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  1. I don’t understand. Those that wanted VY shut down must be very concerned about climate change. How did this happen? I am so surprised and disappointed.

    1. @FermiAged

      I suspect you’re being ironic. The powerful people that wanted VY shutdown were much more concerned about increasing demand for natural gas and acceptance of a program to install subsidized wind turbines on mountain tops.

      Their useful, sign-waving proxies MIGHT have had no idea what they were fighting for — or against.

  2. Such cynicism. Let’s look on the sunny side. Let’s look at California. Those folks actually do a pretty good public accounting of their electric energy inputs and outputs, collected in California Energy Commission’s Energy Almanac. This runs thirty years 1983 – 2014. Let’s look at 2011 – 2012 year over year:

    We lost 15.27 TWh hydro and 18.17 TWh nuclear. Neither of these came back.

    We gained 2.56 TWh renewables (earth, wind, and fire) and 39.36 TWh fossils, of which 30.6 TWh was in-state gas.

    Energy imports are not cleanly broken down between coal, gas, and geothermal. I’ll assume the imported geothermal was unchanged as there’s just one out-of-state plant – Dixie Valley – putting out about 427 GWh / yr.

    Total the damage:
    Loss: -30.93 TWh low-carbon energy. (renewables – hydro – nuclear)
    Gain: +39.36 TWh fossil generation (mostly gas)
    Net: +8.47 TWh gained. All of it fossil.

    Such a deal. 🙂

  3. No kidding.
    You mean windmills can’t replace a nuke plant?
    Hey wait a minute isn’t that Bernies platform ?

  4. Things became somewhat blurred for me.
    Vermont’s governor stated that renewable would fill up the gap the closure of VY left for Vermont. Didn’t see a time schedule (those things take years).

    The figures here concern much larger New England. So no indication whether the governor’s promise is going to be kept. Especially since Hallquits states that part of the 5% gas increase is due to replacing coal.

    So I checked at EIA and saw that wind & solar are far behind compared to my country (NL) despite the much better circumstances in Vermont. But then read:
    “On June 11, Vermont passed a bill creating a 75% RPS by 2032”
    So it seems that Vermont will surpass Germany, which is then at ~60% renewable.

  5. I think that a distinction needs to be made between combined cycle gas and gas peeking plants. I understand that combined cycle plants can be up to 60% efficient, however peaking plants are only a little over half of that. The combined cycle plants can’t change their output nearly as quickly as the peaking plant. As a result it is the less efficient plants that smooth out flunctions in the output of wind power. The amount of energy available from wind is a function of the wind speed cubed.

    1. That’s why any realistic cost of wind power has to include something for baseload cycling. Wiki notes that for a SCGT peaker, the thermodynamic efficiency is between 30 and 42 percent, so on the low end, your guess is correct, assuming a high end for your CCGT unit.

      1. All base load plants are gradually phased out in Germany as those cannot (or won’t with increasing wind+solar) compete.

        With >82GW wind+solar capacity, Germany has more than it’s peak consumption. And expansion goes on with ~5G/a.
        So % of the time during which overproduction with associated low prices (<1cnt/KWh*) will increase. Those price levels make P2G deployment economic.
        So Germany has now already ~20 P2G pilot plants of ~6MW each, using different technologies and targeting different markets.

        As it are unmanned fully automated plants, housed in a few standard sea-containers, the costs of P2G is not high. Many improvements are expected..
        The renewable gas & fuel is intended to sell as car fuel (so the plant is installed at the gas-station), to inject in the natural gas system, etc.
        ___
        *) The marginal costs of wind and solar are only ~0.1cnt/Kwh

        1. Baseload can’t be phased out and retain a functioning electrical grid without an awful amount of fossil fueled peaker plants or extreme overbuild of renewables that is uneconomic and will destroy the german landscape completely.

          Power to gas is a solution in search of a problem; and that problem is renewables. When the various tax, feed in tarriff and grid subsidies go away, they’ll solve the problem the alternate route by not building renewables in the first place.

          1. Renewable scenario assumes zero base load plants.
            In Denmark wind alone will produce >100% during >100days/year in 2020. Germany follows ~ a decade behind. The number of those days will increase in the years thereafter as wind+solar will continue to increase.

