It is fun to see that Germany abandoning its nuclear power due to "green" protests, but in fact increasing the coal burning rate. Problem of political populism - it is probably what will destroy humanity one day.
There's more than enough space and geologically stable locations to put this stuff. Politically speaking and in terms of getting nuclear back in the game, I wouldn't worry too much about waste with the modern solutions within storage.
The french actually are allowed to do it, and have the facilities, and don't have nearly as many issues.
Why people always talk about that like it's the worst thing that ever happened? There's also dangerous chemical storage facilities and these products most of the time don't even degrade over time (so even longer than thousands of years), they are also stored in worse condition than nuclear waste. Despite all of that, I don't see any environmental group talking about it.
> these products most of the time don't even degrade over time (so even longer than thousands of years)
Just see fate of the German storage site Asse II:
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/asse-atomlager-101.html
That's a very costly problem: it will cost billions to fix it.
Just because the Germans can't do it properly, doesn't mean it's impossible.
And a BBC World Service podcast about Onkalo for your perusal: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswvxg
Also this disposal site is still in construction and a research group in 2012 already has cast doubt on the corrosion proofness. Nothing has been proven yet. This is not an easy problem.
>Euroclus study In contrast to the above-mentioned studies, which focus on the Elbmarsch geographical area, the EUROCLUS study attempted to find matches between the 240 leukemia clusters identified in the study.
The evaluation of the study showed that environmental factors such as proximity to nuclear power plants, military airfields or other facilities often causing pollutants do not correlate with the occurrence of leukemia cases, but that demographic factors are the most significant characteristics in which they were studied Clusters match.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1892150/
And not to downplay at all - but 14 cases being the total possible over a ~30 year time-frame seems like a mute issue compared to any other life threatening issues.
The reactor Krümmel actually had incidents in the past where the emergency generators failed, and where the connection to the grud failed. Just by sheer luck never at the same time.
We might give up on tall buildings too as they got demolished in earthquakes...
it doesn't.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/l...
As you can see renewable energy has been massively expanded. 2018 was another record year. Solar had this year an increase of 20% in the first half year.
Also despite green protests.
Groan.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
There will probably be another (hopefully temporary) increase in coal consumption following the shuttering of the remaining German reactors in 2022.
It's fair to say that Germany has surrendered several years of progress on CO2 cuts with its move away from nuclear power. It's not accurate to say that Germany is burning more coal now than before Fukushima, or is currently increasing its rate of coal burning.
Either way, a result has been that the electricity prices are currently quite high here. Many people are reacting by deploying solar on their roofs. However, the pressure on electricity producers to deliver clean power is yielding results. It is likely that
I'm also unclear on how I'm talking behind anyone's back on an open forum in a language readable by a majority of Germans.
And you know, screw Fukushima (which made even China, those crazy hippies, pause for a bit, but hey)... I remember Chernoybyl, and yeah nothing bad happened (to us), but it was real scary in those weeks, when it rained. I remember these stickers... "Unsere Kinder sollen lachen, nicht strahlen" ("our kids should laugh [have a beaming smile etc.], not emit radiation"). The nerve to throw all that, and all these people into one big bucket... I'm at a loss of words that are allowed on HN, to be quite frank.
Oh, and when vaguely important things like human extinction come up on HN, most of the comments are along the lines of how it's all really depressing or best to not have kids, or "AI" this or that. But these ignorant people who don't have the full picture and don't get everything exactly right when they protest between barely getting by on two jobs, they're surely the problem. Jesus Christ.
I know I'm ranting, and please don't take it too personally, but I totally stand by what I'm ranting about. I just don't have good place where to put it, it's off-topic in all of the hundreds of discussions it would apply to, and of course it's nothing to do with HN per se.
> When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
-- George-Orwell, "Nineteen-Eightyfour"
How many miles is everybody here flying per year on average? I mean, that's just for starters. What about those insanely cheap short holiday flights? How will nuclear energy help there? At some point, you will have to step on toes, maybe make sacrifices, nuclear energy or not. Even if you had perfectly clean, infinite energy, we would have to make uncomfortable changes either, and rethink some things, certainly consumerism as a way to compensate for being unfree. But that's hard stuff, that might require principles, courage, drawing lines and then holding your ground -- painting "green protesters" with a broad brush, that's easy.
Solving problems is fun, being told to stop causing them, that's gross.
> I simply disagree with their assessment of tradeoffs.
And you attributed it to "stupidity", without even having the courtesy to fully type it out.
The assessment of tradeoffs by whom, exactly? Who spoke, to whom is it a response? To nobody in particular, just a very vague cherry-picked aggregate, just like the initial comment by the other poster.
> Germany just doesn’t have the strong history in this area compared to Russia, France, US, Japan
Germany had provided lots of expertise to Russia over the years. Especially in dealing with old and dismantled reactors. Russia did just dump them...
> It’s just they have trouble paying bills.
Russia had lots of money and they invested it into modernizing their nuclear weapons and their nuclear-powered submarines. Safety of existing or closed nuclear installations was of no concern.
OTOH Russia's Rosatom was interested to build nuclear powerplants together with Siemens in the early 2000s...
https://www.siemens.com/press/en/pressrelease/?press=/en/pre...
Siemens earlier built reactors together with Rosatom... in 2011 Siemens was quitting this business.