It is amazing. But two major incidents within 30 years time range are not so amazing. When we continue in that rate we will have a serious problem. And with aging reactors and instability everywhere it does not look good.
Nuclear is proven to be our most safe, clean and renewable source of energy.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Similar with wind turbines, but at least those are so small scale that you can convince closeby towns fast by just letting them participate in the profits. Different story for leaking barrels stored underground.
(And yes, that's how this crap ends up. Just google Asse II and then let's discuss German cleanliness again.)
Yes the incidents are scary and news grabbing but that’s it. The actual data is that it’s safe (look at mortality as a function of megawatt hours produced). Not to mention that in the 60-80 years since those plants were designed (Fukushima and Chernobyl are basically the same design if I recall correctly), we’ve gotten much better at designing plants that withstand natural disasters. This is also ignoring the fact that we can do a better job of locating power plants further away from disaster-prone areas due to advances in power distributions systems (eg HVDC).
The problem with nuclear is that there’s a lot of fear still lingering around it from Cold War era propaganda. Any issues just play into and reinforce those fears. The real problem is that education is the only effective tool we know of to fight fear but it’s slow and not up to the challenge that nuclear fission faces. That’s because on top of the fears are actual opponents who will fight any real evidence-based education efforts by playing up the FUD (very old tactic). Fossil fuel companies don’t want it because nuclear presents an existential threat to their existence. US national security interests are worried about proliferation if we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt. It also presents a serious threat to US hegemony if countries are able to establish their own energy independence.
That may very well be true but it's completely irrelevant for future choices. Not building more nuclear plants doesn't mean you'll be building more fossil fuel plants instead.
EDIT: For all the downvoters, see the fourth chart (Gross power production in Germany 1990-2021, by source (non-stacked)) on https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... and explain to me how they're building more fossil fuel power plants over the years while building zero nuclear power plants.
Uhh… Yes it does. The data shows that. An increased reliance on renewables means a large increase in reliance on LNG.
Many people are saying this.
> An increased reliance on renewables means a large increase in reliance on LNG.
What matters is whether increased reliance on renewables slows down the decarbonisation effort. If you have data which shows that, I'd be interested to see it.
In return, let me offer a study from last year which found: "in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions. But in comparative terms, this drop is smaller than that associated with investments in renewable energy. And in countries with a low GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production clearly associates with CO2 emissions that tend to be higher."
Solar and wind are important parts of the energy mix and.OF COURSE we need them. Nuclear is where the bulk of the focus needs to go though to actually decarbonize because it can handle literally every use case that fossil fuels do but cheaper, safer and less polluting.
We do not have enough batteries in the world, and producing enough of them would take decades, and cost us trillions of dollars. Nuclear power plants are better and cheaper solution.
I just added a source that shows that data tells something completely different. In the past ten years, German renewable generation more than doubled (from annual ~100 TWh to ~250 TWh) while their natural gas consumption for electricity generation today is basically the same as back then (somewhere around 90 TWh annually from gas back then as well as today). Not sure how natural gas stagnation can be described as "large increased reliance".
The Germans import a significant amount (~64%) of their energy from other countries, including France (nuclear) and Poland (coal), but also countries further afield like Norway and Russia.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-dependen...
Edit: in response to the large number of people bringing up BER and other infrastructure failures in Germany: yes, BER and others may have been bad, but a completely different kind (and magnitude) of incompetence than that which led to the Chernobyl meltdown. They really aren’t comparable.
You don't build nuclear power plants in narrow valleys with known flood events though. I mean, you also don't build wind turbines in swamps and hope they don't fall over, or put solar panels on your roof and don't fasten them.
1. https://www.itv.com/news/2016-02-09/a-history-of-german-trai...
Germany has this right: do it now, and deal with it, rather than to continue to kick the can down the road for later generations to solve the problems, a kind of temporeal externalization.
Everybody starts cutting small corners everywhere, assuming it doesn't matter much as all the other people are still doing their job. One day, a corner too many gets cut, and the slack in the system is too small to catch what should be a minor problem.
Don't trust the public facade and official reports, they have been filtered by PR departments and by people not wishing to report bad news to their managers and peers
Are we talking about the same Germany?
Edit: I should probably give some examples: Suttgart 21 train station, BER airport
Hahaha! Haha! Ha. #sad
Are you sure? One example:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48527308
>BER has become for Germany not a new source of pride but a symbol of engineering catastrophe. It's what top global infrastructure expert Bent Flyvbjerg calls a "national trauma" and an ideal way "to learn how not to do things".
Anything built after 1972 has not had anywhere near this level of incidents.
Also Chernobyl had severe safety flaws due to its origin as an early model breeder reactor (and my head canon is that the test that caused the disaster was in some way related to surreptitious fuel changing to run breeding experiments. The RBMK reactors were designed for rapid fuel shuffling.... In other words, safety was compromised to keep the door open to the possibility of sneaky weapons grade material production).
Also also, Chernobyl had some other bone-headed flaws, such as a positive void coefficient and positive scram coefficient (read: trying to rapid shutdown during an emergency made the reaction increase). Humanity has learned a ton since then.
IF new generation reactors can prove to be safe and not create waste and decommissioning problems, and if they can be built economically, then they are worthy of consideration.
But power is fungible. If the cheapest next watt-hour is solar or wind, then why spend on anything else?
Not exactly, changes were made to RBMK design after the accident: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...