* It's eye wateringly expensive both to build and to decommission. Solar, wind and batteries are cheaper. Hornsea 2 produces the same power as a nuclear plant at half the price and with surprisingly low intermittency.
* Even if it were the same price, nuclear takes decades to build rather than years.
* Despite constant claims of its safety you wont find an insurance company in the world that will insure one without 99% of the cleanup cost being borne by taxpayer. Nuclear plants simply dont get built without taxpayer insurance and the nuclear industry refuses to take that risk themselves.
* If current history is anything to go by the risk of disaster is about 1 in 4000 per reactor year and the cleanup cost in Japan is around the $600-800 billion mark.
* It is possible to supplant it with green energy and Germany has done exactly that, which is why emissions have gone down.
* The idea that spending more money on a more expensive and slower to build form of green energy will help speed up the green transition is dubious at best.
Why is it so popular in spite of this? It helps offset some of the costs of having a nuclear arsenal (or puts you on the road to having one). This is a large part of why the US, China, UK and France are happy to pay up and take the risks while Germany and Japan threw in the towel.
Climate change is a (existential?) threat to humanity. There is only so much renewable energy generation capacity that can be constructed in any given year. If you shutdown a nuclear power plant, the demand it was servicing does not magically go away. So you need to something to meet that demand: that may be renewable, but if not enough can be constructed, then it could also mean running fossil fuels more.
So if you want to actually treat climate change as an important problem, why would you shutdown non-emitting source of power that you already have?
Keep the existing nuclear plants, shutdown the fossil fuel-based generators, and use the renewable power you're building to offset the retirement of the latter.
Once all your carbon-emitting generators are retired then consider shutting down the non-emitting nuclear generators.
At no point in the above process are new nuclear plants built.
In Germany's case because they saw what happened in Japan and made an adjustment to their projected risk assessments and decided it wasnt worthwhile.
It may have been the wrong decision, especially given the difficulty in measuring the risks involved but it wasnt an irrational decision.
Nuclear power has a small chance of going wrong but when it does it goes very wrong.
And when it did, Japan had to fire up all of its coal and natural gas.
* https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/germ...
"German energy demand, carbon dioxide emissions seen rising in 2021 -industry group"
* https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/german-energy-d...
"Germany’s energy consumption rising, renewables share falling in 2021"
* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-energy-consump...
I live 50km from a nuclear power plant. I don't worry about it at all.
I'd have expected a larger spike in light of the end of lockdowns.
One can have an endless debate about whether nuclear power plants and/or wind/solar/something else should be built. But to have the discussion about whether existing plants that are here NOW should be stopped, at the same time as Russia is using the energy crisis in Europe as an opportunity for a land grab is... crazy .
* Most countries have to import uranium exactly as they have to import oil. They don't have to import sun and wind.
* If a nuclear power plant seriously fails (2 accidents in 70 years) nobody and their nephew's nephew's will be able to live in that area. If a dam fails at least that ground is not lost forever.
* Building, managing and eventually decommissioning a nuclear power plant has its own CO2 impact if we do it using fossil fuels.
This is a fair assessment IMHO: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/nuclear-power-an...
People do live near Fukushima power plant. Regarding one of the nearby towns, Ōkuma: "In April 2019, parts of the town were deemed to have been successfully decontaminated, with residents allowed to return to these areas. [...] The actual population resident in the town was 2578 people". [1]
> If a dam fails at least that ground is not lost forever.
Relocating population for good is very much the case when it comes to dam _building_. [2]
Nuclear power does have pros and cons, but let's stop with fearmongering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ckuma,_Fukushima
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flooded_towns_in_the_U...
How can you even estimate the cost of batteries? Insane amounts of batteries would be needed, capable of storing all of Germany's energy needs (including transportation and residential heating) for 10 days or so. That would be at least 10 TWh, as Germany currently uses about 550 TWh per year.
The global production of lithium ion batteries in 2018 was 290 GWh (1000 GWh = 1 TWh), expected to increase to 2 TWh per year by 2028 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247625/global-productio...).
In other words, even if Germany would buy every single battery produced on Earth over the course of 5 years, it probably wouldn't be sufficient to provide energy for 10 winter days without wind.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab91e9
In your once in a lifetime event I'd be happy if we used a bit of gas. This is something, after all, that Japan also had to do for years after Fukushima went kaput.
