Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants
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I still thank shutting them off is wrong but I think there’s a lot of history in that decision. And it’s much more history than one party deciding that.
I don't understand this argument, isn't Japan known for its earthquakes? Which are essentially non-existent in Germany?
In my opinion Fukushima should be an argument _for_ nuclear power. The death toll was really low, roughly 2000, and many of those death were caused by the evacuation rather than radiation. The death toll of the tsunami/earthquake was 15000 according to wikipedia.
What should really put this into perspective is that air pollutions is estimated to kill millions every year.
And all of this is with reactors that are really old. If we would put the same amount of engineering resources into nuclear as we put into chips I am sure the number of deaths would go down a few order of magnitudes.
I don't understand this argument, isn't Japan known for its earthquakes?
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with that, just trying to describe public opinion.
Germany is also a “well-run country” if you want to run with the old anti-Soviet argument.
Yes, rationally the maths is a lot different, but countering emotions with facts is hard. (And then consider facts like long term deposition of nuclear waste etc.)
And mention of 2200 related to the (post-tsunami) evacuation.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_ac...
Completely cleaning up and taking apart the plant could take a generation or more, and comes with a hefty price tag. In 2016 the government increased its cost estimate to about $75.7 billion, part of the overall Fukushima disaster price tag of $202.5 billion.
I'm a fan of nuclear, but those are eye-watering numbers.
The arguments break down into:
* Pretending that solar/wind isnt 5x cheaper per unit.
* Pretending that only pricey batteries rather than cheap pumped storage can accomodate its variability.
* Pretending that there is a geographical shortage of potential pumped storage locations.
* Pretending that you'd need weeks of power storage to get to 99% carbon free rather than hours.
* Pretending that nuclear power does load following rather than relying upon gas to fill in its gaps like solar and wind.
* Pretending that nuclear power always produces 100% stable power. France manages an average of 72%. Denmark has a wind farm that manages 68%.
The only context in which nuclear power is cost effective is if you are keeping rickety old plants running longer than their scheduled lifetime, which isnt safe OR if the government is using it to subsidize nuclear arsenals/subs/etc.
We're letting imaginary numbers dictate the future of humanity, "why did you let the world die, it was cheaper than fixing it" isn't a valid excuse}
And if you want to talk about number show much does it cost to the German healthcare system to take care of the hundred/thousands of people getting sick and dying because of coal pollution ?
Is land that expensive in Japan? Or is it some sort of ambition to prove they can repair that fuckup? O maybe there is a lot of money to be made in a cleanup operation?
I think the argument would be that the risk wasn't mitigated although it should've been known. There may be other known risks as well.
Re. the low death toll, perhaps it's quite low because people were forced to evacuate. Evacuation and the marking of land as contaminated by radioactivity is considered a very high price to pay.
Especially in dense Europe. In the US there is more space for surch things to happen and have it only affect a stretch of uninhabitated wildland.
Nuclear reactors probably have more in common with the fabs where chips are made. Both are enormously complex engineering challenges where each plant costs tens of billions of dollars and gets more expensive with each new generation of technology.
Whereas solar panels have followed the path of silicon chips and gotten cheaper as they are produced in ever greater numbers, to the point where the panels themselves make up less than half the build cost for utility scale solar.
Japan is known for being technologically advanced and safe, so the earthquake shouldn't have mattered.
> What should really put this into perspective is that air pollutions is estimated to kill millions every year.
This is certainly a great point, one I tend to find convincing, but it seems very hard to convince others on similar grounds: Radiation is just way more immediately scary.
Isn't the pacific now significantly polluted by radiation from the plant? That seems like a pretty bad outcome, even if the direct number of deaths was relatively low.
The entire pacific is 7.10e20 L of water. Even the area around Japan is thousands of times more liters of water. To give you an idea, in 2011, 41% of caught marine species on the coast of Fukushima had Cs137 concentrations higher than the normal limits (100bq/kg, which is still really damn low). In 2015, that was 0.05%
So, no, the pacific doesn't give a damn about Fukushima. And so do the people. You're exposed to about 2100Bq in a year.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
and radioactive material is like a fraction of the problem with coal. they have much worse health impact in other areas. they're linked (directly or indirectly) to 10000s of thousands of deaths a year.
If you get a runaway reaction, it has a fail-safe described in the article that drains the reactor into containment vessels underground.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/04/166330/meltdown-...
Any reactor in use today will have a negative void coefficient. Which means, if you don't put power into it, the reaction naturally stops. Then you've got control rods and neutron moderators that will fall back upon the core if there's no power. Then Gen3+ includes a core catcher in which, should it breach its reactor, it just falls in there and cools down.
That would mean around 10 quadrillion tons of coal would need to get burned to emit the same amount of radiation. China is currently burning 4 trillion tons of coal per year, which is a 2500th part of it.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20005612/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Release_and...
Which is to say, that the radiation could be measured is different from saying that the radiation represented a significant health risk.
Sounds like the GP would receive mushrooms that have elevated levels of radionuclides that are within the legal limit of what is considered safe to consume.
"Around 95% of wild mushroom samples collected in Germany in the last six years still showed radioactive contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, albeit not above legal limits, the German food safety regulator said on Friday."
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/three-decades-g...
> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 2,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.005 millisievert. This is considerably less than the radiation exposure during a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. However, if adults eat such a mushroom meal each week, they will receive an additional annual radiation exposure corresponding to about twenty flights from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. Expressed in numbers it is 0.27 millisievert.
https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
No there's not history. There's not emotions. There's god-damned stupidity and a refusal to evaluate risk at the top level of government, that has condemned hundred of millions.
I've lived near irradiated areas too. There was zero justification for this.
While I agree the German position is more complex, the conclusion is reducto ad absurdum given the Fukushima reactor meltdown is an extraordinarily complex issue without a single definitive root cause which could be attributed to simple human control.
