German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nuclear, last half as long | Hacker News Reader

German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nuclear, last half as long

nextbigfuture.com

318 pointsgaryclarke27293 comments

No one knows the actual cost of French Nuclear. France has yet to dismantle one of its end of life reactor.

Everyone know that the provisioned costs don't make sense. It was pointed by the national court of auditors in 2012 and 2014 [1] and again in a report from the national assembly in 2017 [2]. We are not even taking about puny mistakes. Even the actualisation ratio used is garbage.

[1] https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/201405...

[2] http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/documents/notice/14/rap-i...

> No one knows the actual cost of French Nuclear. France has yet to dismantle one of its end of life reactor.

This.

The sad thing is that the article is probably right about nuclear being preferrable over fossil fuels due to relative priorities of global warming vs. nuclear accidents and garbage disposal.

But this cost comparison against renewables is just comically miscalculated.

In 1995 Germany estimated 3 - 5 billion Euro to dismantle one of the old DDR nuclear plants that was decommissioned in 1990 by 2012. The work has not finished yet. About 1000 people work on this project.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald

Bad project management does not equate bad technology. German government also messed up Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport, it's 7 years late and massively over budget. In UK it takes us 30 years to build a train line.

Those cases don't prove that trains and plains are uneconomical.

That some other projects were late does not mean much for dismantling a nuclear power plant, which is a very different/ unique problem with different actors.

But they should increase your bayesian estimate of typical project costs for these types of projects. If we had a way of reliably preventing bad project management such things wouldn't happen.

There's a common feature of massive complex projects the world over - they pretty much always come late and massively over budget. Then as infrastructure mostly end up sticking around for a century or more, sometimes limiting future choices.

Rail, tube and tram lines will still be there and graded 100 years later - after track replacements, roads are not dissimilar, reservoirs and storage caverns far longer with a turbine replacement or two. Nuclear on the other hand has a much more limited life in which to absorb those overruns.

What has this to do with bad project management? I do not see anything particularly bad happening in this project, while the BER is indeed a clusterfuck that keeps giving.

They are still within their financial budget for this project, will maybe overshoot it by a bit in the end. But that's OK, since such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, and it was just an estimate and everybody knew that. They will exceed their time budget by a lot, which is also OK, since again such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, it doesn't really matter if this thing takes a decade longer to dismantle, and the reason they take longer than initially estimated is that they had to overcome a ton of problems nobody could have known about before and went about their work carefully and systematically. There were a lot of lessons learned from this, which should help with being faster when dismantling other nuclear plants, but and a bit cheaper (maybe at 2/3rds the cost in the future).

With BER on the other hand the date of completion did matter, both politically and economically, and the exploding time and financial budgets were a result of gross incompetence in particular from the politicians that personally kept meddling in the project (it was "prestige" project), complete failure in contractor oversight (which resulted in a ton of defects and also some corruption and embezzlement) and a completely useless project leadership (of mostly political appointments, aside from the politicians themselves, that e.g. resulted in them building that thing without working fire safety).

Wind and solar projects are not coming in at 3-4x their costs anywhere.

So the fact that they are simply simpler projects which rarely (never?) have massive overruns due to "bad project management" is a huge financial point in their favor that is rarely factored in.

Indeed. A huge and complicated project is a much wonderful playground for involved people (from the planners to the decommissioners). They benefit from it (on all accounts, including intellectual, financial, reputation, tolerance for error...) much more than they would with simple and transparent ways.

Decommissioning costs, often neglected, are a ticking bomb.

UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-...

£161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u...

£234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision...

Long-term waste management is another ticking bomb.

Moreover if there is a serious glitch (Chernobyl, Fukushima...), are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no insurance company covers such nuke risk.

Agreed - the lifespan argument is really not portrayed in an accurate way. Besides, France is basically screwed - it hasn’t been able to expand its energy supply beyond population demands (ie it doesn’t and couldn’t support a data center economy). More than likely they will be buying energy rather than generating it in the future — unless of course someone can get the salt reactor commercialized.

Huh? France exports energy, and it has a massive nuclear and hydroelectric industry. Why on earth would it be more screwed than anywhere else in Europe?

Today they produce a lot of subsidized power that when everything operating correctly produces an excess of power. However we are not talking about today, we are talking about the future. The average plant age is 30 years. Some plants are so old that frances neighbors accuse it of risking another Fukushima incident.. Germany closed its plants for precisely that reason. It will like cost close to 100b if not more to decommission and untold amounts to replace whatever they take offline. My point is that just for France to unwind it’s aging nuclear it’s going to have to build and spend a lot and that is just to get back to even... much less expand to cover new sources of electricity like electrification of the car fleet. Germany in contrast has been building new transmission lines and production for a decade and still has a decade to go. Norway actually has a true surplus which is expected to be a multiple of france’s entire output, etc etc. My point was that the author was saying nuclear has an expected age of 40-80 years... I call bs on that lifespan and point to France as an example: there’s just no way we see them continue their existing plants for 80 years when their existing plants are already showing signs they may be at risk or not be able to operate much past 35-40...

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

Tally: Germany 1, France 28

There are many causes, one being that during hot seasons many French atomic plants cannot run at full speed (thermal pollution).

Germany is number 1 because of the wind... there are days when they generate more than they can take. Exporting is not really a good measure of energy security — for example, how much do you think Germany can charge for the wind it cannot use? Hint: it’s a negative number. I am a proponent of nuclear - but I wish to see newer more efficient and safer designs (ie salt). When I look at France through the same lens I look at Norway, I see one country electrifying it’s entire car fleet, all of its homes, its entire North Sea oil production, is investing in massive hectare size data centers and still has plenty left over and then I see France who will be lucky to replace its aging nuclear infrastructure just get back to what it has today. I would love to see them continue to invest in nuclear but it’s own stated goal is to drop nuclear to 50% of the overall rather than the current 75%. If the article’s author is correct, that aging nuclear designs are superior to other forms of energy, why then isn’t France keeping its production at 75%?

I'm a very big fan of nuclear and I believe it should be subsidized at high cost as necessary. However, it is clear that even France has extreme inbound cost problems related to its nuclear industry -

"French power utility EDF estimates it would cost at least 46 billion euros ($51 billion) to build six of its latest generation EPR nuclear reactors if the government decides to build them"

"the Flamanville EPR reactor under construction in northern France has been plagued by cost overruns and a series of technical problems resulting in years of delays. EDF, in which the state has an 84% stake, said in October the project which began in 2006 would cost 1.5 billion euros more than previously expected, raising the total cost to 12.4 billion euros."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-e...

What EDF estimates is meaningless without a strike price and decommissioning cost.

The UK's National Audit Office puts the price of one EDF reactor around that once you include the excess price paid on every MWh over the 50 year projected life, and the decommissioning (which is supposedly built into that MWh price). It remains to be seen if it will be correct. From Wikipedia:

The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion, which "will continue to vary as the outlook for wholesale market prices shifts"

That's $64bn on top of £20bn ($25bn) latest build estimate. A build with such poor worker conditions that it has gained a reputation for suicides.

$89bn would build a ton of pumped storage to underpin offshore wind at a quarter the MWh price.

That is assuming you have the suitable terrain and don't have a problem with forcibly moving the inhabitants - its not the 50/60's the locals might not just pack up and move.

In some or even many cases neither need necessarily apply.

It doesn't always have to be a populated valley that gets dammed. There's a decent selection of disused quarries, maybe some of the Highland lochs that have potential to create something like Dinorwig at minimal disruption to environment once complete. What I don't know is how those constructions compare in today's money to alternatives. Still, £70bn brings an awful lot of choices, especially when lifespan is indefinite, just periodic turbine replacements.

If the geography isn't available there's the Netherlands project that's pumped storage on entirely flat land. Involves building an artificial lake, with a cavern and turbines below it. Suitable rock for the cavern is quite a long way down, which adds to the cost, but also adds to the head so it should end up with significant capacity. As far as I know it is the first such scheme, so costs are projection only at this stage, but it looks pretty interesting if it turns out to be viable economically: https://o-pac.nl

Or the UK company that has a plan involving winching weights (thousands of tonnes) up and down disused mine shafts. The open question of course is how many of the world's thousands of disused mine shafts are going to be viable. If viable the advantage seems to be very low surface profile.

Your version of head assumes discharge into bedrock. Are they building a cavern of many cubic hectares down there too?

That seems to be the plan - enough capacity to store the whole topside lake, which seems to be planned at 500m x 500m (depth 10m). No idea how feasible or economic it will be compared to caverns from hollowing out a mountainside.

All these large-scale energy storage projects are in their infancy. I haven't heard of anyone breaking ground on a project multi-GWh capacilty. Until that happens, it's all hypothetical.

Also, I am no expert on the subject, but digging out underground reservoir sounds expensive.

Dinorwig is 10GWh. There were two backup sites chosen in the same immediate area to cover the case the main site had proved impractical. Many years have passed so it's unlikely they're still there, but geography is not lacking if the political will were there.

There is still bad feeling in wales about some of the valleys that where flooded in the 60's.

With devolved government now in Wales and Scotland and new Pumped storage will face more push back

Given rule changes even without devolved government repeats of the Liverpool reservoir would be much harder. Dinorwig used already existing disused quarries - not flooding a pristine valley.

In the case of Scotland it's been the Scottish government looking at using lochs. No idea what the case is in Wales.

The Hinckley point nuclear deal is comically badly managed, and two EDF executives were so opposed to it, they resigned before the contract was signed.

All of it is down to the creative accounting of the conservative government to demonstrate that they eliminated the deficit.

Instead of financing the construction directly and purchasing the plant as "turn-key" asset, they forced EDF to take a multi-decade loan and agreed a price of electricity decades in the future that would enable EDF to pay back that loan. This doubled or triples the cost.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35741772

What's 'a ton' of pumped storage? Thats doesn't mean much. Can it can back up at least 16GWh, the equivalent of a single nuclear reactor's output over night. I have never heard of a project of this magnitude that wasn't just on the drawing board.

The reason Hinkley was structured as it was is because every other nuclear decomissioning results in socialising the cost to the state. This was intended to ensure that was not the case - despite the massive state subsidy. Which rather brings us to the normality of nuclear - the costs are always indicative of comical mismanagement, overrun and very often completely ignoring the decommissioning entirely. So it never, ever brings electricity at the alleged cost it can in the developed world - decommissioning makes a complete mockery of the figures, every damn time.

Considering Dinorwig cost £425m in the 1980s to get around 10GWh, even allowing for inflation and construction costs rising much in excess, there should be easily enough for multiple times 16GWh from $89bn even with major overruns. Hence "a ton". Probably enough to derive most generation from wind with more than adequate storage underlying it.

Clearly that needs suitable geography for several sites, but considering there were two backup sites within 10mi of Dinorwig should the main site prove unsuitable, and given the geography of the UK those should not be lacking. I know where I would spend my money given the outlook for renewable costs - absolutely not on nuclear. I was once quite keen in my naive twenties.

France did and does heavily subsidize nuclear, it pretty much paid for the whole fleet out of government pockets when it was originally built in the 70s [0]

And because that was expensive, there isn't enough money for decommissioning left, which needs equally massive subsidies [1].

[0] https://www.france24.com/en/20170710-france-hulot-could-clos...

[1] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear/eu-short-of...

The money for decommissioning and upkeep was used to prop up wind and solar uptake in France, with dismal results.

Jean Marc Jancovici quoted 10-15% of the total cost in an interview last week.

A quote is of no value. Actual costs and time spent must be determined by dismantling a reactor successfully.

Quotes don't matter when it doesn't help the argument I'm making on the internet.* Meanwhile projections are used extensively in major engineering projects. The fact error rates exist in probabilities doesn't make them useless.

The parents point is sound in that estimates only have validity if they are about well understood or frequently undertaken activities. There is no basis for certainty about decommissioning of nuclear; older plants especially have unique problems. There have been enormous cost overruns for any plant that has had an incident, and many plants will have problems only discovered upon disassembly.

Problems unique to older plants have no relevance to the estimates for newer plants. They're not even relevant to the choice whether to keep existing plants in operation, except insofar as pushing the decommissioning date further into the future lowers its net present cost due to the time value of money.

Ah but they do! As we discover those unique problems and how to solve them and how long it takes and the cost, our a priori cost estimate improves. The total numbers are so small it is really hard to say what the reliablity is. Newer plants tend to have more commonality and few parts, but we are still to discover all the many fantastic failure mechanisms. There are only 7 active Gen III reactors in the world, so it will be some time before we gain statistical confidence -- well after future designs are finalised.

