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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

You're repeating some of the excuses the article addresses.

- The author says they studied nuclear in grad school, and are probably therefore an expert.

- They quantify the additional risk of meltdown due to delaying new safety regulations. It's negligible compared to operating plants according to the new regulations.

- Their proposal would increase Germany's stockpile of nuclear waste by 3%, which is surely within engineering tolerances, ignoring the fact that the disposal facilities were planned before they decided to prematurely close the plants.

I don't see how it matters which political party made which political decisions in the past. Conditions have changed.

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The way the author dismisses engineering concerns lets me strongly doubt that he is an expert. There is a discussion on fuel, spare parts and personal, where he basically says that he doesn't care.

The burning of nuclear fuel is actually very closely managed, fuel elements are regularly shuffled around because the ones in the center burn up faster than the ones at the edge of the core and the shuffling around is planned a long time in advance. So, when the end of life is planned for 2022 then the plan is actually to have the fuel spent at that date and you couldn't get much additional power out of it.

The same is of course true for spare parts. First of all, the industrial environment that supplies spare parts knows since 20 years about the plans to phase out nuclear and plan accordingly. They are actively trying to run out of spare parts right now, while of course all the maintenance task that get a rating of "should be ok for some time" get skipped in the power plants. That means, that they would need major maintenance right now, while the spare parts are planned to be not there and the industrial capacity to build spare parts has been re purposed or dismantled.

The same of course also for personal, they knew for a long time this was coming and planned their careers accordingly, though this is probably the least problem of the tree, but still that lets me doubt wether the author ever did plan a moderately complex project, let alone being an expert about nuclear power.

He has a couple of masters in non-nuclear engineering and an MBA with a focus on psychology. He is not a nuclear expert nor does he have the scholastic background to say he is. I’m not an expert in all but a few of the topics I studied in graduate school, and without a doctorate degree a great deal of people wouldn’t consider me an expert at those, either.

You can see in his profile on LinkedIn that he never ever worked for anything even remotely related to engineering. All his positions were related to Marketing.

> They quantify the additional risk of meltdown due to delaying new safety regulations. It's negligible compared to operating plants according to the new regulations.

First of all, that estimate was not made by an expert, as other commenters pointed out. Second, the additional risk is created not because of new safety standards, but also from all other factors where deviation from standard procedures could accelerate the process. This risk is hard to quantify, it can materialize in unexpected ways (just like nobody expected Chernobyl or Fukushima) and it will cost such rich and densely populated country as Germany trillions. The choice between „you may loose everything but Russia will suffer next year“ and „let’s try something else to actually stop the war“ has pretty obvious outcome.

> This risk is hard to quantify, it can materialize in unexpected ways (just like nobody expected Chernobyl or Fukushima) and it will cost such rich and densely populated country as Germany trillions.

You know everyone who died from Fukushima died from the evacuation not radiation, right? You know more people are killed in Germany every year from coal pollution than have died as a result of Chernobyl in total?

So what if they died of the evacuation, the nuclear accident caused the evacuation. I find this argument mind-boggling, because people didn't die directly of radiation exposure it is somehow ok that Japan had to evacuate a significant population? If this would happen e.g. to Krümmel you'd have to evacuate the second largest city in Germany, that's 2 million people.

The point is that the people didn’t need to be evacuated.

Some of them likely would have been completely fine and completely unexposed to dangerous levels of radiation.. but not all of them.. and it was impossible to know which were which until weeks and months later when they did more thorough testing.

Many local areas were reporting over radiation of >500 millisieverts/year, which is ~150x the typical background dose. The famous XKCD Radiation chart shows a bunch of Fukushima related doses -- it was actually pretty dangerous for people close to the exclusion zone!

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Why do you think so? To me the argument sounds like:

> no one died of radiation, since they were evacuated. The people who did die, because of the evacuation, shouldn’t count because they didn’t die from the radiation. The evacuation wasn’t necessary, which is proven since no one died from radiation.

And the notion that more people would have died from the radiation if they didn’t evacuate is just ignored. Well, no one died in the fire. The only people that died did because they jumped from windows. But that no one died in the fire proves that the fire wasn’t dangerous and they didn’t need to jump in the first place.

The downside of nuclear power is, potentially & in rare circumstances, a large number of people have to move.

I don't want to trivialise that - it is a big cost. But it isn't exactly like we're talking a threat to anyone's health and well-being. And when I say "rare" I mean once, globally, every 25 years with 1970s plant designs. It is quite a bit safer now with the absurd safety standards people make nuclear keep.

Basically, although costly, it is a tiny risk once we estimate [danger x likelihood = risk].

The problem with nuclear plants is the risk is really unknown. One cannot say it is small.

For example, nobody considered that Russia would fire artillery against nuclear reactors. And now a threat of attacks with powerful conventional weapons against nuclear reactors and waste processing/storage has to be considered very seriously.

Similarly we cannot assume that technological progress would not allow a single terrorist with right equipment to trigger another Chernobyl.

> For example, nobody considered that Russia would fire artillery against nuclear reactors.

I think in that sentence, the scary part is not the nuclear reactor part. And my understanding is nuclear plant design includes consideration of missile impacts.

The biggest downside right now is that it is to slow and to expensive to build new plants to make any meaningful impact in either gas deliveries from Russia or climate disaster.

> So what if they died of the evacuation, the nuclear accident caused the evacuation.