Bear in mind also that demand for heating and transportation can be timeshifted. An Octopus tariff in the UK already allows for this. We've barely scratched the surface of whats possible here because electric grids are slow to evolve to this new reality.
Gas alone does not produce electricity. Gas power stations do. This means building enough gas power stations to cover power requirements of the entire country, then having them sitting most of the time idle there, "just in case".
This is the core of the problem: wind and solar need to be massively backed up. You cannot rely on them supplying even 5 per cent of their nominal capacity if the weather turns against you.
Such a massive backup is eye-wateringly expensive, too. And it consumes concrete and steel, two elements whose production is carbon-intensive.
If you assume:
* We dont already have the infrastructure.
* Power cant be imported.
* Power usage cant be timeshifted.
* Power cant be stored in batteries.
* 10 day periods without wind and sun are routine.
Then yes, it might get expensive.
Solar and wind are predicated on certain things staying one way, while nuclear is predicated on other things staying in a certain way.
Instead, Germany chose the path of decommissioning, which, as you mention, is expensive - and produces no electricity. This was a purely ideological move.
If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better, https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
> Even if it were the same price, nuclear takes decades to build rather than years.
We are talking about closing existing plants. Also, stopping coal in 2038 is no problem, right?
> Despite constant claims of its safety you wont find an insurance company in the world that will insure one without 99% of the cleanup cost being borne by taxpayer.
Probably because of the stupid government regulations? See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#/media/File:Deat....
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If the state no longer limits their liability, but instead applies the same rules to nuclear power plants as it does to other industry, then the average German plants would need to pay €2×10⁹ per year for liability insurance and would have no chance to sell power at anything close to market price.
They can't pay that much because no insurance agency has that scale, so that's out of the question. But even paying the maximum that an insurance agency will accept is out of the question, because even that would make the power too expensive.
My guess is that there'll never be built any, because the renewable fans will make enough noise about this subsidy that the no-subsidies part of the public will be against, and together that's a solid majority.
If the nuclear fans want to build, they have to find safer ways to build and operate, which IMO is an excellent state of affairs, ie. if new plants are built because they're safe enough to insure that's good, and if they're not because they're not, that also good. (I personally suspect that doing it with lower risk requires much research into much more safety-minded organisations than e.g. Tepco was, and if the nuclear businesses have focused on that in the past decade, I haven't noticed.)
I assume you meant some large number and that's probably because you are assuming they need to cover all kinds of exaggerated costs like lawsuits from people who get cancer or keeping radiation levels below the background level in case of a leak.
IIRC the bulk is property. German power plants are located in densely populated areas with high property prices. If a plant renders a smallish area unlivable and BMW has to vacate and replace a factory there, BMW will not want to take a loss on that.
If you consider the affected area/MW to wind or solar it's clearly a net win. And there isn't a need to build nuclear plants in more densely populated areas than others.
Germany is well described as a mixture of densely populated and even more densely populated areas, with very few large and sparse areas. (There was a minor scandal a few years ago, after an airplane crash. Each airport has some sort of designated crash site, "dear pilot, if you can't avoid crashing, try to do it there". Some airport's site was near a village, because there was nothing uninhabited nearby.)
Some people appear to tick all three of these:
- My viewpoint is a scientific one
- The liability rules for chemical plants is fine
- The same rules would be too strict for nuclear plants
IMO anyone can combine any pair of those, but considering all three to be true is… very puzzling to me.
Insuring a nuclear power plant would cost 72 billion Euro/year [0] which gives a hint about how costly (and impactful) nuclear energy really is.
Also there's not really a lot of Uranium on earth. Take [1] for example and this impressive quote: "Given these projections, the uranium resource base [...] is more than adequate to meet low and high case uranium demand through 2040 and beyond. Meeting high case demand requirements through 2040 would consume about 28% of the total 2019 identified resource base"
So, 2040 is not that far, and if we build more nuclear power plants we get into that "high demand" area where we'll use 28% of all found Uranium by 2040.
Ok, maybe we find more, but maybe we won't. Water, sunlight and wind on the other hand... Not sure if we can run out of those easily.
