What can be done to prevent more dangerous heatwaves in Europe?
Does Europe need to plant more trees in it’s cities?
It appears that Europe does many things right for sustainability and climate change - public transit over cars, recycling, reducing carbon footprint better compared to other parts of the world. Of course all communities can do better at reducing their carbon footprint - Is this America’s fault with their carbon footprint that Europe is suffering? America has their cars, and simply cranks up their Air conditioners when it’s hot.
What else is there to do? I thought China had success improving their renewable energy output, even though they are still polluters, is it the actions of China and the USA causing misery in Europe? How do we help Europeans suffering and prevent this from happening again?
A time machine
It’s a tantalizing idea simply to blame the US for the deteriorating climate in Europe. But that seems both pointless and unjustified. Industrialization and excessive emissions started in Europe. We have gone into debt far enough ourselves in a manner of speaking, we can’t blame the yanks although their government currently is … well, you know.
Europeans are going to buy air conditioners and they will probably outfit cooling facilities that people can seek refuge from the heat in as a stop gap measure. That’s definitely causing more nuclear waste in France where atom splitting reigns supreme. Although nuclear power generation will suffer when rivers needed for cooling become mere trickles. And for the rest of the continent one can only hope they don’t burn shit to turn turbines to make more power. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
There is no way to prevent these heatwaves; the damage is already done. If we stopped burning stuff today everywhere, we could prevent them from getting worse. That’s just a very sensible pipe dream unfortunately.
I was under the impression that Europe’s current carbon footprint was lower than much of the world.
Nuclear energy is an interesting discussion. I’ve heard the suggestion that it’s one good alternative specifically for now until communities and countries can get better renewable energy alternatives. But people can be so weary due to the low but real risk that things have gone wrong in the past.
Current? Maybe. Since the 1750s? Nope.
Nuclear power is also a stop gap solution if you ask me. It isn’t clean. It creates highly toxic waste products that nobody wants to keep stored for centuries in their backyard, just not a lot of CO2. That gets waved away a lot like it isn’t an issue. It’s better than burning gas, oil, or coal. It’s not better than renewables in my opinion. And nuclear needs a reliable cooling chain for its survival and all the people unfortunate enough to live close by. That’s normally done with water that happens to flow by the plant. If the increasing heat dries out these rivers, you’ll get a slightly more stretched out version of Fukushima.
The problem is batteries. If we could have batteries that store the sun and wind energy for when sun and wind are on a break, we’d be set. We don’t have that. The tech isn’t there yet. And we’d probably empoverish all the countries who are unfortunate enough to have the necessary rare earths in the ground in the process. We’re fucked in more ways than one.
It creates highly toxic waste products that nobody wants to keep stored for centuries in their backyard, just not a lot of CO2. That gets waved away a lot like it isn’t an issue. It’s better than burning gas, oil, or coal. It’s not better than renewables in my opinion. And nuclear needs a reliable cooling chain for its survival and all the people unfortunate enough to live close by. That’s normally done with water that happens to flow by the plant. If the increasing heat dries out these rivers, you’ll get a slightly more stretched out version of Fukushima.
It’s a very small amount that can be contained in secure casks and concentrated in a particular secure location in the middle of nowhere as opposed to other industrial wastes that are blasted out into the environment and our lungs.
You do need cooling water to keep a plant operational at full power by ensuring your condenser can handle all the steam coming in. If it can’t due to declining river volume then the operators must reduce power (thus making less steam which needs less condensing), if they for whatever reason were not paying attention to the alarms going off then their plant would automatically shut down for loss of condenser vacuum and restore that margin by itself. You don’t have to use rivers as the source of cooling for every nuclear reactor either though some existing ones are designed that way. You can source water from oceans, lakes, groundwater, heck you can make artificial bodies of water that are filled with surplus water and can be used in times of diminished water from whatever is used to feed them, etc.