I wasn't aware that the nuclear accident caused massive flooding (the person you're responding to is saying that everyone died from the tsunami, not the radiation). Your point still stands about large economic costs to exclusion zones, but I don't feel you responded in good faith. As per the article (and as someone who actually did study nuclear physics), the risk of creating an exclusion zone in Germany is extremely small. Last I checked German doesn't have many earthquakes nor large bodies of water that could lead to danger from tsunamis. Germany seems fairly stable from an environmental standpoint, so the only real causes for a nuclear disaster would be from a freak accident. Considering we've learned a lot about safety in the last decade (and way more since Chernobyl), this risk is pretty small.

In Ukraine a nuclear power station was recently shelled with artillery.

If a power station was shelled in Germany what measures would avoid an exclusion zone?

And to be clear, there are plenty of groups that would deliberately cause an issue exclusion zone.

How is it different than shelling a water dam? I would wager it is much easier to do huge harm that way than to shell a concrete hull made to withstand two planes simultaneously hitting it, or even cutting the main pipe in half, which will still safely shut down the plant. The only real (and exceptionally tiny) risk with modern nuclear plants is some contamination, but it needs several several fuckups to happen even with a goddamn tsunami hitting it

No exclusion zone is needed after a dam breach.

A reactor rupture causes widespread contamination even with modern reactors. There is nothing at all in modern designs that stops that.

A few years after Fukushima we had a even large evacuation done in California, 180,000 people (and the relocation of a fish hatchery) compared to 150,000 people in Japan. It did not make international news, the death toll was not estimated, and things went back to normal fairly fast.

Large evacuations are rare but they aren't that uncommon. It just doesn't get the news attention. It is a bit like traffic deaths, which might also be a significant portion of the deaths caused by the evacuation. Force 180,000 to take to the road and some will not return back alive.

Living downstream of a hydro power dam is actually more dangerous than living near a nuclear plant. The destructive forces of a dam is barely being maintained by a thin layer of concrete, and it only takes a bit of human mistakes and bad weather to cause mayhem and death.

Disasters like flood or fire don’t usually render large areas uninhabitable - people can return home, rebuild and live as usual. Nuclear incidents on the contrary have long term economic effects and public health dangers. My Russian grandfather died from cancer after unknowingly spending some time in unrestricted area of radioactive fallout 15 years after the incident (see Mayak plant [1] and Techa river [2]). The local population of Muslumovo there was resettled long after the catastrophe when the details of the incident were made known.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techa

The discussion around Fukushima is not about the loss of land that got rendered uninhabitable, it is exclusively focused on the loss of life. If you want to change the discussion into be about the loss of land we also need to consider how an hydro power dam changes the landscape, turning habitable land into uninhabitable lakes or turning arid land into deserts by changing water flows. For the amount of energy that nuclear power produce, I am uncertain if land usage that can't be used for housing/farming is something that should be argued as an point against it.

It sad that your Russian grandfather died because the government was dishonest and didn't protect their citizens. I know similar stories from mining towns where especially radon tend to be of such high levels that people end up getting cancer and die. Most nations have regulations to prevent that but it took many lives before those regulations where in place. Fossil fuels are particular guilty in creating large uninhabitable areas because of increase radiation risks, but basically any mining has been guilty. Cut into the ground and significant amount of radioactive material will end up in the air and water.

>The discussion around Fukushima is not about the loss of land that got rendered uninhabitable, it is exclusively focused on the loss of life.

This conversation is happening in response to my mentioning of Fukushima (see the thread above). I did not focus exclusively on the loss of life and do not see why the discussion should be restricted to that topic.

Nevertheless, "uninhabitable" means people cannot live there so it's still within your frame. You cannot live in the area with significant radioactivity without risking your life. Loss of life can be prevented by quickly moving people from the dangerous area, but this is also undesirable. This is not comparable to environmental effects related to construction of dams or mining activities, because those can be estimated in advance and mitigations including resettling can be planned. This is also the reason why new mining projects in Germany are rarely happening and there's ongoing process to stop mining coal. If you want to account for possible radioactive fallout from a nuclear plant incident and plan mitigations in advance, there's simply no place in Germany where you could put a circle with 30-50 km radius and just remove all people from there. Practically all land in Germany is covered by urban areas, agricultural lands or natural reserves - increased risks associated with extension of timeline for existing reactors without major and time-consuming investment are unacceptable there.

Are you saying that its acceptable that an energy source is creating large areas of uninhabitable land, as long as it slow enough that people can plan for it?

Quickly moving people from the dangerous area is undesirable, but as I said previously, California did exactly that. It would be interesting to see an estimate on how many died from it so we could make an apple to apple comparison.

When looking at energy sources it is good to look at statistics. Per unit of energy produced, how much land is used. How many lives are lost. How many are maimed or injured.

If we are jumping directly to unacceptable risks, continuing funding Russian military is unacceptable risk to Germany. Continuing burning fossil fuel and causing global warming is unacceptable. Not having enough enough electricity produced to meet demand is unacceptable. Paying more for electricity than the economy can handle is unacceptable. Continuing having nuclear power plants is unacceptable. Solving the unacceptable problems seems to be impossible, and thus some things that are unacceptable will need to be accepted. The question is which one people are willing to stomach. Personally I kind of dislike the idea of funding civilian slaughter and Russian quest for lebensraum.

> Personally I kind of dislike the idea of funding civilian slaughter and Russian quest for lebensraum.

Germany stopping buying gas now will neither stop the war, nor it will prevent Russian military from receiving money from Russian government. Everyone who repeats this idea as you do is just diverting the discussion from other options.

