Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used | Hacker News Reader

Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

atlasobscura.com

124 pointsonnimonni143 comments

The one that really breaks my heart is the SNR-300, a cutting-edge liquid metal sodium-cooled breeder reactor capable of unlocking the full potential of the majority isotope (U-238) rather than just the minority (U-235), giving us literally billions of years of current-day whole-earth power from known uranium resources (including seawater and erosion). It was 100% completed and ready to come up to power, but then Chernobyl happened and the people (of Germany) revolted. It is now an amusement park.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300

Another related timing coincidence is that a smaller sodium-cooled reactor in the USA (the EBR-2) demonstrated completely passive shutdown in loss of flow and loss of heat sink accidents without any control rods going in just 2 weeks before Chernobyl happened. Of course today almost no one has heard of it.

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

I grew up close to Kalkar and visited the theme park that is now located at the power plant a few times as a kid.

If you read the timeline, you can see that the protests started before the Chernobyl disaster. At that point, no government entity wanted the reactor to go online.

Some of my family members went to protest there when they were younger. Our physics teachers discussed the plant with us on several occasions as part of the mandatory curriculum. I can just say, Germany's relationship to nuclear is and was always characterized by strange concerns about environmental issues and a drive just to oppose something for vague political associations. It's hard to describe, but feels very similar to virtue signaling.

Probably didn't help that for much of the cold war Germany was a likely candidate for "ground zero" of a nuclear exchange. I think living under that might reasonably influence people's attitudes.

Conflation between weapons and generators was weird then - and it is fossil idiocy at this point. There was a grain of truth at the time when all civilian nuclear programs were the flipside of military programs, but even then the imagery of mushroom clouds over power plants was either ignorant or dishonest.

Yes, I agree, I think a large part of it came from people not understanding the physics.

Even in my physics class in high school, when we spoke about the reactor in Kalkar and watched several documentaries about Chernobyl, our teachers made it seem like explosions from nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons would be the same in yield. Which is an outright lie, given a nuclear reactor usually explodes from a steam or hydrogen explosion.

I am sure the Russians spent much energy and money to shape the public opinion in Germany to serve their interests.

Not sure if they sold much gas to Germany during the Soviet times. I really don't know if they did, but it was cold war times then after all.

I don't know how much gas they actually sold at the time, but some major oil/gas pipelines were built during the 1960s, 1970s and early 80s. So the intention was clearly there.

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

That's interesting. Even if the volume was low, perhaps the Russians were nevertheless interested in sowing dissent in the German public opinion. In particular, making sure the energy sector is always dependent on some foreign source.

That plus well developed civilian nuclear power gives the means to developing atomic bombs, and Russia has every reason to fear a nuclear-armed Germany

I doubt that this was a major concern as US nuclear weapons have been stationed in Germany since 1960. They remain under US control but the German army is trained to use them in the event of a war. And of course Soviet nuclear weapons used to be stationed in East Germany during the cold war. So for practical purposes Germany was already nuclear-armed.

But who knows. This was 15 years after the end of WW2. It wouldn't be too surprising if there had been lingering fears in Russia about what Germany might be up to outside of NATO.

Even aside from WW2 history just simply having more potential threats is bad.

Deja Vu: I wrote a comment here some days ago arguing that while Russian/Soviet influence certainly exists public opinion is majorly homegrown:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331523

People from the anglosphere often seem to think that Russian and now Qatari gas is a replacement for the nuclear power, which is rather wrong: The vast majority of Germany's natural gas usage is residential for heating and in industry.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...

Gas is hard to replace ad hoc with electricity because you'd have to replace boilers in millions of homes and apartments, a multi-decade infrastructure project.

I have no doubt that the German public is full of true believers. That does not exclude Soviet/Russian influence. I don’t have any solid evidence but the Soviets/Russians had several motives, means and opportunities to spread anti-nuclear influence.

Not only would a (West) Germany with abundant cheap nuclear power have energy to compete industrially, they would have the ability to enrich plutonium which might lead to the development of a home-grown nuclear strike capacity within a short range from Moscow. That is, assuming such an idea was politically possible.

All energy is fungible. Certainly the cost of switching is not free, but the time to begin doing that was decades ago.

> Gas is hard to replace ad hoc with electricity because you'd have to replace boilers in millions of homes and apartments, a multi-decade infrastructure project

The best time to start a multi-decade infrastructure project was multiple decades ago. The second best time is now.

Boilers need replacing anyways, so this could have been very gracefully over time.

I am sure the Americans spent much energy and money to shape the public opinion in Germany to serve their interests.

Russians and companies interested in perpetuating the dependency on fossil fuels.

E.g. Greenpeace Germany had weirdly close links to Gazprom, and was even at one point selling natural gas as "green" and "renewable". Greenpeace Belgium was lobbying for the closing of nuclear power plants and replacing them with gas ones. I find it hard to believe that even Greenpeace could be that blind without external help.

When?

I think the timeline matters here. While the effect of CO2 emission on global warming are known (to some extent) for more than a century already, in the eighties and early nineties, it was not a chief concern of the general populace in Europe, while the (perceived or actual) dangers of nuclear energy certainly was.

