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Finland Set To Become First Country To Ban Coal Use For Energy (newscientist.com)
Finland could become the first country to ditch coal for good. As part of a new energy and climate strategy due to be announced tomorrow, the government is considering banning the burning of coal for energy by 2030. From a New Scientist article: "Basically, coal would disappear from the Finnish market," says Peter Lund, a researcher at Aalto University, and chair of the energy programme at the European Academies' Science Advisory Council. The groundwork for the ban already seems to be in place. Coal use has been steadily declining in Finland since 2011, and the nation heavily invested in renewable energy in 2012, leading to a near doubling of wind power capacity the following year. It also poured a further $85 million into renewable power this past February. On top of this, Nordic energy prices, with the exception of coal, have been dropping since 2010. As a result of such changes, coal-fired power plants are being mothballed and shut all over Finland, leaving coal providing only 8 per cent of the nation's energy.
It's your daily indoctrination on Slashdot, brought to you by the global warming acolytes. If this were any other subject, the lack of evidence for global warming and the zealous defense by the AGW apologists would be ridiculed like the religion that it is. When you eliminate the adjustments to the data, all the warming just happens to disappear. AGW is about as credible as the Book of Mormon.
Canada announced this three days ago... here on Slashdot.
Maybe Finland will be doing it earlier in 2030 than Canada. Don't know. Now I'm wondering how many other countries are going to be first.
"Oh no... he found the
Never fear, high priest MightyMartian will be along soon to viciously insult anyone who points out any one of the many reasons that global warming is false. There is ample evidence that the data are being manipulated to show warming that doesn't exist, no matter how much the climate evangelists deny it.
It's all well and good to reduce dependence on coal, but I think the populace will think different and force their government's hand when 1. they see how damned expensive renewables are (as flowery and nice as they might seem, they're still HEAVILY subsidised, and by taxes on coal too, a subsidy that will disappear when the coal is banned) and 2. how they'll fare in the first storm that lasts more than 24 hours when hydro is off because the rivers flow too fast, the wind generators are shut down because they only work in slow wind, and the solar plants shut down because you know, clouds, something finland has more of than almost anywhere, not to mention the small amounts of usable insolation.
I'll be watching them crawl back to coal within a year, and I'll be eating popcorn and grinning all the way.
US will be the last country to eschew coal, well after China. Finland doesn't matter, except maybe for setting a localized precedent.
Autumn snowfall has actually increased in Arctic regions in the past couple of decades. Antarctic sea ice is also increasing. If global warming was occurring, there should be less Arctic snowfall and less Antarctic sea ice. It's yet more evidence that AGW is false. Finland is wasting their money.
-20 deg C from October to May.
Wind-turbine lubricants freeze at -1 deg C.
Getting nuclear plants online can take 30 years.
Likely Finland will buy electricity form the EU and Russia as long as EU exists which may be for another 12 to 24 months.
This is only a political gamesmanship to buy time until the EU falls. The EU Bureaucrats in Brussels will love it! And that fait accompli is all that is needed.
Shouldn't the headline read:
Finland bans coal use, relies heavily on Nuclear (60%)!
We, the Slash Dotters do not need to feel so indoctrinated by those AGW deniers who cannot feel any passion for the planet on which they live. Their speech is worthless and should be treated as such. Who do you THINK YOU ARE denying scientists and the likes of Al Gore?
Stupid Finnish SJWs. Next they'll be telling us they can get energy from heat trapped underground. Sad!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Fuck coal right in its black asshole. Burning coal in this day and age is a ridiculous abuse of the public health.
China's not slowing down, and baring a miracle Trump will put the US back into coal in a big way.
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Yet another nation announces abandoning coal, a nation with ample hydro resources, dropping prices for oil and natural gas, wind getting cheaper, and likely a shrinking electricity demand. Moving from coal now effectively costs nothing and would likely have happened anyway because of economic forces. They announce this anyway to look good to the CAGW crowd even though it seems few people even fear CAGW any more.
It also creates the illusion of a victory for the CAGW crowd where there was none. I'm sure lobbying from the CAGW people had an effect on the choice to make this announcement, but very little on the choice to abandon coal.
I'm skeptical of CAGW because the few predictions made from global warming models proved true. I must ask those in the CAGW crowd, what kind of evidence would disprove AGW in your mind? CAGW is a theory, if we keep releasing CO2 into the atmosphere then really bad things will happen. It's possible that bad things happen because of something else. It is possible that continued CO2 release will do nothing to the climate.
