>"Nuclear power and fossil fuels brought us here. They caused this crisis, they are not the solution."
>Strong and at times emotional speech by Robert Habeck, after weeks under pressure. Defending his actions in government, but standing by Green values. He got a standing ovation.
Reality: the Greens and their allies spent half a trillion USD on the "energy transition" and turned off perfectly good nuclear reactors. Result: energy shortages and diplomatic submission to Russia. And now they blame nuclear for it. If they had spent that half a trillion on new nuclear reactors, Germany would be an energy superpower. As it stands, they're having to burn coal and wood to get through the winter.
Minority parties can make the governing parties do things. UKIP wasn't in government but they made the Conservative party promise a referendum, which the eurosceptic side won -- and that was in a FPTP system! The Greens weren't in government but they had a lot of influence in the Bundestag and in the various Länder. The anti-nuclear cause has been around for decades, they creep in everywhere like a fungus.
Merkel adopted the anti-nuclear stance to take votes from the Greens, and her administration accelerated the shutdown of Germany's nuclear power plants after Fukushima. Don't blame the Greens, although I do think they are a dogmatic single-issue party and don't see the forest for the trees.
And can we talk about how stupid and actively malicious it is to use the Fukushima accident as a reason for shutting down nuclear plants in Germany?
Fukushima: nuclear plant in a seismically very active region in very close proximity to the ocean where tsunamis are not really a rarity
vs.
German nuclear plants: not very seismically active (if at all), no tsunamis i've ever heard of, not counting floods as those are
1. easier to foresee and manage and
2. very much less intense than a sudden wall of water razing everything in its path.
Also in Japan you kinda have to build near the coast since its surrounded by ocean on all sides while being stretched out long and not that wide with mountains as a backbone in the middle. Germany on the other hand only has the North and Baltic Sea at its northern end then progressively gets higher above sea level the more south you go, ultimately ending at the northern end of the Alps.
This decision and especially this reasoning didn't make sense then and still doesn't nowadays. It was just a kneejerk reaction to retain voter support by exploiting the fear of the uneducated and the anti-nuclear crowd.
The Fukushima reactors and a lot of the german ones were built by the same company. They overlooked the flood risk on the japanese coast (which has huge tsunamis every few decades). What did they overlook elsewhere? After Chernobyl, politicians promised that western reactors could not possibly explode. Fukushima proved them wrong.
The Soviet power plan released radioactivity in the air, make an entire area inhabitable and killed a few dozen a people.
Fukushima did nothing of this, everything stayed inside the structure, no radioactivity went out.
As Fukushima had no recovery generators available (no fuel in them), it is a great proof that a totally out of control modern power plant is not deadly.
The Fukushima disaster cleanup cost a trillion dollars. Over a hundred thousand people were (at least temporarily) displaced. I would call this a pretty darn big failure.
The trillion dollar figure is a bit of a stretch and includes a lot of stuff that didn't need to happen or was double counted.
Less motivated reasoning gives about $300bn which would still be enough to easily replace every coal and oil plant in the country with renewables (as well as half of the gas).
Comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl is not really justified
Chernobyl: Core meltdown and catastrophic explosion of entire reactor. Caused by gross negligence when safety system disabled.
Direct deaths: <100
Estimated indirect deaths: 4 to 16 thousand
Fukushima: Caused by 4th largest earthquake in history. No core explosion. Hydrogen explosion destroyed non structural part of building (this was by design). Core meltdown but largely contained. Contamination of air/water from venting to atmosphere.
Direct deaths: 1 employee died of cancer
Estimated indirect deaths: 300-2000
Your reasoning why nuclear accidents couldn't happen in Germany is moving the goalpost though. First the narrative was that they couldn't happen, then it was that they couldn't happen in western style reactors.
The reality is that nuclear reactors can lead to big events in unforeseen situations, like also Fukushima was. It's impossible to foresee what the cause for the next big event will be.
> Reality: the Greens and their allies spent half a trillion USD on the "energy transition" and turned off perfectly good nuclear reactors. Result: energy shortages and diplomatic submission to Russia.
Um no. Renewable energy is now actually cheaper than nuclear energy. You could build renewable energy + storage within the same range of cost. The problem is the former government shut down nuclear power plants and then did exactly nothing.
The nuclear power plants aren't perfectly good. They are very old and would need a lot of investment if run for more than a couple of month.
And germany isn't even near electric energy shortages. It's currently supplying france with a lot of energy.
If electric heating were used everywhere from now on, there would be an electricity problem. But for that the electric heaters are missing.
It's only recently cheap. It's true that if they had pivoted to Nuclear instead, they would not had these energy shortfalls and maybe even Russia wouldn't have felt they had the leverage to invade Ukraine.
The global output of battery storage isn't high enough to switch to solar/wind. Energy is a solved problem. It's a natural progression of mankind's command of energy. Wood->Coal->Oil->Fission. There's enough Uranium in the ground and oceans to supply humanity for million of years. We can't let a few accidents hold us back for ever.
The coal plants are running as an alternative to gas plants, as is described in the link you posted. The shutdown of the nuclear plants was long planned. Germany managed to decrease dependence on fossil fuels for electricity production while shutting down nuclear plants.
Germany was facing a cold winter, without energy for heating, and the potential for rolling blackouts. With this change, it does not eliminate the threat but makes it less likely.
Who in their right mind would decom any type of energy that could help stave off pain for their citizenship - especially one that has no carbon footprint.
Oh yeah, that's why even the Greens (owning their whole existence as a political party to the anti-nuclear movement of the 80s and 90s) is in favor of keeping those plants online a little bit longer. Remember, the current, and hastly implemented nuclear exit, was a CDU led kneejerk reaction, and rollback of the exit from the exit of nuclear, after Fukushima.
I don't think this is fair. Although I think some among the anti-nuclear movement may have had subversive intent, most of the people who ended up aligning with that movement did have good intentions. They were reasoning that in the long term, nuclear power would bring great misery to humanity. Long term thinking is good, right? If you believe in the eventual probability of those doomsday scenarios, and you value the well being of your fellow citizens, then shouldn't you try to prevent that outcome? I see no moral fault here.
And shaming these people isn't the solution. The solution is to bring them around to seeing the virtue of using nuclear power. They may be wrong about the relative safety of nuclear power but they aren't morally defective people, so shaming them isn't appropriate.
It also downplays the fossil fuel industry's responsibility for anti-nuclear advocacy. Like gosh it's not the literal billions of dollars this industry spends lobbying congress and subsidizing pro-fossil-fuel perspectives in media and think-tanks, it's the healing-crystals wacko's fault!
Much like recycling or jaywalking, it's a way for an industry to diffuse and downplay their own advocacy and push the fault onto the public.
Like yeah, it would be better if Greenpeace supported nuclear... but they're not the ones sitting in senator's offices getting bills passed subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry. Even the "climate change" bill had to throw almost 10% of its spending to fossil-fuel subsidies.
There are no doubt some people who are arguing against nuclear with exactly those pure intentions underlying their advocacy. Given the experience of the US Navy in nuclear power generation, I don't think their doomsday scenarios are inevitable.
I think a lot of people are negatively disposed to nuclear based on beliefs that are not justified by the relative risk and reward of nuclear power generation at this stage in humanity's technological evolution. I don't think we have a combination of (better, cleaner, more reliable) base load generation power source that's available right now (which is the question to consider when contemplating "we have a working nuclear reactor; should we shut it down?")
> Given the experience of the US Navy in nuclear power generation, I don't think their doomsday scenarios are inevitable.
I often see this given as a reason for why nuclear power generation can be safe, but I think it overlooks the fact that military reactors operate in a very different context from civilian ones.
For a start, do we know how expensive (per unit energy) US Navy reactors are? It doesn't matter how safe they are if they are twice as expensive as renewables (plus storage / power-to-gas).
More generally, though, given the secrecy around military and nuclear programs, would we even know how many near-meltdowns and embarrassing accidents US Navy reactors have experienced (at least in the past few decades)?
We would have known about near meltdowns by now, which probably would have been more common in the early decades of nuclear navy power, considering we know things like how the air force nearly destroyed a huge swath of North Carolina due to an accident involving a nuclear bomb for example.
do we know how expensive (per unit energy)
US Navy reactors are? It doesn't matter how safe
they are if they are twice as expensive as
renewables (plus storage / power-to-gas).
Renewables (and fusion, although that's arguably a renewable) are obviously the end goal but until they can fill 100% of our energy needs the real cost comparison needs to be "the cost of nuclear" versus "the cost of fossil fuel plus the cost of the damage done by fossil fuels."
renewables make sense if you can prove to me that you can make them reliable like nuclear, but you can't. Someday I suppose a high density, cheap "battery" tech will happen that will make that true, but right now it's simply not true and the Germans are getting ready to find that out this winter, unfortunately via much higher prices via power imported from adjacent countries using dino-fuel and likely blackouts from time to time.
To be clear, the capacity factor of France's nuclear power stations is "about 70%"[a] (and was "61 percent"[b] in 1988), while recent offshore wind farms manage a "65% capacity factor"[c].
It's also worth noting that there is less parallelism in nuclear reactor designs than in wind farms, so a single mechanical or structural fault (or just the need for regular maintenance and inspection) can take out an entire nuclear reactor, whereas a wind farm can shut down a single turbine without much impact.
So there are certainly differences in the sorts of guarantees that the different types of power station can provide, but I think you need to be a lot more precise about what you mean by "reliable" in order to judge what, if anything, renewables are lacking as an alternative energy source.
> For a start, do we know how expensive (per unit energy) US Navy reactors are?
Price does not matter. It has to work reliably, not only in calm days of peace, but during times of war. Having a source of power to move the big boats without relying on external supplies is worth the price. There even were experiments to generate jetfuel using nuclear power on carriers, certainly not because it is cheap.
I agree. The problem with that position is that pretty much everyone ever believed that their actions would make things better, even if they were very wrong and just made everything worse.
Nevertheless, I don't think the anti-nuclear movement is evil. They're guided by extreme fear, not malice. I don't know how you can bring them around though, unless your offering some form of therapy. But even with that, would they accept it? Would you accept therapy to change some of your deeply held beliefs that you don't view as 'wrong'?
Sure, but I don't believe you run into a lot of actually evil villains in politics that only do what they do because they want to see suffering and want their action to scale instead of ripping the wings from a butterfly one by one. Stalin or Mao didn't just enjoy seeing peasants starve, they believed that sacrificing a million here and there is the price to pay for the communist utopia they thought they were building.
Certainly, I was just pointing out that that's the very problem with the position that someone or some group shouldn't be morally judged for things they do/cause while having good intentions. It's a tough problem, and I guess we're mostly basing our judgement on results. Push through a stupid policy and it's expensive but nobody freezes and you'll be forgotten. Do the same and be unlucky and a million citizens freeze because of it and you won't be forgiven.
"Extreme" seems an overstatement, and I don't think it's necessarily the main motivator for a lot of people that are anti-nuclear. Many don't like it because they believe large-scale power sources supplied and run by (or inevitably being a source of profit for) mega-corporations are a bad idea in general. Others because there are genuine environmental consequences to and risks with uranium mining and storage of radioactive waste that we don't have complete solutions for, even if by almost any measure those consequences are less serious than they are for fossil fuel extraction and consequent GHG emissions. And others because they're skeptical it can scale up quickly and economically enough to reach necessary emissions targets (I have one foot in that camp, at least for my own country).
Ultimately I think increased nuclear power will be accepted as a "necessary evil" or "least worst" solution in most developed countries, though it's hard to see it happening here in Australia, despite the fact we supply much of the world's uranium (*) and arguably have a fair number of appropriate options for waste storage.
* actually we have almost 30% of known viable resources, but only contribute 8% or 9% of the world total supply currently, producing less than a 5th of Kazakhstan, by far the most prolific supplier.
It looks extreme to me, and from my experience is closely related with a general fear of GMOs, strong dislike for plastics, a preference for "alternative medicine" etc. It's fundamentally an emotional approach that isn't concerned with "how do we deal with the waste?" but just grips on to that to rationalize the intuitive fear. Maybe I'm the crazy one, but I am not overly concerned about nuclear plants, I'll gladly live next to one (but not too close, I don't want to live in a shadow half the day) and have the waste containers stored a few hundred meters below me. And my willingness just increases with a thought of all the great things energy does for us.
Of course there are risks, but everything has risks attached -- we calculate the probabilities and then stop worrying about the risks if they're minuscule. And of course there's an economic part to consider, but I'm pretty sure if you counted the amount of hours Germans have spent in 2022 talking about the energy crisis, we could've been well on our way to 100% nuclear coverage if we had spent that time productively instead.
I agree it's irrational fear, but I can understand for many that if they had to choose between living near something that there's no reason to believe will ever prove immediately fatal (a coal-fired power station) and one for which there have been historic examples of unexpected fatal explosions, they'd choose the former, all else being equal (which of course we know it isn't).
In Germany's case I agree it makes no sense, given the number of reactors located in neighbouring countries and the fact Germany has an established nuclear industry with experienced engineers etc. (and more limited renewable options), and is generally well positioned to scale up rapidly to replace fossil-fuel based power.
No one who was for blocking nuclear power was doing any long term thinking, I can assure you. That was cold war paranoia thinking that suddenly everyone would be engaging in nuclear warfare. They would have realized we are not ready to transition away from nuclear power because there is no alternative for our power requirements beyond nuclear energy or dirty energy. Long term thinking would realize that the march we are on currently with climate change will also end up looking a lot like a world after nuclear warfare disrupts society.
No, it was short term thinking that has brought on these opinions. Thats who funds these anti nuclear opinions anyway, people who are invested such to benefit in the near term over preventing adoption of nuclear energy, not actual scientists engaging in long term thinking.
Well-meaning anti-nuclear activists have reasoned incorrectly, but that doesn't mean they should be shamed. Shame is not the appropriate way to correct somebody who has reasoned incorrectly. Shaming them is counterproductive since they know themselves to have good intentions. If you want to bring them around to your point of view, you should use rational arguments.
Use shaming tactics against those who know they've done wrong, like those paid to lie by coal companies. They actually have something to be ashamed of.
most of the people who ended up aligning with that
movement did have good intentions. They were reasoning
that in the long term, nuclear power would bring great
misery to humanity. Long term thinking is good, right?
The problem is that those with good intentions didn't think very hard about the issue.
Even the occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl is preferable to the irreversible fossil fuel-induced hell we're about to experience, with potentially billions of people displaced and so forth. It's especially galling since protecting the planet was their entire raison d'etre.
And there were certainly who opposed nuclear power with evil intentions, specifically the fossil fuel industry.
I'm not sure which one is worse. At least the fossil fuel industry never claimed to be noble.
Intentions do not matter, as emotions do not. This is an calculable problem to almost 99.9% certainty. Nuclear waste will not pose a problem to 99.95% of all human population for the next 1ky even in the worst case. Even if chernobyl was 10 times as bad, it wouldn't cause large-scale issues, and chernobyl was almost the worst possible nuclear incident possible at the technology level of the time.
We have so much other, more real, more tangible and even right now happening vectors of "problems", starting with Covid, not ending with the real chance of WW3, and we whine about miniscule pollution of square kilometers at worst? Hard to get.
Other one I would quote is "perfection is the enemy of good" - it seems nuclear is good, but they would not give up only on good. It had to be perfect where renewable sources are 100% ideal.
Germany heats with gas, which is plenty in storage and again reasonably priced at markets. Germany isn't heating with electricity and their won't be, realistically, any rolling black-outs. Keeping the reactors online is good so, as it means less coal being burned, being ablebto trafe electricity on the markets, frees up the roughly 12% of electricity generate by gas (at least to an extent) for heating. And signals stability to the energy markets, as those have been crazy lately.
Around half of the reactors are shut down for maintenance. Some scheduled, others for faults discovered during inspection. They expect to be back online only at the beginning of 2023.
>Germany heats with gas [...] Germany isn't heating with electricity
And whose fault is that? Why can't their much-vaunted Energiewende manage to keep people warm? After half a trillion dollars of public investment in green energy?
There is no widespread infrastructure for heating with electricity, the dominant sources for heating homes are gas and oil. The reason for that is that until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was unforeseeable that there would be a shortage of gas or oil. And let's not forget that the current "shortage" is a result of political decisions, and not because gas and oil have ceased to exist.
Germany is in the process of moving to greener energies, not just on the state level but also in private homes. But that's mostly true for new constructions of which there are comparatively few. Coincidentally, the German government has recently announced to de-incentivize new construction and rather suggest updating existing houses. It will take many years, though, to get all those houses to move off of gas and oil, especially because Germany has a relatively high percentage of rentals over home owners. There's no real reason for landlords to update the heating system of their investment properties because the cost for heating is paid by the tenants anyway.
> ...it was unforeseeable that there would be a shortage of gas or oil.
If you don't supply it yourself then it isn't unforeseeable. In fact, I'd say it's inevitable. It's only unforeseeable as to when it will occur. Energy independence is a great thing for this reason.
>There is no widespread infrastructure for heating with electricity, the dominant sources for heating homes are gas and oil
Yes and why is that? Electric heating is not some space-age technology. It has been around for a century. There are countries where it's ubiquitous.
Saying "Germany doesn't have the infra for electric heating" is not an explanation. It's just restating the problem in different words. It isn't some accident, it happened by deliberate policy.
I keep harping on this point, but the German government has spent cumulatively half a trillion USD on moving toward green energy, ostensibly in the name of combatting global warming. And yet with all that money and effort, they couldn't transition towards ubiquitous electric heating? Instead, they wrecked their one dependable green energy source (uranium) and became further dependent on Russian gas, which fuels global warming even more (despite propaganda to the contrary). It's all because wind and solar are intermittent, there's nowhere near enough storage capacity on the grid and there won't be for decades, and their politicians have their heads in the sand about the whole business.
