The precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets hot ("decay heat"). Without cooling, it melts. Cooling was lost during the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere.
The "Great East Japan Earthquake" and its tsunami killed 19,759 people. The earthquake was a terrible tragedy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
Meanwhile, the precious fuel remained safely entombed within the concrete and steel vessel that was designed to contain it. Without cooling, the fuel got hot ("decay heat") and melted, always safely enclosed within the vessel.
Unfortunately, during attempts to cool the fuel in the aftermath of the earthquake, some radioactive fission products were released into the environment: caesium, iodine, xenon, etc. These fission products have been diluted and are harmless. See the section "Radionuclide release" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
How much harm did the radioactive fuel cause? Quoting Wikipedia:
No adverse health effects among non-worker Fukushima
residents have been documented that are directly
attributable to radiation exposure from the accident,
according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on
the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
Insurance compensation was paid for one death from lung
cancer (4 years later), but this does not prove a causal
relationship between radiation and the cancer.
Six other persons have been reported as having developed
cancer or leukemia. Two workers were hospitalized because
of radiation burns, and several other people sustained
physical injuries as a consequence of the accident.
This precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets very hot ("decay heat").
Fresh reactor fuel is even more full of potential energy but it doesn't get hot because uranium 235 and 238 have very long half lives. Fuel that has been used in a reactor gets hot primarily due to fission products (lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart) that undergo faster radioactive decay. There's also some decay heat from the production of transuranic elements (elements heavier than uranium, generated by neutron capture). But the fission product decay heat dwarfs the transuranic element contribution until several decades have passed.
It makes sense to be more afraid of the super duper radioactive material from spent fuel than the slightly radioactive material in brand new fuel. The radiotoxicity is vastly higher, the heat generation complicates handling/storage, and the chemical composition has gained dozens of elements scattered around the periodic table. In terms of usefulness, a fresh fuel rod is like a clean cardboard box and a used rod is more like a cardboard box that held a hot pizza. It's so dirty that it costs more to recycle it into something usable than to just sequester it and start with fresh material.
Long-term effects on health are disputed: http://csrp.jp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-UNSCEAR-Repor... http://www.fukushima-disaster.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/e... https://apjjf.org/thierry-ribault/4761/article
The nuclear accident cleanup cost is very high ad raising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...
The primary source for that wikipedia quote argues that the act of evacuating "just in case" caused deaths and that had people remained in place no such deaths would have occurred.
Over 65,000 people were evacuated from the vicinity. One such death, for example, was 102 year old Fumio Okubo who lived 30 km inland and hanged himself after being forced to move for no good reason.
There were 2,202 disaster-related deaths in Fukushima\*, according to the government’s Reconstruction Agency, from evacuation stress, interruption to medical care and suicide; so far, there has not been a single case of cancer linked to radiation from the plant.
That is prompting a shocking reassessment among some scholars: that the evacuation was an error. The human cost would have been far smaller had people stayed where they were, they argue. The wider death toll from the quake was 15,895, according to the National Police Agency.
Of the disaster-related deaths, 1,984 were people over the age of 65.
\* technically not "in Fukushima" but any deaths over the following seven years in the group evacuated from Fukushima.
During the Fukushima nuclear accident information was scarce and volatile, specialists said that evacuating up to Tokyo may prove necessary (this was revealed by Kan Naoto, then Japan's Prime Minister: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ).
This is biz as usual: after a war many armchair experts, especially those acting upon one of the parties, are quite sure that "tackling this was easy". During the event, they are nowhere to be found.
It's not clear that this is a specifically nuclear issue.
Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable, due to extreme bushfires destroying every building, would the stress on the elderly be any less?
An evacuation triggered by a nuclear major accident seems specific to nuclear to me, in the sense: if, instead of this nuclear plant, some field occupied by wind turbines or solar panels were build, there would be no need to evacuate.
> Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable
No human being can control nor counter this sort of event. We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.
Or add passive safety measures to nuclear power plants. Fukushima failed because it was still generating too much heat, but that excessive heat couldn’t power a turbine to cool itself down.
After such an accident some armchair experts are quite sure that it "could have been easily predicted". Before the accident (to "easily" prevent it) or during it they are nowhere to be found.
They knew. Especially after Forsmark, 2006 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J... ), which was a major subject for the industry. The first stages of a similar incident happened in France decades before.
