These people are constantly invited to present these „Zukunftsenergien“ as opposed to the old bad nuclear in talk shows.
And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive AND highest CO2 energy in Europe.
In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end.
Now we are reliant on russian gas and the politicians still want to keep closing the remaining three nuclear power plants.
The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power. We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants.
It‘s ridicioulous.
Do you have any sources? Last time I checked, Germany and France weren't that far apart, if you remove taxes out of the costs. The thing is that Germany has a lot of Taxes that have nothing todo with how we generate the electricity. I.e. 90% of the electricity tax (Stromsteuer) goes into the government pension fund.
Which actually makes sense, if you have a high upfront cost, constant output source iike nuclear, taxing each individual unit makes no sense since the marginal cost is effectively zero up till you need to build a new plant. Whereas if you burn coal or gas, you want to incentivise people to cut back for cost, carbon and pollution reasons.
An even more sensible approach would be to tax the carbon directly and charge more for peak electricity since that contributes more to the infrastructure requirements, which I guess both countries will already be moving towards as is the current trend in most places.
On the other hand: To have higher energy prices provides incentives for less use and must be part of an intermediate strategy to bring down CO2 emissions.
That's more than I pay in the US in total per kWh for electricity, generated, distributed, and taxed.
41.3 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2016 was frankly excessive though it helped PV get much cheaper. Unfortunately, Germany now stuck with these huge agreed upon subsides for another decade.
The Greens in Germany seem to be hell bent on de-industrializing Germany. They hate nuclear power and they hate all fossil fuels, but want to buy fracking LNG from the USA and fire up brown coal plants that were previously shut down to shove it to Putin. The outcome seems to be mass bankruptcies in what seems to be the social fabric of Germany, while getting a lot less energy for the same price.
- the Greens are the party most opposed to brown coal out of all German parties.
- Gas is far less emissions intense than most other forms of fossil fuels, so it is a good transitional source of energy.
- Germanies nuclear plants were built around 40 years ago, with a lifetime in mind of 40 years. The idea of arguing they can run longer because nothing happened in the last 40 years is preposterous, and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how industry works. Not only are the designs lacking essential security features, every single part was produced with 40 year lifetime in mind.
- the three plants that where built in 87 are going to continue to run for now.
You can bring up your "facts" about Germany's nuclear power plants all you want. But the green policies are part of the reason why the investment in nuclear was halted and on top of that the German Taxpayer had to foot a massive payout to nuclear plant operators for the premature exit. [2]
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/erdgas-brau...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-utilities-nuclear...
It's normal to do a general maintenance (with upgrades to recent security standard) at the end of projected lifetime and then run it for another 40 years. It's absolute - economically speaking - bullshit to destroy a mostly-good nuclear power plant. It's not like the reactor core is the only thing there, anyways - even replacing it would be much better than tearing the place down.
The worst thing is - you lose experts, and they don't train new experts. And then there's no one to bring the nuclear power plant up again, or build a new one. Lost technology...
It's like trying to keep an old car on the road, except a few critical components are highly radioactive.
Isn't your choice of telling them false based purely on political agenda? Same happens on other side of the camp, both believe their science is actual science.
I support nuclear scientifically. I don’t think it has a chance politically.
Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem.
Politically, expect to spend billions upon billions and then have things like Yucca Mountain canned after lots of construction.
Both are true and which ones you consider lead to very different conclusions.
Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works, which would be the solution for a lot...
So what does "scientifically...much solavable problem" in practice really mean? Worlds apart..
There is no evidence that fusion is a solution to any energy problems. The central problem of fusion power is that reactions consume more energy than they produce.
Billions upon billions per capita is three-dollar bills upon three-dollar bills.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
No it is not.
There is no place on Earth that we know is geologically stable for the time periods required We have no way of knowing what society will be like ten thousand years from now, let alone 100,000 years. How do we communicate with those people bout the danger of what we left behind?
Greed. Hubris.
And not to mention, how does ground vibration bring sometimes buried under 500 meters of solid rock back onto the surface? Earthquakes shake the ground, they don't dig deep boreholes.
On a geological timescale, tectonic plates occasionally rift down the middle, both successfully (East Africa) and unsuccessfully (a failed plate rift produced the Great Lakes).
With that said, identifying strata that are going to remain seismically stable for a looooong time is a solved problem, and earthquakes generally damage only those things not attached to the (moving) earth.
How should we communicate to those people of those dangers?
We simply trust that people in the future check their water for safety, or avoid drinking from water sources that correlate with illness.
We do this now, and humans have done it for millennia.
(Hum, I hope that they will not have tiktok)
And we need to remember that some people was poisoned just a few months ago for digging trenches in Chernobyl in the middle of a war. The danger is still there forty years later.
Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
So-called environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...
[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and...
And seawater extraction is as renewable as CO2-scrubbing the atmosphere would allow us to go on with burnign coal - both would equally not scale to needs with current technology, so what?
Of course use of breeder reactors could extend this, but with breeders terrestrial U resources are adequate for a very long time.
Breeders, as I said, would greatly extend the terrestrial U resource, both by getting 100x as much energy per unit of natural uranium, and by allowing resources 100x as dilute to be economically exploited.
Also, at the low deaths/TWh of renewables and nuclear w.o. accidents, the "cost of deaths" (at the $9M/statistical life that the NRC uses) is swamped by the direct cost of the produced energy. So renewables continue to beat new nuclear on the cost front, w. cost of deaths added in.
The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low. Just ask Ontario. [1] There is a large cap ex cost at the start, but you can amortize it over 80 years - whereas solar and wind has to be replaced every 20-30.
Nuclear prices in all externalities in its cost assessments due to the onslaught of attacks whereas other energy prices in almost nothing. Coal kills about 100 people per TWh, and at the same $9M NRC cost, coal should cost about $1/kWh.
[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
Only if you ignore the amortization of the cost of financing and building the nuclear power plant. That's fine if the plant is provided by the Nuclear Fairy; not so fine in the real world if we're talking about building new nuclear plants that have to be paid for.
It's hard to see how wasting resources and, all else being equal, doing something the much more expensive way would be "the right thing to do". If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.
No, I'm not.
A role of government in my opinion is to facilitate providing services and creating infrastructure in the public interest which might not make market economic sense at the time we need it - if it is a better outcome for the citizenry. You're welcome to disagree but there's no fallacy there. I never said it was free, I said it was more expensive - but the government should do it anyways because it will make us better off. Like the post office and the EPA.
There's a reason in going to the moon, JFK never said that “we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not just because they are easy, but because they are the cheapest thing we can possibly do, and if it starts to look like it's cheaper or easier to be sitting on the couch then too bad so sad, to the couch we shall return!"
He said it was "because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
> If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.
Right no. I don't believe in that. Again, nuclear is renewable, this much is basically indisputable. I believe that a better solution can be government funded in line with the charter of any world government, be it a western democracy or the PRC. I do not believe market viability is the be all and end all in this here world. I believe that attitude would have left us living as hunter-gatherers. I do not believe the cheapest solution is the only solution we should advocate for or pursue, period.
We deserve better and should demand better than your position.
If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask you to try to be more serious. Nuclear isn't rolled out even that fast.
If intermittency issues caused storage to be quite attractive, why hasn't storage already been rolled out across Germany and California?
Neither if these claims agrees with what happened in these two cases. Any electrical engineer could have told you storage is needed before decommissioning nuclear in favour of renewables.
Could you identify any broadly accepted environmental analysis that says this? It's easy to make accusaiont
> Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
The waste rocks are not at all like the ones removed from the ground, in critical ways (radioactivity). Who says anything about putting them back in the original mines? Why would the original mines happen to be suitable for nuclear waste storage?
When Starship is fully operational the expected cost to launch payload will be $20 / kg
IE you can have a 30x margin of error and still just launch the nuclear waste into space.
Again, selecting a geographic area away from humans and providing sufficient demarcation is dramatically safer than putting it into a rocket and flying it up into orbit over humans. If you disagree, cite a source on its feasibility - and one on the lack of feasibility of deep geological sequestration. Let's not shoot from the hip on this one. I know I haven't found any.
Despite his Twitter account, Musk is not the savior for everything. However, maybe he would like to be blasted into space on the first journey to Proxima Centuri? If anyone can do it, he can!
Defeatism never solved everything, and China building hundreds of reactors might just be the shot in the arm to get things back on track. The big loss will be that it's these Chinese designs the world will use instead of Western designs.
In the Australian outback those are places people used to live. How are you going to stop people returning for 200,000 years?
Greed. Hubris.
Not necessarily in the Australian outback, Yucca Mountain is a great choice. [2] [edit](That area is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site which is already some of the most radioactive land on earth).
What greed exactly are you talking about? I've no financial interest in the success of nuclear power. I recognize it's more expensive than some competing options but it's a better solution.
As for hubris, again, you're not exactly coming to the table with data on the risks, especially since we've got 80 years of experience with nuclear power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
Many radioactive products are either very short lived, and will decay down to minimal levels within a few hundred years, or are very long lived, causing very low radioactivity.
The problem are the elements that are in between which is mostly the other actinides. Those are the ones that would require tens of thousands of years or more to reach safe activity levels. Fast reactor designs don't have significant amounts of such elements in the waste. The waste will decay to uranium ore-ore like levels within only hundreds of years.
The biggest issue is that they need relatively enriched uranium to operate at first. After they are started, they can be used as a breeder reactor that can take in natural uranium and convert it to the enriched uranium it needs to continue running.
Edward Teller in 1967 famously expressed his skepticism about fast reactors because of this safety issue.