Any human control is predicated and annotated by known assumptions and performance envelopes. Failure modes can be predicted, past performance can be analyzed and conclusions can be drawn using scientific knowledge and evidence for the basis of ones systems of control, be they industrial or environmental. Failure events or conditions, although regretful, are very important as they permit us to learn, to adapt, to grow and to change in response to events and conditions as they change or evolve over time.
Because Japan is a brave, science minded nation, it hasnt eschewed the atom even in the face of this egregious misfortune. The initial German response to the accident could best be compared to that of a child: reactionary, undisciplined, haphazard and deleterious. Im glad to learn more sensible minds have prevailed and reconsidered nuclear power as a sustainable partner, albeit somewhat irked to see its only real commitment in this case is the overwhelming demand for energy independence amidst global conflict.
It seems like argument you have is that the "sensible" minds are agreeing with you, and a whole litany of name-calling for the people who advocated abandoning nuclear - who are largely the exact same people by the way.
That's an understandable reaction.
But a better reaction would have been "what lessons did we learn?".
After the 2008 financial crisis, the financial regulators around the world gathered at the 2009 Pittsburgh Summit [1] to see what can be done to improve the resiliency of the global financial markets. They came up with a Statement [2]. Later on, the Basel Committee ironed out some details, and the national regulators other details, and the outcome was a long string of financial reforms known collectively as Basel III.
This was a monumental achievement (well, it's still work in progress, but it's about 80-90% done). Of course, for many professionals in the financial markets it felt more like a curse than a blessing. But we have been trough the March 2020 financial panic, and the financial system coped quite well.
In the nuclear regulatory space, there are so many regulators around the world. The NRC for sure, but also the nuclear regulators in Canada, the UK, France and Finland. One can add South Korea to the list and probably a few more countries. I'm sure they are exchanging notes. Overall, I think they have probably a huge amount of experience, and they have met 99.999% of the edge cases for classical (pressurized and boiling water) reactors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_G20_Pittsburgh_summit
Nuclear technology is risky but Fukushima isn't a good reflection of what modern nuclear power plants can accomplish. The reactors at Fukushima were designed half a century ago and were known to be flawed 35 years before the accident happened [1]. It's ironic that the plant was running longer than was originally planned in part because of Green opposition to newer power plants.
[1] https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/16/fukushima-reactor-flaws...
It still is measurable. Only 5% of the reactor mass managed to escape into the environment. There are effective safety mechanisms but like in Fukushima they are subject to economic realities. The luck here was that water is a very good radiation absorber. It will still go into the food chain and increase risks. Perhaps not by much if we are lucky.
This is politics and letting them run is populism in my opinion. They won't run longer than to their next security inspection. Even the owners were reluctant because you have to reorganize the demolition, which isn't trivial for NPP.
Nuclear can be a source of energy, but the way it is currently hailed as a solution for climate change should only really convince filthy peasants. Emotional is as much a reluctance to consider better options because it is expensive and there are a lot of unsolved problems. Beginning from mining Uranium to getting rid of the waste permanently.
How does it compare to living in Denver, Colorado, vs living in Frankfurt? (Denver is at a higher altitude and also in a region of slightly radioactive rocks.)
How does it compare to the effects of 30,000 km of flying?
I think many people forget that we are really good at detecting radiation. This is mostly due to Cold War era fear and so a lot of research got put into this and we have cheap and sensitive devices. Cheap enough that there are large public networks of radiation monitoring set up by citizens. Not too dissimilar from citizen weather projects.
Their coal power plants made you breath more radioactive particles than Chernobyl
How about not phasing it out at all.
> The fallout from Tschernobyl was measurable in Germany… measurable as in my science teacher measured it in his garden
Yeah you can also measure the output form coal plants.
Tschernobyl killed either literally or basically nobody in German, and hardly hurt anybody.
It was basically nonsense, because of political reasons rules were adopted based on totally fraudulent science and then these rules were used in endless scare mongering campaigns and misinformation campaigns.
But at some point you have to stop with pure emotional responses and endless fear-mongering and actually look at things rationally.
For God's sake, France has 56 power plants. What are we talking about....
there have been many studies on this. tschernobyl has had no measurable impact on any health related metrics you could come up with in countries outside the ukraine. even directly at tschernobyl the long lasting impact was minimal and most related deaths were an effect of accute exposure.
But that doesn't mean Germans haven't pondered seriously about this topic in the meantime. And the result is that, apart from this band-aid solution for the current winter, Germany will still phase out nuclear. Let me try to summarize the most important points I know of:
- Cost. Nuclear energy is expensive energy. It just happened to be cheaper than solar and wind energy a decade ago. But the cost of renewables went down spectacularly, and the cost of nuclear went up at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity). So why invest in nuclear energy when we could have more low-carbon energy for the same price elsewhere?
- Subsidies. So far, all nuclear power plants have been heavily subsidized. There isn't a single country where the full cost of decommissioning and permanent storage of radioactive material is properly taken into account. And there is no power plant with a full insurance, so those risks are carried by the public. Once we eliminate these subsidies, the cost of nuclear grows even further.
- Reliability. Some people dislike renewables because there are times with no wind and no sunshine. But they forget that wind and sunshine are relatively predictable and have worst-case bounds. So investing into storage and the electricity grid makes renewables highly reliable. Now look at nuclear. The worst case scenario is roughly what just happened in France: you discover a problem that affects an entire generation of power plants, and all of them have to be taken offline until the problem is resolved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis...). Without its European neighbors, France would be in deep trouble. If we take precautions against this risk, the cost of nuclear grows even further.
- Inflexibility. Nuclear power plants need a high uptime to amortize their construction cost. But once they operate in a grid with a substantial amount of renewables, they are displaced more and more and the cost per unit of energy grows even further.