            Considering the marginal costs of wind & solar (<$1/MWh), can you explain how base load plants can compete / survive in that environment??

            Power to gas can also contribute to solve the emission problem of combustion engines; cars, boilers for house heating, etc..
            Those emit far more, than ff electricity generation here in NW-EU.

          2. Considering the marginal costs of wind & solar (<$1/MWh),

            Considering the overall costs of wind & solar + storage (> $500/MWh), can you explain how people will be able to afford light and heat in your all-renewable scenario?  They make Olkiluoto look positively cheap.

        2. I can’t reply to your other comment for some reason (tree to deep?).

          “Renewable scenario assumes zero base load plants.”

          Yes, that’s the joke.

          “In Denmark wind alone will produce >100% during >100days/year in 2020.”

          AKA, tenuous gas pipelines will produce most of the power 265 days a year, in 2020.

          “Considering the marginal costs of wind & solar (<$1/MWh), can you explain how base load plants can compete / survive in that environment??"

          They're needed for stable elecitricty prices and reliable supply. Regulators will find a way to keep them around or they will face a lynch mob, when granny is hit up for a $2000 electricity bill in the middle of a cold winter.

          If you start removing baseload, the price will become volatile and shoot to the moon during the long cold winter where renewables don't deliver the goods (especially in Denmark) and electricity use is highest.

          Reality always bats last. All it takes is a couple of weeks of $10/kWh prices and your renewables mirage will evaporate.

          1. gas … will produce most of the power 265 days a year, in 2020.
            Wind will produce >50% of the power in 2020. They also have biomass and solar. An easy to read overview of Danish progress.

            Base load needed for stable electricity prices and reliability?
            Such price peaks are a temporal symptom in a free market.
            When Germany moved towards substantial share of renewable in the 2004-2010 period, electricity prices started to fluctuate highly. So entrepreneurs, etc. saw chances and started all kinds of activities (demand management, storage, peakers, etc). In the years thereafter those high prices became lower and lower. Nowadays those price peaks hardly occur, while renewable share increased from smaller than 10% towards more than 30%.

            German electricity reliability increased significant in the 2004-2010 period when renewable became significant.
            It’s now only surpassed by Denmark, which is >10years ahead in the transition.

  6. US nuclear power capacity factor over the past 5 years has averaged around 90%. No other power source comes close. The regulators need to value that quality as well as the very low carbon foot print when dispatching power sources for use on the grids of the country.

    1. The points I have tried to make on this and other blogs is that the “free market” does not currently place a monetary value on three absolutely vital things that nuclear offers: 1) a capacity factor unmatched by any other generating source, 2) zero-carbon emissions, zero non-carbon emissions (sulfur dioxides), and 3) diversity of fuel source. This latter is an important buffer against price spikes that gas-fired generation is vulnerable to, as well as supply issues like in New England, where gas is diverted to space heating purposes in winter, and electricity generators are often left scrambling for other fuels. Currently the market places no monetary value on these, whereas extremely generous subsidies are offered (and mandated) for non-nuclear, carbon-free generators with very low capacity factors. Why are those rewarded for poor performance (compared to nuclear)? Seems bass-ackwards to me. Either reward the good performers, or penalize the poor performers.

      1. @Wayne,
        >90% CF implies more production of KWh’s, but I don’t see a lot of additional monetary value for that 90% CF??
        The NPP still needs expensive full spinning reserve together with grid adaptations, as it can (and does) stop (sometimes) production within a few seconds.

        1. Very rarely, as the 90+% capacity factor indicates. The 90+% capacity factor has value because it means the energy will very likely be there when you need it, day or night, rain or shine, windy or calm. Dependability has value. Not so with sources whose output depends on the capriciousness of natural phenomena. There is very little value in energy that is produced when it is not needed (but the must-take provisions say you still have to buy it at significantly inflated costs), and of course there is no value in energy that is not produced when you do need it.

        2. Every NPP won’t stop at once. If they do, you have bigger problems.

          Every wind turbine in Europe can and do stop. Wind acts as a single giant plant; and needs to be fully backed up by a duplicate fossil fueled system of the same capacity.