Chernobyl happened for a very specific reason - you know, the late-night tests and the positive void coefficient. Do you think we haven't learned? Please cite sources. The thing is, we have learned. That's why reactors are so expensive. You're double-dipping by citing the risks and the costs. It's really one or the other if you're not being disingenuous.
Hundreds of years is not acceptable. Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time. Look at the Zaporizhia atomic energy site for an extreme example of what I mean.
The problem is not just the time scale either. There are other areas humanity fails at time and again.
P.S. Thank you nevertheless for pointing out several advantages of fast breeder reactors.
There's plenty of buildings that took centuries to make, this projects are comparatively simple/require less coordination once started.
Which is even more ridiculos because heat is the primary product of nuclear reactors. Their thermal rating of a nuclear reactor is about 3x the electrical rating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Ref...
[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
[3] https://www.nucnet.org/news/city-of-haiyang-first-in-country...
"Russia, Dec 1, 2019 — Unit 1 of the Leningrad 2 nuclear power station in western Russia has been integrated into the heat supply system of the city of Sosnovy Bor"
Heating problem IS a power problem given the high efficiency of heat pumps nowadays. And yes they work perfectly fine in Germany's relatively moderate winters.
There are around 350k heat pumps in Germany right now, of 40 million households (ignoring offices, ignoring multi family homes etc).
There is no way Germany could install enough heatpumps to counteract the Russia induced gas crisis, not even over a timeframe of a decade or more. Optimistically you could fix this by 2050.
So yes, there's a heating crisis, not an electricity crisis.
There are however countries who focused on the infrastructure/consumer side of the equation. When communal or heath pump based heating is significant cheaper, suddenly people interest to invest into home improvements goes up. As the report describe, it not obvious which strategy is best in order to reduce pollution.
So we should be careful in appropriating the overwhelming evidence of Nuclear Energy being safe and efficient to reactor in X vs Y.
The problem with nuclear is that companies will not have to pay for final storage of the waste. Tax payers will have to pay forever. Same shit with our german coal mines. Take this into your equation. Google "Ewigkeitskosten"
- maybe you keep the existing nuclear around for levelling, well, fine. But just be ready for it to get "nuked" once the battery/storage costs combined with wind/solar drop under everything. That day isn't today, and it isn't next year, but with cheap sodium ion and many other chemistries in active improvement... it will.
- nuclear waste disposal is solved... if you have a LFTR or similar tech to "burn" it. Otherwise, the usual handwave on nuclear waste is a telltale sign of "old nuclear", as are the people that say it is safe. Solid fuel rod designs are not safe.
I am not saying that LFTR should be the only path forward for nuclear, but the advantages of LFTR should be what a "real" nuclear solution has. LFTR is:
- scalable in size - meltdown-proof (plug and pool where the liquid loses criticality) - burns/breeds virtually all of its fuel, and IIRC can "burn" spend rod waste - somewhat proliferation resistant
Again, I don't know if the LFTR design challenges are truly problematic, but the CAPABILITIES of LFTR should be a standard next-gen nuclear must be held to.
The Greens aren't correct generally in engineering or science, but what they are right about, indirectly, is the culture of nuclear power that grew up in the Cold War and attached to military needs for weapons isotopes.
Those political priorities overrode safety, good design, economic performance, and other concerns, and left us with the terrible solid fuel rod design.
LFTR got canned in the US in a backroom political power move, and the same nuclear establishment keeps it restricted from funds and research.
Again, I'm not saying LFTR is the "one true path". But its core abilities address the Green concerns: meltdown proof and virtually waste free. Those two aspects are the base table stakes a "next gen nuclear" would need. Maybe you have a combined reactor approach where one design produces from solid or pebble fuel, and then that gets fed to LFTRs for final burn off.
So I guess I would recommend Germany / France keep their nukes going for now, but view them as life support: these things are going away once battery/storage tech scales to meet the need, a virtually guaranteed proposition in the five year near future timeline.
For nuclear to be relevant long term you'll need the safety tablestakes mentioned, but all nuclear projects are 10 years out: you'll need a stable price to target/combat 10 years out from wind/solar, and you don't know that right now.
LCOE isn't the only factor of relevance. That's partly how Germany got into its current situation, because LCOE doesn't account for intermittency.
To solve that you need a large interconnected grid and huge overcapacity of renewables (and even then you'll have some brown outs), or you need long-term grid storage, which still has limited options at this time. The LCOE of renewables is not so rosy after you include all of these considerations to achieve the same stable service as a nuclear plant. We might get there in 20 years, but we're not there yet.
The politics in Germany have been pretty actively hostile to wind under the conservative governments. Check this graph I just compiled out of the stats from wikipedia:
https://wtf.roflcopter.fr/pics/gcd4Rw5d/49s68U7X.png
Yeah, if you introduce legislation that "these people" tell you will stall the construction, then _exactly_ that tends to happen. The 10H rules and other BS from the conservatives were expressly and successfully introduced to stifle wind energy construction.
How this "message" of yours reach Netherlands?
Whatever is coming, price is defined in Netherlands, look for Dutch TTF futures.
It is like price of oil - Brent futures minus some discount
> which leads to very high spot prices
Russian gas itself is not traded on spot place(s). It is long term contract, but price follow dutch futures. How this "price gouging" is done, could you describe mechanism?
65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 220 billion kWh from renewables actually
https://www-destatis-de.translate.goog/DE/Presse/Pressemitte...
111 billion kWh from wind, 30 billion kWh from bio gas, 18 billion kWh from hydro, 156 billion kWh from coal, 65 billion kWh from gas.
25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany.
> 25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany.
Well yeah but it's getting phased out on the long-term.
Edit: also it's worth considering that gas and bio gas (the renewable version) power plants can be used during peak times because they can be started and shutdown quickly. That's not possible for nuclear which provides base load - in fact they need to be shut down during heat waves
Google "load following nuclear" and also read the article in Wikipedia [0]. That will help stop false information. Summary: Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and can go from full baseload to nearly "running on idle" in 15 minutes if needed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...
> Well yeah but it's getting phased out on the long-term.
Who will take responsibility for the pollution of that. Saying that it will be phased out doesn't actually mean anything. Every technology and building will at some point in the future be phased out when the time is right, the investments has been repaid, and alternative technology can out compete the old. Current solar plants that is being built today will also be phased out on the long term.
Since cost is mentioned:
"The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...
What part of this entire discussion has anything do to with science? Is anyone actually contesting the science?
Is it a discussion about the number of orbitals of uranium atoms? Or is it a discussion on which entities handle the long-term financials obligations, whether we favor or not decentralized grids, whether we favor short term or longer term solutions -- which in turn depends on whether the (possibly international) risks are long term or short term, etc. Not much of the later is "science".
Politics is not a science and never can be. This entire story -- the word "green" itself -- is as unscientific as it gets. Not in the "science contradicts it" sense; I mean in the "this is neither provable nor falsifiable and science has nothing to do with it" sense.
They're convinced Chernobyl can happen again, and that scientists are arrogantly playing god when they explain what can and can't happen
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/01/24/can-we-ma...
And at any rate, the article claims that
> The small size and large surface area-to-volume ratio of NuScale’s reactor core, that sits below ground in a super seismic-resistant heat sink, allows natural processes to cool it indefinitely in the case of complete power blackout.
Of course, the surface that allows efficient cooling here is the same surface that allows neutrons to escape, so my hunch is that it has poor neutron economy. (And of course, heat escaping through it will not turn turbines.)
> 2) refueling of this reactor does not require the nuclear plant to shut down.
That is very nice when you're trying to breed plutonium, the natural uranium fuel assemblies only have to irradiated a few weeks and then you would already need to shut the reactor down. When you can switch during operation, than there's less downtime.
So in total I guess it's a pretty inefficient reactor that's perhaps a nice addition to your weapons program.
Disclaimer: I'm of course one of the anti-nuclear types HN always tells me are only anti-nuclear because we don't understand these things.
That is very nice when you're trying to breed plutonium, the natural uranium fuel assemblies only have to irradiated a few weeks and then you would already need to shut the reactor down. When you can switch during operation, than there's less downtime.
So in total I guess it's a pretty inefficient reactor that's perhaps a nice addition to your weapons program.
This is incorrect. The NuScale reactor is not an online-refueling design like the CANDU (which is indeed easily adapted for breeding high grade plutonium simply by adjusting irradation time). It is an offline-refueling design like every other operating PWR. See this NuScale presentation about refueling operations:
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1515/ML15159A311.pdf
The reactor has to be completely shut down for more than a week during refueling (slide 13). The plant can stay online because a plant contains a minimum of 4 reactor modules:
https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us/faq
So by staggering refueling times, the plant can continuously generate at least 75% of rated output.
The problem that I was trying to show is that people try to answer a question "can a chernobyl(-like) event ever happen again?" which one simply _can't answer_. Not in a "science" way, since to answer this question you need to predict the existence (not probability!) of a literal _punctual_ event which depends on a gazillion factors outside your control (i.e. this is not simply computing a MTBF).
It's a bit like how the Airbus A380 can't crash like the Hindenburg airship did.
In the same way that I'm sure the victims of the next Airbus crash will be happy to know that "it didn't crash like the Hindenburg did".
An Airbus that loses an engine and has to immediately land has objectively failed; however, acting like that’s equivalent to a plane homing into a skyscraper and exploding is not helpful.
More people die every single year from radiation in coal than have died in the entire history of nuclear power. Replacing all coal with nuclear would save more lives and health than fighting nuclear ever could, even in theory.
And delaying coal to nuclear under the banner of "wind and solar maybe one day can help a bit" has blood on its hands.