I went to primary school (1-4 grade) in the mid 1990s in a small post-communist country. Fossil fuel burning producing emissions bad for your health and harming the planet was something that was a part of the curriculum in like the second or third grade (I remember it vividly because the teacher asked why are trolleybuses better than bused, I was sure it was something to do with the engine, but didn't want to risk embarrassing myself; I was right, and I told myself I should be more confident in myself).

If it managed to get into the curriculum of a small post-communist country in the mid-1990s, "green" organisations should have been aware of the impacts of emissions and CO2. And for what it's worth, Greenpeace up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine made it infeasible, was pushing for closing of actively running and already amortised nuclear power plants and replacing them with gas.

It's hilariously ironic how one of the most iconic green movements actually ended up causing more damage to the planet on the planetary scale than helping. Sucks for us all that have to live with it though, just because a bunch of blind idiots couldn't be bothered to think.

If you cannot think for yourself then often someone else will think for you…

Greenpeace was so rabidly anti-nuclear that they were blind to everything else, especially to the fact that nuclear energy != nuclear weapons.

To me, the opinion about nuclear power kind of feels like the subject of homeopathy in Germany. It feels like in the general population there is a whole that can only be filled by non-science and quackery. The most reasonable people that usually believe in science just get emotional and ignore facts in favor of a vague feeling of defending their beliefs no matter what.

Yes, indeed. But there are still parts of Germany where you should not pick wild mushrooms because of Chernobyl. And the whole Asse II we still have to fix.

Which is a bit more tangable.

Sounds like an overblown myth. I've never heard of any places where you can't pick mushrooms because of Chernobyl in Poland

If I remember correctly that was a result how the fallout was transported via the jetstream - and if it did rain, hence a rather non-uniform distribution. The first fallout cloud went from Ukraine over Poland to Scandinavia but it did not rain down. A second cloud went westwards over then Czechoslovakia and then southern Germany, hence the impact. The German Agency for Radation Protection has this map of Caesium ground contamination in 1986:

https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Bilder/BfS/DE/ion/notfallschut...

The mushroom thing is because of bioaccumulation: Mushrooms seem to ingest the particles from its surrounding ground/ground water, hence a higher concentration of radioactive material in a smaller volume. And then wild boars eat those mushrooms, concentrating it even further. Caesium 137 has a rather short half life of only 30 years, but through the process of accumulation/concentration still today meat from wild boars shot in that region gets tested and is often over the allowable limit to eat.

In Bavaria testing of venison is mandatory and consumers have the right to see the measurement protocol for every piece of sold meat.

Because the contamination varies greatly, depending on where it rained during a short timespan in 1986, the amount of usable meat also varies, but is usually between 50% and 70%. The rest, which is not safe to eat is bought by the state.[1]

People are always quick to call Germans crazy because of their attitude towards nuclear energy, but Chernobyl had real world implications to our daily lives and to a degree still has to this day.

[1] https://www.jagd-bayern.de/jagd-wild-wald/jagdpraxis/rcm-mes...

I recall people talk about that in Sweden too. There did however seems to be a bit confusion around since copper, silver and iron mining tend to release a lot of radioactive radon dust in a fairly large area. The recommendation to be careful with wild mushrooms or wild meat never made a distinction between the two sources.

It's so amusing to see that German anti nuclear policy can be essentially summarized as different eras of 'Russia bad'.

I can confirm that the protests were already hot before 1986. Chernobyl was just the final nail in the coffin. But this is often forgotten.

Another thing that is often forgotten and at least partially contributed to the outcome of Kalkar never going online, is a substantial change in the political climate regarding the question of nuclear proliferation.

It might seem strange now, but 40 years after WW II Germany was probably closer to getting its own nuclear inventory than today. While it was far from uncontroversial at the time it was not a heretic idea either and widely discussed.

A fast breeder like Kalkar would have been an important step in that direction, as would have been the heavy-water reactor in Niederaichbach, which only ran for about a year.

To complete the nuclear fuel cycle and to produce the plutonium for Kalkar a reprocessing plant would have been necessary which again had enabled Germany to produce weapons-grade nuclear material. The planned and partially completed facilities in Wackersdorf were abandoned in the 80s too.

If we have invested the same amount of money to make reliable, safe nuclear power plants that take up fraction of the space "rewnewables" use the world would be a better place.

Btw. there is nothing really renewable in solar planels and wind mills.

"When wind turbine blades reach the end of their 20-to-25-year service lives, they usually end up in landfills."

https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-...

"Are Solar Panels Hazardous Waste?

Hazardous waste testing on solar panels in the marketplace has indicated that different varieties of solar panels have different metals present in the semiconductor and solder. Some of these metals, like lead and cadmium, are harmful to human health and the environment at high levels. If these metals are present in high enough quantities in the solar panels, solar panel waste could be a hazardous waste under RCRA. Some solar panels are considered hazardous waste, and some are not, even within the same model and manufacturer. Homeowners with solar panels on their houses should contact their state/local recycling agencies for more information on disposal/recycling."

https://www.epa.gov/hw/end-life-solar-panels-regulations-and...