> Ah but they do! As we discover those unique problems and how to solve them and how long it takes and the cost, our a priori cost estimate improves.

But it's not just our cost estimate that improves. Gen III reactors were designed with more data on how Gen I reactors were decommissioned than was available when Gen II reactors were being designed, and so on.

Finding a new decommissioning snag affects how you design the next reactor you build, but it doesn't really affect its predicted decommissioning cost because by that point you're aware of the issue and take steps to prevent it from occurring for the generation now being constructed.

This is true but people tend to forget one thing: decommissioning doesn't necessarily means dismantling. Dismantling is a tough challenge (mainly because of the civil engineering part btw, which becomes difficult to manage when you add the constraints from nuclear: “What do you mean when you say we can't use dynamite? oO”) but it's only a legal obligation not an absolute one. With government support to change the law, EDF could just unload the fuel (price is well known, they do it all the time), and pickle the primary circuit in place (the price is also known, they did it a few times already) and now you have a place where all contamination (which comes from neutronic activation) is trapped inside the structure (Co60 in the rebar of the structure mostly) and the biggest risk is asbestos… (like your nearest decommissionined building in your neighborhood, even houses).

This option leaves you with a few ugly buildings in the middle of nowhere, but the cost unbeatable (even way less than decommissioning thousands of wind turbines).

Why isn't this just the default choice?

Good question. The dismantling narrative probably comes from a mix between wishful thinking from politicians and bad habits of lying all the time from the nuclear industry… I mean, the nuclear story is even brighter if we can promise we'll clean up after us right?

> This option leaves you with a few ugly buildings in the middle of nowhere, but the cost unbeatable (even way less than decommissioning thousands of wind turbines).

Aren't you forgetting something? Buildings slowly deteriorate, even if not used. So now you have to maintain the disused reactor, for ... how long exactly?

(Amendment: wind, rain, sunlight, rodents, ... idiots with power tools ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident )

> Buildings slowly deteriorate, even if not used. So now you have to maintain the disused reactor, for ... how long exactly?

And here comes radioactive decays to the rescue! Half-life of Co60 is a little bit more than 5 years, for instance. The important thing to consider is that dangerous radioactive materials are also the ones with the shortest half-life (because the same number of atoms emits more radiation per second), so as long as you took out the fuel[1] you don't have anything really dangerous for too long. It could still be a problem when decommissioning (because you spill everything out in a short time and you have workers just nearby) but if you let the building just decay slowly, you don't have issues.

[1]: the fuel is a bit special, because it has long half-life but it's still dangerous for two reasons. 1) it's alpha emitters, the worst kind of radioactive substance. 2) the concentration is enormous.

Co-60 isn't the only side product though. A quick Google search yields me https://mitnse.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/radiation_npp_07.... which lists:

Krypton-85 Beta/Gamma 10 years

Strontium-90 Beta 28 years

Iodine-131 Beta/Gamma 8 days

Cesium-137 Beta/Gamma 30 years

Carbon-14 Beta 5770 years

Zinc-65 Beta/Gamma 245 days

Cobalt-60 Beta/Gamma 5 years

Iron-59 Beta/Gamma 45 days

Tritium Beta 12 years

I'm also not sure where you got the idea that alpha emitters are the worst kind of radioactive substance; alpha radiation is easily shielded.

On the other hand, sure, just leaving the reactor there for 50 years may be part of a cost effective solution. https://www.dndkm.org/DOEKMDocuments/BestPractices/26-EFCOG%... (linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning) claims a 71% reduction in decomissioning costs. However, this includes neither fuel waste disposal costs nor future costs for full dismantling at some point.

Alpha radiation is easily shielded from external exposure, but for that exact reason it's also the most damaging; gamma radiation, for instance, will mostly pass right through you, while alphas will deposit all of their energy right into your cells. They're shielded by your dead skin, but if you ingest or inhale them, then there's no dead skin to protect you, and all that radiation goes straight into your cells.

In fact, according to the weighting system that converts joules of energy absorbed (Grays) to severity of radiation dose (Seiverts), a joule of alpha radiation is 20 times worse than a joule of X-rays, beta radiation, or gamma rays.

And it's ingestion or inhalation that we're worried about from environmental contamination; not that the environment itself would become so radioactive, Fallout-style, that you'd take rads just from standing around - but that radioactive dust from demolition might get into the air, or that contaminants might leak into the groundwater.

Yeah, but - context. We're talking about leaving a disused reactor around in some type of safe manner. Ideally it won't be leaking... but some radioactive material is still in it. Aren't the beta & gamma radiators more dangerous, even as far as irradiating other parts of the structure itself is considered?

Neither beta nor gamma radiation will "activate" other parts of the structure to make them radioactive themselves; only neutron radiation (which can convert stable isotopes into unstable isotopes with more neutrons in them) can do that.

Nor will they weaken the structure.

So as long as people don't enter the reactor without proper precautions, there's really no reason to worry about radiation inside it. And this problem can be solved pretty well with a fence and warning signs.

> So as long as people don't enter the reactor without proper precautions, there's really no reason to worry about radiation inside it. And this problem can be solved pretty well with a fence and warning signs.

The buildings being designed as a bunker also helps. Just add a single guardian and his dog just to be sure nobody is actively trying to break through the concrete walls and you're good to go.

The parent talk about how the building material like rebars absorbs the isotopes, and then how long it can afterward be harmful.

Do those isotopes also get absorbed, and if so, at what rate? Since I don't know the physic I don't know if all isotopes can get absorbed at the same rate, but my intuition is that the answer is no. I would also guess that nuclear plants get exposed to different amount of each type of isotope, so the above table would need to include both in order to compare the radiation risk after X years.

Isn't cesium contamination the reason why the descendants of the Bikini Islanders still can't move back to their ancestral home? Same group as potassium so it gets sucked up into fruiting bodies (eg coconuts)

Cs137 is a real problem, it's radioactive enough and at the same time it has a long half-life for this kind of product. And as you say, it's metabolized so it can spread through the food chain…

Fortunately, it's a fission product so it's only released when you melt your reactor or when your reactor is in fact a bomb… (Mandatory reference to the Silly Asses short story from Isaac Asimov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_Asses).

Then why is it listed in the grandparent as a product?

Because the GP took a list that mixes both fission products and activation product.

Fission products are directly created when splitting an uranium nucleus in half. They stay in the fuel rod unless it's damaged in a catastrophe. With a bomb you don't have rods, so everything is just released in the air.

You wouldn't leave the spent fuel in the reactor, that removes the first 5 elements. This leaves at most a 5 year halve life if you exclude water.

> I'm also not sure where you got the idea that alpha emitters are the worst kind of radioactive substance; alpha radiation is easily shielded.

Ahah! I considered making an appendix especially for this one because I expected some people to make this mistake, so here we are. Notice that if you're French, the mistake isn't yours but it's the official physics course for French high-schoolers which is to blame.

First of all, alpha rays are helium nucleus, they are really heavy compared to electrons (beta rays) and thus, much more energetic (energy of an order of magnitude of a few MeV vs hundreds of keV), and gamma rays in the case of radioactivity are even lower (40 keV in case of iodine for instance).

If you stand in front of a radioactive source, the radiations comes from in front of you, you can really easily shield against alpha rays (because they are big!), but you can't really shield against gamma rays (because they are just photons), then gamma rays are the most dangerous in that specific context.

But most people aren't physicists or nuclear workers, and you don't usually end up being irradiated by a radio source (the incident you talked about earlier is a good counter example though). The major risk faced by a population is not direct irradiation, it's contamination: that means, you eat food or drink water which contains some radioactive element. And now you get the radioactive source right in your body (let say the thyroid, if we're talking about radioactive iodine). Here, there is no possible shielding, so the total energy is what matters. And regarding the different kinds of rays and their ability to pass through matter, gamma rays have some chance to exit your body without ionizing a single cell, beta have less chance, and alpha have zero chance to go out.

So yes, in terms of radio protection of populations, you fear alpha rays way more than others. And if you operated a plant you are actually allowed to release a little (and subject to regulations of course) amount of beta-emitters (tritium is released in low quantities quite often for instance) but you aren't allowed to release any single atom of alpha emitters.

Also, the list you quote contains fission products (from krypton to C14) as well as activation products. Under normal conditions (I mean, no critical accident like TMI, Chernobyl or Fukushima), most fission products stays in the fuel rod, and then they won't remain in the decommissioned plant.

Zn65 and Fe59 decay quickly, Tritium will be slowly released in the water nearby (yes, that's the normal procedure and it's happening during all the plant's life) and then you have Co60.

That list is a bit misleading for anyone skimming; it has a bunch of numbers in years and in days. I was puzzling over why there is no natural Zinc-65 until I read it more carefully.

Because it's gone in 10 half lives.

The fission products are in the fuel not the primary circuit.

Half life is almost as confusing as statistics. A halflife of 5 years means 10% of the radioactivity is still there 16 years later. You'll still get 1% of the rems 33 years later, and that's if the materials don't migrate.

Alpha decays are still problematic for any material that can by aspirated or ingested. Demolition means flying dust. A leaky building means groundwater contamination. A lot of these substances are also heavy metals, so even without the alpha decay problem they are highly toxic.

Can you keep a building full of alpha sources water tight for five or six half lives?

There would be no alpha sources left in the plant, as they are confined in the fuel rods, that would be taken away from the plant. (And be managed like spent fuel, which is a totally different problem than decommissioning).

> A halflife of 5 years means 10% of the radioactivity is still there 16 years later.

But it's very likely that 10% is irrelevant.

Radioactivity is not a all or nothing thing. It exists all around you right now.

Camping out at a old abandoned nuclear power plant 20 years after it's decommissioned probably gives you less radiation exposure then you would get from a flight from California to Hong Kong.

Iz’s not about camping. It’s about water. France is timy compared to the US.

Ever heard about RO water? You can get a RO water filter for 150€ if you're concerned about contamination.

That won’t solve water table contamination. Are you going to RO plants? The soil?

It's not confusing at all, or maybe only to people with irrational fears. Just leave the building sit for 50 years and you've got 1/2^10 Co60 left.

Also dispose the vitrified spent fuel in a repository after reprocessing it.

Example of one nuclear power plant being decommissioned (German TV documentary, Spring 2018):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpUjNayFJvM

> decommissioning doesn't necessarily means dismantling

That's kinda missing the point, the fact is that France's nuclear fleet is heavily underfunded by at least 50 billion Euro [0].

These are exactly the kind of costs regularly externalized or completely omitted when calculating the profitability of nuclear vs renewables [1].

[0] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear/eu-short-of...

[1] https://energypost.eu/how-profitable-is-an-investment-in-nuc...

the Decommissioning of the Zion reactors. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1909/ML19092A270.pdf

About $650 million budget.

In 2016, They say it is on schedule and under budget. https://www.energysolutions.com/zion-nuclear-power-plant-dec...

They are doing less sorting. They just get a bigger cave and put the entire facility into it. There is room in the large cave for all US nuclear plants.

And waste is far from a solved problem.

"This is the €25bn deep geological storage facility for France’s high and medium-level radioactive waste... [France] produces enough toxic radioactive waste every year to fill 120 double-decker buses (about 13,000 cubic metres worth, or 2kg a year for every French person)." [0]

[0] 2016: "Nuclear waste: keep out for 100,000 years" https://www.ft.com/content/db87c16c-4947-11e6-b387-64ab0a670...

Which is much less waste than solar produces. We barely even try to keep the waste from solar panels segregated from the environment because it is impossible with volumes that high. It is impossible to try to keep it to the same standards as nuclear but the damage is probably about the same.

https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-...

I missed the part about solar panels and radioactive waste that require containment.

End of life PV panels are one of a million waste products that end up in landfills.

The EOL PV products are just as dangerous as radiation; lead and cadmium poisoning are nasty businesses.

If they were held to the same safety standards as nuclear waste it would require containment; the risk of harm is greater (especially after accounting for volume). PV waste isn't held to that silly standard because then it would be impossible to produce solar panels.

If nuclear waste were contained using the same standard of acceptable harm as solar panels the cost would be a rounding error.