Every year coal is still here, instead of nuclear, is 100 years of death. If building powerplants (of any type) were instant, and solar were one year away, then we should STILL replace all coal with nuclear TODAY, to minimize harm. (in a spherical chickens in a vacuum sort of way)
And not only do we not have enough solar, we don't even have a plan for energy storage for solar and wind. We have ideas, not a plan.
So solar&wind replacing coal&nuclear is further away than fusion power, by multiples.
But... we all know that it takes a lot longer to build a nuclear plant (on the order of 10-20 years) than it does to build (large) solar or wind farms (on the order of 1-5 years).
So.... yeah, if it was magically possible to replace all coal with nuclear right now, that would be a net improvement in terms of carbon output and general pollution.
But we live in the real world, and that is not possible, so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, to be honest.
I'm pretty sure that enough solar/wind + storage can be built to replace a significant percentage (30%? 50%?) of the remaining coal plants, before the first new nuclear plant's plans and siting are even finalized, let alone before a new nuclear plant is fully operational.
And it's going to be a lot cheaper, too.
Who should we blame in 10-20 from now if people still are burning coal, oil and gas? Who will take responsibility for the inaction?
Perhaps. But 10-20 years ago, solar/wind/storage was a lot more expensive and a lot less efficient. The situation is quite different now.
> Who should we blame in 10-20 from now if people still are burning coal, oil and gas? Who will take responsibility for the inaction?
Realistically, there will probably still be knuckleheads who will be burning coal, oil and gas in 10-20 years from now. But hopefully they will be a very small minority.
The main thing that gives me hope is that it is now so much cheaper to build/run renewables than fossil fuel plants, that the latter will be phased out sooner rather than later, just for economic reasons. Those 6 out of touch old people on the supreme court are trying to delay things - and their actions will have very bad consequences for all of us - but the trend is clear.
Germany is the largest country in EU. If they are still burning coal, oil and gas in order to supply energy when the wind is low, what will we say about this "very small minority". Investors are putting a lot of money today on fossil fuel power plants that has several decades in estimated life-spans. We can wish and hope that some future technology will prove them wrong, just like climate change denials can wish and hope that scientists are all wrong.
This lead me just back to my original question. Who should we blame in 10-20 if people still are burning coal, oil and gas? If future tech won't save us, who can we blame for making this gamble and using the planet as collateral?
Because of the red tape the mob has strung up. China builds these in two years [1]. France does it in five [2].
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/china-moves-toward-nuclea...
[2] https://lemielleux.com/how-long-does-it-take-france-to-build...
South Korea is also very capable at building these quickly, though I've heard concerns raised about their safety (grain of salt, I have no opinion myself).
Also, the plan described there is an addition to take steam from an ALREADY EXISTING nuclear power plant.
- Nuclear is safer than coal: science (true or not, it's not the point)
- We need to go all the way nuclear: politics. There's a million other things to consider, many of them don't even each into the realm of what is falsifiable (e.g international relations, fuel availability, who knows). _Even_ if nuclear was literally the safest method ever, it is literally still politics whether to use nuclear or not; after all, we sacrifice safety for convenience _many_ times, and good luck defining "convenience" in a scientific way.
Another example:
- Vaccines are safe and effective (scientific; true or not is not the point)
- Vaccines are safe enough compared to the risk of catching the disease itself ("social" sciences; caveat emptor)
- We should force everyone to vaccinate (politics). It does not matter if vaccines are safe, or not. It is still a political topic, not scientific. There are things like ethics, social vs individual rights, etc. that are hardly quantifiable much less scientific.
You can scientificly say something is safe compared to something else, or define safe in some way (less then 1 in X chance of something happening statistically). But there is no such thing as 100% absolute safety. Even an injection with saline is not safe in the absolute.
E.g. if there is a 1 in a trillion chance of a side effect, you will never see it, because there arent a trillion people on earth.
Individuals who are anti nuclear have reasons, explicitly stated, that are misinformed.
Being anti nuclear because Chernobyl is in fact like being anti airplane because Hindenburg.
The criticism is actually (in this analogy) that they claim the hydrogen in a 747 will catch fire. "It's not hydrogen, it's just filled with oxygen and nitrogen" is met with "then what if that spontaneously combusts?!".
But in a way you make a good point. "I don't want to have a rational discussion or learn anything" is indeed the anti nuclear stance. "I don't want the truth, i just want to be right" is political.
The other things you mention are not really even known to anti nuclear people.
Wanting to be right despite facts or ignorance is almost the definition of politics.
People say they're anti nuclear because they want to spare us radiation and death, but when you tell them nuclear would reduce both then they just scream louder.
You can be factually wrong in politics. When your stated and internal reasons don't align with what your actions will accomplish, then that's wrong.
I’m as pro-nuclear as they come, but this is simply not true. No people die from radiation from coal.
When coal is burned, all the uranium daughters accumulated by disintegration—radium, radon, polonium—are also released. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation evaluates the radiation exposure to the population from this source.2 Per gigawattyear (GWe-yr) of electrical energy produced by coal, using the current mix of technology throughout the world, the population exposure is estimated to be about 0.8 lethal cancers per plant-year distributed over the affected population. Table 7.2 summarizes these data. With 400 GWe of coal-fired power plants in the world, this amounts to some 320 deaths per year
The relevant wikipedia quote is
One of the organizations for establishing recommendations on radiation protection guidelines internationally, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) that previously supported the LNT model, no longer supports the model for very low radiation doses.
Projections of the absolute number of cancer cases in a population have less and less information value and can be increasingly misleading at lower and lower doses. As a matter of general practice, the Committee does not use the risks inferred from studies of populations following radiation exposure at moderate and high doses to project absolute numbers of radiation-induced cancers following exposure at low and very low doses.
[2] https://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2012/UNSCEAR_2012_...
It also means that a "new chernobyl" can happen at any power station, be it hydro, coal, solar, etc.
WTF? Chernobyl will NEVER happen exactly the same way again, that much is obvious since
a) it was already a pretty rare event to begin with,
b) the event is likely referenced during the training of every nuclear operator _worldwide_, making an exact repeat of the human errors involved even more unlikely than it was to begin with,
c) steps were taken to avoid this exact situation to happen _even on the other chernobyl reactors themselves_.
I thought it quite obvious that no one would be worried about a exact repeat of Chernobyl like if you hit the "replay" button on YouTube. (But if you believe this is what people have in mind when they ask "can chernobyl happen again" then please do tell). Therefore the only remaining interpretation is "can a chernobyl[-like] event happen again" -- a category which would roughly map to "major historic nuclear accident, the kind of which it is still talked about several decades after on a non-nuclear discussion forum like HN".
Most assuredly, non-nuclear accidents, no matter how large, won't fit this category. But I have been wrong in the past, maybe people would call a dam breakup "a chernobyl" these days?
Modern reactors all have a containment shell made of concrete and steel that is capable of keeping the melted down uranium core inside it, if the worst possible event would happen. Had Chernobyl had this, the incident might have destroyed the reactor and even killed some employees, but that would have been the end of it, and the world would never even have heard about the incident.
There are also plenty of other security improvements since that ancient design, but the containment shell alone makes what I would call "chernobyl happening again" just about impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building
Biggest dam accident is arguably worse than Chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
If the original argument was "the exact same thing that happened at Chernobyl will happen again", then that's meaningless and irrelevant, because... who cares? What people actually care about is whether a nuclear disaster could happen again, one that kills a bunch of people and makes a significant area of land uninhabitable for some long period of time.
If you think that's "moving the goalposts", then I don't think you're here to have a good-faith discussion about why people are worried about nuclear energy.
Having said that, I do believe that a significant accidental nuclear disaster is much much much less likely now than in Chernobyl's time. But that doesn't mean it's impossible, or that we shouldn't think about or be worried about it. And also consider that's "accidental": we also need to consider the possibility of terrorist- or state-level attacks, which may be harder to protect against.
Chernobyl lacked many security features that are standard on all modern reactors. The biggest flaw was it had no containment structure. That's the steel & concrete dome which, if the worst happens, keeps the melted uranium contained within it.
That alone would have made the Chernobyl disaster just a bad local industrial accident, and that's the main thing I mean when I say it can't happen again. Though it's far from the only security improvement modern reactors have over Chernobyl.
> But that doesn't mean it's impossible
This is the "you never know!" argument. The good and bad part of it is the same: It is always true! Any thinkable disaster, can conceivably happen, and maybe you "should" be worried about it.
Of course, applied consistently, it would lead to total paralysis. This is no way to rationally approach risk.
Its still kind of a bad question,because we can't rule out dinosaurs attacking the power plant. Maybe the question should be,is there a less than 1 in a million chance of a level 7 event happening when using a modern nuclear plant design in the next 100 years?
Clearly, the nuclear energy in power plants is far more dangerous than those other forms. This is devolving into a silly discussion.
There is a serious discussion to be had about the trade-off in nuclear energy between cost and safety, and whether it's worthwhile.
That also points at one issue. All the now >50 year old reactors should have been replaced with newer versions at some point. Just think about what kind of electronics there is in those things. This didn't happen anywhere. Not in Germany and not in France.
Seems like an issue with how humans think in general. "It's not an issue now, so why worry about it?"
These sorts of creeping disasters never seem to be addressed by any society in a timely fashion.
A solid fuel rod just needs the right disruption, and you have a meltdown. It's inherent to solid fuel designs because they are ... solid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_Daii...
I look at that timeline and all the active systems that are necessary in solid fuel rod. LFTR doesn't need those to cool, it is a somewhat self-regulating design. There's no high-pressure steam to worry about regulating.
Additionally LFTR:
1) breeds its fuel from Thorium, a low radioactivity element, so some stockpile of heavily radioactive stuff isn't hanging around.
2) "burns" most/all of its fuel, so there isn't some stockpile of bad waste that can get washed away.
