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Comment by aianus | Hacker News Reader

Why would they phase out nuclear before coal??

Because we have got a serious issue with finding long-term storage solutions for nuclear waste. And past commission(s) on solving this issue have often ended in a rather public and politically bad fiasco.

Not really. France generates about 70 per cent of their power from nuclear and don't seem to have many problems. For really inefficient solid fission, waste disposal basically consist of digging a swimming pool in a techtonically stable area, throwing in the spent rods, and filing it with concrete.

Heck, as long as it was properly guarded, you could store the waste in my backyard shed without any health issues arising.

I am not a specialist but the current situation looks complicated and not because of waste disposal but for financial reasons and long term planning issues. Areva, the main civil nuclear actor, made a couple of very bad (and shady) decisions, lost a lot of money, and is currently being restructured and partially merged into EDF, the historical energy French provider. Still they decide to keep betting on EPR power plants and engage a lot of resources in a new Hinkley Point EPR project. None of which have been finished yet. At the same time, inquiries reveal deficiencies or falsifications on quality assesments on supplied parts. The gravity of these is not clear yet. Finally, budget are tightening and plants arriving to their initial end of life dates are being requalifed for a decade or more.

I do not think relying so much on nuclear energy was a bad move but it should have been a transitional thing (to renewable energy, fusion, anything else?). And it requires good forward thinking, commitment and the kind of leader we have not had for decades.

Finally, the EPR looks more and more like a big mistake. Smaller designs might have been more successful and offered more agility in time of crisis.

I think this is a reasonable way to view things. Although I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in fission. We're basically using tech developed in the 60s. And just a little nit pick: fusion is a form of nuclear power generation.

And who ensures that it stays there for the next centuries?

I doubt it would stay there for even the next few decades. As crazy as it sounds, I imagine at some point it would become cheap enough to launch into space or in to the sun. I mean, it wouldn't make economic sense. But at some point it would be worth the cost if only so that we don't have to listen to the irrational and ignorant braying of the so called 'green movement'.

They're like the kids in high school who decided they were avowed communists, except now all grown up.

Who says we won't figure out how to reprocess it and safely burn the fissile waste in the next centuries? :)

Geological objects of no worth to anyone tend to stay where they are for long, long, times.

The current solution for nuclear waste is much better than the current solution for coal waste, which is to just dump it into the world and pretend it's not there.

The current solution for coal are testing areas for compressed carbon storage, and they’re less risky than the nuclear waste storage.

The continual leaking of nuclear waste into the ground water at the Asse II underground nuclear waste storage site is a huge issue.

And so, already in '98, the Energiewende was started.

In the early 2000s Merkel tried to roll back the Energiewende, but was forced to roll back the rolling back when Fukushima happened, and people realized we had plants of the same construction type, where continually the emergency generators failed, and everyone said "nothing wrong, even if the generators fail, it can never go up".

German nuclear controls are just as much of a joke as nuclear controls in Japan or the US, and in most countries, they’re even worse.

One nuclear plant in Germany has bribed regulators for years to just sign it off, despite it violating regulations. Then there’s the plant in Belgium, where construction workers drilled through the containment vessel to screw a holder for a fire extinguisher on it.

Holes stayed open for many years.

Nuclear is a nice concept in theory, but in any capitalistic society, it can not work, because greed will end up with companies trying to save money, and if bribes are cheaper than following the laws, they will do that. If lobbying is cheaper, they’ll do that. If they can just leave the country and can’t be held liable, they’ll just do that.

> One nuclear plant in Germany has bribed regulators for years to just sign it off, despite it violating regulations.

Why do you think regulations around coal generation are any easier to enforce than regulations around nuclear generation?

You can easily find millions of people with serious health problems due to coal waste. The problem is so bad that it's recommended that sensitive populations limit their intake of seafood because of the mercury in it, much of which comes from coal. How many can you find with serious health problems due to nuclear waste? How many large categories of food have cautions on them for children and pregnant women due to nuclear waste?

You can talk about possibilities all you want, but the fact is that as they are done coal waste is a lot more dangerous. So it's weird to put so much emphasis on closing nuclear plants first.

We have solutions for clean coal.

Filter all the pollutants out, and use Compressed Carbon Storage for the CO2. We already are enforcing the first on all existing plants, and working on the second.

But long-term, renewables are the only solution.

Nothing works 100%. How many nines does "all the pollutants" consist of? This is important because the amount of waste produced by coal is vast, many orders of magnitude more than nuclear, so even many nines can still result in more harm than from nuclear.

Also, how do you store the pollutants, and why doesn't that technique work for nuclear waste? I'm guessing that storing the pollutants consists of putting it in good, strong containers, which works fine for nuclear waste too. It's not perfect, but it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it's mercury or uranium leaking.

So because there's scope for bad people to do bad things or cut corners, it's not an option? That basically rules out any form of power generation.

For instance, wind power: http://i.imgur.com/xHyOoc9.jpg

This picture was taken just prior to these two engineers jumping to their deaths rather than being burnt alive. I assume the turbine spontaneously catching fire is not an intentional design feature, but rather the result of inadequate quality control during manufacturing?

The long term storage of CO2 in the atmosphere isn't a problem?

Run breeders.

The Fukushima scare. Germany decided to go nuclear free afterward.