- War. The Russian army has recently captured a Ukrainian nuclear power plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_at_the_Zaporizhzhia_Nuc...). The plant is now used to store military equipment, the employees are bullied or even tortured, and all pillars of nuclear safety are being violated. There are credible approaches how we can build a power plant that resists human stupidity or a natural disaster, but there is no way we can build a power plant that is unconditionally safe in a war zone.
- Nuclear Proliferation. Once the know-how and the infrastructure for handling fissionable material is in place, even if only for civilian purposes, there is a much stronger incentive to also look into military use. And the last thing our planet needs is more nuclear weapons.
Given these points, the current German position seems quite sensible and I wonder why some other nations are suddenly so eager to build new nuclear power plants.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
Odd choice.
Issues with nuclear like fallout from Chernobyl still leading to contamination today in German or bad handling of nuclear waste at the Asse II mine have been a topic in German society for a very long time. The climate crisis picked up as a topic only really in the late 90s. That explains the first nuclear exit plan in 2000.
The current exit from 2011 was a direct reaction to what happened in Fukushima.
I mean even today you still have plenty of people and company that think that there is still a lot of time before more action must be taken against climate change.
Unfortunately, the Merkel government stopped these subsidies and dragged its feet regarding renewables for sixteen years. The flip-flopping stance regarding nuclear didn't help either, of course.
So, eartchquakes and tsunamis were a new developement in japan. The engineers had never a chance to study them and develope methods to mitigate risks for nuclear plants?
If plane crashes would endanger whole countries or continents we would ban air traffic all together.
What you mean is that fraudulent anti-science organization use it to fear monger to get people to do what they tell them to.
The actual contamination is a literal non issue. If nobody ever talked about it and nobody ever did anything about it exactly 0 people would get hurt.
> Asse II mine have been a topic in German society for a very long time.
More fear mongering for the most part.
Had all the money they wasted on Asse II been spent on new nuclear plants, they would literally have saved 1000s of people instead.
It is easy to say that on average nuclear energy is not so terrible, when you were never personally confronted with what happens when you lose the bet. Then an abstract idea is becoming very real. You realise that one day someone else will have to pay the price, or you yourself again: What if the next accident happens not in the Soviet Union or Japan, but in one of the power plants next door?
This experience, shared by millions of people, has done much to cast doubt on the claims that such risks are technically controllable. And the climate protection argument also appears to many to be nothing more than propaganda, because it comes from the same parties and companies that supported likewise nuclear, coal and gas, but downplayed climat change and other environmental issues for decades. Their actions and lobbying helped to create our current situation by slowing down the switch to renewable energies and postponing stricter regulations on energy saving. -- Shall we trust them now after so many failures?
[1] Mushrooms in some areas of southern Germany are still highly contaminated. But that was one of the least of our concerns in those days.
[2] I found an old article from Der Spiegel from 1986 reporting 500,000 Bq/m^2 filter: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/dicke-luft-um-verseuchte-filt... (in German)
Coal and gas plants produce pollution that kills thousands every year, and that's how it's supposed to work.
Meltdowns are next to impossible at correctly designed and built plants, which the German ones are.
This is not true. The German nuclear industry did not even manage to store low and intermediate level radioactive waste even remotely safely. Here is a report from July 2022 about the failure from German public television: https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Marodes-Atommuell... The report is only availablöe in German, but you may run the accompanying documentation through the translator of your choice, to learn what happened.
> Coal and gas plants produce pollution that kills thousands every year, and that's how it's supposed to work.
Wrong alternative. We need 100% renewable.
> Meltdowns are next to impossible at correctly designed and built plants, which the German ones are.
People like you would have said that about Japan too, before 2011, and actively ignore what happend in Harrisburg in 1979 or Sellafield in 1957.
Civilian nuclear waste can absolutely not 'devastate wide regions'.
And civlian nuclear plants in the waste can also not really do that.
What actually can happen is that over a large region you measure slightly higher radiation but not actually enough to be dangerous to the people there.
> I was a victim of the Chernobyl fallout myself, and would not like to experience this again.
There is no measurable impact of Chernobyl. All the claims about all the disabled children were literally all lies. Its all fear mongering.
After the closure of the nuclear plants, the share of electricity generated from coal INCREASED
An equal quantity of renewable generation was brought online. That isn’t the same as replacing it with renewables. Had the nukes stayed, Germany would be more secure and a better global citizen in terms of emissions.
Would it have been possible to replace coal with nuclear instead, and keep gas at 2015 levels?
It's unlikely that coal could have been replaced with new nuclear. It would have probably been an EPR from back then Framatome and Siemens. Construction of the EPR in Olkiluoto started in 2005 and just finished recently.
Keeping old nuclear reactors running and shutting down coal plants instead would have been possible though, but didn't have backing in the population.
I no longer believe in coincidence.
Also, the EU commission declared in February 2022 natural gas as a sustainable energy source, and the EU parliament confirmed this in July 2022. Sounds a bit bizarre, but the dates are correct.
The reactor itself takes a long time to ramp up and down, but it heats a molten salt battery. The battery can burst-power the turbines at well-above the reactor output; they can be sized to handle peak demand + overnight loads.
It's hard to find current numbers, but capital investment for combined cycle natural gas plants seems to be about a tenth of modern reactor projects in western countries.
So basically they replaced a CO2-neutral energy source, with another which is pretty CO2-intensive.
Renewable does not mean good for the environment!
But if Russian gas was as expensive and unreliable 15 years ago as it is now, I suspect they would have kept the nukes.
What could possibly go wrong?
Source: Euratom Supply Agency - Annual Report 2021 - Page 14 https://euratom-supply.ec.europa.eu/publications/esa-annual-...
Also look at page 26ff which states that it would take years to replace current dependency on russia, not only in raw ressources, but also enrichment and recycling services.
But it's besides the point anyway: the grandparent argued that it is stupid to import 15% energy
You can easily source that 19% from Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, and the US instead of Russia.