          1. @Soylent

            I listened to a VP from ERCOT earlier this week explain how they can be suddenly inundated with wind power from West Texas that is roughly equivalent to bringing 8-12 nuclear plants on line within an hour or two. That wind generated electricity supply can disappear just as rapidly. Texas has no capacity market, they have created a grid supply system that depends on hugely risky bets where wholesale market prices are allowed to rise as high as $9,000 per MW-hr. That is equivalent to $9.00 per kw-hr. If a 1 GW generator has an outage, planned or unplanned, and misses the rare hours when those prices exist, they would lose out on $9,000,000 worth of sales for each hour missed.

            Of course, I am sure that every generator in the system is run by honest owners who would never do anything to cause supply to tighten enough to increase the number of hours when those prices are available. After all, Ken Lay is no longer running an electricity trading business.

        3. The NPP still needs expensive full spinning reserve together with grid adaptations, as it can (and does) stop (sometimes) production within a few seconds.

          You vastly overstate the problem. Some spinning reserve could be needed, but much of the rest can be and is covered on the demand side through agreements with industrial customers who buy electricity in bulk. For a discount in the rate they get, they agree to have their power interrupted in these situations until non-spinning reserve can be brought online.

          Whether this deal works out depends on how often electricity production is interrupted. Nuclear plants rarely go down unexpected — so they work well with this kind of arrangement. Junk like wind and solar expected to go down regularly, only one does not know when. They are completely unsuitable for this kind of arrangement and instead must rely on spinning reserve (i.e., fossil fuel plants unless an abundance of hydroelectric is available, such as in Scandinavia) to cover pretty much all of their capacity.

          1. Brian,
            Solar & wind production is predicted, hours and even days in advance as those depend on sun’s altitude and weather predictions.
            That it concerns many thousands of small generators distributed over a very large area, also contribute to the accuracy of the production predictions.

            Little influence if some of those thousands of generators stop suddenly & unexpected.
            Even a power line failure has less influence as those thousands of generators are dispersed all over the grid, even the distribution grid.

            So very little spinning reserve needed.
            It explains the significant reliability increase of the German grid, when the Energiewende got steam.

            1. @Bas

              It’s evident that your skills are more aligned with riding bicycles than with operating an electrical power grid.

              Grids must maintain a tight balance between supply and demand. If generators a liable to suddenly stop or start producing there HAVE to be controls available to maintain the balance.

              It is possible to shed loads, ramp up already running power sources, draw down battery storage, or some combination.

              It’s also possible to maintain reliability as long as there is plenty of overcapacity that’s readily called into service on short notice. Of course, overbuilding is expensive, wasteful and not environmentally beneficial.

  7. @Wayne,
    The 90+% capacity factor has value because it means the energy will very likely be there when you need it,

    Statistics show that reliability of electricity delivery is independent of the CF of individual generators. Statistics suggest even the opposite.
    E.g. Denmark (40% generated by wind alone) and Germany (30% renewable) have far better reliability than ‘nuclear’ UK, France, US (SAIDI figure 4 – 8 times better).
    SAIDI figures in Germany improved significantly when renewable became significant in Germany in last decade.

    1. “SAIDI figures in Germany improved significantly when renewable became significant in Germany in last decade.”

      Note the similarity in the computer industry.
      There reliability also increased greatly when the big mainframes were replaced by many small PC-likes, who operate parallel.

      1. Note the similarity in the computer industry. There reliability also increased greatly when the big mainframes were replaced by many small PC-likes, who operate parallel.

        Bas – Not only are you extremely ignorant about energy policy, but you don’t know anything about computers as well.

        The trend over the last decade has been to switch datacenters to using mainframes, not away from them. Not only are mainframes more reliable, with superior I/O performance (the key requirement for a datacenter) compared to racks and racks of individual units, they use less energy and that reduces costs, which impacts the bottom line.

        The development of Virtual Machine technology and cloud computing has brought the mainframe back.

        IBM switching its server datacenters to mainframes

        “Big Blue expects move to mainframes will reduce its energy bill by 80 percent and save $250 million in overall costs”

        Who says that capacity factor doesn’t matter? It certainly does in the computer world:

        “Servers operate at anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of capacity because they usually run only one software application. But mainframes operate at an average 80 percent of capacity, meaning one mainframe can replace multiple servers, said Bernie Meyerson, an IBM fellow, vice president of strategic alliances and chief technologist. And virtualization, the process of dividing a server into multiple logical servers to improve utilization, was pioneered on mainframes decades ago, he said.