Gas price was 4 ct/kWh two years ago, electricity at 35 ct/kWh. People always take what is currently the cheapest.
> It's all because wind and solar are intermittent, there's nowhere near enough storage capacity on the grid and there won't be for decades, and their politicians have their heads in the sand about the whole business.
They didn't put their heads in the sand. The former government sabotaged the whole renewable industry again and again (e. g. they didn't allow building new renewable power plants for years, storage facilities need to pay for the grid when they store energy and when they release it so they can't be competetitive to gas).
Care to elaborate? Or wouldn't have Russia invaded if Germany (and a large part of Europe, by the way) did rely on Russian gas? That kind of doesn't make any sense, since it was Russia who cut gas supply, and not vice versa. So Russia doesn't seem to have any interest in selling gas to Europe.
One reason is that the lawmakers have allowed those same people to stop the construction of any source of green energy when it is too disturbing for the landscape, or too noisy for them to sleep, or whatever they come up with.
So lesser countries in Europe already managed to have higher count of green energy sources, while lots of construction yards in Germany are blocked on ongoing court cases.
The previous government's. Scientists have been criticizing them for years now that they failed to provide the necessary infrastructure and statutory framework for the "Energiewende" to work.
Simply install an air conditioner and you will have very efficient room heating (no hot water, though). They cost about 1500€ and are really easy to install. I know in Bulgaria many households have switched from oil heating to air conditioners.
That's not that easy with German homes as they are heated with hot water pipes and walls are typically solid. You could maybe install a device that emits hot air in a single room, but to install a forced air system, you'd need to in essence remodel the entire home. In addition, you'd have worse outcomes because now the nice warm floors are gone.
In that case you need to install air/water heat pump, which not only heats the house but also the potable water. They're more costly than regular heat pumps, but are _better_ choice than individual heat pump units around the house.
It's a more difficult situation if the house lacks water circulation (heated floors/radiators).
Why an air/water heat pump and not just a water heat pump? AFAIk heat pumps are becoming quite popular in Germany in recent years and are definitely a very viable option unlike "air conditioning".
I did just that to my house in France. Everybody here (south east of France) does that. Seen the savings and that it both cools in the summer and warms in the summer, it's a complete no-brainer. In addition to that I switched my open fireplace to an enclosed one: the efficiency when burning wood is greatly increased. And I stockpiled on wood. So should there be electricity shortage preventing me from using HVAC to warm the house, at least nobody is going to prevent me from putting wood in the fireplace.
If there is a gas shortage later in winter, which may well happen, people can switch to their cheap electric heaters to at least keep their living rooms warm.
I cannot believe that the green party was willing to severly increase the risk of major blackouts out of pure vanity.
But there may be not enough gas at the end of the winter. And in that case you should gather any other source of electricity available, even if it covers only 8 percent, as nuclear energy currently does.
Then how are they planning to supply the electricity for electric cars in future, if they cannot even supply sufficient electricity for some small heaters? An electric heater usually consumes 2000 Watt, that is not really something that should bring the electric grid to its knees.
By producing more energy, having less cars, better insulated houses, ... It's been calculated and described a thousand times by now by various institutes how this can be done. But obviously this can't be done in a few months, after the previous governments ignored experts for years.
> An electric heater usually consumes 2000 Watt, that is not really something that should bring the electric grid to its knees.
That's an additional 40GW when all gas-heated apartments use one of those heaters. You'd need ~30 additional nuclear reactors to sustain such a load -- the 3 remaining ones in Germany provide 1.4GW each.
Germany also uses electric stoves for cooking more than gas. An electric stove uses 2000-5000W. The grid handles everyone turning on their stove around the same times fine. Maybe heaters will have to run on top of that, but likely most won't have their space heater running while also cooking.
What are you talking about? The reason why electric stoves don't bring the grid down is because it is designed with this load in mind. Adding electric heating to the grid is an additional load, because people won't stop cooking when it's cold, nor would they stop heating if they're hungry.
That's why experts are warning people to not suddenly switch from gas to electric heating this winter.
Fortunately it's possible to use the not yet mothballed nuke plants to split H20 and inject the resulting hydrogen into the natural gas supply for use in heating systems and industrial processes. Blend specifics matter, but the necessaries are well studied and adequately well understood https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hyblend-opportunities-....
People in the west have forgotten how to address scaled emergency problem sets with physical world engineering rather than the crutch of financialization so yeah, I'm as optimistic as you are. But it would be orders of magnitude less costly and easier than sticking to the status quo, and also offers a model for potentially using intermittents like wind and solar to generate H2 for injection into the NG pipeline infra. I expect we'll see Japan making pioneering strides in this area over the coming decade, but it takes more than a parallelclimate crisis, global pandemic and return of industrialised warfare to Europe to shock business leaders, politicians and the public out of cognitive dissonance and complacency evidently.
They do, but they probably don't consume that much energy. I doubt Germany expects to have electricity blackouts, since they're actually going to sell some to France in exchange for gas.
> Germany isn't heating with electricity and their won't be, realistically, any rolling black-outs.
This would be the case during normal times. We're not in normal times though. There has been widespread panic buying of portable electric heaters all throughout summer. Owners of single-family homes are also increasingly switching to heat pumps as the main source of heating (as is strongly encouraged by the government).
If we actually run into a gas crunch this winter, blackouts could ironically be a knock-on effect if everyone turns on their electric heater at the same time.
Electricity does not magically create gas for heating. Electricity in europe is primarily threatened by France failing to adequately maintain their nuclear power plants.
More importantly: Gas-to-power. This summer, for some time we were using more gas than in previous years, because there was not enough wind blowing for power generation. Blackouts must be prevented, so we will use it for power generation if necessary.
No, but when natural gas is 15% of your electrical generation, it does magically free up natural gas that would have otherwise been burnt for electricity.
We don't even know how the temperatures are going to be. It currently points to an average / mild winter, so I don't know where you are getting "a very cold" winter from if the weather base isn't even there yet.
True, and yet solar photovoltaics has almost 4x the carbon footprint of nuclear fission per unit energy produced, and wind has approximately the same as nuclear.
So, for the context of this conversation where Germany is prefering solar and wind to nuclear, and worse, turning to coal in place of natural gas, nuclear is effectively carbon free.
You're arguing with people who only see the downside of nuclear power, but refuse to see any downside to other sources of energy. Here we see this for the carbon footprint, but it's also the case many other impacts:
Strip-mining for coal, devastating huge areas? This is fine.
Radioactive emissions from burning coal? Don't care.
Deaths caused by coal pollution and coal mining, compared to deaths caused by nuclear power? 'tis but a scratch.
Permanent problems with groundwater caused by decades of coal mining? Lalala I can't hear you.
Well, I definitely agree with the decision, but at one point there were some valid things to consider:
1) they had been not doing normal routine maintenance that wasn't going to be needed if they were shutting down, and figuring out what all needs to be done to change gears does take some time (and careful thought)
2) they were at one time buying their fuel for nuclear plants from Russia
Now I believe both of these points have been addressed, and I'm glad of it, but it was not totally unreasonable to raise them and not immediately change course.
The current plan I believe is to only run them until they run out of their current fuel. No new fuel was a "hard line" drawn by the green party to agree to extending at all.
Whether one is pro nuclear or not, I think it makes sense to look at the specific situation at hand. Was it a mistake to shut down all nuclear reactors while not pushing for more renewables and replacing all gas and coal plants first? I think so. Should the last three remaining nuclear plants be kept online? I don't think so.
Germany's main source of heating is gas and yes, gas is used to generate electricity, so nuclear can reduce gas consumption. However, only about 10% of gas (see edit) is used for electricity and Germany has enough electricity. In a worst-case scenario, those nuclear power plants can help stabilize the grid, but they are not needed in general.
The downside is, that they were already in the process of being shut down. They now need to undergo new safety checks, the fuel rods are nearly spend and this will cost 100 millions. Money which can be spent better.
This winter also isn't predicted to be particularly cold, so the full gas storages in combination with the soon opening LNG-terminals will suffice.
EDIT: I made a mistake, 10% of electricity is gas.
> only about 10% of gas is used for electricity and Germany has enough electricity
German household electricity is double the price of America’s and considerably higher than France or Italy [1]. Were this not the case, more houses could be heated with electricity instead of gas and the coming recession made less painful.
Absolutely. But the switch to heat pumps will take time and won't change the situation right now. The political procrastination of the last decades is biting Germany in the ass right now.
> the switch to heat pumps will take time and won't change the situation right now
It could make a dent if seriously pursued, e.g. by focussing transitioning vulnerable households. The economic benefits of reduced electricity prices would also immediately accrue.
There are currently multiple plans in the work and some already started. The goal right now is to install at least 500k heat-pumps per year. But, there aren't enough skilled heating contractors, so they are working on solving this as well.
Comparing france with germany is stupid. Btw these prices are old for Europe, you can basically x2 them (except france) the reason hey it is stupid, is because 0,19 is the number that the people Pay, But Not the actual number (they have fixed pricing kinda)
In fact france would be more expansive now, than germany.
> Germany's main source of heating is gas and yes, gas is used to generate electricity, so nuclear can reduce gas consumption. However, only about 10% of gas is used for electricity and Germany has enough electricity. In a worst-case scenario, those nuclear power plants can help stabilize the grid, but they are not needed in general.
A number of cities also use district heating, where the heat is taken directly from the cooling circuits of nearby power stations. No idea what percentage of total heating this is and if nuclear plants are involved here, but this would be another way how those plants could (theoretically) contribute to heating.
I usually belong to the anti-nuclear crowd, but even I don't think that would be an issue.
From what I know, one of the iron rules of nuclear plant design is that the contaminated stuff never leaves the reactor building. Even the steam circuit that powers the generator is separated from the (contaminated) primary circuit and receives energy through a heat exchanger [1].
The lines for district heating would probably be separated from the primary circuit by several of those.
> The downside is, that they were already in the process of being shut down. They now need to undergo new safety checks, the fuel rods are nearly spend and this will cost 100 millions. Money which can be spent better.
Oh no, here's hoping they learned a lesson from that money.
Without affordable gas, they'll be buying electric heaters. I believe that's already under way. [1]
Right now, gas prices are falling (since the gas storages are full) and federal assistance is currently in the works. So, while possible, I don't know how likely of a problem this will be.
Also maintenance, but still in comparison, it probably isn't a lot. The last figure I have is about 17 billion for all those federal programs and investments (but those include cheaper public transport tickets as well as other things).
However, I don't thing those costs are comparable. Those nuclear plants won't have a dramatic impact on the price of gas or energy, so the cost of the federal programs will be there nonetheless.
> Those nuclear plants won't have a dramatic impact on the price of gas or energy, so the cost of the federal programs will be there nonetheless.
Even if it doesn’t change the price of gas, wouldn’t it mean buying/burning less gas than you would otherwise? That, in itself, would be a huge savings.
Maybe I’m just missing some data, but this seems like a no-brainer to me on several levels. It’s hard for me to understand anyone being against this.
They estimate about 1-2% in gas savings, due to the fact that nuclear is base load and gas plants are used mostly for grid compensation. If the gas storages were empty, and the LNG-terminals weren't about to go online, I would like to see the nuclear plants be kept online. Right now, I'd rather they would invest that money in the future.
I think it will be part of a future solution. But building new right now isn't cheap and will just take to long. In addition the old reactors are pretty expensive. I'm looking forward to see how new reactor designs and modular solutions will fare in the next few years.
I agree completely. Along with solar, wind, hydro (+storage appropriate to each) and probably even natural gas peaker plants.
> But building new right now isn't cheap and will just take to long.
Yep, definitely - but it should be done. If you're interested I'd suggest listening to the most recent Odd Lots with Jigar Shah, who's in charge of the DoE loan program (~300B in capital). He talks about how building reactors right now is like building airports - each one a custom specimen for the given landscape and conditions - whereas he believes we should move to a model of building airplanes, mass-producing reactors that fit only where conditions permit out of reusable components.
> I'm looking forward to see how new reactor designs and modular solutions will fare in the next few years.
Wind conditions are more important question this winter than temperature. Good conditions will mean low power prices, meaning that industries, schools, apartment buildings and homes can afford to pay their bills without government bailing people out.
A worse case scenario would had been windless cold winter with gas supplies empty, and a government that have to bailout both the industry, the government institutions, and private people. 3 nuclear power plants provides a bit of backup for that situation.
> However, only about 10% of gas is used for electricity and Germany has enough electricity.
Energy prices in Germany suggest otherwise. Also, Germany is facing a gas pinch given the geopolitics right now, so freeing up 10% is nothing to sneeze at.
Due to the fact that nuclear is base load and gas plants are mostly used for grid compensation, it would result (according to estimates) in a 1-2% increase in gas usage.
It’s true that Germany might have enough electricity, but we are sharing with EU. And it so happens that in the biggest neighbor, France, half of the nuclear reactors are stopped for maintenance and the French might need to import considerable amounts of electricity this winter.
They are planning to get them up and running till winter, but I don't know enough to have an opinion on whether this is achievable and if not how much of a problem that would be and if those three nuclear plants would make a difference.
You could add cooling towers and they would not have had the problem. But it would still increase the costs further to a degree that it may not be viable anymore.
The high energy prices in Germany are to a large degree political. For instance to make the switch to renewables. It doesn't mean the base cost of energy is high. It is in fact lower for the most part.
The three plants don't do too much, only when you really need every Watt of energy you can muster. Not worthwhile economically to let them run really, as the decommission needs to be reorganized. The owners of the plant weren't too happy.
Yes, but it's not Germany alone.
A lot of the electricity produced in Germany is exported to other countries.
And if this is not longer possible this would be a problem for them too.
More aggravating is the circumstance that France, another European country that usually exports electricity cannot too as many (half) of their fleet of nuclear reactors are in maintenance.
They are planning to get them up and running till winter, but I don't know enough to have an opinion on whether this is achievable and if not how much of a problem that would be and if those three nuclear plants would make a difference.
Doesn't look too good from my laymans point of view [1]:
"Title: Maintenance on eight French nuclear reactors delayed by strike
...
French nuclear availability is currently at 51% of total capacity with 26 reactors offline for maintenance."
I don't know about any evidence to support this claim. By law, industry will be shut down before any private home is affected. About 40% of gas and electricity is respectively used in industries. That means there is a lot of reserve before any home gets a blackout. Short term rolling blackout maybe, anything longer highly unlikely.
EDIT: Just saw the edit. Yeah, that doesn't seem like a big deal to me. In 2019 after a damaged cable, there was a 31-hour blackout in some parts of Berlin. In comparison a 2 to 3 hour one happens all the time during storms etc.
It's more sinister than that. Russia was financially extremely incentivized to let this happen and indeed, it seems the so-called "environmental groups" in Germany and elsewhere are really fronts for the Russian government: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
Designed to cynically "care" about the environment, but in reality meant to destroy Europe's energy independence.
Are there any more specific references what exactly has come to light here?
As it stands, this question just reads as a pretty cheap attempt to frame any and all environmental concerns or pro-renewable/anti-fossil fuel advocacy as russian propaganda. (which doesn't even make sense as gas itself is not renewable - greens usually see gas as the lesser evil compared to coal and nuclear but by no means as an end goal)
The german environmental and anti-nuclear movement predates the reunification, let alone russian gas deals or putin. While there might be some groups who are russian fronts or receive russian funding, the majority of the movement has quite strong motivations of its own.
This doesn't even take the "new" parts of the climate movement into account, such as Fridays for Future.
Yaaawn.. this doomsday propaganda is really getting old, and lets meet in 6 month again and lets see how much impact and necessity those 3 plants had at all on heating here..
Wait, your are likely not from Germany nor even Europe and state "Germany was facing a cold winter" like fact based on what please?
Germany has 0 LNG capability and is for Gas largely dependent on the Netherlands now that Russia is gone. However the Dutch are scaling down gas operations because of earth quake damage and most its LNG capability will be used internally. So that means no new gas contracts with 2 of their largest suppliers.
Germany is going to need the little gas it has for heating and its industry. It's going to need all the gas it can save by using Nuclear for electricity (instead of gas) cold winter or not.
Source: I'm German and live in California now. Not a surprise to me that homes here don't have any heating at all, unthinkable in Germany.
Old people would literally die.
I have memories of when our heating would break down in some winters, living in an old building with bad insulation (which is very common). You could wear a thick jacket inside and a thick blanket but your hands are freezing so much you can't even type on a keyboard.
> Germany was facing a cold winter, without energy for heating, and the potential for rolling blackouts. With this change, it does not eliminate the threat but makes it less likely.
Eeeeh not really, most building are heated by gas, the industry runs on gas, nuclear does't really help with either.
How do we make sure we don’t do this again? What are current things that are unpopular today but will be regrettable in 10-20 years? We need to eradicate the root cause, because we will make costly mistakes like this over and over. That means taking an extremely rational approach towards problems regardless of their popularity and allow opposition to emotion-driven zeitgeists that thrive through oppression and curbing speech.
We need to take a stern look at what went wrong with a few things like this 1) Deindustrialization of the west and rampant globalization with not much thought given to national security 2) Manufacturing loss 3) Rise of China through subsidies and unchecked betting by companies like Nike and Apple. 4) No one in Silicon Valley wants to work on defense and military ventures.
The machinery that enables immunity is allowing unpopular but rational opinions in the society. Newspapers wouldn’t print uncomfortable truths.
That statistic is only about deaths. You still have to deal with nuclear accidents leading to evacuation of huge areas happening once around every 30 years (unknown unknowns and what not).