The German greens' leader has backed running Coal plants as an alternative[1]
The whole political position of this party rests on their fanatic opposition to Nuclear power.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/19/energy/germany-russia-gas...
https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1582050941682954240
quote:
> For all those commenting "only until April 2023":
> No utility will decommission a nuclear plant knowing this kind of reversal is possible even with Greens still in government occupying key posts.
> They will not even mothball the plants. They'll just sit and wait for elections.
Btw if anyone thinks this is exaggeration, it's not. They are evil fanatics:
https://twitter.com/giuliasaudelli/status/158097313099012505...
>"Nuclear power and fossil fuels brought us here. They caused this crisis, they are not the solution."
>Strong and at times emotional speech by Robert Habeck, after weeks under pressure. Defending his actions in government, but standing by Green values. He got a standing ovation.
Reality: the Greens and their allies spent half a trillion USD on the "energy transition" and turned off perfectly good nuclear reactors. Result: energy shortages and diplomatic submission to Russia. And now they blame nuclear for it. If they had spent that half a trillion on new nuclear reactors, Germany would be an energy superpower. As it stands, they're having to burn coal and wood to get through the winter.
Um no. Renewable energy is now actually cheaper than nuclear energy. You could build renewable energy + storage within the same range of cost. The problem is the former government shut down nuclear power plants and then did exactly nothing.
The nuclear power plants aren't perfectly good. They are very old and would need a lot of investment if run for more than a couple of month.
And germany isn't even near electric energy shortages. It's currently supplying france with a lot of energy.
If electric heating were used everywhere from now on, there would be an electricity problem. But for that the electric heaters are missing.
The global output of battery storage isn't high enough to switch to solar/wind. Energy is a solved problem. It's a natural progression of mankind's command of energy. Wood->Coal->Oil->Fission. There's enough Uranium in the ground and oceans to supply humanity for million of years. We can't let a few accidents hold us back for ever.
But if production cost isn't the problem what difference would nuclear power make?
Clearly Germany couldnt, otherwise they would decommission coal plants.
Regardless of the type of power plant, it is totally stupid to shut down some and not allow any new ones to be built.
And can we talk about how stupid and actively malicious it is to use the Fukushima accident as a reason for shutting down nuclear plants in Germany?
Fukushima: nuclear plant in a seismically very active region in very close proximity to the ocean where tsunamis are not really a rarity
vs.
German nuclear plants: not very seismically active (if at all), no tsunamis i've ever heard of, not counting floods as those are
1. easier to foresee and manage and
2. very much less intense than a sudden wall of water razing everything in its path.
Also in Japan you kinda have to build near the coast since its surrounded by ocean on all sides while being stretched out long and not that wide with mountains as a backbone in the middle. Germany on the other hand only has the North and Baltic Sea at its northern end then progressively gets higher above sea level the more south you go, ultimately ending at the northern end of the Alps.
This decision and especially this reasoning didn't make sense then and still doesn't nowadays. It was just a kneejerk reaction to retain voter support by exploiting the fear of the uneducated and the anti-nuclear crowd.
The reality is that nuclear reactors can lead to big events in unforeseen situations, like also Fukushima was. It's impossible to foresee what the cause for the next big event will be.
Fukushima ended in no way like Tchernobyl did.
The Soviet power plan released radioactivity in the air, make an entire area inhabitable and killed a few dozen a people.
Fukushima did nothing of this, everything stayed inside the structure, no radioactivity went out.
As Fukushima had no recovery generators available (no fuel in them), it is a great proof that a totally out of control modern power plant is not deadly.
Chernobyl: Core meltdown and catastrophic explosion of entire reactor. Caused by gross negligence when safety system disabled. Direct deaths: <100 Estimated indirect deaths: 4 to 16 thousand
Fukushima: Caused by 4th largest earthquake in history. No core explosion. Hydrogen explosion destroyed non structural part of building (this was by design). Core meltdown but largely contained. Contamination of air/water from venting to atmosphere. Direct deaths: 1 employee died of cancer Estimated indirect deaths: 300-2000
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschla...
Now another topic that should be talked about: Germany could have shut down coal first, and nuclear second.
Germany was facing a cold winter, without energy for heating, and the potential for rolling blackouts. With this change, it does not eliminate the threat but makes it less likely.
Who in their right mind would decom any type of energy that could help stave off pain for their citizenship - especially one that has no carbon footprint.
Activist politicians who value their cause more than the well being of their citizens.
And shaming these people isn't the solution. The solution is to bring them around to seeing the virtue of using nuclear power. They may be wrong about the relative safety of nuclear power but they aren't morally defective people, so shaming them isn't appropriate.
Much like recycling or jaywalking, it's a way for an industry to diffuse and downplay their own advocacy and push the fault onto the public.
Like yeah, it would be better if Greenpeace supported nuclear... but they're not the ones sitting in senator's offices getting bills passed subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry. Even the "climate change" bill had to throw almost 10% of its spending to fossil-fuel subsidies.
I think a lot of people are negatively disposed to nuclear based on beliefs that are not justified by the relative risk and reward of nuclear power generation at this stage in humanity's technological evolution. I don't think we have a combination of (better, cleaner, more reliable) base load generation power source that's available right now (which is the question to consider when contemplating "we have a working nuclear reactor; should we shut it down?")
I often see this given as a reason for why nuclear power generation can be safe, but I think it overlooks the fact that military reactors operate in a very different context from civilian ones.
For a start, do we know how expensive (per unit energy) US Navy reactors are? It doesn't matter how safe they are if they are twice as expensive as renewables (plus storage / power-to-gas).
More generally, though, given the secrecy around military and nuclear programs, would we even know how many near-meltdowns and embarrassing accidents US Navy reactors have experienced (at least in the past few decades)?
do we know how expensive (per unit energy)
US Navy reactors are? It doesn't matter how safe
they are if they are twice as expensive as
renewables (plus storage / power-to-gas).
