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Comment by fakwandi_priv | Hacker News Reader

>Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early.

Why doesn't the article explain why the Germans are retiring their plants? I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's. From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy but I feel when convincing other people of this you need to portray the good and the bad.

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Pretty much because Merkel decided so in the days following Fukushima. Not exactly the result of long term strategy.

Pretty much just going by feels. Not exactly good governance.

nuclear was being phased out before fukushima anyways in germany, it was just accelerated a few years. New nuclear power plants are just way too expensive - take a look at Flamanville, Hinkley point C, Olkiluoto 3, Wylfa Newydd and Hanhikivi and you'll see that they are just too expensive. You can argue for having the old ones run a bit longer but the older the plants become the more maintenance issues arise.

It's well established that the West has forgotten how to build nukes. But Hitachi, KEPCO, and the Russians have not forgotten, and can build them effectively today. Perhaps with some effort the West can re-learn how its done from these modern success stories.

Wylfa Newydd was a project by Hitachi before it got cancelled despite being guaranteed a higher-than-market compensation of £75 per MWh[0], yet despite those heavy subsidies it apparently is not worht it.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/17/hitachi-set...

Not exactly good governance was what she did before too, going back on existing long-term exit plans that the majority supported. Fukushima just moved that from somewhat unpopular to entirely politically untenable.

Fukushima was an excellent demonstration of what can happen. You devastate huge areas of land and make them unlivable for generations. This is especially applicable to the United States that has proven entirely unable to handle it's own nuclear waste and just accumulates it at the sites where it's generated, waiting for disaster to happen.

I always thought that nuclear waste was a non problem. It is a minuscule amount of confined hazardous material. Even if you don't recycle it, the impact on the environment is negligible.

But I agree that the devastation of huge areas of land is a problem, but let's also keep in mind that the reactors that blew up where early generations reactors. More modern design do not present those risks [1]. Judging nuclear energy based on 1960s design is like judging aviation based on the safety records of 1930s planes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

> But I agree that the devastation of huge areas of land is a problem, but let's also keep in mind that the reactors that blew up where early generations reactors.

With "early generation reactors" you mean all the ones that exist. The whole "next generation reactor" / "generation 4 reactor" thing is at this point nothing more than vague plans for what could be.

That's overstating things. Fukushima was built in the 70s. A nearby reactor faced the same challenges but was built a decade later, and it was fine. That's just a GenII, still not as safe as the GenIII+ we're building now.

Chernobyl, of course, was a horrific design that didn't even have a containment dome. Nobody builds reactors like that anymore.

And GenIV is a little more than vague plans; e.g. Terrestrial Energy's molten salt reactor has already gotten through the hardest part of Canada's licensing process, which puts them on track for a demo reactor by 2025 or so.

They have to secure a few B$ in funding. lol.

Sure it is a non problem.

If your country is the size of the USA and nobody bothers if you let it disappear somewhere in the desert. Which is not the case in Germany and most of the countries. People just don't want to have a nuclear waste dump near by and Germany needs to spend a hell lot of money to clean up the last mine they used as a dump already.

The tech is dead and the lobby won't be able to ride that current artificial hype for ever...

Huge areas of land unlivable for generations is an overstatement. Fukishima and Chernobyl exclusion zones are lush green forests that where wildlife thrives.

Well the wildlife prospers around Chernobyl exactly because it is not safe for humans to live there. Absence of humans usually is great for the wildlife. Besides the wild animals just not knowing about radioactivity, humans are way more sensitive to radiation due to their typically longer life spans.

The wildlife isn't exactly thriving, but I guess getting dosed is better than human contact for most species: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/science/nature-adapts-to-...

Afaik, the main problem with Fukushima disaster was awful handling by Japanese management, mostly finger pointing, instead of fixing the problem.

In particular Fukushima case, the evacuation caused more harm than fallout would do, so, in retrospective, it would be better to not evacuate.

There is no "huge areas devastated and unlivable for generations".

This point about devastating huge areas of land re Fukushima is so wrong I don't even. It was idiocy and blame-shifting from top to bottom. And yes people die from other people's idiocy in rather much bigger numbers.

Hiroshima was literally leveled by an atomic bomb and wasn’t unlivable for even a full generation.

A 13 kiloton fission bomb produces about .01% of the long lived fission products that are resident in the core of a 1 GW(e) reactor just before refueling.

Is that sarcasm? The exclusion zone of Fukushima is very small and people already live there again. The total impact of Fukushima (the nuclear disaster) is one death of a plant employee and 3 people getting cancer.

