Germany Rejected Nuclear Power–and Deadly Emissions Spiked | Hacker News Reader

Germany Rejected Nuclear Power–and Deadly Emissions Spiked

wired.com

40 pointsspamalot15930 comments

Nuclear is the only way to reduce our carbon emissions in both the short term and long term, and the best way to produce energy per unit than any other energy source.

When you remove nuclear from existing supply, you increase your dependence on fossil fuels. Renewables are not able to produce enough energy to cover the absense of nuclear, perhaps in the future, but not with our current engineering.

> Nuclear is the only way to reduce our carbon emissions in both the short term and long term,

This is clearly untrue, to the point of being deliberate misinformation.

Is it now? I heard renewable is barely 5-10% of what would be needed to replace fossil. Nuclear would surpass fossil easily (nothing to say about cost or safety here, just output).

I am pro-Nuclear as the next guy, both from environmental and job creation perspective.

But renewable can reduce emissions and has been proven to do so.

I wasn't arguing to the contrary, my second statement was tied to my first.

Reducing or eliminating nuclear has the negative effect of increasing emissions and reliance on fossil fuels to fill the immediate and long term void that would be left.

Renewables do a wonderful job, but they can not, at this point, take on the share that Nuclear has to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels should nuclear be elimated.

As said, perhaps in the future. But not at this moment.

And deaths also spiked, although they're so diffuse only the statisticians will pay attention.

Nuke is clearly safer than any fossil fuel source by a *wide* margin. By some arguments utility-scale solar is safer than nuke--but only if by some miracle you can get virtually all your power from solar. We don't have the storage technology for that and if you have to run the natural gas plant when the sun doesn't shine you put nuke way in the lead for safety.

> Nuke is clearly safer than any fossil fuel source by a wide margin.

Only if you 1. only take deaths into account and 2. redefine danger to include predictable damage.

Another article that neglects to mention that we had already decided to quit nuclear in 2002. But the corrupt government we had in 2010 reverted that.

I'd also like to know what emissions spiked, considering our nuclear policies ultimately didn't change in 2010/2011.

not sure why you are downvoted. you basically said nothing wrong the article is plain fud.

as if germanies' co2 emission alone did make our world wide temperature rise so bad. the study/article also dismisses so much things. like that we have basically no end storage, that nuclear was already dead in germany and that the plants all were mostly over their end of lifetime anyway (but the governement raised it over and over), such a stupid study/article.

“ as if germanies' co2 emission alone did make our world wide temperature rise so bad”

This nicely demonstrates how CO2 emissions is a collective action problem between all the world’s countries.

Any one country, even the #1 emitter the USA, giving up on fossil fuels isn’t enough to stop changing the climate via CO2 emission.

So each country can claim that its failure to build nuclear or to replace all fossil fuels with renewable and battery storage isn’t a big deal.

The #1 emitter is China, not the US.

Per head USA is first, in absolute terms china is.

Additionally the government started to reduce subsidizing for renewable energy which ruined a lot of very high tech and innovative companies in the solar power field. Further the government made it harder to install wind turbines in the countryside. All while still pumping money in coal.

Here are the raw electricity production figures for the timeframe considered in the study:

https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

When comparing the year-by-year differences, a few interesting things turn up. For the sake of simplicity, I've only counted wind and solar as renewables and natural gas + black coal + lignite as fossil fuels.

- There have only been two years where a reduction in nuclear was not (over-)compensated by an increase in renewables: 2010/2011 (nuclear -30,8 TWh, renewables +19,3 TWh) and 2015/2016 (nuclear -6,8 TWh, renewables -1,3 TWh).

- Even in 2010/2011, the increase in renewables overcompensated the reduction in fossil fuels (-2,8 TWh)

- There have only been two years which actually saw an increase in fossil-fuelled electricity production: 2011/2012 (+7,2 TWh, still fully compensated by renewables) and 2015/2016 (+5,5 TWh).

- In the entire timeframe (EoY 2010 to EoY 2017), renewable production increased by +94,9 TWh, which is more than the reduction in nuclear (-60,8 TWh) and fossil fuels (-28,5 TWh) combined.

- There've been some internal shifts happening within the fossil cluster. In the first couple of years, natural gas consumption was dialled back in favour of solid fuels, which was then slightly reverted in the later years. This is also the reason why 2015/2016 did not see a catastrophic increase in CO2 emissions - parts of the worst offenders have just been replaced by natural gas.

I'm still not sure how the study reached a conclusion that is kind of contradicting real-world data.

In addition, new grid battery storage has become cheaper than natural gas peaker plants. Now we just need the industrial capacity and natural resources to create that many batteries!

https://www.energy-storage.news/news/battery-storage-30-chea...

Interesting to see what happened after the 2011 - 2017 timeframe the study looked at:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...

Coal sucks, and they probably could have got rid of it faster, but they still seem on a good path and the story is similar worldwide.

edit: even in the 2011-2017 timeframe they added more renewables than nuclear lost, so it seems odd that emissions would spike, unless there was either a big shift in the coal/gas/import mix, or just a general rise in demand.

It depends on how you measure renewables. Lets say solar, is the measurement made during the day? Because for most of the clock, they added zero solar. Or wind? Was it measured when the wind was blowing, or not?