Price does not matter. It has to work reliably, not only in calm days of peace, but during times of war. Having a source of power to move the big boats without relying on external supplies is worth the price. There even were experiments to generate jetfuel using nuclear power on carriers, certainly not because it is cheap.
Nevertheless, I don't think the anti-nuclear movement is evil. They're guided by extreme fear, not malice. I don't know how you can bring them around though, unless your offering some form of therapy. But even with that, would they accept it? Would you accept therapy to change some of your deeply held beliefs that you don't view as 'wrong'?
* actually we have almost 30% of known viable resources, but only contribute 8% or 9% of the world total supply currently, producing less than a 5th of Kazakhstan, by far the most prolific supplier.
Of course there are risks, but everything has risks attached -- we calculate the probabilities and then stop worrying about the risks if they're minuscule. And of course there's an economic part to consider, but I'm pretty sure if you counted the amount of hours Germans have spent in 2022 talking about the energy crisis, we could've been well on our way to 100% nuclear coverage if we had spent that time productively instead.
They sit in the government.
most of the people who ended up aligning with that
movement did have good intentions. They were reasoning
that in the long term, nuclear power would bring great
misery to humanity. Long term thinking is good, right?
Even the occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl is preferable to the irreversible fossil fuel-induced hell we're about to experience, with potentially billions of people displaced and so forth. It's especially galling since protecting the planet was their entire raison d'etre.
And there were certainly who opposed nuclear power with evil intentions, specifically the fossil fuel industry.
I'm not sure which one is worse. At least the fossil fuel industry never claimed to be noble.
This is a dramatic understatement. It was coordinated by the Rockefeller Foundation from the very beginning:
https://atomicinsights.com/how-did-leaders-of-the-hydrocarbo...
>They may be wrong about the relative safety of nuclear power but they aren't morally defective people, so shaming them isn't appropriate.
The moral failing that you're missing is arrogance. People who actually study radiation were not leading this movement.
No, it was short term thinking that has brought on these opinions. Thats who funds these anti nuclear opinions anyway, people who are invested such to benefit in the near term over preventing adoption of nuclear energy, not actual scientists engaging in long term thinking.
Other one I would quote is "perfection is the enemy of good" - it seems nuclear is good, but they would not give up only on good. It had to be perfect where renewable sources are 100% ideal.
Why do you appoint morality a higher ground than rationality?
Edit: Typo
Well-meaning anti-nuclear activists have reasoned incorrectly, but that doesn't mean they should be shamed. Shame is not the appropriate way to correct somebody who has reasoned incorrectly. Shaming them is counterproductive since they know themselves to have good intentions. If you want to bring them around to your point of view, you should use rational arguments.
Use shaming tactics against those who know they've done wrong, like those paid to lie by coal companies. They actually have something to be ashamed of.
We have so much other, more real, more tangible and even right now happening vectors of "problems", starting with Covid, not ending with the real chance of WW3, and we whine about miniscule pollution of square kilometers at worst? Hard to get.
Since when? A few days, since the green party convention... Before that, the top figures unmistakenly said nuclear is dead, despite enegery crisis.
> Remember, the current, and hastly implemented nuclear exit, was a CDU led kneejerk reaction
So? And the greens would have exited even faster if they had the chance.
Stop twisting things.
Germany's main source of heating is gas and yes, gas is used to generate electricity, so nuclear can reduce gas consumption. However, only about 10% of gas (see edit) is used for electricity and Germany has enough electricity. In a worst-case scenario, those nuclear power plants can help stabilize the grid, but they are not needed in general.
The downside is, that they were already in the process of being shut down. They now need to undergo new safety checks, the fuel rods are nearly spend and this will cost 100 millions. Money which can be spent better.
This winter also isn't predicted to be particularly cold, so the full gas storages in combination with the soon opening LNG-terminals will suffice.
EDIT: I made a mistake, 10% of electricity is gas.
German household electricity is double the price of America’s and considerably higher than France or Italy [1]. Were this not the case, more houses could be heated with electricity instead of gas and the coming recession made less painful.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...
It could make a dent if seriously pursued, e.g. by focussing transitioning vulnerable households. The economic benefits of reduced electricity prices would also immediately accrue.
Energy prices in Germany suggest otherwise. Also, Germany is facing a gas pinch given the geopolitics right now, so freeing up 10% is nothing to sneeze at.
Due to the fact that nuclear is base load and gas plants are mostly used for grid compensation, it would result (according to estimates) in a 1-2% increase in gas usage.
The high energy prices in Germany are to a large degree political. For instance to make the switch to renewables. It doesn't mean the base cost of energy is high. It is in fact lower for the most part.
The three plants don't do too much, only when you really need every Watt of energy you can muster. Not worthwhile economically to let them run really, as the decommission needs to be reorganized. The owners of the plant weren't too happy.
A number of cities also use district heating, where the heat is taken directly from the cooling circuits of nearby power stations. No idea what percentage of total heating this is and if nuclear plants are involved here, but this would be another way how those plants could (theoretically) contribute to heating.
I usually belong to the anti-nuclear crowd, but even I don't think that would be an issue.
From what I know, one of the iron rules of nuclear plant design is that the contaminated stuff never leaves the reactor building. Even the steam circuit that powers the generator is separated from the (contaminated) primary circuit and receives energy through a heat exchanger [1].
The lines for district heating would probably be separated from the primary circuit by several of those.
Oh no, here's hoping they learned a lesson from that money.
Without affordable gas, they'll be buying electric heaters. I believe that's already under way. [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germans-switch-costl...
However, I don't thing those costs are comparable. Those nuclear plants won't have a dramatic impact on the price of gas or energy, so the cost of the federal programs will be there nonetheless.
