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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

Or revert the decision to phase out nuclear power.

Germany has no long term storage for nuclear waste, it is sending 12.000 tons of depleted uranium-hexafluoride from its reprocessing plant in Gronau to a plant in Novouralsk, Russia, where its turned into uranium-oxide for usage in MOX fuel for fast breeders sometime in the future. Until then it is stored above ground, hoping the containment doesn't leak dust clouds. And those are the few parts of the problem that can be reused. For the vast majority of radioactive and contaminated waste, there is no such solution: there is no reprocessing decades old contaminated reactor parts that are replaced due to old age and material fatigue. The burial site in Asse turned into a disaster and the waste stored there is being digged up again, costing billions. Gorleben is on hold since it was build under the assumptions that lead to the Asse problem, Konrad is not even finished and already booked out, without even taking all of the waste that currently exists. So most radioactive, irradiated or contaminated waste is stored in "temporary containment" with no long term plan. Nuclear power is neither clean nor cheap: its lobbyists are just very good at pushing externalities toward tax payers and future generations. American nuclear industry is trying to convince people that their ocean dumping sites are safe and that the contamination of the Savannah river or the Columbia river are not a problem. Note that these are the same kind of people that argued in favor of leaded gasoline, fracking gas infused tap water and smoking tobacco. Nuclear waste is not a solved problem. And if you look at the other side of the supply chain, uranium mining is even worse. The mines in germany are closed, and most of what was produced there over decades was sold to the SU and USA anyway. Handling millions of tons of uranium trailings and irradiated pumping, mining and milling equipment is left as a problem for future generations. You think the selling price for yellow cake pays for these problems in advance? Think again.

How does all that compare to continuing to burn coal and gas and dumping humongous quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere?

Maybe nuclear waste storage is not yet solved, but it is a long term problem while global warming is already here. I’d rather work on storage solutions for the next 1000 years than fighting floods, hurricanes and forest fires every day.

Instead of investing hundreds of billions to restart a nuclear industry that failed to deliver what it promised for seven decades and created lots of problems of its own, Germany is investing in solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power production to find out what kind of issues those have (turns out wind turbines shredder insects en mass, leading to a different kind of ecological problem - there is no free lunch). Knowing very well that the EU will likely continue to require energy imports in the foreseeable future, Germany is pushing to import hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons, and a major supplier will be Africa. Instead of investing into irradiating our country, we invest into building sustainable power infrastructure with our southern neighbors.

We already know what is the issue with only scalable renewables (wind & solar) - unrealiability. Germany is doing pretty much nothing to scale up energy storage, so this all is just a fig leaf to burn more coal & gas (or imported "renewable" wood). See last autumn - when wind did not blow and sun did not shine as much, you were pretty much just burrning stuff to make electricity.

Hydrogen is a joke, just the infrastructure to distribute it will dwarf any costs nuclear could ever have. Not to mention production costs . . .

And you are already irradiating your country by burning coal, so no idea what do you mean by "Instead of investing into irradiating our country".

Again: whataboutism rarely helps, i am not arguing in favor of coal

It's not whataboutism - when intermittent energy sources are offline you need to have either storage or backup energy source. Fossil fuel (or biomass) sources are good at spinning up quickly, so it makes sense to assume that pushing renewables without storage is effectively pushing burner power plants.

And observed practice in Germany confirms this. Or do you have real data pointing in other direction? Say, period of low output from solar & wind which resulted in anything else than using mostly (imported) fossil-fueled electricity?

EDIT to illustrate:

https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electric... - emission factor of Germany's power generation was for several days (during the selected week) far above EU average (https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/overview-...)

i reject your attempt to conflate my position with a strawman and will not provide any data for that strawmans position.

But to entertain your argument: yes i agree that it would make sense if i, personally, had more energy storage. However i don't see how that is relevant to my point against investing (tax money probably) into reviving a dead nuclear industry.

As a side note with you, _Tev, on a personal level: sure we could have a talk about that "fig leave" metaphor and if there is some kind of conspiracy in german politics and power industry that profits from coal. We could talk about whether hydrogen "is a joke" or a worthy investment, but honestly your rhetoric makes me not want to talk with you at all, as i don't think i will enjoy it.

Back to the point: this constant reiteration of "it is either coal or nuclear" is a false dichotomy and answering an argument against the nuclear industry with "but what about coal" is what-about-ism. My point is: the german nuclear industry is/was incredibly dirty, with an unsolved waste problem, expensive, reliant on Russia, failed to deliver its promises for decades and by now it is deader then disco. The newest german nuclear power plant was constructed in the '80s. Trying to revive that industry is not an actual solution to the problems of our energy market. That is like trying to revive the soviet union to get rid of Putin. The way forward must be something else. And no, that does not mean i am in favor of coal, russian gas, or american fracking.

