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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party. It's understandable that France doesn't want to go with that, as they don't want to be forced down the same ruinous path we're currently on here in Germany. And honestly, good for them.

It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. I did my PhD at the French nuclear energy agency and my French colleagues would always be puzzled when I talked about German energy policies and our anti-nuclear sentiment. But here in Germany the Green party will probably never reverse it's stance on nuclear energy, as their rise to popularity was strongly fueled by the anti-nuclear movement from the 80s and it's the one thing they can't abandon without losing a large number of followers.

I partially blame the highly ideological stance on the way people rise to power in politics and administration in Germany. In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...), whereas in Germany most people rise through social engineering and party politics and most top positions in the administration are filled by people with law degrees that don't have a clue about technology. In my opinion that's also a reason why we completely fail in everything regarding digitalization, lawyers are simply not good technical problem solvers.

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There are also many institutes (e.g IDW) constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc.

These people are constantly invited to present these „Zukunftsenergien“ as opposed to the old bad nuclear in talk shows.

And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive AND highest CO2 energy in Europe.

In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end.

Now we are reliant on russian gas and the politicians still want to keep closing the remaining three nuclear power plants.

The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power. We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants.

It‘s ridicioulous.

> And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive

Do you have any sources? Last time I checked, Germany and France weren't that far apart, if you remove taxes out of the costs. The thing is that Germany has a lot of Taxes that have nothing todo with how we generate the electricity. I.e. 90% of the electricity tax (Stromsteuer) goes into the government pension fund.

Technically, you're still not removing taxes from the equation, because the state owned nuclear plants in France are also funded by taxes, it's just not taxes that are added to the cost of units of electricity.

Which actually makes sense, if you have a high upfront cost, constant output source iike nuclear, taxing each individual unit makes no sense since the marginal cost is effectively zero up till you need to build a new plant. Whereas if you burn coal or gas, you want to incentivise people to cut back for cost, carbon and pollution reasons.

An even more sensible approach would be to tax the carbon directly and charge more for peak electricity since that contributes more to the infrastructure requirements, which I guess both countries will already be moving towards as is the current trend in most places.

Yes, taxes and subsidies distort the actual costs of energy production. But if you look at my example, 90% of the Stromsteuer (tax on your energy bill as a household) don't go into funding of energy production, but to stabilize the (very broken) german mandatory pension/retirment system. But yes, one could argue that it is just moving around taxes in the government spending household.

This is because taxes in Germany can’t be tied to a specified purpose. This is intentional.

The Stromsteuer ist only 5% of the price. It depends on your definition of taxes. The EEG-Umlage alone reached 6.5ct/kwh and directly paid for renewables. It‘s now taken out of the price, so the real price of energy is higher than what is paid by the consumer. The EEG Umlage is now hidden in and paid for by a special fund („Energie- und Klimafonds“)

You're saying that there is a transfer from nuclear to renewables of 6.5 cents/kWh for every kWh nuclear generates, or a net market distortion of 13c/kWh between the two (using the tenuous assumption of roughly equivalent capacities between the two sectors)?

That's more than I pay in the US in total per kWh for electricity, generated, distributed, and taxed.

6.5ct is added to the cost of every used kwh (no matter where it comes from) and paid to the producers of renewable energy

Germany jumped into solar really early and it's very far north so it’s not that relevant when considering todays tradeoffs.

41.3 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2016 was frankly excessive though it helped PV get much cheaper. Unfortunately, Germany now stuck with these huge agreed upon subsides for another decade.

They also "pulled out" of solar early. I have idea how anyone can make sense of German policies. They seem to be working solely on the basis of emotion. The outcome is a disastrous policy that created one of the highest energy prices for consumers for no good reason.

The Greens in Germany seem to be hell bent on de-industrializing Germany. They hate nuclear power and they hate all fossil fuels, but want to buy fracking LNG from the USA and fire up brown coal plants that were previously shut down to shove it to Putin. The outcome seems to be mass bankruptcies in what seems to be the social fabric of Germany, while getting a lot less energy for the same price.

The subsidy was focused on developing a domestic manufacturing sector. Unfortunately rather than pay the subsidy at at instill they bound future customers with it which hid just how much money was involved.

For accusing others of being highly emotional, this post is incredibly biased and doesn't hold a fact check.

- the Greens are the party most opposed to brown coal out of all German parties.

- Gas is far less emissions intense than most other forms of fossil fuels, so it is a good transitional source of energy.

- Germanies nuclear plants were built around 40 years ago, with a lifetime in mind of 40 years. The idea of arguing they can run longer because nothing happened in the last 40 years is preposterous, and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how industry works. Not only are the designs lacking essential security features, every single part was produced with 40 year lifetime in mind.

- the three plants that where built in 87 are going to continue to run for now.

> - Germanies nuclear plants were built around 40 years ago, with a lifetime in mind of 40 years. The idea of arguing they can run longer because nothing happened in the last 40 years is preposterous, and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how industry works. Not only are the designs lacking essential security features, every single part was produced with 40 year lifetime in mind.

It's normal to do a general maintenance (with upgrades to recent security standard) at the end of projected lifetime and then run it for another 40 years. It's absolute - economically speaking - bullshit to destroy a mostly-good nuclear power plant. It's not like the reactor core is the only thing there, anyways - even replacing it would be much better than tearing the place down.

The worst thing is - you lose experts, and they don't train new experts. And then there's no one to bring the nuclear power plant up again, or build a new one. Lost technology...

That's simply false, shutting down a nuclear power plant is extremely fucking expensive. Operators would love to cheaply extend the lifespan, but maintenance costs get so horrific over time it's simply not an option.

It's like trying to keep an old car on the road, except a few critical components are highly radioactive.

Facts are still facts and reality is still reality. The greens are calling for a reactivation of brown coal power plants[1]. Literally the dirtiest of all energy(including coal).

You can bring up your "facts" about Germany's nuclear power plants all you want. But the green policies are part of the reason why the investment in nuclear was halted and on top of that the German Taxpayer had to foot a massive payout to nuclear plant operators for the premature exit. [2]

[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/erdgas-brau...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-utilities-nuclear...

Sorry, but Die Grüne (The Greens) in Germany lost the plot a long time ago. Where they are in power for a long time, for example in BaWu, they are basically the CDU but greenwashed. "Sie kennen mich" anyone?

The EEG Umlage had also been payed by renewable producers which made storage unprofitable in Germany. ENERTRAG was kneekaped by this afaik.

Jeez, I know electricity prices in Europe are higher than in the US generally, but a 6.5c per kwh tax would have been a rate of around 66% at the beginning of 2021 when it was 1.20 USD/EUR and the average US residential rate was ~13c/kwh.

Yes, rates can be much higher. We pay 37c for instance at the moment.

On the other hand: To have higher energy prices provides incentives for less use and must be part of an intermediate strategy to bring down CO2 emissions.

Or it's an incentive to use cheaper energy. In my area gas is cheaper than electricity, but policy tries to push folks to use electricity. It would make more sense to drive down the cost of electricity so that it is the economic choice as well as the environmental one.

> The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power.

Which is even more ridiculos because heat is the primary product of nuclear reactors. Their thermal rating of a nuclear reactor is about 3x the electrical rating.

Out of curiosity, are there any nuclear reactor cogeneration plants in operation?

Yes, for example Switzerland uses two of their nuclear power plants for district heating [1][2]. China has also started using it for district heating in Haiyang [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Ref...

[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

[3] https://www.nucnet.org/news/city-of-haiyang-first-in-country...

Sure

"Russia, Dec 1, 2019 — Unit 1 of the Leningrad 2 nuclear power station in western Russia has been integrated into the heat supply system of the city of Sosnovy Bor"

Sorry but you and GP complaining about how policy prevented nuclear from being the backbone of energy supply, then totally ignoring the impact of policy on the supply of renewables, that is a pretty weak way to argue.

The politics in Germany have been pretty actively hostile to wind under the conservative governments. Check this graph I just compiled out of the stats from wikipedia:

https://wtf.roflcopter.fr/pics/gcd4Rw5d/49s68U7X.png

Yeah, if you introduce legislation that "these people" tell you will stall the construction, then _exactly_ that tends to happen. The 10H rules and other BS from the conservatives were expressly and successfully introduced to stifle wind energy construction.

This is the correct take from my perspective. The same happend to: - biogas - solar - offshore wind

Meanwhile in Russia they are doing heating with water from nuclear powerplants. While price gouging Germany for gas.

"While price gouging Germany for gas" Huh?!? Price is settled somewhere in Netherlands, what Russia has to do with it?

They send very little gas (much less than agreed upon) through NS1 to send a message and try to force-open NS2, which leads to very high spot prices

Yeah the OPEC model. Except you can't end it by threatening to "nuke their ass and take their gas."

What is has to do with "price gouging"?

How this "message" of yours reach Netherlands?

Whatever is coming, price is defined in Netherlands, look for Dutch TTF futures.

It is like price of oil - Brent futures minus some discount

> which leads to very high spot prices

Russian gas itself is not traded on spot place(s). It is long term contract, but price follow dutch futures. How this "price gouging" is done, could you describe mechanism?

Less supply, higher supply volatility = higher prices, this is market 101.

There is no supply of gas from Gazprom to the Dutch FFT. None whatsoever. Never was. Never will be.

> The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power. We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants.

Heating problem IS a power problem given the high efficiency of heat pumps nowadays. And yes they work perfectly fine in Germany's relatively moderate winters.

Only in the most abstract sense, if you're willing to ignore actual installed capacity (and thus reality to some degree).

There are around 350k heat pumps in Germany right now, of 40 million households (ignoring offices, ignoring multi family homes etc).

There is no way Germany could install enough heatpumps to counteract the Russia induced gas crisis, not even over a timeframe of a decade or more. Optimistically you could fix this by 2050.

So yes, there's a heating crisis, not an electricity crisis.

EU has an yearly report of the state of the energy grid, and a common finding is that different country spend subsidies on different things. Germany spend most of any country, and they spend a bit half of that on production of renewable energy and the remaining split between fossil fuel and shared infrastructure like power lines. Very little of the subsidies goes to the consumer side.

There are however countries who focused on the infrastructure/consumer side of the equation. When communal or heath pump based heating is significant cheaper, suddenly people interest to invest into home improvements goes up. As the report describe, it not obvious which strategy is best in order to reduce pollution.

> In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end.

65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 220 billion kWh from renewables actually

https://www-destatis-de.translate.goog/DE/Presse/Pressemitte...

The table in that page says photovoltaics are 41B kWh.

I know, that's why I wrote "renewables". Comparing with one of several widely deployed options seems a bit arbitrary

65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 45 billion kWh from solar, actually...

111 billion kWh from wind, 30 billion kWh from bio gas, 18 billion kWh from hydro, 156 billion kWh from coal, 65 billion kWh from gas.

25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany.

I'm aware of that and it's summed up together with hydro etc. Why would you want to compare Nuclear with solar? I mean solar alone doesn't make much sense because it depends on daylight - which surely is great since most energy is used during the day and battery storage is getting increasingly deployed. But it's better to diversify and therefore rather consider the sum.

> 25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany.

Well yeah but it's getting phased out on the long-term.

Edit: also it's worth considering that gas and bio gas (the renewable version) power plants can be used during peak times because they can be started and shutdown quickly. That's not possible for nuclear which provides base load - in fact they need to be shut down during heat waves

Actually, nuclear plants can be started and be shutdown quickly. Most countries don't do that because a large portion of the investment cost is in construction rather than fuels, so lifting the rods is just a cost center unless the grid is extremely over saturated.

> Well yeah but it's getting phased out on the long-term.

Who will take responsibility for the pollution of that. Saying that it will be phased out doesn't actually mean anything. Every technology and building will at some point in the future be phased out when the time is right, the investments has been repaid, and alternative technology can out compete the old. Current solar plants that is being built today will also be phased out on the long term.

I mean there's a law for coal power in Germany, already since decades but the new add-on codifies that. They might be doing worse than France in terms of CO2 emissions per capita but far better than the US.

Since cost is mentioned:

"The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...

> That's not possible for nuclear which provides base load - in fact they need to be shut down during heat waves

Google "load following nuclear" and also read the article in Wikipedia [0]. That will help stop false information. Summary: Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and can go from full baseload to nearly "running on idle" in 15 minutes if needed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...

> constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc.

Isn't your choice of telling them false based purely on political agenda? Same happens on other side of the camp, both believe their science is actual science.

It kind of depends on what you consider a fact.

I support nuclear scientifically. I don’t think it has a chance politically.

Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem.

Politically, expect to spend billions upon billions and then have things like Yucca Mountain canned after lots of construction.

Both are true and which ones you consider lead to very different conclusions.

> Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem.

No it is not.

There is no place on Earth that we know is geologically stable for the time periods required We have no way of knowing what society will be like ten thousand years from now, let alone 100,000 years. How do we communicate with those people bout the danger of what we left behind?

Greed. Hubris.

Tectonic plates don't move nearly quick enough to be a concern in the span of 100k years. A spot square in the middle of a plate is going to be safe from earthquakes for millions of years.

And not to mention, how does ground vibration bring sometimes buried under 500 meters of solid rock back onto the surface? Earthquakes shake the ground, they don't dig deep boreholes.

Yet, all the attempts to store nuclear fuel underground in Germany proved so catastrophic that they had to scrap all of them and restart the selection process.

And this was because of earthquakes? Germany foolishly stored it in an abandoned mine, rather than impermeable bedrock.

You’re incorrect about the middle of tectonic plates being safe from earthquakes by definition. Locating naively built skyscrapers in New Madrid, MO, for example, would be a bad idea. [1]

On a geological timescale, tectonic plates occasionally rift down the middle, both successfully (East Africa) and unsuccessfully (a failed plate rift produced the Great Lakes).

With that said, identifying strata that are going to remain seismically stable for a looooong time is a solved problem, and earthquakes generally damage only those things not attached to the (moving) earth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraplate_earthquake

If we continue on the current path there will be no society at all. This argument is seriously f'ed up for so many reasons

Nuclear waste disposal has already been solved at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

The flora and fauna in the Chernobyl exclusion zone appear to be thriving.

In some cases, yes, in other it seems that they are sink areas that are simply constantly being nurtured with migrant animals from the surroundings (Some birds for example). Is complex.

And we need to remember that some people was poisoned just a few months ago for digging trenches in Chernobyl in the middle of a war. The danger is still there forty years later.

Poisoned is a relative term. The rates of cancers and deaths from the Chernobyl disaster varies by an incredible amount depending on what source you look at.

There are water around mines that will be toxic to human life until the sun collapse and the earth burns up. People will have to be aware of those dangers for as long human exist, unless humans mutate enough to tolerate lead and sulfur in their fresh water.

How should we communicate to those people of those dangers?

Lead and sulfur are relatively easy to remove from water. Wildlife, however, will be affected by that. We have bigger issues.

We can filter it out, but unless people know that the water is toxic then they might still be harmed. How do we inform the people of the future of the dangers that contaminated fresh water has, and how do we do that for billions of years into the future?

In the very long run we don’t.

We simply trust that people in the future check their water for safety, or avoid drinking from water sources that correlate with illness.

We do this now, and humans have done it for millennia.

We need a banner that says "Don't drink the water full of dead deer"

(Hum, I hope that they will not have tiktok)

https://globalnews.ca/news/5329835/canadas-nuclear-waste-to-...

Flying is scientifically a well understood and safe thing. Still its the FAA that makes the rules, and engineering that needs to produce robust and reliable systems, and still planes fall out of the sky sometimes..

Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works, which would be the solution for a lot...

So what does "scientifically...much solavable problem" in practice really mean? Worlds apart..

> Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works, which would be the solution for a lot...

There is no evidence that fusion is a solution to any energy problems. The central problem of fusion power is that reactions consume more energy than they produce.

That's currently a problem, but I don't think it's the central problem. The central problem for DT is some combination of inherent complexity and very low volumetric power density.

Translating the numbers:

Billions upon billions per capita is three-dollar bills upon three-dollar bills.

It would be one thing if billions and billions lead to success, but we are nowhere near a politically acceptable solution for nuclear waste.

Who is “we” in this context? It looks like the Finns figured it out.