Germany has a high population density. Such a catastrophe happening in Germany would lead to millions getting evacuated.
Another issue is the safe disposal of nuclear waste. It might seem like a low risk, but over the huge timespan nuclear waste needs to be safeguarded that risk adds up. Of course there's also other sources of nuclear waste, but it's best to keep the amounts low.
Last, nuclear currently in the west runs into economic problems. New reactors are plagued by enormous cost overruns and struggle to compete with renewables. But also old reactors are starting to become prohibitively expensive to keep running.
That's a good point, maybe we should also be evacuating huge areas around dirty power plants considering we are aware of the harm they cause to the nearby population?
Nuclear waste is a non issue. If you want to make it perfectly safe and untouchable to most bad actors, you can always dump it into a trench in the ocean. The radioactivity will not penetrate far through ocean water and will be less than other sources of radiation in the ocean today. The only reason why we do things like keep it stored on site, is because its still useful material that can be used in future reaction designs, and throwing it into the sea would be a waste of resources we worked hard to extract from the earth in the first place. I also have not seen any examples in history of people taking waste from a powerplant and turning that into a weapon against other people. So far in history, the only time nuclear weaponry has been used against humans was when it was built by an American arms factory, which is pretty remarkable considering the inherent violence that many of the elite of our species rely upon to maintain their power.
Particulate emissions are a solved problem nowadays For coal plants at least in Germany (see the purple bar in this graphic https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...). Traffic, wood burning and dry goods like gravel are the biggest sources currently.
The bigger issue is the CO2-emissions.
You’re not thinking far ahead enough for nuclear waste. Bad actors aren’t the only issue.
It’s entirely possible that people don’t know what they have in front of them, as can be seen with the Goiânia accident. Places for storage can turn out to be unsafe, for instance in Asse, an old salt mine in Germany there was a water breach leading to the creation of a radioactive salt slurry.
We have to safeguard nuclear waste for thousands to millions of years. So far states have only existed for hundreds of years in a consistent form. 30000 years ago Neanthertals still roamed the earth. It’s not impossible that societal collapse somewhere hinders safekeeping leading to containment of large landscapes.
Nuclear waste is disposed of by being buried underground in a region with impermeable bedrock. Short of deliberate excavation, or a direct meteor impact, there is no scenario in which this waste gets brought back to the surface.
Here are three arguments that I personally find both reasonable and convincing.
1) Nuclear fuel and waste are clearly dangerous. Your linked article makes a logical fallacy in that it claims a dangerous activity is safe because few people have died from it. But we know things are dangerous even when nobody dies from it. The level of security surrounding nuclear is beyond anything else, and it's required to keep it safe. These security measures are expensive to maintain but are dwarfed by the expenses when they fail.
2) Nuclear is much more expensive than we are led to believe.
This is quite clearly deduced from official writings from nuclear agencies, international treaties controlling who will actually pay if things go south, and also demonstrated in the market where nuclear operators are deeply in debt after selling nuclear power for unrealistic prices for decades. (See France).
Nuclear energy is most likely many times more expensive than any numbers presented to date from anyone operating nuclear power plants. This cost is covered "in blanco" by governments, meaning taxpayers now and in generations to come. I am convinced that the energy we consume from nuclear today will be paid for by our great-great-great-grandchildren and theirs too.
3) Renewables are better long-term so all efforts should be spent on inventing and implementing systems to make renewables the source of all energy. (Storage implied).
Money spent on nuclear is not available for renewables so it's reasonable to be opposed to nuclear for that reason too.
All that being said, it is of course very reasonable to keep plants running for a while longer given the current circumstances. :)
These are all valid. However, if only nuclear can get us past "bottleneck events" (e.g., oil supply chains falling apart due to deglobalization or the world's oil running out, either of which would (or possibly will) cause catastrophic effects), then that supersedes #2 and #3, and probably #1 as well in most analyses.
I'm not well-versed enough in hard evidence to assert that we absolutely need nuclear to make it through bottleneck events. But it's plausible that we do. And so we shouldn't rule it out unless there is high-certainty evidence we don't need it.
In other words: I think the burden of proving that nuclear is unnecessary is on the anti-nuclear crowd. I've heard plenty of arguments that wind/solar will be enough, but haven't seen an analysis that seems to prove it based on numbers. (If you know of any such analysis, please share!)
You make a good point, and I like the term "bottleneck event". :)
I think a case could be made that nuclear itself causes a bottleneck event in that we get addicted to the energy since it's deceptively cheap for current generations (as long as nothing goes south).
It will also cause a problem that vastly outlasts the bottleneck itself. We will have to actively maintain nuclear waste for longer than humanity has used oil as fuel for example.
But to be fair, we already have the problem anyway, so keeping existing plants running makes sense to get through the bottleneck. A few more years of operation won't make a big difference.
But the amount of money needed for new plants, that will be operational 10+ years from now, should in my mind clearly be invested in things like green hydro, pumped storage etc.
> 2) If it's too expensive it will not happen, no need for the government to step in.
The government steps in for every second of operation of every nuclear reactor on the planet.
Feel free to pay for your own insurance sans liability caps, find your own loans (without government enforced payment from end users for projects that produce no power), pay for the overruns in decomissioning, and pay for the labour of the regulatory bodies stopping the industry from rendering entire countries uninhabitable.
While you are at it you can control the pollution from uranium mine to the same standard that you'd want in your own back yard and pay for security.
Electricity is a utility and a natural monopoly. The government is always involved and they need to make decisions for what is best in the long term. If you don't have your own enrichment and processing industry then that decision isn't 'become dependent on russia for fuel'. We just saw how well that went.
2) The only reason nuclear power exists is because governments have stepped in to support it and cover most of the expenses.
If you remove that support, it can't exist. No organisation of any kind anywhere in the world can afford to run a business where income is generated for 50-60 years but expenses continue for 1000+ years after. France recently learned this: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-keeps-edf-buy...
3) There are a lot of viable energy solutions with better tradeoffs than nuclear, and it seems reasonable to build them instead of building nuclear power plants. Heat storage, gravity storage, synthesized fuel, hydrogen gas to name a few.
The costs of a nuclear power plant invested in any of these concepts would go a long way.
1) It is dangerous yes. That is the nature of the energy being so concentrated. But this concentration is a blessing because you don't need to mind nearly as much material, and it is far far easier to keep an eye on the waste. Where does the waste from coal/gas go? Into the air. It costs way more to try to contain the harms of those substances because they are the opposite of energy dense.
Nuclear waste is such a tiny tiny amount that we just keep it on site. It's solid. It's not going to leak out of its containers. It just sits in concrete casks on site. Even better, it still has 98% of the energy in it so you don't really want to get rid of it. It can be used in breeder reactors to extract more energy. I quote this too much, but all the nuclear waste the US has ever generated would sit in a single football field, 10 yards high.
2) Nuclear is capital intensive AND the only energy generation that is forced to pre fund its own decommissioning and cleanup. The increased operating costs of nuclear plants is largely due to intentional mismanagement b/c of politics. For example, in France they force nuclear plants to stop outputting power when renewables are generating. They prioritize renewables because that's what politics dictates. They also mandated a cap on power allowed to be generated by nuclear plants, forcing the closure of perfectly good and already paid for plants, so they could buy more renewables. These privatized energy markets don't want stable cheap energy because there's no money in it.
In addition, the US has largely forgotten how to build big things. But it can be done. The UAE just finished 4 1250MW reactors in 10 years. It will generate a quarter of their electricity, (basically) carbon free for 60+ years. Cost was 6B per reactor. Over 60 years, it's a steal. Renewables are only "cheap" in LCOE because the storage costs and capacity factor costs are often not included. Even if you build a megawatt of solar/wind, you really only get 20 to 40% of that peak capacity on average. In Virginia, we are building a wind farm for 10B that is 2640MW. And it is intermittent, off shore is usually 40%. You could get a 1250 MW stable nuke for that much. And it would last twice as long.
3) The main issue with solar/wind though, is that we literally don't have enough material to build enough of it. Not to mention the battery storage. It's not a matter of we can't mine fast enough, we literally don't know of the mineral reserves needed. Here's a presentation going over a report that find this: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2403
> I quote this too much, but all the nuclear waste the US has ever generated would sit in a single football field, 10 yards high.
Well you couldn't because you'd have a stew of fissioning soup. But once you include all the concrete and steel and low level waste that needs decades of storage it's about the same size as a 4hr battery for the entire country.
> But this concentration is a blessing because you don't need to mind nearly as much material
> 3) The main issue with solar/wind though, is that we literally don't have enough material to build enough of it. Not to mention the battery storage. It's not a matter of we can't mine fast enough, we literally don't know of the mineral reserves needed. Here's a presentation going over a report that find this
False. If it's a problem for PV it's a much worse problem for existing nuclear plants.
Olympic dam is one of the world's largest uranium mines. It produces 7.5g of silver and 30kg of copper for every kg of Uranium.
You need 10kg of natural uranium for 1kg of PWR fuel.
PV is made of sand, copper, and silver.
70g of silver is enough for 3.5kW net of solar at 5mg/Watt (after needing 5g for the fuel and control rods which you have yet to supply indium, cadmium, and zirconium for).
The solar panels will produce ~1.8TJ in their lifetime and be recyclable. The nuclear fuel will produce 500GJ and require large quantities of steel and concrete for storage and transport.
You get triple the net energy from a uranium mine compared to nuclear.
The silicon, glass, frame, and power electronics take less resources than the rest of the plant.
The story for wind is not so hilariously one sided (for example it uses more concrete than nuclear), but it's still fine. The blades of a >3MW turbine have about the same energy density as packaged nuclear waste. There are also at least 3 storage technologies undergoing commercialisation that use abundant materials.
> False. If it's a problem for PV it's a much worse problem for existing nuclear plants.
There's basically unlimited quantities of uranium in sea water. Plus you can breed it from thorium if you want to.
> But once you include all the concrete and steel and low level waste that needs decades of storage it's about the same size as a 4hr battery for the entire country.
I highly doubt it but I'd love to see the math on that.
The author of the report I linked concludes that fission cannot be main power source of the future because of the limits of mineable uranium. However he completely ignores the ocean as a source of uranium, which is basically inexhaustible. We don't get it from there today because demand is low and it's cheaper to get it from the ground but ocean uranium capture has been demonstrated.
Solar panels by themselves don't require a lot of rare material but they do require tons of high heat and carbon to "bake". A large part of how cheap they are today is due to the fact that they are made using coking coal in China. But of course the material constraints of the storage needed for solar/wind is the main obstacle. Until we demonstrate cheap storage at scale, wind/solar won't cut it.
> The author of the report I linked concludes that fission cannot be main power source of the future because of the limits of mineable uranium. However he completely ignores the ocean as a source of uranium, which is basically inexhaustible.
In addition to ignoring sea uranium mining which does not exist in any meaningful way he also ignores a bunch of things which actually do exist like LiFePO4 batteries, the last 10 years of PV research, trains, LEVs and affordable offshore wind.
It also ignores things that are much more likely to exist than uranium sea mining like prussian blue batteries, AlS, iron air, perovskite solar panels and affordable tidal power (all of which are presently undergoing large scale industrialisation).
It doesn't exist industrially because there's no need for it. Uranium has been incredibly cheap for decades. But the cost of fuel is such a small factor in the cost of nuclear energy that you could 10x the fuel costs and the LCOE wouldn't move much at all.
LiFePO4 batteries still need lithium, and any wind turbine > 1MW requires literally tons of copper. These solutions are simply too material intensive, ie not energy dense enough.
> It doesn't exist industrially because there's no need for it. Uranium has been incredibly cheap for decades. But the cost of fuel is such a small factor in the cost of nuclear energy that you could 10x the fuel costs and the LCOE wouldn't move much at all.
That's a great way of saying 'I believe the capital and operational costs for nuclear are at least 5x as much as renewables and will stay that way'.
This is $5/MWh in an AP1000 and $10/MWh in lower burnup models. Once the cheap Uranium goes, that doubles. If Rio Tinto or Kazatomprom actually cleaned up their mess properly, that doubles again. Your proposed 100000km^2 sea mining operation is unlikely to be cheaper. There are subsidy free solar farms already at around $13/MWh with more normal prices being in the $30-50 range.
A vestas 660kW turbine uses around ~500kg or 3t per MW net of copper (less than a nuke plant) in the nacelle, busbars and cabinet https://www.copper.org/environment/green/casestudies/wind_en... everything else including transmission can be made from Aluminum. Bigger turbines are more mass efficient as are ones placed offshore. If you wanted to scare monger about wind, focus on the permanent magnets as that's not solved commercially yet.
PV already uses less than a tenth of this. A TopCon or Perc cell uses about 5-10x as much silver as an AP 1000, but silver plated copper metallization reduces this by a factor of 10 and is already being used in demo plants. There are also Aluminum foil backed cells being trialled commercially.
> LiFePO4 batteries still need lithium,
SIB, Fe-Air, AlS and NaS batteries do not, and supply chains for them are better developed than those for PWRs or for still-fictional mining methods.
> That's a great way of saying 'I believe the capital and operational costs for nuclear are 5x as much as renewables and will stay that way'.
Yes, and it still ends up being a better energy source IMO because you don't have to build millions of individual machines. Further, I'd argue that those costs can come down much further and easier than trying to reduce material cost of renewables.
This source (https://help.leonardo-energy.org/hc/en-us/articles/360010919...) puts offshore wind at 6 tons per MW and nuclear at 0.7 tons per MW. I'm not sure if that is accounting for the fact that the location of wind farms are determined by where the wind is vs nuclear plants can be placed wherever. SMRs will help place generation even closer to demand.
Time for napkin math. If we want to convert half of our 490 exajoules of global annual fossil fuel energy to offshore wind energy (let's say all offshore so we can use a generous 50% capacity factor). Then we need 5.22 million offshore wind turbines (3MW each), which will require 94 million tons of copper. That's 11% of all the copper we think exists on Earth. For one generation of wind turbines that will maybe last 25 years. Maybe. This is before we build ANY battery storage, which also needs large amounts of copper, not to mention lithium. It just doesn't make sense to me.
The same calculation for nuclear says we need 6 million tons of copper to replace that same 245 EJ, at a 95% capacity factor. Just 6% of the copper compared to wind. And those plants can go for 60+ years.
Solar PV is even worse than wind for utility scale energy because of its abysmal capacity factor. The main drawback for PV will be the amount of storage or overcapacity needed. So unless we get a miracle breakthrough in energy storage soon, I don't see how wind/solar can scale to replace most of our fossil fuel energy. I'm not against using wind/solar in numbers that make sense. They will definitely be part of the solution, just not the main components IMO.
> Time for napkin math. If we want to convert half of our 490 exajoules of global annual fossil fuel energy to offshore wind energy (let's say all offshore so we can use a generous 50% capacity factor). Then we need 5.22 million offshore wind turbines (3MW each), which will require 94 million tons of copper. That's 11% of all the copper we think exists on Earth. For one generation of wind turbines that will maybe last 25 years. Maybe. This is before we build ANY battery storage, which also needs large amounts of copper, not to mention lithium. It just doesn't make sense to me.
State of the art offshore turbines are 15MW each (so about 5-8MW net). There are commercial 3MW turbines which only have a relatively tiny amount of copper in the nacelle. 6t/MW is high for the turbines alone, but low if including substations and cabling, so I don't know where they drew the boundary. Worldnuclear uses 27t per MW net.
Bus and internal cabling is sometimes Al in smaller turbines as well.
Connecting cables and transformers can also be done with Aluminum. It doesn't happen very often yet because the wind industry lives in the real world where a $1/MWh O&M increase means something won't happen unless it has a commensurable reduction in capital. The second copper rises in price by 50% or so the industry will swap. Al coil substation transformers are already viable.
This cuts out about 80-90% of the copper in onshore wind and 50% or so in offshore (transmission is extremely copper intensive)
Subsea Al transmission cable exists in demo projects but has maintenance issues. It has been tried at scale but would increase costs substantially.
> Solar PV is even worse than wind for utility scale energy because of its abysmal capacity factor. The main drawback for PV will be the amount of storage or overcapacity needed. So unless we get a miracle breakthrough in energy storage soon, I don't see how wind/solar can scale to replace most of our fossil fuel energy
We've had the 'miracle' in the form of sodium ion batteries in about 2018 -- niche safety critical applications for aqueous chemistries are on the market and multi GWh/yr scale factories are presently being built. $60/kWh cell cost is a reasonable expectation (at which point 48hr storage is viable and all PV+battery production is cost competive with nuclear at ~45 degrees north). There are also various projects to radically reduce the cost of brine mining.
Fe-Air is highly promising for 100hr storage but still building out a demo project. AlS and molten salt NaS are undergoing initial commercialisation steps but there have been other technologies at this level that never materialised.
Re. The 480EJ of fossil fuels. There are only 800EJ (2400EJ thermal -- which has relevance for heating and hydrogen) of commercially viable Uranium ore for use in a PWR (even if all the lower efficiency ones are decommisioned immediately). BWRs are a little more efficient, as are Candus (which can use about 4kg of natural uranium where a PWR would use 1kg of enriched). Even in the existing FNR plants (which have resource constraints, cost, reliability, and safety issues to work through before they can be commercial), a closed fuel cycle has never been demonstrated. Reprocessing via MOX and existing designs only adds another 200EJ (600EJ thermal).
Sea mining might be possible, but a world where we can extract the 8kg of natural uranium for 1kg of fuel is a world where we get several thousand tonnes of copper from the same water.
The problem is immense, and the role nuclear energy can provide is only small. Reduction is the primary tool we have.
> I highly doubt it but I'd love to see the math on that.
It was very rough hyperbole/fermi estimate. Can't find figures for the US, so using europe.