Solar panels are highly recyclable after their extremely long life. Certainly no worse than oil, even if left alone (which won't happen, sincethey contain valuable materials).

Turbine blades are mostly fiberglass, which is about as neutral of a material as you can get. They are buried in a landfill (worstcase) after producing tremendous amounts of energy. New designs are lasting longer and being made recyclable, since so many people have this sticking point (even though no fuel oil is recyclable)

Not entirely disagreeing with your key point, but that's not what "renewable" means to me.

Renewable is about fuel, not generator.

If gas station turbine is compared to solar panel and windmill blade, then natural gas and underground oil are compared to sunlight and wind.

Underground oil and gas are limited resources baked many many millions of years ago, pretty much over similar timescales.

Wind and sunlight,for the purpose of this discussion, are self renewing - we will not run out of them.

Your discussion is more on how ecological the actual generators are, and that's a fair discussion to have, but comparison is not a wind mill blade and a car, it's windmill blade and solar panel to nuclear reactors and gas power plants.

It is being used ;)

It's a great place to sleep in for EDM festivals like Parookaville. And the nuclear reactor aesthetic certainly goes well with steampunk stage decoration.

Or the Shutdown festival.

Additionally Zwentendorf is/was used for training for crews of same-type reactors.

Hmm, Kalkar, the only nuclear power plant I ever protested - in the late 70s when I was still in school and construction had just begun. It was finished in 85 but never even fueled due to safety concerns (liquid natrium is nasty, state government did not authorize operation), protests and significant doubts about its purpose (breeders are most suitable to produce bomb material and nuclear fuel).

Chernobyl happened 1986 and probably put the last nail in the coffin, when its radioactive material spilled over Germany and people were recommended to stop eating mushrooms, game animals and homegrown salad. I was doing my nuclear physics practical at the Uni at the time and our lab offered food measurements as a public service, so people brought their homegrown vegetables, fruits and milk. Highest measurements were always the grass in front of the institute though. Much higher than in the "neutron lab" I was working in at the time.

1991 Kalkar was finally officially abandoned and later sold to a private investor.

What a waste

Same goes for Transrapid. Promising tech that they abandoned because of a fixable issue that lead to an accident.

There is also Angra III in Brasil which has a similar history but with completely different outcome. The plant was bought from Germany in 1985 and then stored for a quarter of a century. Some parts were kept in nitrogen to prevent corrosion.

But contrary to Zwentendorf and Kalkar the project was rebooted (in several attempts) and is currently scheduled to be finished in 2028.

The early nuclear power plants were all individually designed and custom built, before commercial power plants were standardized. The German standard plants are called Konvoi and the individual builds Pre-Konvoi.

Currently Angra II is the only Pre-Konvoi plant still in operation in the whole world. If Angra III goes online, it will be a quarter of a century after the last Pre-Konvoi plant (Angra II) and more than half a century after all the others.

In Finland where I'm from the Olkiluoto III nuclear plant was delayed multiple times and ended up being 9th most expensive building in the world (excluding military bases which we don't have public records):

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

I'm highly skeptical of the schedules and since it's so old equipment I would be very surprised if it will be in budget and start when scheduled. Anyway I hope it works out.

It is a good job the station's Finnish owner/operator, TVO, got it on a fixed price contract. That does not make coping with the delays in coming online any easier, but some consolation that someone else is footing the construction bill and enriching the local economy.

This is, to some extent, the same as Hinkley Point C where EDF and CGN have got a long term strike price. I wait with interest to see how Sizewell C will be financed, be it the regulated asset base model or else a Contract For Difference.

There is a good argument for cost-plus construction contracts provided the purchaser can financially cope with the risks. Risk transfer is never free!

> someone else

Indeed. That would be French taxpayers.

EDF has only recently become fully state owned. Also the French state have recently amended the ARENH arrangement to get greater revenues (who knew selling options for 42 EUR/MWh was a bad idea). Greater losses and damages have been incurred by previous governments.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Agreement-on-pos...

I believe the real reason that reactors like this never took off is that the US government pushed hard against them due to "proliferation concerns". Which may or may not have been a cover story for saving the fossil fuels industry.

> giving us literally billions of years of current-day whole-earth power from known uranium resources (including seawater and erosion)

It's not like it was a one-time chance that we missed, and we'll never get back. The technology still exists, it is even in production. Russia has 2 reactors running as of now, BN-600 and BN-800. The first has been running for more than 4 decades, the other for 8 years. A BN-1200 design has been recently approved for construction, and Russia plans to make many of them.

In the US, there's the Terrapower company that has started the approval process with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its sodium-cooled reactor, Natrium [2]. These things take years, but my guess is that in the worst case scenario, they'll still be able to build a reactor by 2040.

[1] https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/BN-1200-plans-for-Be...

[2] https://www.terrapower.com/terrapower-submits-cpa-nrc/

> people (of Germany) revolted

Austria.

Same story as Shoreham Long Island

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

Built and powered up, but never used..

