Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

> The saddest part of this story is that there is no new renewable plant being built overnight to replace Fessenheim. It will be replaced almost entirely by fossil fuels.

> It’s worth noting that, as Fessenheim closes, Germany is commissioning a new coal-fired power plant, in Datteln

Exactly. Why are so many people ignoring what happens in step 2?

When nuclear is shut down, it gets replaced with something worse. Often coal!

"German electricity was nearly 10 times dirtier than France's in 2016... Germany's overall emissions increased in 2016 as a result of the country closing one of its nuclear plants and replacing it with coal and natural gas" [1]

"It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity"[2]

Nuclear energy is also far safer than most other sources, about the same as renewables.

"Nuclear and renewable sources are similarly safe: in the range of 0.005 to 0.07 deaths per TWh. Both nuclear and renewable energy sources have death rates hundreds of times lower than coal and oil, and are tens to hundreds of times safer than gas."[3]

1. https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/2/11/german-...

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...

3. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

The whole controversy around nuclear, seems to indicate people are not as worried about the climate as they claim to be.

It reminds me of how people bash hydro for killing fish and instead advocate wind farms which kill thousands of endangered birds.

Everyone has their vested interests and pre-conceived biases I suppose.

> When nuclear is shut down, it gets replaced with something worse. Often coal!

The implication that this is what happened in Germany is misinformation. None of the energy production of retired nuclear plants in Germany was replaced by coal. Renewable energy replaced the vast majority of it over the last 10 years, and coal use is down by 50% in that period.

Here are some numbers to back this statement:

https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...

It's true that in the first 3 years after the decision to speed-up the closure of nuclear in Germany in 2011, coal use increased. But more recently it went down drastically and was replaced mostly by wind and solar on a yearly basis.

Here is similar data but not just Germany (using the data from the 2020 BP statistical review):

https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/ogrisel/energy_charts/bl...

They still use a lot of brown coal, which is dirty as hell. The way I see it, they could have had reduced the CO2 output more by keeping nuclear and investing into renewables. Missed potential really.

The debate is not renewables vs nuclear. It's nuclear vs fossil .

The reason for that is the coal lobby, not necessity.

Datteln 4 is going online because the government has already approved it, and is afraid that it will get sued if it turns around and rescinds the approval.

The debate is low carbon vs high carbon (if we all agree that climate change is the number #1 pbm).

I wish government bundled nuclear dismantling with similar goals for fossil fuels. They should add in the phase-out that by 2030, all fossil and nuclear plants will be phased out. No new fossil fueled plants should be allowed to be built.

It would be really enjoyable to see how they would solve that while still keeping an functional energy grid (buying fossil generated power from neighbors during bad weather would be cheating), and the scientific progress from such attempt would benefit the world greatly.

Exactly. Coal is not replacing anything. That would imply a growing amount of coal plants. The opposite is true in even the most pro coal markets (like the US).

France still has a lot of nuclear plants left (and of course hardly any coal at all). The one discussed in the article was the smallest one in any case according to this overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran....

Interestingly, this overview excludes solar and wind. Especially solar would be popular in the sense that there are loads of small domestic deployments and comparatively small plants that collectively add up to a lot of production with more coming online all the time. Most of the country gets a decent amount of sun throughout the year and like pretty much anywhere else, the French have been deploying loads of solar panels on their roofs. Also they've been growing their wind deployment in the order of about 1GW/year in recent years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_France

Basically, what the article conveniently also overlooks is that France actually exports more energy than it imports: it produces more than it consumes. The numbers in this article are a bit out of date but paint a clear picture of imports decreasing year over year until 2015 and actually being smaller than exports in any case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France. I did not find any more recent number but I have no reason to assume that this trend turned around in the last 6 years (the opposite actually).