They've got large quantities of Cadmium Telluride and Cadmium Sulfide, the Cadmium portion of which is quite toxic. Not to mention that burning coal releases a ton of radiation into the air also. This isn't whataboutism, far from it, in an ideal world there'd be no waste. But in the real world we have to reduce harm and balance options against each other. Nuclear waste can be quite effectively dropped into long-term geological storage facilities.

At least, recycling the solar cadmium byproducts is much easier than recycling spent nuclear fuel.

Anyway, uranium extraction and refining creates its share of byproducts too.

Easier, potentially, but the question is also of relative volumes. You need an awful lot of cadmium telluride to produce the same amount of power as a fingernail size pellet of uranium.

Per TWh of generated electricity you end up with an order of magnitude more deaths from solar power. It’s always a balance.

You might be surprised how little cadmium telluride is required. With a 2.5 micron CdTe cell thickness [1] and 17.6% beginning-of-life module efficiency, 25 years operation with linear power degradation [2], that's a lifetime average module efficiency of 16.45%. If it's illuminated to achieve 20% capacity factor -- which is realistic for utility scale solar projects [3] -- a square meter of panel generates 7205 kWh over its lifetime. A square meter of panel contains 16 grams of CdTe. That's 3150 kWh of electricity generated per 7 grams of cadmium telluride over the module's lifetime.

If a 7 gram uranium fuel pellet releases as much thermal energy over its lifetime as a tonne of coal [4], that's 8141 kWh. Assuming a thermal efficiency of 33% for conversion to electricity [5], that's 2687 kWh of electricity from one 7 gram fuel pellet.

A breeder reactor could extract many times as much energy from one fuel pellet's worth of uranium, but the world currently operates hundreds of power reactors and only one breeder power reactor, the Russian BN-800.

[1] Table 1 in https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Timothy_Gessert/publica...

[2] http://www.firstsolar.com/-/media/First-Solar/Technical-Docu...

[3] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

[4] https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/nuclear-fission-can-help-...

[5] http://holbert.faculty.asu.edu/eee463/NuclearPowerPlants.pdf

Only some panels use CdTe, most are regular silicon. And in Europe they will all be covered by the WEEE directive: http://www.solarwaste.eu/

Do you mean as the backing or bulk material?

AFAIK photovoltaic cells with the electricity producing junction made of pure silicon do not exist. Don't know how much of non-silicon is there, but arsenic from GaAs cells is not something you want in your soil either.

As for WEEE, I hope most of the cells are returned and recycled or somehow properly disposed of, but not all will be collected, and there will be breakage, maybe even leakage of acid-rain digested cells. Also, even now, the collected e-waste is not really processed in a environmentally friendly way.

The cells are made of purified, doped silicon. That means very pure crystalline silicon modified with tiny additions of boron and phosphorus. A chemist would consider them "pure" silicon -- they are more than 99.99% silicon. About 95% of solar module manufacturing uses silicon cells. The remaining ~5% is split between thin film cadmium telluride modules and an even smaller volume of copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin film modules.

GaAs cells are far too expensive for terrestrial use.

The reality is that no such facilities exist. At the Indian Point reactor in New York, tons of radioactive materials are held in insecure, leaking ponds that are emitting waste into the groundwater and Hudson River. That facility isn’t the worst and isn’t unique.

Ewaste is a problem for sure, but it doesn’t present the same complexity as nuclear waste products.

Almost all of the pro-nuclear arguments depend on an ideal state that never will and never did exist today. We have the reactors that we have because the military was in the midst of a massive buildup of atomic weapons during that timeframe.

As it stands, those plants are often not viable — my state directly subsidizes nuclear plants because the operational expenses and capital costs make the electricity produced more expensive than the open market will pay. And that’s after the taxpayer implicitly taking on the long term expenses associated with decommissioning and dealing with the plants for decades after retirement, at taxpayer expense.

> Ewaste is a problem for sure, but it doesn’t present the same complexity as nuclear waste products.

It isn't complex because it is unsolvable. When large amount of solar panels reach their end of life we are guaranteed to get large quantities of carcinogens in landfill that eventually leaks into the water table. Many sets of landfill are guaranteed to be poorly managed, and even those that are well managed are not scrutinised to the same extent as a nuclear related activity and will be of lower quality.

With nuclear, if we successfully traverse a complicated path then there will be no carcinogens in the water supply in the next 100 years. If we do it wrong there will be small quantities of carcinogens in the water supply.

> Almost all of the pro-nuclear arguments depend on an ideal state that never will and never did exist today.

What we are doing with nuclear today is working better than what we were doing with solar today. There is less waste and the harm it does is less than the harm of solar waste.

Anti-nuclear arguments just don't seem grapple with these questions of scale. Carcinogens sourced from e-waste are at least as bad as carcinogens from radioactive materials. As far as I can tell, large quantities of lead are worse.

> my state directly subsidizes nuclear plants because the operational expenses and capital costs make the electricity produced more expensive than the open market will pay.

This didn't stop Germanny bringing in solar. I've heard a rumour that German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nuclear, last half as long.

This figure sounds excessive, and it's not clear what is counted: no break down between high-level/low-level waste, and does not state if this is before or after chemical reprocessing, if this is before or after vitrification.

Going from first principles, France has 133 GWe of nuclear capacity, and each Gw reactor produces 27t of unprocessed waste a year. France reprocesses used fuel, of which > 95% is un-burnt uranium - this goes back into reactors. Conservative estimate suggest that they produce <200t of waste a year. That's 3g per person! Of that, only 1/5 is real long-lived waste.

There is no industrial process that produces less waste. These volumes are easily manageable.

Check out diagram for what nuclear waste is made up of: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_VyTCyizqrHs/TCWrO7OFt4I/AAAAAAAAIF...

Just put it all in Nevada

Trying since '87, to no avail.

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

Only because of political opposition. It's been consistently shown to be a very safe long term storage plan. Ironically, efforts to stop the Yucca proposal because of "safety" issues make it so that we must store much of our nuclear waste in metal barrels at the same nuclear power plants they were produced in.

Anti-nuclear activists are right when they say that nuclear energy is politically impossible but only because they're the ones making it politically impossible.

As usual experts do not judge it as simple as that.

Rust and corrosion will attack the strongest container – all they need are the right conditions and enough time to work. Not only that, but metals behave differently (and chemical reactions proceed more quickly) at higher temperatures – such as those produced by the decay of fission products. So the thermal effects also have to be factored in when designing the things.

So here’s the bad news about long-term disposal of spent reactor fuel – and the containers meant to hold it. Nobody knows how a container is going to hold up over even 100,000 years, let alone a million years (the time span required by EPA).

Source: https://fas.org/category/yucca-mountain/

Who cares if the waste leaks out of the metal barrels? It's still going to be in Nevada, hundreds of miles from any human settlement for thousands of years.

A landfill will do just fine [0]:

"In an effort to reduce costs, the Energy Department developed a plan to ship nearly 75 percent of the fissile materials in Building 3019, as is, to a landfill at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site by the end of 2014. Because such disposal would violate the agency’s formal safeguards and radioactive waste disposal requirements, the Energy Department changed those rules, which it can do without public notification or comment. Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms."

[0] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...

Plants have been dismantled in the past, not in France though. I think closing Fessenheim is a bad decision, but at least it could shut down this bad argument by showing that costs of decommisioning a nuclear power plants are not 3 years of GDP.

Exactly. The real costs of France's national nuclear program can be hidden inside of the accounting of the entire nation, and fudged beyond belief. It's a point of national pride at this point, they would definitely lie and take to the grave anything that might suggest it's not an overwhelming success. And given how fudged financing can be easy to do and compound into massive errors, it could take a massive team of financial forensic analysts to uncover it.

Not to mention the cost of permanently evacuating an area when the impossible event of a meltdown manages to happen anyway. There's a reason why countries like to put their reactors near the border, that way part of that area is someone else's problem.

There's a major flaw in the argument of this article. They calculate what Germany has payed in the past decades, including the very early phase of solar+wind development. You can of course compare any number of things, whether it makes sense or not.

But for the question how to proceed with future energy it's completely irrelevant what solar+wind costed in 2005. We only care what it costs now and in the future. "Solar was super expensive in 2005, so we shouldn't build cheap solar in 2019" is not a useful or logical argument.

The key thing about the german renewable subsidies (and a few other countries, but particularly for solar it was mostly germany) is that they brought wind+solar from being overly expensive exotic technologies to cheap mass technologies.

>They calculate what Germany has payed in the past decades, including the very early phase of solar+wind development

Yeah, while also ignoring the untold Billions in subsidies from the early stages of nuclear power. It's rather hypocritical.

Or the untold gazillions in indirect subsidies from not requiring nuclear power plants to be insured for damages arising from catastrophic incidents...

The issue is that you won't find an insurance company willing to insure a risk that they can't calculate. There's too little data to find a price here.

In the end, the government always bears the cost, because any catastrophic event will likely bankrupt the operator involved.

I think it's fair to count these catastrophic costs as subsidies, but they're not "untold gazillions". Estimates for the Fukushima disaster go up to about a trillion[1]. At the other side, the costs for Germany's "Energiewende" will run up over half a trillion[2], with relatively little to show for it[3].

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/how-much-does-ger...

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

[3] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/energiewende-scores-mix...

However nuclear is calculated at true cost, solar and wind is not.

And nuclear is also calculated in the past plus its been underdeveloped the last 30 years.

Backup energy for wind and solar is not included wich have to be either coal, gas, oil or nuclear to compensate for the low capacity factor wind and solar which is at 20-40 compared to nuclear which is at 90.

So even if wind and solar were cheaper it only provides at the will of the weather.

I would love to se a proper non-partisan calculation where everything gets calculated in.

> However nuclear is calculated at true cost

That seems highly doubtful. The amount of explicit and implicit subsidies to nuclear power via government programs is massive. And then add the fact that nuclear power is exempt from having to pay for adequate insurance...

There's lots of these in existence, basically every government has run them while deciding what policies to adopt. Here's a nice readable one that's fact checking a right-wing former Prime Minister who claimed that renewables plus storage was cheaper than coal or nuclear:

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-12/is-renewable-power...

How exactly is the insurance that nuclear gets for catastrophic events priced in? You know, the insurance that no private insurer is willing to offer, so what's going to happen is the nuclear operating company declares bankruptcy and the tax payer pays for the cleanup.

The operating company is insured and pays for the cleanup.

Insured by whom? You need to understand how insurance companies operate: They gather data, they calculate the risk vs. the cost of paying out, they add a markup - that's your price. There is not enough data to do this with catastrophic nuclear accidents.

I understand how they work and I have done work both for insurance companies and re-insurers, nuclear power plants are insured a little different.

Here are some facts on how it works.

"Currently, owners of nuclear power plants pay premiums for $375 million in private liability coverage for each nuclear reactor they own. If there is an incident at a nuclear plant, and the $375 million in coverage is not sufficient, the owner’s coverage is supplemented by the second layer of protection, which is supplied by the nuclear power industry as a whole. Under the Price-Anderson Act, all reactor owners are committed to paying their share of any damages that exceed the incident reactor owner’s first-tier limit of $375 million—up to $111.9 million per reactor. Since are currently 104 reactors in operation, the amount that would be available in the industry pool to pay claims totals $12.6 billion (2011). "

It works because nuclear accidents are extremely rare and less dangerous than wind and solar let alone coal, oil and gas.

https://www.iii.org/article/insurance-coverage-nuclear-accid...

Wait...nuclear accidents (e.g.s Chernobyl and Fukushima) are less dangerous than wind and solar?

What sort of blatant BS is this.

I didn't say that.

I said that nuclear power is safer than wind and solar and any other form of energy EVEN including Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Thanks, this reminds me that I read this article half a year ago and forgot... my point is that it's not sufficient as the Fukushima Daiichi accident cost a lot more than $12.6 billion, let me just lazily link to my old comment on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014159

But what's the point though? Three Mile Island was fully paid by the insurance.

With regards to Fukushima the powerplant didn't kill anyone, the tsunami, on the other hand, did and of course, the public needs to pay for as it was force majure not the actual nuclear power plant that created the disaster.

And Tjernobyl was in a country which didn't have any private ownership so of course the public paid for it.

What other cases can you come up with where insurance didn't cover it?

It's pretty important to get things into proper perspectives here.

This isn't an insurance against catastrophic failure on the order of Fukushima or Chernobyl, which run into the hundreds of billions, if not trillions.

Of course you can have an insurance pool that covers arbitrarily small sums at arbitrarily low fees. That's missing the point.

Well you asked and I answered. In the case of Three Mile Island it was enough to pay.