Europe has 2.5 million m^3 of low level waste and 1.5 million m^3 that's fairly imminent from refurbishments/decommisioning and replacement (an array of 6 by 6 football fields stacked 20 yards). This is only about ~50 years, so it will go up over time.
Europe uses about 2660TWh/yr or 300GW
At 500Wh/L (high but existing) that's 4 hours for the 2.5. At 300Wh/L it's 4 hours at 4 million m^3
A lot of that waste probably doesn't need containment after a decade or two, so it's only a ballpark. (and a real battery can't be that densely packed without overheating). Conversely 5% or so of it needs multiple centuries or millenia so it would accumulate much higher.
In case anyone was curious, Germany used to get 25% of its generation from nuclear (now more like 10%), and they had as many as 17 nuclear reactors as of 2010.
Also look at page 26ff which states that it would take years to replace current dependency on russia, not only in raw ressources, but also enrichment and recycling services.
If only there was a sign in 2008 that would indicate to Germany that Russia was not a reliable partner. Like if, for example, Russia targeted oil pipeline running from Azerbaijan to Europe through Georgia and Turkey. Oh, but there was: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121866234961938253
It is needed in summer to replace solar energy during the night. Gas power plants can be switched on and off almost at will, unlike coal or nuclear plants that have long startup and shutdown times. So the gas power plants are switched on at night in summer when the sun doesn't shine.
Also, the EU commission declared in February 2022 natural gas as a sustainable energy source, and the EU parliament confirmed this in July 2022. Sounds a bit bizarre, but the dates are correct.
Some modern nuclear plants can be turned on and off at will.
The reactor itself takes a long time to ramp up and down, but it heats a molten salt battery. The battery can burst-power the turbines at well-above the reactor output; they can be sized to handle peak demand + overnight loads.
Even if technically possible the economics of nuclear power plants don't favour only using them for peak loads. With gigantic initial captial investment and very low fuel costs (almost?) all nuclear power plants are used for base loads.
It's hard to find current numbers, but capital investment for combined cycle natural gas plants seems to be about a tenth of modern reactor projects in western countries.
Gas has lower CO2 emissions and the advantage over coal that it can better supply peak loads. At that point in time Russia was also seen as a reliable cheap supplier of it, as the UdSSR has been since the 70s before.
It's unlikely that coal could have been replaced with new nuclear. It would have probably been an EPR from back then Framatome and Siemens. Construction of the EPR in Olkiluoto started in 2005 and just finished recently.
Keeping old nuclear reactors running and shutting down coal plants instead would have been possible though, but didn't have backing in the population.
An equal quantity of renewable generation was brought online. That isn’t the same as replacing it with renewables. Had the nukes stayed, Germany would be more secure and a better global citizen in terms of emissions.
They could have instead replaced the fossil fuel electrical generation with those renewables, and kept the nuclear plants. That would have been a massive reduction in carbon emissions by Germany.
I would agree, especially from the standpoint of today, but I guess you have to see things historically.
Issues with nuclear like fallout from Chernobyl still leading to contamination today in German or bad handling of nuclear waste at the Asse II mine have been a topic in German society for a very long time.
The climate crisis picked up as a topic only really in the late 90s.
That explains the first nuclear exit plan in 2000.
The current exit from 2011 was a direct reaction to what happened in Fukushima.
I mean even today you still have plenty of people and company that think that there is still a lot of time before more action must be taken against climate change.
But isn't it scary that political decisions about energy are made on reactionary terms rather than engineering terms? An engineer would not have said "we have to stop nuclear power," because of accidents, they would have studied those accidents and developed methods to mitigate them. This is why airlines are safe, because of past accidents that were deeply tragic and catastrophic but often went on to stymie some shortcoming of aircraft that wasn't apparent in modelling and testing that had been done at that point. If we reacted to aircraft disasters how the German government reacted to nuclear energy disasters that didn't even happen within their own borders, we'd be back to using clipper ships to cross the Atlantic in three weeks. This is regressive thinking that hurts our species overall, not progressive thinking that leads to technological improvements and benefits for our species.
> they would have studied those accidents and developed methods to mitigate them.
So, eartchquakes and tsunamis were a new developement in japan. The engineers had never a chance to study them and develope methods to mitigate risks for nuclear plants?
If plane crashes would endanger whole countries or continents we would ban air traffic all together.
Fukushima was actually preventable. There were other reactors in the Tsunami zone that were fine because they were designed for these magnitude events. The fact that Fukushima happened as it did was because engineers with knowledge on international standards were not let into the decision making process. If anything Fukushima is an argument about the dangers of allowing energy production to be controlled by a private company that will focus on its bottom line moreso than engineering best practices (this might ring familiar to people affected by PG&E wildfires). (1). That being said, fukushima still worked as intended and no radiation leaked out.
And plane crashes can and did endanger entire countries in the past, such as 9/11 where hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afganistan civilians went on to die because of a plane crash in new york city. However, we responded to 9/11 by engineering better protocols, like installing a door lock to the pilots cabin and preventing the carrying on of certain blades. There were other times too when a plane crash threatened an entire country, such as when the soviet union shot down an airliner and caused a serious diplomatic incident as a result.
It is scary, but it's not quite what happened. The original nuclear exit was a plan over some decades and included a clear exit from coal power as well. It also included a multi billion dollar plan to accelerate renewable energy as well, one that still reaps dividends today.
Unfortunately, the Merkel government stopped these subsidies and dragged its feet regarding renewables for sixteen years. The flip-flopping stance regarding nuclear didn't help either, of course.
Yes. But they produces nuclear wast and a melt down could devastate wide regions. Glad that this will all be over soon. I was a victim of the Chernobyl fallout myself, and would not like to experience this again.
I was a teenager at that time in southern Germany. Most disturbing was that news about the radioactive cloud trickled in only days after the disaster and then only very, very gradually. It were the first nice, sunny and warm days of spring, but people went outside only when absolutely necessary, because of this invisible threat. No one knew how much there was to come, where it might hit, and how long it might last[1] or how this might affect one's future health or that of unborn babies, etc., etc. After some very high concentrations were found in specific spots such as air filters month after the disaster,[2] people were afraid of using the ventilations of their cars. I remember that there were reports of some particularly high meassurements in sandpits on children's playgrounds, that unsettled people badly.
It is easy to say that on average nuclear energy is not so terrible, when you were never personally confronted with what happens when you lose the bet. Then an abstract idea is becoming very real. You realise that one day someone else will have to pay the price, or you yourself again: What if the next accident happens not in the Soviet Union or Japan, but in one of the power plants next door?
This experience, shared by millions of people, has done much to cast doubt on the claims that such risks are technically controllable. And the climate protection argument also appears to many to be nothing more than propaganda, because it comes from the same parties and companies that supported likewise nuclear, coal and gas, but downplayed climat change and other environmental issues for decades. Their actions and lobbying helped to create our current situation by slowing down the switch to renewable energies and postponing stricter regulations on energy saving. -- Shall we trust them now after so many failures?
[1] Mushrooms in some areas of southern Germany are still highly contaminated. But that was one of the least of our concerns in those days.
But as it turned out, this was just more fear than harm. These radiation turned out to have almost no health consequences in the population. (And 500kBq is not much. The human body is already 5kBq naturally)
> What if the next accident happens not in the Soviet Union or Japan, but in one of the power plants next door?
That would be terrible. But how does it compare to other terrible events such as the flood of last year, arguably caused by global warming?
You were victim of the fear propaganda of the 80's, but people today are victim of the energy crisis in Germany, which is partly caused by the choice to discontinue nuclear.
> About 20,000 cases of thyroid cancer cases were registered in the period 1991−2015 in males and females, who were under 18 in 1986 for the whole of Belarus and Ukraine, and for the four most contaminated oblasts of the Russian Federation. The Scientific Committee now estimates that one in four of those cases is attributable to radiation exposure.
This is not about Germany, but about the area much closer to the power plant.
Also thyroid cancer has a 98% survival rate according to Wikipedia. So that would amount to 20000 * 0.25 * 0.02 ≈ 100 death caused by the accident in the most impacted area. Which is a catastrophe, but also not an apocalypse
But I was talking about Germany anyway where the most alarmist messages were delivered about the danger on the German population.
> You were victim of the fear propaganda of the 80's,
The threat was real. It is like saying that after someone put a knife at your throat, that it was nothing, because you are still alive.
> but people today are victim of the energy crisis in Germany, which is partly caused by the choice to discontinue nuclear.
It depends how you tell the story. It was the choice to discontinue nuclear, but pospone renewables. The companies in the coal and gas energy sector were mostly identical to those in the nuclear energy sector (3 out of 4 large companies). They did not have much of a problem getting out of nuclear energy if they could stay in the coal and gas business or even expand it and pass on the financial risk of their nuclear waste disposal obligations to the taxpayer[1] -- as long as they had not to fear too much competition from renewables.
It were the very same people in industry and politics that supported nuclear whenever possible, that supported coal and gas as a replacement and constantly downplayed the impact of climate change. The people from the environmental movement who warned about all this were not politically strong enough to push through a better agenda. That is what has brought us to the current situation. Guess who I trust the most to find the best way out of this situation ...
[1] They threatend bankruptcy if not, and got away with a one-time payment of only 24,1 billion Euro.
What about the experience of (a much, much higher number than were affected by Chernobyl) people who die every year from cancer and other diseases caused by burning fossil fuels, especially coal?
Are their lives less valuable than the right of the so called environmental activists (mainly referring to the ones from the 80s and 90s) to impose their irrational views on the rest of the society? If nuclear expansion continued at the same pace it did in the 60s and 70s we’d probably have CO2 emissions under control by now. Instead we just wanted several decades waiting for renewables to become cost effective.
> This experience, shared by millions of people, has done much to cast doubt on the claims that such risks are technically controllable.
Yes, people are irrational. I mean nuclear isn’t 100% safe but it’s objectively safer than burning fossil fuels. So it seems absurd to me to be fine with burning diesel and coal but now with nuclear.
The comparison with fossile fuel is irrelevant. You must compare it with renewables.
Worldwide we have roughly 10% nuclear energy for electricity. And we had roughly 20 to 25 years between nuclear disasters (Sellafield, Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukushima). If we had had 100% nuclear, it would mean such a disaster would occure approx. every 2 to 2.5 years.
We also cannot close the books about this disasters. They still are going to hurt and kill people. Ask the Russian soldiers that camped at Prypiat this spring. You might say: They should not have done this and known better. But this is how things play out in reality, while in theory they should not happen.
And then there is the strategic problem in a war. It is no wonder that on maps of the situation in Ukraine like this https://militaryland.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/day_234_... the locations of nuclear power plants are emphasized. Renewables would provide a far better situation for a nation that needs to defend itself, because they are decentralized.
> It kills no one when handled correctly, which it is.
This is not true. The German nuclear industry did not even manage to store low and intermediate level radioactive waste even remotely safely. Here is a report from July 2022 about the failure from German public television: https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Marodes-Atommuell... The report is only availablöe in German, but you may run the accompanying documentation through the translator of your choice, to learn what happened.
> Coal and gas plants produce pollution that kills thousands every year, and that's how it's supposed to work.
Wrong alternative. We need 100% renewable.
> Meltdowns are next to impossible at correctly designed and built plants, which the German ones are.
People like you would have said that about Japan too, before 2011, and actively ignore what happend in Harrisburg in 1979 or Sellafield in 1957.
So since the 80s it is known that water enters the nuclear waste storage locations and how many people have died? None. Okay but how many people have faced any direct adverse consequences from it? Also none. And that isn't even a proper counter argument because the waste was not handled correctly in this instance.
That the waste was not handled correctly is exactly the issue. I agree: Nuclear energy is harmless as long as no accident happens, everything is handled properly and every possibility is taken care of. The problem is only that this is not the case.
> Yes. But they produces nuclear wast and a melt down could devastate wide regions
Civilian nuclear waste can absolutely not 'devastate wide regions'.
And civlian nuclear plants in the waste can also not really do that.
What actually can happen is that over a large region you measure slightly higher radiation but not actually enough to be dangerous to the people there.
> I was a victim of the Chernobyl fallout myself, and would not like to experience this again.
There is no measurable impact of Chernobyl. All the claims about all the disabled children were literally all lies. Its all fear mongering.
Biomass use in certain European countries is... all sorts of questionable. Some of it is wood imports from America for use as "green" energy, discounting the energy cost of shipment.
State-sponsored nuclear fear-mongering is likely to accelerate dramatically online in the coming years. Will it be the right that goes anti-nuclear this time? Hopefully not.
They're the second largest electricity importer of Europe. They're pulling the same shit as Belgium, shutting down their nuclear power plants and importing from France. Guess what France uses to generate electricity ?
While I agree that it would have been sensible to phase out coal and then nuclear, the german position is more complex. The fallout from Tschernobyl was measurable in Germany… measurable as in my science teacher measured it in his garden. Up to today boar and mushrooms have an elevated level of radiation in the forests around my home. So this is the emotional background, the risks are not far away. Fukushima gave the debate another spin „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“.
I still thank shutting them off is wrong but I think there’s a lot of history in that decision. And it’s much more history than one party deciding that.
A nuclear plant that doesn't explode, that is. Pretty sure Tschernobyl released more radiation than a coal plant over its lifetime. Probably more than all coal plants in Germany in their lifetime combined.
I was going to reply that that has only happened literally twice ever, but decided to fact check that first. Apparently small steam and hydrogen explosions happened a whole lot at nuclear reactors in the 1950s and 60s.
I'll give an example of molten salt reactors [1]; other designs have different but comparable safety properties. The nuclear fuel is suspended in a molten salt. If the reactor is breached, you'll have what's effectively a contained chemical spill that has a very limited spread. Current water reactors trigger a steam explosion that spews out radiation into the atmosphere, which is why it's so catastrophic.
If you get a runaway reaction, it has a fail-safe described in the article that drains the reactor into containment vessels underground.
Gen III+ reactors are pretty fucking close to meltdown proof.
Any reactor in use today will have a negative void coefficient. Which means, if you don't put power into it, the reaction naturally stops. Then you've got control rods and neutron moderators that will fall back upon the core if there's no power. Then Gen3+ includes a core catcher in which, should it breach its reactor, it just falls in there and cools down.
All five large reactor disasters occurred with reactors that also had fail-safes that rendered them theoretically safe. In the case of Three-Mile-Island, unlucky technicians had to work very hard against the reactor's system to sustain the failure.
I think the fear of black swans, that is, unknown risks. I think most people don’t understand that the experts can really rule out something like a meltdown in modern reactors
Pretty sure the nuclear still comes ahead after averaging those out with all the nuclear plants that have gotten quietly decommissioned with no explosions, though?
if you really weigh against all coal plants in germany, the numbers are not far off
and radioactive material is like a fraction of the problem with coal. they have much worse health impact in other areas. they're linked (directly or indirectly) to 10000s of thousands of deaths a year.
Let's say a metric ton of coal has around 1 kBq and around 10000 PBq were released at Chernobyl.
That would mean around 10 quadrillion tons of coal would need to get burned to emit the same amount of radiation. China is currently burning 4 trillion tons of coal per year, which is a 2500th part of it.
Part of it is emotional, but so is the argument for it. It is simply too expensive compared to other forms of energy generation. And yes, you still have the waste.
unnecessary german angst. Just check the map https://www.wano.info/members/wano-world-map. We are surrounded by atomic power plants. Switzerland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Czech republic..almost all of them are situated in the german borders.
What do you mean they are situated in Germany borders? You mean other countries operate their nuclear plants within Germany? I clicked on a few that were marked Paris in that map (Neckarwestheim, Philippsburg, Gundremmingen) and they all very much seem to be German owned and operated. What am I missing? Would be very suprised to hear otherwise.
When Chernobyl happened I was a physics undergrad in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and was spending the summer term on campus. We (the grad students really) went up to the roof of the physics building and started measuring for the radiation. There was much rejoicing when it turned up, which as I imperfectly remember was about two weeks after the incident.
Which is to say, that the radiation could be measured is different from saying that the radiation represented a significant health risk.
Not all of us have the luxury of having more than 7000 km between us and the next nuclear accident, though. But I can send you some mushrooms from the forests of southern Germany if you would like to explore the health risks further.
>"But I can send you some mushrooms from the forests of southern Germany if you would like to explore the health risks further."
Sounds like the GP would receive mushrooms that have elevated levels of radionuclides that are within the legal limit of what is considered safe to consume.
"Around 95% of wild mushroom samples collected in Germany in the last six years still showed radioactive contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, albeit not above legal limits, the German food safety regulator said on Friday."
It's tree moss that is the larger risk apparently. It 'breathes' particles and keeps them. Wild boar love it; you shoot a wild boar, you have to get it tested with a Geiger counter to make sure it's safe. Like mercury in salmon, boar are a concentrator for fallout!
Seems like it would be completely fine to eat, even regularly. With mushrooms having 1000 Bq/kg at worst, according to samples by BfS.
> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 2,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.005 millisievert. This is considerably less than the radiation exposure during a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. However, if adults eat such a mushroom meal each week, they will receive an additional annual radiation exposure corresponding to about twenty flights from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. Expressed in numbers it is 0.27 millisievert.
> „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“.
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.
I don't understand this argument, isn't Japan known for its earthquakes?
Chernobyl has often been characterized as the result of a corrupt and incompetent late-stage USSR, whereas post-WWII Japan is seen as a generally well-run country.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with that, just trying to describe public opinion.
It's not fully an objective argument, butnan emotional. "Even Japan can't run them safely!" Where Japan is known for its precision and strict following of rules (perception!)
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.)