... and it didn't change anything.
Everything is easy, nothing is perfect.
That's what Germany did, but such intermittent renewables can't power an industry-heavy country by themselves for obvious reasons (e.g. the sun tends to set at night)
No matter how much renewables capacity you want to install, you always need a controllable and reliable source for the baseload : that will be either coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. Only two of those are low carbon btw.
So let's see :
- Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro (unlike say, Norway).
- They don't want nuclear because politics.
- They became partly reliant on Russian gas, an extraordinary geopolitical own goal (and hilariously, sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated energy company as "green gas")
- The only other solution left is coal, lots of coal. That's what Germany has been doing despite political promises to phase it out.
The two main end results of this policy are :
- Germany has some of the worst CO2 emissions per kWh produced of large European countries. As I write this, it's emitting 23 times more than France (the poster child for nuclear) per kWh. Source : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
- An estimated 22.900 premature deaths every year across the EU from coal-fired power plants. Germany's plants cause an estimated 2490 premature deaths per year in neighbouring countries alone. Source : https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin...
Imagine if France had a nuclear incident causing 2490 deaths in neighbouring countries, every year ?
Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer than all other modes of transportation.
No. Because Fukushima. At the end of 2010 Germany enacted a law extending the operating life of nuclear reactors. Then Fukushima happened and all political parties in Germany closed nuclear reactors: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561
> sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated
Facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Planet_Energy
> The only other solution left is coal,
Facts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41768679
Yes, coal is a disaster. Nuclear risks (major accident, waste, proliferation...) is a potential disaster.
> deaths in neighbouring countries, every year
True, and quite sad. No nation yells because each is a culprit: emissions caused by France's fossil fuels (transportation, industry...) is far superior to those of the German gridpower system. We can agree that all this is a catastrophic state of affairs. Germany's nuclear phaseout is a drop in the sea and wasn't conducted due to some whim.
> Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer
The amount of victims of past accident is controversial, therefore this is controversial.
We'll never know. Doing history fiction, a more probable outcome would be a lot of people dying by "natural causes" in the next months. We talk about places that were mostly ghost cities for a decade, for some reason.
This common discourse of "but nobody died ever by the direct impact in the left eye, of a radioactive atom called John, on a Thursday", seems a little ridiculous frankly. If we have a pool of people that died, and we dismiss all this people one by one with different tricks and shades of "can't prove, not my fault", yes, of course, "nobody" died.
And Santa Cancer doesn't exist, is the parents.
They know that is false, we also know that is false, and they know that we know it, so what's the point of keeping saying that?
What is questionable, as you point out, is the application of different tricks and shades of "can't prove, must be nuclear" to claim all deaths in the pool as a direct result of nuclear.
As others have pointed out there are similar yearly figures for tenuous "coal deaths" as there are here for seven years of post disaster "evacuation deaths".
If we review average annual percent change on Thyroid cancer incidence, there was a more or less stable value between 2008 and 2011. Then in 2012 there is a sudden increase of 10,8% on Fukushima, versus a 3,7% for the whole Japan in the same year [1]. Some increase is normal in a population that is growing and aging but a jump, not so much.
We even have a control population: The Tochigi prefecture (at the South of Fukushima and bordering it). This landlocked prefecture has a big industrial complex, including a strong sector of X-ray machines makers. Tochigi has the lower increase on Thyroid cancer of the three between 2011 and 2012 (3,2% increase). [1]
The death ratio didn't changed, but people that is diagnosed with cancer does not die immediately, so just looking for mortality increase that year is a deceptive measure.
So, something happened in 2012 that increased Thyroid cancer on Fukushima more than in the rest of Japan.
Lets assume that we forget all about the elephant in the room, and past experiences where radioactivity accidents typically increased thyroid cancers. How would you explain that? Any alternative hypothesis?
-----------------
[1] Shibata A, Saji S, Kamiya K, Yasumura S. Trend in Cancer Incidence and Mortality in Fukushima From 2008 Through 2015. J Epidemiol. 2021 Dec 5;31(12):653-659
(The article covers only up to 2015 to remove artifacts from 2016 when the way to report cancer changed, causing another increase on the registers).