The lost nuclear was 24/7.

> Lets say solar, is the measurement made during the day? Because for most of the clock, they added zero solar.

should I tell you what most people do during the night?

> > Lets say solar, is the measurement made during the day? Because for most of the clock, they added zero solar.

> should I tell you what most people do during the night?

In winter, night starts at 18:00. Some people are returning from work at this time of day. Others take dinner (which needs electricity to be prepared). Only chickens slerp the entire night doing nothing else in this time.

Germany re-classified coal plants co-firing with freshly chopped Romanian forest trees to "renewable" status, Its clean biomas!

https://www.fern.org/fileadmin/uploads/fern/Documents/Up%20i...

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/illegal-logging-...

https://www.courthousenews.com/eu-accused-of-standing-by-as-...

Since the HN crowd is really pro-nuclear and in my bubble nobody is maybe somebody could explain how to handle nuclear waste and if modern reators are really as safe as it is often portraied in the comments here.

Even modern reactors would produce radioactive waste, right? In germany we don't have any place that is safe enough for long term storage.

How can this be handled? Would really like to change my mind regarding nuclear power, since it would solve the transitional phase towards renewables.

Also: Quite regurarily cracks are found in the reactors in germany and other countries. Other smaller things happen all the time too. Are modern reactors failsafe? I

Imagine the following hypothetical solution:

We just mix nuclear waste with a lot of dirt. Let's say, millions and millions of tons of dirt. Now we have much lower concentration, but of course that's still a public health hazard.

But! Since there is so much waste now, and since each individual kilogram is not that dangerous, let's just dump it somewhere - in a garbage dump, along the beach, or just dump it straight to the sea. The sea is big, after all.

Horrified enough?

Now realize this is exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels. By the way, Germany is still using as much fossil fuels as renewables, and is in talks with Russia to import even more.

So, we can just throw radioactive waste somewhere deep underground. That's already miles better than fossil fuels. That's miles better than what Germany (and every other nations in the world) are doing right now.

Throwing nuclear waste somewhere underground doesn’t sound cool either.

The question was about nuclear, not fossils.

"It's better than fossil fuels" is a valid answer for any country that's still using fossil fuels. When Germany achieves 0% fossil fuels and figure out how to undo the damage already done by fossil fuels, feel free to complain about nuclear waste.

No, it really isn't. We are on the way to replacing fossils.

New reactors should reduce the waste produced per reactor and/or offer ways reduce it. In general, Gen IV reactors produce far less waste per kWh. There are some theoretical MSRs, molten salt reactors, that may even be used to reduce the radioactivity of existing waste. All active nuclear power plants use LWRs, light water reactors, which need to be refueled every two years. The "spent rods" still have a significant amount of energy. The best Gen IV reactors require one refuel every thirty years. I believe, with enough investment and research, we will see more opportunities to not only reduce but, reuse and recycle waste. The real question is would you rather deal with waste confined to containers or waste that has been spewed into the environment.

There are a lot of structural issues with the current fleet of reactors. Partially because these reactors were built decades ago and have been used far past their designed lifespan. We shouldn't equivocate the capability and issues of old nuclear with new nuclear technology.

Yes... solar, wind, hydro, and grid storage technology have the potential to support our power generation and distribution infrastructure. However, it isn't realistic to expect this within the next couple of decades. Although, we see how investment into these sectors have helped accelerate the technology. We should do the same for nuclear which is powerful, proven, and the only direct replacement for coal and oil(without upgrading the infrastructure). Give me 10 large Gen VI reactors and I can wipe a huge amount of carbon emission out of the mix. Instead of waiting for all these small pieces to be developed, organized, and synchronized into a fully functioning grid.

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

By chemistry and alchemy.

Chemistry: also known as reprocessing [1]. A lot of the nuclear waste is uranium and plutonium, that can be separated and made into nuclear fuel, and put back to work. The side-effect is that the amount of waste is reduced. In principle, chemical separation can be further used to separate the more dangerous isotopes (the ones with half-lives of more than 5 years) from the short-lived isotopes, which will decay naturally in a reasonable amount of time (<100 years).

Alchemy: nuclear transmutation. This can be achieved via bombardment with neutrons. The most efficient way to do that is with a breeder-reactor [2].

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

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...

If the total amount of nuclear waste completely got loose into the environment, the damage done by fossil fuels and mining would still dwarf it by orders of magnitude.

Take a a look at the strip mining damage done in Western Pennsylvania. Those mines continue to leach sulfur into the local rivers and have done so for decades.

Centralia had to be evacuated because a coal seam is on fire and "it's too expensive" to put out.

And how much junk do we breathe every day due to all the cars? And that's before we start talking about places like China and India (where the air pollution is hideous).

Many of the newer reactors don’t need the level of radioactive material as compared to the older ones. AFAIK, some newer ones could even run on spent rods.

As to the feasibility of storage of old material, assume that Germany literally had no excess land to place it on, what about other countries? You couldn’t imagine a country with excess worthless land willing to lease it? Wouldn’t that be a net positive for Germany, for the poor country, and less emissions globally?

Lastly on the failsafes, there are improvements and so called “passive” implementations, but outside of the failed communist state and the tsunami incidents, what critical failures are there? Not talking about 3 mile island etc that were more fear porn than anything.

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