If the answer is that nothing could disprove CAGW then it's not a scientific theory any more, it's a religion.
I'll go along with abandoning fossil fuels so long as nuclear power is part of what replaces it. Wind and solar are too expensive and unreliable to replace coal. Technological or infrastructure development might make it cheaper but does nothing to address the intermittent power production problems. Adding storage to the grid to address the intermittent power problem adds cost. Nuclear power is reliable, inexpensive, safe, and exists now.
I find these announcements to abandon coal so far to be meaningless and unimpressive. What would impress me as a real advancement in the lobbying effort from CAGW people is an announcement to build up nuclear power. This seems unimaginable to many since nuclear power is for some reason a greater threat to humanity than CAGW. I must conclude CAGW is nothing to fear if nuclear power is to remain off the table as a possible solution.
I'll play nice with the CAGW people because I believe much like they do that coal is a poor source of energy. Where I have a problem is if this demand to abandon coal coincides with a demand that nuclear power cannot replace it. Without coal or nuclear power we'll all be in the dark, cold and hungry.
If any of you CAGW types want to convince me that CAGW is real then demanding nuclear power would go a long way in convincing me of the threat it poses. At a minimum it would show me that your belief in CAGW is more than just virtue signalling and/or jumping on the bandwagon.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I haven't seen any evidence that data is being manipulated to show global warming where none exists.
The AGW part is convincing enough, it's all the catastrophic part that doesn't make sense to me. First time I saw CAGW, had to look it up.
Guess what everyone is going to get in their Christmas stocking this year
Steel from that part of the world has had an excellent reputation for over a century due to the very low sulphur content of their coal. Burning it to boil water is a waste.
Also they have been replacing it anyway with tiny generators instead of the capital intensive step of new coal fired units so it's a bit of a non-announcement.
It's like Germany announcing they were giving up on nukes more than twenty years after they had built their last reactor. The real choice was made many years before when it was decided not to build another one.
It's alternative_right and his faggy sidekick shane_optimus come to fag us out with an alt-fag fagpoint. Take it away fags
But the neighbour countries Norway and Sweden haven't used coal in decades. For electricity generation, Norway is basically 100% hydro and Sweden is 45% hydro, 40% nuclear and 15% wind, solar, woodburning and minor natgas. Pressure from Denmark forced Sweden to shut down their most southern nuclear plant, so a small natgas plant had to be built(2 TWh of the total 160 TWh generated). The natgas is bought from... Denmark.
developmenT 8odels
Coal use has been declining because Finland has few coal only plants still running, other coal capable plants have switched cheaper fossil fuels.
I'd also be interested to see if "Energy" includes just electricity, or heat generation as well, because many of their power plants are co-generations plants, and could switch their coal fired boilers to heat generation.
The solution to alt-faggery has been found by scientists:
This is known as a circle jerk of alt-faggery or a web rig of assholes that will allow the the alt-fags to continue their faggery without them realizing anything has changed from when their head normally was, in their own anus.
What about the oil? You still gonna be burning that?
Not so fast! Finland's dependence on renewable energy is diluted by their heavy investment in nuclear power, currently 28% and projected to rise to 60% by 2025.
Is there some problem with nuclear energy that I'm not aware of?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
All those 3 above shows that many mountain glacier were historically bigger, and the sea ice estimate on north poll dropped in surface and volume. But as denier want to deny, I am sure you will hand wave those.
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So no burning on Finnish soil but importing power produced by coal is still OK.
To replace coal, we're building more nuclear. There's one new reactor being built (actually the biggest in the world at 1700 MW, although the project has been seriously delayed and is unfortunately massively over budget/schedule due to problems with the French contractor (Areva) and one additional reactor being planned for 2024. If both of these are successfully completed, it will more than double our nuclear capabilities and increase our energy production capabilities by almost 3000 MW. and should be more than enough to make up for the gap left by abandoning coal.
I'm a fan of nuclear, especially since we're also building the first ever deep geological repository to handle the waste storage. It's just a shame that the project has turned out to be such a screw.up (granted it is partially because the reacrtor type - European Pressurized Reactor - is new and has never been built before), and I'm hoping the authorities here learn something important from this: bidding these types of projects based solely on the price-tag will lead to issues. I do believe though that Areva will end up paying the fees once the case is settled, though whether or not it will actually have the money to do so (it's over 5 billion) is another matter.