"Of course, it is which is why there are two tiers. The other one paid by the whole industry.

But it's an absurd objection to begin with. All sources of energy have financial consequences if they go wrong, we use them anyway because the value they provide to society vastly outperform occasional disasters. And when it comes to human life, nuclear is far the safest, far safer than wind and solar. "

It's still not an argument against the safest and cleanest form of energy we have.

> All sources of energy have financial consequences if they go wrong, we use them anyway because the value they provide to society vastly outperform occasional disasters.

All energy sources aren't equal though. The value to society is cost/risk vs benefit. We're looking for the best deal here. The "catastrophic failure" scenario of wind energy is obviously completely different from that of nuclear power plants. That's a cost that's very difficult to estimate, but it is significant. You can't just ignore it.

> It's still not an argument against the safest and cleanest form of energy we have.

The fact that there's unfunded potential liabilities of enormous extent is an argument against nuclear energy. I'm not against nuclear energy at all, but let's be real here.

The energy wind and solar provides are also completely different. Capacity factor between 20-40 for wind and solar and 90 for nuclear. They provide less than 1% of the global energy and they don't have any other usage than providing energy plus the are unreliable and requires backup from other sources such as nuclear, oil, gas and coal.

I am not ignoring anything I am simply pointing to the fact that when we talk wind and solar the true cost isn't calculated whereas with nuclear it is.

And with regards to the insurance of catastrophes then Three Mile Island was paid by the insurance. Fukushima disaster happened not because of the nuclear powerplant but because of a tsunami, it was also the tsunami not Fukushima that killed thousands of people and Tjernobyl was owned and operated by the state so who else should pay for it?

So yes let's be real. No powerplant in the western world has yet cost taxpayers anything that wasn't covered by insurance and it has provided unparalleled clean energy which at least those who claim to worry about climate change as the biggest threat to humanity should support.

> I am not ignoring anything I am simply pointing to the fact that when we talk wind and solar the true cost isn't calculated whereas with nuclear it is.

I agree with you on wind/solar. I'm just going one step further and admit that with nuclear, the true cost isn't calculated either.

> And with regards to the insurance of catastrophes then Three Mile Island was paid by the insurance.

That convinces absolutely no one of anything. It's not what I was talking about as insuring a nuclear disaster. Don't waste your time making this point, it's worthless.

> Fukushima disaster happened not because of the nuclear powerplant but because of a tsunami, it was also the tsunami not Fukushima that killed thousands of people and Tjernobyl was owned and operated by the state so who else should pay for it?

It doesn't matter to the argument if a nuclear reactor blows up because of a tsunami, or an earthquake or Homer Simpson. It's a catastrophic failure case of enormous cost, and it's not insured, no money is being put into a fund to cover it, those costs are not taken into account when calculating the economics of nuclear energy. If such an insurance existed, it would be vastly more expensive for reactors built in a risk area like the Tsunami coast of Japan, so Fukushima Dai-ichi may have never been built.

I am not trying to convince anyone, I am trying to have a factual and principal discussion about insurance.

Again the three disasters we've had the one in the west that was the fault of the powerplant was paid by the power plant.

Of course you can't calculate the risk of being run by an opressive regime like the soviet union or ignorance/incompetence by those who granted Fukushima rights to build.

However they don't change the fact that nucelear reactors do in fact get insured and as far as I can see sufficiently. The other two other cases where either the state as the owner and thus insured properly, and the state allowing something to be built where it shouldnt.

Neither is an argument against nuclear and it's an unrealistic standard to set from my perspective and it's not a problem in the west.

I do however appreciate that we can disagree about this in a civilized manner.

Look, as far as the broader argument for or against nuclear goes, we are one the same side. I actually want you to have strong position.

> Of course you can't calculate the risk of being run by an opressive regime like the soviet union or ignorance/incompetence by those who granted Fukushima rights to build.

You can not by decree avoid ignorant people and/or incompetent people and/or less-than-ideal political frameworks. You need the wrong people to do the right thing.

> Neither is an argument against nuclear and it's an unrealistic standard to set from my perspective and it's not a problem in the west.

This is really just moving the goalpost. What if due to incompetence/negligence some reactor in a politically/economically deteriorating France blows up? Are you going to say "it's not a problem in America"?

You just keep repeating the mantra that it "isn't an argument". In reality it is an argument that "the other side" uses all the time. You're hurting your own credibility. You may disagree that it's a good argument, but it is an argument.

Now here's my standpoint: We can't by law require operators to purchase insurance that cannot exist. This is an impossible demand of "the other side", presented as a "cost" argument. It just doesn't help to say "but there is insurance!" when that insurance doesn't cover what we're actually talking about.

However, while we cannot calculate an insurance plan, we can pit the actual costs of either wind/solar against nuclear, including potential disasters and including CO2 prices and including the required buffering. I'm fairly confident that nuclear could come out on top even with one or two trillion-dollar disasters in the estimation. Remember, "the other side" just made a cost argument.

At another level, the argument for nuclear changes as the technology changes, newer and safer designs should have exponentially less dramatic worst-case failure scenarios. If "the other side" keeps factoring in speculative cost reductions in both production and storage facilities, so can we.

Sorry but we just have to agree to disagree here.

Insurance is a fringe discussion compared to general opposition to nuclear. Lack of insurance against catastrophic events is an even more fringe discussion and simply isn't a normal argument against nuclear. The normal argument against it is that it's dangerous, waste issues, expensive and so on.

I already stated my position on insurance of catastrophic events and someone isn't able to participate in good faith on that it wouldn't matter what I said anyway and my credibility would be tainted simply because of my position.

And to be frank, I've debated this enough and convinced enough people that nuclear is better than it's rumor. This is actually the first time anyone even mentioned insurance against force majure or communist regimes.

Anyway thanks for the discussion. I don't agree with you but but I appreciate the good faith argument.

> Insurance is a fringe discussion compared to general opposition to nuclear. Lack of insurance against catastrophic events is an even more fringe discussion and simply isn't a normal argument against nuclear.

Dissatisfaction with the way that insurance for catastrophic events is handled is in fact the main argument against expanding nuclear from the faction whose opposition is decisive in the US: the nuclear industry.

All other issues surrounding nuclear in the US are peripheral pieces of the debate over liability and insurance and whether or not the industry’s desired changes on that front should be met.

For every discussion you can find about that i can find a hundred not about that.

Again in the US the one accident we had wasn’t catastrophic and was handled by the insurance they had.

So a lot can be handled simply by not putting it at high risk areas which in the Us is a lot. And never nuclear powerplant will be even safer.

You do realize the exact same argument applies to nuclear as well, right?

Yup, we would never had gotten nuclear power if it wasn't for the massive subsidies from the governments, the electric companies didn't want it. I wonder if Mr. Wang has added those subsidies into the equation.

This sound very similar to David Hume theory of "problem of induction", as any assumption that the past predicts the future can be wrong.

Personally I think there is value in looking at past decision and seeing what the outcomes were. We can compare two nations like France and Germany and objectively say who has contributed more to global warming. We can also calculate how much they paid for it. The cost side is less relevant as I don't live in either country, but the global warming does impact me so I have some stake in the outcome.

Ban globally the act of burning fossil fuels in power plants. That fixes the outcome I want. The cost questions can be address politically within each country.

You might assume this is just some techno-weenie blogger that's getting too excited about one of his hobbies, but if you look at the official submissions from companies aiming to build nuclear in Australia you'll see that this worrying lack of interest in objective truth is endemic to the industry.

Everything else apart, trusting someone with Billions of dollars after they try to pass off obviously out of date info on their competitor in order to con you into supporting them seems unwise.

Even being able to come up with vaguely convincing false information would give you more confidence in their abilities to successfully deliver such a project.

> You might assume this is just some techno-weenie blogger that's getting too excited about one of his hobbies, but if you look at the official submissions from companies aiming to build nuclear in Australia you'll see that this worrying lack of interest in objective truth is endemic to the industry.

It is endemic to human nature. There's no reason to believe that any industry is being particularly honest about their own raison d'être.

Yup, this is a classic example of cherry picking your data.

Germany basically started the shift to renewable energy. As a result, theirs is probably amongst the most expensive solar/wind build outs ever.

Solar and wind energy costs have dropped exponentially since a decade ago, to the point where even if the author is correct about the German costs being 3 times more expensive than the French costs, wind and solar will be cheaper than nuclear today, since their costs have reduced dramatically in the last decade. Utility scale solar, for example, is about 90% cheaper today than it was in 2009 when Germany started building out the bulk of its solar energy infrastructure.

In other words, with no other differences, simply the drop in prices of wind and solar means that wind/solar built out today would be about 2-3 times cheaper than France’s nuclear buildout.

Of course, other things have indeed changed since France started building out its nuclear infrastructure. Primarily, nuclear’s negative learning curve has kicked in to the point that even after adjusting for inflation, nuclear today is far more expensive than nuclear when France built out the bulk of its nuclear energy.

Finally, Germany is not even close to the best candidates for solar and wind energy, whereas France is one of the best candidates for nuclear (by definition, it’s one of 10 or so possible candidates, and any new state is likely to be worse at nuclear than France was).

Solar and wind require a huge geographic footprint to generate significant energy. Because of this constraint, the cost of wind and solar is almost entirely opportunity cost, not the mere accounting cost of producing an extra panel/turbine. The basic problem is twofold: First, as you keep adding solar/wind capacity, you inevitably get diminishing returns from worse wind/sunshine conditions, so additional installation is less productive. (Think about solar panels in valleys or windmills in low-wind areas.) Second, as wind and solar cannibalize land area to provide energy, the price of that land increases substantially as other uses are displaced. For example, let's say that a country had to displace 40% of its productive arable land in order to install wind & solar. Then the price of its farmland would skyrocket as the country continued to deploy wind & solar. In both cases, solar and wind become much more expensive per deployed panel than simply the cost per panel, which is indeed pretty inexpensive. FWIW, the article attempts to make this point, but it frankly isn't very well written, and so the point is a bit hard to understand.

As to your point about countries situated for nuclear vs wind+solar, what do you mean? Do you have any metrics? If I were to guess, wind and solar are extremely sensitive to the geography of a country (including physical and political-economic); I'd guess nuclear is mildly sensitive to political geography. Splitting the atom is not significantly harder in Indonesia or Peru than it is in France. The fact that much of French land area is rural might make nuclear marginally more useful there than in a place like e.g. Germany or the UK, with several major cities dotted across the relatively densely populated landscape. (Based on this inference, I'd imagine that the US, China, Canada and Russia would be the top four countries for nuclear, and Monaco or Luxembourg might be the worst?)

We have a lot of unused land that could be filled with solar panels: rooftops. Until every suitable roof is plastered with them, I don't think that we have a land issue. Similarly for wind, the problem is not that we don't have the land, the problem is NIMBYs that don't want turbines to "ruin their view".

Off-shore wind farms haven't so much of a geographical footprint problem, and their efficiency is neat.

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

Off-shore wind farm have a geographical footprint, especially in area with heavy ship traffic

The cost of solar panels themselves is proportional to the surface area, but the cost of installation has to take into account the administrative units because they impact wiring and other equipment. Residential rooftops are thus the ideal surface area if reducing cost is your main metric. There are other reasons, such as decentralization, for which this kind of deployment is interesting.

So I don't disagree with any of what you've said. I'm glad you brought up decentralization, because that's what I think many people actually want. I can't run a nuclear reactor in my back yard, but I could put panels on my roof. In doing so, I'd be somewhat insured against blackouts, "the crap hitting the fan" or whatever else, as well as not writing a huge check each month to the power company.

Some research[1] indicates that solar panels on most roofs could cover about 40% of the US's current power consumption, although the variance is fairly high (California could cover about 74% of its power demand, while Wyoming could cover only 14%). I think 40% would be a great improvement, particularly if it's fairly efficient and not too expensive; I just think we should be open to using things like nuclear for the other 60%+.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/a-solar-panel-on-eve...

Wind may not affect arable.

There are large areas affected by open pit lignite mining, and presumably candidates for solar in Germany.

This source says there are 179,490 hectares or 1,795 sq. kilometers or 693 sq. miles of former mines.[1]

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany

I'll agree that wind turbines' effect on arable land is much, much lower than solar. That being said, there is still some effect. After all, the land is rendered useless during installation and certain types of maintenance (maybe these cycles could be scheduled when the land lies fallow), and there has to be certain infrastructure (roads/paths) for maintenance.