        “If 30 mainframes can do the work of 3,900 servers, any company can reduce their server count and reduce the need to build more datacenter space, which is challenging given tight energy supplies, Meyerson said.”

        It matters in the energy sector too.

        1. Nice sales promotion of IBM. What’s in a name.
          These new mainframes of IBM have a similar distributed architecture…
          It’s not clear to me whether their new mainframe line became a success and conquered more than a niche.

          Btw.
          We dropped the “one application one server idea” long ago for the same reason as stated in your link:”under-utilization”. Though people running the data-center favor it because it makes life easier for them.

          1. Nice sales promotion of IBM. What’s in a name.

            Coming from you, Bas, that’s hilarious. How many times have we heard from you about Denmark installing Danish-made wind turbines that Denmark works hard to export?

            Really, who pays you to publish this junk on websites? Globe-trotting is expensive, and it’s clear that you don’t have another day job.

            These new mainframes of IBM have a similar distributed architecture …

            No, sorry, they do not. You simply don’t know what you’re talking about — but that is normal for you.

            It’s not clear to me whether their new mainframe line became a success and conquered more than a niche.

            That’s because you are too lazy to follow the trends in IT. I guess you spend too much of your time posting lies and nonsense in the comment sections of blogs like this one to be able to keep up.

            We dropped the “one application one server idea” long ago

            No … more idiocy from you. If anything, it has become more prevalent. With the explosion of “smart” phones, there are legions of computers out there with only one application, one purpose, which is to communicate with and back up data on people’s cell phones. That purpose didn’t exist when that InfoWorld article was written.

      2. That’s a faulty analogy and my personal experience is that it isn’t true. I used to do development work on the CDC Cyber 203 systems in Minneapolis. There were three mainframes. Thousands of people would be logged in simultaneously. One system backed up the other and the third backed up those. When whatever machine was the “on duty” mainframe had a problem (rarely), the others stepped in. After some time we went to downloadable workstations. Nothing but trouble. Mine used to break down all the time. We had to send it back to be repaired. That meant I had to work a lot of nights because the others that might have served as backups were always in use. So availability (capacity factor) was lousy for the distributed system, at least at the user level.

    2. The figures for “reliability” in Denmark and Germany are only the appearance of reliability. That is because they have backed up their “renewable” (unreliable) wind with truly reliable, dispatchable sources. In Germany it is coal (lignite). In Denmark it is easy access to Norwegian hydropower. Those backup sources give the illusion of reliability for their wind sources. If they didn’t have those then two things would happen. First, they’d be short of power. Second, it would be a lot less reliable.

      1. @Wayne,
        Yes. The many thousands of small wind & solar generators also need back-up, though expensive ‘spinning reserve’ capacity can be much smaller as production changes are very small when a few generators stop suddenly.
        The major changes occur gradually and are predicted many hours in advance (weather and sun related), so enough time for ff generators to adapt..

        It’s still not clear what the extra (in addition to higher production for ~ same costs, so lower price/KWh) financial value is of >90% CF?

        1. Are you sure about that? One of the training simulations I was involved in for regional power dispatching control involved a scenario where there were a lot of intermittent generators, mostly wind, but some solar, loaded into the grid because of things like pollution dispatching and also the mandated power purchases that system operators were just becoming resigned to having to manage. It was a daytime period of relatively steady load, things like businesses and factories running at more or less constant load. The first thing that happened was the approach of a rapidly-developing storm front. The leading edge of the front is ragged, with quickly-changing insolation occurring in a chaotic manner as clouds passed and dissipated over the solar arrays. Accompanying that were gusty winds that would surge and peak and suddenly drop off, with the cycle repeating but in a non-periodic manner. The first thing you do is try to smooth out the variations by loading and unloading some of the variable producers, keeping an eye on total load and keeping a reasonable margin from dispatchable sources and the variability of the intermittent generators, never crossing the line between available capacity and load rejection. As the storm front becomes more organized the SHTF in that you know now you have to throw in the towel on both the solar producers and the windmills, because the solar arrays are clouded over and being pelted with rain and sleet, and you have to feather those props so they don’t go overspeed and burn themselves up. But then the question is, do you have baseload supply or not? If you’ve got a nuclear unit supplying the “basement” baseload, you’re probably okay to avoid total load rejection, but you damn well better have either an intertie or some quick-start peakers that can step in to keep everyone else on line. The time periods are often more like minutes rather than hours. Some of those peakers can come up pretty quickly, but not instantly, so you’ll probably have some non-quality sweat time trying to juggle what you have with what you don’t. It will give you a head of gray hairs, and make you want to hit the saloons when your shift is over (if the lights are still on).