Regardless of the difficulties and the cost, nuclear is really the only way forward for us, because we're pretty much tapped out on Hydro and solar doesn't have much use here at commercial scales because for half the year the sun is pretty much gone. So if we want to be rational and dump both coal and the dependency on Russian import gas, going nuclear with modern is the only viable option at this point.
Germany has gone the opposite direction and is shutting down nuclear power plants which is actually leading to an increase in the use of fossil fuels. Here's a TED talk about why the senseless opposition to nuclear is actually harming the environment because of that.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
You can see the evolution of the global warming argument in that acronym.
When it was just "global warming", the argument was basically "global warming is not happening".
Then, when it got too hard to sustain pure denial, they added "anthropogenic", so the argument became "OK, global warming is happening, but it's not us that's causing it"
Now we see "catastrophic" added and the argument morphs again: "OK we are causing global warming, but it's not going to be as bad as people say".
If things carry on like this, presumably the next letter will be "L" for "liable". LCAGW: "Ok, global warming might get pretty bad, but I don't see why I should have to pay for it"
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
The real choice was made many years before when it was decided not to build another one.
There's false attribution there in a global landscape that is hostile towards nuclear power in the face of NIMBYS fearing radiation but championing coal as a solution. Times change and the decision not to build a nuclear reactor 20 years ago is not the same as a decision not to build one now.
That is what makes both cases an announcement. We now have policy decision decided on the current environment, not an inferred position based on what has happened under a different set of circumstances.
You can do better than that.
Think!
What are the differences that would influence the choices between 1996 and now? The sad thing is even the "cutting edge" reactors such as the AP1000 are the same. Time may march on but some stuff doesn't progress like others and some reasons stay constant for a long time.
Also with something like a nuclear industry once you decide to stop building new gear you lose the people with the expertise you need to build new stuff later. Germany decided long ago to give up and just live with what they had to date. Starting again would have been a very major project, larger than the UK-China nuclear collaboration that has people staggered at the cost.
What are the differences that would influence the choices between 1996 and now?
I mentioned the one big one which is giving nuclear renewed interest. Mainly that it's not coal, something no one gave a shit about in 1996.
Also with something like a nuclear industry once you decide to stop building new gear you lose the people with the expertise you need to build new stuff later.
Yes and no. The experience wasn't lost. Construction of a reactor is not specialised and through continued support of existing infrastructure vendors keep on providing all the new products you need. The engineering teams are also still there, still working for westinghouse etc because ... well they never stopped. Only in a few western countries. Construction of a reactor like this is never localised but sucks in expertise from all over the world.
As for cost, comparing the China UK collaboration is just stupid. That project was never about power.
Also you're right Germany made that decision long ago. The only point I was making is that you said it's a non-event. It couldn't be further from the truth. When you make a decision on questionable grounds to appease a few greens by not building something new it is very different from making a concerted effort to shutdown existing installations in the wake of a completely irrelevant event on the other side of the world.
In both cases the policy announcements are significant.
With a population of 5.5 million people and a labor force of less than half that and a GDP of roughly 1/75th of the US, that shouldn't be too difficult. Similar observations can be made about Canada.
The Occupied series depicts this in the "near future". It doesn't go well for Finland.
What the Heck will Santa bring the bad kids?
Let'em freeze in the dark
an ill wind that blows no good
The irony is that most people are already paying for it. Anybody that gets any kind of property insurance right now is already paying for the costs of global warming due to property damage from flooding, coastal inundation and the like, and the costs are only set to go up. When you start seeing food prices going up as more land becomes less arable due to droughts, anyone currently not paying will end up paying as well.
The whole "catastrophic" thing is a bit of a fudge anyways. No researchers that I'm aware of are saying "humanity will be threatened". That's not to say that some populations, those who live in marginal areas or where conditions are such that any long term change in, say, rain belt behavior or glacier melt, could very well be at risk. But the way pseudo-skeptics talk about it, they act as if those evil lying climatologists are insisting the surface of the planet will go molten.