I'm not sure if pebble bed type stuff or other schemes could have similar guarantees, and it's not like an underwater LFTR wouldn't have lots of strange elements leaking, but there are so many failure events in that fukushima timeline that IMO a LFTR design would have simply shut down and no big deal.
http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/
Again, all those pressure events and active cooling system failure points.
LFTR is generally an unproven design, but it has so many good features that I view it as the starting point of next gen nuclear. I think its scalability is the key to nuclear's relevance in the future to compete economically with mature solar/wind/battery.
To get back to your point about the politics: the current nuclear industry... the lobbyists, the regulators, the "culture" ... is gravitationally bound with the solid fuel rod design. A clean slate is needed, and wind/solar sweeping away the economically unviable and inherently dangerous old designs and their political structures is probably doing nuclear a favor in the long run.
It's easy to disparage people who disagree with you (and if they disagree, they must be unscientific! They couldn't be difficult issues and serious concerns). It only poisons attempts to move forward and learn anything.
Much of anti-nuclear energy opinion has been led by scientists and most of the more scientifically sophisticated people I know are very skeptical about nuclear power (including me).
The disparagement makes it look like reactionary politics, not scientific interest - that is their modus operendi - and of course, the reactionary attempt to discredit anything progressive is currently focused on nuclear energy policy.
They are the same people who opposed all GMO food products despite the science.
Of course it can! It's almost certainly much less likely now, but I don't think anyone has presented convincing evidence that it's impossible that something like that could happen again.
And that's a really big deal. Even if the risk of another Chernobyl is ridiculously low, another Chernobyl would be so bad that it's worth considering.
Having said that, I do support nuclear energy, and wish there wasn't so much FUD spread about it. But let's not delude ourselves into believing there are no safety concerns, or that we've solved the waste storage/disposal problem.
Chernobyl has happened each single year since 1986.
Has been swallowing money each single year since 1986. No exceptions. I'm really convinced that the problem will be there still in 2023. And turning much worse is also a possibility because s*t happens in a war-zone.
By comparison, vehicle emission is expected cause ~20,000 premature deaths in the US, every year [1]. (Sorry, I couldn't find a stat for Japan.)
In other words, mankind's second worst nuclear disaster killed about as many people as vehicle emission kills in the US every month. That's not counting car accidents.
In fact the wikipedia page about the disaster [2] contains this amusing bit of information, which might not be a fair way of looking at it, but I can't say it's factually wrong:
> it has been estimated that if Japan had never adopted nuclear power, accidents and pollution from coal or gas plants would have caused more lost years of life.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/science-health-business-environme...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofialottopersio/2021/11/04/no-...
In contrast, a transatlantic flight results in about 0.1 mSv of radiation. Someone getting a single abdomen x-ray would get over 0.2 mSv.
In fact the tsunami killed 20,000 people - and would have done so regardless of whether there was a power plant accident. The nuclear accident killed one person.
Hopefully those incident will have taught those countries to respect the enormous destructive forces involved, create a work culture where safety concerns do not get ignored, and to build power plants with consideration of very rare natural disaster.
The question is not 'was this one prediction accurate?', but 'how reliable is that population of predictions?'
The government doesn't always have attention and money to shower on nuclear plants.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di...
Fossil fuel air pollution cause one fifth of premature death worldwide:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p...
Do the sources I use suit you? Is it enough to convey sense about the orders of magnitude involved?
And I didn't even talk about CO2 and the impending climate change catastrophe looming.
In a debate, it is much better to counter the actual arguments instead of the more convenient ones.
2) Magnitude 9 earthquake
3) Devastating tsunami
4) Catastrophic fire causing loss of power to all control systems
One (1) person died from radiation.
Just how safe do you expect something to be?
How many fatalities would there be if there were a similar sequence of events affecting something like (e.g.) the Three Gorges Dam in China?
A lot more than one, you can bet.
They don't base their opinion regarding safety on data, they base it on the feeling that they get from seeing large disasters and not seeing the countless deaths caused in silence, and they refuse to update their view even in the face of contradicting data.
It is a choice between a very local problem or a global one. There is no free lunch.
As long the choice is between nuclear vs wind + fossil fuel, the discussion will be focused about fossil fuel.
That is 30 years for which you have decide to etiher use fossil fuels or nuclear. So do you wan't to dump CO2 into the air for 30 years and further advance climate change, plus kill millions due to air pollution? Or do you want to accumulate nuclear waste for 30 years, but have way fewer deaths and you don't worsen climate change further?
It is not a nice choice, but it is a choice that has to be made. And Germany decided to choose fossil fuels instead of nuclear.
Not a damm failure, but last year there was ~250 death in Europe and 10 billions of euros of damages because of the floods. [1] That's much more damages than Fukushima and comparable to Chernobyl.
Reactors like Chernobyl and Fukishima are not built today and cannot meltdown. The chance of meltdown is nearly 0%. ...and the danger of meltdown on a modern reactor is like what happened at Three Mile Island (which is basically nothing). No one died, nor was even irradiated. ...and even that type of meltdown is no longer possible.
...and finally "multi kilometer" is not even that big. The Earth is 300 million square kilometers in area. Even if your estimate was correct (which it isn't), then it still wouldn't be a big deal.
If you shut down a coal plant, the pollution dissipates in a fairly short amount of time. (Unfortunately the same is not true of the carbon that has accumulated in the atmosphere over time.) If there's a disaster at a nuclear plant, some amount of land area becomes uninhabitable for some long amount of time (amounts dependent on the severity of the disaster).
For the record, I am in favor of building new nuclear plants, especially in areas where they can replace coal or even natural gas (it's absurd that this EU parliament action is considering natgas "green" as well). But let's not pretend that they are 100% safe, that the worst case can't happen, that the effects of a nuclear disaster aren't that big a deal, or that we've solved the waste disposal and storage problem. I agree that many anti-nuclear folks are driven more by overblown fears than science and statistics, but pro-nuclear people seem to also cherry-pick stats to better support their position.
For example: with Fukushima the nuclear bandwagon arguments that those deaths which actually occurred resulted from moving people to a safe area. As if not moving them would have been an option or if the movement would have happened without the accident.
For Chernobyl it's even worse since there the bandwagon arguments with dead firefighters, ignoring all the "fallout" victims which to these days exist and lose years of life. Not even mentioning missing data: https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/groups/anthrotox-...
Besides that it is the same people who say that Germany could have less coal plants with nuclear running. Something which is also not true since the reason for keeping coal so long was not the lack of electrical power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
For Fukushima for example, the deaths from evacuation ARE included in the death toll (the total number is estimated to be 2,314).
You have a detailed article about the data here [1].
But I am open to change my mind. Can you give a source that compares the mortality rate of energy sources and that, in your opinion, better accounts for all deaths? What is the highest mortality rate for nuclear someone has every estimated?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
You can look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
...for a better breakdown, but this wikipedia article conflates deaths caused by the meltdown evacuation with deaths caused by the tsunami and earthquake evacuation (remember the massive tsunami and earthquake?).
Additionally, while trying to predict future deaths based on undetectible doses of radiation is a very unreliable task. ...and if you compare it to other energy sources, nuclear is one of the safest, if not the safest of the scalable solutions.
If you're making policy based on scientifically inaccurate ideas then you aren't respecting the science.
This happened essentially because without a liability cap the entire insurance industry considers nuclear power to be ridiculously risky. So the government, who wanted to protect investors, stepped in.
I feel like a lot of people who dont know this want to educate me about how safe nuclear power truly is.
I was curious about this figure, found info here. Also, apparently the Price-Anderson Act which created the liability limit was passed in 1957, and there's a reasonable argument to be made that it no longer makes sense now that nuclear technology has matured: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
> Over time, the "limit of liability" for a nuclear accident has increased the insurance pool to more than $13 billion. > > Currently, owners of nuclear power plants pay an annual premium for $450 million in private insurance for offsite liability coverage for each reactor site (not per reactor). This primary, or first tier, insurance is supplemented by a second tier. In the event a nuclear accident causes damages in excess of $450 million, each licensee would be assessed a prorated share of the excess, up to $131.056 million per reactor. With 95 reactors currently in the insurance pool, i this secondary tier of funds contains about $12.9 billion. Payouts in excess of 15 percent of these funds require a prioritization plan approved by a federal district court. If the court determines that public liability may exceed the maximum amount of financial protection available from the primary and secondary tiers, each licensee would be assessed a pro rata share of this excess not to exceed 5 percent of the maximum deferred premium ($131.056 million); approximately $6.553 million per reactor. If the second tier is depleted, Congress is committed to determine whether additional disaster relief is required.
Note, this is a figure cited by opposition politicians. Nowhere near this much money has actually been spent.
The estimate from the government is a bit under $200 billion, and that includes not just cleanup but also resettling people and continued monitoring of the reactor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#:....
It's nowhere near as low as 200 billion.
Either way while the industry refuses to fully pay for its own risks or acknowledge that it does so its claims of safety via public relations channels are sounding more than a little disingenuous.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_United...
And remember, "renewable" energy is really natural gas supplemented by wind and solar. There's no plan for a 100% renewable grid until some massive breakthrough in energy storage happens.
Radiation levels around Fukushima are perfectly fine for habitation and would have been so even if nothing but basic post-accident reactor containment had been done.
It's like comparing the dangers of doctors using 12th century blood-letting and leeches vs getting an MRI.
So far the industry does a lot of the former and zero of the latter. Hell, the op eds about safety routinely coming from nuclear lobbies dont even acknowledge that taxpayers are 99+% on the hook if they fuck up.
Makes me feel even more safe that theyre now lobbying mainly to extend the life of old nuclear plants. What could go wrong?