A fair warning up top: my mind is very much made up about this. The risks of nuclear power generation from feeding the grid until the radiation mess has half-lived itself into harmlessness are too great in my opinion. And that’s what this is. My opinion. I suspect yours differs. If you keep reading, you’ll probably get the feeling that there isn’t anything you can point out that gets through to me. Because, truthfully, it doesn’t.
It’s a very small amount that can be contained in secure casks and concentrated in a particular secure location in the middle of nowhere …
In my opinion, this is the waving away bit I referred to earlier. Europe doesn’t have a “middle of nowhere.” There is no such thing as a “secure location.” There is at best one with slightly reduced risks. There are people spread out everywhere, you’re going to end up in somebody’s backyard who doesn’t want it there. You need to be very careful that this stuff doesn’t escape its container and seep into groundwater. And this needs not to happen for a minimum of a century. You’re not breathing in the fumes constantly, sure. That’s why it’s better than a coal plant. You’re risking radiation leakages over a very long time for future generations, should we survive this as a species. It’s human hubris to say we can engineer around this threat on a scale of centuries.
A significant number of inland plants are built close to rivers for the perceived ease of getting the water. We just need one of them to fail unexpectedly to have a big problem. I’m not sure using groundwater for cooling is a great idea for much the same reasons as it isn’t for data centers. We need to manage our water resources, especially drinking water, as Europe heats up. We need to plan for a time when there is no “surplus water.” And damming up rivers is expensive and the benefits of that to the environment are limited. If we go to these lengths to preserve a nuclear fission plant we might as well built a solar farm and a wind farm.
I understand that emissions-wise nuclear fission is a great way to avoid those and it thus beats burning fossils. It’s still more of a “the plague or cholera?” kind of choice between them. If everything around nuclear power plants is that great and nothing to worry about, why Three Mile, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? It’s the hubris of we’ve got forces much more powerful than us under control. Until we don’t. We’ve thought of everything! Until we find out we didn’t. You put all of this together and that’s why I think fission is a stop gap technology we should phase out completely - drastically, at the very least.
No one changes minds on the internet but I like to yap so w/e though I did almost drop when my draft got wiped.
In my opinion, this is the waving away bit I referred to earlier. Europe doesn’t have a “middle of nowhere.” There is no such thing as a “secure location.” There is at best one with slightly reduced risks. There are people spread out everywhere, you’re going to end up in somebody’s backyard who doesn’t want it there. You need to be very careful that this stuff doesn’t escape its container and seep into groundwater. And this needs not to happen for a minimum of a century. You’re not breathing in the fumes constantly, sure. That’s why it’s better than a coal plant. You’re risking radiation leakages over a very long time for future generations, should we survive this as a species. It’s human hubris to say we can engineer around this threat on a scale of centuries.
Lower populations are fine and plenty of undesirable villages are depopulating as young folks move to the cities and pensioners shuffle off this coil. Find one with an agreeable populace (not as hard as you think, many communities actually try to be selected for waste disposal projects and try to promote their site over others), no seismic activity of importance for a geologically sustained period of time, and impermeable clay soil far below any important aquifer. Place it there with compacted bentonite clay or similar as a liner. Insanely low hydraulic conductivity (~10^-13 m/s) through the torturous paths in the clay which also simultaneously has a strongly adsorbent effect where the solute gets scrubbed out by the clay while the water is on its long journey out means even if the cans fail and a substantial amount of material gets out it won’t be going far… not enough moving aggressively enough to impact hundreds of feet above. As it happens there was already a trial run done by Mother Nature billions of years ago in the natural nuclear reactors of Oklo, Gabon and it turned out that the fission products didn’t get very far at all even with less than ideal materials.
A significant number of inland plants are built close to rivers for the perceived ease of getting the water. We just need one of them to fail unexpectedly to have a big problem. I’m not sure using groundwater for cooling is a great idea for much the same reasons as it isn’t for data centers. We need to manage our water resources, especially drinking water, as Europe heats up. We need to plan for a time when there is no “surplus water.” And damming up rivers is expensive and the benefits of that to the environment are limited. If we go to these lengths to preserve a nuclear fission plant we might as well built a solar farm and a wind farm.
