Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
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The sad truth is, that decision was largely driven by uninformed and emotional reactions to a single event on the other side of the world. Many people think a nuclear reactor can blow up like an atomic bomb, probably from movies and games as well as just assuming everything "nuclear" is inherently explosive and dangerous.
Fukushima changed the perception of exit plans from "yeah, right, I'll believe it when I see it" to "yeah, definitely". Fukushima hit hard because before that, Chernobyl was quite successfully framed as a failure not of nuclear technology but of Sovietism. But Fukushima happened, of all countries, in Japan, famed for accuracy and reliability (they can even run trains on a schedule!) and full of respect for the limited land-mass they have (compare Shintoism to American "exploit and move on"). If they can't handle it, nobody can. A lot of people were reevaluating their perception of Chernobyl and so their personal "disasters in my lifetime because nuclear is hard" counter did in effect not double from one to two, it, jumped to two straight from zero. Opinion shifted from almost a tie to almost unanimous.
This is how overblown the whole affair is.
Yes, wind and solar are safer. So is geothermal. But nuclear is still safer than hydroelectric, gas, oil or coal.
But yes um also all for nuclear until fusion reactors are better, especially salt /thorium reactors And more focus to turn usable waste to RTGs etc
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10837476/
Basically all the reactors involved in the incidents are based on very old technology and had design problems (which is not surprising as the technology and science was new at the time these were built - fukushima 1971, chernobyl 1977).
What we really should do is to work on reactors whose main functionality is to provide energy with extremely minimal possibility for meltdown. It's too bad that even with resources of Gates it seems to be impossible to advance the nuclear technology - I see it as the main way to save our planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/te...
It was only online for two years and was eventually torn down. Well, the cooling tower was, they still have to wait for the reactor to lose it's radioactivity.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
It's a very common opinion among people who have researched this significantly, but not all that common in the general population, sadly.
I also wish it were more practical for interested people to tour operating nuclear power plants. They're amazing feats of engineering and operations--and that's very evident everywhere you look at most plants--but they're not so easy to visit for most people.
Why is that knowledge important for a risk analysis?
Also, renewable power plants of all types (wind, solar, water, etc.) are also amazing feats of engineering. So I don't see this impacting the argument in any particular direction.
>It's a very common opinion among people who have researched this significantly
The nuclear industry has spent a lot on PR to convince the public that they're safer but so far criminal liability for accidents is still minimized and the liability cap (i.e. free government insurance for accidents) is still incredibly low.
I'd personally be more convinced of their frequent protestations that they're 100% safe if they lobbied to increase their own liability rather than engaged public relations firms to put a happy face on their industry.
Actions do speak louder than words, don't you think?
Moreover, if you raised the liability then the research into making them safer ought to more or less take care of itself. The greatest incentive for executives is avoiding criminal liability.
Chernobyl wasn't on the "other side of the world", it was so close that the country was affected by the radioactive pollution.
For example in Greifswald an electrician caused a damage of roughly 500 Million DM on a reactor, by doing a demo creating a short circuit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant
That's what I mean by "single event". Of course, the informed person would not have made a decission based on just that one incident, but it's what I suspect large parts of society did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
I think lots of people were aware that complex technology has lots of risks which were there, but largely ignored. The industry claimed that they can handle the risks it was willing to handle and/or which were thought to be actual risks. There are a lot of risks associated with large/complex technical systems, caused by natural disasters, malfunctioning technical systems, aging technical systems, users making unintentional errors, users making intentional errors and bad actors. Some of these risks were just ignored. For example for many years nuclear power plants were built with no or very weak protection against plane crashes.
For example, how realistic is the risk that a large passenger aircraft can/will be flown into a nuclear power plant? Military planes will then shoot it down before reaching a plant?
Before 9/11 many in the industry would have thought that this risk is nothing they need to deal with and only small plane crashes were thought to be important to deal with. Then also a Lufthansa pilot was flying a plane into the ground and crashed it in France, killing all people on board. Once those events happened, the regulators take it much more seriously - even though parts of the public was already thinking that these events are possible.