Renewable energies are the one and only way to go. What's missing is smart(er) grids and sustainable, efficient and powerful solutions to save power once we create more than we use.
Why are those missing? Because nobody (as in the "the big four") needed those, when you could just burn more coal or build another "money printer" aka nuclear power plant.
So, nuclear energy in Germany is also always a long story of corruption and lobbyism par excellence.
[0] https://www.manager-magazin.de/finanzen/versicherungen/a-761... [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/worlds-uranium...
Presumably the government entered those contracts willingly, though. I don't understand this framing of "have filled their pockets". If you really believe the money was squandered, blame the politicians giving it away, not the energy companies.
"So, 2040 is not that far, and if we build more nuclear power plants we get into that "high demand" area where we'll use 28% of all found Uranium by 2040."
Just like peak oil that never happened? But even if we run out, they keep saying we have 10 years to prevent a climate catastrophe, so 20 years would buy us a lot of time in comparison.
"a long story of corruption and lobbyism"
Corruption in what sense? Lobbyism is not illegal, and in fact presumably necessary. The greens are also "lobbying" for solar power and wind power.
why not both? believe me, we blame the politicians plenty too :)
It's illegal (and immoral) in most of the world.
Care to elaborate what you mean by that?
Wikipedia describes lobbying as "the act of lawfully attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of government officials, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying
That in itself does sound neither intrinsically immoral or illegal.
Climate and environmental think tanks lobby in the same way as financial or industrial interests.
"The ethics and morals involved with legally bribing or lobbying or influence peddling are complicated. Lobbying can, at times, be spoken of with contempt, when the implication is that people with inordinate socioeconomic power are corrupting the law in order to serve their own interests"
Here context is crucial: the sentence in the parent post was a response to "a long story of corruption and lobbyism".
In most countries it's illegal to hand money to politicians and its seen as corruption, with few strictly regulated exceptions.
In the US it's very different and the amount of money involved is staggering.
The term "a long story of corruption and lobbyism" is not referring to the legal and socially acceptable "lobbying" but the other one.
Half the cleaning cost of Fukushima, every year, per every power plant, sounds legit.
In theory, nuclear power may be safe, but in practice there is still too much room for corruption and bungling, which can have very long-term consequences.
That's not what's happening...
Nuclear has been mostly replaced with renewables, while fossil fuel generation has been in slow decline as well. You may disagree with that policy, but please get your facts right.
https://www.dw.com/en/coal-and-fossil-fuel-share-of-german-e...
https://energypost.eu/germany-2021-coal-generation-is-rising...
The money quote:
Similarly, by the end of June 2021, generation from coal-fired power plants was 39 percent higher than in the first six months of 2020. However, generation from coal-fired power in the first half of 2021 was still below the levels seen in 2019.
The third graph here gives you a good idea of the longterm developments of electricity generation in Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
1. Batteries (insignificant) 2. Hydro 3. Nuclear 4. Fossil Fuels
Germany killed number three, and they did not build sufficient hydro or batteries to compensate. That means that they replaced nuclear with fossil fuels.
Now, they might not have built a new cool power plant for every nuclear power plant that they decommissioned, but had they not decommissioned that nuclear power plant, they could have decommissioned those fossil fuel plants instead. That is just as much a replacement in my mind.
But, as others have said, if they'd maintained the level of nuclear generation the CO2 emitting fossil fuel plants could've been shut down instead.
And by the way for the climate-caring crowd: why haven't germans stopped N.S 2 with russia if they care so much about the climate?This is both an environmental and geopolitical hypocrisy: let's stop the entire continent more or less consume fossil fuels while we ourselves get it;oh yeah: and also becoming more reliant on russia while criticizing them at every step because that riles up our citizens and we earn easy poltical capital.
Do you have a good source? I believe you are correct that the total share of fossils has decreased, but I also suspect that the OP might well be correct in that in the end a decent chunk of nuclear plant provided capacity will have to be replaced with fossil fuel plants, because Germany does not and will not have enough hydro (or storage) to compensate intermittency for other renewables. I'm also curious how legit the "biomass" share under renewables actually is, i.e. is it really net?