It’s a rare river that suddenly deletes itself with no forewarning of reduction in flow but anyway the amount of water needed for sustained cooling of fuel pools is substantially lower than that needed to support active operation at full power so if the river reroutes itself entirely or whatever you have in mind then you can scram to shut the plant down. Then your remaining needs can be handled by onsite water storage which is mandated by the regulator along with alternate flexible means of getting the water into the pools such as using firehoses. I’ve seen a site that pumped groundwater to cool the reactor and there was no concern of depletion because it was near a water source that left it constantly charged, even excessively so to the point that flooding would regularly render some of the pump stations inaccessible except by boat in the wetter seasons of the year. I was not getting at building a dam to save a nuke plant but rather pointing out that there are many different designs that can handle different environmental conditions so having hot and low flow rivers does not entirely cancel the prospects for nuclear power entirely even if some specific sites are rendered uneconomical and IF it is worth it perhaps alternatives may exist for a particular site like extending storage ponds and tanks to ride out irregularities in weather and river flow. It’s a good idea to have a mixed power grid that’s not overly reliant on one or two elements subject to shocks.
I understand that emissions-wise nuclear fission is a great way to avoid those and it thus beats burning fossils. It’s still more of a “the plague or cholera?” kind of choice between them. If everything around nuclear power plants is that great and nothing to worry about, why Three Mile, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? It’s the hubris of we’ve got forces much more powerful than us under control. Until we don’t. We’ve thought of everything! Until we find out we didn’t. You put all of this together and that’s why I think fission is a stop gap technology we should phase out completely - drastically, at the very least.
The halt on nuclear but continuing energy demand resulted in continued massive rollout of fossil fuels with all their attending health consequences and the cøimate crisis. Nuclear is right at the bottom of deaths per MW produced between solar and wind. Hydro and the natural gas are two orders of magnitude higher and coal is yet another. If people think that for their area nuclear is prudent and can convince and live up to the standards of the regulator then I see no reason to stand in their way and tell them no such that they build some way deadlier energy source. A lot of expansion is happening for nuclear, much more for solar, and I see both of those developments as really really good if they are preventing something worse like gas from coming online. For what it’s worth ithe worst of the three accidents you mentioned is not physically possible in western reactors which have a negative void coefficient of reactivity whereas Chernobyl had a positive one. In the Chernobyl reactor graphite was the moderator (slows down neutrons to a speed where they will actually interact with the fuel) and water was the coolant whereas in western reactors water is both the coolant and moderator. So at Chernobyl the water wasn’t as good at moderating as the graphite and actually acted as a neutron absorber that ate up neutrons without contributing to fission reactions. So when they heated up, the water expanded and became less good at absorbing which meant less neutrons got consumed so more flew on into the graphite to get moderated and could cause fissions which made more power which boiled more water to repeat the cycle and that’s how you got a runaway reaction at a plant that also didn’t even have a containment. In western reactors since the water is the moderator if it expands from heating then it also becomes worse at slowing down the neutrons because more are sailing through and not slowing down to interact with the fuel. So this limits how high you can get the power much more sharply, plus we have containments to keep the material there even if the vessel loses its integrity. This is part of why the deaths and radioactive releases are insanely less for the other two combined vs. Chernobyl. Those events changed how nuclear does business and inaugurated WANO and comprehensive sharing of operating experience and strategies on safely operating plants, including on beyond design basis accidents in the wake of the unprecedented earthquake and tsunami combo that took out Fukushima. Honestly for mostly safe but occasionally punctuated with insanely deadly and/or displacing tragedies hydro should be considered as scarier than nuclear, meanwhile fossil fuels are just slowly killing people everywhere to general shrugs.
The only way to carbon neutrality is nuclear. “Renewables” require a metric shit-tonne of fossil fuel burning and non-renewable materials mined from the ground to be made, all putting out and endless stream of carbon. Nuclear? Basically none.