Mostly imports and exports are driven by capacity and energy cost. Nuclear is not exactly known to be cheap, so exporting over capacity with tiny margins (or at a loss) in a market increasingly dominated by new, clean, cheap energy sources is less attractive than shutting down what was probably a plant with a comparatively high operational overhead. I'm guessing more plants will follow in the next years for exactly the same reason.

And, had Germany not gotten rid of those nuclear power plants, the new renewable generation would have replaced coal. Sure, you can say that renewables replaced nuclear - but at the end of the day, Germany is using coal+renewables instead of nuclear+renewables.

And it still produces more than 30% less CO2 per capita than the us. The sources are in another comment of me.

So what? "It does 30% better than the worst large country in the world, while also being 30% poorer per capita" (since Germany's per-capita GDP is ~46k, while the US's is ~65k) isn't exactly a glowing commendation.

In electricity production, in absence of diminishing consumption, new production always replaces something. IOW - in absence of that coal plant, something else would be running (or less electricity would be used).

Nuclear is not safer than renewables. These statistics are false, they do not include everything involved with running the plants and gathering the ressources. They get repeated every time in these threads here and are refuted every time.

Your first article is provided by a pro nuclear propaganda association. It's almost certainly also false. And ignores conveniently how much more unrecycable nuclear waste France was producing in 2016, waste we can not store safely.

could you provide some sources on any of your claims, or any links to analysis that takes into account "everything involved with running the plants and gathering resources"?

And preferably "apples to apples"-- are we going to include the entire lifecycle of solar manufacturing, too?

There is no such thing as un-recyclable nuclear waste that cannot be stored safely.

All unsafe waste is by definition recyclable because its viability as fuel is what makes it unsafe.

If it is unviable as recycled fuel then it is quite safely storable and is no more dangerous than the tons of toxic chemicals we store regularly from manufacturing and mining byproducts.

That is incorrect. There are two major groups of elements in spent nuclear fuel:

- Actinides (neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium, leftover uranium). Most of these materials are fissile or can be bred into fissile materials. Fuel recycling processes reclaim and reuse these elements.

- Fission products. These are the lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart. Some of the components that are most important from a waste management perspective are strontium 90 and cesium 137.

Fission products cannot be used as nuclear fuel. The fission products of greatest concern are also much more toxic than ordinary chemical wastes.

The LD50 for arsenic in rats is 15 milligrams per kilogram: https://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Tab...

The LD50 for strontium 90 in hamsters (90 day survival) is 2 millicuries per kilogram: http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895

Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/196800...), in mass terms that's 14 micrograms per kilogram for the LD50. Gram for gram, strontium 90 is about 1000 times as acutely deadly as arsenic, or three times as acutely deadly as the nerve gas sarin. There are few industrial chemicals that have toxicity comparable to or greater than nerve gas, and they (like spent nuclear fuel) have special regulations and require special handling.

"unrecycable nuclear waste France was producing in 2016"

Yeah so nuclear waste is recycled in large part. See Mox. But I agree, I wish we'd use FNRs too. Too bad the Green party shut down the first reactor (SuperPhenix) in the 90s.

"waste we can not store safely."

Did you do your homework? See CIGEO.

How is CIGEO safe?

Because it’s between two very stable geological layers that have been there for millenia.

The statistics i've seen do include resource extraction (which is pretty safe for nuclear power, because you need so little fuel).

I have not seen them refuted on HN. I would be interested to see a refutation - and if a refutation is posted every time, it should be easy for you to find.

I'm hesitant to argue more than I already did against that straw man argument. It's just a propaganda talking point, it's not actually an argument pro nuclear energy. And it's indecent.

But if you are honestly interested, read the greenpeace criticism of these studies to understand how the statistic might be false and how it can be disputed, https://wayback.archive-it.org/9650/20200415093014/http://p3.... Sure, it's easy to ignore that by looking at where it's coming from, but that goes both ways.

Your article seems to show that Nuclear is the least deadly of all energies? Am I misreading?

In terms of directly attributable deaths they are probably pretty similar. Both are good enough compared to coal.

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