"...the state taking over the plant and then attaching a 3 percent surcharge to Long Island electric bills for 30 years to pay off the $6 billion price tag"

"Had the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station gone into operation as planned, it would have prevented the emission of an estimated three million tons of carbon dioxide per year"

Kind of wonder what the plan they tried to get people to sign onto and failed would've been:

> LILCO's problems were compounded by NRC rules in the wake of Three Mile Island, requiring that operators of nuclear plants work out evacuation plans in cooperation with state and local governments. This prompted local politicians to join the growing opposition to the plant. Since any land evacuation off the island would involve traveling at least 60 miles (97 km) back through New York City to reach its bridges, local officials feared that the island could not be safely evacuated.[3]

There are currently 1.5M people in Suffolk County today, and millions more in adjoining areas. If that were a peacetime evacuation that would be one of the largest in history.

Yeah, hopeless.

Normally nuclear accidents lead to a much more significant destruction of property value, vs. actual loss of life- but on Long Island?

Forgetting that for a moment: Fukushima cleanup is estimated to cost $470 to $660 billion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup). Just the aggregate single family home total property value (Suffolk and Nassau) is something like $650 billion (median times number of homes- I'm sure this is a massive underestimate considering the mansions on the Gold Coast and the Hamptons).

Existing insurance is not enough:

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...

Similar to WNP3 in Washington state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNP-3_and_WNP-5

I lived nearby my whole childhood.

I wish they had turned it on instead of building a huge coal (now russian gas) power plant nearby.

imho (!) ...

nice articles ... but - there is always a but ;))

yes, part of it was the "anti-nuclear sentiment" ... but i would say, only a smaller part.

the "real" reason was internal austrian politics.

you have to know the background: during the 1970ties a left-leaning socialist government propelled the country into the future - implemented a large package of reforms -, after decades of societal backlash & stagnation following the 2nd world-war and at first only marginal influence of the late 60ties and early 70ties worldwide students protests etc.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Kreisky

so after zwentendorf was build chancellor kreisky throw all of his popular weight behind it and did something remarkable (i would say: stupid): he said, if the popular vote ends against zwentendorf, he will resign => the liberal-conservative austrian peoples party saw the light to get rid of him and invested heavily into this ... the rest is history...

just my 0.02€

Sounds like a David Cameron all in moment.

You throw in left-leaning socialist and liberal-conservative as if it's supposed to clarify the story. Both of those terms meant vastly different things from now 50 years ago.

Can you be a bit more precise with your 2 cents so we can actually understand what you're saying?

Social Democracy isn't "socialist left", but leaving that aside, what you're saying is that the social democrats of the time tried to create energy independence(opposite of today's social democrats by the way), that's smart. So the Austrian people's party invested into what exactly? What did they do?

I see that he was in the Willy Brandt camp who was famous for his Ostpolitik, interesting. I just learned through the links that while he was working on normalizing ties to the east, he worked at the same time on anticommunist policies, which is also interesting.

If I get what you're saying correctly then this reminds me of when the plan for Fiber optic development in Germany was sacked to create copper to indoctrinate people with cable TV. It was in the same time frame actually.

https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...

He's probably suggesting it was an indirect political move in a power struggle, so we should not take it as gospel that Austrians chose to end nuclear. The way, for example, democrats postponed the covid vaccine for about a month to win the elections, or the republicans are currently helping russia.

(I'm just trying to explain the concept, I have absolutely no idea about Austrian politics. Other than the commonly known fact that they're currently not energy independent)

Unfortunately, as if we didn't have the best facilities for pumped hydro storage in all of Europe. But the Russian gas money is just too sweet

It was only in 1991 the Sozialistische Partei Österreichs changed it's name to Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs.

hello,

ok ... lmgtfu ...

so lets go for the details - sadly most of it is in german

public vote on zwentendorf ~ where you can read the details i mentioned - and more:

* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksabstimmung_in_%C3%96sterr...

an overview about the reforms of the kreisky government during the 70ties

* http://kreisky100.at/meilensteine/index.html

or about the person "bruno kreisky"

* https://kontrast.at/bruno-kreisky-biografie/

very essential for the people were social and work related reforms, education (hertha firnberg) and women-politics (johanna dohnal)

ad johanna dohnal - a really remarkable person, on-off part of austrian governmental politics from the 70ties to the 90ties ... the english wikipedia page is sadly pretty empty:

* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_Dohnal

hertha firnberg - another remarkable women in the austrian politics of the 70ties: in short, she made the (higher) austrian educational system available to people w/o a lot (!) of money (higher education schools and universities, which where very elite prior to her reforms)

* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertha_Firnberg

the english wikipedia page about her is better than johanna dohnals, but the german version is still more extensive ...

ad parties:

the SPOe back in the 70ties was still a socialistic party - i think they already dropped the revolutionary aspect of socialism back then ...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_of_Aus...

the OeVP back then was a "very open to the right", bourgeoise - in its negative connotation - party whose primary "clientel" was - and still is - (very) religious people (christian-catholic), larger companies and rich people.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_People%27s_Party

afaik. it was planned to get the powerplant zwentendorf into operation at a later stage in time, but the famous accident in tschernobyl killed off all those plans by the 2nd half of the 1980ties.

which finally led to the building of the powerplant "Duernrohr"

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrnrohr_Power_Station

yet another 0.02€

OK thank you for clarifying, that was very interesting. If the socialist party was renamed to social democrats almost 8 years after this person left office, then the way the Wikipedia article is written is literally rewriting history.

