Please don't greenwash Germany's horrible energy strategy after they prematurely closed nuclear plants because of Fukushima-based populism. One example: They brought a new 1.1 GW coal power plant online last year that they expect to run until at least 2038. (Datteln 4: https://www.reuters.com/article/deutschland-klima-uniper-idD...)
Until proof is provided that something changed fundamentally, I don't want it (or its waste [1]) in my neighborhood. You can have it in yours.
[1] https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article251....
If you are not willing to host nuclear power in your community, are you at least willing to commit your community to using less energy?
Using coal as a baseline is unjustified where coal is being actively phased out for cleaner alternatives. Much of this has been natural gas (a nonrenewable greenhouse gas contributor, though one with a good safety record), but wind and solar are cheaper than coal, competitive with gas, and growing rapidly (increasing over 2020, in a year energy consumption overall declined).
The biggest risk with nuclear power time and again has proved to be organisational, not technical. (This is a major focus of the late Charles Perrow's work, which I strongly recommend.) Unfortunatley, organisational failures tend not to have technical fixes. In the case of nuclear energy, they have very long-term consequences, on the order of centuries.
Well-running nuclear power plants are some of the safest forms of energy production we have. They are not the safest, with solar trending far better, as well as most hydro (there is one notable exception, as with nuclear, it's a case of organisational failure, unlike the notable nuclear accidents, the incident site is now home to 17 millions of people living without any residual risk). Wind power carries some risks, but those are all but entirely limited to workers, not the general public.
IPCC have studies of risks on a per-GWh generation basis, which largely corroborate this.[2] If we were to compare nuclear with coal only, based on 2020 generation mix, the multiplier for accidents would be closer to 6-fold rather than 70-fold, though that is still 18 major nuclear accidents rather than the three commercial operation incidents observed. Note too that there are several further nuclear incidents where non-generating plants and military operations are concerned, as well as numerous near-catasterophes such as the Tokaimura criticality incident (again: an organisational failure).
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Notes:
1. This and other energy statistics are from the BP Annual Statistical Review for 2020, released two days ago. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...
2. http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report esp. p. 845.
Assuming absolutely zero progress has been made in nuclear R&D, regulation, and application.
Automobile safety is a domain in which we've extensive experience, and what is shown is a decreasing trend in absolute numbers, as well as in percentage safety. In the first decade of widespread adoption in the US (1910--1920), the accident rate per passenger mile roughly halved. It's halved every two decades since, as contributions from a number of factors are combined. Some risks, notably toward pedestrians, have remained largely unchanged or increased over the same period.
In the power sector, the record from hyroelectric facilities across countries shows a similar trend, with early immature sectors exhibiting major disasters, which fall greatly by time. But the pattern itself repeats across countries, and there's some uptick in risk as aging and poorly-managed infrastructure either fails or experiences near-failure. See for example the Edenville and Sanford dam failures in Michigan in 2020, and the near-failure of the Oroville dam in California in 2017.
With more nuclear power plants, there'd also be more plants in more places, including in less well-governed or more unstable countries. Note that in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, much of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South and Central America, and Africa, there've been numerous transitions of government, as well as coups and outright wars, often with major terrorist / partisan freedom-fighter components. We'd have to presume that these would have occurred with a much more substantial nuclear power component.
Under such conditions skilled engineering and management talent often prefers seeking better conditions (higher paying, more stable, safer) elsewher (brain drain), coption of programmes for non-generation purposes (explosive weapons, dirty bombs, other forms of coercion) is far more likely (see Iran and North Korea as two examples), nuclear proliferation, already widespread, would likely be much greater, a even simple errors such as siting on poorly-suited or improperly mitigated locations (as was the case at Fukushima-Diaichi) would be more likely.
Then there are the fuel preparation, delivery, and waste management issues, as well as site decomissioning needs.
Yes decade old information for all the decade old nuclear power plants that are still running. We don't drive cars from the 60s anymore but still operate nuclear power plants from that era. You'll have to shut them down to avoid that criticism because it's perfectly valid as long as those power plants are online.