The obvious answer would be that radioactive iodine-131 entered the food chain and that strontium-90 also was being ingested by dairy cattle and was being concentrated (biologically magnified) in cow’s milk.
As demonstrated in Australia by Hedley Marston.
This seems unrelated to what was being discussed .. the direct attribution of deaths amoung the excavated cohort to nuclear causes.
Compiling statistics about a population is more difficult than doing so for a well-specified group of workers, and given the treatment of workers... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/special-report-he...
Was the evacuation poorly executed in Japan?
> Was the evacuation poorly executed in Japan?
This is a matter of debate. During the Fukushima nuclear accident information was scarce and volatile, specialists said that evacuating up to Tokyo may prove necessary (this was revealed by Kan Naoto, then Japan's Prime Minister: ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ). The extent of the implemented evacuation was considerably inferior. Nowadays, after the battle, according to some pro-nuclear no evacuation was necessary.
Much of the damage caused by natural events can be avoided with proper planning and prevention, but they cost money. Most natural defenses against extreme weather are also removed in order for developing land or extracting natural resources.
Is there a debate about those raw facts?
https://damfailures.org/case-study/oroville-dam-california-2...
> handled with care > proper planning and prevention
I agree. Everyone can fail. Letting very dangerous tiny material undetectable without a complex equipment and active for years getting out then be dispersed on huge areas by wind/rain/... is a nuclear exclusive. Moreover the most risky type of renewables (dams) has more inertia (it cannot trigger an accident in mere minutes, it is more robust). As we now have industrial renewables there is no reason to deploy nuclear anymore.
Come on.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_c...
Sarcasm aside, it's extremely frustrating when deaths are the only dimension people use to compare with other electricity sources. You can't just put on a blindfold and ignore all of the other factors. Just because only a handful of deaths can be directly attributed, doesn't mean nuclear isn't an absolute nightmare when it goes wrong.
The reactor itself is high enough to be safe from tsunamis.
Nukes, as with rockets, are complex. Many things have to go right and keep going right for them to operate as intended.
(See Rickover's "Paper Reactors" paper for a similar take on this.)
Another factor that contributed not only to Fukushima but other inundations following the Tohoku earthquake was that in response to the megathrust-fault slip, the east coast of Japan sank about a meter lower.[1] Engineers building seawalls failed to take this into account, as I understand.
I'd first realised that such quakes could lower land on the continental plate of megathrust faults when looking over satellite imagery of Banda Aceh after the 2004 Indonesian earthquake and tsunami. Regions along the coast were flooded long after the tsunami had passed, which I realised must have come from a lowering of the land itself.
Seattle and the Pacific Northwest may face similar issue should their Big One occur eventually.
________________________________
Notes:
1. "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003808061..." <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003808061...>
And so on.
Pile up enough binary choices, each individually cheap as dirt, and you've got a large problem.
Even dirt in quantity gets expensive to manage: dams (earthen), mines, levees, landslides, etc.
Nukes are complex with variance conditions that are extreme to the extreme.
The total cleanup costs were estimated to be between 50.5 and 71 trillion yen ($470 to $660 billion). For the cleanup, only 184.3 billion yen was reserved in the September supplementary budget of prefecture Fukushima, and some funds in the central government's third supplementary budget of 2011.
Are you aware about the current economic and demographic situation in Japan ?
It’s not good here. That money could’ve went to a lot more useful things. Also remember this was a man made disaster. The plant was not upgraded (as recommended) to meet new safety guidelines, because, as if a mega tsunami would actually happen, right ? Then right after the event the operator was downplaying the extent of meltdown for too long. The PM had to step in and get a proper response team organised.
And others on this same thread are trying to use the same disaster to paint nuclear as expensive.
Full story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...
What works is local and managed by a few people, any Big Thing is a colossus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... feet of clay collapse is all the more painful. This state of affairs doesn't seem to benefit to nuclear (vs. 'renewable sources').
We're talking about moving backup generator to the roof level work:
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2012/03/why-fukushima...
Subsidizing Japanese companies to develop technologies that may be exported elsewhere isn't that bad of a deal actually.
Do you think the technology already exists off the shelf already?
> does the tax payer get any of that privately held revenue back in return?
Japan's taxpayers also happen to be Japanese people employed in these companies, so they get their share of that revenues. And the price doesn't even account for the taxes that are paid back to the government directly.