Just a point about the socialist label for the many Americans here. Willie Brandt worked hard on what was called social market economy, it is actually what gave rise to the successes of the German state in the past. While it is socialist, it is very far away from what the average American likes to call socialist. It was a hugely successful economic model, and the bit by bit destruction of that system is what gave rise to this dysfunctional rump state, which is the current Germany.

I was under the impression that the concept of social market economy is a conservative project, CDU resp. ÖVP (in Austria). I wouldn't call that socialist, after all, it is a competitive market economy with private enterprise.

Also interesting: Kreisky totally didn’t resign after the vote ended against Zwentendorf…so the whole thing was for nothing in the end.

The operator of the plant assumed that the politicians would get to their senses at some point and kept it in operational shape for some years even though it wasn’t producing any power. Then they went bankrupt because pretend-running a nuclear plant is expensive.

Another thing IMO is that the government wasn't trusted to be completely honest about the dangers and the capability to run it proberly. Radioactivity is easy to detect and the mechanism of biological damage also is relatively easy to observe and prove (compared to other toxic substances emitted by e.g. chemical plants -- i.e. it took a very long time to get rid of leaded gasoline). People knew about the devastating effects radiation can have. Austria was a neutral buffer zone between east and west and a typical scenario of possible war the "Bundesheer" prepared for was NATO/soviet troups trying to bypass via austria (and the other block trying to stop them with tactical nukes).

> the liberal-conservative austrian peoples party saw the light to get rid of him

I didn't know this part of the story! Sounds very much like the ÖVP indeed...

Since the article adds no value besides a rage bait, I would like to add that the resulting decision to not build any nuclear power plant without consulting the population first was a significant step for the Austrian population's participation in democratic processes. Resulting in for example this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Hainburger_A...

Global warming turns so many of the environmental fights into saving the flowers while the forests are burning.

If noone ever fought for the environment beyond their own personal immediate health we might be in better position now than we are in term of CO2 and millions of people and thousands of ecosystems and species could be saved.

> If noone ever fought for the environment beyond their own personal immediate health we might be in better position now than we are in term of CO2 and millions of people and thousands of ecosystems and species could be saved.

It is astonishing how far the nuclear bubble is ready to go down the stairs of reason for drama. I mean seriously? Wtf is this? :D Are you joking? This is the equivalent of people who buy a gun to protect their house because the police is useless and being proud of it.

I don't get your analogy and I don't care about nuclear specifically.

There were many examples where dams weren't built to protect local ecosystems. Pumped storage denied. Roads not build that could shorten the travel. Ethanol in fuel that actually emitted more CO2 because of land use change to satisfy the enforced demand. Multi-use bags that require so much energy and resources to build that you need to use them thousand times to get even with single use ones. Paper bags that require more energy and resources to produce which decay or burn releasing CO2. Plug-in hybrids that barely anyone charges that are hauling useless heavy batteries while burning more gasoline. Whole recycling scam mascarading as a solution. All these dumb specific interventions that backfire.

The only thing that comes to my mind that actually improved situation was the global ban on fluorocarbons.

The thinking that climate change / CO2 is any different from CFCs is the primary barrier in the way of meaningful action. It takes persistent leadership on an international basis to get people of the world to do things differently, overcome greed, ignorance, and resistance, and stop the Holocene from ending with mass starvation, mass migration, and tens of billions of unnecessary deaths.

It's easier to get all countries to ban one class of refrigerants than all fuels.

We were super lucky in the case of ozone layer.

Do we need nuclear power anymore? It dose not seem to occupy a very efficient spot as part of the grid anymore due to long spool up and power down times it has to always run at a steady load where what the grid really needs is something that can quickly spool up and down like gas or battery.

Its also really expensive because you need all the infrastructure for nuclear plus the infrastructure for steam turbines which all needs to be built and maintained and is very expensive

Blinky, the three-eyed fish, disagrees. ,:) There's no point bothering with an inherently riskier and more expensive technology when cleaner, safer, and cheaper alternatives exist.

Gas also becomes obsolete with peaking-capable renewables with battery and/or PES.

> There's no point bothering with an inherently riskier and more expensive technology when cleaner, safer, and cheaper alternatives exist.

Not sure how to simultaneously maximise the three metrics. How many tonnes of CO2 is equal to one life or 1M USD?

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/impacts-of-energy-sourc...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...

The tipping point for solar and wind being cheaper (LCOE) and cleaner to deploy and maintain rapidly overtook all other forms of energy (coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro) in more and more markets over time thanks to the economies-of-scale of more deployments and improved manufacturing processes. There are some markets where coal or gas is the cheaper and expedient solution for now where local LCOEs are different, but not for long.