IMHO it's not an "outlier" single event, not after Chernobyl. The track record matters.
But it is on the other side of the world. Unlike Chernobyl.
But somehow people think one headline from back then constitutes the entirety of German nuclear exit policy, and keep repeating this everywhere...
A response that "Chernobyl wasn't on the other side of the world" is either misunderstanding which event entirely, or skipping a whole lot of necessary preamble about it not being a "single event" at Fukushima.
Actually it's completely the other way: in Germany an informed population discussed this topic for two decades and eventually a consensus in society emerged to slowly phase out nuclear first and to create a new, renewable and market-oriented energy landscape.
In Japan an uniformed population was surprised to learn over night that a single event can take out all their nuclear power plants for months & years and can cause for many of these nuclear power plants their sudden end of life. They were also surprised to learn that cores can melt in nuclear power plants and that the industry and regulators have no idea how to handle that.
In 2001 socdem-green coalition agreed on an "Atomaustieg" that would not allow new plants to be greenlighted and the old ones would be phased out by some time 2015–2020.
In 2010 when Merkel first had a sole conservative-liberal coalition, those plants got an extension for another 8 years and even an unpopular "Austieg vom Austieg" (exit from exit) seemed viable.
It was only in 2011, as a direct consequence of Fukushima that Merkel's stance changed (or she saw an oppurtunity to push through with it, if that was her personal preference).
In my opinion, she saw that an "exit from exit"-stance would have endangered her re-election. So it was a largely political driven decision, regardless of what the educated concensus in Germany was. It took away a main attack talking point of the green party, which was polling at about 25%* in post Fukushima-2011, realms the green party only got back in only 8 years later, in the wake of the climate crisis topic last year.
Saying that Germany's handling of the energy sector is purely rational, simply doesn't hold up to the political realities, which can be quite messy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...
After two decades of discussion and political struggle.
> Merkel's stance changed
Merkel knew already that there was not enough support for nuclear. The Fukushima event caused the collapse of the nuclear support in her own party and in the industry.
> Saying that Germany's handling of the energy sector is purely rational, simply doesn't hold up to the political realities, which can be quite messy.
No human decisions are 'rational'. Energy politics is never rational. Every decision in energy politics is guided by current level of knowledge, political influence, influence by industry (their are billions of dollars involved), various preferences, etc.
The German population was never asked if they wanted a monopolistic and centralized electricity system - the one which emerged after WWII. Some politicians even thought that nuclear technology was a step into military power. This was for example the plan of Franz Josef Strauss, a very influential politician at that time.
And nobody wants a reactor or storage facility in their backyard. Keep in mind Germany has a higher population density than France. And even France has problems to find locations for their new plants.
In the end after Fukushima, there just wasn't enough support left in the population.
It's the same as for every other power plant. They don't need to be close to their consumers, power can be transmitted for long distances. Of course, there's the cost of building the long transmission lines, and a small amount of power loss (using higher voltages reduces this loss, while increasing the cost of the transmission lines and equipment).
The main two issues which lead me away from nuclear at the moment are:
- Externalities: even though I've read about various ways to store/dispose of nuclear waste long-term, I've yet to hear of a solution that seems clearly safe -- especially compared to the alternative of not producing nuclear waste in the first place.
- Cost: From what I've seen, Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) seems a standard measure for overall cost of energy production by source, and as of relatively recently, it seems that wind and solar are generally[0] now cheaper than nuclear.
If it's cheaper and externality-free to pursue renewables, that seems like a pretty strong anti-nuclear argument.
I'd agree there's also a larger real-world audience to convince one way or the other -- but I'd also be wary that they'll accept equally spurious arguments about wind/solar not being workable.
