Volkswagen boss criticizes Germany’s decision to privilege coal over nuclear | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen boss criticizes Germany’s decision to privilege coal over nuclear

bloomberg.com

85 pointsjseliger74 comments

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"According to you, does nuclear energy contribute to the production of greenhouse gasses (CO2) and to climate change?"

In France a whopping 86% of 18-34 year olds answer YES.

Source: p17 of https://www.orano.group/docs/default-source/orano-doc/presse...

Which is true indeed!

Nuclear power, in a world where transport emits co2, emits co2 (especially during the enrichment phase).

Just waaaaay less than other forms of electricity production (including solar and wind)

It is exactly this which Greenpeace has latched onto for their propagande. The fact that it is true in only the most trivial way is not understood by those on the receiving end.

The end result is a voting population primed to vote against their own interests.

In related news... Book "Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know" has almost 300 reviews, 92% 4/5 stars: https://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Facts-science-that-doesn...

Quotes from the Facts:

* You will learn that the planet is improving, not in spite of increasing CO2 and rising temperature, but because of it.

* Polar bears are doing just fine

* Ocean acidity = climate pHraud

* Forest fires = fanning the flames of needless panic

...

Museums also educate, with funds from oil companies:

https://thinkprogress.org/smithsonian-stands-by-wildly-misle...

https://io9.gizmodo.com/science-museums-are-skittish-about-c...

How to combat these?

Forget Coal. We can now go Solar directly!

I think nuclear power is great. Unfortunately we don’t have the means to fix a catastrophe should one occur (and it will, as safe as nuclear is, it it not possible to eliminate the possibility of a serious accident).

‘Safety’ has to be considered in the context of mitigation options as well as options to correct problems. It’s the latter that lets down nuclear - Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown we just can’t contain and correct the effects when things go wrong.

Until we as a race figure out how to do that, nuclear will remain dangerous in my view.

>Unfortunately we don’t have the means to fix a catastrophe should one occur (and it will, as safe as nuclear is, it it not possible to eliminate the possibility of a serious accident).

meanwhile, coal powerplants are spewing out co2, heavy metals, and radioactive particles during normal operation.

Nuclear plants produce waste, this means now deciding that humans will have to not mess that up for the next ~100.000 years. Sure, maybe we'll find a way to process it all (or shoot it into the sun with a super safe space elevator?), but right now, this is what we got, and it's really not much:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...

> There is a debate over what should constitute an acceptable scientific and engineering foundation for proceeding with radioactive waste disposal strategies. There are those who have argued, on the basis of complex geochemical simulation models, that relinquishing control over radioactive materials to geohydrologic processes at repository closure is an acceptable risk. They maintain that so-called "natural analogues" inhibit subterranean movement of radionuclides, making disposal of radioactive wastes in stable geologic formations unnecessary. However, existing models of these processes are empirically underdetermined: due to the subterranean nature of such processes in solid geologic formations, the accuracy of computer simulation models has not been verified by empirical observation, certainly not over periods of time equivalent to the lethal half-lives of high-level radioactive waste. On the other hand, some insist deep geologic repositories in stable geologic formations are necessary. National management plans of various countries display a variety of approaches to resolving this debate.

We're the species that used x-ray machines in shoe shops, to sell more shoes than the other guy. We put the guy who discovered the usefulness of washing hands into an asylum, out of sheer pride and arrogance. So great, we have a bunch of "complex models", and that's what we want to gamble it on? The weather forecast also keeps getting more accurate, but few people would bet their own life on the forecast for even tomorrow. But we'll do it on behalf of people who don't get a say?

Nuclear waste doesn’t seem like a big issue compared to climate change. Let’s recall the man-made global climate change is supposed to be a continuous worldwide disaster leading to starvation, wars, and so on.

Meanwhile, nuclear waste can be buried in a mountain with today’s technology, taking up only a very small portion of our planet to house it. Nuclear disaster zones like Chernobyl have, after only a few decades, been considered to have turned into nature reserves where animals and plants are flourishing, while global climate change caused by the carbon dioxide released by coal plants is expected to have all sorts of bad effects on nature. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclus...

We found a way. It's called thorium. Waste is only radioactive for a century and iirc it's a lower energy. They can also use current waste as fuel.

Reactor tech is 40 years old. If your phone is 4 years old, one might consider it trash. Imagine how good they'd be if the industry innovated even as slow and conservatively as medicine. Oh, there's also liquid sodium and fast breeders.

