I don't understand this argument, isn't Japan known for its earthquakes?
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with that, just trying to describe public opinion.
Germany is also a “well-run country” if you want to run with the old anti-Soviet argument.
Yes, rationally the maths is a lot different, but countering emotions with facts is hard. (And then consider facts like long term deposition of nuclear waste etc.)
As compared to the Germans? Supposed rule-sticklers without earthquakes.
What should make people more comfortable
that Germany will be able to safeguard
against their known risks?
There are ~450 plants currently operating in the world, with an average age of multiple decades. Plus all the ones that have been retired. That's a lot of data.
You don't really have to take anybody's word for it. They're safe.
They are not zero-risk, because literally nothing is. We also absolutely know the risks of fossil fuels (the planet is burning, and buyers potentially become dependent on hostile countries like Russia) and the current limitations of renewable energy sources.
So, to answer your questions: that is how you judge their potential safety in Germany or anywhere else.
We were extremely lucky with Chernobyl that young men sacrificed themselves, else a large chunk of Europe would be uninhabitable.
We were extremely lucky with Fukushima all the radiated water just went into the ocean. When it was going down there was nothing we could do but stand back and watch how bad it got.
Of course on a regular day nuclear is safe, but every now and then things go extremely badly, and sooner or later we’re not going to get so lucky. We will simply have to watch and retreat from death.
Deepwater horizon was really bad. Plenty of coal accidents are real bad.
Not having energy is really bad.
Nuclear is the safest form of energy - and catastrophic failures are found in other forms of energy production.
We have tools, equipment and people to put out oil rig fires, clean up oil spills and all that.
Obviously Exxon Valdez was very, very bad. So was deep water horizon. Now imagine they were nuclear plantS that went bad and we didn’t get lucky like in the past. It would be many orders of magnitudes worse, for tens of thousands of years.
Now imagine humans can't even go within a few hundred meters to clean anything up, and we have no robots that can either.
Also imagine that humans can't live within 500km ever again.
Nuclear is clearly the best option, right up until the point it's the worst possible thing for humans and planet earth, which seems to happen about every 30 years or so. As I said, we've been lucky with it so far.
In other words, on a risk adjusted basis, the data continually shows nuclear is the safest and most economical bet for removing fossil fuels and all their problems from the energy mix. You’d need a a relative fuckton of very very bad accidents where everything went wrong and by all accounts that doesn’t really happen.
Given how little time we have to react, and how long it takes to build a nuclear plant (and how expensive they are), putting our hopes on nuclear this late in the game is foolhardy and will never save us.
We have no choice but to go with what will have a meaningful impact in the immediate future (5 year horizon) - wind, solar, hydro. Many countries are already past 50% renewable, and many are climbing towards 100%.
Oh, and mass production of carbon zeolithes to regenerate the sucked empty agricultural fields, to make them into something like 'terra preta' without having to use too much fertilizer, instead of uselessly sequestrating it somewhere underground.
Terraforming, so to speak. Like the 'atmospheric processors' from Alien II(Aliens).
edit: Instead of thinking all the raw materials for wind,solar&batteries grow on trees, without any externalities, sustainability problems, and no emissions at all. Which is a fucking cargo cult!
Uh huh. And when exactly will they be online and performing all this work for us?
As well as the time and cost to build the nukes, how much time and money will it take to build the machines to suck the carbon out of the air.
I'm all for solutions, but 30+ years isn't going to cut it. 10 years is a huge risk.
Even after a few decades late into the game?
What is so hard to get about the idea that we can actually modulate the greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, now that we know that and how they influence our living conditions?
It would even make sense to have something like this in case of the next supervolcano eruption. Call it 'weather control done right', if you like.
Yes, of course that is a great hypothetical option for 30-50 years from now.
We and our children don't have time to wait for that.
Next you're going to tell me if I just wait till fusion works we'll all be saved and can power these "atmospheric processors" with those!
Nope, I won't. Because anything except aneutronic fusion will be much dirtier than the 'nukes' we have now. Which is hypothetical right now, and maybe stays so forever.
Which can't be said about 'nukes', neither the ones we have, or the ones we could have with a little bit of more investment into materials science. (Liquid salt, etc.)
We and our children won't make it with 'renewables' alone, because they emit at least as much greenhouse gasses, or more when you consider all the externalities going into their production. They are not the solution.