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

How about the cost in wild-life and nature? The required area and kill count of enough wind mills to replace a single nuclear plant is absolute insanity. And idk where you live, but we just had a university leader here who had to go because the wind lobby paid her scientists off to falsify reports in favour of wind. Wind and solar have their places sure, but the future is nuclear.

How nasty is producing Solar Panels? Have you looked at the etchants used?

I don't think we have a full account of the cost of the chemicals involved in semi-conductor construction.

I know its an inconvenient fact....

We all want to hate nuclear power but have no good storage plans for these new variable green power sources.

Nuclear may take a long time to spin up but it is constant and reliable.

Electrify the economy they say....

They forget wind and solar are part time producers.

It's expensive but also the only technology that can provide large amount of electricity on demand regardless of the natural resources available (hydro is limited by the need for mountains; should still build as much as possible but it's not enough).

NPPs can do load following: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#N...

Of course if we don't care about the climate gas and coal plants are cheaper (assuming cheap gas and cheap coal)

Coal is about as safe as nuclear except more radioactive but occupies a similar spot in being non demand based. Gas has no good alternative all grids need some gas right now.

Coal isn't as safe as nuclear. More people have died in coal power generation incidents that nuclear power ones; add in the deaths due to the air pollution from coal and it's not even close to being comparable.

> Gas has no good alternative all grids need some gas right now

Batteries are good peaked plant replacements.

Unless it becomes viable to build enough storage under any format (be it green hydrogen, pumped hydro, batteries) that could provide enough energy to withstand each locality/groups of localities' prolonged natural disasters, yes, nuclear is still needed.

Even a very varied grid (solar, wind, offshore wind and tidal) could struggle with e.g. a big storm. E.g. last summer a big part of norther Germany was hit by a storm with very strong winds, which made solar and wind stop generating power reliably over around a week. There was the rest of Germany plus the neighbours (including France's nuclear) to compensate.. but if it coincides with something else, like France being hit with a heat wave lowering rivers' level and increasing their temperature, forcing the shutdown of nuclear reactors, things can get complicated.

I've been noticing writing styles in stuff I read. This article, geez...

Three paragraphs seem to convey the same message "they built it, the public said no, so it never got switched on".

> Completed in mid-to-late 1970s, the plant in Zwentendorf cost around a billion euro to complete.

This sentence begins and ends with basically the same word. Feels like a highschooler level writing...

There's an edit button in the linked page. It's better to contribute than to complain.

They both take roughly same amount of time and other option leaves things better than you found them ;)

That's news to me. Wink.

The irony is that a good chunk of Austria's electricity imports have a nuclear origin. Many of those reactors are a stone's throw away from the border.

There is no irony there at all.

Austria, just like many other European countries, are connected to a single grid which has all kinds of energies and where everybody buys on the European Energy Exchange.

This grid is what makes the rapid transition to renewable energies possible, and which shows that the base load scare is not more than just one of many FUD tools which aim at slowing down or stopping a transition which is already there in full force.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/10/...

The reliance of the Austrian power grid on nuclear energy, combined with their total refusal to produce it domestically is certainly ironic. This phenomenon also predates any notion of green energy transition by several decades.

They don't rely on nuclear energy.

They rely on the grid. Just like the rest of the connected countries. Just like nuclear country France does.

What kind of energy is cheap at the moment there is irrelevant. If nuclear energy would be turned off on the grid, like it happens all the time when the French fleet needs repairs again for example, no lights go out in Austria. Just like no lights go out in France.

What you do is the same thing as making fun of humans because they rely on supermarkets and don't go out on the streets and shoot some animals.

Times change.

Following your metaphor, those humans eat meat while voting to outlaw the killing of animals. But only after spending a billion dollars on hunting equipment.

No. The metaphor is humans voting to stop hunting whales but eat whales before starving to death.

Not really. They've spent that money on hunting equipment only to realize that it would have been more clever to ask the people whose money they spend, if they should do it.

This is why it never happened again.

Learning from mistakes is something good.

> like it happens all the time when the French fleet needs repairs again for example

The one time this happened in 40 years was quite a problem for European supply reliability.

When is this supposed to be? Because the time I've been talking about is not that long ago...

It happened in 2022. That’s not exactly «all the time» or even «again».

When exactly? Do you have any sources on this? An URL? Something?

https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/electricity-revi...

This article literally refutes your statement:

> the European grid almost died so no, they do rely on nuclear whether they are happy or not.

It is actually the opposite of it. I mean seriously: what? :D

> In 2022, the power system proved resilient in the face of the most serious energy crisis since the 1970s

Where exactly are you quoting that first message from?

> I am not honest enough to avoid making strawmen

A-ha!

> If nuclear energy would be turned off on the grid, like it happens all the time when the French fleet needs repairs again for example

It happened a single time in 40 years and the European grid almost died so no, they do rely on nuclear whether they are happy or not.

What are you talking about? Where is the grid "almost died"? :D

Do you have any trustworthy sources for that?

As Austrian it's a national pride, and certainly not ironic.

Germany only followed after their Wackersdorf debacle, matching Tschnernobyl, and then finally Fukushima.

The rest of Europe is still in the hands of the energy lobbies.