FUD keeps the tech from advancing.

> Imagine how good they'd be

I'm talking about today and the facts, saying "we found a solution" is simply ignoring everything.

This is simply untrue. We are able to build ALMR reactors that not only can work using nuclear waste as a fuel but also are "impossible" to blow up or cause disaster because of coolant properties.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

Ps. China heavly invests in this technology now and its not even new.

Not sure which is safer, I believe some research suggests more people die from coal mining then from nuclear energy. See for example this: https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

Coal mining also needs to go.

People believe all of the following:

>Coal needs to go >Nuclear needs to go >High energy (even unsubsidized gasoline) is politically untenable >Economic deprrssion from 1 and 2 is not tolerable, also

Awful broken solutions aren't acceptable.

Not in programming, building things, or running society.

The world isn't perfect, and I'm sure your code isn't, either. It's a series of trade-offs.

Solutions that work for a while but destroy everything in the process aren't solutions.

This isn't some cost/benefit stuff. Single use plastics and building concrete urban blight isn't worth a mass Extinction and global dieoff event. Especially with things like carbon negative concrete available. Not the same thing

It's bad solutions, when good ones are available, at massive scale, to address things that either aren't problems or could be addressed in other ways.

Coal and Nuclear are both expensive, they just get their hidden subsidies in different ways.

Getting rid of them therefore won't cause economic depression, just affect the profits of specific well connected people, so they'll hang around longer than they should.

Afaik nuclear appears to be expensive mostly because of excessive regulatory code/capture, and political risk.

Yes the NRC has regulatory capture, but by the actual nuclear industry to fend off regulation, oversight and scrutiny, subsidize the power and rubber stamp the projects.

It's so prominent its given as an example on the Wikipedia page for regulatory capture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture#Nuclear_R...

Great. Coal mining could have gone in the forty years ago if nuclear had replaced coal. But I guess it was too dangerous, so now we get to live the hottest years on record. Yay for safety, everybody truly did a great job.

False equivalency.

US is a net coal exporter. If we were 100% nuclear the mining would be the same and it'd be exported.

Not a solution.

Instead, Swanson's curve should have been accelerated pushing the cost economics of solar to have made it competitive at an earlier date. Then you wouldn't need global legislative compliance, it'd have been cheaper earlier

I never mentioned the US.

What were you referring to then?

Also, there's more to power than coal and nuclear

There are much more safe alternatives that just need a bit more of funding which do not involve as many risks as current nuclear reactor technology.

For example Molten salt reactors have proved to be quite effective back in the 60s already. I wonder why this doesn't get more attention.

I wonder why this doesn't get more attention.

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E

That, and a lot of misinformation. Like believing that driving is safer than flying.

In the words of Eliezer Yudkowsky, "Shut up and multiply"

https://i.imgur.com/uLihyq4.jpg

Looking at that chart, I find it even more annoying that nuclear and renewables are played off against each other. As if environmentalists were worse than the coal and oil lobby, and not very much opposed to them. Why not join forces, why use nuclear to diss renewables, if you'll forgive putting it in such a silly way? And no matter how great it may be, nuclear being finite, renewables would look "infinitely" better in a chart of that.

You can't really compare ChNPP (or any RBMK) to any modern reactor. It did not have a containment building.

The Fukushima reactors had containment buildings, but other fatal design flaws. We know these flaws and their consequemces now in hindsight. But we can only tolerate so many accidents with containment failures on one planet and all we can realistically do is increase the mean time between accidents through engineering.

How many atmospheric nuclear weapons explosions could we tolerate?

Certainly more than 500, since that's how many were conducted. We're still here.

How many of them were above ground with a substantial release of long lived isotopes? IIRC the ban of atmospheric weapon tests came quite quickly.

512 nukes were detonated in atmosphere during the era of nuclear weapons testing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing#Hist...

One person has been confirmed to have died after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The fatal design flaw of building cities next to water however killed thousands of people from the tsunami.

So few people die from nuclear relative to coal.

Nuclear is dangerous for the local ecosystem, fossil fuels are dangerous to the global ecosystem, and renewables will require a total societal makeover in terms of energy consumption.

A choice needs to be made, and I'd argue that we're better at mitigating Chernobyl and Fukushima than we are about mitigating global warming, or convincing everyone that we don't need industry.

