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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.
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
Poor little delicate snowflake. I'm so sorry the laws of physics don't line up with your world view. Why don't you go have a big ol' cry, poor little alt-right denier snowflake
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"the lack of evidence for global warming"
So why is the north pole ice melting, why are the glaciers clearly receding.
Do you also deny that it gets hot in green houses,
Do you deny that mankind releases billions of tons of CO2?
Do you deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas?
Tell me, which is it?
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Show some peer-reviewed evidence demonstrating your point. Circle-jerk web-rings don't count, nor do "alternative" publications, find some scientific journal articles.
Nope. Read chapter 9.
What evidence? Show documented and peer-reviewed and published scientific articles with authors working in their fields of expertise.
You really need to read more. More than 30% of Finland's energy already comes from renewable sources, and fossil fuels are expensive (in terms of security cost as 75% of Finnish coal comes from Russia) or logistics (no local coal mines, all must be imported). Oil has similar problems (~90% from Russia) as does natural gas (100% from Russia), but fortunately local nuclear power will make up 60% of all energy needs, which combined with normal growth in renewable production over time allows for elimination of fossil fuels in power generation.
Right now nuclear production is only 32% of energy and 18% of net trade, but it WILL be 60% after the Olkiluoto reactor is completed and expended as planned.
I'll bet if you really think about it, you'll figure out why those things are not really equivalent.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Stupid Finnish SJWs. Next they'll be telling us they can get energy from heat trapped underground. Sad!
You are welcome on my lawn.
What about buttering?
http://www.nrel.gov/news/featu... The wind turbines in Antartica seem to be going OK and its a lot colder there.
Clearly you don't live in Central Europe.
Ezekiel 23:20
Forget what the other guy asked for. Tell me a story. A story that beats: Man burn things that release gases that trap heat from radiating off the planet like greenhouse panels do. That's all I ask for!
Unfortunately, nuclear power is the most expensive electricity. High cost, long lead times, unresolved problems with design and waste. Not a good option. Nuclear only gets built with massive subsidies and public liability for cleanup and accidents.
Wind and solar are cheaper and cleaner.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Except " China alone is responsible for 40% of global renewable power growth" in 2015, with the caveat "that represents only half of the country’s electricity demand increase."
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.
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.
Pretty fucked up definitions of both in my opinion if that fits in your mind.
The reason it hasn't been disproved is only because nothing has contradicted it yet and the models have been changing year after year as more is understood about sea currents, cloud formation and a pile of other things. You are blaming scientists for dumbed down soundbites from politicians and economists.
As for nukes, like all massive capital intensive projects economists and bankers hate the things so that's why China and Russia are the only ones going forward with civilian nukes. The choice in the west is TMI painted green - 1970s stuff that nobody trusts and not only looks really disappointing against everything else but takes a decade to build. There was a thorium project with some promise back when Clinton was President (one of those people you are pretending are in the way) but the nuclear lobby, Westinghouse et al, lobbied to have it shut down because they saw it as a danger to their old Uranium designs barely touched since the 1970s. It may seem fun to kick hippies and "the left" over nukes but it wasn't their fault, and it's what you see as "the left" in China (really authoritarian but most people see them as the same as "the left") who are actually getting the things built!
So some of those "CAGW types" really are building nukes.
Yeah... clearly the problem with science is that it's done by scientists. Damn them and their dedication to reasonable conclusions based on empirical evidence! Damn them all!
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
If attacking pseudoscience is zealotry, I'll wear that title proudly. And if you don't like what I wrote, then don't read it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Unfortunately, nuclear power is the most expensive electricity. High cost, long lead times, unresolved problems with design and waste. Not a good option. Nuclear only gets built with massive subsidies and public liability for cleanup and accidents.
Wind and solar are cheaper and cleaner.
Again, if you fear this more than global warming then I have to conclude that global warming is not a threat.
I thought that global warming was supposed to make the entire earth unfit for human life. Even if we can conclude that building up more nuclear power results in more accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, then I assume that is a better alternative than the extinction of our species.
You seem to assume that we've learned nothing from past nuclear accidents, that these unresolved issues with nuclear power cannot ever be resolved, and that number of dead people from wind and solar do not count.
Nuclear power is safer per TWh produced than wind and solar. (That number of dead includes the deaths from mining the uranium, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island, not just on site industrial and radiation hazards.) I thought the goal was to save lives. If the goal is saving lives then nuclear power is the best option we have available right now. If the goal is not saving lives then what is it?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
"Everyone I don't like is alt-right: a child's guide to online political discussions"
I agree that making fun of people who deny even the basic principles of climate change is fun, but there was nothing particularly alt-right about the post.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
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.