[0]: https://energinet.dk/energisystem_fullscreen (Danish grid only, couldn't find any similar tools for the wider grid).
That's another way of saying, the German Gov't have decided to shut down nuclear power, while they still run fossil fuel power plants and bringing renewables online.
Given we're in a climate emergency, we need to shut down fossil fuel power plants first, while bringing up renewables online. Nuclear shouldn't have been prioritised.
German Greens want you to believe we (Germans) are heading into a "right" direction and go 100% ecological, but they conveniently forget about that.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_und_im_Bau_bef...
Also there have been several accidents independently in Fukushima, 3 mile Island and of course Chernobyl. Even more modern reactor designs solve some failure cases but really not all.
Germany is already at almost 50% renewables. That's practically risk-free and the technology is there. I mean just look at all the battery tech craze. That said, Nuclear is heavily subsidized and no insurance in the world insures a Nuclear reactor.
Besides, energy prices saw a steep rise in all of Europe, so it doesn't make much sense to blame the end of nuclear energy for it.
Also, just a single reactor has shut down so far, 11 days ago. A single plant shutting down isn't enough to influence prices to such a degree. Besides, prices were at current levels well before that.
Well, I built it last year, so I didn't know how much energy it would consume. Also, I'm still up to adding a photovoltaics plant on my roof and energy sources should be mostly green on windy and/or sunny days in Germany.
> Besides, energy prices saw a steep rise in all of Europe, so it doesn't make much sense to blame the end of nuclear energy for it.
I didn't blame nuclear specifically for it, but the German electricity politics are insane and far off from reality. Shutting down _any_ energy plant is a bad idea, considering how close we got to a blackout last year.
That's trivialising something complex. If coal is the source, perhaps. It's its way out though, and there'll come a point in the easily foreseeable future where to burn fossil fuel – gas, say – will be the least moral option.
Not if it uses a green energy source, e.g., nuclear.
Germany didn't decide to replace nuclear with fossil. As a fairly wealthy nation, they decided to replace nuclear with renewables and accepting higher energy prices and the need to use less energy. Because they decided the price (it is not a risk, but a certain price) of having nuclear waste is too high. When discussing the nuclear vs renewable vs fossil triangle, we tend to forget that there is a fourth screw to adjust: demand for energy.
Luckily, a large part of Europe's population, mostly the older ones, vividly remember the horror or the nuclear clouds moving over their countries, the scarce and delayed information received about the accident, the ambiguous and conflicting information about the contamination of crops and food supplies.
Between global warming and cancer, I choose global warming. So did Germany and most of Europe. France and Britain need large nuclear reactors for breeding weapons materials, so there's no way around that.
All the bullshit justifications with safer new reactor technologies - keep them to yourself. If anything, besides more expensive, nuclear reactor designs have been getting bolder and bolder. Molten salts reactors are pushed as a safe alternative; a joke that would make any chemist shudder.
This is just a reminder that we still exist and our opinions haven't changed, our willingness to express them in an online world dominated by corporate indoctrination however, has.
In comparison to what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#/media/File:Deat...
> and the term "green energy"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464
> Between global warming and cancer, I choose global warming.
If you choose coal, you choose both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_environmental_impac...
Oh, you will get cancer either way. Every now and then highly carcinogenic crude is spilled into the environment. The ashes from fossil fuels contain heavy metals and radioactive elements, and are much harder to store or reprocess than nuclear waste.
But as you say it's now all sediment(sic). So let's hope we manage to produce enough bateries in time to carry through somehow. Or, more realistically, have enough natural gas.
The French do nuclear power so the Germans don't have to. Except the French are not doing enough - despite being the biggest exporter of electricity in the region.
Similarly California could be 'nuclear free' and put all the nuclear power stations in Oregon.
Germany is still the second largest net exporter of power - primarily to Poland.
I wouldn’t have done it the way Merkel did, I would’ve switched off coal first. But I understand why that wasn’t an option at the time. It’s what it is.
explain
The idea that you could've kept nuclear, still have the renewables buildout and close coal early wasn't a political position anyone in any relevant position was advocating for.
It wasn't a political option.
They could've done it, easily, and it was the sensible thing to do.