Nuclear is dangerous for the local ecosystem

Utterly wrong.

https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/related-info/faq.htm...

You get more radiation living in a brick house

https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q9778.html

https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/building.html

Radiation is just a straw man. Nuclear power plants are like coal plants without CO2, except they are much bigger. The massive amount of water needed to cool down a nuclear power plant takes it's toll on the river ecosystems, sometimes to the point where the nuclear power plant has to shut down to prevent irreversible damage. Then there are the fish that get caught in the coolant system. To them nuclear plants are like those giant Minecraft mob farms that automatically kill monsters without player involvement. A truly magnificient killing machine.

http://www.neis.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Its-the-water...

But to be fair I only consider our inability to build reactors cost efficiently (less disruptive cooling systems cost more $$$) to be the major roadblock to nuclear power. Just look at every HN submission regarding nuclear power. The vast majority of posters are in favor of nuclear power. So where exactly is the political opposition? I only see coal dependent communities as roadblocks but every non coal technology shares this problem.

HN isn't the world though, and seems a bit obsessed with nuclear energy to me. For example, when activists stormed a coal mine in Germany a majority of that discussion was about "why not nuclear".. I think that is nowhere near how the average person would react to the same news, which would be either yay or nay, but not making it about nuclear energy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253954

> The massive amount of water needed to cool down a nuclear power plant takes it's toll on the river ecosystems, sometimes to the point where the nuclear power plant has to shut down to prevent irreversible damage. Then there are the fish that get caught in the coolant system. To them nuclear plants are like those giant Minecraft mob farms that automatically kill monsters without player involvement. A truly magnificient killing machine.

This is true in so many ways. This is why a lot of nuclear advocates are pushing for a non-pressurized water reactor designs like molten salt reactors. In addition to not needing to place reactors in locations with lots of water, we also reduce the damage to waterways from waste heat and water intakes.

And HN is one of the few places where people know the MSR alternative, which barely needs water compared to LWR/HWR. There's still the issue of the final investment stretch before making it a battle-tested technology, but what's that compared to the externalities of coal/oil, or even wind, with its also high ecological impact?

Radiation is not a strawman if it's what preventing the technology from taking off due to pop fear.

Actually we do, the next gen reactor types all planned safety in mind first. This is the primary focus, everything else is secondary. Liquid fluoride thorium reactor are promising.

We haven't really found any way to fix the problems that fossil fuels are creating, either. Which might not be catastrophic yet if you're optimistic, but are certainly heading that way.

More than coal/oil/gas?

And please don't tell me you plan to sell wind/solar to China/India

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=3130

Its depressing that people voting for "green" parties are actually supporting more pollution.

Nuclear power is the only way to be honest.

Solar is the only solution.

Why not both?

I believe Nuclear is a better compromise until we reach a level where we can go 100% solar/renewable.

Meanwhile we need energy. I think nuclear is better that fossil

Nuclear Power is great until it's not. 'Germany is Wrong..' is a bit simplistic. No one would say japan is wrong for shutting nuclear down. Yet Chernobyl was only 30 years ago and fallout was blown over Germany. Some food could not be harvested for years (Mostly mushrooms like my beloved chanterelle •`_´•).

There grew a whole movement out of it and from that a political party called "Bündnis 90/Die Grünen" (the greens) which stand for protecting the environment and getting rid of nuclear power. They nearly overtook the conservative christian party at the last eu elections.

Also it's been at least a 20 year struggle to find a place to put all the nuclear waste, also highly politicised and vastly expensive.

You see, it's a little complicated.

Personally I would be fine with nuclear power as long as externalities are paid by the power companies and we learn how to better handle disasters.

> No one would say japan is wrong for shutting nuclear down.

Many people say that, including those best placed to know.

> Also it's been at least a 20 year struggle to find a place to put all the nuclear waste, also highly politicised and vastly expensive.

All you need is a warehouse. Sure, a reinforced one, a nice one. But there is no need to put the waste kilometers under the ground. It's only so vastly expensive because some people will feel better when it's 'out of the environment'.

I overreached a little with 'no one', I admit. I's just, telling someone he is just wrong while there are reasons, idk.

Have not really thought about a 100000 year warehouse that maybe susceptible to disaster or attack, sounds great.

I'm on board if the costs are paid by power company.

