Is anti-nuclear sentiment consistent across Europe?
Nuclear is a non-starter for many. Too many people afraid of another Chernobyl or nuclear waste handling without understanding what caused the former or not being informed about how we deal with the latter, today.
News and images like this https://www.thelocal.de/20141010/one-third-of-barrels-leak-a... (2014) don't exactly help restore confidence.
(If you can't get that to load, here's the same in German https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Loechrige-Atom-Faesser-entdeckt-...)
Edit to add, the infamous old picture of a loader dumping barrels into a pit in the Asse II salt mine: https://static.dw.com/image/16445664_303.jpg - while this happened decades ago, the mine is an ongoing problem that makes the news every year with new leaks or progress of the remediation effort, lack of progress, or predictions of collapse before the remediation can be completed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine).
> “The chambers are secure and there is no danger for the personnel or the local population,” Vattenfall said in a statement released on Thursday
I don't see how that has... anything to do with anything. Proper inspection revealed this problem and it's been rectified. Mission accomplished.
> the infamous old picture of a loader dumping barrels into a pit in the Asse II salt mine
> while this happened decades ago
Right, again, I don't see how this is relevant to modern nuclear handling. That's a cleanup effort from poor procedures from decades ago, and it's been pretty well contained. Compare that to the current cleanup efforts of decades of fossil fuel burning, and the effects that has had.
I don't see how any of this is an argument against nuclear.
People also tend to not believe "no danger" claims - such claims, especially when coming from the companies running those plants, provide very little information, as we have learned that we should expect to hear the same claims even if a reactor core is currently melting its way through the containment (both in Chernobyl and Fukushima, false reassurances were given long after the people in charge knew of the seriousness of the accident).
Likewise, officials claim that nothing is leaking from Asse and it is safe, yet there is an unexplained but very significant (p<0.01) increase in various cancers.
Even if this was just feelings (and I disagree with that - seeing partial failures that get caught by other layers of a multi-layered safety system does provide information about the risk that one day the "holes in the Swiss cheese" [1] will line up), it explains why people in Germany are so opposed to nuclear.
Fukushima was particularly devastating for public trust, because Japan is seen as a developed, industrialized, "orderly" nation, so if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. Additionally, nuclear power plants in developed countries were portrayed as absolutely safe, so it's a "fool me once, fool me twice" situation. (Since this is usually countered by "they couldn't expect the Tsunami": that just means that when an unexpected event - e.g. a 300 year flood event, as has recently happened in Germany - comes, we should expect a similar outcome and similar attempts from the people in charge to weasel out of the blame. Again, not helpful for trust.)
In short, people - me included - don't believe that the plants will be operated to the claimed safety standards. The trust in the industry is gone, and people don't want to take the gamble, even if rationally, it may be the lesser evil than e.g. coal.
It's called deep borehole disposal[0]. Drill a hole all the way down to Earth's crust, put your waste there = it's not coming back on anything shorter than geological timescale. " It is estimated that only 800 boreholes would be sufficient to store the entire existing nuclear waste stockpile of the USA"[0]
From what I understand it isn't being done for two reasons:
1) cost
2) once stored this way it's almost impossible to retrieve. Spent nuclear fuel is kept around partially because we know we might be able to recycle it into fresh fuel in the future. If we dump it in a hole deep in the ground it's gone forever.
So no, not "tomorrow".
https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better
Not only that, but running it. No private company insures a nuclear power plant (at least in the densely populated Central Europe). We're talking about dozens of billions each year.
Currently the operator does a token insurance of a few hundred million but if things really go south it's essentially up to the society to absorb the costs of the aftermath.
If you can't socialize the risks and have to pay market price the "cheap" goes out of the window fast.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/462535/nuclear-share-ele....
The bigger issue in the public debate are the national safety and strategic concerns. At the moment, it seems Russian and Chinese companies will be banned from bidding.
So, the sentiment is definitely not consistent. CZ is much more favorable towards nuclear than DE or AT, but it's still a complicated topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
We could be building hundreds of these across Europe, placing them close to small cities and using the waste heat for district heating.
Nuclear and wind suffer from NIMYBism and are now nothing more than political totems. PV is going this road now that people are realizing installing solar farms means cutting on forest or actual food farms.
Coal is already pretty much extinct.
Whereas gas is "painless" from a political point of view, private interest in the field (total, engine) have a strong history of political influence, and "gas" wins if RE are installed but the sun does not shine nor the wind blows... So gas is the energy of the future for Europe until there is a breakthrough in fusion or safer modular fission.
This will not make the geopol situation any simpler in the east, and is of course a disaster climate-wise - except maybe for coal-heavy countries like Poland and Chez Republic
I mentally think of power generation reliability as: Uncontrollably variable from hour-to-hour: wind, solar, tidal motion Uncontrollably variable on month-to-year spans: hydro Pretty controllable: nuclear (and fossil fuels)
Natural gas instead would really shine as a backup power source.
Of course, this is a lot less efficient than having one big nuclear reactor pumping huge turbines; but it’s possibly more efficient than other forms of peak-load generation, which is the key issue.
Plus, any given individual SMR would produce a low-enough wattage to be able to reasonably divert/“dump” power from it into an practical-to-construct-anywhere sink or battery (e.g. building-sized pumped storage, rather than huge dam-sized pumped storage) for handling ramp-down discontinuities.
If liquid hydrogen fuel was ever useful, it could produce that with excess capacity also (but again, other issues).
Alternatively if the grid is unreliable, end-use customers will install their own batteries and generating capacity. Voila, problem solved on someone else's dime!
In fact, modern Combined cycle natural gas plants are less controllable than nuclear ones.
(That being said, given that the cost of a nuclear plant is mostly independent from its energy output, why would you build wind farms if you already have nuclear plant? Except for political reasons of course)
Maybe this statement is just a reflection of what can be done in a reasonable amount of time (a few years)? Planning and building nuclear plants takes an order of magnitude longer, it seems.
If nuclear were the only option, it would be different. But the only pro-nuclear policies that make sense for achieving 1.5-2 degrees are keeping existing plants online and reactivating old ones (also policies with reasonable disagreements, but at least positive regarding climate change afaict). Building new ones simply takes too long to achieve climate goals while wind & PV are reasonably quick to do (if the political will is there).
How I wish that where true. But looking at all current new Nuclear power plant projects in Europe and the US it's clear that we are incapable of that. Yes we can argue about why that is and how in theory it shouldn't take that long, but the truth is that best case scenario it will take you more than 5 years just to get a building permit to start buildings a new nuclear power plant.
In a way, my utility can do things that force this (voltage reductions), but it’s only really effective for resistive loads, and could increase resistive losses on the transmission/distribution network.
https://www.ieso.ca/en/Sector-Participants/IESO-News/2021/01...
One big problem is that transmission/distribution costs aren’t variable based on time-of-day, but they could be too.
Specifically, if we had a whole continent's worth of electric cars charging during the day to soak up excess solar production (8am - 6pm);
And allowed them to offload the same energy back into the grid from 6pm - 8am.
To deal with the duck curve: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam-Milshtein/publicati...
The simplest way to solve this is to mandate EV charging points at all workplaces and commuter parking lots, and require all new EVs include the UI and functionality necessary to upload to the grid interactively, and adjust regulations to actually allow and encourage that.
We could also build giant solar farms in Morocco and Western Sahara, a comparatively stable and friendly part of Northern Africa, where peak solar times conveniently align with the evening peak of Central Europe.
https://learn.pjm.com/three-priorities/buying-and-selling-en...
Or nuclear. Sad that this isn’t seen as an option any longer.