Yes, you may feel some moral obligation to cut off economic ties to Russia, but there are always stupid moral choices (doing more harm than good) and reasonable ones. Continuing with nuclear, stopping gas imports are both stupid choices. Locking cash paid for gas on an escrow account in neutral country could work better. Accelerating investment in renewables and energy conservation, cutting red tape, shipping heavy weapons and offering other support to Ukraine are more pragmatic and impactful options.

The risk that continuing buying gas from Russia will cause more war and further destruction is higher than the risk that continuing operations of nuclear power will cause a nuclear accident.

We can call names if we want. Continuing heating the planet up by burning fossil fuels when we have a cleaner option is stupid and history won't look favorable to fossil fuel advocates. There is a mass extinction occurring all over the world, especially in the oceans, just because people are afraid of a once in 100,000 year risk that with modern technology is even smaller risk. There has never been a earthquake recorded in Germany that has been large enough to interfere with German nuclear plants. Utterly madness how afraid people are to something which won't occur.

Conflict resources are internationally known to be a factor in war, in contributing to war, and to prolong wars. It doesn't matter if the aggressor is an IS, some warlord in Congo, or Russia. A major tactic dealing with IS was to cut their funding, and while it did take many years, the effect of cutting IS funding is rarely disputed.

> Utterly madness how afraid people are to something which won't occur.

What you are doing here is a perversion of facts and opinions. Nobody is afraid of a nuclear incident caused by an earthquake in Germany. Nobody in this thread was talking about it. The examples of Fukushima or Chernobyl were provided only as examples of unforeseen events, that illustrate why safety must be taken seriously, why any „acceleration“ is dangerous and why actual risks and costs can be higher than some people wish to see.

>The risk that continuing buying gas from Russia will cause more war and further destruction is higher than the risk that continuing operations of nuclear power will cause a nuclear accident.

Europe will stop buying gas from Russia relatively soon to ensure it has less resources to wage new wars. It is absolutely baseless claim to say that immediate stop will have a significant positive impact.

> Germany stopping buying gas now will neither stop the war, nor it will prevent Russian military from receiving money from Russian government

Please provide your facts that providing Russia with more funds won't prolong and extend their war in Europe.

We can call your assertion a perversion of facts and opinions if you like. It is absolutely fact-less to say that immediate stop will not have a significant positive impact. An opinion one might say.

It is a fact that nation do see the purchase of conflict resources as an contributing factor for prolonging wars. Europe might stop buying fossil fuels from Russia in 5-10-20 years from now. It is also a Fact that we don't know if it will be too late, what Russia will do in the mean time, nor how they will react to more sanctions. The risk is that Russia will invade more countries if funding continue is only something which people can estimate, like the risk that a nuclear accident might occur within that time frame.

Please provide your crystal ball for inspection.

Power dams are historically very safe: See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Also, Chernobyl was due to a completely incompetent plant manager. They intentionally disabled many fail safes in order to get the plant into a vulnerable state.

I think human error is one of the kinds of error it's really hard to work around. You are always going to have people who make mistakes or even intentionally cut corners or do unsafe things, depending on the circumstances.

Would I expect a German plant to be run in a safer manner in the 2020s than a Soviet Ukrainian plant in the 1980s? Sure, absolutely. Both because of the design of the plants, and because of the different safety cultures. But I don't think we can just hand-wave a disaster away and claim that it only happened because of X or Y or Z, without being certain X, Y, and Z have been eliminated. And I don't think we can say that with certainty.

Chernobyl was no error per se. It was conscious decision with political background, possible, because entire system of values in USSR was upside down. In normal country there would be no reason to do any of that.

And Germany has never had any odd political issues?

This type of issues? No. I assume you mean nazis, but while it's hard to find words to describe their crimes, they had pretty robust approach to engineering. On the east side from the other hand ideology always beat logic.

Also, if we're going to assume, that everything we build will be foundation for the next Hitler, then there's hardly point in doing anything.

The point is that corrupt political outcomes occur anywhere.

And Nazi Germany had exactly the same issues you identified in Soviet Union: a reluctance to tell authority bad news.

Of course it was present, like in any authoritarian system.

But you can see that the scale of fuckups for these two is nowhere near of each other. Modern evidence is Ukrainian war, which Russians believed, can win in 48 hours.

I'm not sure what side of the argument you are on.

My point is that authoritarian regimes are possible anywhere; they lead to information being surpressed; and this could be dangerous in the case of nuclear reactors.

The example of Russia seems an excellent example of the same pattern.

Not sure if I have to pick a side. Usually there's some truth at both ends. :-)

My point is, that chance of USSR-like regime in western Europe are pretty low, and being afraid to do anything, because it might be used by this hypothetical regime will probably cause more harm than good.

For eg. right now we're feeding Russia with money, which is guaranteed to be bad for us in the long run. I assume we are doing that, because it will be easier to find single scapegoat for nuclear plant failure, than for years of bad foreign politics.

> that chance of USSR-like regime in western Europe are pretty low

Why? Surely if Brexit or Berlusconi or Le Pen or Orban or Erdogan shows us anything it shows how democratic outcomes are unpredictable, especially over the 50 year plus timeframe of a Nuclear Plant.

And how can we avoid incompetence in the future?

Don’t have the politicians in charge tell people to over ride multiple safety procedures. Actually pay attention to safety in some fashion.

Oh good - we just need to change human nature and fix endemic political corruption. Good thing none of that exists near the US nuclear industry.

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2204/ML22040A111.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/flynn-backed-plan-...