"Title: Maintenance on eight French nuclear reactors delayed by strike ... French nuclear availability is currently at 51% of total capacity with 26 reactors offline for maintenance."
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-says-strike-hits...
A worse case scenario would had been windless cold winter with gas supplies empty, and a government that have to bailout both the industry, the government institutions, and private people. 3 nuclear power plants provides a bit of backup for that situation.
EDIT: Not 2 to 3 blackouts, 2 to 3 hour blackouts. When grid is overstressed.
EDIT: Just saw the edit. Yeah, that doesn't seem like a big deal to me. In 2019 after a damaged cable, there was a 31-hour blackout in some parts of Berlin. In comparison a 2 to 3 hour one happens all the time during storms etc.
Designed to cynically "care" about the environment, but in reality meant to destroy Europe's energy independence.
Are there any more specific references what exactly has come to light here?
As it stands, this question just reads as a pretty cheap attempt to frame any and all environmental concerns or pro-renewable/anti-fossil fuel advocacy as russian propaganda. (which doesn't even make sense as gas itself is not renewable - greens usually see gas as the lesser evil compared to coal and nuclear but by no means as an end goal)
The german environmental and anti-nuclear movement predates the reunification, let alone russian gas deals or putin. While there might be some groups who are russian fronts or receive russian funding, the majority of the movement has quite strong motivations of its own.
This doesn't even take the "new" parts of the climate movement into account, such as Fridays for Future.
1) they had been not doing normal routine maintenance that wasn't going to be needed if they were shutting down, and figuring out what all needs to be done to change gears does take some time (and careful thought)
2) they were at one time buying their fuel for nuclear plants from Russia
Now I believe both of these points have been addressed, and I'm glad of it, but it was not totally unreasonable to raise them and not immediately change course.
I wouldn’t call 700% increase over just two years ago „reasonable”…
This would be the case during normal times. We're not in normal times though. There has been widespread panic buying of portable electric heaters all throughout summer. Owners of single-family homes are also increasingly switching to heat pumps as the main source of heating (as is strongly encouraged by the government).
If we actually run into a gas crunch this winter, blackouts could ironically be a knock-on effect if everyone turns on their electric heater at the same time.
The grid isn't build for such a load.
> An electric heater usually consumes 2000 Watt, that is not really something that should bring the electric grid to its knees.
That's an additional 40GW when all gas-heated apartments use one of those heaters. You'd need ~30 additional nuclear reactors to sustain such a load -- the 3 remaining ones in Germany provide 1.4GW each.
The rivers won't be low in the winter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/business/france-sends-gas...
And whose fault is that? Why can't their much-vaunted Energiewende manage to keep people warm? After half a trillion dollars of public investment in green energy?
Germany is in the process of moving to greener energies, not just on the state level but also in private homes. But that's mostly true for new constructions of which there are comparatively few. Coincidentally, the German government has recently announced to de-incentivize new construction and rather suggest updating existing houses. It will take many years, though, to get all those houses to move off of gas and oil, especially because Germany has a relatively high percentage of rentals over home owners. There's no real reason for landlords to update the heating system of their investment properties because the cost for heating is paid by the tenants anyway.
Except it was foreseeable and foreseen [1] just very politically and economically inconvenient.
1. https://www.gmfus.org/news/why-germans-ignored-putins-true-n...
If you don't supply it yourself then it isn't unforeseeable. In fact, I'd say it's inevitable. It's only unforeseeable as to when it will occur. Energy independence is a great thing for this reason.
Yes and why is that? Electric heating is not some space-age technology. It has been around for a century. There are countries where it's ubiquitous.
Saying "Germany doesn't have the infra for electric heating" is not an explanation. It's just restating the problem in different words. It isn't some accident, it happened by deliberate policy.
I keep harping on this point, but the German government has spent cumulatively half a trillion USD on moving toward green energy, ostensibly in the name of combatting global warming. And yet with all that money and effort, they couldn't transition towards ubiquitous electric heating? Instead, they wrecked their one dependable green energy source (uranium) and became further dependent on Russian gas, which fuels global warming even more (despite propaganda to the contrary). It's all because wind and solar are intermittent, there's nowhere near enough storage capacity on the grid and there won't be for decades, and their politicians have their heads in the sand about the whole business.
If the 2014 invasion of Ukraine wasn't a dead giveaway, I don't know what else could habe make it more foreseeable.
It was very foreseeable. Both the US and other Eastern European nations warned about this but Germany chose to be ignorant till the very end.
The russian invasion of Ukraine happened because Germany is dependant on Russian gas.
The previous government's. Scientists have been criticizing them for years now that they failed to provide the necessary infrastructure and statutory framework for the "Energiewende" to work.
So lesser countries in Europe already managed to have higher count of green energy sources, while lots of construction yards in Germany are blocked on ongoing court cases.
So, for the context of this conversation where Germany is prefering solar and wind to nuclear, and worse, turning to coal in place of natural gas, nuclear is effectively carbon free.
Strip-mining for coal, devastating huge areas? This is fine.
Radioactive emissions from burning coal? Don't care.
Deaths caused by coal pollution and coal mining, compared to deaths caused by nuclear power? 'tis but a scratch.
Permanent problems with groundwater caused by decades of coal mining? Lalala I can't hear you.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/CO2_Emis...
Yaaawn.. this doomsday propaganda is really getting old, and lets meet in 6 month again and lets see how much impact and necessity those 3 plants had at all on heating here..
Wait, your are likely not from Germany nor even Europe and state "Germany was facing a cold winter" like fact based on what please?
Source: I'm German and live in California now. Not a surprise to me that homes here don't have any heating at all, unthinkable in Germany.
Old people would literally die.
I have memories of when our heating would break down in some winters, living in an old building with bad insulation (which is very common). You could wear a thick jacket inside and a thick blanket but your hands are freezing so much you can't even type on a keyboard.
