Green Energy, and the German Grid, from: Kiev Is Burning

[Strannik]

 

 

[urbanoid]

Quote

Norway: Russian man detained with 2 drones near Arctic

Norway has bumped up security at energy installations in the country after numerous drone sightings. The 50-year-old was ordered held in custody for two weeks.

A Norweigan court on Friday ordered a 50-year-old Russian national held in custody for two weeks as he admitted to flying two drones over the country, potentially over critical energy infrastructure.

In recent weeks, there have been numerous drone sightings near the country's offshore oil and gas platforms.

Security has been ratcheted up following explosions that targeted gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea last month. 

What do we know about the suspect?

The identity of the Russian male was not made public, only that he was detained on Tuesday with three passports in his luggage, two Russian ones and one Israeli, according to local Norweigan media.

Authorities also seized four terabytes of data, some of it encrypted.

Customs officers reportedly located two drones and numerous electronic storage devices during a routine check at the border crossing in Storskog, the only border crossing between Norway, a NATO member, and Russia.

The border between Russia and Norway is 198 kilometers (123 miles) from Arctic land.

Prosecutor Anja Mikkelsen Indbjor told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the Russian man is suspected of violating sanctions that were put in effect following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

Under the measure, Norway prohibits aircraft, including drones, operated by Russian nationals or companies "to land on, take off from or fly over Norwegian territory."

The VG newspaper reported that the suspect told the Eastern Finnmark District Court in Vadso that he had been in Norway since August and flew the drones across the country.

Jens Bernhard Herstad, the defense attorney for the Russian national, has said his client acknowledged flying drones across Norway but has not told the court why he is in the country other than as a tourist on vacation.

Justice Minister Emilie Enger Mehl said it was still "too early to draw conclusions." After police review the seized material, charges against the Russian man could be expanded.

Enger Mehl told the broadcaster NRK, "It is known that we have an intelligence threat against us which has been reinforced by what is happening in Europe."

https://www.dw.com/en/norway-russian-man-detained-with-2-drones-near-arctic/a-63441134

[John T]

On 10/11/2022 at 8:30 PM, Strannik said:

 

On 10/12/2022 at 12:00 AM, DB said:

Apparently, a papermill workers strike caused a 23% reduction in industrial energy use in Finland between January and June (the strike ended in May). Otherwise, the total energy use reduction appears to be about 5% overall. Of course, if you take data from 3/4 of a year and compare it with 3/4 of a year averaged consumption you're ignoring the ramp-up of energy used for heating for autumn and the first part of winter. - I believe I can see that effect by comparing the Mediterranean countries with the northern/central European ones.

Must try harder, Putin shill.

Percent of what?

Looks to me the graph is about Russia gas (or Natural gas in general) , not total energy consumption.
Sweden and Denmark in one bar ( as we have common gas system) and Finland uses rather small amount and could then easily reduce/replace 50% of, was it like 5% of total energy consumption.

 

 

[BansheeOne]

Give it another year, and they'll vote for new fuel rods, too.

Quote

Date 15.10.2022

German Greens lay out nuclear power position, amid federal government infighting

After bitter debate, the Green Party agreed to support ongoing operation of nuclear power plants in Germany, but rejected procurement of new fuel rods. Germany's government is currently having the same argument.

The Green Party supported German Economy Minister Robert Habeck in his plans to operate two nuclear power plants in reserve in southern Germany by spring 2023.

At the delegates' meeting on Friday evening in Bonn, a motion by grassroots representatives to block an extension of the nuclear power plants' lifetime failed.

Instead, the party congress supported leaving the Isar II and Neckarwestheim II nuclear power plants in operation as emergency reserves until April 15. The Emsland nuclear power plant, on the other hand, should go offline at the end of 2022 — as previously planned for all three sites.

However, there is still a dispute about this in the federal government. The FDP is calling for the Emsland nuclear plant to continue to operate and even beyond spring 2023.

Habeck's ministry, with responsibilities including energy and economic affairs, has been trading blame with the FDP-led Finance Ministry this week for the slow progress in bringing the coalition's current plan for a limited extension through Cabinet and sending it on to parliament to be debated.

No to new nuclear fuel

The issue has also put Habeck in a difficult position with the party grassroots, given the Green Party's longstanding objection to German nuclear power and the pride it took in being part of the first government to declare that the country would stop using it altogether.

