Fear of a Meltdown
zeit.de
zeit.de
Where I diverge from the article is the opinions of the anti-nuclear activists, where they say "It is time to bring nuclear energy to an end". I realize that nuclear power is scary and that this particular reactor may have a higher than average risk profile. However, where they lose me is the alternative. There, currently, is no viable alternative to nuclear that provides the same safety and econimic benefits, not to mention environmental pros of nuclear.
Simply not liking something is not enough reason to get rid of it. Who knows maybe a new, safer plant would have been built if they were allowed, but the people voted against it. I find this type of reasoning problematic, it has somehow become common (or I'm just realizing its happening) to rally against something without considering the alternatives that would have to replace it.
More people die every year from Coal than have died from Nuclear in it's entire history.
More people die every year of setting up solar and wind than of nuclear.
I could go on.
The fear of nuclear is absurd and 100% due to the success of a mostly anti humanist environmental movement and the completely un-scientific political debate that surrounds this (which also have found it's way into the climate debate)
It's really quite sad.
Edit: because people fall off roofs.
While very few people were killed by the explosion itself, millions were affected and died from the event's consequences.
"An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18712022
I just find it odd that Nuclear seems to create these almost religious followers like the parent comment I replied to that ignore the tradeoffs and special risks of Nuclear failures. Wind and solar seem a lot more preferable and are getting better with battery improvements leading to increased capacity with a lower cost.
Humans seem to be wildly irrational in their acceptance/rejection of different types of risks that has little to do with the odds of the risk.
Wind and solar are not even close to being able to deliver like nuclear and they deliver a fraction of the worlds need (1%). More people die from setting up solar and wind, way more animals die because of wind, both wind and solar pollute more. Its pretty obvious who is the religious person here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
The area above is not inhabitable.
And this was Japan. You can't accuse them of being a bunch of Vodka swilling engineers that misjudged the signalling of a couple of dials because they were drunk.
The problem is that the consequences of a nuclear catastrophy are horendous and in the hands of profit seeking, private companies with a potential tendency to cut corners it gets outright dangerous.
The fear of nuclear is absurd and 100% due to the success of a mostly anti humanist environmental movement and the completely un-scientific political debate that surrounds this
You don't know me. You have no idea who I am or how I form my opinions. You just essentially judge anbody a manipulated, non-thinking idiot who disagrees with your point of view.
Now that's rally quite sad.
I would add that the problems of nuclear are mostly self-inflicted and due to an unwillingness to admit to its own shortcomings. To give you an example, a Nuclear physics professor told my class, with a straight face, that nuclear plants were designed so well that one could expect a catastrophic failure no more than once every thousand or so years. Since the actual frequency of catastrophic failures has been more like one in every twenty years or so, his model was clearly off by orders of magnitude - but he hadn't updated it! Nuclear has probably the largest expert problem of any industry I've encountered, it's full of smart people living in a completely different world than the 'un-scientific' public they look down their noses at. If Nuclear is to fulfill its potential the people in the field need to do some painful introspection and recognize that the uncertainties in their models are actually much larger than they'd like to believe. I'd recommend any book by Taleb if you think that's an avenue worth pursueing.
In Germany, 13% of our energy is nuclear energy. Only 13%. We're a net exporter of energy, big time, so we could (almost) disconnect nuclear power right now, if we didn't want to export energy to our neighbours. We're at 52 TWh (tera whatt hours) export per year right now.
In the last 18 years we've gone from 143 TWh (2000) to 92 TWh (2018) per year nulcear energy generation. In the same time, wind energy alone has added 160 TWh per year, so that alone is more than enough to compensate. There is another 105 TWh from water, sun & bio gas that we added. But wind energy alone is not even close to fully captured.
Thing is: each nuclear energy plant in Germany right now makes more than 1 million € per day in profits. Each plant. If you'd have that plant as an energy producer, would you take it offline?
France gets around 70% of its energy from nuclear, they not germany should be applaused.
Negative prices may sound good but in reality it is causing chaos with backup generation and the economics of the grid.
Also keep in mind that the carbon mass per kWh in Germany has been rising recently, because of all the dirty brown coal that is getting burnt when wind and solar generation is low (instead of nuclear). Add this with some of the most expensive consumer prices in the world and very few people would recommend following Germany's model.
France is not free from problems either: https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-power-supply/germany-...
You are right, that there needs to be some sort of mechanism to stabilize the grid in case renewables are not available. But nuclear energy is not an option for this since it takes days to start a reactor. So what are the options?
* Gas turbines (in the short run, known technologie, fast start-up times, but still creating CO2 even if less than coal)
* Batteries (e.g. https://www.ewe-gasspeicher.de/en/home/b4p )
* Smart Grid (electric cars for example are often flexible in their charging times).