So as long as we make sure that only competent and sane people get elected to political posts, we are safe. That will make me sleep well at nights.

If you're assuming that political situation will come anywhere near this known from communist block, then random nuclear plant failure is probably pretty low on the list of the issues they caused. Much more people died due to simply saying something against propaganda than as a result of Chernobyl.

I know that politicians suck, but if we do everything assuming that next Stalin and Lenin are inevitable, then even knfie production starts to look suspicious.

For each Stalin, we get quite a few Trump.

Depending on politicians - or anyone's - ability to completely eliminate that risk is completely naive.

And that's why scientists (and politicians listening to them) have consistently underestimated the risks. Scientists somehow think it is not their job to account for Human error, fallibility or even depravity (see Russians attacking nuclear plants in Ukraine).

In software development we patch and upgrade libraries to remove security vulnerabilities.

With nuclear plants we first of all do not acknowledge any vulnerabilities and if we do find one we do absolutely nothing because upgrading safety costs billions or requires building a new power plant which costs 10s of billions. Running nuclear power plants in unsafe conditions is an everyday business affair.

It's important to note that Chernobyl and Fukushima have quite different (multiple!) causal factors leading to their meltdowns. Chernobyl was mostly do to highly secretive nature of nuclear (with information actively being suppressed by the Soviet Union), lack of safety equipment, poor staffing, poor response time, and a lack of knowledge of physics (xenon spiking). People mostly chalk it up to incompetence, but saying that's all that happened is naive. A lot of this isn't as surprising since the tech was very new at the time and the cultural warfare going on. Fukushima was a combination of cheaping out on safety concerns and a lack of scientific understanding that such a large earthquake could happen in the region (remember, that was the largest in recorded history for the area. Tsunami records indicating similar sizes are hard to differentiate fact from fiction). We've also learned a lot about fault dymanics since then (e.g. that Cascadia can have a massive quake too). Germany on the other hand is geologically stable and there's not many environmental concerns like tsunamis, earthquakes, or tornadoes. So we just have to hope we've learned some safety things in the last 50 years.

2 people died in Chernobyl at explosion time, 28 in the coming months, 30 in the coming years.

None died in Fukushima.

As far as people's lives are concerned, the death toll of the war in Ukraine is already two orders of magnitude higher.

Economic costs are incomparable too.

Tell that to the families of the "exterminators" in Chernobyl. Tell them that it had nothing to do with radiation from Chernobyl that most of them died by cancer years after the accident.

This is an urban legend. There are 4000 statistical casualties.

Liquidators (not exterminators) were well over 100,000 and while I was too young in 1986 to participate in liquidation efforts, I knew a few personally later on. They got their share of health problems from poor logistics on the ground. Like sleeping for months in tents at sub-zero temperatures. But not from radiation exposure.

You're emotionalizing the discourse. The people killed by other types of power plants have families too, you know. Your level of propaganda implies an ideological agenda against nuclear power. I do think the general sentiment for environmentalism and against the governments and industries that destroyed the planet was and is justified. But the anti-nuclear ideology was the wrong conclusion and has done more harm than good (lots of burned coal, lots of misguided activists/politicians). Nuclear power is comparatively healthy (even considering your inflated worst-case numbers), albeit expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

The Fukushima plant was older than the Chernobyl plant, maybe we should just shut them down and build new ones to save us the cost of another nuclear exclusion zone?

I've yet to see an insurance that would insure against human incompetence.

If nobody provably died because of the Fukushima accident, it was because of expansive and costly evacuations. The Japanese minstry of trade estimates the cost of the cleanup to $187 billion, though I'm not sure if that really includes everything. And that number is certainly not the upper bound on what could happen when other plants have similar or worse accidents.

It's a very small risk with a huge downside. The fact that scientists have consistently underestimated the likelihood of these events - even though so far there has never been one caused by ill intent - is not reassuring.

Is the cleanup related to nuclear, or the whole tsunami?

Also, how is it underestimated? There was an exceptionally huge tsunami there, and even with that there would have been no trouble given the backup-generators would work well and even then, only a slight radiation exposure happened. There have been orders of magnitude more failures in other power plants causing much bigger damage (not even counting the environmental effect of them!).

Can you name such accidents specifically? I just stated a figure from the Japanese Ministry of trade, and that seems to be the radioactive cleanup and paying of benefits etc.. while there is another figure that decommissioning the plant will cost about 750 billion US Dollars.

A particular problem are millions of square meters of radio-active top-soil and where to store it. Yes, those problems have not been solved yet, and most evacuees have not yet returned and will probably never return. No amount of propaganda will convince them that the site is safe after the "safe" reactor blew up and contaminated everything. Meanwhile nuclear power has become really unpopular in Japan. People like you will dismiss this as irrational fear. Or is it irrational that you think that the future risk is a) actually quantifiable and b) tolerable? Because neither of these is scientific consensus.

The number of deaths from a nuclear incident will be significant in Germany in any case, either as a result of evacuation or from radiation. The economic damage overall will be much higher than in any incident of the past, due to environmental impact, destroyed or de-valued property, disrupted businesses etc. Half of German GDP will be the lowest estimate.

And you know that there is no reliable casualty count from Chernobyl? The Soviets didn't count and follow up, nobody else wanted to do that neither. And long term effects, e.g. highe cancer rates, are extremely hard to quabtify and correlate woth a singluar event.

> According to the official, internationally recognised death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...