The reason nuclear power ended in Germany was economical. There's no way nuclear can compete with cheap Russian gas, and Germany had over invested in the latter for over two decades, for reasons that obviously had nothing to do with nuclear power.
Look no further than Gerhard Schröder to see how this started. Again, this is not secret and there were newspaper articles everywhere. Then follow to the path across time and party lines to Angela Merkel who saw it through. Simple economics ruled all the way.
This is not complicated, and there's no reason to see a conspiracy here.
Unless relations with Russia go south. That's some short-sighted economics there.
It goes with the meme that you glorify France while ignoring it's failures which are quite prominent these days just the same way he ignores the fact that the chancellor for the last 16 years was an actual physicist.
This is the level of debate we currently have again here in Germany.
This only works because Germany is still burning ungodly amount of coal, to fill the gaps when there is no wind or sun (about 60% of the time)
Is this the meme you're talking about?
Maybe sources are memes too? What happens if you take coal away from here:
That's a misconception. ENS has two branches, science and literature. ENS Sciences is technical, the other isn't. X (Polytechnique) is an engineering school in theory, but in practice very few of its students become actual engineers.
ENA is essentially a law school; it's even less than that, it only teaches how the French administration works, not law.
The one thing these schools have in common is that they are extremely competitive, and select for extreme dedication (and a bizarre capacity to study with high intensity at an age when other people are dating or partying).
But at the top level of the French government you mostly find only énarques (= people who attended ENA); they are not technical in the least, "don't have a clue about technology", but think they know everything. It's a terrible, terrible system.
Source: am French.
Of course not everyone is graduating with a technical degree, but coming from Germany where top politicians often don't even have a finished university degree and high-ranked politicians are regularly found out to have been plagiarizing their PhD work it was pretty impressive to see a working elite system. It also has some negative aspects and nepotism is a thing as well (in the sense that people who went through the system know how to game it to get their children in with high probability) but it's much better than what we have here, in my opinion.
Germany was and still is scared of anything that can be considered elitist as people always associate it with the elitism from the Third Reich.
1/ énarques aren't technical at all, don't actually know anything except how bureaucracy works, and yet they're in charge of everything
2/ super-selective schools have the side effect of letting people think they're geniuses because they topped a competition while in their teens
Weird, it's almost like these ideological people were listening to experts, but you didn't like what the experts were saying, and so you labelled 'following expert advice' as 'ideological' to help you continue to ignore expert opinion.
They haven't forgotten, they were fighting a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens. The same eco-ideologist that ruined Germany have made it impossible to properly invest in the nuclear plants in France and to ensure knowledge and expertise is properly transmitted and developed with the younger generation.
For years the message was "don't invest in nuclear, don't study nuclear, don't build nuclear, don't maintain nuclear". Now the message is "we can't even do nuclear properly", it's a disengenous argument.
What we need is a bit of future perspective: Nuclear is here to stay for the next decades (plural). Nuclear related jobs will be in high demand. Nuclear jobs will be well paying. Nuclear jobs will be safe. Nuclear formation is important, and here is money to ensure it happens. Maintenance of nuclear plants is important, it needs to happen and it will be financed. And that will lead to true expertise and safety.
We ended up with a group of people who would benefit a moderate amount from cheap power, and a fanatic anti-nuclear lobby that succeeded in scuttling decades of progress. The more motivated group won, as is predictable.
It is amazing watching Europeans trying to achieve energy poverty in defiance of their technical head start. The energy figures out of places like the UK, France and Germany are startlingly bad (eg, [0]). Especially considered per-capita.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Historical_D...
That's the problem with nuclear; even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two.
No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. Decommissioning of the first UK nuclear power plants is expected to last another century. That's being paid for by taxpayers. The builders and operators of those plants were never asked to plan or pay for decommissioning; and anyway, 200 years is a long time to expect a corporation to stay alive.
So let's be quite clear: the cost of a nuclear power plant includes the cost of decommissioning. Since decommissioning takes such a long time, you can't rely on contracts with private companies to ensure they finish the job. Decommissioning is a horrible insurance risk; never having been completed successfully, there's no reliable guide to how much it might cost.
So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my grandchildren!
>No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned.
There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully decommissioned[1].
According to your link, there are 10 plants that have achieved "DECON status": that is, the spent fuel and machinery have been removed from the site (presumably to some other site).
I'm sorry, but that's a cop-out: it's cheating to say you've decommissioned a site, when what you've really done is transport the entire site, including topsoil, to a new location. That's like saying your plastics are green, because when they are no longer wanted they are all shipped to Indonesia. And apparently at least some of those "decommissioned" sites still have spent fuel stored on-site; I don't see how a site with spent fuel can be considered to have been returned to "greenfield" condition.
Same with solar. Spent solar panels don't go nowhere.
No other plant either.
> The DOE was required by contract and statute to begin removing spent nuclear fuel and GTCC waste by January 31, 1998. To date, the DOE has not removed any spent fuel or GTCC waste from the CY site, and it is unknown when it will.
The current 'plan' is for the companies looking after the waste on the original site to sue the government every few years to get paid for looking after the waste.
Meanwhile you are complaining about waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.
For example, it was forbidden to have more than 50GW installed capacity of solar. By Law.
oh and also destroying the industries building the solar panels, therefore losing the entire market to China…
Obviously, nothing can be done with nuclear power now to address that problem. Looking back, there is no reason to think that fossil fuel usage would have disappeared by now. Even the issue of climate change has had little impact. Nuclear is generally far more expensive.
Now if we had had made the fossil fuel industry pay the true cost of their waste products - greenhouse gases - then there might have been a market for nuclear.
> idealism
If you have a good argument, why disparage people who disagree? Why not address their concerns seriously?
The threat of nuclear waste is very real and serious. There are solutions, but these are serious issues that won't be addressed by disparaging other people.
> waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.
Nobody has died yet (is that even true?), so it's safe?
If you reckon it's OK to leave waste lying around, especially in constrained economic and political circumstances, that's a legitimate point of view. Argue for that. But don't declare that "decommissioning" simply means something like "Do your best, and then be done with it". That's dishonest (I'm not accusing you personally of any dishonesty).
If "decommissioning" doesn't mean complete reversal of all harmful results of the operation of a plant, then we need a new word that does mean that.
How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants we’ve been running for forty years while people like yourself threw ignorant tantrums over nuclear?
How would you “reverse all harmful results of the operation of a plant”?
How are you going to recapture all the pollution they dumped into our air, exactly?
The word apparently means whatever the responsible authorities want it to mean.
> How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants
We used to make gas by heating coal with steam; the result was a contaminated site, coal gas, and coke for steel. But the site was left contaminated with chemical waste - stuff that can in principle be chemically denatured, or buried fairly safely. Thing is, I'm against making new coal-to-gas plants, as much as I'm against new nukes.
I don't have to defend coal and gas power plants; I don't have to explain how to reverse their effects; I'm against building any new ones, and my lack of any remedies for the effects of plants built before I was born doesn't invalidate my stance.
[Edit] I think I missed your point, which was probably based on my use of the word "reversing". You're effectively asking me how to complete the decommissioning of plants that were put out of use before I was born. If you want childish, that's childish: you're asking me for a proposal for reversing climate change.
I'm talking about how to build a nuclear power plant that can be properly decommissioned, in the sense that there's no persistent environmental pollution, and the land can safely be returned to normal uses, such as agriculture and residential housing. I'm against repeating the mistakes my grandparents made, in all their ignorance.
You’re making the exact same mistake by rejecting today’s an attainable but imperfect solution in favor of an unattainably perfect one.
The end result is that we waste another few decades spewing pollution into the air.
1. Spew the waste into the air (fossil fuels)
2. Contain and bury the waste (nuclear)
3. Go without electricity when the weather is not favorable until major tech improvements in storage
So unless you want to argue for 3, and I don't think you do, 2 is clearly the best option.
We really need to get deep storage unstuck from the Yucca Mountain issue, but I think this still counts as decommissioned.
This attitude only makes sense if one's view is that humanity isn't going to last more than 10,000 years.
Unless we can find a way of rendering nuclear waste safe, then we have to find a way of making it so inaccessible that a future civilisation is unlikely to come across it by accident, and so secure that even a major earthquake won't cause it to leak into the environment.
Storing this stuff in metal tins on the surface isn't even a gesture at a solution.
At any point, if interest rates aren't pretty much exactly zero, it pays to delay burying waste. The present cost of guarding it at the surface is < the cost of burying it now. If, at any time, the interest rates do drop to zero and stay there, it can be buried then.
The only real argument against this is that the waste ceases to be self-protecting from "amateur" diversion of plutonium in about 300 years, which could greatly increase the cost of guarding. But that's no justification for burying it now.
Waiting also reduces the thermal output from fission products, which reduces heat buildup in the repository, at least a bit. And it would allow the waste to be reprocessed (and more easily) if that (perhaps unexpectedly) becomes appropriate. It would also allow time for other disposal methods, such as launching into space, to become competitive. How cheap will the descendants of SpaceX's launchers be in 300 years?
I think there may have been an argument for rapidly burying waste during the cold war, where surface waste could be volatilized by a direct H bomb strike, causing enhanced local long term fallout. That's more an argument against nuclear power itself, though, as NPPs could also be disrupted by direct strikes.
This is always a funny topic when people wax philosophical about dirty bombs as though you wouldn't get cooked trying to open a cask.
We’re the grandchildren of the eco-ideologists that spent the last forty years dumping coal and gas pollution into the atmosphere because they were afraid of nuclear power.
My grandparents were from the era of steam-powered mills; I doubt the word "pollution" had been coined before they died. I'm pretty sure the term "ecology" dates from the mid-20th-century, after all my grandparents had died.