I'm not against using wind where it is particularly efficient (old strip or surface mining areas may be particularly great); I just think it needs to make economic as well as ecological sense. Wasting a bunch of industrial capacity (largely powered by fossil fuels still) to create wind and solar energy that are more expensive and less efficient at scale than, say, nuclear seems like a bad idea.

> For example, let's say that a country had to displace 40% of its productive arable land in order to install wind & solar.

How do wind turbines take up substantial arable land? The wind farm near the university I went to in Indiana was surrounded by corn fields outside of a little dirt road to each one and a small patch of of unseeded space around each turbine likely for a crane.

Example: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7421689,-87.0894657,152m/dat...

And as others have said, we don't need to worry about solar space until pretty much every roof is covered with solar panels.

More importantly, as a result, they will burn more fossil energy. I think that's the crucial point.

No one would mock Germany for trying if it were 100% nuclear. But it chose a technology that will delay its exit from fossil fuel economy.

It chose to build a completely new energy landscape, which will not only transform Germany.

Wrong, Germany is burning less and less fossil fuel because of the massive increase of renewables. Germany aims at 100% renewable energy. The government has passed a law to fade out fossil energy and joined an international alliance of countries who want to do the same.

France, often cited as a sound nuke-advocate (world tally: second nation in raw amount of grid electricity produced by nuclear plants, and first by the part of it) is in fact...

... escaping from it!

A law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") states that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it.

2 years later the government (lacking funds and unable to cope) reported it to 2025, then 2 years later to 2035 ("programmation pluriannuelle de l'énergie").

However the political and strategical orientation is perfectly clear, just don't believe France is on the nuke camp.

Can you explain what you mean by nuclear's "negative learning curve?" That's not an argument I've heard before.

Nuclear lives or dies by Project Management and some countries just suck at it. When you need a reactor, it's a controversial big-ticket item/government project. Countries with strong central planning can handle that (France and China).

In UK our government can't build a train line without fucking it up[1]. If we had open-source Fusion reactors tomorrow, they would commission it, then cancel it, then privatise it, then find out it was built upside-down. There would be a chain of 15 contractors involved and they would all be suing each-other. Then the taxpayer would cover the cost anyway.

We really need SMRs [small modular reactors]. Those would be ~100 ton devices built at a factory, and all quality controls would be done there. They are subject to normal market mechanisms. Nuclear would become more like solar and wind. When you need them, you just buy them, get them delivered and follow instructions to install them.

You don't need to create a 20-year old political football for party politics.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/27ab2f5c-a976-11e9-984c-fac8325aa...

Strange that the article is not talking about the latest french reactor Flamanville 3. This EPR reactor is already 10 years late and will cost more than 13b€ For 160MW. And this just for construction cost and not for running/dismantling it.

Then I wonder what practical exemple would support that after 15 years a solar PV installation has to be rebuilt.

It's the first of its generation and is quite a failure on many aspects. It's not representative of all the nuclear reactors in France, far from it. Thus it is quite insignificant.

But solar failure rate and cost will never go down?

> It's the first of its generation and is quite a failure on many aspects. It's not representative of all the nuclear reactors in France, far from it.

It's the only new one, based on designs of early 90s and earlier. The others are mostly all old and many with completely outdated designs from the 70s. Many wouldn't survive the crash of a larger airbus or boeing aircraft.

I don't judge a software on an alpha release.

Alpha release software is not for production.

It isn’t software

To stay in France, it's a bit as if you said the cathedrals construction was a total failure basing your judgment on the Beauvais cathedral which also suffered of the second system effect.

That's the problem. Nuclear reactors are huge undertakings and obviously producing only one is going to be incredibly expensive, just like building only one wind turbine of a design. That's why countries should cooperate to build more continuously and more efficiently.

Countries should cooperate to phase out fossil and nuclear fuels and instead invest that money into expanding the power grid and into power storage.

In many ways Germany's renewable infrastructure was first of its kind, because Germany paid for the entire industry to get kickstarted.

Just like semiconductors needed ridiculously overpaid government contracts to get started at the beginning of Silicon Valley, solar needed a massive government funded effort to kick start the beginnings of the industry.

And unlike nuclear, which never got cheaper as we built more, solar is plummeting in price on a consistent schedule.

And whether or not it is a first of kind, the estimated for the FOAK build were wildly off and inaccurate, whereas with solar, Germany knew exactly the amount of financial risk they were taking by buying high.

This article is an interesting thought exercise and it makes some good points about how expensive Germany’s renewable build out has been. However, these are all sunk costs and don’t matter going forward. What matters is the cost today.

Also, the total terawatt hours isn’t nearly as important as keeping the lights on. Nukes are great and renewables are great, but this isn’t a contest to see which generates the most electricity over the course of a year, but rather we need to keeps the lights on by using the sources that make the best sense to do that at lower cost or lower co2 emissions.

> However, these are all sunk costs and don’t matter going forward. What matters is the cost today.

one of the major points from the article is that Germany's renewable build out is not a one time capital cost. according to the article, the German power infrastructure is more expensive and has half the expected lifetime compared to France. unless solar and wind decrease in cost much faster than nuclear, there's no way it ends up being cheaper in the long run for Germany.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to say whether the figures quoted in the article are actually correct/complete, but if you accept them, it seems France is getting a lot more bang for its buck.

The short lifespan of renewables is deliberate and correct.

When technology is changing rapidly, optimizing for long lifespan is stupid. The long life of a nuclear reactor is an illusion now, since solar and wind are improving so fast that they would not operate their full 40+ years.

France sits on a lot of nuclear power plants with very old standards. But upgrading them is technically and/or economically impossible.

Once a new plant is already constructed, shutting it down early would only make sense if the average generation price fell below the operating cost, excluding the construction and decommissioning costs which by that point are already historical costs. Solar panels could be free and not be able to match that price, because they still require land and energy storage and labor to install and maintain, so the nuclear plant would still operate the full 40+ years and have that long to amortize the construction.

At least in the US, land is an negligible part of the cost of PV in most of the country. And here, many reactors have been having trouble meeting their operating costs, particularly if they encounter a major maintenance issue, or if they are smaller or not paired with other reactors to save on staffing. The remaining reactor at TMI was cash flow negative for six years before it was retired for being unprofitable.

There is some reluctance on the part of utilities to shut down nuclear power plants because continuing to operate them allows decommissioning (and its costs) to be delayed.

> At least in the US, land is an negligible part of the cost of PV in most of the country.

If you pick any one component of the overall cost it's small, but the panels themselves are already less than half the overall cost. Everything else adds up. And the everything else has stickier prices than the panels -- the price of the panels may get cut in half but the price per acre of land or the hourly wage for labor doesn't.

> And here, many reactors have been having trouble meeting their operating costs, particularly if they encounter a major maintenance issue, or if they are smaller or not paired with other reactors to save on staffing. The remaining reactor at TMI was cash flow negative for six years before it was retired for being unprofitable.

TMI is hardly the typical case. It's the one site to have screwed the pooch and lost a reactor. That harms their reputation and makes it cost more to buy insurance and borrow money, and doesn't lend itself to receiving any sympathy or leniency from the public or regulators etc.

Their operating cost correspondingly exceeded the average.

And it's true that operating multiple reactors on the same site significantly reduces operating costs, but that just argues in favor of opening new plants with multiple reactors on the same site.

> There is some reluctance on the part of utilities to shut down nuclear power plants because continuing to operate them allows decommissioning (and its costs) to be delayed.

Feature not bug. The net present cost of decommissioning goes down by a lot when you can push it out 40 years and collect interest on the money in the meantime.

All of what you say aside, nuclear still loses when compared to what solar and storage can reasonably be expected to cost. It makes absolutely no sense to build a new nuclear power plant now. It would be a way of destroying billions of dollars for no good reason.

Even if solar and storage do actually turn out to be cheaper in the long term, that isn't the same thing as destroying the full amount of money you put into a nuclear plant. The amount of money you're out is only the difference between the initial cost and the price you can sell electricity at in competition with solar and storage. You could plausibly get back less than you put in but still get back 90% of it.

And if that does happen, there is a good reason for it, which is that we're not actually sure that solar and storage will make it to that point, and there's a non-trivial chance that they don't. Or even if they do eventually, that they don't do so quickly.

If we get a significant carbon tax before the existing fossil fuel generating plants are decommissioned then the price of electricity is going to rise significantly until their capacity is replaced. That could take 20 years or more. In the meantime that nuclear plant is more than paying for itself -- it could pay off its full capital cost in that time at the higher generation price -- so that by the time solar and storage gets cheaper the nuclear plant only has to cover its operating cost and continues to be cost competitive for the remainder of its operating life.

It's basically a speculative investment against the chance that solar and storage don't get cheaper fast enough. You could lose some money, or you could win big if we get a carbon tax and the storage technology comes up short for a long period of time. Which also makes it a good hedge against investments in storage technologies.

I think you are not properly emphasizing the differences. A nuclear powerplant MUST run for more than 40 years. Renewable energy CAN run for more than 20 years but since costs are going down and efficiencies going up it makes more sense to upgrade your infrastructure. This is not a bug it's a feature.

This also means that when PV costs finally flatten out, there's a final cost reduction to be had from uncompressing their lifespan to the 40+ years nuclear is already counting on.

Neither of those things are true.

The reason you replace solar panels after 20 years rather than 40 is that they degrade and stop producing as much power. There is no option to run them for 40 years at their original generation capacity. The alternative is to keep using the old panels but add more panels on top of that to make up the difference. But then you still have to buy some new panels and on top of that you need to use more land instead of reusing the existing land, which may not be any cheaper than reusing the existing land by replacing all of the old panels.

And the cheaper the panels get the shorter their lifespan gets because the point when the generation loss from older/degraded panels exceeds the replacement cost comes sooner. It doesn't suddenly get longer when the price flattens out, it just stops getting any shorter than it already is by that point.

unless solar and wind decrease in cost much faster than nuclear...

Is there any chance that won't be the case? Has the cost of nuclear ever not wildly increased, let alone decreased?

The recent high construction costs for nuclear have a lot to do with lack of scale. If you only build one or two reactors over a decade you have to amortize all the first-time construction mistakes over that small number. If you build a hundred, you may make mistakes that require expensive reworks on the first one or two but not on the third or fourth and certainly not on the fiftieth.

The other major contributor is regulatory inefficiency. That's fixable at the stroke of a pen given the political will to do something about it.

Meanwhile people look at the exponential curve for renewables as if it's going to last forever, but they never do in the end. The question is how far from the end we are, but nobody has a crystal ball. Which is why we should hedge our bets.

Build both. If people figure out how to make it work with only wind and solar then we paid some money for insurance. If they don't, we're still prepared. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

We've heard about these small-scale reactors for decades. Various militaries have used them for decades. We have lots of eccentric multibillionaires now, many of whom require reliable power in remote locations. Why are there no small-scale reactors offered for sale for civilian use?

Gates is behind TerraPower which is supposed to have something like that Real Soon Now, but they got a bit delayed because they originally had a partnership with China which fell victim to the trade war, so now they're regrouping.

But the answer in general is much the same as it is for larger reactors -- you need a sympathetic host country whose regulators aren't captured by fossil fuel industry lobbyists trying to destroy you. It's a political problem, not a technical one.

If he could afford to bribe all the necessary parties in China I'm sure that some other nation could be found as well. Would that even be required? Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, where naval reactors are developed, is in a suburb of Pittsburgh (surprisingly, it appears that Cyrus K. Bettis was no relation to Jerome) and has always been run by defense contractors. Lots of nuclear facilities in USA (e.g. the one in Paducah where my grandfather was exposed to radiation) have been hazards to surrounding communities. The whole point of these micronukes is that there is less nuclear fuel involved. I'm just not seeing the obstacle here, which makes me suspect the real obstacle is as yet unmentioned.

Half the expected lifetime at a fraction of the capacity factor.

"France completed construction on 76% of its current 58 reactors at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330 billion (€290 billion). The complete buildout of the 58 reactors was less €400 billion."

Whoever managed to build plants in the past must have retired. "Flamanville is just one of three projects being built in Europe using the next-generation EPR technology. The other two are the Olkiluoto project in Finland, which is more than a decade late, and the UK’s Hinkley Point, which is also delayed and mired in controversy over its high costs." https://www.ft.com/content/877eedae-f987-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d...

Yes, in theory new nuclear plants could be small, modular and safe.