And Austria does not rely on nuclear at all. It's rather the other way round, that all the others rely on Austria (and Swiss) expensive peak energy from their high mountains. When Europe turns on all it's power switches at the very same time the grid would collapse without Austria.

That's how it sponsored Putin's war for decades, by being reliant on Russian oil and gas. Austria is still doing that, until maybe Ukraine closes down or blows up the pipeline.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/we-...

And this is how countries with nuclear energy still doing it:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01228-5

https://cepa.org/article/russias-civil-nuclear-threat-must-b...

Not really European countries, no.

Quote from your article:

> With the exception of Hungary, which has recently signed an agreement with Rosatom for the expansion of its Paks nuclear power plant, European countries have been seeking to diversify away from the company since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

> Not really European countries, no.

Is nuclear energy a European energy source, or how is this comment related?

In 2023, 12% of Austria's electricity had a nuclear origin [0]. As for the risk of a meltdown, look at a map of reactors in Europe. The reactors Austria is buying that power from aren't much further away from major population centres than Zwentendorf.

[0] https://w3.windmesse.de/windenergie/pm/46044-ig-windkraft-at...

Austria does not rely on nuclear at all. The biggest power station in the country (south of Graz) went off grid a few year ago, because gas and coal became too expensive, but could be turned on immediately.

Zwentendorf of the very same size cannot be turned on again fortunately. The meltdown and earthquake risk with all the insecure Russian reactors around is of course still around.

> When Europe turns on all it's power switches at the very same time the grid would collapse without Austria.

Would you happen to have a source?

Talked in person to my two friends at the top of the Austrian grid

I have a friend who works on the Czech grid (so a neighboring country), and Austria never came up in the conversation as an important factor, it's always Germany causing problems.

The Czech and Slovak powerplants are both close enough to our border that it doesn't really matter.

At some stage one Austrian politician said that Austria won't buy nuclear contaminated energy from Hungary.

> This grid is what makes the rapid transition to renewable energies possible

No, it makes it possible to have nuclear base load plants in Hungary and Bulgaria and few other countries while some small country can play the renewable game at home. Renewables are not something that we can control. This makes them useless without a giant battery or power plants that are possible to scale up and down. The irony is that these power plants are usually gas turbines.

Even something like https://ndb.technology/ has a more serious vision for our energy future, much more serious than the usual we do not need base load just put a solar panel on everything movement largely driven by clueless politicians.

> No, it makes it possible to have nuclear base load plants in Hungary and Bulgaria and few other countries while some small country can play the renewable game at home

Those reactors play a negligible role. We've seen it all when the rotting French fleet went down for months.

Nuclear was the smallest part in the mix in 2020. This is 4 years any additional percentage of renewables ago: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/EU-energy-mix-2020-12_fi...

> This makes them useless without a giant battery or power plants

How are you still repeating this myth? We have the whole of Austria or the Nordics as giant batteries. The grid is working now. Despite the constantly rising amounts of really clean energy in it, and despite the FUD from the nuclear bubble.

YouTuber Tom Scott did a video about it:

This billion-euro nuclear reactor was never switched on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUVZbBBHrI4

Between this and brexit it seems that referendums about concrete things are a terrible idea.

They're a terrible idea when the population is not educated on the topics they're voting on and the possible consequences their vote has, since then they just vote on emotions rather than logic, or let themselves be manipulated by propaganda and fake news.

I wonder how much it would cost to move it to England, would it be more or less expensive than rebuilding it from scratch.

Depends on whether you want to use it as a museum or as a power plant.

It is one single westinghouse reactor of the same type that was used in Fukushima II. So essentially 60ies technology. I'm no nuclear expert but there surely is much improved more efficient and safer reactor technology now, not to speak of completely obsolete control and safety systems.

Also AFAIK it isn't really complete anymore as parts have been dismantled and sold to be used in reactors of similar vintage.

It is not a westinghouse reactor. Westinghouse doesnt and has never produced Boiling Water Reactors afaik. They mostly do Pressurized Water Reactors.

And while Fukushima and Zwentendorf had the same type of reactor (Boiling Water Reactor), it was not the same modell or from the same vendor. Fukushimas reactor was made by General Electrics. Zwentendorfs reactor was made by the German Kraftwerk Union.

You are right, its a GE design. Boiling Water Reactor doesn't say that much, the soviet RBMK (big reactor with tubes) also are of boiling water type. This ORF story https://noev1.orf.at/stories/504751 (in german) claims that the type in Zwentendorf is identical to those in Fukushima (I). Maybe it's not exactly the same type but the designs seem to be very close relatives.

General Electric

Fukushima's BWRs were GE, Hitachi, and Toshiba. It doesn't matter who the official brand is on the side because they're integrated and supported on-site using consulting companies who probably designed them and probably worked for both or all 3 companies at some point.

Sorry, not entirely correct: https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/nuclear-fuel/boiling-wat...

I worked for the company of one the main guys who designed BWR-4, consulted on BWRs, came up with SBWR (never used) and ABWR, and submitted ALWR plans to EPRI that never really went anywhere because of public relations and regulatory climate. ALWR became the basis of some SMRs like NuScale. WH and GE Hitachi SMRs are BWRs.