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

Well no, we have plenty of data that shows in reality, nuclear is the safest (lowest deaths per TWh generated [1]), among the lowest-carbon intensity (lower than solar, higher than wind) [2] and with seawater extraction has the potential of being renewable.

Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.

So-called environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...

[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and...

> Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.

In the Australian outback those are places people used to live. How are you going to stop people returning for 200,000 years?

Greed. Hubris.

Do you think those aren't solved problems? First, fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years. [1] And even to answer your original question directly, there's a whole area of study that's fascinating on how to provide long-term warnings. [3]

Not necessarily in the Australian outback, Yucca Mountain is a great choice. [2] [edit](That area is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site which is already some of the most radioactive land on earth).

What greed exactly are you talking about? I've no financial interest in the success of nuclear power. I recognize it's more expensive than some competing options but it's a better solution.

As for hubris, again, you're not exactly coming to the table with data on the risks, especially since we've got 80 years of experience with nuclear power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...

Exactly right. The goal with nuclear waste is basically to get it back down to levels similar the original ore. At that point, it isn't especially dangerous.

Many radioactive products are either very short lived, and will decay down to minimal levels within a few hundred years, or are very long lived, causing very low radioactivity.

The problem are the elements that are in between which is mostly the other actinides. Those are the ones that would require tens of thousands of years or more to reach safe activity levels. Fast reactor designs don't have significant amounts of such elements in the waste. The waste will decay to uranium ore-ore like levels within only hundreds of years.

The biggest issue is that they need relatively enriched uranium to operate at first. After they are started, they can be used as a breeder reactor that can take in natural uranium and convert it to the enriched uranium it needs to continue running.

> fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years.

Hundreds of years is not acceptable. Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time. Look at the Zaporizhia atomic energy site for an extreme example of what I mean.

The problem is not just the time scale either. There are other areas humanity fails at time and again.

P.S. Thank you nevertheless for pointing out several advantages of fast breeder reactors.

> Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time.

There's plenty of buildings that took centuries to make, this projects are comparatively simple/require less coordination once started.

Fast reactors are also in principle subject to Chernobyl-like criticality accidents (only worse) in case of meltdowns.

I mean, any bad design is subject to failure. Aircraft are subject to catastrophic failure too, so we iterate and improve until they're super safe.

Fast reactor inherently have more fissionable material in a smaller volume, and don't have a moderator that can either keep things separated or remove itself in an accident to kill the chain reaction. If a supercriticality on prompt neutrons alone occurs in a fast reactor the neutron population will increase orders of magnitude faster than in a thermal reactor, because the neutrons are moving so much faster.

Edward Teller in 1967 famously expressed his skepticism about fast reactors because of this safety issue.

That's not the argument I was making. I said anything of sufficient scale carries significant risk, and we can in time reduce that risk to acceptable levels via engineering practices and principles. As with airplanes, which are metal tubes full of humans we load up with kerosene and send into the atmosphere. A bad plane will crash, a bad reactor will melt down. We can overcome the risks to reap the rewards. That's like our whole thing, as humans.

Chernobyl happened for a very specific reason - you know, the late-night tests and the positive void coefficient. Do you think we haven't learned? Please cite sources. The thing is, we have learned. That's why reactors are so expensive. You're double-dipping by citing the risks and the costs. It's really one or the other if you're not being disingenuous.

It's not the argument you were making, but it's a point your argument is compelled to address. Yes, any system of sufficient scale carries risks. In the case of breeder reactors, one of those risks is the possibility of something approaching an actual nuclear explosion, with fast neutron physics similar to what happens in actual fission bombs, not pitiful low yield moderated explosions as happened in Chernobyl.

You fell into the same trap. You linked 2 studies. Other side could link 2 studies with very different conclusion. We should understand it is fundamentally a political issue, and both side shouldn't hide behind 2 links to support them.

I didn't fall into the trap. Objective reality isn't political. The total number of people killed in nuclear accidents divided by TWh generated is pretty objective.

Not when deaths caused by nuclear energy are incredibly hard to quantify.

Are they though? Do you have some quantification of that difficulty? Any studies? Any citations to back up your thesis?

When someone is exposed to radiation and dies of cancer many years later it’s impossible to know whether he’s a victim of radiation or just unlucky. As simple as that.

Unfortunately despite the track record nuclear won't make a revival. The planning cycles for new plants are just too long. Renewables will yet again half in price by the time you could just build another nuclear plant. That's why really nobody is trying anymore.

Is that still true for mass produced SMRs ('small' modular reactors)? That don't rely on special forges, of which we don't have much? Isn't that the promise of all those startups from the sector? Regardless of exact model and technology? True production lines like in shipyards, maybe more airplane-/carfactory like? Instead of almost 'artisanal' 'one-offs', like it is now, even though they have common design elements?

Besides this being studies for which other studiest exist the same, we also learned in the pandemic that "deaths" cannot be the sole metric (however you want to interpret that).

And seawater extraction is as renewable as CO2-scrubbing the atmosphere would allow us to go on with burnign coal - both would equally not scale to needs with current technology, so what?

Why wouldn't seawater extraction scale? There's 4 billion tons of uranium in the sea (a 60,000 year supply at current usage levels), and 100 trillion tons of uranium below that from which it's replenished as it is extracted.

[1] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514

Supplying a single 1 GW(e) burner reactor with seawater uranium would require a 170 square kilometer absorber field on the continental shelf. That's much worse power/area than solar, and just slightly higher than the power/area of an offshore wind field.

Of course use of breeder reactors could extend this, but with breeders terrestrial U resources are adequate for a very long time.

Sir. There's a practically unlimited quantity of uranium available to meet our energy needs now and for as long as humans wander this rock. To claim otherwise is disingenuous at best. A huge reason breeder reactors aren't used right now is that there's plenty of land-based uranium already and fuel is not a concern. So much so that stretching it with breeders doesn't really matter, and as a percentage of the cost of generated electricity the uranium input barely registers. By the time we need to dip into the renewable water-based sources, we'll long since have been carbon-free. It'll scale just fine. Stop worrying about problems that won't matter for 10-100,000 years. We've gotta clear the century first.

There is a pratically unlimited quantity if cost is no object. But for cost to be no object, breeder reactors are needed. For burner reactors, fuel cost will begin to be seriously affected rather quickly if we try to supply a 100% nuclear world economy with only terrestrial U sources. That economy would go through in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year to supply the current world average primary energy demand of 18 TW (about 6000 3 MW(th) reactors.) This could exhaust known terrestrial uranium resources (not proven reserves) in less than a decade.

Breeders, as I said, would greatly extend the terrestrial U resource, both by getting 100x as much energy per unit of natural uranium, and by allowing resources 100x as dilute to be economically exploited.

Still nuclear is finished everywhere (or on the way out except in China) and won't come back from the grave. It is like asking for cars from the 70ties to return.

Isn't that exactly what Tesla just did? The electric car was of course the 'car of the 70s' until it was the car of the 2020's.

Defeatism never solved everything, and China building hundreds of reactors might just be the shot in the arm to get things back on track. The big loss will be that it's these Chinese designs the world will use instead of Western designs.

No, the nuclear from the 70s won't come back. Modern ones will.

> environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas.

Could you identify any broadly accepted environmental analysis that says this? It's easy to make accusaiont

> Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.

The waste rocks are not at all like the ones removed from the ground, in critical ways (radioactivity). Who says anything about putting them back in the original mines? Why would the original mines happen to be suitable for nuclear waste storage?

The cost to store nuclear waste is $600 / kg

When Starship is fully operational the expected cost to launch payload will be $20 / kg

IE you can have a 30x margin of error and still just launch the nuclear waste into space.

I agree with more nuclear but blasting waste (at least highly radioactive) to space is a problem as there's always a risk the rocket explodes and spreads the radiation on earth. At least I've always understood that's the objection and seems to me reasonable. Yucca mountain type solutions seem more palatable.

You encapsulate the waste so it survives any accident. This adds some weight, but not an enormous amount of weight.

If you can encapsulate the pellets to the point that they can survive getting blown out of orbit, catching fire and raining down over the human population without causing any harm - you can encapsulate them and throw them into Yucca Mountain and save the whole exiting earth step.

Except no, those are not the same thing. Stuff in the repository, for example, is exposed to a much higher cumulative radiation dose, which causes huge and unacceptable changes in many materials.

I'm not sure that's relevant to the broader argument I am making. Don't blast waste into space. It carries with it dramatically higher costs - and drastically higher risks. It's completely untenable according to every study and paper on the matter.

Again, selecting a geographic area away from humans and providing sufficient demarcation is dramatically safer than putting it into a rocket and flying it up into orbit over humans. If you disagree, cite a source on its feasibility - and one on the lack of feasibility of deep geological sequestration. Let's not shoot from the hip on this one. I know I haven't found any.

It's untenable with current launch vehicles. Do you think current launch vehicles are the sine qua non of launcher technology, for centuries into the future? We don't have to shoot stuff into space right this moment.

Thanks. Where does that number come from?

Despite his Twitter account, Musk is not the savior for everything. However, maybe he would like to be blasted into space on the first journey to Proxima Centuri? If anyone can do it, he can!

The safety of nuclear assumes no nuclear accidents.

Also, at the low deaths/TWh of renewables and nuclear w.o. accidents, the "cost of deaths" (at the $9M/statistical life that the NRC uses) is swamped by the direct cost of the produced energy. So renewables continue to beat new nuclear on the cost front, w. cost of deaths added in.

Renewables literally can't beat nuclear at power generation until long term grid storage is a proven thing. We're not there yet.

They can beat nuclear right now -- you get more CO2 reduction per $ from adding renewables than you do from adding nuclear. And you get it sooner. Little or no storage is required. By the time storage becomes necessary, the economic environment (price as a function of time) on the grid will be so hostile to new nuclear that there will be no sense even trying to pretend nuclear makes sense.

You get more CO2 reduction until intermittency or geopolitical issues require you to bring coal plants back online to address energy shortfalls, like with Germany. You'd need an order of magnitude more renewables and a huge grid expansion to even remotely come close to solving energy unreliability in Germany, and even then you'll still have some issues. CO2 reduction is not the only goal, power stability is important.

When you need storage, the residual demand is highly intermittent. Coal would serve this rather poorly (and nuclear even more so). Gas would be more likely. However, at that point there are wild swings in the price of power across each day (and possibly across seasons), making storage quite attractive, and it would be rolled out.

If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask you to try to be more serious. Nuclear isn't rolled out even that fast.

You can make all the theoretical arguments you like, but the empirical data (California, Germany, and more) disagrees with your conclusion. Perhaps you should consider a more serious argument that actually agrees with the current evidence.

What? Experience in Germany and California is completely consistent with what I was saying. Of course natural gas without sufficient CO2 charges will continue to cover intermittency, especially when there's a great deal of already installed gas capacity whose capital cost is sunk.

Why is Germany reopening it's coal plants if not to make up for the intermittency problems of renewables?

If intermittency issues caused storage to be quite attractive, why hasn't storage already been rolled out across Germany and California?

Neither if these claims agrees with what happened in these two cases. Any electrical engineer could have told you storage is needed before decommissioning nuclear in favour of renewables.

The safety of any power source projects past performance onto future performance. This is a tautology, and not really relevant as we have 80 years of experience and nuclear provides 20% of US power. It provides almost 40% of Canada's electricity. 10% of the world's electricity. We have plenty of samples necessary to make an informed projection.

The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low. Just ask Ontario. [1] There is a large cap ex cost at the start, but you can amortize it over 80 years - whereas solar and wind has to be replaced every 20-30.

Nuclear prices in all externalities in its cost assessments due to the onslaught of attacks whereas other energy prices in almost nothing. Coal kills about 100 people per TWh, and at the same $9M NRC cost, coal should cost about $1/kWh.

[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

> The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low.

Only if you ignore the amortization of the cost of financing and building the nuclear power plant. That's fine if the plant is provided by the Nuclear Fairy; not so fine in the real world if we're talking about building new nuclear plants that have to be paid for.

Some things are expensive - more expensive - but we should do them anyways because they're the right thing to do. Generally I refer to the 'nuclear fairy' as the government, whose job it is in my opinion, to make sure we do the right thing even when the market isn't interested.

You are engaging in the egregious fallacy of "if the government pays for it, it's free". That's true at the individual level. It's not true at the level of the whole society. And it's that latter level that matters when asking if nuclear power makes sense.

It's hard to see how wasting resources and, all else being equal, doing something the much more expensive way would be "the right thing to do". If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.

> You are engaging in the egregious fallacy of "if the government pays for it, it's free".

No, I'm not.

A role of government in my opinion is to facilitate providing services and creating infrastructure in the public interest which might not make market economic sense at the time we need it - if it is a better outcome for the citizenry. You're welcome to disagree but there's no fallacy there. I never said it was free, I said it was more expensive - but the government should do it anyways because it will make us better off. Like the post office and the EPA.

There's a reason in going to the moon, JFK never said that “we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not just because they are easy, but because they are the cheapest thing we can possibly do, and if it starts to look like it's cheaper or easier to be sitting on the couch then too bad so sad, to the couch we shall return!"

He said it was "because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

> If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.

Right no. I don't believe in that. Again, nuclear is renewable, this much is basically indisputable. I believe that a better solution can be government funded in line with the charter of any world government, be it a western democracy or the PRC. I do not believe market viability is the be all and end all in this here world. I believe that attitude would have left us living as hunter-gatherers. I do not believe the cheapest solution is the only solution we should advocate for or pursue, period.

We deserve better and should demand better than your position.

- LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a political and management issue.

- maybe you keep the existing nuclear around for levelling, well, fine. But just be ready for it to get "nuked" once the battery/storage costs combined with wind/solar drop under everything. That day isn't today, and it isn't next year, but with cheap sodium ion and many other chemistries in active improvement... it will.

- nuclear waste disposal is solved... if you have a LFTR or similar tech to "burn" it. Otherwise, the usual handwave on nuclear waste is a telltale sign of "old nuclear", as are the people that say it is safe. Solid fuel rod designs are not safe.

I am not saying that LFTR should be the only path forward for nuclear, but the advantages of LFTR should be what a "real" nuclear solution has. LFTR is:

- scalable in size - meltdown-proof (plug and pool where the liquid loses criticality) - burns/breeds virtually all of its fuel, and IIRC can "burn" spend rod waste - somewhat proliferation resistant

Again, I don't know if the LFTR design challenges are truly problematic, but the CAPABILITIES of LFTR should be a standard next-gen nuclear must be held to.

The Greens aren't correct generally in engineering or science, but what they are right about, indirectly, is the culture of nuclear power that grew up in the Cold War and attached to military needs for weapons isotopes.

Those political priorities overrode safety, good design, economic performance, and other concerns, and left us with the terrible solid fuel rod design.

LFTR got canned in the US in a backroom political power move, and the same nuclear establishment keeps it restricted from funds and research.

Again, I'm not saying LFTR is the "one true path". But its core abilities address the Green concerns: meltdown proof and virtually waste free. Those two aspects are the base table stakes a "next gen nuclear" would need. Maybe you have a combined reactor approach where one design produces from solid or pebble fuel, and then that gets fed to LFTRs for final burn off.

So I guess I would recommend Germany / France keep their nukes going for now, but view them as life support: these things are going away once battery/storage tech scales to meet the need, a virtually guaranteed proposition in the five year near future timeline.

For nuclear to be relevant long term you'll need the safety tablestakes mentioned, but all nuclear projects are 10 years out: you'll need a stable price to target/combat 10 years out from wind/solar, and you don't know that right now.

> - LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a political and management issue.

LCOE isn't the only factor of relevance. That's partly how Germany got into its current situation, because LCOE doesn't account for intermittency.

To solve that you need a large interconnected grid and huge overcapacity of renewables (and even then you'll have some brown outs), or you need long-term grid storage, which still has limited options at this time. The LCOE of renewables is not so rosy after you include all of these considerations to achieve the same stable service as a nuclear plant. We might get there in 20 years, but we're not there yet.

What's happening in Germany is unfortunate, But I feel that while rebutting the statements of Anti-Nuclear Energy institutions with science people often forget that in the end humans run the reactors and the safety/efficacy of a Nuclear reactor also depends upon the people who run it i.e. even the stringent of safety protocols & design choices can be rendered useless by corrupt imbeciles(As we've seen in the past).

So we should be careful in appropriating the overwhelming evidence of Nuclear Energy being safe and efficient to reactor in X vs Y.

