Comments by "Archangel17" (@MDP1702) on "DW News"
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@ar7363-t5g
Nuclear marine propulsion has been a thing since the 1950s.
Yes, and these are very expensive, therefor only used for specific purposes (like military or like you mentioned icebreakers) rather than entire shipping fleets.
A nuclear powered ship goes faster than a conventional one
Not really, there is a reason shipping vessels go the speed they do, and that is one simple thing: energy consumption. The more energy consumed the more expensive the trip. Most current shipping vessels could go a lot faster than they actually do, they just don't need to.
and eliminates the need for refueling since it has to stop just once every 24 months.
This really isn't an advantage at all. A ship needs to dock at a port for quite some time anyway, the refuelling really isn't a problem.
Producing all this electricity with intermittent renewables is difficult to imagine
Not really. This hydrogen is likely going to be produced in arid sunny regions. If they use CSP, they can run 24/7 on solar energy. CSP's are for now more costly (around 12c/kWh), however they could use a mix. Using PV during the day (an average of 8 hours of good sunlight a day already is 2920 hours) at around 0.04c/kWh currently (and still expected to drop), is it definitely possible to get an average of around 2-4$/kg for the energy in hydrogen production in the long term.
Now considering that hydrogens complete efficiency cycle (from production to end use) is around the same as the efficiency from bunker fuel burning in the engine, every kWh we put into the hydrogen initially is around worth the same as the energy available in the bunker fuel before it is burned. Considering bunker fuel has an energy density of around 11 kWh/kg and hydrogen starts with around 50kWh/kg (just like you pointed out), we'd need around 5 kg of bunker fuel per kg H2. Bunker fuel is around 0.63$/kg, or around 3,15$/kg H2 eq. So in other words if hydrogen is around 3-4$/kg, it is price wise similar to current fuel use.
So purely on fuel/energy economy there likely isn't a problem.
Then you would need to transport hydrogen to the ports.
Hydrogen would most likely be produced at the coast and there isn't really a reason why this shouldn't be close to a port, from there it can be transported using large hydrogen ships to other ports.
And hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe therefore is difficult to transport and even more difficult (and expensive) to store in large quantities
That is indeed a problem that needs to be overcome, however considering that hydrogen will most certainly play a large role in the energy transition, even without shipping, there will definitely be improvements here. Also there is a way to store hydrogen as a solid and this shows promise if it can really be achieved at large scale and for the properties the company claims.
And then the ship itself: hydrogen takes an enormous volume and all this volume could not be used for the cargo.
That is indeed another issue, it takes around 3 times more space than regular fuel in liquid form and around 4-5 times more in gaseous form. In that case they'd lose around 5-10% cargospace (at a least based on the explorer class containership).
Therefore a nuclear powered cargo ship would be capable of transporting a larger cargo at higher speed.
Higher speed means higher energy consumption meaning larger nuclear reactor needed, meaning higher costs than necessarily needed. Speed is not necessarily an issue for shipping. In essence the profit from higher speed doesn't outweigh the costs. The same likely will be true for nuclear, since you essentially would oversize the reactor with a larger cost as a consequence.
You'd spare around 2% extra room for containers or around 7-12% more cargo space vs hydrogen.
This is the reason why hydrogen-powered ships are proposed just for very short trips.
This ofcourse is something that could happen, that ships take more routes with an extra stop. Only for crossing the pacific would this likely be not really possible. But it isn't definitely needed, hydrogen ships could also travel longer distances if need be, just with a slight reduction in cargo capacity.
Yes of course the personnel of a nuclear powered cargo ship would need to be specifically trained but I don't see the problem,
You don't see a problem with needing thousands upon thousand of highly skilled nuclear engineers more? Really?
When it comes to pirates, the IAEA and the IMO would be in charge of setting the standards to protect the ship from attacks (for example a dozen of well trained soldiers on every ship).
If pirates or other groups want to get a hold of a nuclear powered ship, this just means they'd need to assemble a few more bodies and ships. If it was this easy don't you think they'd just put soldiers on every large ship passing regions with pirates, avoiding hijackings like this, instead of sending several ships to these regions?
Can you imagine the ransom demands pirates can make with these ships? The loss of the ship alone would be 2-4 times more expensive for the company, the threat of sending it into a port and causing a nuclear catastrophy there is unimaginable. Just imagine a nuclear ship gets a nuclear 'accident' in the panama or suez canal. Anyone that gets their hands on such a ship and gets in one of those canals, can demand insane amounts of money to not make one of these canals unusal for decades or more.
Something else, several nuclear powered military ships have in the pas been taken out of commission because they were too costly. To be clear, not because the initial investment cost was too high (afteral all they were already in operation), but because operating costs were too high. So clearly nuclear marine propulsion is even in operation expensive, and due to the higher investment costs, they definitely need to be much much cheaper in operation.
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Pedro Brexit The first step was mounting legal actions. But because the German government very quickly rectified the situation, it never got any further. The Polish government has made it clear they won't do anything to rectify the situation and are essentially directly challenging the EU. And again, the Polish court ruling directly undermines several fundamental articles of the EU treaties, much worse than the German situation, by a longshot. Thus this comes down to a completely different situation, both in government response as well as severity.