I don't think there is any need to try justify a screw up on this level as being good. Fukushima was a disaster, economically and for the image of nuclear globally.
Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade. This was a disaster, politically, economically and environmentally. Yes some good will come from it, but ultimately, it was better off not happening. All that money could’ve and should’ve went on new and safer power plants.
French experts stated it clearly:
1/ 'Cour des comptes' (France's supreme audit institution) established the cost of the nuclear fleet at approximately 228 billion € (2012 Report "Les coûts de la filière nucléaire"). It was contested and is probably under evaluated because some costs were paid for on various budgets (defense, scientific research...) but isn't too far fetched.
2/ IRSN (Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire: Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute") stated that the cost of a single major accident may surpass 430 billions € ( https://www.irsn.fr/savoir-comprendre/crise/cout-economique-... ).
Worse, we store untreatable chemical waste forever (see Germany's many chemical waste dumps), unlike nuclear waste which will eventually become safe.
Chemical industry also produces very dangerous waste (Seveso...), I agree. This cannot serve as an excuse for nuclear, especially as, nowadays, we know how to industrially obtain electricity from renewable sources (no major accident similar to a nuclear's one, nor such dangerous waste).
Unfortunately the two sites have no english entries in Wikipedia, I just put them there because they are the two largest, but still mostly unknown to the general population.
With the exception of the locals, who fear for them leaking into their groundwaters. Which may be unfounded for Herfa-Neurode because that is sitting in a real stable formation, for now...
...which says nothing about larger timescales, which we are dealing with here, because much of the stuff stored there has no 'half-life', and is way nastier than anything which caused Seveso.
The other site, Ihlenberg, formerly called "Schönberg" ('nice Mountain', get it?) has a more interesting history. It's located right next to the former border between West-Germany and East-Germany, seperating them from the end of WW2 until reunification.
In those times they buried much western trash for money in rather 'hush-hush' and corrupt ways there. The nastiest ones. They were poor and needed the money. What exactly, and how much, at which position und which conditions is still unknown, and not easy to assess, because that probing would disturb the other nasty stuff which it is embedded in.
The fear there is much more founded, because it happend in rather uncoordinated ways, because of the 'hush-hushness' due to corruption, and that site is not stable. If it leaks, it has the potential to poison the whole Bay of Lübeck.
It also sits on something like a geologic fault line roughly spanning from Kiel in the Northwest to there, caused by glacial rebound of Scandinavia. Slowly and gentle for now, but one never knows, right?
That was that. As to an excuse for nuclear...
Do you really think all that oh so sustainable green shit is growing on trees? Maybe look into so called 'superfund sites' in the USA, and how they overlap with semiconductor production sites, which also applies to solar cells. Japan should have had some of those 'oopsies', too. But probably not spoken about, because the nail that is standing out has to be hammered in, right?
Wind? How long do they last? What's with the abrasion of the (mostly the front edges) blades while they operate and the entry of those stuff in form of microplastics into the environment?
Their disposal after use?
The large fundaments they need in the form of concrete, and the OH MY GAWD ALL THAT NASTY CARBON!1!! that is causing? Not to speak of the disturbance of ground water tables, when they have to go 15 to 40 meters (or even more) deep for stability.
Geothermals? You have much of that. Why is it used so rarely?
Sayonara.
As already stated by Kon5ole: we get the benefits and future generations gets the burden.
Nuclear (decommission, hot waste...) plays the same game.
> Do you really think all that oh so sustainable green shit is growing on trees?
No, but AFAIK we know ways (some are expensive) to alleviate part of their burden and the net result cannot be matched by other type of sources.
> Wind? How long do they last?
It depends. https://www.tvindkraft.dk/stories/a-new-nacelle-back-end/
> What's with the abrasion of the (mostly the front edges) blades while they operate and the entry of those stuff in form of microplastics into the environment?
Nothing is perfect. Nowadays a coating is used ( https://weatherguardwind.com/leading-edge-erosion/ ).
> Their disposal after use?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783908
> Geothermals? You have much of that. Why is it used so rarely?
Because in some places it can trigger earthquakes. Renewables is a set of solutions, none is perfect (one-size-fits-all). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely.
The only weird thing about it is that they're being hated on so much from the nuclear-bubble, while the bubble simultaneously drags the shield of innovation and environment protection. Meanwhile, there is negligible innovation in nuclear and saving the environment 2024 means acting fast. Nothing about nuclear is fast.