Nice idea to shrink "Zukunftstechnologien" down to solar at the end of the argumentation...

The problem with nuclear is that companies will not have to pay for final storage of the waste. Tax payers will have to pay forever. Same shit with our german coal mines. Take this into your equation. Google "Ewigkeitskosten"

> It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany.

What part of this entire discussion has anything do to with science? Is anyone actually contesting the science?

Is it a discussion about the number of orbitals of uranium atoms? Or is it a discussion on which entities handle the long-term financials obligations, whether we favor or not decentralized grids, whether we favor short term or longer term solutions -- which in turn depends on whether the (possibly international) risks are long term or short term, etc. Not much of the later is "science".

Politics is not a science and never can be. This entire story -- the word "green" itself -- is as unscientific as it gets. Not in the "science contradicts it" sense; I mean in the "this is neither provable nor falsifiable and science has nothing to do with it" sense.

A lot of the anti-nuclear opinion is passionately opposed to scientific analysis.

They're convinced Chernobyl can happen again, and that scientists are arrogantly playing god when they explain what can and can't happen

The last time I heard a physicist evaluate nuclear, it didn't look like any notable improvements happened in the last 20 years.

Well, maybe, but most nuclear reactor designs are at least 50 years out of date, and a lot of progress was made between 1970 and 2000.

Do you have the source where you heard that? Also worth noting that Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island were all built 50-60 years ago.

Right. This is a bit like evaluating airline safety based on the design of Amelia Earhart's plane.

What "scientific" analysis has claimed "chernobyl can't happen again" ? It would be as ridiculous as someone claiming the new Airbus XXX model can't crash. Even analysis of the type "a chernobyl will happen once every XX years" are more political in nature than scientific, since you are assuming a stable society for decades to come (i.e. no degradation in the skill level of constructors or operators, etc. -- even foreign ones). Which, barring sudden miraculous discoveries in the area of Psychohistory, is basically entirely politics and outside the realm of science.

Chernobyl can't happen again because the awful design that made that failure possible is long ago abandoned.

It's a bit like how the Airbus A380 can't crash like the Hindenburg airship did.

I'm quite sure that no one who asks "can chernobyl can happen again?" is actually interested in the response to "can chernobyl happen again _in exactly the same way_"?. This is malicious nitpicking.

In the same way that I'm sure the victims of the next Airbus crash will be happy to know that "it didn't crash like the Hindenburg did".

Is it not malicious to scream "chernobyl!" willfully deceptively or willfully ignorantly confusing what can and cannot happen?

More people die every single year from radiation in coal than have died in the entire history of nuclear power. Replacing all coal with nuclear would save more lives and health than fighting nuclear ever could, even in theory.

And delaying coal to nuclear under the banner of "wind and solar maybe one day can help a bit" has blood on its hands.

Every year coal is still here, instead of nuclear, is 100 years of death. If building powerplants (of any type) were instant, and solar were one year away, then we should STILL replace all coal with nuclear TODAY, to minimize harm. (in a spherical chickens in a vacuum sort of way)

And not only do we not have enough solar, we don't even have a plan for energy storage for solar and wind. We have ideas, not a plan.

So solar&wind replacing coal&nuclear is further away than fusion power, by multiples.

To exemplify the difference between science and politics:

- Nuclear is safer than coal: science (true or not, it's not the point)

- We need to go all the way nuclear: politics. There's a million other things to consider, many of them don't even each into the realm of what is falsifiable (e.g international relations, fuel availability, who knows). _Even_ if nuclear was literally the safest method ever, it is literally still politics whether to use nuclear or not; after all, we sacrifice safety for convenience _many_ times, and good luck defining "convenience" in a scientific way.

Another example:

- Vaccines are safe and effective (scientific; true or not is not the point)

- Vaccines are safe enough compared to the risk of catching the disease itself ("social" sciences; caveat emptor)

- We should force everyone to vaccinate (politics). It does not matter if vaccines are safe, or not. It is still a political topic, not scientific. There are things like ethics, social vs individual rights, etc. that are hardly quantifiable much less scientific.

I don't think this is relevant to my point. Not wrong, just not relevant.

Individuals who are anti nuclear have reasons, explicitly stated, that are misinformed.

Being anti nuclear because Chernobyl is in fact like being anti airplane because Hindenburg.

The criticism is actually (in this analogy) that they claim the hydrogen in a 747 will catch fire. "It's not hydrogen, it's just filled with oxygen and nitrogen" is met with "then what if that spontaneously combusts?!".

But in a way you make a good point. "I don't want to have a rational discussion or learn anything" is indeed the anti nuclear stance. "I don't want the truth, i just want to be right" is political.

The other things you mention are not really even known to anti nuclear people.

Wanting to be right despite facts or ignorance is almost the definition of politics.

People say they're anti nuclear because they want to spare us radiation and death, but when you tell them nuclear would reduce both then they just scream louder.

You can be factually wrong in politics. When your stated and internal reasons don't align with what your actions will accomplish, then that's wrong.

These are bad examples. "Vaccines are safe and effective" is not scientific because science can deal with comparisons, it cannot deal with absolutes.

You can scientificly say something is safe compared to something else, or define safe in some way (less then 1 in X chance of something happening statistically). But there is no such thing as 100% absolute safety. Even an injection with saline is not safe in the absolute.

E.g. if there is a 1 in a trillion chance of a side effect, you will never see it, because there arent a trillion people on earth.

You are completely right. I actually wanted to write "vaccinates are this safe and effective".

> Every year coal is still here, instead of nuclear, is 100 years of death. If > building powerplants (of any type) were instant, and solar were one year away, > then we should STILL replace all coal with nuclear TODAY, to minimize harm. (in > a spherical chickens in a vacuum sort of way)

But... we all know that it takes a lot longer to build a nuclear plant (on the order of 10-20 years) than it does to build (large) solar or wind farms (on the order of 1-5 years).

So.... yeah, if it was magically possible to replace all coal with nuclear right now, that would be a net improvement in terms of carbon output and general pollution.

But we live in the real world, and that is not possible, so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, to be honest.

I'm pretty sure that enough solar/wind + storage can be built to replace a significant percentage (30%? 50%?) of the remaining coal plants, before the first new nuclear plant's plans and siting are even finalized, let alone before a new nuclear plant is fully operational.

And it's going to be a lot cheaper, too.

> it takes a lot longer to build a nuclear plant (on the order of 10-20 years)

Because of the red tape the mob has strung up. China builds these in two years [1]. France does it in five [2].

[1] https://interestingengineering.com/china-moves-toward-nuclea...

[2] https://lemielleux.com/how-long-does-it-take-france-to-build...

That red tape was installed (in North America) post-Five Mile Island however.

South Korea is also very capable at building these quickly, though I've heard concerns raised about their safety (grain of salt, I have no opinion myself).

I’m not suggesting we strike all the rules. But they’ve metastasised. Korea and France aren’t insensitive to popular concern.

China does not build nuclear plants in two years. In particular when China starts the clock on building a plant is not same as when the clock is started in the West. In China, there's already concrete and steel in the ground at that point.

Also, the plan described there is an addition to take steam from an ALREADY EXISTING nuclear power plant.

People who made those exact arguments 10-20 years ago where wrong, since those plants would have prevented a lot of coal, oil and gas from being burned. Those people have both blood and an ongoing climate crisis on their hands.

Who should we blame in 10-20 from now if people still are burning coal, oil and gas? Who will take responsibility for the inaction?

> People who made those exact arguments 10-20 years ago where wrong, since those plants would have prevented a lot of coal, oil and gas from being burned. Those people have both blood and an ongoing climate crisis on their hands.

Perhaps. But 10-20 years ago, solar/wind/storage was a lot more expensive and a lot less efficient. The situation is quite different now.

> Who should we blame in 10-20 from now if people still are burning coal, oil and gas? Who will take responsibility for the inaction?

Realistically, there will probably still be knuckleheads who will be burning coal, oil and gas in 10-20 years from now. But hopefully they will be a very small minority.

The main thing that gives me hope is that it is now so much cheaper to build/run renewables than fossil fuel plants, that the latter will be phased out sooner rather than later, just for economic reasons. Those 6 out of touch old people on the supreme court are trying to delay things - and their actions will have very bad consequences for all of us - but the trend is clear.

> Realistically, there will probably still be knuckleheads who will be burning coal, oil and gas in 10-20 years from now. But hopefully they will be a very small minority.

Germany is the largest country in EU. If they are still burning coal, oil and gas in order to supply energy when the wind is low, what will we say about this "very small minority". Investors are putting a lot of money today on fossil fuel power plants that has several decades in estimated life-spans. We can wish and hope that some future technology will prove them wrong, just like climate change denials can wish and hope that scientists are all wrong.

This lead me just back to my original question. Who should we blame in 10-20 if people still are burning coal, oil and gas? If future tech won't save us, who can we blame for making this gamble and using the planet as collateral?

> More people die every single year from radiation in coal than have died in the entire history of nuclear power.

I’m as pro-nuclear as they come, but this is simply not true. No people die from radiation from coal.

A quick Googling gives this quote:

When coal is burned, all the uranium daughters accumulated by disintegration—radium, radon, polonium—are also released. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation evaluates the radiation exposure to the population from this source.2 Per gigawattyear (GWe-yr) of electrical energy produced by coal, using the current mix of technology throughout the world, the population exposure is estimated to be about 0.8 lethal cancers per plant-year distributed over the affected population. Table 7.2 summarizes these data. With 400 GWe of coal-fired power plants in the world, this amounts to some 320 deaths per year

https://rlg.fas.org/mwmt-p233.pdf

This estimate uses the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model [1], which is unsupported by science. The organization you mentioned, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation no longer uses this model.

The relevant wikipedia quote is

  One of the organizations for establishing recommendations on radiation protection guidelines internationally, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) that previously supported the LNT model, no longer supports the model for very low radiation doses.

The actual UNSCEAR paper is [2]. The relevant quote is on page 33:

  Projections of the absolute number of cancer cases in a population have less and less information value and can be increasingly misleading at lower and lower doses. As a matter of general practice, the Committee does not use the risks inferred from studies of populations following radiation exposure at moderate and high doses to project absolute numbers of radiation-induced cancers following exposure at low and very low doses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

[2] https://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2012/UNSCEAR_2012_...

If all you mean by "chernobyl happening again" is "a serious accident could happen", you've moved the goalposts beyond where I think meaningful discussion is possible.

It also means that a "new chernobyl" can happen at any power station, be it hydro, coal, solar, etc.

> If all you mean by "chernobyl happening again" is "a serious accident could happen", you've moved the goalposts beyond where I think meaningful discussion is possible.

WTF? Chernobyl will NEVER happen exactly the same way again, that much is obvious since

a) it was already a pretty rare event to begin with,

b) the event is likely referenced during the training of every nuclear operator _worldwide_, making an exact repeat of the human errors involved even more unlikely than it was to begin with,

c) steps were taken to avoid this exact situation to happen _even on the other chernobyl reactors themselves_.

I thought it quite obvious that no one would be worried about a exact repeat of Chernobyl like if you hit the "replay" button on YouTube. (But if you believe this is what people have in mind when they ask "can chernobyl happen again" then please do tell). Therefore the only remaining interpretation is "can a chernobyl[-like] event happen again" -- a category which would roughly map to "major historic nuclear accident, the kind of which it is still talked about several decades after on a non-nuclear discussion forum like HN".

Most assuredly, non-nuclear accidents, no matter how large, won't fit this category. But I have been wrong in the past, maybe people would call a dam breakup "a chernobyl" these days?

OK, I'll clarify:

Modern reactors all have a containment shell made of concrete and steel that is capable of keeping the melted down uranium core inside it, if the worst possible event would happen. Had Chernobyl had this, the incident might have destroyed the reactor and even killed some employees, but that would have been the end of it, and the world would never even have heard about the incident.

There are also plenty of other security improvements since that ancient design, but the containment shell alone makes what I would call "chernobyl happening again" just about impossible.

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

Biggest dam accident is arguably worse than Chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

I think this is a disingenuous take.

If the original argument was "the exact same thing that happened at Chernobyl will happen again", then that's meaningless and irrelevant, because... who cares? What people actually care about is whether a nuclear disaster could happen again, one that kills a bunch of people and makes a significant area of land uninhabitable for some long period of time.

If you think that's "moving the goalposts", then I don't think you're here to have a good-faith discussion about why people are worried about nuclear energy.

Having said that, I do believe that a significant accidental nuclear disaster is much much much less likely now than in Chernobyl's time. But that doesn't mean it's impossible, or that we shouldn't think about or be worried about it. And also consider that's "accidental": we also need to consider the possibility of terrorist- or state-level attacks, which may be harder to protect against.

How about a middle ground of, can a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale happen again?

Its still kind of a bad question,because we can't rule out dinosaurs attacking the power plant. Maybe the question should be,is there a less than 1 in a million chance of a level 7 event happening when using a modern nuclear plant design in the next 100 years?

I think much of the friction in this discussion is that we mean different things with "Chernobyl can happen again".

Chernobyl lacked many security features that are standard on all modern reactors. The biggest flaw was it had no containment structure. That's the steel & concrete dome which, if the worst happens, keeps the melted uranium contained within it.

That alone would have made the Chernobyl disaster just a bad local industrial accident, and that's the main thing I mean when I say it can't happen again. Though it's far from the only security improvement modern reactors have over Chernobyl.

> But that doesn't mean it's impossible

This is the "you never know!" argument. The good and bad part of it is the same: It is always true! Any thinkable disaster, can conceivably happen, and maybe you "should" be worried about it.

Of course, applied consistently, it would lead to total paralysis. This is no way to rationally approach risk.

> a "new chernobyl" can happen at any power station, be it hydro, coal, solar, etc

Clearly, the nuclear energy in power plants is far more dangerous than those other forms. This is devolving into a silly discussion.

There is a serious discussion to be had about the trade-off in nuclear energy between cost and safety, and whether it's worthwhile.

Distinguishing between failure modes isn’t nitpicking when the difference is between the plant being totaled for the purposes of future power generation as opposed to spewing radioactivity over a third of a continent.

An Airbus that loses an engine and has to immediately land has objectively failed; however, acting like that’s equivalent to a plane homing into a skyscraper and exploding is not helpful.

RBMK-1000 is actually still in use in Russia at three locations (they obviously fixed the bug that lead to the disaster, so it won't repeat 1:1...).

That also points at one issue. All the now >50 year old reactors should have been replaced with newer versions at some point. Just think about what kind of electronics there is in those things. This didn't happen anywhere. Not in Germany and not in France.

> All the now >50 year old reactors should have been replaced with newer versions at some point.

Seems like an issue with how humans think in general. "It's not an issue now, so why worry about it?"

These sorts of creeping disasters never seem to be addressed by any society in a timely fashion.

Here's an article from 2018 describing a commercial implementation of a reactor that cannot melt down. (The technology was decades old at that point.)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/01/24/can-we-ma...

There is a big stretch from a "manufacturer claims my reactor design can't be hacked" to "chernobyl can't happen again", and neither is still a scientific claim.

The problem that I was trying to show is that people try to answer a question "can a chernobyl(-like) event ever happen again?" which one simply _can't answer_. Not in a "science" way, since to answer this question you need to predict the existence (not probability!) of a literal _punctual_ event which depends on a gazillion factors outside your control (i.e. this is not simply computing a MTBF).

A article reiterating a press release from a company that doesn't have a prototype is not exactly a good source.

And at any rate, the article claims that

> The small size and large surface area-to-volume ratio of NuScale’s reactor core, that sits below ground in a super seismic-resistant heat sink, allows natural processes to cool it indefinitely in the case of complete power blackout.

Of course, the surface that allows efficient cooling here is the same surface that allows neutrons to escape, so my hunch is that it has poor neutron economy. (And of course, heat escaping through it will not turn turbines.)

> 2) refueling of this reactor does not require the nuclear plant to shut down.

That is very nice when you're trying to breed plutonium, the natural uranium fuel assemblies only have to irradiated a few weeks and then you would already need to shut the reactor down. When you can switch during operation, than there's less downtime.

So in total I guess it's a pretty inefficient reactor that's perhaps a nice addition to your weapons program.