FWIW, I'm a fan of nucear, but ... they don't have to counter that argument. It doesn't have to be earthquakes - it can be 1 of 100 problems. Japan knew they have to deal with earthquakes and didn't. What should make people more comfortable that Germany will be able to safeguard against their known risks?
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.
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.
> Not to mention that Russia - Rosatom - will again play a big role in Western European energy when it comes to nuclear.
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.
And France having maintenance issues is in large part because of the anti-nuclear campaign that increasingly started to attempt to move away from nuclear. For a while even in France they basically just wanted to run the reactors out and switch to renewables.
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!!!"
Agreed. "A good reactor design" to that definition is enormously hard though - I'll be incredibly happy if that gets solved, hopefully with a modular "built in a factory" design that can be easily replicated and remain very safe.
No bad reactor designs get built or have been built in the West in many decades.
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.
1 of 100? Compared to the alternatives? Because that’s what matters here. Does nuclear have one-hundred times the problem?
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.
What should make people more comfortable
that Germany will be able to safeguard
against their known risks?
The safety of nuclear power plants isn't exactly some great unknown.
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.
The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad.
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.
The difference is even when coal or oil goes “worst case scenario” bad, it’s still entirely manageable.
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.
This is the core problem. In this thread people keep referencing the data of the actual historical track record and you’re bringing up imaginary scenarios that haven’t existed and might never. Of course, the flip side argument is that past performance is not indicative of future results. Still, the track record approach feels like a better way to evaluate because a) non-green alternatives are waaaay worse b) green alternatives have a comparable number of deaths per MWh produced c) nuclear can reasonably ween us off fossil fuels d) if you actually invest in technology and make the regulatory environment sane, over time the cost and risk of nuclear decrease really rapidly.
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.
The time to start building tons of new nuclear plants was 20 years ago.
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%.
You are thinking too small. With enough 'nukes' we could suck the carbon out of the atmosphere, and use that to make syngas/synfuels for the applications where it would be impractical to replace them. That alone would be almost carbon neutral. Similar for hydrogen production by electrolysis and process heat
for many industrial applications.
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!
Did it ever occur to you that we actually could revert the atmospheric conditions we produced with those 'nukes' and attached 'atmospheric processors'?
Even after a few decades late into the game?
What is so hard to get about the idea that we actually could 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.
> Did it ever occur to you that we actually could revert the atmospheric conditions we produced with those 'nukes' and attached 'atmospheric processors'?
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, nor 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'
> The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad.
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.
Oh sure. The wave of deformed children that I grew up with in the shouthern German, southern Austrian area surely had nothing to do with this, pure coincidence. There are certain mushrooms that are still forbidden to eat.
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.
First, I am very sorry. That must have been unimaginably scary.
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 mostly agree, but I would also say the same thing about fossil fuels.
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?
Yeah most of this 'deformed children' stuff is also not really true. The reported facts about this are just not correct.
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.
The BP oil spill was immeasurably more disastrous than Fukushima. Oil is dangerous to drill and refine and it pollutes like crazy when converted to energy.
The problem is that nuclear plants only need to fail once to have global catastrophic consequences. Chernobyl was so catastrophic that Gorbachev blamed the Soviet Union's collapse on it. Solar and other renewable energy sources can never even remotely approach this level of environmental risk.
Candu's actually solve most of the problems the PWR constantly lies about. If people were proposing building those (and demonstrating that they weren't even more expensive) I don't see the issue.
They're hardly the super-100%-reliable baseload advertised, or anything approaching 'too cheap to meter' though.
Problem is that one plant critically failing is enough to devastate large portions of land, especially in tightly packed Europe. And the fault in Fukushima was due to economic reasons, the risk of backup generators being flooded was known. These are realities that you won't ever address fully because it would make energy generation too expensive.
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.
All is takes is sabotage of the nuclear plant, perhaps by those sympathetic to Russia and upset with Germany over their increased defense budget in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
So the lesson is that don't put together single impression for everything in a country (except communist country?). TEPCO (and some other nuclear corps in Japan) was known for hiding incidents, even prior the earthquake.
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.
Anybody knows why they are completely cleaning up that plant instead of just cordoning it off and marking it as "deadly land, nobody allowed in". You know, an exclusion zone like Chernobyl.
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?
We're talking about highly toxic soil here. Soil doesn't stay where it is, it moves with water and wind. You have to fix it, somehow. Just putting a bit of warning tape around it doesn't cut it.
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.
No its not actually highly toxic and not actually very dangerous at all. A false level of danger has been assigned to radiation and its risk, mostly because of bad science in the 1970s.
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.
I can read all the science about how nuclear material in the soil is safe, but also I can't in good conscience let my toddler roll around in it and put it in her mouth. You need 100% buy in from parents who will be raising their children there.
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.
> 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 publicly identified costs soar as the public begins demanding ever more onerous mandates, causing people to stop voluntarily remediating, which is why lead thresholds are set considerably lower than for other similarly problematic but less common contaminants.
Just this past week we called up the city environmental health 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. simple tarping (even if amateurish), to minimize leaded paint flake dispersal. And what more can you reasonably ask? Turning every house scraping job into a super fund site would just be ridiculous, yet if the law treated lead the same way it treated nuclear, that's exactly what would be demanded.
> Ignorance is bliss. Contaminated soils abound across the industrialized world, it's just that most people have no idea.
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.
That's irrelevant to this particular discussion. I'm not talking about regular "dismantling a nuclear plant", but if 1/100 of the plants have 1000x the cleanup costs due to accidents, that changes the math. I pulled the above numbers out of my hat, they're probably wrong. I'm just adding a bit of nuance to the TCO calculation.
I was just bring a data point about dismantling.
Most reactors would be extended, in US we agreed to extend to 60 years, and already some are asking to push to 80 years. Since we update and replace lots of things every over time, we end up with "newer" plant over time. Pretty much everything is new beside the pool.
There is no valid argument against the eye watering price of nuclear power.
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 and wind.
* Pretending that nuclear power always produces 100% stable power. France manages an average of 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 the government is using it to subsidize nuclear arsenals/subs/etc.
Seeing everything through the economical lens is exactly why we're still burnin coal and sucked Putin gas until a few months ago.
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 ?
> 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.
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.
Has there been a spike in mutations in sea life? Humans? I have my doubts. The amount of radation dumped from fukushima is literally a drop in the ocean.
The pacific's radiation levels have increased by about 0%. The total releases from all of Fukushima was on the order of 30 PBq. Water has a natural radioactivity of 13 Bq/L. So, if you want to only double the natural radioactivity of water (which is still basically nothing), you need to dilute ask this radiation in 2e15 L of water.
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.
It's worth noting that oceanic water is actually very poorly mixed, with only the first 200m or so mixing well with the atmosphere, so the radioactive emissions likely wouldn't increase in the deep ocean water. On the other hand, that basically only lops a zero off your number.
There's moderate seismic activity in the South-Western part of Germany, higher once you get closer to Basel (which was destroyed by an earthquake in the 14th century). Curiously, the French Fessenheim nuclear power plant is in this area as well.
Most nuclear accidents are caused by greed, laziness and shortsightedness. Japan seems to be one of the few societies (possibly the only wealthy one) that doesn't suffer too badly from these issues. When I worry about nuclear power here in the UK, I don't worry about earthquakes, I worry to PMs cousin will get a billion pounds to build a containment unit and not do it. Or the reactor will need to be shut down but the CEO will decide to keep it running because safety and maintenance are just "cost centres"...
I don’t want to argue your positions but you gotta realize that this argument you’re making is fact based one. OP is talking about triggered emotions which are much more complex to dissect and understand.
> 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.
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.
I think the point is that indeed Japan is known for earthquakes & tsunamis, and yet they still failed to do the work of making their reactors tsunami-proof. Thus people think that if Japan, with a reputation valuing "high quality", takes such brazen shortcuts, can their own government be trusted to responsibly operate nuclear power? It's quite tragic since nuclear is a great technology in many cases, especially where there is high density populations but not much land for renewables.
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.
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.
While I agree the German position is more complex, the conclusion is reducto ad absurdum given the Fukushima reactor meltdown is an extraordinarily complex issue without a single definitive root cause which could be attributed to simple human control.
Any human control is predicated and annotated by known assumptions and performance envelopes. Failure modes can be predicted, past performance can be analyzed and conclusions can be drawn using scientific knowledge and evidence for the basis of ones systems of control, be they industrial or environmental. Failure events or conditions, although regretful, are very important as they permit us to learn, to adapt, to grow and to change in response to events and conditions as they change or evolve over time.
Because Japan is a brave, science minded nation, it hasnt eschewed the atom even in the face of this egregious misfortune. The initial German response to the accident could best be compared to that of a child: reactionary, undisciplined, haphazard and deleterious. Im glad to learn more sensible minds have prevailed and reconsidered nuclear power as a sustainable partner, albeit somewhat irked to see its only real commitment in this case is the overwhelming demand for energy independence amidst global conflict.
...you do understand that your "sensible" minds only decided to keep three reactors online for six months, right?
It seems like argument you have is that the "sensible" minds are agreeing with you, and a whole litany of name-calling for the people who advocated abandoning nuclear - who are largely the exact same people by the way.
> „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“
Nuclear technology is risky but Fukushima isn't a good reflection of what modern nuclear power plants can accomplish. The reactors at Fukushima were designed half a century ago and were known to be flawed 35 years before the accident happened [1]. It's ironic that the plant was running longer than was originally planned in part because of Green opposition to newer power plants.
It is measurable, but not harmful to a meaningful extent. There are lots of sources of low-dose radiation in the natural human/primate/.../mammalian environment.
For what it is worth, I did an estimate on here awhile ago (welcome to search my history) where IIRC you had to eat several kilos of boar and mushrooms every day to approach limits for radiation workers (which has a large safety margin).
I think many people forget that we are really good at detecting radiation. This is mostly due to Cold War era fear and so a lot of research got put into this and we have cheap and sensitive devices. Cheap enough that there are large public networks of radiation monitoring set up by citizens. Not too dissimilar from citizen weather projects.
Emotions certainly played a major role when Germany decided to phase out nuclear in 2011, and the execution and timeline of that phase-out were poor.
But that doesn't mean Germans haven't pondered seriously about this topic in the meantime. And the result is that, apart from this band-aid solution for the current winter, Germany will still phase out nuclear. Let me try to summarize the most important points I know of:
- Cost. Nuclear energy is expensive energy. It just happened to be cheaper than solar and wind energy a decade ago. But the cost of renewables went down spectacularly, and the cost of nuclear went up at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity). So why invest in nuclear energy when we could have more low-carbon energy for the same price elsewhere?
- Subsidies. So far, all nuclear power plants have been heavily subsidized. There isn't a single country where the full cost of decommissioning and permanent storage of radioactive material is properly taken into account. And there is no power plant with a full insurance, so those risks are carried by the public. Once we eliminate these subsidies, the cost of nuclear grows even further.
- Reliability. Some people dislike renewables because there are times with no wind and no sunshine. But they forget that wind and sunshine are relatively predictable and have worst-case bounds. So investing into storage and the electricity grid makes renewables highly reliable. Now look at nuclear. The worst case scenario is roughly what just happened in France: you discover a problem that affects an entire generation of power plants, and all of them have to be taken offline until the problem is resolved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis...). Without its European neighbors, France would be in deep trouble. If we take precautions against this risk, the cost of nuclear grows even further.
- Inflexibility. Nuclear power plants need a high uptime to amortize their construction cost. But once they operate in a grid with a substantial amount of renewables, they are displaced more and more and the cost per unit of energy grows even further.
- War. The Russian army has recently captured a Ukrainian nuclear power plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_at_the_Zaporizhzhia_Nuc...). The plant is now used to store military equipment, the employees are bullied or even tortured, and all pillars of nuclear safety are being violated. There are credible approaches how we can build a power plant that resists human stupidity or a natural disaster, but there is no way we can build a power plant that is unconditionally safe in a war zone.
- Nuclear Proliferation. Once the know-how and the infrastructure for handling fissionable material is in place, even if only for civilian purposes, there is a much stronger incentive to also look into military use. And the last thing our planet needs is more nuclear weapons.
Given these points, the current German position seems quite sensible and I wonder why some other nations are suddenly so eager to build new nuclear power plants.
The forests near mine and just about everywhere else on the entire planet have elevated levels of BEING ON GODDAMNED FIRE thanks to coal-burners.
No there's not history. There's not emotions. There's god-damned stupidity and a refusal to evaluate risk at the top level of government, that has condemned hundred of millions.
I've lived near irradiated areas too. There was zero justification for this.
> While I agree that it would have been sensible to phase out coal and then nuclear
How about not phasing it out at all.
> The fallout from Tschernobyl was measurable in Germany… measurable as in my science teacher measured it in his garden
Yeah you can also measure the output form coal plants.
Tschernobyl killed either literally or basically nobody in German, and hardly hurt anybody.
It was basically nonsense, because of political reasons rules were adopted based on totally fraudulent science and then these rules were used in endless scare mongering campaigns and misinformation campaigns.
But at some point you have to stop with pure emotional responses and endless fear-mongering and actually look at things rationally.
> Fukushima gave the debate another spin „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“.
That's an understandable reaction.
But a better reaction would have been "what lessons did we learn?".
After the 2008 financial crisis, the financial regulators around the world gathered at the 2009 Pittsburgh Summit [1] to see what can be done to improve the resiliency of the global financial markets. They came up with a Statement [2]. Later on, the Basel Committee ironed out some details, and the national regulators other details, and the outcome was a long string of financial reforms known collectively as Basel III.
This was a monumental achievement (well, it's still work in progress, but it's about 80-90% done). Of course, for many professionals in the financial markets it felt more like a curse than a blessing. But we have been trough the March 2020 financial panic, and the financial system coped quite well.
In the nuclear regulatory space, there are so many regulators around the world. The NRC for sure, but also the nuclear regulators in Canada, the UK, France and Finland. One can add South Korea to the list and probably a few more countries. I'm sure they are exchanging notes. Overall, I think they have probably a huge amount of experience, and they have met 99.999% of the edge cases for classical (pressurized and boiling water) reactors.
"What lessons did we learn?" is an excellent question, but it's the reaction of a seasoned professional. The reason we have to teach that outlook to new grads is people don't think that way by default. It's unrealistic to expect that reaction from the general populace.
How does it compare to living in Denver, Colorado, vs living in Frankfurt? (Denver is at a higher altitude and also in a region of slightly radioactive rocks.)
How does it compare to the effects of 30,000 km of flying?
It still is measurable. Only 5% of the reactor mass managed to escape into the environment. There are effective safety mechanisms but like in Fukushima they are subject to economic realities. The luck here was that water is a very good radiation absorber. It will still go into the food chain and increase risks. Perhaps not by much if we are lucky.
This is politics and letting them run is populism in my opinion. They won't run longer than to their next security inspection. Even the owners were reluctant because you have to reorganize the demolition, which isn't trivial for NPP.
Nuclear can be a source of energy, but the way it is currently hailed as a solution for climate change should only really convince filthy peasants. Emotional is as much a reluctance to consider better options because it is expensive and there are a lot of unsolved problems. Beginning from mining Uranium to getting rid of the waste permanently.
there have been many studies on this. tschernobyl has had no measurable impact on any health related metrics you could come up with in countries outside the ukraine. even directly at tschernobyl the long lasting impact was minimal and most related deaths were an effect of accute exposure.
Finally! Everybody was telling them to do so, it was very hard to understand why they would do the opposite. Personally I'm very happy reason hasn't lost its way.
What's noteworthy is that Kanzler Scholz basically told his ministers that all 3 plants will stay open and the ministers have to organize it. That's very unusual. The coalition was actually still arguing about this, so some people, especially in the Green party are going to be pissed. But at least they now have theoretically more time to deal with other pressing issues instead of bickering about a few months more run time.
391 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadThe German greens' leader has backed running Coal plants as an alternative[1]
The whole political position of this party rests on their fanatic opposition to Nuclear power.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/19/energy/germany-russia-gas...
https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1582050941682954240
quote:
> For all those commenting "only until April 2023":
> No utility will decommission a nuclear plant knowing this kind of reversal is possible even with Greens still in government occupying key posts.
> They will not even mothball the plants. They'll just sit and wait for elections.
Btw if anyone thinks this is exaggeration, it's not. They are evil fanatics:
https://twitter.com/giuliasaudelli/status/158097313099012505...
>"Nuclear power and fossil fuels brought us here. They caused this crisis, they are not the solution."
>Strong and at times emotional speech by Robert Habeck, after weeks under pressure. Defending his actions in government, but standing by Green values. He got a standing ovation.
Reality: the Greens and their allies spent half a trillion USD on the "energy transition" and turned off perfectly good nuclear reactors. Result: energy shortages and diplomatic submission to Russia. And now they blame nuclear for it. If they had spent that half a trillion on new nuclear reactors, Germany would be an energy superpower. As it stands, they're having to burn coal and wood to get through the winter.
And can we talk about how stupid and actively malicious it is to use the Fukushima accident as a reason for shutting down nuclear plants in Germany?
Fukushima: nuclear plant in a seismically very active region in very close proximity to the ocean where tsunamis are not really a rarity
vs.
German nuclear plants: not very seismically active (if at all), no tsunamis i've ever heard of, not counting floods as those are
1. easier to foresee and manage and
2. very much less intense than a sudden wall of water razing everything in its path.
Also in Japan you kinda have to build near the coast since its surrounded by ocean on all sides while being stretched out long and not that wide with mountains as a backbone in the middle. Germany on the other hand only has the North and Baltic Sea at its northern end then progressively gets higher above sea level the more south you go, ultimately ending at the northern end of the Alps.