The Greens said their red line on any nuclear extension would be the procurement of new nuclear fuel elements. The Greens would not agree to any legal regulation in the Bundestag that would procure new nuclear fuel.

Party co-leader Ricarda Lang said in the debate that new fuel rods or a return to nuclear power "will not happen with us." Renewable energies need to be expanded, and "nuclear power is not the future," Lang said.

Habeck also described a return to nuclear power as "wrong", adding: "There's no way that's going to happen to us."

As for the reserve operation of the two nuclear power plants, he said that "we shouldn't rule out this contribution from the outset" because of the emerging gap in the energy supply.

[...]

https://www.dw.com/en/german-greens-lay-out-nuclear-power-position-amid-federal-government-infighting/a-63449846

[urbanoid]

1 hour ago, BansheeOne said:

Give it another year, and they'll vote for new fuel rods, too.

https://www.dw.com/en/german-greens-lay-out-nuclear-power-position-amid-federal-government-infighting/a-63449846

I hope so. I mean, some 'far-left'/'green' parties have no problem with nuclear power, actually they support it. 

[BansheeOne]

I was surprised by the impact St. Greta's recent line of "better to keep using existing nuclear plants than bring back coal" had on discussion in the Green camp, particularly since it's not the first time she has made a statement to that effect. But judging from editorials in the "tageszeitung" etc., some people are ranging from troubled to offended over it, while others have come around to agree for some time already.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Why is it Germans are so offended by Nuclear power? Is it just a case of Mutti drawing a line under it, and they are recluctant to publicly admit it was a huge mistake?

After Nordstream, Im not sure why that would be such an problem....

[BansheeOne]

Let me pull a Roman and quote some of my earlier posts on this.

On 6/15/2022 at 5:42 PM, BansheeOne said:

Public opinion in Germany about nuclear power has always been succeptible to the impact of major events. Mostly negative in the form of nuclear disasters, but even before the Ukraine War, the energy crisis manifesting over the previous year led towards more positive attitudes towards nuclear power playing at least some part in the energy mix; since the war, even Green ministers are talking about an "unbiased assessment" of its future role.

On 6/16/2022 at 10:17 AM, BansheeOne said:

Well after Chernobyl, the widely-accepted narrative was "Yeah but that was an old Soviet reactor designed, built and operated by communists - it could never happen here." Fukushima played hell with that, particularly as Japanese like Germans are supposed to be technical perfectionists. That this was also an old American design, and tsunamis are unlikely to occur on the Upper Rhine were nuances lost in the noise of the argumentative cataclysm. Not least because public debating culture had changed in the preceding decades; as we all know just looking around this forum, the internet age doesn't do nuance and unemotional discussion well.

I guess you could also say there had been an anti-nuclear groundswell since Chernobyl. In the 40:40 opinion climate around the Millenium, the Red-Green Schröder government decided to get out of nuclear power based upon total amount of energy yet to be generated by it, which would have seen an exit somewhere between 2015 and 2020. Just the year before Fukushima, the conservative-liberal Merkel II cabinet extended operation for the remaining plants by eight years for older, 14 for newer reactors. Of course after Fukushima and faced with important state elections in Baden-Württemberg against the already-strong Greens, they did a 180 in a typical Merkelian approach to steal the opposition's ammunition, and set a hard exit date for the end of 2022.

It didn't help them any obviously; people rather voted for the original, and I suspect the impact on public opinion was "well when even a CDU/FDP government says nuclear power is too dangerous, there can be no doubt". In light of the effects on energy supply accurately predicted by cooler heads and highlighted by recent events, you could say this was Germany's Brexit (Nuxit?) moment, except that it was decided top-down and a vast majority was happy with it.

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

Germany's Brexit, right I get it, thank you. Lunacy dressed up as Policy, well im sure we have all seen that.

 

[Ssnake]

I used to be pro-nuclear, and changed my position, though I wouldn't consider myself rabidly anti-nuclear. My problem is that a lot of the arguments why nuclear energy is safe is mostly or completely based on engineering arguments while discarding the human element. But people operate all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle and therefore you also introduce people problems like laziness, corruption, ignorance.

You can't engineer away human nature.

 

In Japan there was a case where cleanup crew workers, apparently employees of sub-sub-contractors, poured some unknown fluid from one half-filled bucket into another and thus triggered a nuclear chain reaction that irradiated them.