Disclaimer: I'm of course one of the anti-nuclear types HN always tells me are only anti-nuclear because we don't understand these things.

> 2) refueling of this reactor does not require the nuclear plant to shut down.
That is very nice when you're trying to breed plutonium, the natural uranium fuel assemblies only have to irradiated a few weeks and then you would already need to shut the reactor down. When you can switch during operation, than there's less downtime.

So in total I guess it's a pretty inefficient reactor that's perhaps a nice addition to your weapons program.

This is incorrect. The NuScale reactor is not an online-refueling design like the CANDU (which is indeed easily adapted for breeding high grade plutonium simply by adjusting irradation time). It is an offline-refueling design like every other operating PWR. See this NuScale presentation about refueling operations:

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1515/ML15159A311.pdf

The reactor has to be completely shut down for more than a week during refueling (slide 13). The plant can stay online because a plant contains a minimum of 4 reactor modules:

https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us/faq

So by staggering refueling times, the plant can continuously generate at least 75% of rated output.

I think what the commenter is saying is that it's not typical for good research to make statements like "X can never happen". Even if the conclusion of the research is that it's very unlikely for X to happen, or that there is no known way for X to happen.

If by "Chernobyl" you mean any nuclear accident that results in some kind of radiation release, then of course, it is a possibility as long as we build any kind of nuclear reactor. But if by "Chernobyl" we mean a massive explosion of an uncontained reactor that contaminates thousand of square kilomoters of land severely, and spreads some degree of contamination across continental areas, then it's an entirely different story. It is possible to build reactors that simply don't have a catastrophic failure mode like the Soviet RBMK, or evenm like those of 1950s and 1960s designs for BWR (used at Fukushima) or PWR (Three Mile Island). Any design can fail, of course, but how they fail, matters.

And even if a chernobyl as in the massive explosion were to happen yearly, it'd still be much less deaths than coal, for example.

A MSR/LFTR can simply have a heat plug and a "cooling pool" where the fuel spreads out (the pool is not actively cooled at all). So if the reaction is going off the rails, the plug melts, the liquid disperses in the pool, and neutron economy cliffdives and the fuel stops reacting automatically

A solid fuel rod just needs the right disruption, and you have a meltdown. It's inherent to solid fuel designs because they are ... solid.

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

I look at that timeline and all the active systems that are necessary in solid fuel rod. LFTR doesn't need those to cool, it is a somewhat self-regulating design. There's no high-pressure steam to worry about regulating.

Additionally LFTR:

1) breeds its fuel from Thorium, a low radioactivity element, so some stockpile of heavily radioactive stuff isn't hanging around.

2) "burns" most/all of its fuel, so there isn't some stockpile of bad waste that can get washed away.

I'm not sure if pebble bed type stuff or other schemes could have similar guarantees, and it's not like an underwater LFTR wouldn't have lots of strange elements leaking, but there are so many failure events in that fukushima timeline that IMO a LFTR design would have simply shut down and no big deal.

http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/

Again, all those pressure events and active cooling system failure points.

LFTR is generally an unproven design, but it has so many good features that I view it as the starting point of next gen nuclear. I think its scalability is the key to nuclear's relevance in the future to compete economically with mature solar/wind/battery.

To get back to your point about the politics: the current nuclear industry... the lobbyists, the regulators, the "culture" ... is gravitationally bound with the solid fuel rod design. A clean slate is needed, and wind/solar sweeping away the economically unviable and inherently dangerous old designs and their political structures is probably doing nuclear a favor in the long run.

Let's talk Fukushima ?

Issues with Fukushima that could've prevented the disaster were raised by engineers/scientists but were ignored for years by the government/politicians

That's always going to happen though.

The government doesn't always have attention and money to shower on nuclear plants.

...and what lessons can we draw from this?

Trust your nuclear scientists/engineers because they know what they're doing and are, in fact, not playing god

So? Anything could have been prevented on hindsight.

It's not hindsight when someone warns you beforehand.

Given a large enough population, you can always in hindsight find someone who predicted the outcome.

Similar claims are often made after accidents, especially by people sympathetic to engineers an scientists (such as at HN). Given a large enough population, you can always find people who predict disaster. Every leader (of a large enough population) has to decide which predictions to trust and which not to; there isn't enough money and time in the world to listen to them all, and to perfect any machine - especially large, highly complex ones.

The question is not 'was this one prediction accurate?', but 'how reliable is that population of predictions?'

Let’s build a nuclear plant in a country famous for tsunamis next on the coast. What could go wrong?

Fukushima also coincided with the largest earthquake Japan has ever seen (which caused Fukushima incident itself and complicated evacuation efforts). The expected death toll ranges between several hundred and several thousands.

By comparison, vehicle emission is expected cause ~20,000 premature deaths in the US, every year [1]. (Sorry, I couldn't find a stat for Japan.)

In other words, mankind's second worst nuclear disaster killed about as many people as vehicle emission kills in the US every month. That's not counting car accidents.

In fact the wikipedia page about the disaster [2] contains this amusing bit of information, which might not be a fair way of looking at it, but I can't say it's factually wrong:

> it has been estimated that if Japan had never adopted nuclear power, accidents and pollution from coal or gas plants would have caused more lost years of life.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/science-health-business-environme...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

> mankind's second worst nuclear disaster killed about as many people as vehicle emission kills in the US every month.

In fact the tsunami killed 20,000 people - and would have done so regardless of whether there was a power plant accident. The nuclear accident killed one person.

The death toll for the Fukushima nuclear plant (as opposed to to deaths from the tsunami) is either zero or one. There was one 80 year-old who died of lung cancer, but it's unclear whether the cause was radiation from the incident or if he'd have died of lung cancer anyway as many 80 year-old smokers in Japan do.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofialottopersio/2021/11/04/no-...

The population exposure from radiation from Fukushima will likely cause some hundreds of cancers. These will not be statistically detectable, but that doesn't mean they won't exist and that policy cannot take their plausible existence into account.

Any sources for this estimation? I've read nothing even remotely close to that prediction. At its peak, people in Fukushima city were only receiving ~0.06 mSv/day of radiation. This only lasted a couple of days. The vast majority of people didn't even face that since they were evacuated.

In contrast, a transatlantic flight results in about 0.1 mSv of radiation. Someone getting a single abdomen x-ray would get over 0.2 mSv.

It's a ballpark from 2 million people exposed to an extra dose of about 1 mSv.

Fukushima caused exactly one death from ionizing radiation:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di...

Fossil fuel air pollution cause one fifth of premature death worldwide:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p...

Do the sources I use suit you? Is it enough to convey sense about the orders of magnitude involved?

And I didn't even talk about CO2 and the impending climate change catastrophe looming.

Exactly no one is advocating the use of fossil fuels to replace nuclear.

In a debate, it is much better to counter the actual arguments instead of the more convenient ones.

Fukushima in 2011 is very similar to Oroville Dam in 2017. 154,000 evacuated vs 180,000, and both were caused by very rare natural disaster. Both involved failures in handling emergency scenarios like natural disaster, and failures in technology that was supposed to prevent catastrophic failures. Both also involved political failures in addressing risk to people who live near those power plants, and failures in addressing prior safety concerns.

Hopefully those incident will have taught those countries to respect the enormous destructive forces involved, create a work culture where safety concerns do not get ignored, and to build power plants with consideration of very rare natural disaster.

1) Outdated design

2) Magnitude 9 earthquake

3) Devastating tsunami

4) Catastrophic fire causing loss of power to all control systems

One (1) person died from radiation.

Just how safe do you expect something to be?

How many fatalities would there be if there were a similar sequence of events affecting something like (e.g.) the Three Gorges Dam in China?

A lot more than one, you can bet.

Thank you for this common sense reply. The truth is Chernobyl can never happen again, and scientists are completely all-knowing when they explain what can and can't happen.

Arguing with an anti-nuclear activist is indistiguishable to arguing with an anti-vax or climate change denier.

They are the same people who opposed all GMO food products despite the science.

> They're convinced Chernobyl can happen again

Of course it can! It's almost certainly much less likely now, but I don't think anyone has presented convincing evidence that it's impossible that something like that could happen again.

And that's a really big deal. Even if the risk of another Chernobyl is ridiculously low, another Chernobyl would be so bad that it's worth considering.

Having said that, I do support nuclear energy, and wish there wasn't so much FUD spread about it. But let's not delude ourselves into believing there are no safety concerns, or that we've solved the waste storage/disposal problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion_(psychology)

> A lot of the anti-nuclear opinion is passionately opposed to scientific analysis.

It's easy to disparage people who disagree with you (and if they disagree, they must be unscientific! They couldn't be difficult issues and serious concerns). It only poisons attempts to move forward and learn anything.

Much of anti-nuclear energy opinion has been led by scientists and most of the more scientifically sophisticated people I know are very skeptical about nuclear power (including me).

The disparagement makes it look like reactionary politics, not scientific interest - that is their modus operendi - and of course, the reactionary attempt to discredit anything progressive is currently focused on nuclear energy policy.

> They're convinced Chernobyl can happen again

Chernobyl has happened each single year since 1986.

Has been swallowing money each single year since 1986. No exceptions. I'm really convinced that the problem will be there still in 2023. And turning much worse is also a possibility because s*t happens in a war-zone.

Nuclear power was ended in Germany for political reasons. The public has an incorrect idea of how dangerous nuclear power is and how dangerous nuclear waste is and it was easier for the politicians to go along with it for points than stand it's ground.

If you're making policy based on scientifically inaccurate ideas then you aren't respecting the science.

In Germany the maximum insurance liability for nuclear disasters is $2.5 billion. In the US it's $0.35 billion. Fukushima cost $800 billion.

This happened essentially because without a liability cap the entire insurance industry considers nuclear power to be ridiculously risky. So the government, who wanted to protect investors, stepped in.

I feel like a lot of people who dont know this want to educate me about how safe nuclear power truly is.

> In the US it's $0.35 billion.

I was curious about this figure, found info here. Also, apparently the Price-Anderson Act which created the liability limit was passed in 1957, and there's a reasonable argument to be made that it no longer makes sense now that nuclear technology has matured: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...

> Over time, the "limit of liability" for a nuclear accident has increased the insurance pool to more than $13 billion. > > Currently, owners of nuclear power plants pay an annual premium for $450 million in private insurance for offsite liability coverage for each reactor site (not per reactor). This primary, or first tier, insurance is supplemented by a second tier. In the event a nuclear accident causes damages in excess of $450 million, each licensee would be assessed a prorated share of the excess, up to $131.056 million per reactor. With 95 reactors currently in the insurance pool, i this secondary tier of funds contains about $12.9 billion. Payouts in excess of 15 percent of these funds require a prioritization plan approved by a federal district court. If the court determines that public liability may exceed the maximum amount of financial protection available from the primary and secondary tiers, each licensee would be assessed a pro rata share of this excess not to exceed 5 percent of the maximum deferred premium ($131.056 million); approximately $6.553 million per reactor. If the second tier is depleted, Congress is committed to determine whether additional disaster relief is required.

Governments insure a lot of things, some that are arguably idiotic. The US gov insures people who build houses right on the coast. The homeowners couldn't afford private insurance since the expected costs would be astronomical. So the Gov steps up. Same with New Orleans, built on an unsustainable location. So every decade or so, the Gov chips in a couple hundred billion so people can go to Mardi Gras...

That's not going to protect the investors. If a company causes damages beyond its liability insurance cap, plaintiffs can sue the company for the difference.

There is a world of difference between a modern Gen III+ reactor, and the 1960s design of Fukushima and Chernobyl.

It's like comparing the dangers of doctors using 12th century blood-letting and leeches vs getting an MRI.

At least the leeches won't irradiate me

There is a world of difference between a cheap PR offensive that tries to convince the public that nuclear power is now safe and stepping up to shoulder the liability and costs if it is not.

So far the industry does a lot of the former and zero of the latter. Hell, the op eds about safety routinely coming from nuclear lobbies dont even acknowledge that taxpayers are 99+% on the hook if they fuck up.

Makes me feel even more safe that theyre now lobbying mainly to extend the life of old nuclear plants. What could go wrong?

> Fukushima cost $800 billion

Note, this is a figure cited by opposition politicians. Nowhere near this much money has actually been spent.

The estimate from the government is a bit under $200 billion, and that includes not just cleanup but also resettling people and continued monitoring of the reactor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#:....

So you exceeded the liability cap by a factor of 100, rather than 400... I'm sure there is a person for which a 99% vs a 99.75% payment by the state makes a difference. But ...

By comparison, what are the costs inflicted by climate change?

By comparison why dont solar, wind and pumped storage warrant such extreme and lavish taxpayer funded subsidies?

Nuclear receives a fraction of the subsidies that renewables do: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/2016_Ene...

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_United...

And remember, "renewable" energy is really natural gas supplemented by wind and solar. There's no plan for a 100% renewable grid until some massive breakthrough in energy storage happens.

High end figures are 1 trillion. Those are pushing it a bit.

It's nowhere near as low as 200 billion.

Either way while the industry refuses to fully pay for its own risks or acknowledge that it does so its claims of safety via public relations channels are sounding more than a little disingenuous.

The Japanese government (and indeed, insurance too) is doing far more work than they should be. The standard should not be "fix area to how it used to be" it should be "take what measures are cost effective to improve area". But that's politically untenable.

Radiation levels around Fukushima are perfectly fine for habitation and would have been so even if nothing but basic post-accident reactor containment had been done.

This argument is tiresome. Several strong interests wanted to end nuclear power in Germany for a long time before it finally happened. And it wasn't the greens that did it. That much is public knowledge, there are wikipedia pages and everything.

The reason nuclear power ended in Germany was economical. There's no way nuclear can compete with cheap Russian gas, and Germany had over invested in the latter for over two decades, for reasons that obviously had nothing to do with nuclear power.

Look no further than Gerhard Schröder to see how this started. Again, this is not secret and there were newspaper articles everywhere. Then follow to the path across time and party lines to Angela Merkel who saw it through. Simple economics ruled all the way.

This is not complicated, and there's no reason to see a conspiracy here.

> There's no way nuclear can compete with cheap Russian gas

Unless relations with Russia go south. That's some short-sighted economics there.

It is stuff like people religiously dissmising you when you tell them that nuclear is nearly the safest power source in terms of deaths per TWh [1].

They don't base their opinion regarding safety on data, they base it on the feeling that they get from seeing large disasters and not seeing the countless deaths caused in silence, and they refuse to update their view even in the face of contradicting data.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Those numbers are based upon flawed and selective numbers making them quite ridiculous for several reasons:

For example: with Fukushima the nuclear bandwagon arguments that those deaths which actually occurred resulted from moving people to a safe area. As if not moving them would have been an option or if the movement would have happened without the accident.

For Chernobyl it's even worse since there the bandwagon arguments with dead firefighters, ignoring all the "fallout" victims which to these days exist and lose years of life. Not even mentioning missing data: https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/groups/anthrotox-...

Besides that it is the same people who say that Germany could have less coal plants with nuclear running. Something which is also not true since the reason for keeping coal so long was not the lack of electrical power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...

Uh, did you actually read the source I posted?

For Fukushima for example, the deaths from evacuation ARE included in the death toll (the total number is estimated to be 2,314).

You have a detailed article about the data here [1].

But I am open to change my mind. Can you give a source that compares the mortality rate of energy sources and that, in your opinion, better accounts for all deaths? What is the highest mortality rate for nuclear someone has every estimated?

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

The source you posted is highly biased against nuclear - and HEAVILY inflated the number of deaths caused by Fukushima, while strangely putting outrageously low numbers for the deaths from Chernobyl.

You can look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

...for a better breakdown, but this wikipedia article conflates deaths caused by the meltdown evacuation with deaths caused by the tsunami and earthquake evacuation (remember the massive tsunami and earthquake?).

Additionally, while trying to predict future deaths based on undetectible doses of radiation is a very unreliable task. ...and if you compare it to other energy sources, nuclear is one of the safest, if not the safest of the scalable solutions.

The reason people are skittish about nuclear is because when it does fail, it fails catastrophically. The biggest failures in memory are all failures that risked making a multi kilometer area potentially completely uninhabitable for decades. Even if the risk is only 1%, coal is a much less scary prospect.

I understand that, but really you have the option of either going all-in on nuclear and potentially making patches of several km² uninhabitable, or going all-in on fossil fuels and making gigantic regions of the earth uninhabitable due to climate change.