The coal industry was at some point the country's largest. It's also older than all other in the industrial sector, since coal was the raw material fueling the industrial revolution.
As such, it became the raison d'etre for whole regions. The Ruhr area in west Germany grew from Iowa-level population density to New York State levels on coal. Unions, as a concept, got started in the coal mines. I recently saw a bunch of news broadcasts from the late 80s/early 90s and among 10 of them, eight or so featured labor issues in the sector. Until reunification, it was the most salient issue in politics.
Besides that something like this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdgasleck_in_der_Nordsee could also lead to a tsunami if it caves in.
Considering how many we have there it's not that unlikely:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_and_gas_fields_of_...
Power plants are built according to the requirements of their location and history shows we fail in getting all the risk
Not to mention corruption and botching.
Which company would you trust to built and operate these power plants?
Vattenfall, Shell, Siemens, Facebook, Apple?
Edit: Alternatively Die Schwesternschaft des Heiligen Strahls, äh Scheins.
There is also post-glacial rebound in northern Germany with several fault lines, one of them roughly between Kiel and Lübeck. Where parts of Denmark, Sweden and Norway still slowly rise, while the outer parts bordering Northern Germany slowly sink, 'scratching' against it.
Also several large salt domes, producing sink holes which can be seen as lakes today. Interestingly, some of these are being explored today as energy storage solution, what could possibly go wrong?
edit: Besides that, flooding. Again and again
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Sturmfluten_an_der_N...
Pick your 'fiction or fantasy' ;->
Because heavy earthquakes in Germany are unlikely the standards for german nuclear power plants aren't planned to withstand one because the planning is accordingly to the dangers of the location.
And that is the problem. We are building something that has to last decades if not centuries and if we miss something the damage is severe.
For example before satellite imagery ships were built according to the normal distribution of waves which said large waves are rare, freak waves nearly impossible. Stories about freak waves were even often dismissed as exaggeration or sailor's yarn. Nowadays we know freak waves happen a lot more often as we thought and ships are built accordingly but older ships have problems if a freak wave shows up or they simply sink.
Mind you - nobody thought we got tsunamis in Scotland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
Just to make clear: I'm completely comfortable with nuclear power and I live reasonably close to the remaining operational nuclear power station in Scotland:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...
And still there were only a handful of deaths directly caused by it.
More people die because of wind turbines every year.
Nuclear deaths is 90 per TWh
Wind death toll is 150 per TWh
Solar 440/TWh
and leading the pack is Coal at 100000/1Twh produced
The question is, as always with nuclear: Do you want constant, verified, 100% certain deaths every day or do you risk a larger death toll that may or may not happen some time in the future?
That's like comparing death by train accident or plane accident. Planes are better per kilometer but worse per hour.
I'd welcome building new modern ones as a substitution, though. Just look at what Asia, specifically India, does right now. Oh, and please shut down all fossil fueled plants with no exceptions forever.
Some sources on that:
For example, the Biblis NPP does not have any spatial separation of the power supply and control cables. A scenario like the one that actually occurred at the U.S. nuclear power plant at Browns Ferry on March 22, 1975, would therefore also be possible at Biblis: When searching for an air leak, the controller used a burning candle. The cables were surrounded by foam, which ignited on the candle flame. This was not detected until the foam was already burning and significant damage had already occurred to the power supply and control cables. As a result, the power failed and almost all of the plant's emergency cooling systems of the reactor were no longer functional. Only one emergency cooling system was still available in Unit 2. Without adequate cooling, a meltdown can occur because radioactive decays in the reactors continue to generate such high heat after shutdown that reactor vessels could not withstand it. In the case of Browns Ferry, a meltdown was prevented because two condensate pumps that were present but actually intended for normal operating for the normal operating system were switched on.
[0]: https://www.bee-ev.de/fileadmin/Publikationen/Studien/110511...
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C_Siemens_quits_the_nucle...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensreform
This influenced all kinds of German movements both on the left and right side of the political spectrum and for instance is the reason why nudism and homeopathy are so popular. I think it's also one of the explanations why COVID vaccination rates are currently lower than in Western and Southern Europe.
This also leads to all kinds of absurd things like "vitalized water"[1] being used in hospital water systems in Austria.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belebtes_Wasser https://www.isi-trade.ch/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Benefits...