Official =|= reliable

The USSR, and successor states, lost track of the liquidators, completely. It helped in not paying them. The West was fine with it, it made it easier to sell nuclear as save. It also meant that any Liquidator who died of conplications after Chernobyl was most likely not included in official figures, because nobody officially counted him as having been there in the first place.

Not matter how much will be repeated, both claims are still false. Had been debunked here extensively before.

Without disagreeing per se, some of the reasoning is dubious.

Studying something in grad school likely makes you familiar, not an expert. I would be skeptical of anyone without at least a decade of industry experience. No one becomes an expert by going to grad school; you have to build real things under real constraints. I went through a selective hard sciences program (coincidentally including nuclear chemistry) and industry people forgot more than we ever learned.

School creates confident sounding opinions but it rarely creates deep domain expertise. I would put more value in the opinions of people that have built or worked on real systems.

And to be clear, I am broadly pro-nuclear. I think it is a critical part of the energy mix that has been maligned on anti-scientific grounds by parties with an agenda separate from providing clean, inexpensive energy.

Ah yes, completely unscientific... Like the Russian soldiers who dug trenches in the "red forest" near Tschernobyl, got radiation poisoning and scattered the stuff all over the place where people still have to work to contain the impossible accident that happend decades ago.

Yes, things like that and "Oh, from now on nothing will happen, science says so!"scares the shit out of people. Anti-scientific? There is just no public support for storing the waste anywhere near where people live. And there isn't a safe site in Germany anyway.

Safe nuclear reactors may be decades away from broad commercialization.

I don’t think any nuclear supporter would call Chernobyl impossible. Rather inevitable. Same as what will happen if we don’t go nuclear.

I've heard a lot of supporters who generally disregard the possibility of future such accidents happening. Certainly you wouldn't want it to happen anywhere near you?

And there is no clear, scientific reasoning that nuclear power is safer than the best mix of alternatives. First of all, any calculation to that regard is horrendously complicated on the nuclear side. Second of all, it always depends on the likelihoods observed in the past. There better be nobody sabotaging a nuclear plant, or stealing waste material for a dirty bomb and so on. Because that's impossible to calculate, so it is entirely reasonable to err on the side of caution.

You realize that this is not a coherent and rational response, yes? You don't address anything, you just throw out oddly random straw men. Maybe I am incorrect but nothing you wrote would contribute to that discussion.

In my opinion the opposition to nuclear power is not anti-scientific. It is bullshit to just label all the proponents scientists and the opposition non-scientists. There are two factions arguing on scientific grounds.

That there is another level to the discussion, the fear of nuclear disasters is another topic. It is impossible to say where the "rational" level of fear is. Scientists have been wrong about the risks too often. With the huge downsides, people will gladly err on the side of caution.

My arguments are examples why the "anti-scientific" argument is just BS. The fear is not always rational, but always legitimate. It is all about risk tolerance.

GP might have ranted, but after decades of searching a suitable place for long-term storage of nuclear waste in Germany, the list of candidate sites is empty. And the willingness of anyone in Germany to tolerate a nuclear waste storage facility in their neighborhood is non existant. That is the reason why nuclear is unpopular in Germany. On the other hand, Germany also imported most of its uran from Russia. So that would have to change as well if Germany where to return to nuclear.

The original article also treats all sources of electricity as interchangable. Some kind of plants are slow to turn on and up (e.g. nuclear plants) whereas others are very fast to turn on, off, up, or down (e.g. natural gas plants). The latter kind of plants is needed to compensate the unpredictability of solar and wind energy. Nuclear plants cannot fulfill that role.

In my opinion Germany should have started to invest way more in the last two decades in synthetization of natural gas from thin air and cheap solar and wind energy. That would provide us with huge storage facilities for energy. And we could make huge amounts of natural gas heating unit eco-friendly without having to replace them. And even ten or fifteen years back it was clear that not being dependend on Russia would be a good thing.

Do you think the politicians who made the decision were any more qualified?

Not to argue the case, but they surely had ample opportunity to be briefed by persons who were very qualified-- and if they failed to get those briefings they were failing in their duty.

Chancellor Merkel holds a PhD in quantum physics, I think she knew how to read scientific papers, statistics, probabilities.

So any other countries’ pro-nuclear decision was made by politicians only, not knowing much about the topic?

> I would put more value in the opinions of people that have built or worked on real systems.

+100. It took me a while to internalise Nassim Taleb's point of skin in the game. Now that I exactly know what he means I've learned to more or less disregard opinions of non-practitioners.

Interesting. Which of his books do you refer here to?

This one[1]. To be clear I haven't read the book. However, I have read quite a bit of his articles and watched his talks all of which I highly recommend.

The crux of the argument is simple enough. One should attach more weightage to opinions of who have stake in what they talking about. For instance, an a bond trader will have more realistic picture of economy than someone like Paul Krugman. Bond trader earns his wages by being more correct about economy. Paul Krugman on the other hand can change his opinion at the drop of a hat with zero negative impact to his earnings.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36064445-skin-in-the-gam...

Just be aware that you very easily talk yourself into believing that someone does or doesn't have skin in the game on accident or to maintain a certain opinion.

Measuring expertise is particularly tricky with the nuclear industry.

Is it enough to be an expert in the underlying physics? Should you be an engineer with experience in any one of the dozens of disciplines? Do you need to be familiar with the specific design of a reactor (that is probably confidential)? Everyone is an expert but no one has a holistic view of everything. It's complicated!

In this particular case it's rather simple to define who is an expert: if you want to challenge government report, you have to understand the challenged topics very well, have to have a lot of factual information about the state of the German nuclear industry and have to understand how possible solutions will work.