That's too simplistic. Retiring nuclear power plants has been the long term goal of the German anti-nuclear movement since the 70s. They were an important faction in the founding of the Green Party. When the Green party came into power in 1998 in a coalition government, they passed a law to retire all nuclear power plants by restricting the remaining energy output they could produce. BTW, this was done in consensus with the German nuclear industry. In 2009, a free-market/conservative coalition came into power again and they reversed course. Then Fukushima happened, a couple hundred thousand people demonstrated against nuclear power in Germany, a Green-led government won the elections in a historically conservative state, and Andrea Merkel changed her opinion.

Long story short, phasing out nuclear energy has been a long term goal and has broad support in Germany.

> a Green-led government won the elections in a historically conservative state, and Andrea Merkel changed her opinion.

Chronologically was the other way around, and her "Our party now consider nuclear harmful" stance didn't change the outcome post-Fukushima. But it's typical Merkel of the time, changing her tune to whatever's politically advantageous.

> Then Fukushima happened, [...], and Andrea Merkel changed her opinion.

Didn't you say the same as OP, with a lot more words?

No. He explained that there is a huge societal movement behind that. OP made it sound like Merkel decided on a personal whim.

The fact that you missed her name (it’s Angela, not Andrea) makes me doubt the veracity of the rest of your comment.

Yeah, that was a brain fart. Not sure, who I was thinking of in the moment.

You are aware that the "long-term strategy" had been to phase out nuclear, with laws and contracts laying out a gradual shutdown in place, and Merkels government slowed that process down against majority opinion in the population before Fukushima? The shallow "Merkel did it after Fukushima" meme is a mockery of what has been a long democratic process that Merkels government tried to renege on, with nuclear power having been a contested topic for decades.

Also the beginning of this statement is not really true:

> Germany, which went all-in for renewables…

This might have been the case more than a decade ago with the green party being part of the government but the political climate changed. Angela Merkel talks a lot about saving the climate but actual policy is the opposite slowing down the switch to renewable energy as much as possible.

> From what I read and hear Nuclear power is a great source of energy

Not really,

* It's expensive as hell, it just might seem cheap because a lot of the cost is offloaded to the tax payer in the long run

* Even western first world countries operate nuclear power plants which have known safety issues (look at e.g. France or Belgium) so even if we could technically do it safely, our societies are not politically mature enough to implement it.

* Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster so it's not even as clean as often advertised

> Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster

[citation needed]. It was in the 1950s, for sure, before we knew that you should ventilate the radon. Today a lot of it is done in ways that's much cleaner than mining for resources for coal, fracking, or heavy metals for millions upon millions of battery banks, wind turbines, and solar panels.

Remember E=MC2 is the key excitement about nuclear energy. There are 2 million times more Joules in a kg of uranium than in a kg of coal/gas/diesel/lithium. Thus you don't have to mine all that much of it to power the planet.

In fact, with breeder reactors and reprocessing (super expensive, but that's another story), you could power the entire US for a few hundred years off the depleted uranium sitting in the yard of an enrichment plant in Kentucky.

> with breeder reactors and reprocessing (super expensive, but that's another story)

Till and Chang argue in their book about the IFR that if we start building IFR style plants for production usage it's entirely possible that costs drop to about LWR levels.

So far fast breeders have been expensive, but that's largely because they've all been one-off designs largely for R&D purposes without much effort to reduce costs.

For reprocessing, their argument is that electrorefining (pyroprocessing) would be much cheaper than PUREX. To the point that the lower fuel acquisition cost and cheaper waste disposal could make it roughly comparable to once-through LWR costs, even with relatively cheap uranium.

Such a shame IFR was shut down.. sigh

Most of Germany's plants were built in the 1970s and were reaching end of life dates anyway. They probably would have been decommissioned in the early 2020s but Merkel accelerated the process due to the Fukushima disaster.

> Why doesn't the article explain why the Germans are retiring their plants?

It does, although it doesn't draw the connection directly.

> I think these articles should go more in-depth regarding the pro's and con's.

The con's (both for Germany, and the US) are (quotes below from the article):

> irrational dread among the public and many activists

> ...

> people estimate risk according to how readily anecdotes like well-publicized nuclear accidents pop into mind.

For Germany in particular:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...

Tl;dr, Germany politic interest in nuclear phase-out began around 2000 as misdirected "green" activism and was escalated by irrational public fears in response to Fukushima in 2011.

> why the Germans are retiring their plants

Politicians bowing to the wishes of an ill-informed public.

Nobody really believes science that goes against their deep settled beliefs.

There was a decades long discussion about nuclear energy in Germany. You can bet that the public was much better informed about nuclear, than the politicians and the nuclear industry liked.

There were a bunch of failed nuclear projects like the pebble bed reactor, the fast breeder or the storage sites. Watching them made the decision to get out of that type of industry much easier. Germany had the same level of corrupt nuclear industry, which is known from Japan and which has been exposed there.

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