Incidentally, have a look at what's doing the most damage to Ukrainian land currently. It's a lot of damage, and it's not reactor no. 4.
Quite. One good thing (the only one?) that came out of Thatcherism was the end of the British coal industry, though at the cost of enormous suffering for many people. Although BoJo and his crew of sub-100 IQ morons seem to be intent on opening a new one.
These stickers in the 70s, mostly on polluting Citroen 2CVs used to really piss me off:
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...
And actually now, which I had completely forgotten, I remember meeting a gorgeous blond girl in Bennets Bar in Edinburgh, about 1978, and her taking me back to my flat in her car with the "Nien Danke" sticker on it. And I said it would have to go. Well, you can probably imagine what the result was.
Actually, more memories are now flooding back. One of my flat-mates (not the greatest-looking man) met up with a really hideous woman in Sandy Bells and tried to inflict her on us - we fairly resolutely said "NO" - it all worked out for the best in the end - he ended up with a nice nurse.
What? A 2CV is a tiny, lightweight car, with a miniature engine. How much pollution can it possibly throw out already? Surely far less than many brand new cars today. I know you can actually almost see the petrol fumes coming out of some big old cars, but to go after 2CV owners is absurd IMO. Although i'm not any kind of expert, so i might be wrong. "Green 2CV".
Emissions tech has come a long way; just looking at the legal max emissions, the 2CV failed to 2.72g/km CO emissions while the legal max since 2006 has been 1g/km CO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_2CV#1980%E2%80%93...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Em...
Ugh
I guess they try to sell the "our party cares about the environment" to win (i.e. lie to) voters, but at the same time they care about their industries, and old emission standards are easier to comply to. I can imagine they know research for better emissions is hard, but building cars to antiquated standards is easy and can keep more people employed...
A bit like Angela Merkel, after many years of not wanting to, suddenly agreeing to a timeline to shut down German nuclear power plants a few days after Fukushima and a few days before a state election (her stunt didn't help, the Greens still won a majority of the votes).
It's a four stroke flat twin (boxer engine).
It's far less efficient and I expect it to be more polluting than a modern engine, but I don't know how to search for objective measures of such pollution.
In any case, 1.1GW pales in comparison to the amount of renewables coming online every year. Also, Germany is actually shutting down more coal than that this year (1.5GW). That 2038 deadline is part of a plan to shut down most of their remaining coal plants: https://www.mining.com/germany-to-shut-1-5-gw-of-coal-genera....
Call this a last 'success' for the coal lobby. They are going to lose most of the coal capacity by 2038 but they got to have a new plant. I'm sure that made sense in somebody's head when they agreed to take the plant into operation but only until 2038. That plant had already been built so they were negotiating about taking it into operation at all. They won that battle but then lost the battle about shutting down all of the coal plants. In any case, this might end up being the last coal plant Germany ever built. This being a relatively modern plant, it might also be the last one they will shut down.
That might happen a lot sooner than 2038 too. There will be elections in Germany at the end of this summer. Conservative CDU, and its coal friendly sister party CSU who were responsible for pushing this through, might find themselves having to negotiate with the green party over exactly this topic. And depending on how things go, they might have to swallow their pride and compromise. Like they compromised with SPD before.
Shutting down coal in Germany is a hot topic. Shutting down brown coal, which is the nastiest form of coal, doubly so. That's the real hot potato politically. My impression is that there will be lots of haggling over that final shut down year during every election between now and 2038. So, that deadline might start shifting a bit. Since that's only 17 years from now, I'd say 2030 is a nice round number to shoot for. Given some political will, that might actually happen. In the grand scheme of things whether its 2030 or 2038 won't actually matter a whole lot. It's going to be definitely a thing of the past somewhere in that time-frame.
I imagine at some point it also becomes a "lets just rip off the band-aid and get it over with" kind of thing for politicians. The less coal remains, the less power the coal lobby will have to preserve what remains. They are losing power every year. 1.5GW this year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54462311
Germany replaced nuclear power with Russian gas.
Beautiful.