So yes: my grandparents left me with a problem; but it's not their fault, because they didn't know. We do know, and my grandchildren would be right to curse me if I left a similar problem for them to solve, knowing what I was doing all along.
Trojan?
> The ISFSI storage pad is surrounded by a secured area, which is monitored and protected round the clock.
Same word games as the other one.
The reactor itself is temporarily buried awaiting movement to Yucca Mountain, which has no planned date.
Is this really a problem, though?
200 years is sorta manageable, I suppose, if you have the resources and longevity of a nation state. You can bury it under a mountain, and set a battalion of armed orcs to guard it. But nation states can change their minds; whether the cost of hiring those orcs is money well-spent is a political decision, and the politicians responsible may not have "the long view" in mind.
I think nuclear power can be done safely; but I don't think that's possible as long as the task is overseen by profit-making corporations or short-termist governments. And I don't see who else can do it.
As is, it seems that for you, dangerous waste is a deal breaker for something you are ideologically opposed to, but perfectly fine in other areas.
Meanwhile plans to get some foreign company to build giant new nukes here are pressing ahead. So yeah, my focus is on the imminent threat that I can do something about, not on old mistakes that were made before I was born, that I can't do much about.
> something you are ideologically opposed to
You're the second person that has accused me of being "ideological". Is that the same as "having opinions"? That word is generally used dismissively. It should mean that I subscribe to some ideology. What ideology is it that you believe I subscribe to? How could you know whether my views on nuclear are inspired by some ideology that I've bought into wholesale, or whether they are the result of thinking things through for myself?
Feel free to ask me about my opinions, but kindly refrain from telling me what they are.
It's the reactionaries that are in the way. Why blame the only people who have been concerned about climate change? Because it's easier to attack them; because people are scared of taking on the reactionaries.
> a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens
This is just jumping on the bandwagon of demonizing the target du jour. Can you back this up? What do you mean by witch-hunt? Who in particular was attacked? By who?
I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" [1] by a Cambridge professor, it goes into great detail about the problems of matching electricity demand to supply day- & year-round.
This book has come up on Hacker News before, and I've read it, and it has a crucial flaw, well, two actually:
- It underestimates the efficiency of solar panels by quite a bit, supposing that 10% would be a lofty goal (and arguing on this basis that solar farms are not economically viable). In fact, panels on the market are approaching 20% [1], and 25% seems well within reach.
- It uses the United Kingdom, one of the dimmest countries in the world [2] and one of the most densely populated, as an index for the viability of solar power in any country. In fact, the UK is probably the worst-case geography+population for solar power, and almost every other country would have a better time of it. In this context, it is worth considering that nuclear power may be particularly appropriate for Europe specifically, since it is peaceful, densely populated, mostly north of the 45th parallel, and cloudy, but solar is probably more practical elsewhere.
The real problem with cost estimates for solar and wind power is that they do not necessarily adjust well for the rate of construction. They may be reasonably accurate assuming a constant rate of construction, but a truly worthwhile implementation of solar and wind power would require a much higher rate of construction than is currently being implemented. I rarely see much of the methodology of these studies, but what I have seen basically involves taking the current price of solar and battery installations, applying a few fudge factors, and scaling up linearly. That may not be realistic.
Meanwhile, the cost estimates for nuclear power are based on data from the construction of large facilities, and therefore necessarily incorporate a much more realistic high rate of investment. Nuclear plants are big.
1: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/photovo...
2: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/World_DN...
Where it feels a little parochial, is its focus on the UK as if the GDP or population of the UK matters in the context of a global issue like sustainable energy.
It simply doesn't and he has enough facts and figures available even at that time to put that together, but probably fell into the classic british position of assuming they are more important than they really are in a global context.
Anyone outside the UK must read it in the same way people in the UK would read a small island dweller writing "Yes this might work for most of the UK but the Isle of Man would need to import power, which is simply unthinkable, even though it already does, so maybe we should build nuclear there instead to maintain the islands sovereignty".
Or maybe we can discount the needs of half a percent of the population if they run counter to the needs of the other 99.5% and focus on the big picture?
In the end we didn't need to as the wind power, heat pumps, EVs and carbon fees required for the UK overlapped heavily with other nations but this was a clear blindspot which I think you are charitably interpreting as a silly mistake when really it's more akin to arrogance.
Once you update it with current figures I'm assuming it can only make a stronger case. So are you just using the old figures and pretending those haven't changed?
That's like trying to model the next iPhones specs from first principles with specs from the last century.
Well it won't have a very big HDD because all that spinning rust will really drain the AA batteries.
edit to add, but his basic strategy is sound:
> The principal problem is that carbon pollution is not priced correctly. And there is no confidence that it’s going to be priced correctly in the future. When I say “correctly,” I mean that the price of emitting carbon dioxide should be big enough such that every running coal power station has carbon capture technology fitted to it.
> Solving climate change is a complex topic, but in a single crude brush- stroke, here is the solution: the price of carbon dioxide must be such that people stop burning coal without capture
The UK basically did this. Note that it was found by the market that replacing the coal plants entirely was cheaper than adding carbon capture to them.
edit 2:
> The most promising of these options, in terms of scale, is switching on and off the power demand of electric-vehicle charging. 30 million cars, with 40 kWh of associated batteries each (some of which might be ex- changeable batteries sitting in filling stations) adds up to 1200 GWh. If freight delivery were electrified too then the total storage capacity would be bigger still.
> There is thus a beautiful match between wind power and electric vehicles. If we ramp up electric vehicles at the same time as ramping up wind power, roughly 3000 new vehicles for every 3 MW wind turbine, and if we ensure that the charging systems for the vehicles are smart, this synergy would go a long way to solving the problem of wind fluctuations.
The UK also did this.
I'm baffled at the books continued popularly with renewable "debunkers". The book clearly described the problems and solutions. The main skepticism was aimed at politicians being able to overcome the political power of fossil fuel lobbiest and do something sensible.
The only explanation is a willful disregard for the new knowledge we've acquired in the intervening time period, much of which the author guesses correctly but we now know for a fact.
There's an E (for economics) plan outlined as a proposed solution, that assumes we'll deploy a lot of the cheapest energy source, whatever that is. It then also assumes (!) that onshore wind will cost the same as Nuclear and offshore wind will cost more. Put those two assunptions together and you get a plan with lots of nuclear.
Note, he's not actually predicting this outcome, though it does seem to be his personal preference at the time. He mentions that cheaper solar-to-fuel might be an alternative, as what really mattered was which was cheapest, which he assumed, incorrectly, would be nuclear.
Actual reality looks a lot closer to his G plan, for 'greenpeace' named sarcastically because they just love wind power, because as it turned out wind was cheaper than basically everything else (until solar caught up in most of the world). Maybe Greenpeace got lucky, maybe they were just better informed.
So if he was to rewrite that same plan with today's figures, the Economist and Green party plans would probably agree. Amusingly ironic and a testament to his methods even if his clearly stated assumptions no longer hold true.
https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB
Also, UK has one of the best in the world conditions for wind power. Wind sucks in Poland or Czech Republic.
Batteries would be another candidate but again the required amount of energy and the power slew rate are enormous, so storage facilities would be extremely costly and would compete with electric car battery production. I don't have much faith in the idea of storing energy in electric vehicle batteries as most of these cars will be on the road when the energy is needed (7-9 am) and will be mostly plugged in to charge when renewable production is low (during the night). Also I'm not sure if the electricity grid would even allow such a conversion as it's not designed for many small producers arranged in a mesh.
And then lays out multiple solutions, including 20Kwh of EV battery storage for every person which must have been basically science fiction at the time of writing but now sounds entirely boring and inevitable for reasons entirely separate from power storage.
Yeah I'd say that holds up pretty well, but I'm still not seeing the problem it apparently poses for today's world of cheap renewables?
We need and want to produce lots of green hydrogen for non-burning purposes. That fits perfectly into the demand response idea he lays out in reasonable detail. So why do you seem to think pumped hydro storage was the only solution he mentioned?
Even with his dated view on PV prices, he raises the possibility of importing hydrogen:
> "Solar photovoltaics were technically feasible for Europe, but I judged them too expensive. I hope I’m wrong, obviously. It will be wonderful if the cost of photovoltaic power drops in the same way that the cost of computer power has dropped over the last forty years."
What a great quote to look back on from a future where his hopes came true.
If one also follow energy politics this has also been very clear by the politicians themselves. The green political movement has been advocating the concept of "reserve energy" over nuclear "base load". The strategy is to build out as much wind and solar as possible, while keeping natural gas and oil plant on subsidized plans. When the weather is bad for energy production, those natural gas and oil plant starts up and supply the missing supply.
For oil and gas operators this is a pretty great deal. They get paid twice, once by the government and then a second time by the market. They also only need to spend fuel when the market price is at its highest, reducing fuel costs and improving profits. It is pretty much a win-win situation for the government and power plants operators.
If that sounds idiotic to you, that's because the change in the EEG was created to make exactly this impossible.
> Weird, it’s almost like these ideological people were listening to the experts.
Go away, bully.
The most cynical thing is that the biggest nuclear accident in history was caused by Soviet negligence and incompetence and yet they managed to exploit it politically.
edit: eg. https://www.wired.com/story/the-nuclear-reactors-of-the-futu...
For Germany cheap Nuclear energy on central/east Europe is dangerous because cheap energy = more competitive market. Add cheaper workforce and you have very dangerous mix. Read why Bulgaria was forced to shut down majority of their reactors before joining EU. Offically it was about "security". Bulgaria with cheap nuclear energy from already built power plants and cheap workforce was too "dangerous" for old EU countries. Politics is very important when discussing energy market.
