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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

The climate impact would be limited in Germany because of the large amount of electricity produced from coal. But it would still make an environmental difference: German cities have a big problem with particulate matter, which seems to be a major cause of lung cancer and other resparatory diseases. Moving pollution out of the cities into electricity plants would be very beneficial, even if there was no climate effect at all (which there will be because the power mix is consistently changing for the better, with coal becoming uneconomical).

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Coal is the most deadly form of energy production. It's cause thousands of germans to die prematurly each year

It's time for germany to stop relying on coal and open up to nuclear like France and Sweden

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/repor...

Planning a nuclear plant, getting the necessary permits, fighting challenges to those permits from NIMBYs etc takes at least a decade. Constructing a nuclear plant takes another decade. So the earliest expected benefit would be in 2040. Also nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build. On that time frame and with those capital expenses basically any other solution would work just as well with much less opposition.

Well yeah but the problem is that since energy production needs to be constant, the only real alternative to nuclear is coal,gas or hydro. Nuclear and hydro is the only option that doesn't lead to extinction due to global warming

- Gas is already a big improvement over coal, so it's not all that bad as an intermediate solution

- If we count hydro as an option we also have to include wind with pumped hydro storage (which comes with the same problems as hydro: geographic requirements and ecosystem disruption).

- Wind/Solar with Li-Io storage is technically a possibility and likely will become cost effective within 20 years.

- Within 20 years better grid-scale storage for use with wind/solar might become widely deployed, like molten salt. Especially if we would be willing to spend equal amounts of capital as would be required for deploying nuclear

- Energy consumption could be much more closely coupled to solar/wind availability by changing electricity prices from a fixed price to a dynamic price coupled to real spot prices. We already shift electricity use into the night by charging industrial consumers less for off-peak use, the same strategy can be used to shift consumption anywhere to any other time of day.

Intermittent power sources can be combined with storage and peaker plants to cover base load. Gas plants make nice peakers, and while not ideal, they are certainly superior to coal (less pollution, 40% less CO2) and allow the eventual transition to power-to-gas solutions.

There is still a problem with electric cars, the tires also produce particles that are carcinogenic.

"Electric vehicles emit no NO2 but do produce small particle pollution from the wear on brake discs and tyres and by throwing up dust from roads. A recent European commission research paper found that about half of all particulate matter comes from these sources."

EVs use their brakes less because of regenerative breaking. The particulate matter of tires is for the most part comparatively big an heavy, so a larger part of it stays near the ground and gets swept away by rain, and could be cleared in problematic locations by wetting the street (also bigger particles seem somewhat less problematic for health).

You're right that EVs don't fully solve the problem, but they are a giant step in the right direction.

EVs are also generally concerned about overall weight and have smaller tires on average than non-EVs in their respective categories.

Normally they use break discs only at speeds of about 0-10 km/h.

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