Germany is going to need the little gas it has for heating and its industry. It's going to need all the gas it can save by using Nuclear for electricity (instead of gas) cold winter or not.
Eeeeh not really, most building are heated by gas, the industry runs on gas, nuclear does't really help with either.
Germany has a high population density. Such a catastrophe happening in Germany would lead to millions getting evacuated.
Another issue is the safe disposal of nuclear waste. It might seem like a low risk, but over the huge timespan nuclear waste needs to be safeguarded that risk adds up. Of course there's also other sources of nuclear waste, but it's best to keep the amounts low.
Last, nuclear currently in the west runs into economic problems. New reactors are plagued by enormous cost overruns and struggle to compete with renewables. But also old reactors are starting to become prohibitively expensive to keep running.
Nuclear waste is a non issue. If you want to make it perfectly safe and untouchable to most bad actors, you can always dump it into a trench in the ocean. The radioactivity will not penetrate far through ocean water and will be less than other sources of radiation in the ocean today. The only reason why we do things like keep it stored on site, is because its still useful material that can be used in future reaction designs, and throwing it into the sea would be a waste of resources we worked hard to extract from the earth in the first place. I also have not seen any examples in history of people taking waste from a powerplant and turning that into a weapon against other people. So far in history, the only time nuclear weaponry has been used against humans was when it was built by an American arms factory, which is pretty remarkable considering the inherent violence that many of the elite of our species rely upon to maintain their power.
You’re not thinking far ahead enough for nuclear waste. Bad actors aren’t the only issue. It’s entirely possible that people don’t know what they have in front of them, as can be seen with the Goiânia accident. Places for storage can turn out to be unsafe, for instance in Asse, an old salt mine in Germany there was a water breach leading to the creation of a radioactive salt slurry.
We have to safeguard nuclear waste for thousands to millions of years. So far states have only existed for hundreds of years in a consistent form. 30000 years ago Neanthertals still roamed the earth. It’s not impossible that societal collapse somewhere hinders safekeeping leading to containment of large landscapes.
It took a long time to ban dumping barrels of nuclear waste, sadly that isn't true for waste water yet.
And yes, this will all go into the food chain and will have repercussions. For virtually forever.
Of course the waste is a problem, we have 1 or 2 permanent storages in the world and there is a reason for that.
And coal waste isn't an issue because it's filtered by our own lungs, right ?
1) Nuclear fuel and waste are clearly dangerous. Your linked article makes a logical fallacy in that it claims a dangerous activity is safe because few people have died from it. But we know things are dangerous even when nobody dies from it. The level of security surrounding nuclear is beyond anything else, and it's required to keep it safe. These security measures are expensive to maintain but are dwarfed by the expenses when they fail.
2) Nuclear is much more expensive than we are led to believe.
This is quite clearly deduced from official writings from nuclear agencies, international treaties controlling who will actually pay if things go south, and also demonstrated in the market where nuclear operators are deeply in debt after selling nuclear power for unrealistic prices for decades. (See France).
Nuclear energy is most likely many times more expensive than any numbers presented to date from anyone operating nuclear power plants. This cost is covered "in blanco" by governments, meaning taxpayers now and in generations to come. I am convinced that the energy we consume from nuclear today will be paid for by our great-great-great-grandchildren and theirs too.
3) Renewables are better long-term so all efforts should be spent on inventing and implementing systems to make renewables the source of all energy. (Storage implied).
Money spent on nuclear is not available for renewables so it's reasonable to be opposed to nuclear for that reason too.
All that being said, it is of course very reasonable to keep plants running for a while longer given the current circumstances. :)
I'm not well-versed enough in hard evidence to assert that we absolutely need nuclear to make it through bottleneck events. But it's plausible that we do. And so we shouldn't rule it out unless there is high-certainty evidence we don't need it.
In other words: I think the burden of proving that nuclear is unnecessary is on the anti-nuclear crowd. I've heard plenty of arguments that wind/solar will be enough, but haven't seen an analysis that seems to prove it based on numbers. (If you know of any such analysis, please share!)
I think a case could be made that nuclear itself causes a bottleneck event in that we get addicted to the energy since it's deceptively cheap for current generations (as long as nothing goes south). It will also cause a problem that vastly outlasts the bottleneck itself. We will have to actively maintain nuclear waste for longer than humanity has used oil as fuel for example.
But to be fair, we already have the problem anyway, so keeping existing plants running makes sense to get through the bottleneck. A few more years of operation won't make a big difference.
But the amount of money needed for new plants, that will be operational 10+ years from now, should in my mind clearly be invested in things like green hydro, pumped storage etc.
2) If it's too expensive it will not happen, no need for the government to step in.
3) Have a look at the link, some renewables like Biomass emit a lot of C02, all energy sources are trade offs
The government steps in for every second of operation of every nuclear reactor on the planet.
Feel free to pay for your own insurance sans liability caps, find your own loans (without government enforced payment from end users for projects that produce no power), pay for the overruns in decomissioning, and pay for the labour of the regulatory bodies stopping the industry from rendering entire countries uninhabitable.
While you are at it you can control the pollution from uranium mine to the same standard that you'd want in your own back yard and pay for security.
Electricity is a utility and a natural monopoly. The government is always involved and they need to make decisions for what is best in the long term. If you don't have your own enrichment and processing industry then that decision isn't 'become dependent on russia for fuel'. We just saw how well that went.
2) The only reason nuclear power exists is because governments have stepped in to support it and cover most of the expenses. If you remove that support, it can't exist. No organisation of any kind anywhere in the world can afford to run a business where income is generated for 50-60 years but expenses continue for 1000+ years after. France recently learned this: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-keeps-edf-buy...
3) There are a lot of viable energy solutions with better tradeoffs than nuclear, and it seems reasonable to build them instead of building nuclear power plants. Heat storage, gravity storage, synthesized fuel, hydrogen gas to name a few. The costs of a nuclear power plant invested in any of these concepts would go a long way.
