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.
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.