[2] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/ausbau-erne...
PS. because it automatically comes up: no, Germany could not phase out coal before nuclear because there are much more jobs connected to coal and no politician would survive such a fast exit. How important it is, can be seen from the name of the commission tasked with the coal phase out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
Now. For years they switched to coal. Even today, Germany falls to the siren songs of the gas lobby, who promise a €1.5tn investment into gas infrastructure will be happily written off for the sake of the planet.
This simply isn't true. Coal use for electricity has been declining consistently in Germany and especially since the first shutdowns of nuclear plants (cca 2011). And the replacement was not natural gas as in e.g. the US.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?time...
Looks like coal usage for electricity production indeed only went up for ~3 years around 2011, probably we can consider that a mere blip within the downward trend.
Wind and solar indeed seem to pick up what nuclear used to bring to the energy mix. Gas usage is only slightly up over 30 years, which doesn’t look like it’s directly substituting nuclear — but surely it could have gone down had nuclear be kept around?
(Personally, I wish politics would have pushed harder against coal and simply ignored nuclear for a couple more decades. But political feasibility is important ofc, and I don’t know how hard of a sell that would have been in 2010.)
In general what I think is people make a pariah out of Germany and its energy choices, but this is mostly based on false data, which tells me enough. The debate is riddled with false data which lead to even worse conclusions. In the end the numbers are positive and that's all what's important for me. There are better candidates for criticism when looked at individually or even globally, what the individual strategies accomplish on a global scale. So when looked at globally, the German energy transition has accomplished a ton. E.g. the 600TW of solar this year never would've happened without it, which more than offsets the 10-15GW of nuclear they switched off, most of which was past its retirement age.
A point you certainly can argue about, is that coal should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear, but that discussion is over now.
For gas use electricity production is just a minor use. Most gas is consumed by industry and for heating purposes. Not enough happened in Germany in the last years electrifying them.
Right. Coal stayed online where it would have otherwise gone away. That was true for close to a decade.
> gas use electricity production is just a minor
And growing. Look at your own chart. The change in natural gas electrical generation is about as large as solar’s entire controbution.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...
As a result, Germany’s industrial production is falling. Which will be great for the environment if countries who previously imported goods produced by Germany’s clean nuclear power don’t just switch to goods produced by China and South East Asia’s far dirtier electricity.
Of course, China is steadily increasing its own nuclear energy production, so it’ll end up being clean eventually, and likely sooner than us given how efficient they are.
But it’s not like we’re reducing dependency on nuclear power. It’s more like we’re trading the risk of nuclear accident in our own backyards for something else. I tend to think that the something else is the risk that the eastern world’s factories stop accepting the western world’s increasingly worthless paper money, which they’ll be in a much stronger position to do once we’re no longer able to manufacture what we need due to environmental concerns.
The causality here seems debatable.
Cheap Chinese goods which take market share from German goods aren't just cheap because of cheap energy.
In Spain, where we didn's shut down nuclear energy nor have oil or coal, energy intensive industry is also threatening or shutting down (https://www.miningweekly.com/article/alcoa-threatens-to-shut...). The threats are barely hidden "subsidize our costs or else...".
(this was later un-done in 2009 and then redone in 2011 which is the cause of confusion).
IE. Germany got INCREDIBLY lucky that China went hard into renewables and dropped the price of them dramatically. Because they did basically replace or plan to replace all the nuclear plants with coal plants.
Lets have a look at how the German electricity production has shifted over the years:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
- Fossil gas: 2011 -> 2023 = stable.
- Coal: 2011 -> 2023 = large reduction
At the height of the energy crisis when half the French nuclear fleet was off line due to corrosion issues.
Germany temporarily reopened a few mothballed coal power plants to keep the lights on in France.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
You should probably have started with a correct statement, not a falsehood that you had to rephrase into a correct statement.
As we've concluded it evidently was not. Both coal and nuclear power has been replaced with renewables.
I would suggest you stop spreading falsehoods.
Those require a large amount of baseload energy.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR...
Note that France has lost more nuclear generation than Germany over this period.
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...
Maybe it's not always clever to use US-logic on the rest of the world.
Germany is not Texas.
