplastics and pesticides.
Relative to what! Coal power plans spew out more radiation. You could screw over just one km^3 of earth putting all our waste there for hundreds of years. Localizing the damage like that is almost incomparably better.
The old gaseous diffusion enrichment process plants were very inefficient. You may be thinking of those. They're not used today in the West. (I'm not sure if Russia or China still operates such plants.) The last French plant closed in 2012 and the last American plan closed in 2013 [1]. Commercial centrifuge enrichment, a much more efficient process, started in the 1970s [2]. That's what enriches uranium for power reactor fuel today.
That said, even with gaseous diffusion enrichment, nuclear power had much lower life cycle emissions per megawatt hour than any fossil generating source. Nothing is 100% "carbon free" over its full life cycle but nuclear power and renewables both have very low emissions compared to fossil combustion [3].
If you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions effectively, you must support nuclear power.
France went the nuclear path and their energy sector causes 50 million tons of CO2 per year.
Germany went the renewable path and their annual energy sector emissions are about 300 million tons of CO2.
They were a bit less in both countries due to Covid-19 causing shutdowns of industries.