If only there was another power source that could be used, perhaps one that didn't rely on burning fossil fuels, if only...
You can point your finger at the CDU, but saying that the CDU was the big driving force is disingenous.
It seems that Germany's descisions on exiting nuclear power plants are always unhappily timed. First, Fukushima happens, making the extension a few months earlier look really weird. Then, the Ukraine war happens, rendering Germany's original plan moot to replace coal with natural gas from russia, and everyone is shaking their head again as Germany is keeping to the original plan.
That the current generation of voters who supported the shutdown of nuclear power production were substantially "encouraged" to adopt such views by said Greens' actions and politics when they were children and teenagers living in the 80s is incontrovertible fact. So, even if Merkel ended up as the one who executed the will of the people as head of the CDU, that will had nothing to do with CDU policy, and certainly not in the 80s and 90s. That was by definition the policy of the Greens, who also laid the groundwork for the irrational fear that Germans in their 40s and 50s have been cultivating for decades.
Why can i say this with complete certainty? Because I was one of those kids.
Kids are glueing themselves onto streets because their obsessions aren't satisfied strongly enough. The brainwashing is real.
Unfortunately obsessions lead to lack of wider thinking or logic.
And fighting it isn't something that only Germany is tasked with.
btw. it's not kids, but grown ups of all ages that are gluing themselves onto streets; in various countries
I'm rather sure that not being able to afford energy - heat in the winer - is a the real existential threat to a kid in continental Europe.
Worrying about sea level going up 10cm in his/her lifetime is a rich person hobby.
Worrying about the future past next year is definitely a rich person hobby, if you define "rich" as "not imminently starving".
Sea level rise is the least of the trouble. Look at fisheries decline (yield per inflation-adjusted-dollar spent has been recorded for a long time now - in spite of new tech it's been dropping for over a century), temperature-driven crop failures, increased frequency of severe storms damaging infrastructure.
But the primary near-term risks from climate change are heat damaging crops, (wet) heat killing humans, declining soil moisture in some regions, and increased risk of flooding along some rivers. Over two centuries, coastal cities may be inundated, but that is a long time.
So no, this isn't something rich people will face in 50 years. It's something everyone faces today.
But let's take the last year, sanctions policies that lead them to trade direct resource imports from Russia to having the same imports but paying premium through brokers like Morocco, India and Chinese LNG(all coming from Russia). Let's remember what the BASF CEO said before it escalated.[1]
A lot of people in Germany were begging the government to postpone the shutdown of the remaining power plants until they have replacements, but the ideological Greens just charged ahead replacing Nuclear with Coal to achieve their ideological goal of removing nuclear. They have also been at the forefront of pushing legislation at an EU level to block nuclear in various forms.[2][3]
I've seen these obsessions in various other parts of society. I've had people stand behind me waiting telling me they could not pass anywhere but where I am even though they could just take a turn around me. I've personally experienced and heard from multiple people at the CCC that their Math teachers would punish them for achieving a result with a different technique than what the teacher taught them.
[1] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/basf-chef...
[2] https://www.brusselsreport.eu/2022/01/04/germany-needs-to-st...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-pushes-nucle...
Do people feel that way? Their automobiles are some of the worst from an engineering perspective and the only software company I can think of is the dinosaur SAP.
When I think of Germany I do not think of good engineering but rather automobiles that lose so much value so quickly because the have expensive and frequent maintenance costs and outdated software companies. Germany makes things unnecessarily complex and therefore prone to failure. It’s a cultural thing I believe.
In which ways us Germany considered excellent at engineering today?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Criticis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...
All Russia had to do is use their unlimited money (from selling gas to Germany) to buy some influence in German news papers (difficulty level: easy) and maybe pay some people to organize protests.
Of course the fact that Russians bought Schroder isn't even speculation (unlike the above). To me the above is extremely likely to have happened (and probably still on-going).
Even in the early days of Putin's war Germany was still sponsoring Putin by buying many 100's of millions of EUR of gas from him.
They "got rid of Russian dependence in the energy sector" by reopening old German coal mines, firing up coal power plants and shifting gas imports from Russia to the US + importing tons of nuclear energy from France.
Germany only stopped buying Russian gas for > 50% of their energy needs AFTER a war started AFTER the pipelines to Russia got bombed and AFTER they had no other choice.
We also would have to get foreign workers. A lot of NPP workers went into early retirement.
As of now Germany has no “Endlagerstätte”, all current wast storage sides are intermediate. The last attempt to establish a permanent storage side failed horribly and the nuclear wast that was interned there will be extracted under high costs.
Well, BWRs and PWRs release Carbon-14 into the atmosphere where it is dwarfed by the Carbon-14 created by cosmic rays banging into Nitrogen ... and the total amount from both sources is truly tiny with a half life (of remaining in atmosphere) of 12 to 16 years.
The decay half life of Carbon-14 is almost 6,000 years .. ie: it decays slowly and the small amounts of Carbon-14 release even smaller amounts of ionising radiation due that slow decay.
Per human body Carbon-14 (mostly from cosmic ray interactions, magnitudes less from reactors) makes up a very very small part of regular mean environmental radiation per year per kilogram.
Source: a decade+ running numbers on global geophysical exploration surveys: background magnetics, radiation, gravity, etc instrumentation running 12/7/360 (daylight hours, all days of the week, little downtime) across multiple airframes.
The UNSCEAR boils all these complex details down to a collective effective dose per generated electricity (in man-sievert per gigawatt year) for atmospheric discharges. This hides a lot of details, including the mentioned plutonium-239 as well as the carbon-14 releases, the radon-222 exhaust, and the uranium-238 traces being discharged to the atmosphere both by coal burning power plants and the uranium mills required for nuclear power. How half life plays into that, why nuclear accidents were taken out of scope, and why you don't want an old italian geothermal complex in your backyard. As i said, any TLDR i can give will not do justice to the details and quality of the report.
You appear to have since edited your original comment to replace "Carbon-14" with a broader non specific "radioactive waste".
> the "compared to cosmic rays" reminds me of the fuel industry claiming that atmospheric lead is natural
It might remind you of that but I assure the intent was to legitimately compare the actual amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere (which originates from cosmic ray collisions) against the additional amount added by PWR + BWR reactors.
Reactors add very little by magnitude to an amount that is already very small and in toto the effect on humans is a very small part of the "normal" human exposure to environmental radiation that has persisted for our time on this planet.
> there is natural radon-222 as well, does that mean the radon exhaust of coal power plants can be ignored ..
Absolutely not, but for a meaningful understanding it should be compared to the already occurring creation of radon from 'natural' uranium decaying within granites and expressing to the surface.
I'd suggest paying attention to ground topography also - radon pools in valleys until stiff breezes clear them of those pools - hence the recommendations for venting in basements in granite rich areas.
> This hides a lot of details, ... will not do justice to details and quality of the source.
If it's hiding details you can find better sources that drill deeper in the individual components.
Eg: Australian AGSO and National Pollution Inventory reports on Olympic Dam [2] and other "uranium mills".
Water usage might be an issue of greater significance there (at Olympic Dam).
i did, within minutes of posting it, and before ever knowing about your follow up response, because i was unhappy with pinpointing such a detail and wanted to avoid this exact situation of someone over-focusing on that specific detail, disregarding the larger context of comparing whole sectors. I take full responsibility for pointing at the cherry you picked, before realising i should not.
Then you may be happy to hear that the UN report also notes water pollution by the nuclear industry, citing a publication by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency as reference L2 concerning Olympic Dam
https://www.unscear.org/unscear/uploads/documents/publicatio...
You should read it yourself because any TLDR will not be able to mention all the intricate details