In practice, the biggest challenge is political rather than technical. How do you set up institutions that can deliver these projects on time and on budget?

In the time these plants have been delayed, solar prices have dropped more than 80%. By the time they're scheduled to be finished, solar should cost 50% less than today.

Germany overpaid by a lot, which is the price for building a local industry and being pioneers in a new technology. I hope it works out for them. Either way, humanity will owe them a debt for this.

I so happen to disagree, but well reasoned point. However, please abstain from using theory in that context. What you mean is a conjecture, or hypothesis. Anything substantiated by evidence is in fact a theory. Those that are not are hypotheses. In fact, theories work in practice. That’s why they are theories - quantum theory, germ theory, general and special relativity theory. Etc..

Words have multiple meanings. This use of "theory" exists in all dictionaries and is well used and accepted.

Instead of trying to control language, we should encourage appropriate interpretation of context and meaning.

Many (mostly indirect) costs related to nuke plants construction in France were not published and therefore cannot be taken into account.

Some were military programs aiming at producing weapon-grade plutonium (=> opaque budgets), part of them necessary to the plants. In fact it was the main political reason behind the French nuclear program, and the inherited opacity remains.

Part of this are R&D paid for by the taxpayer under other programs, many not financially linked to nuke plants, mainly done by a huge and very costly monster named CEA (its current yearly budget is 4.7 billion euros).

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

Fascinating that an article with so much detailed information doesn't include a discussion of waste and the costs associated with handling and storing it safely for [checks notes] 10,000 years.

It doesn't take up much space so I imagine the cost is just as much as it would cost to dig a very deep hole in the ground in a location unlikely to be exposed even if all record of its location was lost... perhaps under the ocean.

All of it needs to be processed in a breeder reactor before storage. Processing in a breeder reactor is illegal under US law.

Just dump it in the Marianas Trench.

> a crescent-shaped trough in the Earth's crust averaging about 2,550 km long and 69 km wide.

It's still better for humans and the environment than burning fossil fuels (and arguably better than solar/wind).

All the nuclear waste we've ever made in the USA stacks about 3 barrels high on a single football field, about .002 square miles.

One of USA's deserts is around 190,000 square miles.

I'm sure we can find someplace to store it all.

If it is so simple, I wonder why the problem takes so much discussion to be solved...

Because of the irrational fear of nuclear.

The waste is irrationally still radiating for 10.000 years? A reactor might be safe in some sense, but the waste certainly is not.

I mean, the chemical waste from photovoltaic production is also still poison for 10,000+ years - lots of heavy metals and other nasty shit there. But we don't seem to be quite so afraid of it...

What percentage of the waste is radiating for 10000 years? And how radioactive is it? Without facts, precise facts to back it up your statement looks irrational indeed.

Obviously nuclear waste is dangerous, but it's still safer for the planet than the massive amounts of gasses emitted to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. As opposed to radioactive casks, these gasses cannot be contained deep, deep under ground forever, they can only be released to change our environment in ways neither we nor the nature are prepared to deal with.

I'd rather manage nuclear waste in a remote site for 10000 years than needing to build up a permanent desalination effort to keep mankind supplied with drinkable water.

Don't forget that there are already nuclear waste sites that are managed by the government. It's just a small operational cost for today's governments.

There doesn't seem to be a believe that governments will be around for 10000 years to keep this managed securely. But honestly, if society deteriorates to the point it can no longer organize a government, a few highly radioactive spots on earth are not going to be a huge deal.

Nuclear waste facilities also have nice economies of scale in the sense that a single site's incremental cost of storing an additional ton of nuclear waste is negligible. So unlike global warming, you're not saddling the future generations up with a massive bill.

Because there's little reason to solve it right now. The amount of waste is low enough and technology advances so quickly that we're better off putting this decision off. There's a good chance that some of the waste could be used as fuel itself in the future. There's also a good chance that a century from now, we can build a much better permanent storage facility than right now.

That is actually the hint it isn't a problem. It is being treated as though it isn't a problem and that is working.

If it were actually a problem, someone would have to do something about it. The volumes are so small they can simply be stored in an ad-hoc matter.

It is a mystery why people get so fixated on the waste. It is very hard to articulate a problem apart from the fact that it goes away eventually (unlike most waste which sits there pretty much forever). We produce a lot of dangerous substances; nuclear waste isn't the worst of them.

There’s 90000 tons of nuclear waste waiting for disposal around the US. And every proposal in the last 60 years has been rejected

https://www.gao.gov/mobile/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_...

Yep, that's more like 30 barrels high. The parent's point still stands though - there isn't that much of it.

That number is potentially misleading. Only a small portion of that waste is high level waste, like fuel. 90% of that does not need to be stored for 1000 years.

Once you look at waste, most of nuclear waste is not 'waste', and some countries like france and Russia use chemical reprocessing to separate long lives waste from unburnt fuel. That gives a further >90% reduction.

What you are left with is a small amount of High level waste, that can be stored in deep repositories like sweeden is doing. That's a permanent solution, because we know that bedrock has not moved for 10s of millions of years.

To downvoters: it's a waste of time to discus nuclear waste without realising that 95% is the original fuel and only 1% of it is the actual long-lived waste.

Is there something in the tone of my comment you are unhappy about?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_VyTCyizqrHs/TCWrO7OFt4I/AAAAAAAAIF...

A location has already been found and selected, but the Democratic Party has single-handedly blocked it for decades to win Nevada votes through a cycle of misinformation whereby they have convinced votes that Las Vegas will somehow be at risk if the approved repository, Yucca Mountain, is used.

It's an indictment of double think that the party which believes we will all die from climate change (rightly) is also the party that has made sure the one power source we have that could have saved us in the last 70 years wasn't used.

Had we voted republican across the board in the 1960s we could have solved climate change without ever talking about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace

Noor II CSP is a 600GWh solar plant which is 2.6 square miles or ~1700 football fields. That's space permanently lost if the powerplant is run forever. A nuclear waste dump is tiny in comparison. Land use of solar is gigantic.

> That's space permanently lost if the powerplant is run forever.

Many Australian farmers who lease their land to electricity companies for use as solar farms run sheep on those same solar farms.

Since the solar panels track the sun, grass grows under them and sheep being small enough to fit under the panels are perfect at keeping that grass under control.

So the farmer actually gets two incomes from the one field.

>> Since the solar panels track the sun

Really? Such tracking systems do exist, but outside of CSP they are generally not economic. I would be surprised if many PV solar plants in Australia use tracking motors.

Not to say grass won't grow under static panels. I have no idea about that.

It does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPTetKHb7Yw

Open pit brown coal mining destroys bigger areas in irreversible manner. Solar plant at least doesn't exhaust.

I think everyone here wants to move away from fossil fuels. The discussion is bout what to move to next.

Comparing waste from coal, oil and natural gas to nuclear waste is a difficult discussion to have. Climate change is not caused by nuclear waste. We can hit any temperature goal we want regardless of how much nuclear waste is generated.

My own personal view is that the threat from global warming is worse than the threat of nuclear waste buildup. This is why I usually comment that we should ban burning fossil fuels for power generation and then first afterward start the discussion on how we want to create the energy grid of the future. Nuclear waste is a very relevant topic once we got to the point that we agree that burning fossil fuels has to stop and we decided which day the fossil fueled power plants must shut down.

> doesn't include a discussion of waste and the costs associated with handling and storing it safely

Right, so French nuclear waste is given to private shipping companies who take it to Somalia and dump it just off the shore there.

The rise of Somalian "piracy" 30 years ago was due to villagers tired of the poison washing up on shore and so they would take rafts out to ships to inspect them, as is their right as an impromptu but only existing coast guard.

France doesn't export its nuclear waste.

96% of the mass of nuclear "waste" is uranium 238. This can be fissioned when neutron are 1000 times faster. This occurs in fast reactors.

Uranium 238 is unused fuel.

Coal, oil, natural gas waste sit in the air you breath and in pools or dumps on land. Plus there is the CO2.

Solar and Wind use ten times the cement and steel to generate the same power as nuclear. Cement and steel generate pollution and CO2 in their production.

> Solar and Wind use ten times the cement and steel to generate the same power as nuclear.

I'd be interested in a reference for this. My intuition goes like this:

I can see wind using a lot of steel and cement for the towers (though masts built incorporating other materials do exist) and solar using just a small amount of cement and steel -- but solar doesn't produce much power for the same area compared to a nuclear power plant, so I can see that amounting to a lot of steel and cement if you build a bunch of solar in the same way you'd build nuclear power plants.

However, solar power plants and some wind power are often not far away from where the power will be used, which means that less steel is used for the electrical masts and power lines. And solar is often mounted on roofs, which means that very little structural cement is needed.

Plus... while the article says that solar and wind power needs to be replaced every 20-25 years (note: there are turbines in operation that are older than that), when you replace a wind turbine, you'll often keep the tower and just replace the turbine on the top, so it's not like you need to scrap the whole thing every 20-25 years.

You are continually getting radioactive sulfur and carbon into your lungs from coal--and they're beta emitters.

And, while people talk about Chernobyl and Fukushima, they never talk about coal fires that have been burning for decades in places like Centralia and Xinjian--which are WAY worse than all of our nuclear disasters.

Since the longest lived isotope of sulfur has a half-life of 87 days, those coal deposits must be REALLY young.

Not necessarily: the sulfur might be continually created from the decay of a radioisotope of longer half-life.

It's not.

Let's be clear: the claim that burning coal releases radioactive sulfur and carbon is wrong. There are radioactive materials released, but they are from contaminants like uranium and its decay products.

I'm not going to repeat all the arguments against this article as countless other HN commenters have already done a fine job of this. But it's worth making the point that this article is revealing in its use of lies, misrepresentations, flimsy arguments and circular reasoning. It all looks rather desperate.

There's so much of it going on that you have to wonder whether the author is aware of this. I.e. is this an intentionally misleading article written to green wash highly lucrative government spending on new nuclear plants? Without this spending no nuclear plants get built. Just a theory but this article looks a lot like it is written with this kind of agenda in mind.

Germany pushed PV ten years ago to help drive it down its experience curve. This was spectacularly successful. PV modules are now nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than they were then, and PV is delivering at a fraction of the levelized cost per kWh of new nuclear plants.

I think China played a much more important role in driving down PV module costs than Germany. Germany was one source of demand - China has amounted to about all of the supply.

Germany has an important coal industry and lobby and remains a large user of coal.

Germany invested a lot very early into technology building for mass production of efficient PV. The cheap mass production in China came later...

And our building capacity got destroyed by the government, so china took over. We were on track to be number one producers, but yeah. Same is done to wind now.

Actually if one looks it up (I have many times), as the Chinese industry was developing (meaning a while ago now), a large part of the key cell technology that China used came from a research group at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

There's useful research done around the world.

I think where German companies felt they might maintain a manufacturing presence was in machinery infrastructure - whether the machines that populate the factory floors that manufacture either cells of modules or machines (say, inverters) or that are used downstream of electrical production in a module.

I was last in this space some yrs ago but it's not clear to me just how much of a presence German companies have been able to keep in either.

One industry web site is here:

https://www.pv-tech.org/

and if I wanted to ascertain German presence in the industry (including some aspects of research) I might look through this site.

What total bullshit.

No country would commit to any new nuclear plants unless it is a cover for a weapons program. (UK)

Here is a simple test, would any privately-owned utility buy a new nuclear power plant without a government guarantee? No.

A nuclear plant if ever finished as half are abandoned takes about 20 yrs to build (eg Flamanville / Olkiluoto)

A 1G PV plant with storage with 25% utilisation would be built in a year. With a capital cost of 7%-10% of nuclear or about 1/3 adjusting for utilisation.

There are three costs for a powerplant:

1. Capital costs - most are 20%- 30% equity and the rest debt.

2. Fuel costs - How much is the coal, gas or other fuels used to create the power.

3. Operations and Maintenance (O&M) - All thermal plants (solar thermal, nuclear, gas or coal etc) use high-pressure steam. The O&M on steam is about USD 20 per MW-h.

So, if you had a solar thermal plant (Ivanpah) the steam O&M is about the same price as total generation from PV.

Based on the average of Flamanville, Olkiluoto and Hinkley Point here are some reasonable guesses.

Capital Cost: USD 15 per watt (pv with storage USD 0.50)

O&M - USD 40 per MW-h (Ops 10 + steam 20 + closure 10)

Fuel - USD 10 per MW-h

Taiwan, Japan have nuclear power plants and do not have weapons programs.