It is a choice between a very local problem or a global one. There is no free lunch.

No, we also have the option to go all-in on solar and wind power, and avoid both of those bad outcomes. Of course, solar and wind aren't perfect either, and have other problems that need solving (energy storage for nighttime and dark/calm days, for one thing), but "nuclear or fossil fuels" is the falsest of false dichotomies.

Let the marker and voters decide by removing fossil fuel from the choices. Without fossil fuels as a cheap storage solution it will be up to tax payers, investors and market operators to decide if energy storage or nuclear is the best/cheapest/technology viable solution.

As long the choice is between nuclear vs wind + fossil fuel, the discussion will be focused about fossil fuel.

You can't just snap your finger and say "we go 100% renewables now!". Germany is probably one of the country that commits the strongest to transitioning to renewables right now, and we started that process in 2011 and expect to reach 100% renewables between 2035 and 2040 the earliest. In the meantime, you HAVE to use another source.

That is 30 years for which you have decide to etiher use fossil fuels or nuclear. So do you wan't to dump CO2 into the air for 30 years and further advance climate change, plus kill millions due to air pollution? Or do you want to accumulate nuclear waste for 30 years, but have way fewer deaths and you don't worsen climate change further?

It is not a nice choice, but it is a choice that has to be made. And Germany decided to choose fossil fuels instead of nuclear.

See - this is exactly the kind of irrational comment that is a problem. "multi-kilometer" "1%" "catastrophically". ...these are all emotionally driven elements to an argument that does not hold water under scientific scrutiny.

Reactors like Chernobyl and Fukishima are not built today and cannot meltdown. The chance of meltdown is nearly 0%. ...and the danger of meltdown on a modern reactor is like what happened at Three Mile Island (which is basically nothing). No one died, nor was even irradiated. ...and even that type of meltdown is no longer possible.

...and finally "multi kilometer" is not even that big. The Earth is 300 million square kilometers in area. Even if your estimate was correct (which it isn't), then it still wouldn't be a big deal.

How about hydro? There have been catastrophic damm faillures in the past, too.

Not a damm failure, but last year there was ~250 death in Europe and 10 billions of euros of damages because of the floods. [1] That's much more damages than Fukushima and comparable to Chernobyl.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods

1% per what? 1% per GWh? Coal power kills a huge number of people through air pollution, and that's during regular operation. So for me personally, coal power is much more scary than nuclear power.

I don't think "deaths per TWh" is the only measure we should be looking at, though. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is around 1000 square miles. It's certainly arguable if that is the correct size, or how long it will need to be in place.

If you shut down a coal plant, the pollution dissipates in a fairly short amount of time. (Unfortunately the same is not true of the carbon that has accumulated in the atmosphere over time.) If there's a disaster at a nuclear plant, some amount of land area becomes uninhabitable for some long amount of time (amounts dependent on the severity of the disaster).

For the record, I am in favor of building new nuclear plants, especially in areas where they can replace coal or even natural gas (it's absurd that this EU parliament action is considering natgas "green" as well). But let's not pretend that they are 100% safe, that the worst case can't happen, that the effects of a nuclear disaster aren't that big a deal, or that we've solved the waste disposal and storage problem. I agree that many anti-nuclear folks are driven more by overblown fears than science and statistics, but pro-nuclear people seem to also cherry-pick stats to better support their position.

Radioactive fallout can be cleaned. Most of the Fukushima exclusion zone has been resettled. Pripyat was not resettled because it was a planned town specifically created to support the power plant and its workers. So there's no reason to spend the money to rehabilitate it.

It has nothing to do with science. OP is just parroting a meme circulating in a certain group of people who didn't realise that nuclear is gone and has been replaced by renewables years ago.

It goes with the meme that you glorify France while ignoring it's failures which are quite prominent these days just the same way he ignores the fact that the chancellor for the last 16 years was an actual physicist.

This is the level of debate we currently have again here in Germany.

> nuclear is gone and has been replaced by renewables years ago

This only works because Germany is still burning ungodly amount of coal, to fill the gaps when there is no wind or sun (about 60% of the time)

Is this the meme you're talking about?

Maybe sources are memes too? What happens if you take coal away from here:

https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

Many of the claims made by the anti-nuclear ground directly contradict established science.

The German greens were more against nuclear power than fossil. If you care about the environment that's a pretty irrational choice.

Russian influence operations at work. Russia has been promoting anti-nuclear sentiment in the West since the 1960s.

> In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...)

That's a misconception. ENS has two branches, science and literature. ENS Sciences is technical, the other isn't. X (Polytechnique) is an engineering school in theory, but in practice very few of its students become actual engineers.

ENA is essentially a law school; it's even less than that, it only teaches how the French administration works, not law.

The one thing these schools have in common is that they are extremely competitive, and select for extreme dedication (and a bizarre capacity to study with high intensity at an age when other people are dating or partying).

But at the top level of the French government you mostly find only énarques (= people who attended ENA); they are not technical in the least, "don't have a clue about technology", but think they know everything. It's a terrible, terrible system.

Source: am French.

I had colleagues that went through École Polytechnique and the Corps de Mines (usually reserved to the top 2 graduates of a given graduating class of several grandes ecoles) that then went on to work for the government. And I think it's still mandatory to work a certain number of years in the administration after going through some of the grandes écoles, not sure if that was changed (I graduated in 2012 so it was a while ago).

Of course not everyone is graduating with a technical degree, but coming from Germany where top politicians often don't even have a finished university degree and high-ranked politicians are regularly found out to have been plagiarizing their PhD work it was pretty impressive to see a working elite system. It also has some negative aspects and nepotism is a thing as well (in the sense that people who went through the system know how to game it to get their children in with high probability) but it's much better than what we have here, in my opinion.

Germany was and still is scared of anything that can be considered elitist as people always associate it with the elitism from the Third Reich.

I know almost nothing about the German political system so I won't discuss that. But the French system has plenty of flaws, two of the biggest being that

1/ énarques aren't technical at all, don't actually know anything except how bureaucracy works, and yet they're in charge of everything

2/ super-selective schools have the side effect of letting people think they're geniuses because they topped a competition while in their teens

Yeah I'm sure the French system also has its problems, my general impression about the administration (not top level political positions) was that people were more technically competent though. I might be biased though as I mostly know people from a few institutes on the Saclay plateau, so it might just have been an "island of happiness" in a sea of problems.

70% of the people in current Bundestag have finished University and another 15% some other colleges. 5% studied without finishing. With a clear upward trend in those numbers each legislature period. I'd consider that a high enough number for people representing society. Thought technical degrees are sadly rather low (don't have exact numbers, but seem to be around 10% of those with degrees). Source (in german): https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/272942/924eeff93db104...

And yet weirdly, those non-technical people seem to have accidentally stumbled on the solution that the whole world is moving towards, while the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear and even their most ambitious goals include using less nuclear and replacing it with the stuff the ideological German's came up with, because it's better. And it wasn't that long ago that they were threatening to scrap the whole idea of nuclear if the industry didn't produce one on time and budget, which still seems to be the main problem, they've just been given another chance to fail.

Weird, it's almost like these ideological people were listening to experts, but you didn't like what the experts were saying, and so you labelled 'following expert advice' as 'ideological' to help you continue to ignore expert opinion.

Solar and wind alone won't work without support by gas or other non-renewable sources. Try to find a single scientific study that gives a detailed overview of how the German energy mix is supposed to work and that explains how supply will be matched to demand 24/7 all year round. None exists. The whole "Energiewende" is built on the hope that either our neighbors will produce the necessary base capacity to stabilize our energy grid, or that a miracle storage technology will somehow be invented in the next 10 years.

I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" [1] by a Cambridge professor, it goes into great detail about the problems of matching electricity demand to supply day- & year-round.

1: https://www.withouthotair.com/

And somehow the cost of the non renewable energies that are required to deal with the volatility of wind and solar are never factored in the cost.

In 2011 ENERTRAG had a constructed a system to use a windpark to produce hydrogen and burn this in a gas/fuelcell plant. But since a change in the EEG Umlage Gesetz made them pay for their own energy produced by wind, it became unprofitable to do so.

If that sounds idiotic to you, that's because the change in the EEG was created to make exactly this impossible.

I think your information is out of date. It appears the wind park with hydrogen production is still active [1].

[1] https://enertrag.com/produkte/windgas

I read the book before the numbers it cites were decades out of date. And even then, it made a pretty good case for renewables in the parts of the globe where most people live.

Once you update it with current figures I'm assuming it can only make a stronger case. So are you just using the old figures and pretending those haven't changed?

That's like trying to model the next iPhones specs from first principles with specs from the last century.

Well it won't have a very big HDD because all that spinning rust will really drain the AA batteries.

edit to add, but his basic strategy is sound:

> The principal problem is that carbon pollution is not priced correctly. And there is no confidence that it’s going to be priced correctly in the future. When I say “correctly,” I mean that the price of emitting carbon dioxide should be big enough such that every running coal power station has carbon capture technology fitted to it.

> Solving climate change is a complex topic, but in a single crude brush- stroke, here is the solution: the price of carbon dioxide must be such that people stop burning coal without capture

The UK basically did this. Note that it was found by the market that replacing the coal plants entirely was cheaper than adding carbon capture to them.

edit 2:

> The most promising of these options, in terms of scale, is switching on and off the power demand of electric-vehicle charging. 30 million cars, with 40 kWh of associated batteries each (some of which might be ex- changeable batteries sitting in filling stations) adds up to 1200 GWh. If freight delivery were electrified too then the total storage capacity would be bigger still.

> There is thus a beautiful match between wind power and electric vehicles. If we ramp up electric vehicles at the same time as ramping up wind power, roughly 3000 new vehicles for every 3 MW wind turbine, and if we ensure that the charging systems for the vehicles are smart, this synergy would go a long way to solving the problem of wind fluctuations.

The UK also did this.

I'm baffled at the books continued popularly with renewable "debunkers". The book clearly described the problems and solutions. The main skepticism was aimed at politicians being able to overcome the political power of fossil fuel lobbiest and do something sensible.

The only explanation is a willful disregard for the new knowledge we've acquired in the intervening time period, much of which the author guesses correctly but we now know for a fact.

I think I figured out why they like it.

There's an E (for economics) plan outlined as a proposed solution, that assumes we'll deploy a lot of the cheapest energy source, whatever that is. It then also assumes (!) that onshore wind will cost the same as Nuclear and offshore wind will cost more. Put those two assunptions together and you get a plan with lots of nuclear.

Note, he's not actually predicting this outcome, though it does seem to be his personal preference at the time. He mentions that cheaper solar-to-fuel might be an alternative, as what really mattered was which was cheapest, which he assumed, incorrectly, would be nuclear.

Actual reality looks a lot closer to his G plan, for 'greenpeace' named sarcastically because they just love wind power, because as it turned out wind was cheaper than basically everything else (until solar caught up in most of the world). Maybe Greenpeace got lucky, maybe they were just better informed.

So if he was to rewrite that same plan with today's figures, the Economist and Green party plans would probably agree. Amusingly ironic and a testament to his methods even if his clearly stated assumptions no longer hold true.

UK did this and that, and yet currently gas + nuclear generates over half of energy production.

https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB

Also, UK has one of the best in the world conditions for wind power. Wind sucks in Poland or Czech Republic.

I'm mostly referring to the section on storage, which is still largely true today. Germany does not have enough mountain areas to build significant hydro storage, and no other storage technology currently comes close to that in terms of efficiency and scale. We could of course produce hydrogen and burn that again but there the round-trip efficiency is only around 20 % in the best case I think (up to 50 % if we could use the waste heat as well), compared to around 80 % for hydro. Hence we would need to over-provision wind & solar energy production by 400 % to use this form of storage, which is highly unlikely as we will have trouble fulfilling our current ambitious goals for wind and solar, which already require a 500-1000 % increase in construction rates over the next decades.

Batteries would be another candidate but again the required amount of energy and the power slew rate are enormous, so storage facilities would be extremely costly and would compete with electric car battery production. I don't have much faith in the idea of storing energy in electric vehicle batteries as most of these cars will be on the road when the energy is needed (7-9 am) and will be mostly plugged in to charge when renewable production is low (during the night). Also I'm not sure if the electricity grid would even allow such a conversion as it's not designed for many small producers arranged in a mesh.

The section on storage that literally starts by pointing out that a renewable only or nuclear only plan would both require storage?

And then lays out multiple solutions, including 20Kwh of EV battery storage for every person which must have been basically science fiction at the time of writing but now sounds entirely boring and inevitable for reasons entirely separate from power storage.

Yeah I'd say that holds up pretty well, but I'm still not seeing the problem it apparently poses for today's world of cheap renewables?

We need and want to produce lots of green hydrogen for non-burning purposes. That fits perfectly into the demand response idea he lays out in reasonable detail. So why do you seem to think pumped hydro storage was the only solution he mentioned?

Even with his dated view on PV prices, he raises the possibility of importing hydrogen:

> "Solar photovoltaics were technically feasible for Europe, but I judged them too expensive. I hope I’m wrong, obviously. It will be wonderful if the cost of photovoltaic power drops in the same way that the cost of computer power has dropped over the last forty years."

What a great quote to look back on from a future where his hopes came true.

The evidence that renewables need to be supported by gas and oil is evidential in northern Europe, observed by anyone who pay their own electricity bill. When the wind is weak the market price is determined by gas and oil prices. When the wind is strong the price goes down to basically transit costs. Since the average wind condition is pretty much the same each year, the market cost for electricity has been 100% determined by gas and oil prices for the last decade.

If one also follow energy politics this has also been very clear by the politicians themselves. The green political movement has been advocating the concept of "reserve energy" over nuclear "base load". The strategy is to build out as much wind and solar as possible, while keeping natural gas and oil plant on subsidized plans. When the weather is bad for energy production, those natural gas and oil plant starts up and supply the missing supply.

For oil and gas operators this is a pretty great deal. They get paid twice, once by the government and then a second time by the market. They also only need to spend fuel when the market price is at its highest, reducing fuel costs and improving profits. It is pretty much a win-win situation for the government and power plants operators.

>Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air

This book has come up on Hacker News before, and I've read it, and it has a crucial flaw, well, two actually:

- It underestimates the efficiency of solar panels by quite a bit, supposing that 10% would be a lofty goal (and arguing on this basis that solar farms are not economically viable). In fact, panels on the market are approaching 20% [1], and 25% seems well within reach.

- It uses the United Kingdom, one of the dimmest countries in the world [2] and one of the most densely populated, as an index for the viability of solar power in any country. In fact, the UK is probably the worst-case geography+population for solar power, and almost every other country would have a better time of it. In this context, it is worth considering that nuclear power may be particularly appropriate for Europe specifically, since it is peaceful, densely populated, mostly north of the 45th parallel, and cloudy, but solar is probably more practical elsewhere.

The real problem with cost estimates for solar and wind power is that they do not necessarily adjust well for the rate of construction. They may be reasonably accurate assuming a constant rate of construction, but a truly worthwhile implementation of solar and wind power would require a much higher rate of construction than is currently being implemented. I rarely see much of the methodology of these studies, but what I have seen basically involves taking the current price of solar and battery installations, applying a few fudge factors, and scaling up linearly. That may not be realistic.

Meanwhile, the cost estimates for nuclear power are based on data from the construction of large facilities, and therefore necessarily incorporate a much more realistic high rate of investment. Nuclear plants are big.

1: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/photovo...

2: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/World_DN...

The book doesn't actually use british solar numbers for the rest of the world, it even suggests shipping in solar energy derived fuels from other countries to the UK and that even including the extra conversion and shipping/transmission costs would be competitive with nuclear built in the UK, which implies its a no-brainer for those source nations to use it for their own power.

Where it feels a little parochial, is its focus on the UK as if the GDP or population of the UK matters in the context of a global issue like sustainable energy.

It simply doesn't and he has enough facts and figures available even at that time to put that together, but probably fell into the classic british position of assuming they are more important than they really are in a global context.

Anyone outside the UK must read it in the same way people in the UK would read a small island dweller writing "Yes this might work for most of the UK but the Isle of Man would need to import power, which is simply unthinkable, even though it already does, so maybe we should build nuclear there instead to maintain the islands sovereignty".