I don't think anyone who didn't live through Tschernobyl, WAA, Castor and the NATO Double-Track Decision with the SS-20 scare can understand why Germany doesn't want nuclear power.

...and the Asse mismanagement [1][2] with costs of 4-6 billion EUR.

[1] English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

[2] German: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse

I only have a shallow understanding of the economic forces at play in the energy market. But it seems to be that we're just not going to be able to disrupt the fossil fuel industries before it's too late.

Is there someone who's knowledgeable on this subject that can cheer me up with some good data suggesting maybe we can turn this ship around in time? Or should I just start hoping that we miraculously nail fusion in the next 5 years and suddenly find we have absolutely no need for oil / coal / gas?

Global solar installation doubling every <3 years ⇨ we will be at 95% solar in less than 20 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

No miracle needed, no politics needed.

> At that rate we will be at 95% solar in less than 20 years

What’s the growth rate for energy storage technology that can keep the lights on when it’s cloudy or night time?

seems to be similar(?):

https://www.futuretimeline.net/blog/images/1509.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47A2m_usNOs/Tg7vhWBqroI/AAAAAAAAFB...

That’s why government intervention is needed. We can disrupt these industries with the stroke of a pen. No matter how much it hurts, it’ll hurt more to let them continue to spew greenhouse gasses and other pollutants into the air.

This reduces into the most insane game of chicken ever played.

Everyone loses (in every dimension) if no one switches off, but the first country to switch off will absolutely lose (economically).

I’d rather just lose economically than destroy our entire society, wouldn’t you?

If one country destroys their economy and no one else follows, climate change due to increased carbon levels still happens.

Perfect! After you..

Sure thing. Put it on the ballot and I’ll vote for it.

We can turn this ship out by educating our peers. I have convinced countless people about reconsider their view on energy. Keep doing it and we will succeed.

Merkel’s decision to prematurely shut down Germany's generally safe and successful nuclear power program was quite frankly just stupid.

Is there anything new here that adds to the discussion on HN or can we expect the same pseudo-scientific back and forth between "nuclear isn't too bad, we have new reactors" and "it's still not safe enough"? The democratic society in Germany settled on the latter decades ago, I'm not sure why this needs to be regurgitated every month just because some countries settled on the former.

The Japanese really screwed nuclear power from a PR standpoint, just when we should be going all-in on it.

While the handful of Fukushima related injuries are tragic, they pale in comparison to the thousands of injuries/deaths directly caused by pollution by traditional plants, not to mention climate change.

On the other hand it might be an opportunity to prove that a nuclear disaster (even in an outdated reactor and the worst case scenario of the largest tsunami ever) isn't all that bad. Instead of leaving it alone, there's an active effort to clean up the damage completely, and it might just work. JR East has just announced that limited express train from Tokyo to Sendai that goes right through the exclusion zone (within 1.5 km of Fukushima Dai-Ichi) will be relaunched by the end of the year (currently it stops at Iwaki). The methods used to remove radiation around the railway are quite interesting (replacing the soil, walls of trees to prevent contamination by wind-blown particles etc.)

A lot of the strong anti-fission sentiments in Germany is buit on emotion and not facts. The debate has been thoroughly poisoned by fear-mongering of the opponents of nuclear power. Interestingly, this was the strategy of environmentalist and left-wing parties jumped onto the same bandwagon. This has been going on for more than 3 decades and the public is mostly trained to ignore any rational arguments (no matter whether for or against). So unless a new generation grows up that is not indoctrinated (for lack of a better term), the decision to exit nuclear power has no chance of being overturned.

Was post Japan Fukushima incident that Germany did this as a knee-jerk reaction. Of course, not factoring in the enviromental aspect. Then the big factor that most of Germanies coal electric generating plants sit on the border of other countries, makeing their enviroment/air quality at the mercy of the wind. An often overlooked aspect in air quality in some places - change of wind and they get somebody else's dirty air and tips the balance triggering the EU to fine the place with the dirty air and overlook the source that may of been within limits (just) but combined with another source that is within limits, tips the balance and you get air quality that's classed as unfit and bad.

So for many neibours, thank you Germany for your pollution so you can carry on burning your toxic coal at any excuse.

Hey, please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewars, or any flamewars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, certainly not my intentions or intended sentiments.

I'm sure that's true. It's just that a lot of these start unintentionally, so we all have to practice fire safety.

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