In reality, the whole "catastrophic" claim is just a strawman. It's a standard tactic of contrarians to restate the theory they are attacking in the most hyperbolic terms, and then declare "You see, those vile scientists are making nonsensical predictions!" Of course, since most of the people who repeat those claims know absolutely nothing about climatology or AGW analysis and modeling, they eagerly pick up on it. In part, I think it is a contrarian bent to be found among conservatives and libertarians, and in part it's because I think many of the deniers are just selfish cowards who don't want to hear bad news, and most certainly don't want to change today's behavior for tomorrow's problem.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There was an utter bastard called Alex Gabbard doing PR for Oak Ridge Labs who used that argument in the early 1990s - the one that started the "coal ash is nuclear waste too" thing. By 1996 he'd even managed to get something in Scientific American. Also the science deniers hadn't got as much traction in 1996 as they have now and Al Gore among many others was making a lot of noise about the carbon dioxide from coal fired power stations.
So I can't say I see much of a difference, in fact I think it was even a bigger issue back then due to less PR from the science deniers.
I've worked with a few people from a research reactor and read a few papers on issues that also applied to components in coal fired boilers - based on that I think you are wrong - I think it's specialised as fuck. The Toshiba factory that makes some major reactor components and has a waiting list of years seems to support that.
Funny you should mention the company that laid off all their skilled nuke staff, managed to stumble through after taking over a Japanese nuke company, then sacked most of those new staff as well. The current AP1000 projects have been a learning exercise for newbies, one of the reasons why the first few took so long.
Not why it happened. That's the political attack lie but reality is different. Was Thatcher green? Carter? Reagan? Kohl? You have been conned. The increase in influence of economists who despised large projects of any kind is a very major part of the answer. Nukes have a massive capital cost and some people just cannot see past that to any benefits.
By the way, Finland has a nuclear power plant under construction. As with Japan the situation there is to have an energy source that doesn't require continuously shipping in or piping in vast amounts of material from somewhere else outside of their control.
It's not stupid, building up a nuclear industry from scratch again would cost far more again than piggybacking on the infrastructure of somewhere else. If you think the cost of that huge project is staggering you haven't considered what it would take to do it without China (or you have not considered the scale and expected returns over decades).
One less consumer on the market can only result in lower prices for everyone who's left.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I've worked with a few people from a research reactor and read a few papers on issues that also applied to components in coal fired boilers - based on that I think you are wrong - I think it's specialised as fuck. The Toshiba factory that makes some major reactor components and has a waiting list of years seems to support that.
I work with ex-nuclear people. The reactor itself relies on specialised components but they are still very much in business because these components were continuously required. That was my original point. The actual plant construction is nothing exciting, and the component which are specialised are still available, currently produced and there's been no loss of engineering knowledge.
You have been conned. The increase in influence of economists who despised large projects of any kind is a very major part of the answer. Nukes have a massive capital cost and some people just cannot see past that to any benefits.
Oh hogwash.Yes economist despise large capital costs but they always have. What we have is a chicken and egg. The green fear campaign followed by the public outrage created an over regulated market in which costs skyrocketted. This may have further strengthened the economist's despise of mega projects but there were underlying forces at play helping that.
building up a nuclear industry from scratch again
What are you talking about? They're not building anything from scratch. Half of the reactors in the UK are still actively operated.
If you think the cost of that huge project is staggering you haven't considered what it would take to do it without China
Causality problem. If China built a reactor alone it would be much cheaper, but for absolutely none of the reasons we typically attribute low cost to China. As you said, many of the components are specialised and these are definitely not made in China.
Damn - I have to dumb it down this far - stop drinking booze before reading garbz.
A nuclear fucking construction industry from scratch obviously. They are pretty fucking major projects that take a fucking decade each and the parts really are very specialised in the reactors which is why it takes so fucking long even though the turbine hall etc is the same as other plants. Look at an example of something real (eg. the current Finnish one) instead of a blind guess - your guesses have sucked.
Was that blunt enough to soak in?
It's been so long since the UK built a reactor that the workforce that built the previous one has long retired.
Under Thatcher? Reagan?
You've been conned by revisionists looking for something to blame on the greens today. Back then they were powerless.
A nuclear fucking construction industry from scratch obviously.
I can't make this any simpler for you. THERE'S NO SUCH THING. IT'S NOT SPECIALISED.
Seriously?
What corn flake packet did you read that from?
Why bluff with an empty hand in the first place? Since you don't know about this stuff why are you banging on about it?