Germany, like Japan is an occupied country since WWII. The US controls it. The US does not want Germany to have either rocket industry or nuclear industry, because that makes them capable of making nuclear bombs.
Also France and UK are terrified of Germany having a strong rocket or nuclear energy, and with good reason. They invented rockets and could make them much better and economically than they can.
So the US wants to dismantle Germany nuclear industry and make it impossible for them to make nuclear bombs because they don't have either the people or the industry to support it.
They will love to do that with France or UK too, if they could, but those countries will never do that, as they are much more independent that Germany is.
The real reason Germany prime ministers do what the US wants is because the US pressures them all the time with economic sanctions and they must comply or else...
Gas use is also up, at 400 €/MWh that goes to a dictator who is overtly planning invasion of Eastern Europe. The southern part of which is rapidly becoming a desert: https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/desertification-of....
This is not brave, or principled, or sophisticated. It's a death toll with slightly higher plausible deniability.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/styles/80...
A majority of the deaths due to fallout would've been prevented if The Party would've admitted they messed up and told everyone to eat canned food for a few weeks. Iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days. Maybe even distributed more iodine pills for the population.
But nope, The Party could do no wrong and was always right, so they did nothing and said nothing.
Do you "attribute" deaths caused by other energy production means the same way? Coal kills people every day. People die when installing wind farms, do they count?
The estimates range from 80 years to hundreds of thousands of years, depending on the assumptions made, including: Possible sources (land mining, sea refining), current consumption level, efficiency of reactors. Where it is approximately this:
Mining land uranium at current consumption (i.e., no new nuclear): 80-250 years.
Refining uranium from sea: 5000-500.000 years.
Overall, it seems to me that just assuring that we have resources for hundreds of thousands of years is a bit misleading or at least undisclosed strong optimism.
I'd be happy to have a more scientific source with reliable information.
[1] https://bettermeetsreality.com/how-much-uranium-is-left-in-t...
Do you know that you could fit the whole amount of nuclear waste on a ridiculously small surface? That's not for no reason uranium works: it's extremely dense in energy, and the same goes for its waste.
there's also apparently asteroid uranium resources, and with SpaceX making it progressively possible to have payload delivered with economies of scale such industry may start in space once it makes economic sense.
Now, if we use 30Mt for the next 60 years, it doesn't look like enough Uranium for the next 1000 years... (even without considering the fact that those 50Mt of uncovential resources are probably not usable)
Not sure that word means what you think it means.
> Climate change aside (which will kill us all)
That is a religious viewpoint, not based in fact. Either show the proof or retract it, statements like that add nothing to the discourse. It also makes it hard to take the rest of your question seriously.
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/9/5/187/htm - this looks very much like it can kill a lot of us and I wonder how many will survive the following chaos.
I also still don't get how you are pro-nuclear and think climate-change is not an existential threat, but so be it. It makes it hard for me to take you seriously.
This is, by the way, also why I am pro-nuclear. It is clear that there are better ways of generating electricity than burning fossil fuels (which lead to environmental pollution/destruction as well as often subsidising less savoury regimes (and companies)). I'm also for putting PV panels on top of roofs an other "unused" surfaces while I see "solar farms" as a waste of space unless established in deserts or similar areas.
I'd suggest to read [1] some [2] books [3] and think this whole "we're all going to die" thing over. Yes, die we will, all of us, but not for the reason or in the way many people seem to think.
[1] https://www.unsettledsciencebook.com/
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56643992-false-alarm
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50173134-apocalypse-neve...
A nation of conservative Luddite bureaucrats ruling over the EU, and a puppet for the Americans. Meanwhile they extort and damage other EU nations with the ECB policies and push mass immigration to lower wages and destroy trade unions.
The probability of a catastrophic event in a modern nuclear plant is vanishingly low. Even the overworked ancient plants from the 60's and 70's we are currently running are exceedingly safe.
People will rather take constant death from coal power than risk a low-probability event.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiatio...
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/air-pollut...
Yes. All the reasons for the catastrophes are well known.
Do you know how to reduce continent scale threat to just the size of a nation or a town?