Edit: /me mumbling something like 'Look into fucking GESAMTSTOFFMENGENKREISLAUF'
It’s fair to bring up hypotheticals, but you have to do it for everything you’re comparing!
It’s especially important to include “never happened” scenarios for brand new, or lightly used, methods of energy extraction!
What are the worst case scenarios for windmills? Solar panels?
Imagine a major Soviet-level accident at a rare earth element mine.
Imagine a large supply of rare earth metals are improperly labeled.
It might not be as bad as a major nuclear accident … then again maybe it would be.
Not really. If you actually measure it, its not actually that bad.
> We were extremely lucky with Chernobyl that young men sacrificed themselves, else a large chunk of Europe would be uninhabitable.
Often claimed but, the scientific bases for this claim is beyond shake. Maybe at the very worse you could say that radiation that was slightly dangerous would have been measurable all over Europe, but even that is a stretch.
> The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad.
Fukushima killed people because of rush unnecessary evacuations. Nobody actually died of radiation, maybe a very small group of people will have a slightly higher likely-hood of getting cancer, but even that will most likely not even be measruable.
The actual earth quake and the water killed far more people. The nuclear event made the news because its a novelty, while we have seen many people killed by earthquake and water.
> sooner or later we’re not going to get so lucky.
Given that safety increases over time, even the chance of a minor incident is increasingly less likely.
And if we actually built modern plants not 1970 design we could make it almost impossible for any significant risk to exist at all. But of course research and progress has essentially been stopped.
It is easy to talk for someone who has not experienced the fallout of an nuclear powerplant burning a few countries over. Experiencing such a thing (hopefully understandably) changes how favourable people see the technology.
On top of that the question of safe nuclear waste storage is far from solved in dense Europe. From an ethical standpoint I think an approach of "Lol we need energy now, let's have later generations deal with this and pay for it" highly questionable.
If you produce one kW/h of nuclear energy today, my opinion is that the costs of the potential fallout in the weird rare cataatrophe scenario and the waste storage for the whole lifetime of the waste need to be paid ahead. That, however would make nuclear uneconmical.
It is easy to talk for someone who has not
experienced the fallout of an nuclear
powerplant burning a few countries over.
While it it not the same as experiencing this terror firsthand, my grandparents lived not very far away from you during the Chernobyl incident. It was very frightening.
Also, I live not so far away from Three Mile Island here in the USA. As well as very several currently functioning nuclear plants.
So while it is "easy" for me to talk about nuclear power, it is not purely fantasy for me.
If you produce one kW/h of nuclear energy today
my opinion is that the costs of the potential
fallout in the weird rare cataatrophe scenario
and the waste storage for the whole lifetime of
the waste need to be paid ahead. That, however
would make nuclear uneconmical.
I am looking at this from the perspective of global warming, which will have disastrous consequences for many billions of people.
Should we also add the costs of global warming to each kW/h of energy produced by coal or natural gas?
Yes. That's what carbon pricing/taxes is all about after all: counting the externalities.
Its basically not statically significant.
There might be a somewhat larger effects on some treatable cancers, but the numbers are still incredibly small compared with the fear mongering and of course compared with other forms of energy used back then.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/children-...
You are like better of with having a nuclear fallout every could decades rather then a coal plant.
As opposed to many other reliable generation types which have global catastrophic consequences† while running normally.
And by "reliable" I mean can consistently provide power more that 50% of the time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto...
† E.g., climate change.
Compare it dollar for dollar.
You can get a lot of curtailment, oversupply, and storage for $12/W
Also if you look at France, nuclear's not doing so hot on the availability front.
Meanwhile, in Ontario, Canada, where I live, nuclear+hydro generate base load 24/7 with little issue:
They're hardly the super-100%-reliable baseload advertised, or anything approaching 'too cheap to meter' though.
Of course, it takes a significant amount diesel fuel, energy, and mining to make EV related equipment, too.
A full life-cycle analysis of nuclear power isn't really favorable. Germany is a net power exporter. Sure, there is more to it since the energy isn't generated in correct place at the right time, the infrastructure has problems and then some.
But in the end nuclear isn't a solution here. Expensive, slow, another resource dependence and nobody knows yet how to get cheap uranium in the future. The developments previously are going in the correct direction and that direction did not include nuclear power in the meantime.
Of course these obvious problems are not mentioned by name. Which makes one think that there are one-hundred unnamed ones beyond once the initial one-hundred would have been dealt with.
Given a appropriate attention and care, these can all be planned and accounted for.