This decision and especially this reasoning didn't make sense then and still doesn't nowadays. It was just a kneejerk reaction to retain voter support by exploiting the fear of the uneducated and the anti-nuclear crowd.
Fukushima ended in no way like Tchernobyl did.
The Soviet power plan released radioactivity in the air, make an entire area inhabitable and killed a few dozen a people.
Fukushima did nothing of this, everything stayed inside the structure, no radioactivity went out.
As Fukushima had no recovery generators available (no fuel in them), it is a great proof that a totally out of control modern power plant is not deadly.
Less motivated reasoning gives about $300bn which would still be enough to easily replace every coal and oil plant in the country with renewables (as well as half of the gas).
Chernobyl: Core meltdown and catastrophic explosion of entire reactor. Caused by gross negligence when safety system disabled. Direct deaths: <100 Estimated indirect deaths: 4 to 16 thousand
Fukushima: Caused by 4th largest earthquake in history. No core explosion. Hydrogen explosion destroyed non structural part of building (this was by design). Core meltdown but largely contained. Contamination of air/water from venting to atmosphere. Direct deaths: 1 employee died of cancer Estimated indirect deaths: 300-2000
The reality is that nuclear reactors can lead to big events in unforeseen situations, like also Fukushima was. It's impossible to foresee what the cause for the next big event will be.
Um no. Renewable energy is now actually cheaper than nuclear energy. You could build renewable energy + storage within the same range of cost. The problem is the former government shut down nuclear power plants and then did exactly nothing.
The nuclear power plants aren't perfectly good. They are very old and would need a lot of investment if run for more than a couple of month.
And germany isn't even near electric energy shortages. It's currently supplying france with a lot of energy.
If electric heating were used everywhere from now on, there would be an electricity problem. But for that the electric heaters are missing.
The global output of battery storage isn't high enough to switch to solar/wind. Energy is a solved problem. It's a natural progression of mankind's command of energy. Wood->Coal->Oil->Fission. There's enough Uranium in the ground and oceans to supply humanity for million of years. We can't let a few accidents hold us back for ever.
Clearly Germany couldnt, otherwise they would decommission coal plants.
Regardless of the type of power plant, it is totally stupid to shut down some and not allow any new ones to be built.
But if production cost isn't the problem what difference would nuclear power make?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschla...
Now another topic that should be talked about: Germany could have shut down coal first, and nuclear second.
Germany was facing a cold winter, without energy for heating, and the potential for rolling blackouts. With this change, it does not eliminate the threat but makes it less likely.
Who in their right mind would decom any type of energy that could help stave off pain for their citizenship - especially one that has no carbon footprint.
Activist politicians who value their cause more than the well being of their citizens.
Since when? A few days, since the green party convention... Before that, the top figures unmistakenly said nuclear is dead, despite enegery crisis.
> Remember, the current, and hastly implemented nuclear exit, was a CDU led kneejerk reaction
So? And the greens would have exited even faster if they had the chance.
Stop twisting things.
And shaming these people isn't the solution. The solution is to bring them around to seeing the virtue of using nuclear power. They may be wrong about the relative safety of nuclear power but they aren't morally defective people, so shaming them isn't appropriate.
Much like recycling or jaywalking, it's a way for an industry to diffuse and downplay their own advocacy and push the fault onto the public.
Like yeah, it would be better if Greenpeace supported nuclear... but they're not the ones sitting in senator's offices getting bills passed subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry. Even the "climate change" bill had to throw almost 10% of its spending to fossil-fuel subsidies.
They sit in the government.
I think a lot of people are negatively disposed to nuclear based on beliefs that are not justified by the relative risk and reward of nuclear power generation at this stage in humanity's technological evolution. I don't think we have a combination of (better, cleaner, more reliable) base load generation power source that's available right now (which is the question to consider when contemplating "we have a working nuclear reactor; should we shut it down?")
I often see this given as a reason for why nuclear power generation can be safe, but I think it overlooks the fact that military reactors operate in a very different context from civilian ones.
For a start, do we know how expensive (per unit energy) US Navy reactors are? It doesn't matter how safe they are if they are twice as expensive as renewables (plus storage / power-to-gas).
More generally, though, given the secrecy around military and nuclear programs, would we even know how many near-meltdowns and embarrassing accidents US Navy reactors have experienced (at least in the past few decades)?
To be clear, the capacity factor of France's nuclear power stations is "about 70%"[a] (and was "61 percent"[b] in 1988), while recent offshore wind farms manage a "65% capacity factor"[c].
It's also worth noting that there is less parallelism in nuclear reactor designs than in wind farms, so a single mechanical or structural fault (or just the need for regular maintenance and inspection) can take out an entire nuclear reactor, whereas a wind farm can shut down a single turbine without much impact.
So there are certainly differences in the sorts of guarantees that the different types of power station can provide, but I think you need to be a lot more precise about what you mean by "reliable" in order to judge what, if anything, renewables are lacking as an alternative energy source.
[a] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
[b] http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/electricit%...
[c] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/worlds-first-fl...
Price does not matter. It has to work reliably, not only in calm days of peace, but during times of war. Having a source of power to move the big boats without relying on external supplies is worth the price. There even were experiments to generate jetfuel using nuclear power on carriers, certainly not because it is cheap.
Nevertheless, I don't think the anti-nuclear movement is evil. They're guided by extreme fear, not malice. I don't know how you can bring them around though, unless your offering some form of therapy. But even with that, would they accept it? Would you accept therapy to change some of your deeply held beliefs that you don't view as 'wrong'?
However, I'm not sure the distinction is too useful. Ultimately we're judged by actions, not intentions.
* actually we have almost 30% of known viable resources, but only contribute 8% or 9% of the world total supply currently, producing less than a 5th of Kazakhstan, by far the most prolific supplier.
Of course there are risks, but everything has risks attached -- we calculate the probabilities and then stop worrying about the risks if they're minuscule. And of course there's an economic part to consider, but I'm pretty sure if you counted the amount of hours Germans have spent in 2022 talking about the energy crisis, we could've been well on our way to 100% nuclear coverage if we had spent that time productively instead.
This is a dramatic understatement. It was coordinated by the Rockefeller Foundation from the very beginning:
https://atomicinsights.com/how-did-leaders-of-the-hydrocarbo...
>They may be wrong about the relative safety of nuclear power but they aren't morally defective people, so shaming them isn't appropriate.
The moral failing that you're missing is arrogance. People who actually study radiation were not leading this movement.
No, it was short term thinking that has brought on these opinions. Thats who funds these anti nuclear opinions anyway, people who are invested such to benefit in the near term over preventing adoption of nuclear energy, not actual scientists engaging in long term thinking.
Why do you appoint morality a higher ground than rationality?
Edit: Typo
Well-meaning anti-nuclear activists have reasoned incorrectly, but that doesn't mean they should be shamed. Shame is not the appropriate way to correct somebody who has reasoned incorrectly. Shaming them is counterproductive since they know themselves to have good intentions. If you want to bring them around to your point of view, you should use rational arguments.
Use shaming tactics against those who know they've done wrong, like those paid to lie by coal companies. They actually have something to be ashamed of.
Even the occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl is preferable to the irreversible fossil fuel-induced hell we're about to experience, with potentially billions of people displaced and so forth. It's especially galling since protecting the planet was their entire raison d'etre.
And there were certainly who opposed nuclear power with evil intentions, specifically the fossil fuel industry.
I'm not sure which one is worse. At least the fossil fuel industry never claimed to be noble.
We have so much other, more real, more tangible and even right now happening vectors of "problems", starting with Covid, not ending with the real chance of WW3, and we whine about miniscule pollution of square kilometers at worst? Hard to get.
Other one I would quote is "perfection is the enemy of good" - it seems nuclear is good, but they would not give up only on good. It had to be perfect where renewable sources are 100% ideal.
The rivers won't be low in the winter.
And whose fault is that? Why can't their much-vaunted Energiewende manage to keep people warm? After half a trillion dollars of public investment in green energy?
Germany is in the process of moving to greener energies, not just on the state level but also in private homes. But that's mostly true for new constructions of which there are comparatively few. Coincidentally, the German government has recently announced to de-incentivize new construction and rather suggest updating existing houses. It will take many years, though, to get all those houses to move off of gas and oil, especially because Germany has a relatively high percentage of rentals over home owners. There's no real reason for landlords to update the heating system of their investment properties because the cost for heating is paid by the tenants anyway.
If you don't supply it yourself then it isn't unforeseeable. In fact, I'd say it's inevitable. It's only unforeseeable as to when it will occur. Energy independence is a great thing for this reason.
Yes and why is that? Electric heating is not some space-age technology. It has been around for a century. There are countries where it's ubiquitous.
Saying "Germany doesn't have the infra for electric heating" is not an explanation. It's just restating the problem in different words. It isn't some accident, it happened by deliberate policy.
I keep harping on this point, but the German government has spent cumulatively half a trillion USD on moving toward green energy, ostensibly in the name of combatting global warming. And yet with all that money and effort, they couldn't transition towards ubiquitous electric heating? Instead, they wrecked their one dependable green energy source (uranium) and became further dependent on Russian gas, which fuels global warming even more (despite propaganda to the contrary). It's all because wind and solar are intermittent, there's nowhere near enough storage capacity on the grid and there won't be for decades, and their politicians have their heads in the sand about the whole business.
Gas price was 4 ct/kWh two years ago, electricity at 35 ct/kWh. People always take what is currently the cheapest.
> It's all because wind and solar are intermittent, there's nowhere near enough storage capacity on the grid and there won't be for decades, and their politicians have their heads in the sand about the whole business.
They didn't put their heads in the sand. The former government sabotaged the whole renewable industry again and again (e. g. they didn't allow building new renewable power plants for years, storage facilities need to pay for the grid when they store energy and when they release it so they can't be competetitive to gas).
Except it was foreseeable and foreseen [1] just very politically and economically inconvenient.
1. https://www.gmfus.org/news/why-germans-ignored-putins-true-n...
If the 2014 invasion of Ukraine wasn't a dead giveaway, I don't know what else could habe make it more foreseeable.
It was very foreseeable. Both the US and other Eastern European nations warned about this but Germany chose to be ignorant till the very end.
The russian invasion of Ukraine happened because Germany is dependant on Russian gas.
So lesser countries in Europe already managed to have higher count of green energy sources, while lots of construction yards in Germany are blocked on ongoing court cases.
The previous government's. Scientists have been criticizing them for years now that they failed to provide the necessary infrastructure and statutory framework for the "Energiewende" to work.
It's a more difficult situation if the house lacks water circulation (heated floors/radiators).
I wouldn’t call 700% increase over just two years ago „reasonable”…
The grid isn't build for such a load.
> An electric heater usually consumes 2000 Watt, that is not really something that should bring the electric grid to its knees.
That's an additional 40GW when all gas-heated apartments use one of those heaters. You'd need ~30 additional nuclear reactors to sustain such a load -- the 3 remaining ones in Germany provide 1.4GW each.
That's why experts are warning people to not suddenly switch from gas to electric heating this winter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/business/france-sends-gas...
This would be the case during normal times. We're not in normal times though. There has been widespread panic buying of portable electric heaters all throughout summer. Owners of single-family homes are also increasingly switching to heat pumps as the main source of heating (as is strongly encouraged by the government).
If we actually run into a gas crunch this winter, blackouts could ironically be a knock-on effect if everyone turns on their electric heater at the same time.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/CO2_Emis...
So, for the context of this conversation where Germany is prefering solar and wind to nuclear, and worse, turning to coal in place of natural gas, nuclear is effectively carbon free.
Strip-mining for coal, devastating huge areas? This is fine.
Radioactive emissions from burning coal? Don't care.
Deaths caused by coal pollution and coal mining, compared to deaths caused by nuclear power? 'tis but a scratch.
Permanent problems with groundwater caused by decades of coal mining? Lalala I can't hear you.
1) they had been not doing normal routine maintenance that wasn't going to be needed if they were shutting down, and figuring out what all needs to be done to change gears does take some time (and careful thought)
2) they were at one time buying their fuel for nuclear plants from Russia
Now I believe both of these points have been addressed, and I'm glad of it, but it was not totally unreasonable to raise them and not immediately change course.
Germany's main source of heating is gas and yes, gas is used to generate electricity, so nuclear can reduce gas consumption. However, only about 10% of gas (see edit) is used for electricity and Germany has enough electricity. In a worst-case scenario, those nuclear power plants can help stabilize the grid, but they are not needed in general.
The downside is, that they were already in the process of being shut down. They now need to undergo new safety checks, the fuel rods are nearly spend and this will cost 100 millions. Money which can be spent better.
This winter also isn't predicted to be particularly cold, so the full gas storages in combination with the soon opening LNG-terminals will suffice.
EDIT: I made a mistake, 10% of electricity is gas.
German household electricity is double the price of America’s and considerably higher than France or Italy [1]. Were this not the case, more houses could be heated with electricity instead of gas and the coming recession made less painful.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...
It could make a dent if seriously pursued, e.g. by focussing transitioning vulnerable households. The economic benefits of reduced electricity prices would also immediately accrue.
A number of cities also use district heating, where the heat is taken directly from the cooling circuits of nearby power stations. No idea what percentage of total heating this is and if nuclear plants are involved here, but this would be another way how those plants could (theoretically) contribute to heating.
I usually belong to the anti-nuclear crowd, but even I don't think that would be an issue.
From what I know, one of the iron rules of nuclear plant design is that the contaminated stuff never leaves the reactor building. Even the steam circuit that powers the generator is separated from the (contaminated) primary circuit and receives energy through a heat exchanger [1].
The lines for district heating would probably be separated from the primary circuit by several of those.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_exchanger
Oh no, here's hoping they learned a lesson from that money.
Without affordable gas, they'll be buying electric heaters. I believe that's already under way. [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germans-switch-costl...
However, I don't thing those costs are comparable. Those nuclear plants won't have a dramatic impact on the price of gas or energy, so the cost of the federal programs will be there nonetheless.
Even if it doesn’t change the price of gas, wouldn’t it mean buying/burning less gas than you would otherwise? That, in itself, would be a huge savings.
Maybe I’m just missing some data, but this seems like a no-brainer to me on several levels. It’s hard for me to understand anyone being against this.
China knows this, which is why they're adding 150 new nuclear power plants in the next 15 years. [1]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
I agree completely. Along with solar, wind, hydro (+storage appropriate to each) and probably even natural gas peaker plants.
> But building new right now isn't cheap and will just take to long.
Yep, definitely - but it should be done. If you're interested I'd suggest listening to the most recent Odd Lots with Jigar Shah, who's in charge of the DoE loan program (~300B in capital). He talks about how building reactors right now is like building airports - each one a custom specimen for the given landscape and conditions - whereas he believes we should move to a model of building airplanes, mass-producing reactors that fit only where conditions permit out of reusable components.
> I'm looking forward to see how new reactor designs and modular solutions will fare in the next few years.
Me too!
A worse case scenario would had been windless cold winter with gas supplies empty, and a government that have to bailout both the industry, the government institutions, and private people. 3 nuclear power plants provides a bit of backup for that situation.
Energy prices in Germany suggest otherwise. Also, Germany is facing a gas pinch given the geopolitics right now, so freeing up 10% is nothing to sneeze at.
Due to the fact that nuclear is base load and gas plants are mostly used for grid compensation, it would result (according to estimates) in a 1-2% increase in gas usage.
The high energy prices in Germany are to a large degree political. For instance to make the switch to renewables. It doesn't mean the base cost of energy is high. It is in fact lower for the most part.
The three plants don't do too much, only when you really need every Watt of energy you can muster. Not worthwhile economically to let them run really, as the decommission needs to be reorganized. The owners of the plant weren't too happy.
"Title: Maintenance on eight French nuclear reactors delayed by strike ... French nuclear availability is currently at 51% of total capacity with 26 reactors offline for maintenance."
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-says-strike-hits...
EDIT: Not 2 to 3 blackouts, 2 to 3 hour blackouts. When grid is overstressed.
EDIT: Just saw the edit. Yeah, that doesn't seem like a big deal to me. In 2019 after a damaged cable, there was a 31-hour blackout in some parts of Berlin. In comparison a 2 to 3 hour one happens all the time during storms etc.
Designed to cynically "care" about the environment, but in reality meant to destroy Europe's energy independence.
Are there any more specific references what exactly has come to light here?
As it stands, this question just reads as a pretty cheap attempt to frame any and all environmental concerns or pro-renewable/anti-fossil fuel advocacy as russian propaganda. (which doesn't even make sense as gas itself is not renewable - greens usually see gas as the lesser evil compared to coal and nuclear but by no means as an end goal)
The german environmental and anti-nuclear movement predates the reunification, let alone russian gas deals or putin. While there might be some groups who are russian fronts or receive russian funding, the majority of the movement has quite strong motivations of its own.
This doesn't even take the "new" parts of the climate movement into account, such as Fridays for Future.
Yaaawn.. this doomsday propaganda is really getting old, and lets meet in 6 month again and lets see how much impact and necessity those 3 plants had at all on heating here..
Wait, your are likely not from Germany nor even Europe and state "Germany was facing a cold winter" like fact based on what please?
Germany is going to need the little gas it has for heating and its industry. It's going to need all the gas it can save by using Nuclear for electricity (instead of gas) cold winter or not.
Source: I'm German and live in California now. Not a surprise to me that homes here don't have any heating at all, unthinkable in Germany.
Old people would literally die.
I have memories of when our heating would break down in some winters, living in an old building with bad insulation (which is very common). You could wear a thick jacket inside and a thick blanket but your hands are freezing so much you can't even type on a keyboard.
Eeeeh not really, most building are heated by gas, the industry runs on gas, nuclear does't really help with either.