The nuclear waste is a drop in the ocean compared to the landfill created from “renewables”. We’ll end up just blasting it off into outer space one of these days anyway.
According to the UN and other organizations: To PREVENT the heatwaves, it is crucial that the amount of CO2 released globally is reduced. All nations need to tighten laws to lower CO2 production. This means you need to VOTE for the right party. To MITIGATE the effects of the heatwaves, countries can do many things: plant trees in towns (as they lower temperatures due to evaporation and shade), improve architecture etc. That may not help too much though, as the intensity and length of the heatwaves will continue to increase over the next decades. So reduction of CO2 released is the best bet.
You know those reflector screens they put in cars, yeah picture that but enough to cover a continent.
What if the reflective screen is angled towards another planet and signs of life appear?!
I was thinking aiming it back at the sun to give it a taste of its own medicine but your idea works as well.
We’re past the “prevention” phase and have moved on to the “adaption” phase.
We can do both! And call it pre-daptive
is this serious ?
120yrs ago, yeah CO2 emissions will be a problem in the decades to come
50 years ago, yeah emissions will be a problem in decades to come, including heatwaves that will damage infrastructure and kill poeple
30 years ago, yeah emissions will be a problem in decades to come, including heatwaves that will damage infrastructure and kill poeple
10 years ago, yeah emissions will be a problem in decades to come, including heatwaves that will damage infrastructure and kill poeple
this year, how about that heat, if only we’d been warned /s
it very likey that if we’re not near emission system by 2030/2035 (not net zero bullshit) then we’ll end civilization in the decades to come as there is no coming black from the increasing tipping points. Strat with bannibg all private jets.
It appears that Europe does many things right for sustainability and climate change
as long as this sort of bullshit is prevalent in the zeitgeist then nothing changes.
As to doing something ? vote green (not to get the Greens into power per se but to move the Overton Windows) , don’t fly, don’t drive.
What we’ll do instead is normalise out stupidity as we go fascist and keep on keeping on, like we do with inequality, hunger, homelessness, war erc
Methinks this needs policy-level changes. There’s only so much we can do individually at this point
Immediate terms: There’s nothing that can be done to curb the heatwave IMO, but there are ways to prevent danger. Namely, AC, cooling centers, public education on preventing heat-related injuries/deaths… Maybe govts can even temporarily reduce regulations/give subsidies on split-systems to help nudge some folks, but nothing much else can be done. One pet-idea I have is cooling centers, since I know Houston (which has extreme weathers) opens cooling/warming centers when the weather is too extreme; it is a very progressive implementation that benefits those who are underprivileged
Slightly longer term: Trees/green spaces always help. Public transit systems always help. Some fairly sweeping changes in climate-related regulation (ease AC regulations, tighten car regulations, tax on pollution, etc), aimed at both reducing danger and improving the climate… or at least recuperate some “pollution tax” so the govt can use the money to plant more trees and build more trains. Also some European countries can do so much better at discouraging car use (or at least switch to EVs) given how good the train networks are; for countries without good train networks, build some
Even longer term: Massive investments in green energy; if they are investing already, invest more. But be practical… temporary solutions like nuclear are not everyone’s cup of tea but they help with the transition. Do better on international collaboration. Find ways to discourage international trading partners from over-polluting (probably a combination of tariffs and negotiations… not my specialty).
Obligatory not an economist/political scientist, there are probably better ways to implement these than what I suggested
europe needs to invest in ACs, apparently the continent temperatures rises alot faster than other continents as for an immediate solution, long term, they need to accelerate into green energy.
That’s the thing about climate change.
One place can do everything right…if the other countries in the world doesn’t do the same everyone is fucked regardless.
“Nobody else is doing anything about it so why should we go slightly without and pay slightly more to do our part?”
- pretty much everyone at the same time, unironically.
NO! This is not just false, it’s dangerously false.