Some issues I see are accountants, management, laziness, "somebody else's problem", etc. Those are businesses and they will try all the well-known ways to save money. Which the politicians will also encourage, because nuclear power will need to be justified continuously (like all other forms).
There also are water issues, not just river temperature (France, this summer), we also had a lot of European rivers with barely enough or not enough for most of the normal uses of those rivers this summer - and predictions are we'll have more such extremes. So, ensuring water supplies will be adequate at all times will become harder too, and much more expensive.
Not to mention that Russia - Rosatom - will again play a big role in Western European energy when it comes to nuclear. (https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2022/russias-multi-mill...)
Air plane and human space flight accidents are extremely rare but they still occur despite all the rules and regulations and the training and the many levels of precautions, but nuclear has to be even better.
Good thing that 1), nuclear fuel storage in europe tend to have almost decade long stockpiles, 2), there are plenty of alternative to Rosatom to buy nuclear fuel from, 3), nuclear fuel is fairly easy to import compared to massive amount of natural gas.
Sweden is only a stone throw away and they have nuclear fuel production that they sell as exports. They also acquired the design and patents to produce nuclear fuel that fit power plants from Rosatom. Those 20% of fuel that Russia sell is a solvable problem, but as with anything it would cost money, investments and a bit of time to ramp up production.
So the politics goes like this, cause maintenance delay, condemn nuclear for maintenance delay. Seriously, these delays are being handled in a reasonable time-frames and most of the reactors will be back when they are really needed.
Consider that with the age of these reactors, wind-farms would have to be mostly rebuilt to a larger degree.
Also, if we actually made progress on technology then we could have had moved on to air-cooled designs but sadly we can't have nice things.
There's various kinds of human errors (and humans will continue to make errors), equipment malfunctions, problems during equipment maintenance and so on.
Can you call "human incompetence" something to be planned for? Yes, sure, you have to plan for it. Can you plan it well enough so that it simply doesn't happen? Doesn't seem to have happened so far. Does it concern me too much? No. But do other people have to have the same risk tolerance? Also no. It's been proven that people are averse to rare-but-acute risks and can more easily accept frequent small risks (i.e. radiation and contamination from coal plants).
All that is to say that if people are concerned, it's on us to understand the reasons, not just shout into that void that "nuclear is SAFE!!!"
Better designs would have been here long ago if we actually had continued with this technology, but its not that current reactors are truly bad designs.
The problem with them is more that they don't fit into how energy markets and energy investments are made and have been made. That goes for both the US and Europe.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_ac...
Completely cleaning up and taking apart the plant could take a generation or more, and comes with a hefty price tag. In 2016 the government increased its cost estimate to about $75.7 billion, part of the overall Fukushima disaster price tag of $202.5 billion.
I'm a fan of nuclear, but those are eye-watering numbers.
Is land that expensive in Japan? Or is it some sort of ambition to prove they can repair that fuckup? O maybe there is a lot of money to be made in a cleanup operation?
This isn't a theoretical point, either, wild mushrooms are still unsafe to eat in some parts of central Europe, almost four decades after Tchernobyl.
The whole Fukushima disaster is another lesson in the prevention paradox. We see low death and disease numbers, and somehow many people think that's because the disaster wasn't that bad after all, completely ignoring the literal tens of billions of dollars that the Japanese government and TEPCO expended to keep them that low.
If (enough) so, it is spread across the globe so it become negligible. Those lands are highly polluted so it can't be live.
This mushrooms are still unsafe stuff is mostly a myth. What's correct is that these mushrooms still measure over the arbitrary level set government regulation during the height of panic about nuclear.
> We see low death and disease numbers, and somehow many people think that's because the disaster wasn't that bad after all, completely ignoring the literal tens of billions of dollars that the Japanese government
Actually much of those efforts have actually killed and hurt more people then it saved. Creating a panic and evacuating a major city because of some unfounded unscientific assessment of the danger.
I'm sure all the money spent on cleaning the grass has saved millions of people. The reality is that many of those efforts are political show making, security theater, like the TSA.
I'm sure there are some reasonable measures as well, but much of it is vastly overblown in terms of actual effects it would have.
See in Tschernobyl where very little was done, and people in the exclusion zone (where there is more radiation then in Japan) are totally fine.
Japan has removed the top ~8 inches of topsoil from the affected areas around fukashima, I think that is really impressive, but even then I would never allow my family to move there for any reason.