We need to take a stern look at what went wrong with a few things like this 1) Deindustrialization of the west and rampant globalization with not much thought given to national security 2) Manufacturing loss 3) Rise of China through subsidies and unchecked betting by companies like Nike and Apple. 4) No one in Silicon Valley wants to work on defense and military ventures.
The machinery that enables immunity is allowing unpopular but rational opinions in the society. Newspapers wouldn’t print uncomfortable truths.
Wind turbines and power lines in my backyard. It's already regrettable today.
Germany has a high population density. Such a catastrophe happening in Germany would lead to millions getting evacuated.
Another issue is the safe disposal of nuclear waste. It might seem like a low risk, but over the huge timespan nuclear waste needs to be safeguarded that risk adds up. Of course there's also other sources of nuclear waste, but it's best to keep the amounts low.
Last, nuclear currently in the west runs into economic problems. New reactors are plagued by enormous cost overruns and struggle to compete with renewables. But also old reactors are starting to become prohibitively expensive to keep running.
Nuclear waste is a non issue. If you want to make it perfectly safe and untouchable to most bad actors, you can always dump it into a trench in the ocean. The radioactivity will not penetrate far through ocean water and will be less than other sources of radiation in the ocean today. The only reason why we do things like keep it stored on site, is because its still useful material that can be used in future reaction designs, and throwing it into the sea would be a waste of resources we worked hard to extract from the earth in the first place. I also have not seen any examples in history of people taking waste from a powerplant and turning that into a weapon against other people. So far in history, the only time nuclear weaponry has been used against humans was when it was built by an American arms factory, which is pretty remarkable considering the inherent violence that many of the elite of our species rely upon to maintain their power.
You’re not thinking far ahead enough for nuclear waste. Bad actors aren’t the only issue. It’s entirely possible that people don’t know what they have in front of them, as can be seen with the Goiânia accident. Places for storage can turn out to be unsafe, for instance in Asse, an old salt mine in Germany there was a water breach leading to the creation of a radioactive salt slurry.
We have to safeguard nuclear waste for thousands to millions of years. So far states have only existed for hundreds of years in a consistent form. 30000 years ago Neanthertals still roamed the earth. It’s not impossible that societal collapse somewhere hinders safekeeping leading to containment of large landscapes.
It took a long time to ban dumping barrels of nuclear waste, sadly that isn't true for waste water yet.
And yes, this will all go into the food chain and will have repercussions. For virtually forever.
Of course the waste is a problem, we have 1 or 2 permanent storages in the world and there is a reason for that.
And coal waste isn't an issue because it's filtered by our own lungs, right ?
1) Nuclear fuel and waste are clearly dangerous. Your linked article makes a logical fallacy in that it claims a dangerous activity is safe because few people have died from it. But we know things are dangerous even when nobody dies from it. The level of security surrounding nuclear is beyond anything else, and it's required to keep it safe. These security measures are expensive to maintain but are dwarfed by the expenses when they fail.
2) Nuclear is much more expensive than we are led to believe.
This is quite clearly deduced from official writings from nuclear agencies, international treaties controlling who will actually pay if things go south, and also demonstrated in the market where nuclear operators are deeply in debt after selling nuclear power for unrealistic prices for decades. (See France).
Nuclear energy is most likely many times more expensive than any numbers presented to date from anyone operating nuclear power plants. This cost is covered "in blanco" by governments, meaning taxpayers now and in generations to come. I am convinced that the energy we consume from nuclear today will be paid for by our great-great-great-grandchildren and theirs too.
3) Renewables are better long-term so all efforts should be spent on inventing and implementing systems to make renewables the source of all energy. (Storage implied).
Money spent on nuclear is not available for renewables so it's reasonable to be opposed to nuclear for that reason too.
All that being said, it is of course very reasonable to keep plants running for a while longer given the current circumstances. :)
I'm not well-versed enough in hard evidence to assert that we absolutely need nuclear to make it through bottleneck events. But it's plausible that we do. And so we shouldn't rule it out unless there is high-certainty evidence we don't need it.
In other words: I think the burden of proving that nuclear is unnecessary is on the anti-nuclear crowd. I've heard plenty of arguments that wind/solar will be enough, but haven't seen an analysis that seems to prove it based on numbers. (If you know of any such analysis, please share!)
I think a case could be made that nuclear itself causes a bottleneck event in that we get addicted to the energy since it's deceptively cheap for current generations (as long as nothing goes south). It will also cause a problem that vastly outlasts the bottleneck itself. We will have to actively maintain nuclear waste for longer than humanity has used oil as fuel for example.
But to be fair, we already have the problem anyway, so keeping existing plants running makes sense to get through the bottleneck. A few more years of operation won't make a big difference.
But the amount of money needed for new plants, that will be operational 10+ years from now, should in my mind clearly be invested in things like green hydro, pumped storage etc.
2) If it's too expensive it will not happen, no need for the government to step in.
3) Have a look at the link, some renewables like Biomass emit a lot of C02, all energy sources are trade offs
The government steps in for every second of operation of every nuclear reactor on the planet.
Feel free to pay for your own insurance sans liability caps, find your own loans (without government enforced payment from end users for projects that produce no power), pay for the overruns in decomissioning, and pay for the labour of the regulatory bodies stopping the industry from rendering entire countries uninhabitable.
While you are at it you can control the pollution from uranium mine to the same standard that you'd want in your own back yard and pay for security.
Electricity is a utility and a natural monopoly. The government is always involved and they need to make decisions for what is best in the long term. If you don't have your own enrichment and processing industry then that decision isn't 'become dependent on russia for fuel'. We just saw how well that went.
2) The only reason nuclear power exists is because governments have stepped in to support it and cover most of the expenses. If you remove that support, it can't exist. No organisation of any kind anywhere in the world can afford to run a business where income is generated for 50-60 years but expenses continue for 1000+ years after. France recently learned this: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-keeps-edf-buy...
3) There are a lot of viable energy solutions with better tradeoffs than nuclear, and it seems reasonable to build them instead of building nuclear power plants. Heat storage, gravity storage, synthesized fuel, hydrogen gas to name a few. The costs of a nuclear power plant invested in any of these concepts would go a long way.
Nuclear waste is such a tiny tiny amount that we just keep it on site. It's solid. It's not going to leak out of its containers. It just sits in concrete casks on site. Even better, it still has 98% of the energy in it so you don't really want to get rid of it. It can be used in breeder reactors to extract more energy. I quote this too much, but all the nuclear waste the US has ever generated would sit in a single football field, 10 yards high.
2) Nuclear is capital intensive AND the only energy generation that is forced to pre fund its own decommissioning and cleanup. The increased operating costs of nuclear plants is largely due to intentional mismanagement b/c of politics. For example, in France they force nuclear plants to stop outputting power when renewables are generating. They prioritize renewables because that's what politics dictates. They also mandated a cap on power allowed to be generated by nuclear plants, forcing the closure of perfectly good and already paid for plants, so they could buy more renewables. These privatized energy markets don't want stable cheap energy because there's no money in it.
In addition, the US has largely forgotten how to build big things. But it can be done. The UAE just finished 4 1250MW reactors in 10 years. It will generate a quarter of their electricity, (basically) carbon free for 60+ years. Cost was 6B per reactor. Over 60 years, it's a steal. Renewables are only "cheap" in LCOE because the storage costs and capacity factor costs are often not included. Even if you build a megawatt of solar/wind, you really only get 20 to 40% of that peak capacity on average. In Virginia, we are building a wind farm for 10B that is 2640MW. And it is intermittent, off shore is usually 40%. You could get a 1250 MW stable nuke for that much. And it would last twice as long.
3) The main issue with solar/wind though, is that we literally don't have enough material to build enough of it. Not to mention the battery storage. It's not a matter of we can't mine fast enough, we literally don't know of the mineral reserves needed. Here's a presentation going over a report that find this: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2403
Well you couldn't because you'd have a stew of fissioning soup. But once you include all the concrete and steel and low level waste that needs decades of storage it's about the same size as a 4hr battery for the entire country.
> But this concentration is a blessing because you don't need to mind nearly as much material
> 3) The main issue with solar/wind though, is that we literally don't have enough material to build enough of it. Not to mention the battery storage. It's not a matter of we can't mine fast enough, we literally don't know of the mineral reserves needed. Here's a presentation going over a report that find this
False. If it's a problem for PV it's a much worse problem for existing nuclear plants.
Olympic dam is one of the world's largest uranium mines. It produces 7.5g of silver and 30kg of copper for every kg of Uranium.
You need 10kg of natural uranium for 1kg of PWR fuel.
PV is made of sand, copper, and silver.
70g of silver is enough for 3.5kW net of solar at 5mg/Watt (after needing 5g for the fuel and control rods which you have yet to supply indium, cadmium, and zirconium for).
The solar panels will produce ~1.8TJ in their lifetime and be recyclable. The nuclear fuel will produce 500GJ and require large quantities of steel and concrete for storage and transport.
You get triple the net energy from a uranium mine compared to nuclear.
The silicon, glass, frame, and power electronics take less resources than the rest of the plant.
The story for wind is not so hilariously one sided (for example it uses more concrete than nuclear), but it's still fine. The blades of a >3MW turbine have about the same energy density as packaged nuclear waste. There are also at least 3 storage technologies undergoing commercialisation that use abundant materials.
> False. If it's a problem for PV it's a much worse problem for existing nuclear plants.
There's basically unlimited quantities of uranium in sea water. Plus you can breed it from thorium if you want to.
> But once you include all the concrete and steel and low level waste that needs decades of storage it's about the same size as a 4hr battery for the entire country.
I highly doubt it but I'd love to see the math on that.
The author of the report I linked concludes that fission cannot be main power source of the future because of the limits of mineable uranium. However he completely ignores the ocean as a source of uranium, which is basically inexhaustible. We don't get it from there today because demand is low and it's cheaper to get it from the ground but ocean uranium capture has been demonstrated.
Solar panels by themselves don't require a lot of rare material but they do require tons of high heat and carbon to "bake". A large part of how cheap they are today is due to the fact that they are made using coking coal in China. But of course the material constraints of the storage needed for solar/wind is the main obstacle. Until we demonstrate cheap storage at scale, wind/solar won't cut it.
In addition to ignoring sea uranium mining which does not exist in any meaningful way he also ignores a bunch of things which actually do exist like LiFePO4 batteries, the last 10 years of PV research, trains, LEVs and affordable offshore wind.
It also ignores things that are much more likely to exist than uranium sea mining like prussian blue batteries, AlS, iron air, perovskite solar panels and affordable tidal power (all of which are presently undergoing large scale industrialisation).
LiFePO4 batteries still need lithium, and any wind turbine > 1MW requires literally tons of copper. These solutions are simply too material intensive, ie not energy dense enough.
That's a great way of saying 'I believe the capital and operational costs for nuclear are at least 5x as much as renewables and will stay that way'.
Fuel is $1660/kg currently using fairly generous assumptions https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
This is $5/MWh in an AP1000 and $10/MWh in lower burnup models. Once the cheap Uranium goes, that doubles. If Rio Tinto or Kazatomprom actually cleaned up their mess properly, that doubles again. Your proposed 100000km^2 sea mining operation is unlikely to be cheaper. There are subsidy free solar farms already at around $13/MWh with more normal prices being in the $30-50 range.
A vestas 660kW turbine uses around ~500kg or 3t per MW net of copper (less than a nuke plant) in the nacelle, busbars and cabinet https://www.copper.org/environment/green/casestudies/wind_en... everything else including transmission can be made from Aluminum. Bigger turbines are more mass efficient as are ones placed offshore. If you wanted to scare monger about wind, focus on the permanent magnets as that's not solved commercially yet.
PV already uses less than a tenth of this. A TopCon or Perc cell uses about 5-10x as much silver as an AP 1000, but silver plated copper metallization reduces this by a factor of 10 and is already being used in demo plants. There are also Aluminum foil backed cells being trialled commercially.
> LiFePO4 batteries still need lithium,
SIB, Fe-Air, AlS and NaS batteries do not, and supply chains for them are better developed than those for PWRs or for still-fictional mining methods.
Yes, and it still ends up being a better energy source IMO because you don't have to build millions of individual machines. Further, I'd argue that those costs can come down much further and easier than trying to reduce material cost of renewables.
This source (https://help.leonardo-energy.org/hc/en-us/articles/360010919...) puts offshore wind at 6 tons per MW and nuclear at 0.7 tons per MW. I'm not sure if that is accounting for the fact that the location of wind farms are determined by where the wind is vs nuclear plants can be placed wherever. SMRs will help place generation even closer to demand.
Time for napkin math. If we want to convert half of our 490 exajoules of global annual fossil fuel energy to offshore wind energy (let's say all offshore so we can use a generous 50% capacity factor). Then we need 5.22 million offshore wind turbines (3MW each), which will require 94 million tons of copper. That's 11% of all the copper we think exists on Earth. For one generation of wind turbines that will maybe last 25 years. Maybe. This is before we build ANY battery storage, which also needs large amounts of copper, not to mention lithium. It just doesn't make sense to me.
The same calculation for nuclear says we need 6 million tons of copper to replace that same 245 EJ, at a 95% capacity factor. Just 6% of the copper compared to wind. And those plants can go for 60+ years.
Solar PV is even worse than wind for utility scale energy because of its abysmal capacity factor. The main drawback for PV will be the amount of storage or overcapacity needed. So unless we get a miracle breakthrough in energy storage soon, I don't see how wind/solar can scale to replace most of our fossil fuel energy. I'm not against using wind/solar in numbers that make sense. They will definitely be part of the solution, just not the main components IMO.
State of the art offshore turbines are 15MW each (so about 5-8MW net). There are commercial 3MW turbines which only have a relatively tiny amount of copper in the nacelle. 6t/MW is high for the turbines alone, but low if including substations and cabling, so I don't know where they drew the boundary. Worldnuclear uses 27t per MW net.
Here's a commercial wind turbine with no copper windings or permanent magnets https://electriccity2021.windeurope.org/sites/default/files/...
Bus and internal cabling is sometimes Al in smaller turbines as well.
Connecting cables and transformers can also be done with Aluminum. It doesn't happen very often yet because the wind industry lives in the real world where a $1/MWh O&M increase means something won't happen unless it has a commensurable reduction in capital. The second copper rises in price by 50% or so the industry will swap. Al coil substation transformers are already viable.
This cuts out about 80-90% of the copper in onshore wind and 50% or so in offshore (transmission is extremely copper intensive)
Subsea Al transmission cable exists in demo projects but has maintenance issues. It has been tried at scale but would increase costs substantially.
> Solar PV is even worse than wind for utility scale energy because of its abysmal capacity factor. The main drawback for PV will be the amount of storage or overcapacity needed. So unless we get a miracle breakthrough in energy storage soon, I don't see how wind/solar can scale to replace most of our fossil fuel energy
We've had the 'miracle' in the form of sodium ion batteries in about 2018 -- niche safety critical applications for aqueous chemistries are on the market and multi GWh/yr scale factories are presently being built. $60/kWh cell cost is a reasonable expectation (at which point 48hr storage is viable and all PV+battery production is cost competive with nuclear at ~45 degrees north). There are also various projects to radically reduce the cost of brine mining.
Fe-Air is highly promising for 100hr storage but still building out a demo project. AlS and molten salt NaS are undergoing initial commercialisation steps but there have been other technologies at this level that never materialised.
Re. The 480EJ of fossil fuels. There are only 800EJ (2400EJ thermal -- which has relevance for heating and hydrogen) of commercially viable Uranium ore for use in a PWR (even if all the lower efficiency ones are decommisioned immediately). BWRs are a little more efficient, as are Candus (which can use about 4kg of natural uranium where a PWR would use 1kg of enriched). Even in the existing FNR plants (which have resource constraints, cost, reliability, and safety issues to work through before they can be commercial), a closed fuel cycle has never been demonstrated. Reprocessing via MOX and existing designs only adds another 200EJ (600EJ thermal).
Sea mining might be possible, but a world where we can extract the 8kg of natural uranium for 1kg of fuel is a world where we get several thousand tonnes of copper from the same water.
The problem is immense, and the role nuclear energy can provide is only small. Reduction is the primary tool we have.
It was very rough hyperbole/fermi estimate. Can't find figures for the US, so using europe.
Europe has 2.5 million m^3 of low level waste and 1.5 million m^3 that's fairly imminent from refurbishments/decommisioning and replacement (an array of 6 by 6 football fields stacked 20 yards). This is only about ~50 years, so it will go up over time.
Europe uses about 2660TWh/yr or 300GW
At 500Wh/L (high but existing) that's 4 hours for the 2.5. At 300Wh/L it's 4 hours at 4 million m^3
A lot of that waste probably doesn't need containment after a decade or two, so it's only a ballpark. (and a real battery can't be that densely packed without overheating). Conversely 5% or so of it needs multiple centuries or millenia so it would accumulate much higher.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
What could possibly go wrong?
Source: Euratom Supply Agency - Annual Report 2021 - Page 14 https://euratom-supply.ec.europa.eu/publications/esa-annual-...
Also look at page 26ff which states that it would take years to replace current dependency on russia, not only in raw ressources, but also enrichment and recycling services.
But it's besides the point anyway: the grandparent argued that it is stupid to import 15% energy
You can easily source that 19% from Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, and the US instead of Russia.
But if Russian gas was as expensive and unreliable 15 years ago as it is now, I suspect they would have kept the nukes.
Would it have been possible to replace coal with nuclear instead, and keep gas at 2015 levels?
Also, the EU commission declared in February 2022 natural gas as a sustainable energy source, and the EU parliament confirmed this in July 2022. Sounds a bit bizarre, but the dates are correct.