Nuclear waste is such a tiny tiny amount that we just keep it on site. It's solid. It's not going to leak out of its containers. It just sits in concrete casks on site. Even better, it still has 98% of the energy in it so you don't really want to get rid of it. It can be used in breeder reactors to extract more energy. I quote this too much, but all the nuclear waste the US has ever generated would sit in a single football field, 10 yards high.
2) Nuclear is capital intensive AND the only energy generation that is forced to pre fund its own decommissioning and cleanup. The increased operating costs of nuclear plants is largely due to intentional mismanagement b/c of politics. For example, in France they force nuclear plants to stop outputting power when renewables are generating. They prioritize renewables because that's what politics dictates. They also mandated a cap on power allowed to be generated by nuclear plants, forcing the closure of perfectly good and already paid for plants, so they could buy more renewables. These privatized energy markets don't want stable cheap energy because there's no money in it.
In addition, the US has largely forgotten how to build big things. But it can be done. The UAE just finished 4 1250MW reactors in 10 years. It will generate a quarter of their electricity, (basically) carbon free for 60+ years. Cost was 6B per reactor. Over 60 years, it's a steal. Renewables are only "cheap" in LCOE because the storage costs and capacity factor costs are often not included. Even if you build a megawatt of solar/wind, you really only get 20 to 40% of that peak capacity on average. In Virginia, we are building a wind farm for 10B that is 2640MW. And it is intermittent, off shore is usually 40%. You could get a 1250 MW stable nuke for that much. And it would last twice as long.
3) The main issue with solar/wind though, is that we literally don't have enough material to build enough of it. Not to mention the battery storage. It's not a matter of we can't mine fast enough, we literally don't know of the mineral reserves needed. Here's a presentation going over a report that find this: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2403
Well you couldn't because you'd have a stew of fissioning soup. But once you include all the concrete and steel and low level waste that needs decades of storage it's about the same size as a 4hr battery for the entire country.
> But this concentration is a blessing because you don't need to mind nearly as much material
> 3) The main issue with solar/wind though, is that we literally don't have enough material to build enough of it. Not to mention the battery storage. It's not a matter of we can't mine fast enough, we literally don't know of the mineral reserves needed. Here's a presentation going over a report that find this
False. If it's a problem for PV it's a much worse problem for existing nuclear plants.
Olympic dam is one of the world's largest uranium mines. It produces 7.5g of silver and 30kg of copper for every kg of Uranium.
You need 10kg of natural uranium for 1kg of PWR fuel.
PV is made of sand, copper, and silver.
70g of silver is enough for 3.5kW net of solar at 5mg/Watt (after needing 5g for the fuel and control rods which you have yet to supply indium, cadmium, and zirconium for).
The solar panels will produce ~1.8TJ in their lifetime and be recyclable. The nuclear fuel will produce 500GJ and require large quantities of steel and concrete for storage and transport.
You get triple the net energy from a uranium mine compared to nuclear.
The silicon, glass, frame, and power electronics take less resources than the rest of the plant.
The story for wind is not so hilariously one sided (for example it uses more concrete than nuclear), but it's still fine. The blades of a >3MW turbine have about the same energy density as packaged nuclear waste. There are also at least 3 storage technologies undergoing commercialisation that use abundant materials.
> False. If it's a problem for PV it's a much worse problem for existing nuclear plants.
There's basically unlimited quantities of uranium in sea water. Plus you can breed it from thorium if you want to.
> But once you include all the concrete and steel and low level waste that needs decades of storage it's about the same size as a 4hr battery for the entire country.
I highly doubt it but I'd love to see the math on that.
The author of the report I linked concludes that fission cannot be main power source of the future because of the limits of mineable uranium. However he completely ignores the ocean as a source of uranium, which is basically inexhaustible. We don't get it from there today because demand is low and it's cheaper to get it from the ground but ocean uranium capture has been demonstrated.
Solar panels by themselves don't require a lot of rare material but they do require tons of high heat and carbon to "bake". A large part of how cheap they are today is due to the fact that they are made using coking coal in China. But of course the material constraints of the storage needed for solar/wind is the main obstacle. Until we demonstrate cheap storage at scale, wind/solar won't cut it.
It was very rough hyperbole/fermi estimate. Can't find figures for the US, so using europe.
Europe has 2.5 million m^3 of low level waste and 1.5 million m^3 that's fairly imminent from refurbishments/decommisioning and replacement (an array of 6 by 6 football fields stacked 20 yards). This is only about ~50 years, so it will go up over time.
Europe uses about 2660TWh/yr or 300GW
At 500Wh/L (high but existing) that's 4 hours for the 2.5. At 300Wh/L it's 4 hours at 4 million m^3
A lot of that waste probably doesn't need containment after a decade or two, so it's only a ballpark. (and a real battery can't be that densely packed without overheating). Conversely 5% or so of it needs multiple centuries or millenia so it would accumulate much higher.
In addition to ignoring sea uranium mining which does not exist in any meaningful way he also ignores a bunch of things which actually do exist like LiFePO4 batteries, the last 10 years of PV research, trains, LEVs and affordable offshore wind.
It also ignores things that are much more likely to exist than uranium sea mining like prussian blue batteries, AlS, iron air, perovskite solar panels and affordable tidal power (all of which are presently undergoing large scale industrialisation).
We need to take a stern look at what went wrong with a few things like this 1) Deindustrialization of the west and rampant globalization with not much thought given to national security 2) Manufacturing loss 3) Rise of China through subsidies and unchecked betting by companies like Nike and Apple. 4) No one in Silicon Valley wants to work on defense and military ventures.
The machinery that enables immunity is allowing unpopular but rational opinions in the society. Newspapers wouldn’t print uncomfortable truths.
Wind turbines and power lines in my backyard. It's already regrettable today.