Would make an amazing set for a film.

I live a 15 mins drive from Zwentendorf and I can assure you they are used for so much. They have a "Shutdown festival" (rave party), you can go on a tour in the reactor (even go in the main boiler) and it's also often used for movies or small local productions.

Also fun fact: The plant is still producing energy but with Solar panels since they plastered the whole yard and the roof of the plant

The first few editions of the “Nuke” music festival were also held there in the early aughts: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuke_(Musikfestival)

I did that tour a few years back and it was truly impressive and mesmerising - especially standing in the reactor chamber with all the (empty) rods on top of you (they cut a hole into the wall so you can enter there - and it was never in use, so safe to be in there). Pretty crazy. The whole tour was like entering a time capsule and felt like being in a movie or computer game. Everything looking brand new and unused, but old and outdated at the same time. Apart from all the tech and science that they showed and explained this eery time capsule part was sticking with me. And the tour was even free, or almost free as far as I can remember, only getting a slot was hard. Can recommend a visit, if you get the chance.

Damn that sounds like a great visit. It seemed like very interesting piece of history and I wanted to share the link here. I'm driving through Europe right now and wanted to go there but nobody answered my emails and the online reservation form doesn't seem to work. Would you know if they still do it around this time of the year?

hey, I checked as well and it looks like they currently don't have any tours online. I can forward you the contact from when we booked our tour at the time if you want. sent you a linkedIn connection request (I think, connected some dots).

Also, I found this [0] post with lots of pictures [1] from the Technical University of Graz about a visit, and the pictures give a good taste of what you might see there.

btw, if you come to pass Austria (Vienna or rural Upper Austria) and want to grab a beer or something let me know - seems like we are both working as engineering managers and share some interests, might be interesting :)

[0] https://www.tugraz.at/institute/iee/news-events/article/fueh... [1] https://www.tugraz.at/institute/iee/bildergalerien/2019-07-1...

HackFu 2021 was held there: https://hackfu.at/

> Would make an amazing set for a film.

Correlated: SVT did a concert in one[1][2].

[1] - https://www.svtplay.se/video/e56v35j/radiokoren-i-reaktorhal...

[2] - https://youtu.be/Q560cKnreSk

Edit: Added Trailer

For non-swedes: SVT is Swedens public television.

    sed s/SVT/PBS/g se_SE > en_US

Genuine question:

How much of the anti-nuclear movement in the West was actually a initiative of the USSR?

The country that became Russia, which is a huge proponent of nuclear power...?

I would think Russia makes more money selling fossil fuels than by promoting nuclear energy.

Unless you're saying that Chernobyl was a Soviet initiative... which wouldn't even be super wrong strictly speaking... But if that's not what you meant, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't, then no not really. I think it's hard to overstate how much Chernobyl scared people. If anything the Soviets had everything to win by making nuclear look safe back in the cold war. If you look at Soviet propaganda, nuclear technology was very prominent and a key part of the international image they wanted to project.

But a West without nuclear power generation benefited the USSR.

It’s mind boggling how a country can be so rich as to spend millions of manhours on a project and never use it. Maybe we have become too rich as a species.

Consider how much is wasted on unwinnable wars, this is nothing.

Or subsidies for fossil fuels, the dying german car industry etc. Five billion Schilling really isn't a lot

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider comes to mind.

Emperor Nero invested millions of man-hours into the Corinth Canal, but that did at least eventually get some use a mere 1,800 years later.

Or we have become stupid enough to start projects that in the case of nuclear power plants are mostly over budget, over time and with the unsolved long-term problem of nuclear waste. Imagine all that money back then invested into solar research and building wind farms.

It wouldnt keep happening were it not for the military wanting to share a supply chain and skills base with a civilian nuclear power industry.

That's why some countries gain and then lose interest in nuclear power as well - e.g. Poland has recently and suddenly gained interest in it because of Russia.

The cost of development at the time were around 5 billion Austrian Schillings. That's around 360 million EUR when the exchange rate was fixed in 1999, in today's money it would be about 560 million EUR (ca. 600 million US$). Last year that would have bought you 42 minutes of superbowl commercials, 4 minutes less of the total amount of available air time (46 minutes).

As a rule of thumb, If something seemed too good to be true, but then never was adopted at scale; assume that it didn't worked as planned in the real life, and was silently discarded to save face. Lost of trust in a mega-project is a serious issue.

To start, the sellers of the project will be pressed to embellish the history and real capabilities of the system.

And mega-projects are a magneto for corruption. Part of the money will vanish, then somebody will typically hide it, cutting corners in safety, and then some horrified official looks at it and thinks: "No way I will sign the green light and associate my name with this mess".

This is a dilemma. Politicians can't never, ever admit that this never worked (and millions were burnt by their naivety). "best thing since chocolate with grapes, but can't be opened and will never be" is a common defense. Plus <blame deflected to outer group like hippies or public> for better measure.

I'm not saying that this is the case here, but it just happens a lot with mega projects and, lets face it, companies working on nuclear projects were all except honest or transparent with the public on those years

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