Or maybe we can discount the needs of half a percent of the population if they run counter to the needs of the other 99.5% and focus on the big picture?

In the end we didn't need to as the wind power, heat pumps, EVs and carbon fees required for the UK overlapped heavily with other nations but this was a clear blindspot which I think you are charitably interpreting as a silly mistake when really it's more akin to arrogance.

I believe it also assumes significant input from biomass, which has a very large effect on the amount of land area needed because of the extremely low power/area of biomass.

Nuclear is no different that solar and other technologies. It is economical at scale. It is prohibitive if all you build is a prototype once every 10 years, which is what we do in Europe. China and Korea found a way to make it work.

> the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear

They haven't forgotten, they were fighting a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens. The same eco-ideologist that ruined Germany have made it impossible to properly invest in the nuclear plants in France and to ensure knowledge and expertise is properly transmitted and developed with the younger generation.

For years the message was "don't invest in nuclear, don't study nuclear, don't build nuclear, don't maintain nuclear". Now the message is "we can't even do nuclear properly", it's a disengenous argument.

What we need is a bit of future perspective: Nuclear is here to stay for the next decades (plural). Nuclear related jobs will be in high demand. Nuclear jobs will be well paying. Nuclear jobs will be safe. Nuclear formation is important, and here is money to ensure it happens. Maintenance of nuclear plants is important, it needs to happen and it will be financed. And that will lead to true expertise and safety.

> Nuclear is here to stay for the next decades (plural).

That's the problem with nuclear; even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two.

No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. Decommissioning of the first UK nuclear power plants is expected to last another century. That's being paid for by taxpayers. The builders and operators of those plants were never asked to plan or pay for decommissioning; and anyway, 200 years is a long time to expect a corporation to stay alive.

So let's be quite clear: the cost of a nuclear power plant includes the cost of decommissioning. Since decommissioning takes such a long time, you can't rely on contracts with private companies to ensure they finish the job. Decommissioning is a horrible insurance risk; never having been completed successfully, there's no reliable guide to how much it might cost.

So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my grandchildren!

In the US operators pay into a fund for decommissioning.

>No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned.

There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully decommissioned[1].

[1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792

"fully decommissioned" by some somewhat unintuitive definitions:

> The DOE was required by contract and statute to begin removing spent nuclear fuel and GTCC waste by January 31, 1998. To date, the DOE has not removed any spent fuel or GTCC waste from the CY site, and it is unknown when it will.

The current 'plan' is for the companies looking after the waste on the original site to sue the government every few years to get paid for looking after the waste.

http://connyankee.com/

The casks are safe where they are and should hold safely for at least 90 years according tot he notoriously conservative NRC. They should be moved, and congress needs to get its shit together, I agree.

We really need to get deep storage unstuck from the Yucca Mountain issue, but I think this still counts as decommissioned.

Why do we need to get deep storage unstuck? Putting the waste in dry casks is cheaper.

There are radionuclides in those casks with half-lives of 200,000 years - much longer than human civilisation, and much longer still than the lifetime of a human writing system. We don't even know how to make a label that will make sense in 200,000 years.

This attitude only makes sense if one's view is that humanity isn't going to last more than 10,000 years.

Unless we can find a way of rendering nuclear waste safe, then we have to find a way of making it so inaccessible that a future civilisation is unlikely to come across it by accident, and so secure that even a major earthquake won't cause it to leak into the environment.

Storing this stuff in metal tins on the surface isn't even a gesture at a solution.

I sort of mostly agree. Long term deep storage is nice because with a good design, we can pretty much set and forget. Most LLFPs aren't actually very dangerous as they don't emit gamma rays, but Tc-99 and I-129 are pretty nasty stuff. we could probably reprocess those into Ru and throw the rest of it into a deep geologically stable hole. Any society in 10k years that could find the stuff will be advanced enough to avoid or rebury it. As long as we don't store anything highly bioavailable near water, it should be fine. By 10k years from now the amount of radiation actually being released will be miniscule. But, I'm all for a big deep hole.

No, the attitude makes sense because of the time value of money.

At any point, if interest rates aren't pretty much exactly zero, it pays to delay burying waste. The present cost of guarding it at the surface is < the cost of burying it now. If, at any time, the interest rates do drop to zero and stay there, it can be buried then.

The only real argument against this is that the waste ceases to be self-protecting from "amateur" diversion of plutonium in about 300 years, which could greatly increase the cost of guarding. But that's no justification for burying it now.

Waiting also reduces the thermal output from fission products, which reduces heat buildup in the repository, at least a bit. And it would allow the waste to be reprocessed (and more easily) if that (perhaps unexpectedly) becomes appropriate. It would also allow time for other disposal methods, such as launching into space, to become competitive. How cheap will the descendants of SpaceX's launchers be in 300 years?

I think there may have been an argument for rapidly burying waste during the cold war, where surface waste could be volatilized by a direct H bomb strike, causing enhanced local long term fallout. That's more an argument against nuclear power itself, though, as NPPs could also be disrupted by direct strikes.

> "amateur" diversion

This is always a funny topic when people wax philosophical about dirty bombs as though you wouldn't get cooked trying to open a cask.

this is exactly the idealism thats causing problems -the energy futures in germany reaches the highest price in recorded history, the industry is being decimated and it's importing gas from a tyran that has started a war on Gemany's doorstep. Without Europe's gas dollars he would not be able to fund it's millatry and 12 million ukranians would never become homeless refugees.

Meanwhile you are complaining about waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.

No, what's creating the problems is the gas and coal lobby that dug into the conserveratives (CDU) and social democrats (SPD) to prevent the Energiewende from completion by creating burocratic and economical hurdles.

For example, it was forbidden to have more than 50GW installed capacity of solar. By Law.

oh and also destroying the industries building the solar panels, therefore losing the entire market to China…

I think that misses the point.

If you reckon it's OK to leave waste lying around, especially in constrained economic and political circumstances, that's a legitimate point of view. Argue for that. But don't declare that "decommissioning" simply means something like "Do your best, and then be done with it". That's dishonest (I'm not accusing you personally of any dishonesty).

If "decommissioning" doesn't mean complete reversal of all harmful results of the operation of a plant, then we need a new word that does mean that.

That’s not what decommissioning means and what you’re asking for is childishly ridiculous.

How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants we’ve been running for forty years while people like yourself threw ignorant tantrums over nuclear?

How would you “reverse all harmful results of the operation of a plant”?

How are you going to recapture all the pollution they dumped into our air, exactly?

> That’s not what decommissioning means

The word apparently means whatever the responsible authorities want it to mean.

> How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants

We used to make gas by heating coal with steam; the result was a contaminated site, coal gas, and coke for steel. But the site was left contaminated with chemical waste - stuff that can in principle be chemically denatured, or buried fairly safely. Thing is, I'm against making new coal-to-gas plants, as much as I'm against new nukes.

I don't have to defend coal and gas power plants; I don't have to explain how to reverse their effects; I'm against building any new ones, and my lack of any remedies for the effects of plants built before I was born doesn't invalidate my stance.

[Edit] I think I missed your point, which was probably based on my use of the word "reversing". You're effectively asking me how to complete the decommissioning of plants that were put out of use before I was born. If you want childish, that's childish: you're asking me for a proposal for reversing climate change.

I'm talking about how to build a nuclear power plant that can be properly decommissioned, in the sense that there's no persistent environmental pollution, and the land can safely be returned to normal uses, such as agriculture and residential housing. I'm against repeating the mistakes my grandparents made, in all their ignorance.

> I'm against repeating the mistakes my grandparents made, in all their ignorance.

You’re making the exact same mistake by rejecting today’s an attainable but imperfect solution in favor of an unattainably perfect one.

The end result is that we waste another few decades spewing pollution into the air.

It doesn't matter if something is "OK" or not. It matters what your options are. And they are:

1. Spew the waste into the air (fossil fuels)

2. Contain and bury the waste (nuclear)

3. Go without electricity when the weather is not favorable until major tech improvements in storage

So unless you want to argue for 3, and I don't think you do, 2 is clearly the best option.

> the energy futures in germany reaches the highest price in recorded history, the industry is being decimated and it's importing gas from a tyran that has started a war on Gemany's doorstep. Without Europe's gas dollars he would not be able to fund it's millatry and 12 million ukranians would never become homeless refugees.

Obviously, nothing can be done with nuclear power now to address that problem. Looking back, there is no reason to think that fossil fuel usage would have disappeared by now. Even the issue of climate change has had little impact. Nuclear is generally far more expensive.

Now if we had had made the fossil fuel industry pay the true cost of their waste products - greenhouse gases - then there might have been a market for nuclear.

> idealism

If you have a good argument, why disparage people who disagree? Why not address their concerns seriously?

The threat of nuclear waste is very real and serious. There are solutions, but these are serious issues that won't be addressed by disparaging other people.

> waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.

Nobody has died yet (is that even true?), so it's safe?

The US government made nuclear plants pay into a fund for long-term waste storage. Last I saw, that fund had accumulated over $40 billion. But since the Yucca Mountain facility was canceled, the government never provided the waste storage they were charging for. It's not surprising if nuclear operators don't want to pay twice.

Not only that, congress mandated that Yucca Mountain is the only allowable site, and has also prevented its use…

> There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully decommissioned

According to your link, there are 10 plants that have achieved "DECON status": that is, the spent fuel and machinery have been removed from the site (presumably to some other site).

I'm sorry, but that's a cop-out: it's cheating to say you've decommissioned a site, when what you've really done is transport the entire site, including topsoil, to a new location. That's like saying your plastics are green, because when they are no longer wanted they are all shipped to Indonesia. And apparently at least some of those "decommissioned" sites still have spent fuel stored on-site; I don't see how a site with spent fuel can be considered to have been returned to "greenfield" condition.

No coal plant has ever been decommissioned either, because its radioactive waste, and other waste, is now in the air we all breathe.

Same with solar. Spent solar panels don't go nowhere.

No other plant either.

> even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two.

Is this really a problem, though?

Well, I think nuclear waste is a problem. It's highly toxic, and there's no process for detoxifying it. It has to be "got rid of", somehow, or put somewhere that humans can't accidentally encounter it. And it remains dangerous roughly forever, in terms of the span of a human civilisation.

200 years is sorta manageable, I suppose, if you have the resources and longevity of a nation state. You can bury it under a mountain, and set a battalion of armed orcs to guard it. But nation states can change their minds; whether the cost of hiring those orcs is money well-spent is a political decision, and the politicians responsible may not have "the long view" in mind.

I think nuclear power can be done safely; but I don't think that's possible as long as the task is overseen by profit-making corporations or short-termist governments. And I don't see who else can do it.

People would be less suspicious of your motives if you would spread the same amount of panic about coal industry ash ponds -- where arsenic and heavy metals will be lethal forever rather than just for thousands of years -- or mine tailings dams which burst with alarming regularity killing more people and devastating more square milege annually than nuclear waste ever did or will.

As is, it seems that for you, dangerous waste is a deal breaker for something you are ideologically opposed to, but perfectly fine in other areas.

I am from the UK. Our coal industry was almost completely destroyed by Margaret Thatcher. For many years, the notion of digging new pits has not been on the agenda. There is now a pit waiting for planning permission, but I don't think it will succeed (I hope not).

Meanwhile plans to get some foreign company to build giant new nukes here are pressing ahead. So yeah, my focus is on the imminent threat that I can do something about, not on old mistakes that were made before I was born, that I can't do much about.

> something you are ideologically opposed to

You're the second person that has accused me of being "ideological". Is that the same as "having opinions"? That word is generally used dismissively. It should mean that I subscribe to some ideology. What ideology is it that you believe I subscribe to? How could you know whether my views on nuclear are inspired by some ideology that I've bought into wholesale, or whether they are the result of thinking things through for myself?

Feel free to ask me about my opinions, but kindly refrain from telling me what they are.

>No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned.

Trojan?

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

WP says the plant has been "largely decommissioned". To my reading, that means the same as "not decommissioned yet".

The reactor and fuel were removed, and the reactor building and cooling tower were demolished. Maybe we need to use another word? Seems like that plant is pining-for-the-fjords.

From what I'm reading, that just means there are a couple of buildings (offices, warehouses, etc) left on the site. It hasn't been completely demolished yet, but it doesn't sound like there's anything extraordinary preventing that, either.

> The concrete casks sit on a heavy concrete pad, located adjacent to the former Trojan Nuclear Plant site.

> The ISFSI storage pad is surrounded by a secured area, which is monitored and protected round the clock.

Same word games as the other one.

The reactor itself is temporarily buried awaiting movement to Yucca Mountain, which has no planned date.

> So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my grandchildren!

We’re the grandchildren of the eco-ideologists that spent the last forty years dumping coal and gas pollution into the atmosphere because they were afraid of nuclear power.

My father was born in 1914; they didn't invent nuclear power until he was 40. It wasn't until the early 2000s that there was consensus that coal and gas caused pollution that was a very serious problem, if you set aside the smogs of the early 50s.

My grandparents were from the era of steam-powered mills; I doubt the word "pollution" had been coined before they died. I'm pretty sure the term "ecology" dates from the mid-20th-century, after all my grandparents had died.

So yes: my grandparents left me with a problem; but it's not their fault, because they didn't know. We do know, and my grandchildren would be right to curse me if I left a similar problem for them to solve, knowing what I was doing all along.

The term pollution dates back to the 14th Century...

Thank you, I am now better-informed.

The message and reality have always been detached in Europe: almost every physics department I know has a nuclear institute. And funding is there, too. The know-how was never lost in my opinion.

I think the engineering know-how isn't there as much. When you haven't actually built a plant in 30 years and all the experienced building and designer engineers have moved on, you don't actually know how to build one any more. I feel the delays on the new projects are mostly caused by lack of experience, lack of clarity on actual risks, a lot of second system syndrome (we're doing it right this time, say the maintainer of the previous systems...) and also more regulatory oversight (which is IMO a gold thing). Let's see how these plants built with far more oversight age better than the old ones.

Hungary is just building one right now.

That's great news. I wish the European nuclear industry would have always 10 of these projects running at any time, so we could continuously learn, train and improve ever-so-slightly the designs.

This highlights the real Achilles heel of the nuclear industry - it is a labour efficient power producer that it doesn't employ enough people to guarantee political protection.

We ended up with a group of people who would benefit a moderate amount from cheap power, and a fanatic anti-nuclear lobby that succeeded in scuttling decades of progress. The more motivated group won, as is predictable.

It is amazing watching Europeans trying to achieve energy poverty in defiance of their technical head start. The energy figures out of places like the UK, France and Germany are startlingly bad (eg, [0]). Especially considered per-capita.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Historical_D...

No, the real Achilles heel is that the nuclear power plants are too expensive and don't seem to be able to be built on budget in the West.

Money->safety is not a provable claim

We have many better solutions than nuclear, and have for decades. Why not use them - reduce energy consumption, use a market-based solution of making people pay the actual cost of greenhouse gas production (e.g., trading carbon credits), etc.?

It's the reactionaries that are in the way. Why blame the only people who have been concerned about climate change? Because it's easier to attack them; because people are scared of taking on the reactionaries.

> a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens

This is just jumping on the bandwagon of demonizing the target du jour. Can you back this up? What do you mean by witch-hunt? Who in particular was attacked? By who?

"Reduce energy consumption" is not a solution. The population is growing every year. Energy consumption is growing every year. Energy production has to grow to keep up. If it can't because the chosen technology doesn't scale, then that's a problem with that technology.

You are arguing in bad faith. As IMTDb correctly points out, these plants have become more difficult to build because of a deliberate bullying campaign - one that you are continuing here.

> Weird, it’s almost like these ideological people were listening to the experts.

Go away, bully.

It's basically victim blaming. "I just punched you in the face and broke your nose. Why are you so ugly now?"

Anti-nuclear sentiment (both environmentalist and anti-nuclear weapons) was generously sponsored by the Soviet Union. What a surprise than nowadays the same groups are serving the interests of Russia.

The most cynical thing is that the biggest nuclear accident in history was caused by Soviet negligence and incompetence and yet they managed to exploit it politically.

I would love to read more about this. Can you provide sources?

Check the sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_influence_on_the_peace_...