It has been claimed many times by Soviet defectors. Every defector from GRU or and high-profile officers from the KGB claimed so. It is very hard to prove, but it is so extremely serving to the USSR.
Peace meant unilateral disarmament and abandonment of nuclear technology - how convenient. Today the claims by some politicians in Europe that "aiding Ukraine prolongs the war" are a similar trope of Russian origin.
Back in the Cold War one of the policies the "Peace movement" advocated was "nuclear-free zones" in Western countries. The USSR encouraged organisations by providing funds and used its propaganda arms to aid the movement (conveniently keeping quit on its own arrangements).
Can you back that up?
> What a surprise than nowadays the same groups are serving the interests of Russia.
It's actually the reactionary right that is supporting Russia these days.
So this is why Russia supports and is supported by all radical groups that want to change the current order - left or right.
The state it self is right-wing but you can see even anarchist organisations parroting its agenda.
Russian trolls also just stir up trouble - the same people will post extreme fake claims supposedly by BLM protesters and then right-wing conspiracy theories. They see stirring up racial and class tensions as useful because it destroys the "hypocritical liberal order" - it paralyses countries and governments so they can't do effective foreign policy.
Framing it as some closed minded ideological stance, and that Germany wouldn't be in a position to understand the pros and cons to nuclear technology, just looks to dismiss those that might have actual rationales for running their countries differently.
Energy is at the core of economic development and Germany and a bunch of other countries were able to get gas for decades.
There is no single concience called Germany that may definitively answer the question of whether it benefits them.
As is often the case, people benefetting from this relationship are not the ones paying the price when something goes wrong.
For every 1 billion of economic benefit produced by this relationship, this war has destroyed 5.
most lukely, without this relationship, the qar would not be possible.
And you’ve noticed yourself that the benefits accrued in the EU and the costs were incurred in Ukraine. But this is oversimplifying things - the Ukraine war has other important geopolitical facets besides the admittedly important energy aspect, such as NATO expansion.
It's the same here, but with selling energy to "capitalists".
What Europeans might have seen as purely economic affair for the USSR / Russia was just means of getting money to grow and support its army, to buy Western politicians and media influence, etc.
Practically you’re not though, because as history attests, the USSR dissolved peacefully and thorough all the ups and downs the economic relationship survived.
This is perhaps why the warnings from the US were ignored for so long: they were based on self-interest and they had a track record of being wrong for decades.
'Why Germany pipes down when talk turns to Nord Stream 2 sanctions | Chancellor Olaf Scholz won’t say pipeline is finished if Russia attacks Ukraine, despite strong pressure from allies.' 2022 February 8 https://www.politico.eu/article/olaf-scholz-silence-on-nord-...
It's not falsified. It may have improved conditions for peace; the situation could have been far worse now. Real-world issues don't work out neatly; they are extremely complex; you never know what the alternative outcome would have been.
As an analogy, eating healthy food and getting exercise isn't 'falsified' as health recommendations when someone happens to die young.
This partnership, which was being undermined by the US from the beginning, is attributed to establishing a basis for cooperation between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Considering that the Soviets pulled out peacefully of Eastern Germany, that worked pretty great.
Given how peacefully it collapsed and the huge potential for mayhem, I’d stay away from altering the timeline.
What we do know is where we are today: Russia is not playing nice with the world despite our attempts to have beneficial economic exchanges. Would the not play nice with USSR scenarios be worse - we have no real idea.
First, it's Russia, not Putin's Russia. It's derogatory to frame discussion like that. Should we also start putting "Biden's USA" and "Macron's France"? Just writing this way, and suddenly both USA and France appear like some fourth world banana republics.
Second, both Russia and Soviet Union before were the most reliable energy partner. They didn't fail their obligations a single time.
Reduction in Russian gas should be blamed on NATO sanctions that prevented a timely maintenance of North Stream 1 by confiscation of the gas turbine, and the refusal to start using North Stream 2 although it is ready to deliver gas tomorrow, if Germany decides so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonizing_the_enemy#Personifi...
This has always been a standard operation model for the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit...
So yes, Putin's Russia is used intentionally to introduce the same feeling as Hitler's Germany. That's the way how Biden's USA works, supported by Ursula von der Layens EU, Stoltenberg's NATO and their minions.
Would Bush's USA, Clinton's USA, Nixon's USA, Obama's USA or POTUS X' USA work better? Because each one of the US presidents except Trump and Biden (give him some more time) is directly or indirectly responsible for more killing around the world than Putin would ever be. Hundreds of thousands (in case of some presidents even millions) people have been murdered on their direct command. Even if "Putin's Russia" is really responsible for everything that US / NATO propaganda accuses them, they still have a long way to go to reach this levels of atrocities and destruction.
And while you could certainly argue that for example Bush plunged his country into an unnecessary war to feed his pride, you're arguing that he's not that much of a break from his predecessors. And the American people as a whole definitely carry more of that responsibility. That's still a reason to call out Putin specifically, instead of the country as a whole.
It's Putin's Russia because Russia does what Putin wants.
Biden wants a lot of things for America but both the legislature and the courts are stopping that. So in that sense it is America's America.
As many people have pointed out, comparisons to Hitler's conquests at the start of WW2 are not unjustified; Putin is using much of the same rhetoric that Hitler used. His state media is actively discussing the need for genocide. Those "same feelings as Hitler's Germany" are because the facts are far too similar.
I don't think we have enough data to say this confidently. Putin enjoys a very broad base of support
This, along with Russia’s notoriously pervasive secret police and domestic surveillance may have something to do why even “anonymous” polling of Russia finds fairly small numbers of people willing to say they don't support the regime wholeheartedly, independent of actual sentiment.
Sorry, this is bollocks. For more than 30 years Russia is using energy supplies as a weapon against pretty much all the eastern and central Europe.
The only time when we had issue with gas it was some ten years ago when Ukraine stopped the transit hoping to blackmail both Russia and the EU to get a better deal for themselves. Ukraine was a failed state then that couldn't pay for gas they used.
Note Russia always does something to shift the blame, usually starts "dispute" over payments. It's done because media need to report ”balanced" view, so just by reading general news it's not apparent tha this is really blackmail. Stockholm tribunal regularly disproves Russian version, it just takes time, which is what Russia is after: you can't survive winter without heating, and the final verdict won't arrive in time. So until LNG terminals and pipelines to Norway sprang around the Baltic Sea, coupled with Third Package, Eastern Europeans mostly had to yield to this blackmail.
> The only time when we had issue with gas
ISTM you live west of Oder. No one in Eastern Europe would say this.
> it was some ten years ago when Ukraine stopped the transit hoping to blackmail both Russia and the EU to get a better deal for themselves. Ukraine was a failed state then that couldn't pay for gas they used.
This is false, Ukraine wasn't "failed state". What failed was an attempt to rig an election.
I think you are confusing Ukraine after Maidan with Russia under Putin.
(Well, no, I really think you are just parroting laughably dumb Russian propaganda, but it would be more accurate with those substitutions.)
What Germany did get wrong is that they invested too much in renewables too early and that continues to haunts Germans by paying subsidies for renewables installed more than 10 years ago. Germany helped to jump-start the whole scaling of renewables (together with the US) but the price is high.
I would argue this isn't actually so bad because we need to price energy higher anyway to reduce consumption and further accelerate the building of renewable capacity.
No matter what anybody says: nuclear is dead. The number of projects in planning (outside China) is so small that it won't make the slightest dent for our emissions goals. The only topics worth focusing on is solar, transmission and energy storage. Wind only matters in the next 10 years. Afterwards solar will be another magnitude cheaper and wind won't be able to compete.
Why do you think solar will get cheaper by another order of magnitude?
(of course i'm french)
I think it is changing. Both the IPCC and the ERDF reports were unambiguous and politicians and technocrats who were paying attention noticed. Now, skyrocketing gas prices are a warning shot. A blackout or a brownout could completely change public opinion (not that si would welcome it, but at this point it seems inevitable; we almost had 3 last winter).
> Sadly, I think in this domain (as in many) france lives with the infrastructure and build of its past and currently fails to invest for its future, it's more managing decline than anything else.
That is very true, unfortunately. That’s why building a series of EPR would be a good thing long-term, as it would provide some justifications to train new engineers and a refreshed skilled workforce.
> My dream would be that france, with help of germany and other eu countries would build new reactors with an overcapacity for france alone and would then provide this energy to other ue countries.
This would make sense from a technical point of view (one large fleet in a single country is easier to manage and more efficient than the same number of reactors distributed across several states). But that’s very difficult from a political point of view.
> Nuclear energy is a chance and is not mutually exclusive with other energies.
This is something a lot of people do not seem to grasp. We need all the low-carbon energy we can produce, and we need it 20 years ago. There is no point bickering about the share of renewable and the share of nuclear. We need renewables where we can and nuclear where we must.
In the end, what matters is that even a carbon-free electricity supply is just half the journey, and the easy half at that. It’s not something we will solve with a one-size-fits-all approach.
Also very true. The most difficult is most likelihy to build the first one, reacquire the supply-chain, engineering, knowhow, then, you can build the next ones at scale, certainly with both an economy of time and money.
I think this will stay a dream. Aren't "modern" nuclear plants such as the EPR all a) very late and b) massively over budget?
The EPR project is basically a complete train-wreck.
The Finnish one was both due to epic project management failures, from bad suppliers with dodgy welds, to changing the reactor design as it was being built to accommodate future regulations. Flamanville is also late and over budget for much of the same reasons (shoddy project management and unreliable suppliers; this time the concrete was out of specs as well). These sort of issues get sorted naturally if yew build in series instead of one-of-a kind.