          1. @Wayne,
            Thanks for the nice story. Having been an extreme mountain climber, it seems to me you have a really nice, interesting job!

            German grid operators have the option to adapt wind turbine production on line, without intervention of the owner/manager of the wind farm. So the delay is a minute or less. I’m not sure but think they can also switch off/on some solar arrays, witch is a matter of less than a second.

            Btw. the owners get some compensation for missed production, so grid operators prefer to avoid it.

            Furthermore the first (flow) batteries are installed in the German grid. Believe, those are a great help to stabilize the frequency within the demanded, increasingly more narrow, band.

        2. Bas, FTR and honesty. that was a simulator that I had a chance to work with. I don’t think I could stand the stress of doing it everyday, although the people I know who do say they think they are filling a vital role in keeping a modern society running.

  8. Obfuscation.

    That is the tactic of BAS and Bernie. Because its pretty simple to explain to laymen if you can get their attention for a minute or so.

    Wind/solar are as variable as the weather. The grid cannot be variable. Thus wind/solar need 100% back-up which in the US the preferred choice is natural gas plants which are basically giant jet engines that ramp up and down as the wind gusts and then ebbs.

    The wind/solar cheerleaders never mention the natural gas back-up plant requirement.

    I have swayed some of my friends and relatives to the pro-nuclear camp with a brief education

    1. Not only backup, but if you have any portion of your baseload supply being cycled due to variability in wind and solar, that adds a significant cost. Very few “studies” that I have seen touting the use of unreliable generators mention the cost of baseload cycling. When you do include it, the price for unreliable generators escalates even further.

    2. Sorry, that I obfuscated.
      I want to get clear what that additional financial value is of >90% CF???
      (apart from obvious lower cost price if CF increases)

      Your back-up remark:
      All critical generators need back-up..
      The calculation which is cheaper:
      – predicted fluctuations in wind+solar production, with fossil backup and a small % of expensive (‘fossil spinning reserve’ + storage) backup; or
      – NPP’s which need primarily expensive (‘fossil spinning reserve’ + storage);
      is complicated. We won’t get that clear.

      I only want to remark that the fossil can also be renewable (biomass, gas made by P2G).

  9. Even if (hypothetically) they brought new renewables with similar annual generation to VY online, after VY’s closure, they still would have effectively chosen fossil (gas) generation over nuclear, because that added renewable generation could have been used to replace fossil fuels instead.

    The simple fact is that as long as fossil generation continues to provide a significant fraction of power in the region, all new renewable generation must be used to replace fossil fuels, not nuclear. That is, if one really claims to be concerned about global warming. How can one defend spending huge amounts of money (on new renewable generation) just to keep CO2 emissions the same? And, as this article points out, in almost all cases, fossil generation actually increases.

  10. @Jim,
    How can one defend spending huge amounts of money (on new renewable generation) just to keep CO2 emissions the same?
    Because nuclear is viewed to be more dangerous than global waming. E,g, for next generations.

    1. More junk science from Scherb. Rod swore that he was going to ban you (again), Bas, if you ever posted that junk again. Bye.

      1. @Brian,
        I just answered Jim’s question…

        Your proposal confirms the argument often stated in Germany:
        That nuclear power facilitates/requires a society of secrecy and censorship, which is anti-democratic.
        It contributed to give ‘democratizing electric energy’ important place in the Energiewende.

        Rod respects the first amendment
        So I doubt whether he will follow TheEnergyCollective (TEC) whose censors filter anti-nuclear comments before publishing, as I and others experienced. Similar as in former East-Germany, etc.

        1. Bas – This is between you and Rod now. In Rod’s defense, you had been warned, so you knew the rules. Personally, I think that you are a paid troll, so I will not be sad to see you go.

          1. I’m not paid. Earn enough money with part time ICT activities.
            It allows me a lot of other activities such as long distance biking (cycled in 8 weeks a lot of New Zealand this winter), paragliding, mountain climbing, skiing, Amnesty International, traveling, etc.