I really hate how irrational green groups are on nuclear power generation. And how much the media stokes irrational fears about nuke plants.

There were no deaths directly attributable to radiation exposure (although 300 Tepco workers were exposed to above lifetime legal limit radiation). WHO estimated life time risk of thyroid cancer for infants in the immediate area increased by 0.5 per cent, relying on the linear no threshold hypothesis (an untested hypothesis that the UN has recently backed away from).

More generally, the IPCC calculated nuclear fission to be the second safest form of power generation in human morbidity and mortality terms end to end, mining to waste disposal (the first being hydro electric). The stupidity of the German decision makes me want to scream.

While Fukushima did not claim lifes, it made a huge area uninhabitable. The public has to suffer the damages, not the company that profited from the plant.

Hey I'm not saying that's right. All I'm saying is that responding to Fukushima by shutting down the second safest form of energy production (according to the IPCC), which also happens to emit no CO2, is a special kind of stupid.

Site selection turns out to be pretty important for nuke plants.

Last time I checked, Germany has infinitesimally small chances of being struck by tsunamis.

Yet, a nuclear plant, at a river that frequently floods in autumn, with not-working emergency generators, is in quite a risky position, don’t you think? It’s about the same risky position Fukushima was in.

And most German plants are like that.

Then add the fact that German inspections are a corrupt business regarding nuclear plants, and that the nuclear waste storage was a huge disaster polluting tap water for a large area, and you can see where the problems come from.

Tsunamis yes. But unfortunatly, quite a few studies have proven that the german nuclear reactors are susceptible to earth quakes, terrorists and floods. With almost no precautions taken, the big energy companies have noone to blame but themself.

The germany decision is not at all stupid once you read up on the Asse II nuclear waste storage site (or, a more fitting name, Asse II ground water contamination site).

One of our largest nuclear waste storages, and it’s all leaking into the ground water.

I read the Wikipedia page but didn't get a great deal of information. From what I gathered, they decided to use a structurally/mechanically unsound abandoned salt mine as an 'experimental waste dump', and now there are concerns that if the mine floods, nuclear waste byproducts will get into the ground water? You're probably more acquainted with the issue so perhaps you can fill in the holes here?

At any rate, shutting down all German nuke plants because of something like this is akin to shutting down all coal mines because someone held a BBQ and accidentally started a fire.

>I really hate how irrational green groups are on nuclear power generation

It was Angela Merkel's decision. She's a physicist.

That's very short-sighted and reactionary. Shame on them. What about the every-other-day Beijing/Shanghai smog scare?

And what about the 20,000 people killed in coal mining accidents every year[0]? What about the 130 million tonnes[1] of radioactive waste[2] produced by coal plants annually? Why are we still building a new coal power plant every other week[3]?

[0]http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595235...

[1]https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics

[2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

[3]http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/as-u-s-shutte...

Welcome to germany, land of the green and people who consider their morality to be superior. We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables. We shut down our mostly modern atom reactors to burn more coal. We now spend ~30 dollar cent per kilowatt hour to have much dirtier energy than most of the rest of europe. We pay money to our neighbours so they take away our surplus of energy at peaks and push the energy distribution to the limits which results in instabilities. Newbuild house prices have increased by 40% in the last ten years just because of the extremely high energy standards home builders have to adhere too (insulation, stupid energy exchangers et. al)

And all the while we are the only sane people in our own eyes.

We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables.

In 2015, the total power generation in Germany was 559 TWh. Renewables amount to about 121 TWh, i.e. about 22%. [0]

Newbuild house prices have increased by 40% in the last ten years

That sounds like a lot. From what I can find, construction prices have increased by about 20% since 2005 -- that goes for virtually all kinds of construction, including road construction[1][2]. Must be all the heat exchangers in those new roads... I'm not sure if that figure is corrected for overall inflation, it doesn't appear to be (cumulative inflation in Germany since 2005 is about 15%[3]).

[0] https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_de.htm [1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/Preise/B... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baupreisindex#/media/File:Baup... [3] http://www.zinsen-berechnen.de/inflationsrechner.php

Yeah you get nice numbers if you ignore the total energy usage. The numbers you gave are only one fifth of Germanys total energy consumption. I was off by 2% though, 3% is covered by renewables. We are not only talking electric, but total energy: heat, oil etc.

http://m.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article156130737/Energie...

Renewable energy is usually only framed in terms of electrical power generation, but taking a wider perspective is sensible.

Primary energy is 3704 TWh[0], so 3% jives with the numbers I gave (so you were off by a factor of 3). 27% of that is heating, 39% transportation. The key to reducing those is gains in efficiency, ie. things like insulation, combined heat and power, renewable heat on the one hand, more efficient cars and more public transportation on the other hand.

[0] https://www.bmwi.de/BMWi/Redaktion/PDF/E/energiestatistiken-...

> We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables. We shut down our mostly modern atom reactors to burn more coal. We now spend ~30 dollar cent per kilowatt hour to have much dirtier energy than most of the rest of europe.

This is so wrong I don't know if you're pushing some sort of agenda or just trolling.

Read the facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

While they doubled down on phasing out nuclear after that, initially Germany's exit was decided upon in '98.

It was a, if not the major topic in the first federal election I was allowed to vote in.

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