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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

It's an emotional thing. The German Green party founding ideology was built around stopping nuclear power ("Atomkraft nein danke!"). I remember having discussions about the logic back in the 80s with my German compatriots. All these years later the generation that were school kids then are now in power and renewable energy expansion creates the illusion that turning off nuclear power plants now is a good idea. Personally I'd like to see nuclear power be a part of a stable baseline for a few more decades.

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It’s also a cultural thing in the west too, a lot of early green movement was built the same way, when half lives were incredibly long. The politics just hasn’t caught up with the science.

What’s the half-life now?

A few human generations. Which is still a problem but not as much as storing waste in a way that a civilisation thousands of years need to understand.

Was not disputing. Just have no idea about it and was wondering. Thanks! Yeah, a few human generations is definitely a huge improvement!

> (...) when half lives were incredibly long.

I'm sorry, did the laws of physics changed in the last couple of decades?

The laws of physics remain the same, however the ability to reduce waste half lives by reusing spent fuel rods has changed, so we don’t need to store waste for ten thousand years.

Maybe do a bare minimum of research before posting a snide comment?

> The laws of physics remain the same,

Yes, this means the half lives are still the same, and the original claim was patently nonsense.

> however the ability to reduce waste half lives by reusing spent fuel rods has changed,

This is also patently false. The advances in nuclear reprocessing only mean that spent fuel rods can be refined and reused, so that the resulting nuclear waste has fewer material with eternal half lives.

Still the shortest half lives of the remaining materials still span thousands of years, which in humanity's time scale means they are eternal.

> so we don’t need to store waste for ten thousand years.

The thing is, you still do. The shortest half lives are tens of thousands of years. Those are the shortest ones. material with longer half lives still exist in spent nuclear fuel, but with lower concentrations. What leads you to believe they don't exist?

> has fewer material with eternal half lives

Grammar error aside - ‘eternal’ half lives don’t exist. The time taken for radioactivity to decay by half cannot be and is not 'forever'. That's very basic maths. Again you’re aggressively incorrect.

> (...) and renewable energy expansion creates the illusion that turning off nuclear power plants now is a good idea.

What exactly leads you to believe that shutting off nuclear power is anything other than a good idea?

> Personally I'd like to see nuclear power be a part of a stable baseline for a few more decades.

It was my understanding that by now it was clear this is all around an awful idea. What leads you to still think otherwise?

The obvious downside of this decision is that nuclear generation that has been shut down is replaced by coal and gas.

Also it's not a given that the renewable strategy will succeed. The bulk electricity prices are already going down to zero across Germany at random times when the weather is good. Which means the renewable energy business don't get revenue when they generate the most electricity. As a consequence even more subsidies are required to further increase the share of renewables.

> The obvious downside of this decision is that nuclear generation that has been shut down is replaced by coal and gas.

This is patently false.

Isar plants were built in the 70s. Back then Germany's share of renewable energy sources was residual. Since then, Germany started shutting off nuclear and currently over 40% of it's energy needs are met with renewable energy sources.

The only way to claim that Germany is replacing nuclear with coal and gas is if you opt to go the disingenuous route and claim that some coal and gas power plants went online while nuclear plants were being shut down.

> Also it's not a given that the renewable strategy will succeed.

What? Supplying nearly half of a country's energy needs is now a sign of failure?

> This is patently false.

It's not false, it's just probably not easy to understand.

It's easy to understand if we consider a hypothetical situation where the nuclear power plant is running AND Germany still keeps all other renewable plans. Since the demand does not change, what other generation would not be running in this case? It is coal and gas.

Thus, by shutting down nuclear, several coal or gas power plants are running instead of idling somewhere.

> What? Supplying nearly half of a country's energy needs is now a sign of failure?

Success in this case is replacement of dirty electricity generation and not using the rest of Europe as a giant battery to solve the unpredictability of renewable generation. The limits of easy renewable deployments are becoming exhausted and it will become much harder to increase the share of renewables even more.

I think we agree that it's great that Germany runs so many renewables already. But long-term objective is much more and it's not clear that it will be achieved.

"It's easy to understand if we consider a hypothetical situation"

lol

> It's not false, it's just probably not easy to understand.

In other words, the thesis has no basis and you have a hard time coming across people who swallow nonsense.

> It's easy to understand if we consider a hypothetical situation where the nuclear power plant is running AND Germany still keeps all other renewable plans.

Is your personal belief held by artificial scenarios that are both absurd and unrealistic?

No wonder people find this blend of bullshit claim hard to understand.

Nuclear is for base load. If Germany kept their reactors or increased them, then coal and gas would not be necessary for the times when renewable energy is not available, which is constantly. So yes, nuclear did get replaced by gas and coal, even though renewables are a much bigger source today.

> What exactly leads you to believe that shutting off nuclear power is anything other than a good idea?

It's objectively a terrible idea until a single coal power plants is still running anywhere in Europe (well approximately anyway...).

Unless that is you consider the value of human lives to be insignificant. 20-30 thousand people die in the EU alone because of coal, slowing down climate change is just a "free" bonus..

> It was my understanding that by now it was clear this is all around an awful idea

Not building more nuclear plants before renewables became economically viable was a awful idea (of course only if you care about pollution and climate change which the German Green had did not even the tiniest bit back in the 80s)

> It's objectively a terrible idea until a single coal power plants is still running anywhere in Europe (well approximately anyway...).

That's not an explanation or rationale. You just repeated a personal belief.

Do you have any rational basis to support that belief? Repeating "because I said so" doesn't make nuclear power more of an option, nor does it eliminate any of it's many problems.

> Unless that is you consider the value of human lives to be insignificant. 20-30 thousand people die in the EU alone because of coal, slowing down climate change is just a "free" bonus..

It should be good news to you then that Germany is also phasing out coal power along with nuclear then, with 2028 set as the deadline.

> Not building more nuclear plants before renewables became economically viable was a awful idea (...)

Reality does not agree with you, as proven by the fact that nearly half of Germany energy needs already come from renewable sources while Nuclear is already on its way out. It makes no sense at all to try to spin this problem as some clerical issue, specially now when renewables are a tremendous success.

How many people to you estimate will die because of coal reactors until we hit this 2028 timeline?

> That's not an explanation or rationale. You just repeated a personal belief.

Are you implying that burning coal results in about as 100-1000 as many deaths as nuclear for the same amount of power generated? I assumed that was common knowledge, sorry..

> It should be good news to you then that Germany is also phasing out coal power along with nuclear then

I guess. They could have already done so by now if not a decade or two ago.

> Reality does not agree with you, as proven by the fact that nearly half of Germany energy needs already come from renewable sources while Nuclear is already on its way out

Yes and? What about share of renewables in 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005? I never said nuclear would be a good option now, it's way too late for that now. However switching to nuclear the same way France did back in the 80s would have resulted in significantly less pollution and CO2 emission (or will you try to argue with that by saying the word "reality" a lot and saying?).

Had this happened worldwide we would be already 10-20 years ahead in the fight against climate change (also prevented thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths).

Obviously jumping straight to renewables back in the 80s and 90s would have been ideal. Nuclear was the second best option. Sticking to fossil fuels was obviously the worst (even though it was the cheapest, at least if we ignore the externalities, option back then).

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