The reactor itself takes a long time to ramp up and down, but it heats a molten salt battery. The battery can burst-power the turbines at well-above the reactor output; they can be sized to handle peak demand + overnight loads.
It's hard to find current numbers, but capital investment for combined cycle natural gas plants seems to be about a tenth of modern reactor projects in western countries.
The plant designs I’m describing are new, but marching to commercialization. They are not in wide-scale production yet.
They are optimized for a world where solar and wind have taken over most of the production.
It's unlikely that coal could have been replaced with new nuclear. It would have probably been an EPR from back then Framatome and Siemens. Construction of the EPR in Olkiluoto started in 2005 and just finished recently.
Keeping old nuclear reactors running and shutting down coal plants instead would have been possible though, but didn't have backing in the population.
I no longer believe in coincidence.
An equal quantity of renewable generation was brought online. That isn’t the same as replacing it with renewables. Had the nukes stayed, Germany would be more secure and a better global citizen in terms of emissions.
Odd choice.
Issues with nuclear like fallout from Chernobyl still leading to contamination today in German or bad handling of nuclear waste at the Asse II mine have been a topic in German society for a very long time. The climate crisis picked up as a topic only really in the late 90s. That explains the first nuclear exit plan in 2000.
The current exit from 2011 was a direct reaction to what happened in Fukushima.
I mean even today you still have plenty of people and company that think that there is still a lot of time before more action must be taken against climate change.
So, eartchquakes and tsunamis were a new developement in japan. The engineers had never a chance to study them and develope methods to mitigate risks for nuclear plants?
If plane crashes would endanger whole countries or continents we would ban air traffic all together.
And plane crashes can and did endanger entire countries in the past, such as 9/11 where hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afganistan civilians went on to die because of a plane crash in new york city. However, we responded to 9/11 by engineering better protocols, like installing a door lock to the pilots cabin and preventing the carrying on of certain blades. There were other times too when a plane crash threatened an entire country, such as when the soviet union shot down an airliner and caused a serious diplomatic incident as a result.
1. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.037...
Unfortunately, the Merkel government stopped these subsidies and dragged its feet regarding renewables for sixteen years. The flip-flopping stance regarding nuclear didn't help either, of course.
What you mean is that fraudulent anti-science organization use it to fear monger to get people to do what they tell them to.
The actual contamination is a literal non issue. If nobody ever talked about it and nobody ever did anything about it exactly 0 people would get hurt.
> Asse II mine have been a topic in German society for a very long time.
More fear mongering for the most part.
Had all the money they wasted on Asse II been spent on new nuclear plants, they would literally have saved 1000s of people instead.
It is easy to say that on average nuclear energy is not so terrible, when you were never personally confronted with what happens when you lose the bet. Then an abstract idea is becoming very real. You realise that one day someone else will have to pay the price, or you yourself again: What if the next accident happens not in the Soviet Union or Japan, but in one of the power plants next door?
This experience, shared by millions of people, has done much to cast doubt on the claims that such risks are technically controllable. And the climate protection argument also appears to many to be nothing more than propaganda, because it comes from the same parties and companies that supported likewise nuclear, coal and gas, but downplayed climat change and other environmental issues for decades. Their actions and lobbying helped to create our current situation by slowing down the switch to renewable energies and postponing stricter regulations on energy saving. -- Shall we trust them now after so many failures?
[1] Mushrooms in some areas of southern Germany are still highly contaminated. But that was one of the least of our concerns in those days.
[2] I found an old article from Der Spiegel from 1986 reporting 500,000 Bq/m^2 filter: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/dicke-luft-um-verseuchte-filt... (in German)
> What if the next accident happens not in the Soviet Union or Japan, but in one of the power plants next door?
That would be terrible. But how does it compare to other terrible events such as the flood of last year, arguably caused by global warming?
You were victim of the fear propaganda of the 80's, but people today are victim of the energy crisis in Germany, which is partly caused by the choice to discontinue nuclear.
Thousands died of thyroid cancer but for the population that is easily described as "almost no consequences" due to scale.
https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2018/unisous395....
The death of a man is a catastrophe. A thousand deaths is a statistic!
> About 20,000 cases of thyroid cancer cases were registered in the period 1991−2015 in males and females, who were under 18 in 1986 for the whole of Belarus and Ukraine, and for the four most contaminated oblasts of the Russian Federation. The Scientific Committee now estimates that one in four of those cases is attributable to radiation exposure.
This is not about Germany, but about the area much closer to the power plant. Also thyroid cancer has a 98% survival rate according to Wikipedia. So that would amount to 20000 * 0.25 * 0.02 ≈ 100 death caused by the accident in the most impacted area. Which is a catastrophe, but also not an apocalypse
But I was talking about Germany anyway where the most alarmist messages were delivered about the danger on the German population.
The threat was real. It is like saying that after someone put a knife at your throat, that it was nothing, because you are still alive.
> but people today are victim of the energy crisis in Germany, which is partly caused by the choice to discontinue nuclear.
It depends how you tell the story. It was the choice to discontinue nuclear, but pospone renewables. The companies in the coal and gas energy sector were mostly identical to those in the nuclear energy sector (3 out of 4 large companies). They did not have much of a problem getting out of nuclear energy if they could stay in the coal and gas business or even expand it and pass on the financial risk of their nuclear waste disposal obligations to the taxpayer[1] -- as long as they had not to fear too much competition from renewables.
It were the very same people in industry and politics that supported nuclear whenever possible, that supported coal and gas as a replacement and constantly downplayed the impact of climate change. The people from the environmental movement who warned about all this were not politically strong enough to push through a better agenda. That is what has brought us to the current situation. Guess who I trust the most to find the best way out of this situation ...
[1] They threatend bankruptcy if not, and got away with a one-time payment of only 24,1 billion Euro.
Are their lives less valuable than the right of the so called environmental activists (mainly referring to the ones from the 80s and 90s) to impose their irrational views on the rest of the society? If nuclear expansion continued at the same pace it did in the 60s and 70s we’d probably have CO2 emissions under control by now. Instead we just wanted several decades waiting for renewables to become cost effective.
> This experience, shared by millions of people, has done much to cast doubt on the claims that such risks are technically controllable.
Yes, people are irrational. I mean nuclear isn’t 100% safe but it’s objectively safer than burning fossil fuels. So it seems absurd to me to be fine with burning diesel and coal but now with nuclear.
Worldwide we have roughly 10% nuclear energy for electricity. And we had roughly 20 to 25 years between nuclear disasters (Sellafield, Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukushima). If we had had 100% nuclear, it would mean such a disaster would occure approx. every 2 to 2.5 years.
We also cannot close the books about this disasters. They still are going to hurt and kill people. Ask the Russian soldiers that camped at Prypiat this spring. You might say: They should not have done this and known better. But this is how things play out in reality, while in theory they should not happen.
And then there is the strategic problem in a war. It is no wonder that on maps of the situation in Ukraine like this https://militaryland.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/day_234_... the locations of nuclear power plants are emphasized. Renewables would provide a far better situation for a nation that needs to defend itself, because they are decentralized.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Nuclear is often compared to flying: accidents can happen and are crazy scary, but on average flying is the safest way to travel.
Coal and gas plants produce pollution that kills thousands every year, and that's how it's supposed to work.
Meltdowns are next to impossible at correctly designed and built plants, which the German ones are.
This is not true. The German nuclear industry did not even manage to store low and intermediate level radioactive waste even remotely safely. Here is a report from July 2022 about the failure from German public television: https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Marodes-Atommuell... The report is only availablöe in German, but you may run the accompanying documentation through the translator of your choice, to learn what happened.
> Coal and gas plants produce pollution that kills thousands every year, and that's how it's supposed to work.
Wrong alternative. We need 100% renewable.
> Meltdowns are next to impossible at correctly designed and built plants, which the German ones are.
People like you would have said that about Japan too, before 2011, and actively ignore what happend in Harrisburg in 1979 or Sellafield in 1957.
Civilian nuclear waste can absolutely not 'devastate wide regions'.
And civlian nuclear plants in the waste can also not really do that.
What actually can happen is that over a large region you measure slightly higher radiation but not actually enough to be dangerous to the people there.
> I was a victim of the Chernobyl fallout myself, and would not like to experience this again.
There is no measurable impact of Chernobyl. All the claims about all the disabled children were literally all lies. Its all fear mongering.
After the closure of the nuclear plants, the share of electricity generated from coal INCREASED
So basically they replaced a CO2-neutral energy source, with another which is pretty CO2-intensive.
Renewable does not mean good for the environment!
https://www.app.electricitymaps.com
I still thank shutting them off is wrong but I think there’s a lot of history in that decision. And it’s much more history than one party deciding that.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
If you get a runaway reaction, it has a fail-safe described in the article that drains the reactor into containment vessels underground.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/04/166330/meltdown-...
Any reactor in use today will have a negative void coefficient. Which means, if you don't put power into it, the reaction naturally stops. Then you've got control rods and neutron moderators that will fall back upon the core if there's no power. Then Gen3+ includes a core catcher in which, should it breach its reactor, it just falls in there and cools down.
and radioactive material is like a fraction of the problem with coal. they have much worse health impact in other areas. they're linked (directly or indirectly) to 10000s of thousands of deaths a year.
That would mean around 10 quadrillion tons of coal would need to get burned to emit the same amount of radiation. China is currently burning 4 trillion tons of coal per year, which is a 2500th part of it.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20005612/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Release_and...
For God's sake, France has 56 power plants. What are we talking about....
Which is to say, that the radiation could be measured is different from saying that the radiation represented a significant health risk.
Sounds like the GP would receive mushrooms that have elevated levels of radionuclides that are within the legal limit of what is considered safe to consume.
"Around 95% of wild mushroom samples collected in Germany in the last six years still showed radioactive contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, albeit not above legal limits, the German food safety regulator said on Friday."
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/three-decades-g...
> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 2,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.005 millisievert. This is considerably less than the radiation exposure during a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. However, if adults eat such a mushroom meal each week, they will receive an additional annual radiation exposure corresponding to about twenty flights from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. Expressed in numbers it is 0.27 millisievert.
https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
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.
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.
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.
Given appropriate attention and care, these can be accounted for through planning processes and protocols.
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.
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.
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.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdgasleck_in_der_Nordsee
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/elgin-gasaustrit...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648...
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 actually could 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.
Retroactive.
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, nor 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'
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankey_diagram
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.
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.
I mostly agree, but I would also say the same thing about fossil fuels.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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price
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:
* https://ieso.ca/en/Power-Data
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.
And mention of 2200 related to the (post-tsunami) evacuation.
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 publicly identified costs soar as the public begins demanding ever more onerous mandates, causing people to stop voluntarily remediating, which is why lead thresholds are set considerably lower than for other similarly problematic but less common contaminants.
Just this past week we called up the city environmental health 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. simple tarping (even if amateurish), to minimize leaded paint flake dispersal. And what more can you reasonably ask? Turning every house scraping job into a super fund site would just be ridiculous, yet 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 and wind.
* Pretending that nuclear power always produces 100% stable power. France manages an average of 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 the government is 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 ?
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.
While I agree the German position is more complex, the conclusion is reducto ad absurdum given the Fukushima reactor meltdown is an extraordinarily complex issue without a single definitive root cause which could be attributed to simple human control.
Any human control is predicated and annotated by known assumptions and performance envelopes. Failure modes can be predicted, past performance can be analyzed and conclusions can be drawn using scientific knowledge and evidence for the basis of ones systems of control, be they industrial or environmental. Failure events or conditions, although regretful, are very important as they permit us to learn, to adapt, to grow and to change in response to events and conditions as they change or evolve over time.
Because Japan is a brave, science minded nation, it hasnt eschewed the atom even in the face of this egregious misfortune. The initial German response to the accident could best be compared to that of a child: reactionary, undisciplined, haphazard and deleterious. Im glad to learn more sensible minds have prevailed and reconsidered nuclear power as a sustainable partner, albeit somewhat irked to see its only real commitment in this case is the overwhelming demand for energy independence amidst global conflict.
It seems like argument you have is that the "sensible" minds are agreeing with you, and a whole litany of name-calling for the people who advocated abandoning nuclear - who are largely the exact same people by the way.
Nuclear technology is risky but Fukushima isn't a good reflection of what modern nuclear power plants can accomplish. The reactors at Fukushima were designed half a century ago and were known to be flawed 35 years before the accident happened [1]. It's ironic that the plant was running longer than was originally planned in part because of Green opposition to newer power plants.
[1] https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/16/fukushima-reactor-flaws...
I think many people forget that we are really good at detecting radiation. This is mostly due to Cold War era fear and so a lot of research got put into this and we have cheap and sensitive devices. Cheap enough that there are large public networks of radiation monitoring set up by citizens. Not too dissimilar from citizen weather projects.
But that doesn't mean Germans haven't pondered seriously about this topic in the meantime. And the result is that, apart from this band-aid solution for the current winter, Germany will still phase out nuclear. Let me try to summarize the most important points I know of:
- Cost. Nuclear energy is expensive energy. It just happened to be cheaper than solar and wind energy a decade ago. But the cost of renewables went down spectacularly, and the cost of nuclear went up at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity). So why invest in nuclear energy when we could have more low-carbon energy for the same price elsewhere?
- Subsidies. So far, all nuclear power plants have been heavily subsidized. There isn't a single country where the full cost of decommissioning and permanent storage of radioactive material is properly taken into account. And there is no power plant with a full insurance, so those risks are carried by the public. Once we eliminate these subsidies, the cost of nuclear grows even further.
- Reliability. Some people dislike renewables because there are times with no wind and no sunshine. But they forget that wind and sunshine are relatively predictable and have worst-case bounds. So investing into storage and the electricity grid makes renewables highly reliable. Now look at nuclear. The worst case scenario is roughly what just happened in France: you discover a problem that affects an entire generation of power plants, and all of them have to be taken offline until the problem is resolved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis...). Without its European neighbors, France would be in deep trouble. If we take precautions against this risk, the cost of nuclear grows even further.
- Inflexibility. Nuclear power plants need a high uptime to amortize their construction cost. But once they operate in a grid with a substantial amount of renewables, they are displaced more and more and the cost per unit of energy grows even further.
- War. The Russian army has recently captured a Ukrainian nuclear power plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_at_the_Zaporizhzhia_Nuc...). The plant is now used to store military equipment, the employees are bullied or even tortured, and all pillars of nuclear safety are being violated. There are credible approaches how we can build a power plant that resists human stupidity or a natural disaster, but there is no way we can build a power plant that is unconditionally safe in a war zone.
- Nuclear Proliferation. Once the know-how and the infrastructure for handling fissionable material is in place, even if only for civilian purposes, there is a much stronger incentive to also look into military use. And the last thing our planet needs is more nuclear weapons.
Given these points, the current German position seems quite sensible and I wonder why some other nations are suddenly so eager to build new nuclear power plants.
No there's not history. There's not emotions. There's god-damned stupidity and a refusal to evaluate risk at the top level of government, that has condemned hundred of millions.
I've lived near irradiated areas too. There was zero justification for this.
How about not phasing it out at all.
> The fallout from Tschernobyl was measurable in Germany… measurable as in my science teacher measured it in his garden
Yeah you can also measure the output form coal plants.
Tschernobyl killed either literally or basically nobody in German, and hardly hurt anybody.
It was basically nonsense, because of political reasons rules were adopted based on totally fraudulent science and then these rules were used in endless scare mongering campaigns and misinformation campaigns.
But at some point you have to stop with pure emotional responses and endless fear-mongering and actually look at things rationally.
That's an understandable reaction.
But a better reaction would have been "what lessons did we learn?".
After the 2008 financial crisis, the financial regulators around the world gathered at the 2009 Pittsburgh Summit [1] to see what can be done to improve the resiliency of the global financial markets. They came up with a Statement [2]. Later on, the Basel Committee ironed out some details, and the national regulators other details, and the outcome was a long string of financial reforms known collectively as Basel III.
This was a monumental achievement (well, it's still work in progress, but it's about 80-90% done). Of course, for many professionals in the financial markets it felt more like a curse than a blessing. But we have been trough the March 2020 financial panic, and the financial system coped quite well.
In the nuclear regulatory space, there are so many regulators around the world. The NRC for sure, but also the nuclear regulators in Canada, the UK, France and Finland. One can add South Korea to the list and probably a few more countries. I'm sure they are exchanging notes. Overall, I think they have probably a huge amount of experience, and they have met 99.999% of the edge cases for classical (pressurized and boiling water) reactors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_G20_Pittsburgh_summit
[2] http://www.g20.utoronto.ca/2009/2009communique0925.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III
How does it compare to living in Denver, Colorado, vs living in Frankfurt? (Denver is at a higher altitude and also in a region of slightly radioactive rocks.)
How does it compare to the effects of 30,000 km of flying?
It still is measurable. Only 5% of the reactor mass managed to escape into the environment. There are effective safety mechanisms but like in Fukushima they are subject to economic realities. The luck here was that water is a very good radiation absorber. It will still go into the food chain and increase risks. Perhaps not by much if we are lucky.
This is politics and letting them run is populism in my opinion. They won't run longer than to their next security inspection. Even the owners were reluctant because you have to reorganize the demolition, which isn't trivial for NPP.
Nuclear can be a source of energy, but the way it is currently hailed as a solution for climate change should only really convince filthy peasants. Emotional is as much a reluctance to consider better options because it is expensive and there are a lot of unsolved problems. Beginning from mining Uranium to getting rid of the waste permanently.
Their coal power plants made you breath more radioactive particles than Chernobyl
there have been many studies on this. tschernobyl has had no measurable impact on any health related metrics you could come up with in countries outside the ukraine. even directly at tschernobyl the long lasting impact was minimal and most related deaths were an effect of accute exposure.