> nuclear was not economically viable vs going green
This is such a strange statement as nuclear is the greenest power source.
This is such a strange statement as nuclear is the greenest power source.
However, the highly destructive, scary and dangerous trash that it does produce is like a comical epitome of the kind of visible pollution the first generation green movement was fighting. There is a reason that dystopian sci-fi trash heap illustrations always feature a leaking nuclear barrel.
Combined with the fact that Germany is just (fairly) densely populated everywhere, criticism of storage solutions are not about endangered desert lizard species, but about radiation spikes in elementary schools.
I'm both German and would like to re-establish nuclear here as a necessary evil, but I get the contra points. I hope this gives some perspective :)
And that's without considering fuel reprocessing, which would not only drastically reduce the raw fuel need (and therefore increase the green value of nuclear power), but would reduce the final waste product to something that could fit in a broom closet.
The scale of the nuclear waste problem is seriously, seriously oversold.
Hanford alone has enough liquid nuclear waste to fill 80. Does that waste not count?
Note that storage solution for radioactive waste is necessary even without nuclear reactors, as there are plenty of radiocative waste from radiology/radiotherapy devices and also associated accidents, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident .
Each euro earmarked for a nuke plant is a euro not spent building out solar, wind, and storage that would yield much more power than the nuke, almost immediately, and have extremely low operating cost. So, not green, because it competes with actually green for capital.
I'm sorry that I'm not that familiar with the German regulatory situation, but here in the USA for example new nuclear plants are required to pre-fund their decommissioning costs upfront before they are ever turned on, and have insurance against accidents, etc. Which is probably a good thing and I'm not arguing against--except that literally no other source of energy is subject to the same requirements. And so when people say "nuclear is expensive!" they are comparing apples-to-oranges.
A coal or natural gas plant generates literal tonnes of environmental waste that they don't need to pay to clean up, and they aren't required to have insurance or bonds against the much more likely industrial accidents their workers and community members will suffer.
Same for solar, which would be a heck of a lot more expensive if solar installation companies had to insure millions of dollars against their workers falling off roofs, or pre-pay the costs of smelting solar panels that reach end of life so their parts don't end up in land fills.
Nuclear isn't expensive. The nuclear energy and regulatory environment is. As it was designed to be by people who don't want nuclear power.
Even if this was true (which I don't think it is) then what are you proposing? Relaxing the regulations?
It is expensive because any large unit of capital in a public works context is expensive. (A clear majority of this cost is in unavoidable structural corruption tax.) On top of that, operating a nuke is very expensive: this is where fuel cycle costs come in, including mining, refining, processing, and disposing, as well as others like fixing turbines and guarding access. On top of that, shutting one down is expensive. None of these costs are falling, while alternative cost are, so, relatively, they are all sharply increasing.
(Coal, oil, and gas are also expensive, mainly in environmental effects, and their costs are also increasing, relative to renewables. They do not count here, except in how they contribute to renewables construction cost, where they fall as their contribution to that cost does.)
Insurance for construction accidents, and disposal costs, are figured in: silicon panels and wind turbine blades are inert, so cheap to dispose of. CdTe panels and rare-earth magnets are valuable, already-refined chemicals, and are reclaimed.
Each cost alone makes nukes more expensive than alternatives. All added up, they make nukes ruinously expensive.