That Belgian Tihange reactor at the German border underwent a security review, and only 10% of the holes and cracks they found in the containment vessel were "safety relevant"; unfortunately the total number of cracks was around 4,000.

A janitor in a German nuclear powerplant was tasked to install a fire extinguisher wall mount. So he diligently drilled two M8 holes into a wall, and because the peg wouldn't hold, he took longer bolts and secured them on the other side with M8 nuts; turns out, he was happily drilling through an inch of containment vessel steel.

 

I'm sure that most people in nuclear facilities, most of the time, do a competent job.

[sunday]

There have been, are, and always will be incidents related to human factors.

The cruise ship industry did not go away after the Titanic's, nor after Costa Concordia's sinking.

Air travel did not go away after the suicide of that German Wings pilot.

Coal mining still keeps quite the butcher bill.

Lots of traffic accidents because drivers' distractions, intoxications, etc.

To ban nuclear power because a few incidents with small loss of life does not seem rational.

[jmsaari]

52 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

I used to be pro-nuclear, and changed my position, though I wouldn't consider myself rabidly anti-nuclear. My problem is that a lot of the arguments why nuclear energy is safe is mostly or completely based on engineering arguments while discarding the human element. But people operate all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle and therefore you also introduce people problems like laziness, corruption, ignorance.

You can't engineer away human nature.

In Japan there was a case where cleanup crew workers, apparently employees of sub-sub-contractors, poured some unknown fluid from one half-filled bucket into another and thus triggered a nuclear chain reaction that irradiated them.

That Belgian Tihange reactor at the German border underwent a security review, and only 10% of the holes and cracks they found in the containment vessel were "safety relevant"; unfortunately the total number of cracks was around 4,000.

A janitor in a German nuclear powerplant was tasked to install a fire extinguisher wall mount. So he diligently drilled two M8 holes into a wall, and because the peg wouldn't hold, he took longer bolts and secured them on the other side with M8 nuts; turns out, he was happily drilling through an inch of containment vessel steel.

I'm sure that most people in nuclear facilities, most of the time, do a competent job.

So the issue is what's the probability of bad outcomes, and how bad the worst-case bad outcome we might expect. Fukushima I think we can pretty well take as the outcome of what can go wrong when everything combines in the worst possible way: first you had the monster tsunami from what was (IIRC) the most powerful earthquake in recorded japanese history, then you had safety shortcomings due to the human factors you said throughout, resulted in diesel generators being unavailable --> loss-of-coolant accident; more complacency/laziness/corruption --> no H2 recombiners in containment building --> containment building roofs blown off. Only with the combination of all that we got an accident where the death toll from radiation was still precisely zero. Few people died at the plant, I think it was 2 if my memory serves one from falling debris and another heart attack. 

So then there's the massive cleanup bill - but that needs to be put into perspective also, in that the operation was completely overblown. Meaning that if radiation levels applied in Japan for evacuation were applied as such in Finland, there are some apartment buildings built on moraine hills that would be evacuated immediately without possibility to visit even to retrieve personal belongings. Now, those are for sure buildings where amount of radon in the indoor air is well above what it should be and what is healthy, and are really the worst of the worst, but you get the point... 

One can look at it from the perspective that with around 20,000 reactor years of cumulative global experience by now, even including Chernobyl, nuclear power still has caused the least amount of deaths per kWh_el.... people falling off roofs installing solar panels is enough to take the solar PV death toll above nuclear, for example (that was IIRC the main way how solar power kills people in the study I saw). And then beyond the accident risk, there's also smallest footprint on land area and material use, and almost no pollution of any kind being produced. Those look like quite acceptable risks to me, considering that there's a price to pay in safety and health in any type of power generation one can imagine. 

[urbanoid]

If we want to cut emissions AND maintain technological civilisation, there's really no other way than nuclear power. 

[Ssnake]

In less densely populated countries nuclear power may have its place. If reactors exist that can generate power economically where a meltdown with the resulting wide-spread contamination is intrinsically impossible (as I understand it, the verdict of economic viability is still out on them), then yeah, I suppose I wouldn't oppose them.

[Ssnake]

2 minutes ago, urbanoid said:

If we want to cut emissions AND maintain technological civilisation, there's really no other way than nuclear power. 

I don't think so.