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(passage from Dec. 2018 Physics Today; Texas natural gas is even cheaper than that now)
The yearly balance (imports - exports) is key.
2023 (last full year): 9.34 / 8.92
Source: https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=...
Moreover FR/DE isn't the main path anymore, and as DE sometimes plays as a gateway we have to take the complete balance into account.
As the other commenter wrote: trading, transfers, etc. is normal in the EU grid. You buy cheap, you sell expensive. Just because Germany imports electricity, doesn't mean it has to. The German grid, even in its unfinished state, allows turning off power generation where it doesn't make sense financially, and they can do that fast because they don't have those slow nuclear power generators clogging up the grid.
We'll see what comes of it when the year is finished and official sources release their information. Until then, you can translate this page here from the Federal Network Agency: https://www.smard.de/page/home/topic-article/444/213848
In the last paragraphs they write on in/exports and that they've bought cheap from France and Belgium in the last quarter. Why shouldn't they? France needs to have their reactors running. They are a constant deficit on the French taxpayer. Therefore, it is cheap on the EEX.
Nope. Albeit being shock-full of nuclear reactors... France always maintains fossil fuel active in order to load-follow. Add 'peakers' (needed during peak-demand) and here is the result: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+...
Details: there are safety-related limits (power modulation proportion, duration of a pause needed after each modulation, modulations frequency...) to nuclear load-following capacity, and the very combustible status is a major parameter.
Pertinent document (French ahead!): https://www.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
« un réacteur peut varier de 100 % à 20 % de puissance en une demi-heure, et remonter aussi vite après un palier d’au moins deux heures, et ce deux fois par jour »
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
> Edf indeed needs to sell as much as they can
No. EDF always needed to sell as much as they can, even before AREHN, because maintaining a high load factor for their nuclear reactors is financially key. An idle industrial reactor is a financial disaster.
An ICE car is 20-30% efficient, an EV is 90% efficient. Generally we are looking at a grid expansion, but it is not massive.
See this amazing chart on rejected vs. useful energy:
An EV is 85-90% efficient with power coming out of the batteries. However, the charging efficiency of the batteries is at about 80%. So the overall efficiency is 80% of 90%, or 72%.
472g of C02 per kW/h as we speak[1]. 20 times more than France and its nuclear.
A resounding success…
Ironically there was a spike in coal usage in 2022, that was caused both by the war Russia started against Ukraine and even more so by France having to shut down too many nuclear reactors for repairs - German coal had to fill part of that gap.
They aren't “optimistic”, nuclear simply doesn't emit CO2 directly, and indirect emissions are dwarfed by direct emissions of fossils fuel plants.
> What can and is being done is to replace coal as quickly as possible and that is happening.
It has been happening for the past 13 years, and there's no end in sight. We'll be able to have the same discussion in 13 years with only marginal progress (maybe they'll be around 200g/kWh at that point if we're being optimistic…).
> and even more so by France having to shut down too many nuclear reactors for repairs - German coal had to fill part of that gap.
And so what? French nuclear has been filling the gap for defunct German nuclear for more than a decade now … And Germany could have filled this gap with coal even if they had much less regular coal use thanks to their nuclear.
There has been a strong decline in coal usage in the last years, both because the CO2 prices have started to move the balance and also because the buildup of renewables has been accelerated again. And no, France hasn't been "filling the gap". Until very recently, Germany had been a constant net electricity exporter.
It may cause a “lot of emissions” per kilogram of enriched Uranium, but it is very low compared to the amount of energy it produces because you really need little Uranium to produce tons of energy (that's also why all French nuclear fuel waste over 60 years of nuclear industry fit in a single room).
> There has been a strong decline in coal usage in the last years
This has been the narrative for the past 10 years, yet here we are. And in ten years Germany will still be producing way too much CO2 from its coal plants…
> And no, France hasn't been "filling the gap". Until very recently, Germany had been a constant net electricity exporter.
So is France, but that doesn't mean there's no gap to fill when the wind isn't blowing…
Centrifuge enrichment and improved extraction techniques (high quality ore in Canada or else in-situ leaching) mean CO2 emissions are very low.
Would you care to provide references for CO2 emissions from already built nuclear power stations (preferably not the infamous StormSmith and Sovacool papers)?