So you say i should invest into energy storage? Sounds reasonable, any more concrete pointers?

Meanwhile coal powerplants have put 100x (!) More radiation into the environment than fukushima and chernobil did combined, and noone even blinked.

whataboutism rarely helps, i am not arguing in favor of coal

It's like pointing out that car accidents kill ~10x more Americans a year than 9/11 did so why are we so obsessed with making sure you can't bring weapons on a plane? The real threat is giving every moron with a pulse control over a 4,000lb wrecking ball.

Logically it's absolutely true that inattentive drivers are a greater risk to Americans than airline hijackers but 3,000+ people dying in one day in one location hits a lot harder than 30,000 people dying mostly one or two at a time, over 12 months, spread out across fifty states.

Can't they reprocess in la Hague? I imagine it was politically complicated before, but in light of recent developments?

As an aside, France announced last week a plan to construct 6 new EPR installations, and a plan to revamp and extend the existing fleet.

The Netherlands has reversed it's decision to phase out gaz, and is extending it's capacity.

My knowledge about the nuclear economy of France is limited, but i don't think La'Hague has a UF6 defluorisation plant. I believe there are some in southern France but those are unable to handle the amount of UF6 France produces on its own, without buying more from Germany. Also, much like the german reprocessing plant in Gronau, the french plant in La'Hague is only a small part of a long re-processing and re-enrichment chain. It is a producer of "uranium de retraitement" (URT). Ask the French what they do with it, their "nuclear circular economy" goes through Tomsk in Siberia.

You don't need a long-term plan for waste – most plants just store it onsite – it doesn't take much space.

While I would appreciate that, this would be political suicide for the Green party involved in the coalition. While they want a lot less co2 they are also very much anti-fission.

Green party also was against spending money on the military. So there you go. The situation has changed dramatically since the election.

Green is on the other side true but the current legislation works well together as far as I'm experiencing it.

It feels more like modern cooperation working together.

Article in german from yesterday: https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/akw-deutsch...

> German nuclear energy companies reject demands for nuclear power extension

Would that really make a difference? Europe gets about 10% of its total energy (ie not just electricity) from Russian gas. I find it hard to believe Germany’s 17 reactors provided that much.

It would make a difference, more electricity generation softens the demand for gas.

Would it make more of a difference than just using the same amount of money that would need to be spent to refit the old nuclear plants for longer use to build out renewables across the EU? No, not even close.

One might discuss prolonging the life-time of the reactors still operating and bringing back the ones switched off a few weeks ago. But this might be more difficult to do than it sounds, as their end-of-lifetime was planned long ago so they might no longer be in a state where you just could keep them running.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't make sense to go back to nuclear power. It is afterall a very expensive technology. It is much more efficient to go full in with renewables. And nuclear power does not work well together with renewables, as it cannot be controlled fast enough.

That's outright impossible. Not just on the political level - no one aside from the fascist party wants nuclear energy. The closed-down reactors are being torn down as we speak, it is impossible to put them back together. For those still running, we do not have the capacity to make new fuel rods for and to maintain the reactors themselves, they are at the end of their designed life time. And new projects are completely out of the question - the French and Finnish projects are many years and many billions over budget.

That’s kind of a brittle take. Germany has suffered an embarrassment and is back peddling over the course of only a few days.

- From helmets to actual military aid to Ukraine.

- large increase in military expenditure instead of woeful inadequacy.

- reversal of Swift decision.

Why wouldn’t there be a change in energy policy if Russia continues its war in Ukraine? This huge reliance on Russian gas has Europe, and especially Germany, in this strange conflict of interest.

Building out nuclear plans takes years, many billions of euros, and considerable protest from wherever you install them. Installing wind and solar power is cheap and fast, in comparison.

It takes years because people like you in aggregate demand that it do so. Submitting plans, evaluations of those plans, comment periods, etc. etc. etc. only move so fast because that's how the process is set up. The process is set up to delay and deny because that's where the political winds blew at the time the process was created.

If political winds change to support nuclear then such processes would evaporate into something far more streamlined and efficient because they simply don't make any sense in the context of "we want to do this nuclear thing and we want to do it ASAP".

Meanwhile, the Netherlands are moving away from gas and are planning to build new nuclear reactors. Belgium has postponed the planned closure of their nuclear plants. France has decided to build new nuclear reactors.

It doesn't seem to be so impossible as you think.

France isn't building enough new reactors to replace all the aging ones - at best this can delay the exit from nuclear power. Whether Netherlands is going to see through building new reactors has to be seen.

> That's outright impossible

Lets imagine that the gas pipeline from Russia explodes due to war or Putin shuts it off. Is it still 'impossible', as in we'd rather freeze and have blackouts?

> "the gas pipeline"

which one? https://www.gie.eu/publications/maps/gie-lng-map/

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