If a country takes measures to emit 500M less tons of CO2 per year, the result is… 500M less tons of CO2 in the air per year than otherwise. That helps!
There isn’t a single fucked/not fucked threshold. There are a lot of nuances of fucked and each one we dodge puts us in an incrementally less awful place. Who knows how many more lives saved for each Mton CO2 not produced. Who knows how many species get to live, how many fewer days of heatwave per year, how many more glaciers survive.
I STG, “we’re already fucked anyway” is oil shill talk. Fuck that noise, let’s make oil obsolete, let’s avoid entire shades of fucked, we’ve already made insane progress with renewables and electric cars, let’s just keep going! Let’s pressure our individual politicians because you know the fuckers love it when you give up! You on board?
If a country takes measures to emit 500M less tons of CO2 per year, the result is… 500M less tons of CO2 in the air per year than otherwise. That helps!
Not if that country just offloads industry to another country. This is what the west is doing, offloading dirty industry to China, then pointing fingers at China.
💯
Australia is “reducing” their emissions by having China manufacture everything using the coal that companies dig out of our ground and sell them, then we buy it all back and ship it over here on planes and boats, while claiming we’ve reduced emissions.
It’s all a grift.
You can’t prevent them you can only prepare for them mainly with AC. Europe must get on AC or at least have more cooling centers for people.
So we will just run for cover from ac spaces to other ac spaces like americans? No thanks.
AC just displace the issue, you will be good in your ACed appartment but the neighbor who face the exhaust will be blasted with hotter air.
At a building scale it creates “hot air islands”, at a city/datacenter scale it is +2°C at least in a large radius.
AC should be only a part of the solution, as it adds more issues (electricity needs, pfas emissions, dangerous fluids management).
At least for the most vulnerable, like the elderly
So we will just run for cover from ac spaces to other ac spaces like americans? No thanks.
Well, your other options are enduring the heat or move too somewhere cooler.
There is nothing else to do. We went beyond the tipping point on warming and those in charge didn’t listen. It only gets worse from here.
More green wouldn’t hurt. The city I live in invested heavily in removing green space. Shrubs and plants are nearly all removed and the remaining empty grass fields are continuously cut. Having green space cools the city down, gives shade and helps animals, so how about we plant things and stop cutting everything?
In the USA, we cover everything we can with black asphalt, and those expansive parking lots means you can’t walk anywhere.
The interesting question for the US is “can we be doing anÿhing to make things worse than we already are?”
Build infrastructure to make Europe more heat tolerant.
A lot of what Americans do to deal with the heat, like air conditioning and ice water, need to get adopted in Europe. As for the concern of the energy needed to power air conditioners, most demand generally follows peak solar production. Also, if you install heat pumps instead of normal air conditioners, it will help lower carbon requirements for heating.
End all fossil fuel use asap and make trade blocks that prefer countries that do the same. Tarrifs gor those that use dirty fuels beyond the Eurobloc’s schedule.
Remember, even if we stopped today, there is a 20 year lag time so it’s getting way, way worse.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/fossil-fuels#tracking
We are still growing fossil fuel use. The repercussions are enormous, and effectively, permanent.
At this point we need to spend all of our effort in advancing ways we can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean, we are fucked unless we find an efficient way to do so.
Yes, but I don’t believe there is any process could ever be efficient enough.
Deep ocean algae farms might do it. Oil companies have brought up and side lined research on it for decades however.
But that would hurt fossil fuel companies, so we can’t do that. (/jk)
The major pollutants are manufacturing, mining, oil and energy production, and animal agriculture. not air conditioners. If we want the rest of the world to stop producing with manufacturing, you’re going to need to create agreements to share your wealth in ways that do not require the exchange of goods. That’s why people over-produce right now. For money. That’s why the world will continue to get hotter for the considerable future. Nobody wants to be the ones to give away our wealth for free. You need to take care of your people and install air conditioners like the rest of the world. Good luck finding somewhere in China without air conditioning.