Japan has a deniable weapons program. They've accumulated a very large stockpile of reactor grade Pu. This would require some effort to turn into adequately efficient weapons, but with modern designs it should be possible.

Japan is said to be a always a few years away from a nuclear weapons program, in case they need it.

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

Also: Belgium, Spain, Holland, Switzerland, Chehia, Sovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, and others: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Nuclear_...

OP is wrong, and wrong on every sub claim.

Where do all these countries get their reactors from? I don’t know about most of them, but I remember reading that Swedens was Westinghouse, and Finland is getting their latest one from France?

The majority of the Swedish reactors were designed and built by the Swedish ASEA (now ABB), but their nuclear division was sold to Westinghouse in 2000

So far as you know. My impression is that especially Japan's strategy is always to keep itself at the threshold of becoming a full nuclear weapons with very little effort given the Geo political situation. They already have a full fledged delivery mechanism in their space launch program. Given how cheap SpaceX is, the only reason for keeping these programs around is really weapons delivery.

Given the even more unique political situation of Taiwan and the strategic global importance of TSMC, it's very likely they have some option to weaponize - even if only dirty bombs.

Yeah, but China does. And if the US nuclear umbrella shows signs of being withdrawn estimates of how long it would take Japan to get the bomb vary from six weeks to six months. I doubt Taiwan is much different. Sweden is in a similar position re:Russia rather than China.

"Sweden is in a similar position re:Russia rather than China"

What do you mean?

Russia and Sweden have no territorial disputes, no wars for the last 200 years and Sweden stays more or less neutral by not joining NATO.

Sweden’s neutrality is as much of a farce as Ireland’s.

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

> In the early 1960s U.S. nuclear submarines armed with mid-range nuclear missiles of type Polaris A-1 were deployed outside the Swedish west coast. Range and safety considerations made this a good area from which to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike on Moscow. The submarines had to be very close to the Swedish coast to hit their intended targets though. As a consequence of this, in 1960, the same year that the submarines were first deployed, the U.S. provided Sweden with a military security guarantee. The U.S. promised to provide military force in aid of Sweden in case of Soviet aggression. This guarantee was kept from the Swedish public until 1994, when a Swedish research commission found evidence for it. As part of the military cooperation the U.S. provided much help in the development of the Saab 37 Viggen, as a strong Swedish air force was seen as necessary to keep Soviet anti-submarine aircraft from operating in the missile launch area. In return Swedish scientists at the Royal Institute of Technology made considerable contributions to enhancing the targeting performance of the Polaris missiles.

Still, unlike Japan and China, there are no old grievances and no territorial disputes between Sweden and Russia.

And by staying out of NATO, Sweden is unlikely to be drawn by the US into a confrontation with Russia.

> No country would commit to any new nuclear plants unless it is a cover for a weapons program.

Except for Czechia. We're going to build new reactors because here it's cover-up for stealing government's money.

Could you say more about this? Or link some articles? I'm interested as there are some distant plans to build nuclear units here in Poland and the last time around such plans became a costly fiasco. That was in a different time though, around Chernobyl and the fall of communism.

I'll try to find some articles in English, but just this headline says a lot: "(premiér) Babiš prosazuje expanzi jaderné energie, i kdyby měl porušit právo EU" - "(prime minister) Babiš advocates the expansion of nuclear energy, even if it is to violate EU law".

> There are three costs for a powerplant (Capital costs, Fuel costs, Operations and Maintenance)

In which category should be put the cost of negative pricing from oversupply?

We also have costs associated with policy. A hydro plant can't just dump water with no regard to downstream or they cause flooding. They can also not just drop water levels in lake or rivers with no regard to the environment. Power plants need to cooperate and that cooperation is a kind of cost which is hard to covert to fuel costs.

In the case that a government operate a powerplant we also have the liability cost of making sure that demand is meet. The article talk about the energy Germany produce and cost associated with it, not individual plants. Germany as a nation has costs associated with meeting energy demands, including importing/exporting energy to balance the grid. Not sure external costs like those can be combined in one of the above three categories.

> A nuclear plant if ever finished as half are abandoned

It seems the very best argument anti-nuclear people have is that their own interference via politics will ruin the cost-effective nature of the operation...

It has more to do with the incompetence of the previous generation of nuclear powerplant designs and simply the nature of the idea. Big unique power plants cost "big unique power plant" money.

But the nuclear waste lasts for thousands of years. Unless we feed the nuclear waste into breeder reactors which can utilize the waste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste "High-level waste"

Solar panels needs to be designed to be recycled.

This just in, the cost of new green energy is more expensive than mostly amortized, entrenched nuclear power that has yet to enter it's least profitable period.

That is not what the article claim. The argument is that Germany spend more money for a solution that results in 46% green energy and 56% dirty energy than France that get 92% green energy and 8% dirty energy.

If they are correct is up to debate, and one worthy to have considered the political aspect of the claims. It is also important to note that they are defining green energy based on green house emissions. Still, if we are to have any meaningful discussion it is important to discuss the claims they make.

It's worth noting that Germany has less solar energy potential anywhere in their country than in any single state in the USA, including Alaska. Yet they had more solar deployed in watts than the entire USA for a long time.

Ya I was gonna 'complain' about solar being constrained by geography, but then I saw this map https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/solarwa/pages/93/attac...

One massive differentiator that is often ignored is scalability - as in can it be scaled DOWN?

Nuclear has to be done in massive scale, which causes all sorts of problems: project complexity and cost; security; security of supply; transmission costs. Renewables are very attractive in that light.

Has human electricity consumption scaled down?

>Renewables are very attractive in that light

Yes, and only in the light. Once the sun goes down and the wind dies down, you'll have to turn off your heaters and turn off your televisions.

Yeah, which does not happen on grid scale.

This is comparing the cost of building new power capacity in Germany to the cost of operating existing plants in France! You can't get any more spun than that.

That is, renewables are new technology and being built out rapidly. Nuclear capacity is 3-4 decades old and the build-out investment was recouped long ago. France absolutely cannot build new reactors 3x cheaper than Germany can put up equivalent windmills, and to argue that is absolutely laughable. This is a ridiculous article.

It compared the cost of building the nuclear reactors in France to the cost of building Solar, Wind and biomass in Germany. It also looked at the cost and amount of energy produced from the last five years of construction in Germany. So the newer and cheaper solar and wind. 160 billion euros for 70 TWh per year. France built 400 Terawatt hours per year from 290 billion euros. France has run them for over 30 years.

China's more recent nuclear construction was also cited. $150 billion for 300 TWh per year.

80% of the world's new nuclear reactors are being built in China, India, Russia and South Korea. Those are coming in at a price of $2000-3000 per KW. A gigawatt nuclear reactor at $2-3 billion each built in 4-6 years. A gigawatt nuclear reactor can generate 8 Terawatt hours per year.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a...

A fully amortized nuclear power plant generates power at about 2 cents per kwh. http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/info/pdf/Econ...

Germany, between 2006 and 2017, increased the cost of electricity for households by 50%. (per OECD)

http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf

French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity compared to Germany.

If nuclear plants really do generate at about 2 cents per kWh, how come the most established and respected power industry pricing analysis finds that it costs over six times that - between 12 cents and 19 cents per kWh ?[1]

Where does the 2 cents figure come from? - A website commissioned explicitly to promote nuclear power industry. Have some discernment, please.

[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

> French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices

what now, costs or prices? These things are hard to compare: what is the actual energy bill of a household? A typical German household will consume less electricity and have a higher income.

> Nuclear plants can last 40-80+ years

French nuclear power plants will need >>$100 billion investments in the near future to keep them running.

Many of them will reach their projected life time in the coming 2020 decade. Let's see how France will replace them or keep them running. My bet is that they keep them running, because they have little chance to replace them in the 20-30 decade. For the French government, which owns most of the plants though EDF, the problem to replace them is greater than the perceived security problem.

If France would NOW start to plan (plan -> build -> operate) for additional nuclear plants, then it would take at least 15-20 years until a new one is operational.

(edit) France may want to decide in the early 20s about six new EPR 2 with 15 years construction time... Thus the current nuclear landscape has to be kept running until the end 30s.

> 80 nuclear reactors would now cost €1600 billion euros for Germany. This would still be cheaper than the estimated costs for the solar and wind buildout that is underway.

It's difficult to set up the renewable energy landscape in Germany, but it comes with decentralized lower-risk technologies. Stuff a less state-oriented economy can built. Germany by far has not a centralized state controlled economy like France. Thus the German Energiewende is also a way to decentralize energy production and to get away from a state controlled oligopoly for energy production - currently the electricity production is still largely controlled by four large companies which have their own regions.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_großen_Vier_(Energieversor...

For several years none of these big four companies has really invested in and supported the Energiewende - because they surely want to keep their monopoly in their region. Which is the opposite of an open market for energy production.

For 80 new nuclear power plants there is no space in a relatively densely populated country like Germany with a short coast.

The local acceptance in the population of new and large-scale nuclear is around zero. Null. Nothing. Every new nuclear will face much longer delays in court than any wind turbine ever will. Nuclear is a technology that's dead in Germany. If we look at the US, there hasn't been much progress on nuclear power plants either - even though the country is much larger, less dense populated AND has a need for nuclear technology in the military. Nuclear worked better in a centralized France which needs nuclear technology for its military or in more authoritarian countries like China where independent control does not exist.

> 80 nuclear reactors would now cost €1600 billion euros for Germany.

and would take >4 decades to be rolled out. By then Germany is 90% renewable for electricity production. But with a decentralized modern grid.

France is currently struggling to build ONE new nuclear power plant: Flamanville. A technical design of the early 90s. Four times more expensive than projected and going online maybe in 2023 - with a construction start from 2007. Largely state financed and state controlled.

http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-warns-of-added-co...

If there's no space for nuclear power plants, how are you going to find space for renewables? I can't think of any renewable sources that would take less space than nuclear, especially in Europe since we're further north than the US and that makes solar take up even more space.

> If there's no space for nuclear power plants

Renewable energy production and nuclear power plants have very different space requirements.

> find space for renewables

Germany has more than 30000 wind turbines. For example here in North Germany it's planned to increase the offshore wind energy production by a factor of three in the coming decade. This offshore space is available.

> Renewable energy production and nuclear power plants have very different space requirements.

Chiefly, that wind and solar require much more of it.

They also have many more space options. A farmer can put one or more wind turbine somewhere on his farm. OTOH having your own nuclear power plant on your farm is usually not an option.

You can only put nuclear power plants next to sufficiently large rivers that can provide cooling. On the other hand you can put solar panels pretty much on every roof and wind turbines in any place with sufficiently low NIMBY density and a bit of wind.

Most roofs still have no solar panels on top in Germany. There's plenty of space for that. You don't have to give up as much space as you'd think for renewables.

Nuclear on the other hand, good luck fighting those lawsuits against the local population. I can't think of any area in Germany that is so underpopulated or desperate for tax revenue, that the local population would be willing to live next to a nuclear plant. There's no "space" for nuclear in Germany in that regard at all.

Rooftop can't support energy intensive industries.

Germany’s solar farms will have to be rebuilt every 15-25 years

Why is that? Do solar panels really degrade to the point where they are unprofitable to run after 15 - 25 years?

Basically, yes. The same is true for anything electro-mechanical. Things wear out.

Plus you have to keep the panels clean - a dirty solar panel doesn't generate the same output as a clean one.

No they don't. The reason they get replaced is because of technical obsolescence. Newer panels are just so much better that at some point you replace them to get much better yields.

Same with wind. Technical progress has increased the efficiency. Better still, it has vastly decreased the amount of maintenance needed. Modern ceramics vastly reduce the amount of wear and tear that happens due to friction.

There are multiple factors at work: There's ongoing maintenance as with everything, and you can probably accumulate its costs into it meaning "you're paying for a new one every 40 years through maintenance alone". Yield is going down over time (solar panels are sold with guarantees like "80% efficiency after 20 years"). And finally, technology is improving: replacing these 2006 solar panels in 2020 not only gives you back the base yield of a 2006 panel, but the base yield of a 2020 panel (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/CellPVef... for a research level comparison over time. That won't translate directly into industrial use though, but the direction should be evident)

So the situation is less that is "has to be rebuilt" but that it's economical to rebuild every 20-ish years (factoring in the maintenance costs: a panel that you replaced due to physical damange 10 years in needn't be scrapped just 10 years later) rather than letting the stuff hang around for arbitrarily long times.