It has been claimed many times by Soviet defectors. Every defector from GRU or and high-profile officers from the KGB claimed so. It is very hard to prove, but it is so extremely serving to the USSR.

Peace meant unilateral disarmament and abandonment of nuclear technology - how convenient. Today the claims by some politicians in Europe that "aiding Ukraine prolongs the war" are a similar trope of Russian origin.

Back in the Cold War one of the policies the "Peace movement" advocated was "nuclear-free zones" in Western countries. The USSR encouraged organisations by providing funds and used its propaganda arms to aid the movement (conveniently keeping quit on its own arrangements).

That doesn't make any sense because Russian companies are significant suppliers within the nuclear power production logistics footprint.

edit: eg. https://www.wired.com/story/the-nuclear-reactors-of-the-futu...

Money Russia gets from nuclear poewr production are miniscule comparing to money from gas/oil export. _any_ expansion of nuclear energy in Europe is against Russian agenda to be major gas/oil provider. Geramany suppose to be broker of that.

For Germany cheap Nuclear energy on central/east Europe is dangerous because cheap energy = more competitive market. Add cheaper workforce and you have very dangerous mix. Read why Bulgaria was forced to shut down majority of their reactors before joining EU. Offically it was about "security". Bulgaria with cheap nuclear energy from already built power plants and cheap workforce was too "dangerous" for old EU countries. Politics is very important when discussing energy market.

Exactly! Plus the majority of customers for Russias nuclear tech are not in the West - they are in places like Iran, Turkey, China and some smaller countries.

> Anti-nuclear sentiment (both environmentalist and anti-nuclear weapons) was generously sponsored by the Soviet Union.

Can you back that up?

> What a surprise than nowadays the same groups are serving the interests of Russia.

It's actually the reactionary right that is supporting Russia these days.

There is barely a speech by Putin and Lavrov where they don't literally say something like "beginning of a radical breakdown of the US-style world order. This is the beginning of the transition from liberal-globalist American egocentrism"

So this is why Russia supports and is supported by all radical groups that want to change the current order - left or right.

The state it self is right-wing but you can see even anarchist organisations parroting its agenda.

Russian trolls also just stir up trouble - the same people will post extreme fake claims supposedly by BLM protesters and then right-wing conspiracy theories. They see stirring up racial and class tensions as useful because it destroys the "hypocritical liberal order" - it paralyses countries and governments so they can't do effective foreign policy.

The people that usually are puzzled about this approach, also avoid any of the arguments on why people don't want nuclear facilities as the basis of their energy infrastructure.

Framing it as some closed minded ideological stance, and that Germany wouldn't be in a position to understand the pros and cons to nuclear technology, just looks to dismiss those that might have actual rationales for running their countries differently.

Also, framing it as if Germany policy had not been also ... "influenced" by Russia's long-term strategy would be quite naive.

Why does everyone attribute to deception what could just as easily be attributed to this relationship being beneficial for Germany (and a lot of other EU countries which are conveniently omitted from this discussion)?

Energy is at the core of economic development and Germany and a bunch of other countries were able to get gas for decades.

Do you the famous (and maybe fake) quote 'The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them' ?

It's the same here, but with selling energy to "capitalists".

What Europeans might have seen as purely economic affair for the USSR / Russia was just means of getting money to grow and support its army, to buy Western politicians and media influence, etc.

Theoretically you’re right.

Practically you’re not though, because as history attests, the USSR dissolved peacefully and thorough all the ups and downs the economic relationship survived.

This is perhaps why the warnings from the US were ignored for so long: they were based on self-interest and they had a track record of being wrong for decades.

It was not peacefully. Rather without large scale war. Some people got killed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events_(Lithuania)

Germany is just the b*tch of the USA though, that becomes very clear in this press conference. Germany has nothing to say over Nordstream: https://youtu.be/OS4O8rGRLf8?t=74

'US Senate approves Nord Stream 2 Russia-Germany pipeline sanctions | The move by US lawmakers is part of a push to counter Russian influence in Europe, but European [i.e., German] lawmakers have said the US should mind its own business.' 2019 December 17 https://www.dw.com/en/us-senate-approves-nord-stream-2-russi...

'Why Germany pipes down when talk turns to Nord Stream 2 sanctions | Chancellor Olaf Scholz won’t say pipeline is finished if Russia attacks Ukraine, despite strong pressure from allies.' 2022 February 8 https://www.politico.eu/article/olaf-scholz-silence-on-nord-...

"could just as easily be attributed to this relationship being beneficial for Germany"

There is no single concience called Germany that may definitively answer the question of whether it benefits them.

As is often the case, people benefetting from this relationship are not the ones paying the price when something goes wrong.

For every 1 billion of economic benefit produced by this relationship, this war has destroyed 5.

most lukely, without this relationship, the qar would not be possible.

The fact that it persisted for decades and increased in capacity is proof that it benefited Germany and the other European countries.

And you’ve noticed yourself that the benefits accrued in the EU and the costs were incurred in Ukraine. But this is oversimplifying things - the Ukraine war has other important geopolitical facets besides the admittedly important energy aspect, such as NATO expansion.

I think it's a mistake to see that as one sided. Bringing Russia closer to Europe and (according to the now falsified theory) creating conditions for peace while also getting cheap energy has been a goal of plenty of European elites.

Elites who have been compensated handsomely by the Kremlin. "Useful idiots" comes to mind.

> Bringing Russia closer to Europe and (according to the now falsified theory) creating conditions for peace

It's not falsified. It may have improved conditions for peace; the situation could have been far worse now. Real-world issues don't work out neatly; they are extremely complex; you never know what the alternative outcome would have been.

As an analogy, eating healthy food and getting exercise isn't 'falsified' as health recommendations when someone happens to die young.

Yeah, definitely. I meant the position that it would be sufficient or decreased the probability much more than it could have (and did.) I'm actually of the opinion that it was the right thing to do and really we didn't do enough connecting the economies, bridging the cultures and elites and that's why we ended up in this situation. On the other hand, we probably shouldn't have gone that far in on gas without having done the rest of that and seeing actual results. If the long-term costs were accounted for, I think green was actually cheaper all along.

I'm puzzled about why nuclear is deemed less satisfactory than dependence on Putin's Russia for the energy requirements of the world's 4th biggest economy.

Dependence on the Soviet Union and later Russia worked for 50 years.

This partnership, which was being undermined by the US from the beginning, is attributed to establishing a basis for cooperation between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Considering that the Soviets pulled out peacefully of Eastern Germany, that worked pretty great.

This is incredibly short-sighted. Soviets pulling out of Eastern Germany, the collapse of the GDR, the Warsaw Pact, the USSR has very little to do with the energy imports. One might even argue that the USSR would collapse economically even earlier if not for all the currency it got from oil and gas sales.

Having a relationship based on mutually beneficial economic exchanges is an important reason why one would treat their economic partner nicely. It’s perhaps not the reason, but it is a reason.

Given how peacefully it collapsed and the huge potential for mayhem, I’d stay away from altering the timeline.

We have no idea what the alternate histories would look like. We can guess - yours is a reasonable guess - but it is all guesses. I can come up with reasons thing would things went far worse, and if you think a little you should be able to as well - they may be somewhat unlikely, but that is all the more we can say.

What we do know is where we are today: Russia is not playing nice with the world despite our attempts to have beneficial economic exchanges. Would the not play nice with USSR scenarios be worse - we have no real idea.

Yes, please give the Soviets due credit for how well they treated the Eastern Bloc countries. The Czechs and Slovaks, along with the Hungarians might like a word with you, to point out a few extreme examples. Same with the rest of the Bloc countries that had to cope with decades of repression.

> dependence on Putin's Russia

First, it's Russia, not Putin's Russia. It's derogatory to frame discussion like that. Should we also start putting "Biden's USA" and "Macron's France"? Just writing this way, and suddenly both USA and France appear like some fourth world banana republics.

Second, both Russia and Soviet Union before were the most reliable energy partner. They didn't fail their obligations a single time.

Reduction in Russian gas should be blamed on NATO sanctions that prevented a timely maintenance of North Stream 1 by confiscation of the gas turbine, and the refusal to start using North Stream 2 although it is ready to deliver gas tomorrow, if Germany decides so.

Putin's power in Russia is a lot more absolute than Biden's in the US or Macron's in France. And especially with his war against Ukraine and general hatred of democracy, Putin is relevant. The EU would have had less problems buying gas from Yeltsin's Russia. In fact, that's how we got into this situation; Russia was supposed to be on the road to becoming a normal, open democracy. And then Putin changed course.

Demonizing an enemy by personalisation and reduction to one evil dictator is a known propaganda / manipulation technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonizing_the_enemy#Personifi...

This has always been a standard operation model for the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit...

So yes, Putin's Russia is used intentionally to introduce the same feeling as Hitler's Germany. That's the way how Biden's USA works, supported by Ursula von der Layens EU, Stoltenberg's NATO and their minions.

But Putin does have dictator level control...

It's Putin's Russia because Russia does what Putin wants.

Biden wants a lot of things for America but both the legislature and the courts are stopping that. So in that sense it is America's America.

You might have a point if any of the other people you mention had maintained unchallenged political power for 2 decades by the expedient of murdering their political rivals.

I am just pointing out that if you use these terms, it frames the whole country in a negative sense.

Would Bush's USA, Clinton's USA, Nixon's USA, Obama's USA or POTUS X' USA work better? Because each one of the US presidents except Trump and Biden (give him some more time) is directly or indirectly responsible for more killing around the world than Putin would ever be. Hundreds of thousands (in case of some presidents even millions) people have been murdered on their direct command. Even if "Putin's Russia" is really responsible for everything that US / NATO propaganda accuses them, they still have a long way to go to reach this levels of atrocities and destruction.

It emphasises the negative effect Putin has on the country. And he does. He's plunging the country and the world into an unnecessary war just to feed his pride, and he does so in a clear break from his predecessor. Putin's Russia is significantly different from Yeltsin's Russia that it's worth pointing out the difference, especially since that difference is all him.

And while you could certainly argue that for example Bush plunged his country into an unnecessary war to feed his pride, you're arguing that he's not that much of a break from his predecessors. And the American people as a whole definitely carry more of that responsibility. That's still a reason to call out Putin specifically, instead of the country as a whole.

It's done mostly out of compassion with the average Russians who have no say in the matter. I think it's important to remind people that it's specifically Putin who wants this war, and that most Russians don't. Just like we try not to blame the average German for Hitler's mad aggression.

As many people have pointed out, comparisons to Hitler's conquests at the start of WW2 are not unjustified; Putin is using much of the same rhetoric that Hitler used. His state media is actively discussing the need for genocide. Those "same feelings as Hitler's Germany" are because the facts are far too similar.

> Putin who wants this war, and that most Russians don't.

I don't think we have enough data to say this confidently. Putin enjoys a very broad base of support

People, including elites in Putin’s inner circle, perceived as insufficiently loyal to Putin have experienced a rash of widely reported “murder-suicides” of their entire families, and others who have avoided that fate have experienced, other very public, severe adverse consequences.

This, along with Russia’s notoriously pervasive secret police and domestic surveillance may have something to do why even “anonymous” polling of Russia finds fairly small numbers of people willing to say they don't support the regime wholeheartedly, independent of actual sentiment.

Because he controls the media. There have also been very persistent protests against the war. Russians in a position to speak freely often criticise it. That's not true for the majority of Russians, however.

> Second, both Russia and Soviet Union before were the most reliable energy partner. They didn't fail their obligations a single time.

Sorry, this is bollocks. For more than 30 years Russia is using energy supplies as a weapon against pretty much all the eastern and central Europe.

Can you give one single example when it was Russia's guilt for not delivering gas?

The only time when we had issue with gas it was some ten years ago when Ukraine stopped the transit hoping to blackmail both Russia and the EU to get a better deal for themselves. Ukraine was a failed state then that couldn't pay for gas they used.

First well published incident was cutting off Estonia in 1993, right after it regained independence.

Note Russia always does something to shift the blame, usually starts "dispute" over payments. It's done because media need to report ”balanced" view, so just by reading general news it's not apparent tha this is really blackmail. Stockholm tribunal regularly disproves Russian version, it just takes time, which is what Russia is after: you can't survive winter without heating, and the final verdict won't arrive in time. So until LNG terminals and pipelines to Norway sprang around the Baltic Sea, coupled with Third Package, Eastern Europeans mostly had to yield to this blackmail.

> The only time when we had issue with gas

ISTM you live west of Oder. No one in Eastern Europe would say this.

> it was some ten years ago when Ukraine stopped the transit hoping to blackmail both Russia and the EU to get a better deal for themselves. Ukraine was a failed state then that couldn't pay for gas they used.

This is false, Ukraine wasn't "failed state". What failed was an attempt to rig an election.

It is a failed state. Or call it a puppet state. After the Maidan coup it became pretty fast s fascist autocracy. And it was corrupt since the gain of independence. How else would you call it? A pinnacle of democracy certainly not.

> After the Maidan coup it became pretty fast s fascist autocracy

I think you are confusing Ukraine after Maidan with Russia under Putin.

(Well, no, I really think you are just parroting laughably dumb Russian propaganda, but it would be more accurate with those substitutions.)

In what ways has nuclear energy failed Germany that don't stem from small scale and lack of investment?

Your comment gets it entirely backwards. France is currently in a terrible spot with their monoculture of nuclear because the hot temperatures have caused shutdowns of many reactors, many old plants are offline because of security concerns and the French operator of the nuclear plants is close to bankruptcy and needs to be pulled back into government ownership because renewables can be so much cheaper today.

What Germany did get wrong is that they invested too much in renewables too early and that continues to haunts Germans by paying subsidies for renewables installed more than 10 years ago. Germany helped to jump-start the whole scaling of renewables (together with the US) but the price is high.

I would argue this isn't actually so bad because we need to price energy higher anyway to reduce consumption and further accelerate the building of renewable capacity.

No matter what anybody says: nuclear is dead. The number of projects in planning (outside China) is so small that it won't make the slightest dent for our emissions goals. The only topics worth focusing on is solar, transmission and energy storage. Wind only matters in the next 10 years. Afterwards solar will be another magnitude cheaper and wind won't be able to compete.

I wonder how much of your comments/predictions will be true after this coming winter.

I am not looking forward to my gas bill indeed. Still hard to forsee that nuclear could come to the rescue in any way. Even in France they have scaled back eletric heating and will face hard times when cold weather strikes.

I’m less concerned about high prices than I am about rationing.

The problems of nuclear you mention seem fixable and french electricity prices are waaaaaaay cheaper than german ones. I fail to see how france is in a terrible spot when it's germany that's likely to freeze this winter (and has literally no solution for that, other than begging their enemy).

Why do you think solar will get cheaper by another order of magnitude?

Why do you think we need to reduce consumption?

While it's evident nuclear sentiment is not great in germany, from my point of view, I wouldn't characterize it as great in france either. Sadly, I think in this domain (as in many) france lives with the infrastructure and build of its past and currently fails to invest for its future, it's more managing decline than anything else. I think as current nuclear plants become older and mismatch between current needs and true green energies production become more apparent, people still live in a bubble and don't see the urgency nor courage to really invest in new reactors and plants and prepare the future, for france and europe. My dream would be that france, with help of germany and other willing eu countries would build new reactors with an overcapacity for france alone such that it would then provide this energy to other ue countries. Nuclear energy is a chance and is not mutually exclusive with other energies.

(of course i'm french)

> While it's evident nuclear sentiment is not great in germany, from my point of view, I wouldn't characterize as great in france either

I think it is changing. Both the IPCC and the ERDF reports were unambiguous and politicians and technocrats who were paying attention noticed. Now, skyrocketing gas prices are a warning shot. A blackout or a brownout could completely change public opinion (not that si would welcome it, but at this point it seems inevitable; we almost had 3 last winter).

> Sadly, I think in this domain (as in many) france lives with the infrastructure and build of its past and currently fails to invest for its future, it's more managing decline than anything else.

That is very true, unfortunately. That’s why building a series of EPR would be a good thing long-term, as it would provide some justifications to train new engineers and a refreshed skilled workforce.

> My dream would be that france, with help of germany and other eu countries would build new reactors with an overcapacity for france alone and would then provide this energy to other ue countries.

This would make sense from a technical point of view (one large fleet in a single country is easier to manage and more efficient than the same number of reactors distributed across several states). But that’s very difficult from a political point of view.