          2. Bas, I don’t mean to dictate or criticize your lifestyle choices (although I have alluded to them in a deprecatory manner in the past), but I must say that your globe-trotting activities have given your a carbon footprint in your thirty-something years (a guess based on your picture) that dwarfs mine for the sixty-something years I have been on this Earth. While you’re flying to New Zealand, all I can afford to do is take a 1600-mile roundtrip to the beach and back with three people in the car. Good thing there are those safe, reliable, clean nuclear plants out there to offset the carbon footprints, large or small.

          3. Brian,
            Alas I passed even my forties..
            Not always involved in activities with high CO2 footprint. Still do competition rowing, cycle almost always when in NL, sit too much in meetings and behind a screen.

            Your remark regenerated my curiosity about why so few US people travel around compared to some decades ago.
            I see far less in Europe now.
            When we met no Americans (and many other nationalities) during our bike trip around Aconcagua Chile/Argentine in 2011, we thought it may be because of the language barrier.

            When we traveled in 2012 through SW-USA a guide in Meso Verde National Park asked the nationalities of the visiting group (~30 people) he guided. It was amazing that the majority came from Europe, there were almost as much Asians as US people. He seemed not surprised.

            Recently we met only two Americans in the 8 weeks in New Zealand (NZ), lots of Germans, etc. While it takes less time to fly to NZ for Americans, the native language is English, and NZ is a very safe, relaxed, easy going country.

            So I’m puzzled…

            Rod,
            I know it’s entirely off topic. So feel free if you want to remove this comment.

          4. I have only traveled abroad on business so I guess that added to my carbon footprint, although I had no choice in the matter since it was for work. I went to one Caribbean island for my honeymoon back in the mid 1980s, but that is about it for personal travel. Why? Cost, hassle, expenses once you get there, being a target abroad, etc. I know there are ways to reduce those costs but I am a bit on the old side to be doing the youth hostel thing. We are both too old for camping and my wife hates RVs and campers because of a bad experience in her younger years doing that. I guess I am just happy being on the beach and watching the waves. It calms my spirit and has a renewing effect. For me it is worth the 800 mile one-way trip, but that’s just me.

          5. I now understand.
            When we cycle around on our bikes we have a tent and cooking gear with us.
            Usually we buy food in the last village we pass before the camp site (sometimes we buy food for more days when there is no shop in the next >100km), cook ourselves, etc.
            Our Garmin GPS with all camping’s & shops is a great help.

            Except during our Indian Kashmir cycle trip in autumn 2014. The cheap small hotels were operated by poor families, so you grant these people business.
            We only camped once, near the road towards the highest pass, as there was no other option.

          6. Like I said, I will not stand in judgment of your lifestyle choices, although I may make a comment or two about the carbon footprint of undertaking such journeys. I assume to must use air travel to get to those places and that racks up considerable air mileage, probably many times what I have accrued in my time on this Earth. You are fortunate to have the time and means to make such trips. I never did. I was always too busy in school or work and raising a family. I am just too old now to do those things. And whatever little money I can make now from consulting work seems to get eaten up by government taxes. So, bottom line, count your blessings.

          7. I didn’t know that. My condolences. Very tragic. I can’t read Dutch but she looks like a happy and beautiful child. Certainly a parent’s worst nightmare to outlive their children. Has not happened to me (thankfully) but did to my Mom when my younger sister died at age 34 (self-inflicted). We never really got over it. Sometimes life can be very confusing.:-(

        2. Bas, the first amendment in the US has to do with government censorship of free media. It does not apply to owners of private media like websites restricting or censoring content. There the rules are made by the media (website) owners regarding private individuals. Not all letters to the editor are published by newspapers, for whatever reasons. The 1st Amendment guarantees that Government will not restrict the free printing of news stories, opinions, advertising, etc. But you are not a US citizen so we have to cut you a little slack. I have no idea what Dutch law entails so in that sense the shoe is on my foot as well as yours.

          1. @Wayne
            Thanks! Yes the owner can follow the policy of allowing only mildly critical or unfounded comments and censor better founded comments, such as TEC does.
            Preventing most of a real discussion. So the site will mainly be visited by pro-nuclear who find confirmation of their opinions. Contributing to a ‘deformed’ view of the world, leading to questions such as the one of Jim to which I reacted.
            Real discussions to be kept elsewhere.