> The author says they studied nuclear in grad school, and are probably therefore an expert.

That's not how it works. Just going to grad school (and it appears this is just for a Master's) doesn't imply you're suddenly an expert on an entire discipline. Even full professors don't generally claim to be experts in their entire fields; they become experts in their niches sub-fields/areas of research. You'd need to know what topics someone has actually studied, what their work/research was like, etc. before you can assume they're an expert in the areas you care about, and that information isn't given here.

I think this is moving the goalposts. According to you it's not enough to have the qualifications, you need specific ones in specific sub areas. What's to stop you dismissing him by dividing it up even more if it turns out he's actually studied the right area?

To me it sounds a bit like when anti vaxxers dismiss doctors who aren't epidemiologists, or when people dismiss Krugman because he's a trade economist and not some other subspecialty.

Just give the guy credit for his claim that he's studied this, chances are he's closer to the area than people who don't claim expertise and otherwise let him present his case, which is what really matters anyway.

> What's to stop you dismissing him by dividing it up even more if it turns out he's actually studied the right area?

I would think my reasonableness would stop me in that case, but there's not much I can offer you when you've already assumed otherwise.

And to be extremely clear: I was merely responding to the metric/reasoning used in the parent comment, not making any claims about the author's qualifications in particular. It would've applied to anybody, whether Einstein or just a random dude. Even for Einstein, you don't say "I know Einstein was an expert because he went to grad school", you say (for example) "I know Einstein was an expert in mechanics because he came up with relativity, an expert in electromagnetism because he explained the photoelectric effect, etc." That was my point, is all.

Being expert in this case means being familiar with the current situation in German nuclear industry and knowing it from the inside. Just knowing how nuclear plant works in theory is not enough.

He read the primary sources, including the German government's risk assessments for these plants.

In order to challenge these risk assessments he must know the specifics in detail. Just reading some public documents does not make him an expert.

So the actual quote is:

> I studied nuclear energy generation in my two MSc in Industrial Engineering.

which to me sounds not like he actually did a masters in nuclear power generation, but took some courses during his masters. But even if he did, that doesn't make him an expert, whom of the software developers here would let a grad student come to their company and say "I did a masters in CS I will tell all of you how to do your dev work"?

So yes this sounds exactly like the anti vaxxers, who say they studied some bioscience (or are even some doctors) and can somehow dismiss World renowned experts.

> whom of the software developers here would let a grad student come to their company and say "I did a masters in CS I will tell all of you how to do your dev work"?

Isn't this... how you hire people?

That's a fair point, but does a few courses make someone a subject matter expert? Probably not. Could they still have something constructive to say? Probably? Should that verified with other sources? Of course.

> That's not how it works. Just going to grad school (and it appears this is just for a Master's) doesn't imply you're suddenly an expert on an entire discipline.

I think it makes you pretty knowledgeable. Expert is a bit vague. Many would consider expertise in having extensive knowledge beyond that of the public. If he studied in undergrad he'd have this. He'd get more in grad school. But if we're talking expert as in "leading expert" then no, he clearly isn't that. But by your own definition, it means that the politicians that made these evaluations and decisions themselves were not experts. If a full professor does not qualify then even a PhD in nuclear physics but working in politics certainty does not qualify.

So I'm a bit confused by this comment. I appreciate an appeal to experts as opposed to assuming that we here on HN know better, but I feel this comment moved the goal post too far and just shifted the decision to experts in an inconsistent manner.

I don't think the line between "expert" and "knowledgeable" is in any way blurry enough for it to affect this discussion. For something as serious as nuclear power plants and their safety (not to mention political factors), I don't think "let's expect considerably more than a Master's degree in nuclear engineering... we need an expert" is a remotely controversial statement or a movement of any goalpost. I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the public sentiment/goalposts have been and will continue to be on this issue.

Surely an expert actually does work to come to conclusions. They build a team, write papers, do research etc. Follow an objective process.

My main point here is that the gp said "op isn't an expert because they don't have xyz qualifications so can't criticize these experts (who also don't have xyz qualifications)". It's the inconsistency.

Also, the piece is at such a high level that it really doesn't take a lot of expertise to write. The summary of the article is "I'd rather take the risks of nuclear by restarting our existing nuclear infrastructure rather than to continue to fund the Russian war machine." That's really it. He gives more support and tries to sound scientific, but it's just an opinion and the guy is an actual expert in marketing. Seems fair enough.

Everything in life is a tradeoff. To me, the risks of keeping the nuclear plants in Germany are much lower than the risks of continuing to fund Russia.

The economic effects of stopping gas consumption are not immediate for Russia due to large financial reserves and it will not stop the war. It will certainly harm Russian economy, but several months later and EU has no power to fully stop Russian exports - China is a big consumer too.

This is the beginning of a multi decade conflict. The end game is Russia becoming a North Korean style vassal state of China. Every world leader that is speaking about the conflict seems fine with this outcome.

Also, it will take a while for Russia to build enough natural gas pipelines to China.

In practice, those pipelines will be Putin's leash. (He will need China, but they have no need for him.)

I hope Ukraine maintains its independence, but it's just the first battle in a war Putin accidentally created, and will surely lose.

> I hope Ukraine maintains its independence, but it's just the first battle in a war Putin accidentally created, and will surely lose.

Putin did NOT accidentally create this war. It's clear that this was intentional and that there are real people suffering because of that intention. He tried opening more doors to see what benefits he could gain. That isn't an accident.