Solar power generation has nicely followed a negative exponential trend over the past sixty years, so I think it's safe to assume that the trend will continue for a while. That means, solar power is eventually going to be cheaper than any other form of electricity generation. At that point we no longer have to worry much about the efficiency of energy storage solutions. If the costs of generated electricity approaches zero, it doesn't matter that electrolysis wastes 40% of the primary energy. You still have a process that can generate a near-infinite amount of hydrogen that can be used in industrial processes as well as gas turbines for power generation, or synthetic fuels. And there is your solution to balance the grid.

We'll have solar cells everywhere, like integrated into the glass facades of skyscrapers. Sure, they won't be at peak efficiency, but once that the costs of production fall below the then current threshold of marginal costs of power generation, the market will adopt them. We don't have to plaster the Sahara desert. We'll simply have solar panels on every roof.

We're in a transition period. That needs to be managed. It's foolish to force a transition that doesn't follow the price decay of solar panels because, as Germany shows, that's an unsustainably (hah!) costly subsidy path. Energy storage with electric cars as a part of the grid may well be an option (if we need to build a lot of batteries for those cars, we might just as well use them for grid stabilization ... but I'm not proposing building industrial scale battery parks). There will be alternatives to lithium ion batteries, ideally made from materials that are more easily obtained and less problematic to extract, such as iron and sulphur.

In short, I'm decidedly upbeat about the potential of solar power and our abilities to stabilize the grid while making the transition. Nuclear power will fall out of fashion simply because, outside of special use cases, it's eventually going to be too costly to operate than the alternatives. We're not quite there yet, but the trends are unbroken and give reasons for optimism.

[Ssnake]

 

[urbanoid]

Sometimes the sun doesn't shine and sometimes there's no wind - renewables need a stabilizer. Germany chose gas to be a stabiliser and it emits quite a lot (~half as much as coal). At the same time closed the zero emission NPPs. If that's not madness...

[Ssnake]

It was a reckless gamble, and ended like most reckless gambles do.

Now we have to come up with a new solution, fast!, and one of the three parties in power with, effectively, veto rights is an offspring of the anti-nuclear movement. Also, they happen to favor principle over practicality pretty much whenever given the choice. Of course the new policy isn't completely free of stupid. But that doesn't mean that the long-term goal of transition towards renewable energies is unfeasible. It's just that the chosen transition path is likely to be needlessly expensive.

[urbanoid]

France is doubling down on nuclear. Poland will introduce nuclear power or we'll never transform our energy production otherwise. Whatever happens, Germany will be pretty much surrounded by NPPs. And betting on nuclear power is betting on what's available today, not what MIGHT be available when 'technology X' matures and gets cheaper. 

Sanity largely prevails and nuclear power is either introduced or expanded in developed countries. Japan will even put old NPPs to work. Seems like Germany will be maybe not the only, but one of the few countries that will stick to 'nuclear bad' and it's all due to one small party holding everyone hostage.

[Colin]

Also I suspect the SMR's are going to get a bump in production and will be used to "harden" electrical grids. The greatest weakness in the west really is transformers, a few EMP bursts or a Carrington event would really screw us. Small Hydro run of the river facilities are also a good idea.

[sunday]

1 minute ago, Colin said:

Also I suspect the SMR's are going to get a bump in production and will be used to "harden" electrical grids. The greatest weakness in the west really is transformers, a few EMP bursts or a Carrington event would really screw us. Small Hydro run of the river facilities are also a good idea.

Whatever destroys transformers would also destroy generators, IMHO.

[Colin]

1 hour ago, sunday said:

Whatever destroys transformers would also destroy generators, IMHO.

Seems they are working on it

https://www.afcea.org/signal-media/guarding-power-grid-against-natural-enemy

[sunday]

18 minutes ago, Colin said:

Seems they are working on it

https://www.afcea.org/signal-media/guarding-power-grid-against-natural-enemy

Seems they think transformers would protect the devices downstream of them. Could be.

[rmgill]

11 hours ago, sunday said:

Whatever destroys transformers would also destroy generators, IMHO.

To that end we need to start stock piling transformers and generator heads of specific sizes to mitigate that issue. 

[sunday]

2 hours ago, rmgill said:

To that end we need to start stock piling transformers and generator heads of specific sizes to mitigate that issue. 

Feasible with the smaller sizes, pole pigs and the like. The larger sizes are too large. Perhaps it could be more sensible to develop isolating devices suitable for those disturbances, but I do not know if that is possible - MOVs able to dissipate those amounts of energy could be impractical, for instance.