For new-build, Hinkley Point C "not an EPD" make interesting bed-time reading. https://www.edfenergy.com/sites/default/files/hpc_-_life_cyc...
What can be done and what is being done are miles apart. Investing into new fossil fueled power plants is not what the best thing Germany could be doing, nor is it what they should be doing. In 20 years there will be a large fleet of fossil fueled power plants and people will be again arguing that historically they burned too much of it but nothing can be done retroactively. Changing the current plans of new fossil fueled power plant would not be a retroactively change today, but it will be in 20 years.
No, the Fukushima accident was decisive. Just before, at the end of 2010, the operating life of nuclear reactors has been extended by law. The Fukushima happened and public opinion reversed, wanting an as-quick-as-possible nuclear phaseout. Not a single political party could save those reactors: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561
When faced with pressure to save money but still deliver, weighed up against a very low risk of catastrophe in their time, they did the mental math and cut corners, found ways around the safeguarding policies previously put in place and kicked infrastructure spending down the line.
The big problem with nuclear is not technological, it’s guaranteeing that whoever is responsible for it will be competent, capable and solvent for hundreds of years.
When the tsunami hit and Fukushima #1 lost power and was at risk of meltdown, TEPCO was ready to scuttle the reactors by dumping seawater in them. It would have rendered the reactors unusable, but meltdown would be prevented.
The Japanese government at the time, coming from the Prime Minister (Naoto Kan) himself, denied TEPCO from scuttling them because the government wanted the reactors usable. TEPCO was begging for authorization but it was not meant to be.
So what happened was the meltdown happened and the reactors became unusable anyway.
The blame was then scapegoated on TEPCO, because elite politicians surely can't and shouldn't be prosecuted for their ineptitude.
What happened at Fukushima #1 was a human failure that did not have to happen.
Bittersweet revenge was that the incumbent party at that time, the Democrat Party of Japan, lost the subsequent general election and the party subsequently fell apart.
The nuclear (TEPCO) people in the field were and are amazing, and it is a cardinal sin they got scapegoated for political purposes.
"Everything would have been fine if it weren't for the politicians" is not a path forward. These sorts of disasters will continue to happen.
Isn't it always true, for such matters?
As we cannot avoid committing errors it seems better to prefer a way without any risk of major accident (very dangerous radioactive things, difficult to cleanup, travelling long-distance thanks to wind, rain...). No wonder renewable sources quickly gain traction.
That isn't how this works.
We have a replacement for nuclear: renewables.
Renewables can be a complement to other power sources, but to even suggest they can be a "replacement" for nuclear power indicates either naivety or ignorance.
As I said: "The big problem with nuclear is not technological, it’s guaranteeing that whoever is responsible for it will be competent, capable and solvent for hundreds of years."
Humans working in the nuclear industry are "the" nuclear industry. By definition all economical sectors are arranged around human workers. Remove each human and the industry will lose its reason to exist.
I mean. If the story is true (which I have my doubts about). Then the simple change required would have been to make it clear that TEPCO has the sole authority to decide to scuttle the reactors. The politicians could have been morons going on a power trip all they wanted, and the reactors would have been safely scuttled.
If you are a firefighter you wouldn't ask the government if you should pump gasoline or water on a fire. Why did the people managing the nuclear reactors gave the government an opportunity to choose wrong? (Or rather, why was the system set up such that it was not already clearly defined under which technical circumstances the reactor must be be scuttled.)
For the simple reason that the 3/11 Tohoku Earthquake defied and rewrote essentially all the geological/maritime scientific and political expectations up to that point.
I doubt the same errors will happen today, but hindsight is 20/20.
Don't worry, experts are perfectly able to maintain a high level of safety (nope), then to assess correctly during an accident (nope: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-ody... ), and also to manage the aftermath (nope... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/special-report-he... ).
PM Naoto Kan infamously declared "I know nuclear!" in unilaterally ordering TEPCO around during the crisis and ultimately denying their request to scuttle the reactors. Nevermind that TEPCO had the finest nuclear engineers Japan could muster at that moment.
For his valiant achievement of causing a nuclear meltdown and turning back the clock on nuclear power for the better part of a century, PM Naoto Kan was rewarded with merely the loss of his premiership, loss of his parliament seat in the subsequent general election (regained in the same election by proportional vote), and the victim card (sympathy from guys like you).