Maybe OP meant it in the way that Putin wanted to just rush over Ukraine, replace the government and be done with it. That would have been a very short war at best. But that is not the war he got, so yes, he "accidentally" created the current one.

“Accident” implies a lack of responsibility, which is not the case.

I meant he accidentally started WWIII at the same time he made it clear Russia's military is collapsing from the inside out.

It probably won't escalate to a shooting war outside of Ukraine, but that's mostly because the rest of the world will probably be able to stop him via a proxy war.

He showed spectacular lack of judgment. I'm sorry if anyone thought I meant he lacks responsibility for his actions. I hope Putin is charged and convicted of war crimes.

By your definition the Korean and Vietnam Wars would have counted as World War Three as well.

There is a kind of an economic world war brewing right now, but I expected China to be on the receiving end from the start...

I agree, there is no way an oligarch just simply starts a war he knows he is going to lose. The least you would expect is that he wants to maintain his power as long as possible, not accelerate his demise

> This is the beginning of a multi decade conflict.

Germany is currently removing the dependency on russian gas. There is a consensus on this within Germany. The discussion on this topic revolves entirely around the question of how quickly to do this.

If this is or sure a multi decade conflict, what does it matter if this takes 1-2y instead of 1-2 weeks?

Agreed. Many folks in this thread seem to be saying things like “it will only help some” or “it will take a long time” which are not arguments against going back to nuclear power.

continuing the nuclear power will have almost no impact on the war or dependence to Russia. The biggest issue by far is gas

The article covers this. The electricity that would be produced by the plants is enough to offset 100% of Russian natural gas imports.

Gas and electricity are not entirely fungible, but Germany uses enough natural gas to produce electricity to cover the reduced imports.

Gas and electricity are not at all fungible for Germany or the EU. You’ve repeatedly made this claim in the thread and other commenters posted detailed reports showing the use of gas in the German economy.

It’s suicidal for the EU to give up gas short or mid term.

To make the point a little clearer - natural gas is an important resource for the chemical industry, for example input to the Haber-Bosch synthesis of Ammonia. The Hydrogen used is mostly gained from methane, that is natural gas. Ammonia is fundamental in producing fertilizer - cutting of natural gas could severely reduce fertilizer production, at a time when two of the largest grain exporters are at war and unlikely to produce much in terms of exports.

It’s possible to produce the required hydrogen using electricity and electrolysis, but not at a moments notice. You can’t just easily replace gas in electricity production by using nuclear- gas power plants are used for peak load, nuclear power plants for base load.

Sure but the article says 30% of Russian gas is used for electricity which is fungible with other electric production - nobody denies that Germany needs gas for other things.

Although if greens in Germany were actually committed to reducing energy use they would have subsidized converting buildings from gas heat to using heat pumps instead of subsidizing solar production in Germany.

Gas in electricity production is mostly not used for base load - it’s peaker plants that need to spin up and adjust load within minutes. Nuclear replaces coal, not gas in most use cases.

Heat pumps are subsidized in germany.

And if you want to blame the greens - they’ve been the most vocal party asking for energy independence, subsidizing energy efficient technologies and were very vocal against nord-stream 2. It’s just that they weren’t in power at all in the last decade.

Nevertheless, more base load means less peak plant use.

That’s not how base load/peak load works. You can’t just increase the base power output - that would lead to too much more electricity in the network, you need to balance the energy provided with the energy used. That’s exactly why you need peak load plants that can follow the load curve quickly. Gas turbines and water turbines can do that, thermal power plants cannot. They’re too sluggish.

I find it quite likely that running higher base load will result in electricity exportable to other European nations who are also trying to quite gas.

The general thrust of your argument seems to be “nuclear power will not help shed Russian gas even a little bit” which seems ludicrous.

If your argument would hold true, that load would already be taken by coal power plants which fill the same role. Gas peaker plants are substantially more expensive to operate per kWh of electricity produced than base load plants. They fill an important niche, but do not provide substantial continuous output. Nuclear replaces coal, coal replaces nuclear. Renewables plus gas (or storage) replace both.

There are other niches where gas is used to produce electricity, for example we have a gas micro power plant that produces both electricity and heat for the apartment complexes on the local compound. This too, cannot be replaced by a nuclear plant.

Gas used for electric production and nuclear electricity are absolutely fungible. I suspect that at least some nuclear power could be brought back online within months if there was a will to do so.

Gas was chosen because it is a cost effective transitional power source. You can turn it off the moment you have enough renewables. You're not going to turn off your nuclear powerplants, they are too expensive.

To me the likelihood of even the remaining nuclear reactors having serious accidents is higher than Russia trying something successfully against Germany. You can say to Putin: "You and what army?" It looks like virtually any NATO member state would be able to defend itself alone against the conventional army of Russia, much less with allied help.

Nuclear weapons is another topic, but those won't be affected by short term sanctions in the slightest...

Can you actually quantify these risks like the article does?

Nobody can quantify these risks and that's a big problem. Assuming the risk conforms to what happened before is a dangerous fallacy. For example so far nobody purposefully sabotaged a plant, stole radioactive material for dirty bombs and no semi-rogue country used a nuclear weapon. None of that risk is quantifiable.

But what happened in Fukushima or Tschernobyl is bad enough. The damage caused by the Fukushima incident might well run into the trillion US Dollar range. No, it's not cleaned up yet, they still don't really know what to do with all the soil and how to demolish the plant. You really don't want anything like that happening in your country, even at the low probabilities the nuclear lobby claims.