That said, I'm generally in favor of nuclear. I just don't want my kid rolling around in contaminated soil.
Ignorance is bliss. Contaminated soils abound across the industrialized world, it's just that most people have no idea.
Moreover, there's legitimate pressure to keep it that way as people irrationally freak out when they learn something is "contaminated". It turns out that often times the best way to promote soil remediation is to turn a blind eye (at least to some extent), as once contamination is identified costs sore through the roof as people begin demanding ever onerous mandates, which is why lead thresholds are set considerably lower than for other similarly problematic contaminants.
Just this past week we called up the city inspector to ask him to check out some painting work being done at a house whose yard abuts our own. We've done it before as we have two young children. The inspector is very nice and accommodating, and there's basically zero risk of anyone getting fined or handed any stop-work order. He simply nudges the painters to take the barest of safety measures, e.g. tarping, to prevent leaded paint flakes from dispersing. And what more can you ask? Turning every house scraping job into a super fund site would just be ridiculous, but if the law treated lead the same way it treated nuclear, that's exactly what would be demanded.
Absolutely right. And most of the industrial contaminates are a lot harder to detect than radiation. Even utterly minuscule amounts of radioactive isotopes are almost trivial to detect.
Like all the radon and the heavy metals in the ground, water, and dust in Niger and Kazakhstan?
The arguments break down into:
* Pretending that solar/wind isnt 5x cheaper per unit.
* Pretending that only pricey batteries rather than cheap pumped storage can accomodate its variability.
* Pretending that there is a geographical shortage of potential pumped storage locations.
* Pretending that you'd need weeks of power storage to get to 99% carbon free rather than hours.
* Pretending that nuclear power does load following rather than relying upon gas to fill in its gaps like solar ans wind.
* Pretending that nuclear power always produces 100% stable power. France manages 72%. Denmark has a wind farm that manages 68%.
The only context in which nuclear power is cost effective is if you are keeping rickety old plants running longer than their scheduled lifetime, which isnt safe OR if you are using it to subsidize nuclear arsenals/subs/etc.
We're letting imaginary numbers dictate the future of humanity, "why did you let the world die, it was cheaper than fixing it" isn't a valid excuse}
And if you want to talk about number show much does it cost to the German healthcare system to take care of the hundred/thousands of people getting sick and dying because of coal pollution ?
I think the argument would be that the risk wasn't mitigated although it should've been known. There may be other known risks as well.
Isn't the pacific now significantly polluted by radiation from the plant? That seems like a pretty bad outcome, even if the direct number of deaths was relatively low.
The entire pacific is 7.10e20 L of water. Even the area around Japan is thousands of times more liters of water. To give you an idea, in 2011, 41% of caught marine species on the coast of Fukushima had Cs137 concentrations higher than the normal limits (100bq/kg, which is still really damn low). In 2015, that was 0.05%
So, no, the pacific doesn't give a damn about Fukushima. And so do the people. You're exposed to about 2100Bq in a year.
Nuclear reactors probably have more in common with the fabs where chips are made. Both are enormously complex engineering challenges where each plant costs tens of billions of dollars and gets more expensive with each new generation of technology.
Whereas solar panels have followed the path of silicon chips and gotten cheaper as they are produced in ever greater numbers, to the point where the panels themselves make up less than half the build cost for utility scale solar.
Re. the low death toll, perhaps it's quite low because people were forced to evacuate. Evacuation and the marking of land as contaminated by radioactivity is considered a very high price to pay.
Especially in dense Europe. In the US there is more space for surch things to happen and have it only affect a stretch of uninhabitated wildland.
Japan is known for being technologically advanced and safe, so the earthquake shouldn't have mattered.
> What should really put this into perspective is that air pollutions is estimated to kill millions every year.
This is certainly a great point, one I tend to find convincing, but it seems very hard to convince others on similar grounds: Radiation is just way more immediately scary.
I don't understand this argument, isn't Japan known for its earthquakes? Which are essentially non-existent in Germany?
In my opinion Fukushima should be an argument _for_ nuclear power. The death toll was really low, roughly 2000, and many of those death were caused by the evacuation rather than radiation. The death toll of the tsunami/earthquake was 15000 according to wikipedia.
What should really put this into perspective is that air pollutions is estimated to kill millions every year.
And all of this is with reactors that are really old. If we would put the same amount of engineering resources into nuclear as we put into chips I am sure the number of deaths would go down a few order of magnitudes.