It also doesn't help that the Polish court that made the ruling is in the past few years engulfed in a constitutional crisis, potentially breaking with another EU requirement: the rule-of-law. In fact there is still a constitutional crisis in Poland due to the actions of the Polish government to essentially fill up 5 of the 15 free positions in the constitutional tribunal (who made the EU ruling) with their chosen candidates, against the tribunal's own ruling that this wasn't done in the right way.
3 of these positions were filled up right before PIS took over the parliament by the outgoing parliament (as was their mandate), however the PIS president didn't allow these candidates to be sworn in, after the PIS controlled new parliament took over, they nominated 3 new candidates for these positions. This wasn't accepted by the tribunals president, which denied these candidates to hear cases. As a response the PIS parliament and government made a new law that would allow these new judges to hear new cases, however the tribunal ruled this new law unconstitutional, which the PIS government just ignored.
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@al rode
your 45% is not even remotely close to beeing 45% of the actual eletric power we'll need.
Correct, neither was this the case for nuclear. However EV's could potentially even help renewable adoptation. The main problem currently with a renewable roll out is storage. Without proper storage getting more than 50-60% renewables is going to be really hard and expensive. However the moment we have cheap enough storage in large enough quantities we can quickly up this to even 100% renewable (though I am not going to say that would be the best option).
Grid storage wasn't an issue up untill 3-5 years ago, so its field is relatively new. Yet there are several storage systems that are quite promising, they just need a bit of time to develop, prove themselves, scale up and decrease the price in the process. This is certainly possible.
cause unlike you I am not using one against the other.
Except you did: "or we could go and construct 15 nuke power plants during that time". So clearly you are putting nuclear vs renewables here. And considering you use Germany's renewable, I used France's nuclear as a comparison.
20%nuclear, 60% renewables
This is something entirely different from what I infered. I now see why. You made it seem like an OR OR proposition (or however you want to call it), which made it look like it was renewable OR nuclear.
however in that case I'd have to say that your reasoning isn't entirely correct either. You essentially just proposed spending more. There was no OR needed in your proposition, since there is no other option than building those 15 nukes extra, other than not spending that money, which wouldn't happen.
It should have been:
we could do the same for another 20 years and get to maybe 45-55% of the overall energy needs beeing covered bye non fossil energy or and we could go and construct 15 nuke power plants during that time and add another 20% of non carbon intensive energy to the mix
or even better:
we could do the same for another 20 years and get to maybe 45-55% of the overall energy needs beeing covered bye non fossil energy or we could invest more and construct 15 nuke power plants or more renewables+storage during that time and add another 20% of non carbon intensive energy to the mix
So, yes. I am not against your proposal, it is just a misnomer since you just proposed a larger investement and how to use it. The way you phrased it also made it sound like it was renewables vs nuclear.
I am sorry for the misunderstanding and part renewables and part nuclear indeed can be an option.
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@al rode
I just highly doubt that private businesses will actuallyy pick up on renewable exoension to a speed where it's gonna be sufficient
I'd say this is the same for nuclear, private bussiness isn't going to fully go on renewables without serious government intervention.
we had 15% in 12 yeas.
Sure, but in the beginning solar was still 10 times more expensive than currently and wind also more expensive.
In the first 7 years (2008-2014) only around 17 TWh of wind was added, in the last 6 years (2014-2020) 73 TWh was added, so in regards to wind, using the past 6 years as a reference seems better. As for solar, this is different with a more steady growth over the 12 years, however the question now is whether this will remain the same or go up. I think a lot will depend on the future costs of (grid)storage.
A nuclear reactor construction likely wouldn't go faster than 10-12 in Germany, so most likely you'd at best seen the same number of added low carbon energy. The next decade will show what would have been best.
* just highly doubt that we'll get to the necessery 5% anual expension that we'd need to get to 100% bye 2040.*
You ignore the fact here that fossil fuels are less efficient. For example an EV has 2-4 times the efficiency of an ice car, so the transition to EV's could drop the energy use of cars significantly. The same with heating using a heatpump/electric boiler (and good isolation) vs gas or fuel oil burner. So the overall energy consumption should also go down. Just by moving to BEV's for cars and trucks, we could cut energy use by 10%
Currently electricity makes up around 33-34% of Germany's total energy consumption. Meaning that even if you'd make 100% of the grid renewable, you'd still only got 1/3rd renewable. Now it is more difficult for renewables to go above 50% of the electricity mix without good storage. At this moment renewables are around there. However if you'd electrify transport and heating, it would currently make up around 20% of the electricity mix, giving 30% more growth room before storage is really needed, vs the +-5% growth room now.
Essentially the rate of renewable adoption is now mostly dependend on 2 things: electrification of fossil sectors (transport, industry, heating, ...) and rolling out storage.
I'd much rather juist pay more
In that case we could also pump more money in renewables and especially storage. Storage by far is what holding renewables back and considering grid storage is a pretty new sector currently, they certainly could use the money to speed up the roll out of cheaper storage. Similar to how Germany's subsidies and transition helped reduce costs of for example wind and to an extent solar.
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