It's only the US Santa's problem. The finnish Santa lives in Rovaniemi. And the original Santa was living in what is now South Turkey.
So that's how I know that the glaciers I know of are receding: By actually going there and looking at them.
Hah. Given most people are simply not interested in climate change, this is all moot. [1]
But seeing as this is Slashdot, and a Friday, the thing is, most "climate change deniers" don't have an issue with any of those points. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and mankind releases CO2, and greenhouses do indeed get hot (why this last one is on the list is beyond me, as "greenhouse" is just an analogy here).
The point which EVERYBODY is up in arms about, is how much warming will actually come from feedbacks, and not from CO2 itself.
The mainstream respectable "in the field" "non-denialist" expert view is that the feedbacks could give you 4 or even oh I dunno as it is a feedback who can say where it would stop maybe 8C for all we know... and the denialist view is that this is ludicrous as why didn't the Earth just accidentally cook itself already.
The science issues are really all about feedbacks, not "basic physics". And the people and politics issues are really all about values. [2]
[1] So much for superordinate goals which could appeal to the different values systems of the global population.
[2] Human beings grow through about 6 or 7 major stages of worldview, each with its own values-system. This is why everyone is usually quite sure that their own way of looking at the world is the "right" way. Climate change isn't just science. Climate change is often really about trying to get the world to adopt a particular values-system. (And then when this values-system gets rejected by people, we end up thinking about them as "selfish", "consumerist", etc.) And in many ways climate change is about bringing forward a better set of values for the world. But because nobody seems to know that values cannot simply be imposed, like how you can't impose democracy on Iraq by bombing the old regime out of office, ie. because people actually grow through values in a particular way, in an organic, life experience kind of way, and cannot be made to change, even if the planet is burning or whatever, then the fact remains, most of the world does not care about climate change, because the way climate change is framed, it is all about a particular set of values, and most people are not at that stage of values. They just aren't. And if climate change proponents would stop being so narrow minded, they might see that. Someone somewhere made a huge blunder in trying to tie a new values system to a science theory (theory in the strong sense of the word). The values system should have been made subject of philosophy and ethics and even religion. But no, it was tied to a science theory, as if "reality" would force you to change how you value things. Which is just not how human beings work. So climate change will fail. It has been failing. It'll continue to fail. It'll really not be going anywhere, it is so failed (you Americans seem to like this kind of phrasing!) But as I say, this is Slashdot and a Friday, so who cares anyway.
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
That particular part of Turkey was quite dark skinned, including the Greek part of the population - even for Turks (as in - black). And the oldest known images of the historic St Nick all show a black man. Now these weren't done from life and we don't know how accurate they are - but he was clearly perceived as a black person for at least the first few centuries after he died, the white santa was only invented fairly recently.
We actually know very little about the man - and it's very hard ot tell which parts of the legend (if any) ever actually happened. But the odds are that he was black and this is why he was painted (and depicted in stained glass) as such for centuries.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Uranium et al aren't renewable?
(not saying anything about pollution, just that GP was pointing to renewables)
So... biomass, then?
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At the time of Einstein, it was well understood that something was wrong with Newtonian physics. Light was measured to move at a finite fixed speed, yet this speed didn't change relative to the relative velocities of the sender and receiver. Different reference frames for the same beam of light didn't match up. An explanation had to be found. It was one of the great problems of physics of the day.
Wingus, Dingus! Listen up!
Technically, solar, hydro, and wind aren't renewable either - you need to consume non-recyclable resources to produce the plants. Primarily concrete for the latter two, though newer wind turbines are making heavier use of fiberglass which uses plastic resins. Solar is just a mess right now - the cost to manufacture PV panels still makes it far more costly than other power sources.
I know there's a tendency to limit the term "renewable" to the fuel being consumed, because that's the most obvious consumable. But to do a proper comparison you really need to consider everything that's consumed (and not recycled) over the life cycle of the power plant, from breaking first ground through operation to demolition/disposal. I've done the math for wind vs. nuclear, and per TWh of power generated nuclear actually requires less infrastructure to be constructed (fewer construction materials consumed) than wind. Dunno if it's enough to offset the uranium that's consumed over the nuclear plant's lifetime. But saying one power source is not "renewable" while others are is not as cut and dry as popular definitions make it out to be.