TEPCO's engineers meanwhile got dragged through the judicial mud before they were finally cleared a few years ago, the train to repair their reputation having left the station long ago.
A solid source detailing the story would be useful.
TEPCO ignored his order to stop pumping in order to avoid re-criticality, and Kan soon accepted TEPCO views on the matter: This seems sourced to me (no mention of scuttling anything): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naoto_Kan#Fukushima_nuclear_ac...
> was rewarded with merely the loss of
I don't think so. Japan was, then, in a political turmoil with 4 prime ministers from September 2006 to June 2010 (when his mandate began): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Jap...
He passed a bill to promote the use renewable energy. This is sufficient, even for this ex nuclear enthusiast, to be blacklisted and villified.
Something I found out recently was that the city of Brussels discharged raw sewage into the rivers until 2007. This from a wealthy city at the heart of the European project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
Radioactive waste disposal is seldom paired with a cost-benefit analysis. Perhaps this is because the benefits are harder to quantify.
Does anyone know how many lives will be saved by spending an estimated 4.7B EUR to commence retrieval of the low and intermediate level waste from the Asse II mine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
4.7B EUR could provide humanitarian aid to many around the world, saving lives and enabling yet more to more fully reach their potential.
In the case of the Asse II mine it is not clear how strongly connected the water at the mine is to water at the surface. Given it is a salt mine I would not expect a strong connection.
> Everyone has consistently treated mining waste as an unavoidable side effect of mining
Yes, there are better and worse ways to dispose of it. Tailings are a huge problem and have caused many a dam disaster. Plainly Difficult Youtube channel dam disasters makes for sobering viewing. https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/playlists
No wonder that dumping nuclear waste to river and oceans is cheaper than having to safely store it for at least a couple of centuries.
If we can't responsibly keep track of the waste we're producing then we shouldn't produce it. I'm pro-nuclear, and I think we can do it, but we need to be the kind of civilization that can plan beyond the next quarter first.
[1] https://oceanliteracy.unesco.org/ocean-exploration/, https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/exploration.html
Now, seriously, screwing with ecosystems we know nothing about is a very bad idea, even if for no other reason than we being unable to study them after we turn them into radioactive deserts.
Dig into the rising costs, and you find root causes like 3 mile island showing the industry it needed to increase maintenance spending. It wasn’t some arbitrary overreaction but simply the damage accumulated enough to cost a billion+ dollar asset. Thus much of that “increased” spending is simply asset preservation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
If you were to commit such a large amount of cash - a reparation for the disaster - would you spend it all on this?
Do you mean that the Fukushima nuclear accident dumped locally in a few days 0.45% of all dumped nuclear waste during the last ~80 years?"? If so it seems non-negligible to me.
> 20 years earlier (nothing on tectonic timescales) this wouldn't be up to much discussion
Not sure about this. Maybe ~50 years ago, and even so the accident at Three Mile Island (1979) didn't pollute much but triggered quite a bunch of discussions.
> would you spend it all on this?
Yes, because there is no other realistic way: it is about losing citizens' trust and having to cope with other nations' claims, whatever the real risk. Associations of women were created to periodically measure radioactivity in various areas! In Japan! No government exposed to such distrust can decide to ignore it. A stain was made, it has to be cleaned.
AFAIK in theory the people knows what is good for itself, and therefore making voters happy is governing well.
ObQuote: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
TMI was an expensive mistake but the public wasn't at risk.
The ocean already contains a billion tons of uranium and is mildly radioactive, the cannister and components are far too heavy to float or get carried much by currents, water is a fantastic radiation blocker (a few meters away and you're quite safe) and carries away exces heat and there's almost no life on the abyssal planes.
I really should get around to properly writing up all the details and background knowledge in a blog post at some point... (the above is missing a lot, including references, common objections and numbers)
Personally I think deep bore hole disposal in geologically inactive regions makes the most sense.
Can't decide if it's a success of nuclear or a failure. Leaning towards success:
- ~900 tons of super duper radioactive material is more or less safely sitting in steel enclosures
- we're (as a global civilization) slowly but surely figuring out how to move the hazardous waste to a safer storage, and it may only (ahem) take a couple generations
- OTOH another big earthquake/tsunami can potentially wash it all away and release clumps of radioactive and poisonous metals to the environment...?