As a family we had to learn and memorize where those tablets where. Chernobyl was around the same time.
There might be a stigma built. But what are the facts?
Full disclosure: incase I was not clear I'm pro nuclear.
They were part of the government for 8 years under Schröder and again now. They are the third biggest political party in our country for a long time now.
All that combined made everyone pretty skeptic for nuclear power.
- climate catastrophe
- insane debt
- rampant pollution
- the ongoing mass extinction
- pensions during changing demographics
Other than that nuclear is slower and much more expensive to newly deploy than wind and solar. It also remains more dangerous because there is always the human factor (hubris and corruption!) as we have seen in Japan. Before Fukushima, people said it couldn't happen there, only in countries like Russia.
This is one of the primary things that fueled nuclear scepticism in Germany, people become more aware of the news around nuclear power operators and the dogeiness that is happening. For example it happened multiple times that there were incidents that should have been reported by law and operators didn't report because it possibly would have meant to a shutdown period. Usually, nothing came out of these violations, even though there are provisions that require operators to be "trustworthy".
Looking at other countries, e.g. France, information was very biased to keep bad news about nuclear away. For example my partner told me that when Tschernobyl happened when she was young they were essentially told that all radiation had stopped at the border and now restrictions regarding vegetables, mushrooms etc were necessary.
That said, I completely agree that burning lignite is shameful, I would argue that it has nothing to do with nuclear or renewables, it's politics.
Regarding gas, both nuclear and most renewables are not really in the same category as gas in terms of the supply they provide. Gas would be just as necessary if all current goal plants are nuclear (or wind for that matter). It might very well be that gas would allow to reduce CO2 emissions and transition to renewables more quickly than without. I agree with the geopolitical implications, but Germany is producing lots of things in China and are delivering weapons to Saudi Arabia and now we suddenly take a stance when it comes to gas from Russia? In terms of environmental impact it's still better than developing reserves from fracking.
So we can hype up renewables even though we know we can't really build enough fast enough, completely throw out nuclear because of the hypothetical risk of some future corrupt politician coming into control of our waste pile, then when it comes to gas we suddenly take a Realpolitik stance but only as it pertains to the despot next door?
Here's another unsolved problem for you : intermittence of renewals. Why having a base of reliable energy source from nuclear when you can burn coal? Or give up geopolitical independence by being reliant on Russia's gas?
Its better to use invest in renewables
In electricity demand is intermittent, therefore you need to have your supply to be able to follow those demand fluctuations, in other words you need a quickly adjustable supply. Traditionally electricity grids used gas turbines to give this quickly adjustable supply. However, generally power from gas turbines is relatively expensive, so what many grids did is use coal or nuclear (which was cheaper, but could also not be adjusted) to supply a fraction of supply and only use gas to even out the demand fluctuations.
Renewables are now significantly cheaper than both coal and nuclear, however as you correctly point out they are intermittent, so you can't combine them with "base load" because you still need quick adjustable supply. Renewables therefore mainly replace the slow "baseload" plants. Moreover the economics are such that it makes it much cheaper to just overprovision with renewables (to essentially make it easier to even out fluctuations) instead of using some plants which have to run at a 100% full time to be economical (like nuclear).
TLDR "baseload" only makes sense if the way of producing it is cheaper than all other methods. That is not the case with nuclear by a significant margin.
In an imperfect world, which is what we live in, you're guaranteed huge disasters like Chernobyl happening.
In case you are not aware, areas in a radius of hundreds of kilometers all around Chernobyl are still affected by it, and will continue to be for hundreds of years.
That still doesn't prevent leaks like Fukashima though, but that has had a very small impact so far, that I'd be tempted to even call negligible - especially if you compare it to the problems pollution causes from lignite plants.
By the way, what's the point of comparing Fukushima to something else terrible?
>A screening program a year later in 2012 found that more than a third (36%) of children in Fukushima Prefecture have abnormal growths in their thyroid glands.
I think that's hardly comparable to coal.
Because in Germany the concrete choice 10-15 years ago was between developing nuclear, or burning lignite now and importing gas from oligarchies later. These were the only two options on table which were politically and technically feasible. (And then Fukushima made nuclear no longer politically feasible. And now it's also too late to be technically feasible.)
Coal is much bigger killer, just too slow to make for good news story.
As an aside, what is the base rate? In all the reporting on this number I've not been able to find it. (Only that the base rate among adults is around 50%, which may or may not be comparable.)
Btw. 660 bill on clean up thats nowhere to be done is big impact.
A real and true accounting of the Nuclear History of the World is perhaps too secret to ever be told ;)
First, that Germany is extremely "anti nuclear". But, deciding over 20 years ago to close plants when their lifetime runs out and not replace them is hardly the drastic act of a maniac.
Germany is just doing what everyone else is doing, building cheap renewables. Only real difference is that many countries never built any nuclear plants in the first place and so they don't have old plants to shut.
That’s not as simple as it sounds. The initial lifetime given to nuclear plants is extremely conservative. And given proper maintenance it can easily be extended by decades. Closing plants because they « reached their lifetime » often means closing a perfectly good plant, and it’s a political act, not a rational act.
I don’t know if it was the case for German plants but it was definitely the case in France with Fessenheim.