* Pump storage
That's how you do it properly instead of using nonscaleable energy solutions to solve an exponentially growing demand. Again wind and solar is doing around 1% of the worlds needs. They are not even close to being able to solve the basic energy needs.
Coal is used because solar and wind is insufficient not because it's political.
"People"
We don't build these things to last thousands of years. We build them to last a few decades.
And the people that run them? You can select dependable people, but no one seems to be able to quantify the objective details that make for an ideal nuclear engineer. Is there an unlimited supply? What if market forces apply pressure to our feedstock of nuclear engineers?
How do you know there will always be people to tend the flame?
Look at New York City's MTA and its subway system. There are people willing to spend time running those trains and maintaining those tunnels and booths, but how much skill does that require, and how much does it cost?
Given the option to take on a role operating a train as an engineer on an NYC subway line (pick any line), underground in smelly, toxic soot covered tunnels inhabited by roaches, rats and bums all urinating and defecating as needed, drunks on the weekends, commuters punching and fighting each other in the morning and on the way home during rush hours, 12 hours a day for the rest of your life, which other jobs would you take first, provided matching pay?
Garbage man? Dishwasher? Short order cook? Professional baseball player? Basketball player? Porn star? Cashier? Branch manager at a bank? Librarian? Truck driver?
Now perform the same exercise for nuclear engineer.
Nevermind the science, What about the social forces? The human factors are the issue.
If it were as simple as stacking bricks and leaving them where they are, with a failure mode rendering the system dead and little more than an explorable landmark, without consequence no one would complain. But that's not what happens when these things fail.
If the potential is so valuable, why not build them with all the reverance of an international landmark?
People can see through this fact. Such a plan will never see the light of day. Nuclear plants will always be bult with all the charm of an American public school. A place with all the charm of a child prison, running on a razor thin margin.
If the power they can produce is so plentiful, why are they not built to lend the impression of an unlimited budget?
This is entirely anecdotal of course, but I know many people from different European countries and (except for the physicists) all Germans I know seem to associate nuclear power with nuclear weaponry and polluting mother nature to a degree that other European countries just don't have. No matter what the educational background.
Is there some historical precedent? Some political movement unique to Germany?
In some Simpsons episode a secret government film informs the viewer that Springfield is the designated "nuclear victim zone" of the US which will be used for calibrating ICBM targeting in the event of total nuclear war.
In the cold war, Germany was the designated nuclear victim zone.
e.g. "Asse" was a salt mine to test storing nuclear waste. It was supposed to last for 20.000 years, but only lasted 20 and its not possible to retrieve the waste stored in there (and environmentalists warned that this would happen). So will you trust these people to get the decision right the next time?
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%...
Gorleben (another salt mine) was chosen for nuclear waste storage partly to piss of the former GDR since it is right next to the border. Neither a very good reason.
Compared to the US Germany just does not have any uninhabitated areas, where you can store nuclear waste.
As a result, reducing the electricity supply further is currently politically impossible.
> People in Germany essentially got paid to use electricity on Christmas. Electricity prices in the country went negative for many customers - as in, below zero - on Sunday and Monday, because the country's supply of clean, renewable power actually outstripped demand, according to The New York Times.
The negative prices that you quote are very special cases due to wind conditions. The wind doesn't always blow when it is unusually cold.
Also, the power lines used for import have limited capacity, and there has been underinvestment there as well.
This is a great quote for the problems Nuclear faces. The scrutiny is orders of magnitude more than in, say, coal or solar, and so many more mistakes and problems are found.
The result is that nuclear remains much safer in pretty much every way. Nuclear should be less safe, it would be more economic and bring the risks in line with what people accept in other fields. If nuclear power was 10 times as safe as driving a car to work, or going to the supermarket, then nuclear power would be shut down. No questions asked.
The situation is frustrating and stupid.
Not really. I can't really conceive of a situation in which a solar voltaic power installation can kill even a single person. Maybe a panel falls on a worker there. It's even harder to conceive of a situation in which hundreds of square kilometers of land would be contaminated by one in such a way that it would cost billions to clean it up. With nuclear, there is no need to conjecture such a scenario, it has now happened twice in 25 years.
The problem with nuclear is that despite the low probability of a major failure, when one happens, it is very, very expensive. They cannot be allowed to happen, so heavy oversight is necessary. For Fukushima, the 2016 estimate was $193B in costs to clean up, and between 2012 and 2017 the ratepayers of Tepco had shouldered $21B in costs in the form of higher rates. So even if you don't care about the safety of individuals directly at risk from a failure, the economic costs demand such scrutiny.
vs nuclear where we're getting a good idea what the significant failure rate is. One serious event every 10 years. Extrapolating that to a world that uses 100% nuclear energy means one Fukushima/Chernobyl failure per year. Extrapolate that over the 200 year emergency we're at the beginning of and yeah, just no.
Your call.