The author is misrepresenting or misunderstanding the nuclear waste argument in the report. The report says that you have to consider the costs of storing the waste if you want to run the reactors longer than planned, that's it.

And we have not solved the storage at all in Germany, there is no plan yet on where to put long-term storage for nuclear waste. This is certainly a solvable problem, but the fact that it has not been solved until now does not inspire confidence.

There's nothing really to solve. Dry-cask storage can be used long term. The waste is secure, easily monitored, and if at some point in the future reprocessing makes economic sense that can be done too.

You say that with great confidence, can you give any examples where people have securely stored highly dangerous things for 100s or 1000s of years?

The quantity of highly radioactive waste honestly isn't that large. It probably won't have to be stored that long; per [0] (turn on captions if you don't speak Dutch) that volume, given current energy usage in a first world country like the Netherlands, might amount to that of an apple per lifetime. That's tiny! Given advances in spaceflight in recent decades, we might be able to affordably send that amount of radioactive matter off the planet entirely. The sun seems like a fine place to safely put it for 100,000 years.

[0]: https://youtu.be/YjFWiMJdotM?t=610

I don't think anyone wants to send radioactive waste to the sun. The possibility of it exploding during launch and spreading over a wide area is way too high.

Burying it deep down in the earth is far safer. Sure, someone might eventually dig it up someday, but that'd be limited exposure in a confined area.

I don't get it. Just reprocess the waste and dilute the rest back to original levels of background radiation. Bury small amounts all over the country.

The pyramids?

(Granted, the contents were not highly dangerous, but they would have been adequate for nuclear waste storage until at least now.)

And most of them were looted.

Spot on. Even USSR-time RTGs have been looted, causing contamination and deaths, despite people being aware of nuclear power for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

So what? If, 500 years from now, future generations want to use today's waste in advanced reactors, what's the problem?

The problems would be if someone in the future looted some ancient artefacts they didn’t understand.

Most of the waste is inert after a decade. 58% is Very low level waste, 34% low level, 9% intermediate, and only 0.03% is high level[0]. Only the high level needs long term storage and deep geological repositories are well suited for this[1]. These big cask storage containers are mostly holding low and intermediate level waste. High level is often stored in the reactor or in another pool.

Mind you, in comparison the waste of gas is CO2, which is creating an existential crisis. (There's also other wastes like lead and heavy metals, from anything electronic, that need to be stored _forever_. Lead and heavy metals don't decay. They are dangerous forever.)

[0] https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-wast...

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

>The waste is secure

People don't remember the Hanau scandal of the 80s/90s.

It was the 'Atomic village' of Germany, home to the two largest nuclear companies of Germany (one was, funnily, called Nukem). Their managers were accused of taking bribes, selling radioactive waste for weapons, and mislabeling atomic waste for cheaper disposal (including just chucking it into the sea!). It's one of the reasons why the early Green party was so anti-nuclear, there was no trust.

Atomic waste can be securely stored, but there will always be corners to be cut to make a quick buck.

There's a German language summary here: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/hanau-der-anfang-vom-en...

We have a responsibility to future generations. Which is a really long time, considering the half-life involved.

"Secure and easily monitored" doesn't account for: Natural disasters, human error or human depravity (sabotage, shooting, terrorism etc). And what if the government breaks down for some reason? If for any reason the "securely and safely monitoring" gets neglected...

The way it is going, future generations will be left with much worse problems that a few tons of nuclear waste.

To stop climate change with nuclear power, you wouldn't risk "a few tons of nuclear waste" (which we already can't store safely), but it would have to be scaled up by a factor of ten at least. The plants and waste storage sites would have to be everywhere. Including where there is no trustworthy government. Including where people can shoot at the sites, steal material for dirty bombs, start their own nuclear weapons program and whatever.

So no, "a few tons of nuclear waste" really doesn't capture the problem...

I went to grad school. I never, ever claim to be an expert in the field I studied, because I have virtually no real-world industry experience in it. Two more years of school does not make one an expert; it prepares one to become an expert.

> ... ignoring the fact that the disposal facilities were planned before they decided to prematurely close the plants.

That is not true, there are zero long-term storage facilities for nuclear waste in Germany. We only have short term and midterm storage facilities. That is the root problem. Nuclear power plants were build and operated without a plan how to dispose of the waste.

To be fair the same is true for every power generation source that ever existed. CO2, coal slag, disused solar panels, composite rotor blades, all lack a clear strategy for long term disposal.

You can resurface solar panel wafers and then build new ones. Glass and aluminum are easy to recycle as well. Lead free solder is used everywhere.

Only cadmium based thin film solar panels are problematic.

The author only said they took classes in nuclear engineering.

I think it’s unreasonable to classify someone as an expert because they took a few courses in the curriculum for a related discipline.

Fans of nuclear power really love those "negligible" risks, don't they? The general public not so much. Certainly not after "impossible accidents" keep happening. And then the nuclear fans say "Now it's all better, pinky promise with cherry on top!" Well...

No, the author doesn't seem to be an expert. Also for his claims you don't need a nuclear engineering background, you need economics.

If the political party doesn't matter, the author shouldn't have made false accusations against the Green party and used those as "support" for his argument.

Usually in 2022 when a "fan" of nuclear power points "negligible" risks, it's regarding climate change, i.e. they think the industrial risk of not getting to the emissions targets in scenarios without a nuclear outweigh nuclear risks. Here is a recent relatively neutral study of different mix scenarios for 2050 in France with their different risks category assessed: https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2022-01/Energy%20p...

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