> Nuclear energy is a chance and is not mutually exclusive with other energies.

This is something a lot of people do not seem to grasp. We need all the low-carbon energy we can produce, and we need it 20 years ago. There is no point bickering about the share of renewable and the share of nuclear. We need renewables where we can and nuclear where we must.

In the end, what matters is that even a carbon-free electricity supply is just half the journey, and the easy half at that. It’s not something we will solve with a one-size-fits-all approach.

> That’s why building a series of EPR would be a good thing long-term, as it would provide some justifications to train new engineers and a refreshed skilled workforce.

Also very true. The most difficult is most likelihy to build the first one, reacquire the supply-chain, engineering, knowhow, then, you can build the next ones at scale, certainly with both an economy of time and money.

> My dream would be that france, with help of germany and other eu countries would build new reactors with an overcapacity for france alone and would then provide this energy to other ue countries. Nuclear energy is a chance and is not mutually exclusive with other energies.

I think this will stay a dream. Aren't "modern" nuclear plants such as the EPR all a) very late and b) massively over budget?

The EPR project is basically a complete train-wreck.

> Aren't "modern" nuclear plants such as the EPR all a) very late and b) massively over budget?

The Finnish one was both due to epic project management failures, from bad suppliers with dodgy welds, to changing the reactor design as it was being built to accommodate future regulations. Flamanville is also late and over budget for much of the same reasons (shoddy project management and unreliable suppliers; this time the concrete was out of specs as well). These sort of issues get sorted naturally if yew build in series instead of one-of-a kind.

The Chinese did not have any problem building two, and the British one is progressing more or less as planned.

Also, the EPR is not really a modern design.

> These sort of issues get sorted naturally if yew build in series instead of one-of-a kind

That would appear to rule out any possibility of rapid increasing nuclear generating capacity if we are going to be forced to build them one after another in order to work out how to do it well?

> The Chinese did not have any problem building two

...that they've admitted to?

> the British one is progressing more or less as planned

2022: "The nuclear power station being built at Hinkley Point will start operating a year later than planned and will cost an extra £3bn, EDF has said"[0]

2021: "British Hinkley Point Nuclear Plant Delayed With Higher Costs First reactor will start producing power in June 2026. Cost will be 500 million pounds more than previously planned"[1]

2019: "Costs Rise Again for U.K. Hinkley Point Nuclear Project. Utility increases bill for Hinkley units, flags possible delay. EDF also cuts estimated return from plant to as little as 7.6%"[2]

My issue with it is more the spectacularly bad deal for the consumer that it represents. Originally the UK government insisted that "the private sector would shoulder both the development costs and risk", but then the financial crisis happened, and they ended up having to rework the deal to the benefit of EDF, who basically had them over a barrel.[3]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-61519609 [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/edf-sees-... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-25/edf-raise... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

Check the data: https://www.stromdaten.info/ANALYSE/periods/index.php

- Timeframe: 01.06.2021 - 26.06.2022

- Import/Export country: Frankreich

Data:

- physical export balance 11,77 TWh

- monetary export balance: 2,13 Mrd €

- average import price/MWh: 133,71 €

- average export price/MWh: 169,91 €

It's good for Germany, not for France. Germany is selling electricity to France when prices are high, and buying when prices are low. And it is selling way more than buying.

Additionally, France is reducing the nuclear power share. Not by decommissioning working plants, but simply by not building as many new plants as would be necessary to keep the share.

Nuclear does have a cost problem in the sense that costs have not really dropped since forever, which is not boding well for a technology (unlike, for example costs for solar). So I can accept people arguing that way - but could also still argue for nuclear as an expensive baseload technology.

The whole taxonomic discussion is a distraction anyway. We are long past some simple carbon reduction path making a dent (and also coming at high costs), so in the end will be about mitigation and even attempts at geoengineering - as usual politics are way behind the curve.

One could argue ten years ago for nuclear as an expensive (but still overall desirable) baseload technology, but I think the window on that argument has closed.

Seems like France nuclear power has it's own problems

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

Very interesting! So basically what this story says means that the nuclear operator in France has been selling the electricity at a loss, so much so that they are way behind on maintenance and almost bankrupt.

Which in turn means that the actual cost of nuclear power in France is higher than has been reported so far. The cost has just been postponed for decades, until now.

It's certainly bad timing to discover it now - what a nasty "perfect storm" of unfortunate events we are having for electricity in Europe this year. :(

> In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...), whereas in Germany most people rise through social engineering and party politics and most top positions in the administration are filled by people with law degrees that don't have a clue about technology [..]

Would one really claim France is succeeding at a national level in the technology space due to all those excellent technically-trained administrators?

> In my opinion that's also a reason why we completely fail in everything regarding digitalization, lawyers are simply not good technical problem solvers

Why are administrators supposed to be the ones actually solving technical problems? Aren't government administrators more likely to be reading and writing plans and contracts (which trained [ex-]lawyers must have _some_ useful skills...)?

The French manage to spend less on military than Germany and seem to get about twice the capability.

"De-nuclearization of other European countries" - Germany should mind its own business.

I heard someone call Germany the "California of Europe" for this reason. It's simultaneously full of high-tech and engineers yet paradoxically also full of alternative-medicine quackery and anti-science viewpoints on things like nuclear power.

AFAIK there's a weird through-line here where California new age and 70s "new left" ideology has some of its roots in the same early 20th century romanticism that was and I'm sure in various forms still is popular in Germany. Look up the Volkisch movement:

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

The Dead Kennedys arguably beat you to this realization.

The only "ruinous" aspect is that Germany did not prepare on the side of renewable installed capacity (and perhaps storage, although I'm not sure.)

Nuclear is:

* Something like 3x more costly (levelized cost etc.) relative to solar and wind.

* Dangerous I: Yes, still dangerous for the foreseeable future. There are still significant risks, especially with nuclear waste storage, but to some extent with active plants. I'm not an expert on this, but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... with some examples from recent years.

* Dangerous II: Considering the state of infrastructure generally in some world states (e.g. the US) and profit motives, I do not believe the private nuclear industry can be trusted to deliver sufficient levels of safety.

* Dangerous III: Earthquakes, bombardment, and partisan/terrorist attacks are threats even to plants and storage facilities which are otherwise safe. And these occur with relative frequency; just think of the Zhaporizye (sp) plants a couple of months ago.

* Has greenhouse gas emission costs via mining of Uranium and such. Caveat: Not sure how much this compares to wind/solar/geothermal on one hand and coal/carbon-rich gas on the other hand/

* Is promoted to a great extent as a counterpart to nuclear arms programs. For nuclear weapons, you need fissile material, and you produce that in a nuclear reactor. Which then also produces heat, which you convert to power. Not all nuclear plants need to be like that, but again, no trust that these will go away.

Now, I am certainly no expert on the matter, so - convince me otherwise if you can.

It's such a pain how certain groups are so hung up on specific energy sources. German greens will never consider nuclear energy, Albertans will never consider anything that didn't come out of the ground either as oil or oil derived. It's like belonging to a sports team, it's silly.

I used to be very much against nuclear energy because of the unsolved issue around dealing with it's waste. Two decades later after learning about climate change and understanding more about pros and cons of different fuels and ways to generate electricity, it's obvious that nuclear energy can play a useful role in the transition off fossil fuels.

When oil producing countries are racing to get nuclear energy, it remains no surprise that it is something that will only help in the transition, because burning the fule is not a enough!

So, what changed in regards to dealing with its waste in the two decades? Or do you simply not care enough anymore?

I put too much weight on the waste storage problem. Looking at it now, in my opinion it might be preferable to have nuclear waste underground somewhere than keep polluting the atmosphere. It seems silly to still get hung up on that. Sure it's not great and I'd rather we don't, but we're at the eleventh hour and we've got to take more drastic, albeit suboptimal, steps.

Waste was never the big problem with fission, nor is it the blocking issue now. The world has gravitated toward dry cask storage of spent fuel, which is both simple, sensible, and cheap. It only contributes $0.001/kWh toward the cost of power from fission reactors, and precludes no future options to dealing with the spent fuel.

What has blocked fission is one thing: cost. For a while, fission advocates could stand pat, knowing that eventually fossil fuels would have to be moved away from, to fission, regardless of how expensive fission was. But now renewables have undercut fission, so that (somewhat lazy) expectation, that fission was almost entitled to be the post-fossil energy source, is no longer valid.

The grande école aristocracy in France isn't desirable either. It's a form of nepotism.

Yeah there's definitely problems with that as well, not saying it's perfect. I mostly want to contrast it to the anti-intellectual approach here in Germany, where top-level politicians are proud of not having any higher education and see it as their mission to get more ideologically-formed people into top positions.

Instead of accusing people of being ideological and irrational why don't you address all the issues around nuclear?

Political stability VS centralization of power is one. Nuclear power is highly centralized and vulnerable to corruption.

And also to war, terrorism and social unrest.

If we are to expect extreme climate and social instability in the next 50 years, it's safer to democratize and localize energy production and storage.

Renewables go in that direction. Nuclear goes in the opposite direction.

New nuclear is decentralizing with micro reactors.

Except it's impossible to safely scale down nuclear to domestic/community/small-town level.

Instead renewables and especially solar as well as batteries and geothermal heat storage scale down very well and can build resilient networks.

After the horrific blackouts that happened in some countries people on HN should be able to grasp this...

Unless microreactors are stacked up at centralized sites to share labor their operating costs are likely to be prohibitive.

Lawyer-run government is the norm in most Western countries. Software dev today is dominated by the US because of the brain drain great sucking noise.

Environmental sciences are still a niche and the storage problem hasn't been solved yet. E.g. the infamous Asse II has empirically proven to be unsafe mostly because of water influx and the 126.000 containers (which are partially captured within slowly floating salt) now have to be retrieved which is going to cost billions

No insurance company in the world is willing to insure a nuclear power plant and both risk and operation have been heavily subsidized since decades.

In fact renewable sources are even cheaper:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...

There's no reason to require polyticians to be technicians, and no reason to expect less formally-educated people to be more anti nuclear (except in the presence of massive disinformation campaigns). Requirements for formal education just select for conservative and obedient people - and we put them on the leaders (we got it backwards!). The US seems to kind of got it a bit more right, but it's probably just circus.

Technocratic politics doesn't work in practice (ask USSR), and there should be no requirements of formal education on politicians (not even non technical). But politicians and administrators do need to (re)learn fast on-the-lob so in practice an IQ test requirement would be great for them and probably for them only (yes, IQ measures well only how fast someone can learn something and not at all how good is someone at doing something after they've learned it, but, guess what... knowing and (re)learning fast about stuff they don't actually do is kind of the job requirement for politicians and administrators - an 145 IQ high-school-dropout with or without some alchol or substance issues is kind of the best person for a job like Prime Minister, Energy or Finance Minister etc.).

Oh, and on the active (we know their effects, so they must exist) campaigns of disinformation against known to work tech, there's a solution for that: laws for spreading false-facts and disinformation + throwing in jail people breaking them. Glue your ass on the highway or spread misinformation on facebook fueling anti-nuclear protests: how about a 5 years prison sentence baby?

As a society we're so f terrible at allocating human resources, that it's no wonder that other resources like those involved in energy production are massively missalocated too...

"In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...)"

These are schools that train bueurocrats, "technically excellent" yes, at politics and public service but not engineers. For example the new energy transition minister has a business degree and went to ENA.

I'm not one to call people elites but it's strange how you are using this to differentiate between France and German

This is a very good (and long) article looking at the history of nuclear energy in Germany in a broader context. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/20/germany-nuclear-power-e...

Germany's anti-nuclear environmental movement was, in part, funded by Russia. https://www.transparency.org/en/press/germany-state-governme...

This is a conspiracy which doesn't have anything to do with reality or what is written in the article you've linked to.

The article describes a "Foundation" which was created 2021 to keep on building Gazprom 2. It neither has something to do with the decision to get out of nuclear energy (that was 2000) nor does it have anything to do with the Green party or any group which is against nuclear energy in Germany.

In America Green Peace and Sierra Nevada had major donations by gas companies. https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra...

I don’t really have a strong stance on the nuclear energy debate (although I highly doubt that it is as clear cut as the debates make it out to be). But I can’t really blame people for not being too excited about a technology that was first introduced to them by bombing two Japanese cities, had two worst case disasters, and was subject of the biggest arms race in history.

You typed your message on a binary computer, often used to calculate missile trajectories and to run nuclear fuel centrifuges.

Its really funny that this description not only fits my country also but probably quite a few other.

Issue that happens world wide is that politics is filled with “nice face” or “easy to buy” by corporations.

There are no engineers with passion or corruptless ppl joining politics.

Smile and wave guys, smile and wave.

Ps. Here in Poland we talk about German politics as they were those competent ones, go figure.

For politicians and administrations, I'm pretty sure any ideological stance is simply a facade to allow them to climb the ladders. The real propellent, throughout history, for politicians and administrations, are always more $$ and more power so I don't think Germany is an outlier.

> blame the highly ideological stance on the way people rise to power in politics and administration in Germany

Don't be so harsh on your country. It's like that everywhere. But it gets better over time. It used to be a lot worse centuries ago...

>De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party

which was funded by Russia behind the scenes, along with anti-fracking and any other alternatives to Russian fossil fuel exports.

>“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”

this was the former head of NATO in 2014, all of this has been known for a long time but nothing was done to prevent it

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...

> I did my PhD at the French nuclear energy agency

Cheers from Saclay! :)

To be fair, Germans always (in the recent past anyway) cared more about environment issues in general. Recycling, cycling instead of driving, things like that. It was not mainstream in France until fairly recently. But yeah, the lack of understanding of scientific and technical aspects of energy production from a supposed nation of engineers is disturbing.

A shame german carmakers didnt care much.

Indeed. Well, no country is perfect.

Aparently the German Green Party was started with Russian influence.

So there may be some conflict here.

What is your "science" for dealing with the long term waste?

What "science" do you use to design mechanisms to keep highly toxic materials away from human contact for 200,000 years?

It is not science. There is no science that can solve those problems. It is greed.

(I live in the South Pacific. The French are hated here for what they have done for their nuclear programme)

Let the waste sit in place for decades to decay away much of its radioactivity, dig a hole in a geologically boring mountain away from people, dump waste in the hole.

Alternative first step: build breeder reactors to recycle most of the waste into nuclear fuel and dump the smaller amount of leftovers in the mountain.

> dig a hole in a geologically boring mountain away from people

Where?

Where on Earth will you find a place that will still be like that in 200,000 years.

Deep holes in mountains in deserts in tectonically boring locations in the middle of plates.

Ancient geologically stable rock formations exist

Nuclear waste doesn't need to be sequestered for anything like 200,000 years.

After a few hundred years it's no more radioactive than the rocks from which it came.

You seem to have the common misconception that "long half-life" = "more radioactive", when in fact "long half-life" = "less radioactive", by definition.

200,000 years is not much on geological timescales. Here's one example of a place with very stable geology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield

The other main thing to remember when burying nuclear waste is that it's important to keep it away from aquifers and generally any flow of water under the ground. Obviously you'd probably want to seal it in waterproof containers anyway, but it's better to not have to rely on the container staying intact over long spans of time.

Burn off most of the waste in breeder reactors (100x less waste in fact), and the remaining waste is only dangerous for a couple hundred years. That's easily stored underground for the duration. I'm also partial to the idea of dumping that into a subduction zone.

The German Green party showed in multiple occasions that it's completely anti-science. They pick scientists that support their agenda, and then represent it as the one and only truth.

They are basically a spiritual successor of the middle-age Catholic Church. All they talk is about sacrifice, suffering in our earthly life for better afterlife, bans, and restrictions. The only difference is that instead of God, they swear by "Klimawandel".

And of course, it's not relatively rich Green party members and supporters that suffer from their policies. They keep their SUVs, flight regularly, and the poorer half of the population will need to save the planet.

Atom energy is bad, but fracking is obviously fine for them. What a bunch of hypocrites.

I hope the Green get off their moral high horse or get replaced before they do even more harm to the German economy, wealth and even environment. They are just the most destructive force leading Germany to collapse.

Is it supported by the fossil fuel industry?

That might explain why Mojib Latif’s books are published by a publisher otherwise specializing in religious books

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