            The PPT I linked refers to the m/f sex ratio increase if fathers are in areas with increased radiation in the days before conception. Something UNSCEAR reported already in 1958 to the UN general assemby. Should that be hided?

            It also shows the m/f sex ratio increase around nuclear waste site Gorleben, confirmed by independent research by pro-nuclear scientists (their report is linked at sh. 19). After a conference with all involved scientists (also pro-nuclear professor from university, etc. All could present) the state then asked Scherb to write the final report for Merkel cs which delivered premature closure last summer, while the huge storage building is largely empty.
            Btw. this again confirms that Scherb is one of the leading scientists.

            Should that factual story kept behind? So you can go on not understanding and defying people who (dare to) show they think otherwise? Just as with the weapons of mass destruction of Hussein.
            Or should US nuclear learn about it and improve storage such that the genenetic damage doesn’t occur? US has enough space to avoid such damage.

          2. Bas, I don’t know, it is up to Rod Adams for this particular site to decide those issues. He may or may not object to a poster repeatedly bringing material or links to the site that have been previously denied.

            The allowance of only a prescribed set of viewpoints, basically people telling each other what they want to hear, is, as we all know, what is commonly called an echo chamber. I don’t think Atomic Insights is one because my impression is the moderator allows dissenting viewpoints as long as they are presented dispassionately and with solid, validated supporting evidence, preferably peer-reviewed, documented information that is publically accessible. The fact that you are posting here (although sent to detention at least once in the past) shows opposing views are tolerated. You may get some blowback from other posters, but the internet is that way if you come to a site that is clearly noted as being advocacy for a particular viewpoint. But pushback is not the same as censorship.

          3. the moderator allows dissenting viewpoints as long as they are presented dispassionately and with solid, validated supporting evidence, preferably peer-reviewed, documented information that is publically accessible.

            The publications I link are all publicly accessible. Most in peer reviewed scientific journals. The PPT I linked is based on such publications and has many such links.

            If you find any of my viewpoints are not supported by scientific research results, please state those, so I can respond with the supporting scientific publication or excuse myself.

            Agree that censorship here is less bad than that of TheEnergyCollective (TEC).
            Because TEC presents itself as neutral.

          4. Bas, I don’t know about your sources. You say they are credible and peer-reviewed but others have classified them as junk science. I haven’t read them myself. There is a game people play on the internet where they do a modified Gish Gallop on links and sources, either dumped at once (traditional Gish Gallop) or trickled out over many posts (modified Gish Gallop), basically versions of the logical fallacy argumentum ad tl;dr. I have no inclination or time to engage in whack-a-link. But others, including the moderator, may be willing to run those down. I will read what you post because it is your own work in your own words. I weigh that against my own knowledge of the subject (30+ years in the business, four years of college and five years of graduate school, not to Appeal to Authority or anything) and draw whatever conclusions I can. But again, that’s just me and how I do things.

          5. You say they are credible and peer-reviewed but others have classified them as junk science.
            You may assume that:
            – German government didn’t decide to close their prime nuclear waste storage prematurely, if Scherb etal produced junk science.
            – respectable peer reviewed scientific journals won’t publish his reports again and again. If it is junk science, pronuclear scientists will attack and destroy those publications. Which affects the rating of the journal.
            – the German parliament (Bundestag) does not invite junk scientists to present their research and results.

            I have seen only unfounded statements that the results cannot be true.
            I don’t know of any study which indicate that there is a threshold below which radiation causes no DNA damage to humans, and especially not to newborn.
            While others scientists report similar results as Scherb’s.

          6. I don’t assume anything. And I really don’t want to rehash the Scherb business. I read through that long discussion that was on AI last year, as well as looking at other information, and I really don’t see anything convincing. I am not into data mining, but I do know radiation physics, and the whole thing looks pretty weak to me.

            As far as the German government and what they do regarding things nuclear and nuclear-related, there are any number of reasons why they do what they do, but in the end it all boils down to two things: FUD and politics. And I really don’t want to rehash those, either. They can do what they want, burning lignite and coal and generally making a worse environment for their people and their neighbors, but they will have to answer for that.

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