There have never been any nuclear power plants in Ireland. They are even prohibited: „The production of electricity for the Irish national grid (Eirgrid), by nuclear fission, is prohibited in the Republic of Ireland by the Electricity Regulation Act, 1999 (Section 18)“. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Ireland
But since you are pro nuclear just think for a moment where on your beautiful island you would like to store all the highly radioactive nuclear waste?
You probably will have difficulty answering this. And the same is true for Germans, even although Germany is much bigger than Ireland and it searched for decades for a suitable place and failed.
The best individual metric I'm aware of as a way to compare costs of different types of energy production is called "Levelized Cost of Energy" (LCOE) - here's a Feb 2021 report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration with a link to an estimated cost comparisons page:
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
If we can go on with renewables then it's great although I hope the tech is maintained somehow like for example space exploration.
In the 90s Green party of Germany built its identity around being anti-nuclear. Meanwhile Schroeder (who came from conservatives) had a problem with miners aggressively pushing to preserve coal mines.
They formed otherwise unlikely alliance against nuclear power. This resulted in lots of propaganda and actual laws being implemented in order to dismantle nuclear plants, which impacts Germany to this day.
Given ties that Schroeder has to Gazprom, he could have also other motives in not allowing Germany to be too energy independent.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
The plan to eliminate nuclear by 2022 and coal by 2038 should have been swapped. And lignite should've been banned a decade ago.
That's correct, but more relevant is when the build started. There are likely all sort of legal reasons why they could not stop the plant going into operation at this stage. Saying that Germany is going back to coal based on this is a bit factitious though. Germany was in fact planning more new coal plans previously, most of them did not get built. https://www.greenpeace.de/klimaschutz/energiewende/kohleauss...
> They are still claiming a victory because they are opening one and shutting down multiple. Of course those four were going to shut down anyway, but by any normal meaning of words this is "going back to coal".
No it is not. They put into operation a plant that was planned 15 years ago (im not arguing that they should have done this, but they did) . Should they instead have kept operating one of the older plants just to say "we haven't build a new one"?
> The plan to eliminate nuclear by 2022 and coal by 2038 should have been swapped. And lignite should've been banned a decade ago.
Completely agree on lignite, and they should (and likely could) have phased out both coal and nuclear by now.
We have wasted an entire decade offsetting our drop in nuclear power and a minute amount of nuclear waste with renewables, when we could have kept nuclear on to offset coal and gas instead. Germany "proving that you can go without nuclear without going back to coal" is not a reality-based opinion. Nuclear waste is a problem, but we have chosen one of the few paths even worse than that.
What have you got, ten year old hope?
https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
And only 200g per person per year of total radioactive waste has half life of more that 30 years.
I know this might be a bit challenging knowledge for someone with strong beliefs, but it's worth it to realign your beliefs with reality.
Talking about reprocessing (recycling is a complete misnomer), did you know that reprocessing greatley increases the amount (volume) of nuclear waste? And that it is not really economical, unless you want to make nuclear weapons.
The Merkel government was just a unprincipled opportunistic one, although I do credit her for having the guts to say "Syrian refugees can stay"; she took the morally correct decision, not the politically expedient one. But her previous steps before that like championing austerity (anyone remember the PIIGS problem?) ensured that her populace got really pissed off, imagine seeing your conservative government stripping away money for social programs for decades (while the elite get richer), and then suddenly saying "we can afford to host refugees"...
> In the 90s Green party of Germany built its identity around being anti-nuclear. Meanwhile Schroeder (who came from conservatives) had a problem with miners aggressively pushing to preserve coal mines.
Schröder was a social democrat not a Conservative, however it is true that miners still hold a disproportionate influence with the SPD, one of the reasons why Germany has not moved off coal as quickly as they could have.
> They formed otherwise unlikely alliance against nuclear power. This resulted in lots of propaganda and actual laws being implemented in order to dismantle nuclear plants, which impacts Germany to this day.
It was not an unlikely alliance, since the greens became a signicant power and the liberals (FDP) moved into the direction of a free market Liberal instead of social Liberal it was always the second coalition option. It was largely considered only a question of time until the greens became part of a federal coalition government.
It also needs to be pointed out that quite a few older plants got extensions on their operation certificate in exchange for operators not trying to extend other plants.
Finally it was actually the Conservative Merkel government which really nailed down the move away from nuclear. Knowing anything about how she did politics you can be sure that there was widespread support for this.
> Given ties that Schroeder has to Gazprom, he could have also other motives in not allowing Germany to be too energy independent.
> Finally it was actually the Conservative Merkel government which really nailed down the move away from nuclear. Knowing anything about how she did politics you can be sure that there was widespread support for this.
Indeed there was. I don't find it surprising, since nuclear power was stigmatized for a long time everywhere. Arguably in Germany more than in other places.
That almost plays into the 'we never planned for that' scenario. Will it ever be safe ?
I think when you consider the risk of nuclear plants, it's worth taking into account the culture of the host nation. Japan, with its culture of institutional and individual corruption, is always a bit risky with dangerous industries, as demonstrated by its history of lethal industrial accidents.
I think Germany would be a little bit better, but it's hard to say for sure.
How much lives we could save or improve with that money... damn.