Nuclear fusion or LENR can do that, because of small amount of radioactive materials and no positive coefficient by design, but how you can do that for massive fission?
Current generation nuclear plants default to off, they need active operation to stay on. If something goes wrong, they automatically, without any intervention by anyone, go offline.
They are also designed to withstand collisions from aircraft and multiple other attack vectors: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1159_web.p...
I will reword my question: How we can make nuclear safer by 10x in next 10 years? We need them to be 10x safer if we want to have 10x more nuclear plants.
Mind you, I'm not saying that justifies the current fear of nuclear power but then again it doesn't really surprise me. Maybe it's just a lingering fear of anything with "nuclear" in the name.
Even if the attack is completely unsuccessful it would cause panic.
Furthermore, highly centralized electricity generation makes the distribution network very vulnerable as well.
Actually, now that I think of it, the WDPF system it was derivated off was used in some nuclear power plants as well.
Regardless, what I wanted to say was... being obscure, while it makes things mildly harder for skiddies is not a big deal for state actors or more resourceful attackers. The Stuxnet was highly targeted and they got access to specific vulnerabilities in the Siemens DCS systems that were running there. Just having exotic systems is no guarantee. I agree, obscurity is a layer of defense in depth, but no guarantee. Surely you don't suggest they use a new purpose built HW for each control system design. Also, control systems DO need to have their SW updated as well. It's obvious you can't make it hard read only. You do have physical lockout mechanisms for this though.
1986 - Chernobyl happened. Wasn't our fault, but we got the fallout for it. Poisoned drinking water, people in quarantine and everything. And we were the lucky ones, the map for the East doesn't look any good. [4]
1991 - The "Schnelle Brueter" (SNR-300 / Kalkar) almost went up during a test. Political debate around investing additional 105 Mio DM was happening, but due to Chernobyl was leading against it. [5]
~1989 The THTR-300 (Thorium High Temperature Reactor) was spreading radioactive particles in the surrounding area, poisoning soil, water, and people. Additionally it was emitting too much radiation through burned particles [1]
1969-1998 - The SBH-Uran (Siemens Brennelementwerk Hanau) was closed down. The reactor didn't fullfill the legal requirements for handling enriched Uranium, and Siemens couldn't prove that they can fullfill them afterwards. [2]
1972-2011 - The KKW/AKW (Kern/Atomkraftwerk Kuemmel) was having a meltdown in 2005. 2 years later during cooldown phase, there was a fire, leading almost to an explosion. [3] The aftermath was poisoning surroundings with radioactive particles, as always.
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Note that years of cooldown is literally by-design and cannot be avoided. During the phase of an almost-meltdown and a cooldown phase afterwards, everything is at-high-risk for _YEARS_ where everything can literally explode any second if not done correctly. And these are only the cases I personally know about during my lifetime, there are probably more that never made it public and were successfully contained.
So yeah, as a German I'm pretty much against radioactive reactors. This shit is highly unstable tech and should be treated as such. Especially given the lack of cybersecurity and/or outdated and unstable/never-even-patchable tech stacks running this.
Also: France is putting their reactors on their Far-East border for a reason. Winds are more than 90% of the year from North-West to South-East, so I'd say they want the tech but don't want to deal with the aftermath.
Also: Where do you store the radioactive trash? Simply where you bury all your plastic - in landfills - and build some homes over them to ignore it for a couple generations... or what? Ever thought about trash that needs to be sealed off and contained for _hundreds of years_ to come?
I'm not saying coal plants are favorable (they're definitely not), but things like the NIF or established green tech like solar/wind energy makes far more sense to me - considering the risk tradeoffs.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300
[2] https://www.atommuellreport.de/daten/detail/rbu-hanau.html
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Kr%C3%BCmmel
[1] https://www.irsn.fr/FR/connaissances/Installations_nucleaire...
[2] https://p4.storage.canalblog.com/42/20/127041/23073496.jpg
Germans have a basically a positive stereotype of being a scientific nation and all around clever lads -- this has enormous soft power and gives leverage to things like "Made in Germany" as a brand. This anti-nuclear stance in Germany is absolutely caustic to that projected image.
It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and replace it with fossil fueled plants. I love Germans and Germany but they're simply in the wrong on this and I don't know what the right way forward is.