power?
Of course, in the 1980's - that would be roughly two decades ago - around the time of Chernobyl and just after Three Mile Island, some countries, specifically Sweden and Germany, voted to abandon nuclear power. Neither country has actually abandoned nuclear power and replaced it with magical solar power though, have they?
It has been almost twenty years since the failure of a nuclear plant has injured anyone. Contrast this with Greenpeace coal, which kills people every damn day - even without the global climate change catastrophe that is striking right now.
Somehow I think the Swedes, and everyone else who gives a shit - this would obviously exclude religious small minded twits who can't add and subtract - can figure out the nature of reality when it stares them in the face.
In 2001, the four reactors at Ringhals produced over 25 terawatt-hours of electricity, one sixth of Sweden's entire demand, the third highest production level ever. 25 terawatt-hours is the equal to 90 petajoules (9 X 10^16 J). If we assume that the reactors operated at 30% efficiency, the total energy consumed was about 300 petajoules. At 25,000 kJ/kg, for coal, this is the equivalent of 12,000,000
tons (not milligrams, thank you) of coal. This single facility provided one sixth of the total electrical demand of Sweden, sufficient to power five cities the size of Gottenberg.
http://www.ringhals.se/files/Annual_Report_2001.pdfIt doesn't sound like Sweden abandoned nuclear power, now does it?
Sweden voted to abandon nuclear power twenty years ago, around the same time that Greenpeace twits were promising a solar nirvana in about ten years. Neither promise has come even remotely close to reality, and I expect, neither will within the lifetimes of anyone reading this.
Now that their little drinking binge is over and they've sobered up, I'll bet the Swedes will begin, like their Finnish neighbors, to think more clearly. It's not like they're stupid Americans, you know.
It seems to have recently occurred to the Swedes that they will have to burn coal if they really shut their nuclear plants because - hello? - the wind doesn't really blow all the time and the nights are very, very, very, very long in Stockholm around December 21. Theoretically, they could, one supposes, chop down every tree in Sweden and burn it up, but somehow this particular bit really isn't satisfying to thinking people. One hundred and fifty billion "watts" of PV cells don't work very well at night - even if solar are rated by misleading fools as if they operated continuously at their peak rating 24/7, 365.24 days a year.
Of course, anti-nuclear anti-environmental activists don't give a shit about coal - it is in fact their real agenda - but I predict it will be a very, very, very blistering hot day in Norbotten when Sweden actually shuts all of its nuclear plants to begin burning coal.
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