The Chinese did not have any problem building two, and the British one is progressing more or less as planned.
Also, the EPR is not really a modern design.
That would appear to rule out any possibility of rapid increasing nuclear generating capacity if we are going to be forced to build them one after another in order to work out how to do it well?
> The Chinese did not have any problem building two
...that they've admitted to?
> the British one is progressing more or less as planned
2022: "The nuclear power station being built at Hinkley Point will start operating a year later than planned and will cost an extra £3bn, EDF has said"[0]
2021: "British Hinkley Point Nuclear Plant Delayed With Higher Costs First reactor will start producing power in June 2026. Cost will be 500 million pounds more than previously planned"[1]
2019: "Costs Rise Again for U.K. Hinkley Point Nuclear Project. Utility increases bill for Hinkley units, flags possible delay. EDF also cuts estimated return from plant to as little as 7.6%"[2]
My issue with it is more the spectacularly bad deal for the consumer that it represents. Originally the UK government insisted that "the private sector would shoulder both the development costs and risk", but then the financial crisis happened, and they ended up having to rework the deal to the benefit of EDF, who basically had them over a barrel.[3]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-61519609 [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/edf-sees-... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-25/edf-raise... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
- Timeframe: 01.06.2021 - 26.06.2022
- Import/Export country: Frankreich
Data:
- physical export balance 11,77 TWh
- monetary export balance: 2,13 Mrd €
- average import price/MWh: 133,71 €
- average export price/MWh: 169,91 €
It's good for Germany, not for France. Germany is selling electricity to France when prices are high, and buying when prices are low. And it is selling way more than buying.
Additionally, France is reducing the nuclear power share. Not by decommissioning working plants, but simply by not building as many new plants as would be necessary to keep the share.
The whole taxonomic discussion is a distraction anyway. We are long past some simple carbon reduction path making a dent (and also coming at high costs), so in the end will be about mitigation and even attempts at geoengineering - as usual politics are way behind the curve.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...
Which in turn means that the actual cost of nuclear power in France is higher than has been reported so far. The cost has just been postponed for decades, until now.
It's certainly bad timing to discover it now - what a nasty "perfect storm" of unfortunate events we are having for electricity in Europe this year. :(
Would one really claim France is succeeding at a national level in the technology space due to all those excellent technically-trained administrators?
> In my opinion that's also a reason why we completely fail in everything regarding digitalization, lawyers are simply not good technical problem solvers
Why are administrators supposed to be the ones actually solving technical problems? Aren't government administrators more likely to be reading and writing plans and contracts (which trained [ex-]lawyers must have _some_ useful skills...)?
AFAIK there's a weird through-line here where California new age and 70s "new left" ideology has some of its roots in the same early 20th century romanticism that was and I'm sure in various forms still is popular in Germany. Look up the Volkisch movement:
Nuclear is:
* Something like 3x more costly (levelized cost etc.) relative to solar and wind.
* Dangerous I: Yes, still dangerous for the foreseeable future. There are still significant risks, especially with nuclear waste storage, but to some extent with active plants. I'm not an expert on this, but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... with some examples from recent years.
* Dangerous II: Considering the state of infrastructure generally in some world states (e.g. the US) and profit motives, I do not believe the private nuclear industry can be trusted to deliver sufficient levels of safety.
* Dangerous III: Earthquakes, bombardment, and partisan/terrorist attacks are threats even to plants and storage facilities which are otherwise safe. And these occur with relative frequency; just think of the Zhaporizye (sp) plants a couple of months ago.
* Has greenhouse gas emission costs via mining of Uranium and such. Caveat: Not sure how much this compares to wind/solar/geothermal on one hand and coal/carbon-rich gas on the other hand/
* Is promoted to a great extent as a counterpart to nuclear arms programs. For nuclear weapons, you need fissile material, and you produce that in a nuclear reactor. Which then also produces heat, which you convert to power. Not all nuclear plants need to be like that, but again, no trust that these will go away.
Now, I am certainly no expert on the matter, so - convince me otherwise if you can.
I used to be very much against nuclear energy because of the unsolved issue around dealing with it's waste. Two decades later after learning about climate change and understanding more about pros and cons of different fuels and ways to generate electricity, it's obvious that nuclear energy can play a useful role in the transition off fossil fuels.
What has blocked fission is one thing: cost. For a while, fission advocates could stand pat, knowing that eventually fossil fuels would have to be moved away from, to fission, regardless of how expensive fission was. But now renewables have undercut fission, so that (somewhat lazy) expectation, that fission was almost entitled to be the post-fossil energy source, is no longer valid.
Political stability VS centralization of power is one. Nuclear power is highly centralized and vulnerable to corruption.
And also to war, terrorism and social unrest.
If we are to expect extreme climate and social instability in the next 50 years, it's safer to democratize and localize energy production and storage.
Renewables go in that direction. Nuclear goes in the opposite direction.
Instead renewables and especially solar as well as batteries and geothermal heat storage scale down very well and can build resilient networks.
After the horrific blackouts that happened in some countries people on HN should be able to grasp this...
No insurance company in the world is willing to insure a nuclear power plant and both risk and operation have been heavily subsidized since decades.
In fact renewable sources are even cheaper:
"The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...
Technocratic politics doesn't work in practice (ask USSR), and there should be no requirements of formal education on politicians (not even non technical). But politicians and administrators do need to (re)learn fast on-the-lob so in practice an IQ test requirement would be great for them and probably for them only (yes, IQ measures well only how fast someone can learn something and not at all how good is someone at doing something after they've learned it, but, guess what... knowing and (re)learning fast about stuff they don't actually do is kind of the job requirement for politicians and administrators - an 145 IQ high-school-dropout with or without some alchol or substance issues is kind of the best person for a job like Prime Minister, Energy or Finance Minister etc.).
Oh, and on the active (we know their effects, so they must exist) campaigns of disinformation against known to work tech, there's a solution for that: laws for spreading false-facts and disinformation + throwing in jail people breaking them. Glue your ass on the highway or spread misinformation on facebook fueling anti-nuclear protests: how about a 5 years prison sentence baby?
As a society we're so f terrible at allocating human resources, that it's no wonder that other resources like those involved in energy production are massively missalocated too...
These are schools that train bueurocrats, "technically excellent" yes, at politics and public service but not engineers. For example the new energy transition minister has a business degree and went to ENA.
I'm not one to call people elites but it's strange how you are using this to differentiate between France and German
The article describes a "Foundation" which was created 2021 to keep on building Gazprom 2. It neither has something to do with the decision to get out of nuclear energy (that was 2000) nor does it have anything to do with the Green party or any group which is against nuclear energy in Germany.
Issue that happens world wide is that politics is filled with “nice face” or “easy to buy” by corporations.
There are no engineers with passion or corruptless ppl joining politics.
Smile and wave guys, smile and wave.
Ps. Here in Poland we talk about German politics as they were those competent ones, go figure.
Don't be so harsh on your country. It's like that everywhere. But it gets better over time. It used to be a lot worse centuries ago...
which was funded by Russia behind the scenes, along with anti-fracking and any other alternatives to Russian fossil fuel exports.
>“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”
this was the former head of NATO in 2014, all of this has been known for a long time but nothing was done to prevent it
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...
Cheers from Saclay! :)
To be fair, Germans always (in the recent past anyway) cared more about environment issues in general. Recycling, cycling instead of driving, things like that. It was not mainstream in France until fairly recently. But yeah, the lack of understanding of scientific and technical aspects of energy production from a supposed nation of engineers is disturbing.
So there may be some conflict here.
What "science" do you use to design mechanisms to keep highly toxic materials away from human contact for 200,000 years?
It is not science. There is no science that can solve those problems. It is greed.
(I live in the South Pacific. The French are hated here for what they have done for their nuclear programme)
Alternative first step: build breeder reactors to recycle most of the waste into nuclear fuel and dump the smaller amount of leftovers in the mountain.
Where?
Where on Earth will you find a place that will still be like that in 200,000 years.
After a few hundred years it's no more radioactive than the rocks from which it came.
You seem to have the common misconception that "long half-life" = "more radioactive", when in fact "long half-life" = "less radioactive", by definition.
The other main thing to remember when burying nuclear waste is that it's important to keep it away from aquifers and generally any flow of water under the ground. Obviously you'd probably want to seal it in waterproof containers anyway, but it's better to not have to rely on the container staying intact over long spans of time.
They are basically a spiritual successor of the middle-age Catholic Church. All they talk is about sacrifice, suffering in our earthly life for better afterlife, bans, and restrictions. The only difference is that instead of God, they swear by "Klimawandel".
And of course, it's not relatively rich Green party members and supporters that suffer from their policies. They keep their SUVs, flight regularly, and the poorer half of the population will need to save the planet.
Atom energy is bad, but fracking is obviously fine for them. What a bunch of hypocrites.
I hope the Green get off their moral high horse or get replaced before they do even more harm to the German economy, wealth and even environment. They are just the most destructive force leading Germany to collapse.
It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. I did my PhD at the French nuclear energy agency and my French colleagues would always be puzzled when I talked about German energy policies and our anti-nuclear sentiment. But here in Germany the Green party will probably never reverse it's stance on nuclear energy, as their rise to popularity was strongly fueled by the anti-nuclear movement from the 80s and it's the one thing they can't abandon without losing a large number of followers.
I partially blame the highly ideological stance on the way people rise to power in politics and administration in Germany. In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...), whereas in Germany most people rise through social engineering and party politics and most top positions in the administration are filled by people with law degrees that don't have a clue about technology. In my opinion that's also a reason why we completely fail in everything regarding digitalization, lawyers are simply not good technical problem solvers.