With a proper recycling chain that shouldn't be too bad (there's little reason why the silicon can't be purified, and the doting material be refurbished), and ongoing maintenance is a concern with all types of power plant.

Without any particular rancour, this sort of thing is why the environmentalists keep experiencing a mysterious and conspiracy-like resistance to their plans. Their plans are ineffective and expensive.

France has cheaper, more technically excellent, safer and cleaner energy than Germany for military reasons. That is a massive egg on the face of the German environmentalists. And it turns out the people saying solar was very cheap were not being straightforward; although hopefully the march of research will prove them right in time.

My personal belief is that the people complaining about nuclear waste are struggling to tell which of two numbers is bigger - I'm happy to guess that waste from solar panels is more damaging due to the large scale they are produced at. Lead-acid battaries too.

What a terrible article. We have a liberalised energy market in Europe. Therefore energy prices in this market are not that different between Germany and France. Also, the writer is missing the costs of disposal of nuclear waste.

To be clear, this is cost to build and maintain. But with nuclear there's also the cost of shut down and storage. To say nothing of a nuclear accident somewhere along the line.

Somewhat of a tangent: With the much longer half-lifes of heavier elements, given their decay is longer than human history, would it be the best long term solution to put them in a literal vault made of precious metals like gold or titanium? Burying them in the ground isn't working especially since the early sites were largely just cement or housed in wood supported tunnels and those are already a huge problem we can't deal with.

The people who chose not to build nuclear plants are either retarded or get money from russian natural gas exporters for doing so shit decisions. Maybe both.

# France (population: 66,89 million) - 76,5% nuclear 8% non hydro renewables 10% hydro 3,7% natural gas 1,9% coal 0,4% oil - CO2 emmisions: 124 milion tones

# Germany (population: 82,79 million) - 34,9% renewables (hydro and non hydro) 22,5% lignite 12,9% natural gas 12,9% hard coal 11,8% nuclear 4,2% others 0,8% mineral oil - CO2 emmisions: 725,7 milion tones

What about the costs of a broken solar or wind turbine. Easy replaceable. But calculate the cost of a nuclear fallout...

Does this factor for the potential cost of a disaster though, or the environmental costs of uranium mining?

Thank God there are a few smart folks on HN to push back on all the mediocre pro-nucleur weak arguments and propaganda here as of late.

Does this take into account the risk of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable? Please note that:

- The average number of deaths caused by a nuclear each year is neither "risk" (for a country) nor "of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable".

- Past accidents may have been caused by human error. Unfortunately we have run out of übermenschen that don't make errors so that doesn't help.

The worst part is, we can become as green as you can get in Germany, if our direct neighbor country France has one of their so-low-carbon nuclear plants blow up, we are just as inhabitable, for eternity.

> if our direct neighbor country France has one of their so-low-carbon nuclear plants blow up, we are just as inhabitable, for eternity

Do you have a verifiable source for this? The impact sounds greatly exaggerated to me.

Just look at how habitable Chernobyl still is.

Yup, it's brimming with wildlife: https://theconversation.com/chernobyl-has-become-a-refuge-fo...

Most wildlife has not long enough living spans to be affected by radiation as humans are (who have the expectancy to live longer than 70 years). And even those who will be affected by radiation wouldn't know it. Of course, absence of humans is a huge boost for any kind of wild life.

Most humans born today will experience the negative effects of climate change over the next 80 years, with between 10-30% of them dying due to events caused by it.

Dying at 60 from cancer is still a hell a lot better than starving at 15. And that's assuming we have a Chernobyl like even happen every few hundred square kilometers.

If climate change is an extinction level even we should expect to make sacrifices like those in other events that killed millions, like WWI and WWII. I don't understand people who can think that we think we will die for sure because of climate change, but aren't willing to risk a much smaller chance of dying from nuclear accidents.

And I don't understand people that don't make this very valid point rather than making fools of themselves by denying the dangers of nuclear power and refuting arguments no one ever used.

If there Germans managed to support themselves on 100% renewable energy I wouldn't say they needed to go nuclear again. As it is the Germans rely on more than 50% dirty energy which is polluting all of northern Europe and people ARE dying because of it.

So, sure there are dangers with nuclear power if there's an accident. Ideally there shouldn't be, historically there has been a few (seven with fatal outcomes to be exact)[1]. Still with modern reactors that shutdown instead of melting down we should be able to safely handle virtually any accident. With burning fossil fuels the deaths are not _if_ there's an accident, they are a _consequence_ of polluting the air. And the 800000 annual deaths caused by coal burning doesn't even include deaths due to global warming [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... [2] https://endcoal.org/health/

Yes, if our only choices were coal and nuclear, I would be strongly in favour of nuclear. Both on the direct emissions and global warming level. But the thing is, wind and solar (and quite a few other reneweable energies) are now cheaper than nuclear and don't bear the risk of contaminating large regions in case of a major accident.

Of course these risks could be mitigated by different designs or just building the reactors 200m underground, but that seems to be even more cost-prohibitive, so it has not even being suggested.

>But the thing is, wind and solar (and quite a few other reneweable energies) are now cheaper than nuclear and don't bear the risk of contaminating large regions in case of a major accident.

And are destroying every grid which they dominate. Germany, South Australia, California. When you start getting negative price events while the overall price increases something has gone very wrong with the market.

A renewable network is not fit for an industrial society. You need a stable base load to run machines, like computers, elevators or hospitals. You can either try and build batteries, which costs trillions of dollars build in large enough quantities (the largest battery in the world can run South Australia for about 5 minutes), a transcontinental grid to share power, which costs trillions of dollars to build, or nuclear power, which cost billions and is something we already know how to do.

That is all just FUD. At least here in Germany, reneweables are not destroying the grid. Quite the contrary, they help to stabilize it, when e.g. nuclear power plants have to reduce their power output due to the streams they use for cooling are overheating.

Negative grid prices are the consequences of power plants which cannot shut down in times of oversupply, that is mainly coal and nuclear.

Of course there need to be further investments to be made in the grid and even more so some market mechanisms need to adjust in an age of mostly renweables in the grid. So far, grid pricing was dominated by a varying demand vs. a more constant power output on the grid. With reneweables, there comes the additional component of a variable production. But that is something the market can adjust to. Companies which require a constant supply have to pay for that, those that don't can save a lot of money. Charging electrical cars is a great example of something that can use electricity when the supply is very large.

> Negative grid prices are the consequences of power plants which cannot shut down in times of oversupply, that is mainly coal and nuclear.

Riddle me this, then: Why did negative energy prices emerge along with renewables[1]?

The problem isn't coal/nuclear, because the variance in demand is far lower than the variance in output of renewables. Furthermore, both coal and nuclear plants can be adjusted to react to seasonal variance.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-...

The reason is shows up with renewables is that the marginal cost of production for renewables is zero. And nuclear and coal plants have high shutdown/startup costs. One of these is a negative the other is not.

The marginal cost of renewables isn't zero, producing it causes more wear and tear than not producing it. Furthermore, if you pay negative prices as a result of a renewable surge, that might as well be considered into the marginal cost.

Even if the marginal cost was zero, you gave coal/nuclear as the cause for negative energy prices, even though they didn't exist before renewables came into the picture. You may claim that the situation is better with the renewables in the mix, but you can't claim that renewables aren't the ultimate cause of negative prices in this case.

Similarly, you may claim that coal/nuclear are slow/expensive to regulate, but then must also concede that wind/solar can't be regulated up at all and couldn't provide a stable supply without e.g. natural gas, or a buffering solution that currently doesn't exist (at scale) and isn't priced into wind/solar.

> The marginal cost of renewables isn't zero

Please provide a citation that renewables have a non-neglible marginal cost.

> Furthermore, if you pay negative prices as a result of a renewable surge, that might as well be considered into the marginal cost.

With a lot of imagination.

> couldn't provide a stable supply without e.g. natural gas

Alright, we'll keep those nuclear power plants that run on natural gas for now.

> or a buffering solution that currently doesn't exist (at scale)

We've got a way to build things that don't exist yet. It's called "engineering".

Actually they didn't. Even before renewables, excessive energy production had to be taken care of. In Belgium, all highways got street lights to use up the excessive nuclear energy at night. In many places, electricity was promoted for heating at night.

The negative prices paid on EPEX did not exist until 2007 on the German/Austrian market[1], which clearly coincides with the green energy rollout in Germany.

> And are destroying every grid which they dominate. Germany, South Australia, California. When you start getting negative price events while the overall price increases something has gone very wrong with the market.

Yes, there has. There are still way too many inflexible legacy fossil and nuclear power plants producing electricity no one needs because the demand has been filled by renewables. What we need are storage, load-shedding (contrary to popular opinion, pausing energy intensive industry for a few minutes will not bring us back to the stone age) and, as a stop gap, flexible plants.

> You can either try and build batteries

No, that would be stupid. You're pretty sure of yourself for someone that apparently thinks batteries are the only storage technology.

> a transcontinental grid to share power, which costs trillions of dollars to build,

About 0.13 trillions, to be precise.[1]

> or nuclear power, which cost billions

Hinkley Point C is going to produce 3200MW at a build cost of ~25 billion USD. The EU had about 1TW of capacity in 2017. That's 312.5 Hickley Point Cs, costing 312.5*25=7812.5 billions.

The costs of waste disposal, eventual dismantling the plant and liability insurance (if anyone was actually willing to insure the risk nuclear power causes) is left as an exercise to the reader.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/big-energy-debate/european-super...

In the 30+ years since Chernobyl we could have had >400000 similar accidents and still not reach the death toll of coal burning... that's food for thought...

The average number of deaths caused by a nuclear each year is neither "risk" (for a country) nor "of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable".

Chernobyl could have been a lot worse, frankly. Other factors to keep in mind are that Chernobyl was both criminally mismanaged by the Soviets, and built using a dangerous reactor design even for gen2 reactors.

Not for eternity, but for many decades. Which for practical purposes is basically the same. Large parts of Bavaria have been contaminated by the Chernobyl accident. Every single wild boar shot in Bavaria has to be checked for radiation before it can be consumed, and many of them have to be disposed off. The forests of Bavaria will be contaminated for many decades to come.

So any large reactor incident in France could make parts of Germany inhabitable, and large parts unusable for agriculture. Besides that I find that an objectionable szenario, the financial damage would be astronomical

So because you (Germans) have an irrational fear of a black swan event (there has been seven nuclear accidents with fatal outcome in the 60 years we have been nuclear [1] with a very low death toll), you instead are participating in killing off nearly 1 million ppl per year by burning coal [2]. Heck, even if you went all wind & solar the annual death toll would be higher per TWh [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... [2] https://endcoal.org/health/ [3] https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/deaths-nuclear-energy-com...

Tihange has to preheat their emergency cooling water to prevent the reactor vessel from rupturing in an emergency because of the large cracks in it.

The average number of deaths caused by a nuclear each year is neither "risk" (for a country) nor "of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable".

The acid rains we get here in northern Europe thanks to the Germans insistency with burning coal sure doesn't improve the habitability of the country either. I much rather take a minuscule risk of making my country uninhabitable than the certainty of doing so (even if done slowly over time).

Since we aren't going to burn coal forever acid rain won't make any country uninhabitable.

>The worst part is, we can become as green as you can get in Germany,

The worst part is that Germany still burns a great deal of coal. One estimate is that worldwide use of coal causes up to 800,000 deaths a year - this is much worse than all deaths from nuclear, including the bombs that were dropped on Japan.

https://endcoal.org/health/

Even with the advanced air pollution controls on coal plants in Europe, an estimate is that over 20,000 deaths are caused per year due to burning coal. I am not sure how many of these deaths Germany is exporting every year to countries downwind, but it isn't zero.

https://news.mongabay.com/2013/06/burning-coal-responsible-f...

A NASA estimate is that the use of nuclear power has saved approximately 1.8 million lives in the years 1971-2009.

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/

>...we are just as inhabitable, for eternity.

The Chernobyl plant would have been illegal to build anywhere else in the world other than the Soviet Union due to the chance of a disaster and the fact they didn't build a containment dome. With a containment dome, that level of disaster won't occur.

If solar covered one percent of the UK it would meet the country’s entire power demand. That's a guarantee of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable if the UK went all solar.

https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/if_solar_covered_one...

UK has massive wind energy potential, solar PV not so much. Completely different problems in the UK.

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