I think brief 'talking points' end up being pushed by industry a lot to try to influence people in one way or another - and that those end up flowing through communities and social networks and defining people's 'default' reaction in debates based on cherry-picked arguments even if they haven't had time to read further about the issues.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Nuclear waste used to be my main reason for not liking nuclear power. The thing is, if you're gonna argue that way, what about CO2? It stays in the atmosphere for far longer, unless we find some good way to actually put it underground again, which atm wejust don't.
The benefit of nuclear waste is that there's far less of it, so putting it underground is actually viable.
And it's not even like renewables don't have their own environmental problems; just look at how many bats and birds are killed by wind turbines.
Birds killed by x in the US annually [1]:
- wind turbines: < 570k
- Domestic and feral cats: > 210m
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...
They have no comparable numbers for bats, but it seams the industry is working on active counter measures.
Calling it a fad about a single event is uninformed indeed. Ever heard of Chernobyl and other nuclear accidents?
The Flamanville site is in the process of building an EPR unit, and already has 300% cost overruns [0].
The official prognosis for 6 new plants (to replace the old ones) has put the sticker price at $51 billion [1] - without any cost overruns, without waste disposal and without decomissioning of the plants - each of which adding billions per plant. Including these costs, utility scale wind turbines are roughly the same price, at about $15-20 billion per 1000MW.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-e...
The more turbines, the higher that percentage becomes. (For comparison, French nuclear plants also only produced power a bit over 70% in 2016/7)
[0] = https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.475...
Germany and Norway also currently work on a project for a direct connection between their respective grids, called NordLink.
Base load in a renewable-only world is an essentially solved problem, see for example the following link: https://skepticalscience.com/detailed-look-at-renewable-base...
But yeah, just building safer reactors would have been less of a gamble in the short term at least.
Since Uranium is a finite resource, it is not at all clear if supplying the world's demand using nuclear power would be sustainable for more than a few years. Many types of breeder reactors have been proposed and tested over the decades, but so far with very limited success.
In contrast to relying on true regenerative sources of energy, this makes a full commitment to nuclear energy a huge gamble. On top of that, the nuclear waste problem is still largely unsolved. All attempts at long term storage in the German nuclear programme have ended in extremely expensive failures.
I recommend reading this chapter from "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" by David JC MacKay if you want to know more (with calculations!). It is an excellent book for reading about the facts of energy generation.
On top of that, even with current easily accessible Uranium sources, nuclear energy is significantly more expensive than both fossil fuels and renewables. I don't see that getting better with even more complicated reactor technologies.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
edit: Also currently on HN frontpage is "Climate threats now dominate long-term risks, survey of global leaders finds" so maybe adverting that is worth the cost.
Hyperbole like that will only lead to the rest of your arguments getting ignored. Even Venus, with its runaway greenhouse effect, is not a "giant fireball" (we even have pictures of its surface).
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
Nuclear would be ideal but that has been ruled out for political reasons.
Shifting the burden elsewhere hardly seems fair, does it?
Anyhow, I don't think that importing power from a neighboring country is a long-term solution to Germany's electricity needs.
There is no interconnector, France and Germany are on the same grid I believe.
It irks me because there is no such thing really. "Baseload" is the lowest point demand reaches during the 24 hour cycle. At all other points in time it is basically a number on a sheet.
What is needed, is enough dispatchable generation to cover lapses in renewable output, keeping blackouts to an "acceptable" level. Such dispatchable generation does not necessarily need to be large thermal plants.
The bigger reason why there is not much new nuclear, is not political reasons but rather the fact that nuclear is simply uncompetitive with other fuels, including wind. Given that wind power is only increasing, investors don't want to invest into a nuclear plant, then wait a decade for a plant to be built that ends up rarely selling power because other power sources always undercut them.
Just because there's a timetable for it still makes it backward (including the self-decided avoidance of Nuclear) to hang on so long.
That's only true if most of the coal-using world excludes the 2.7 billion people living in China and India, neither of which have any plans to phase out coal at all. The US is also only gradually phasing out coal, it'll still be a major coal energy producer 20 years from now (probably 15% of its power base at that point).
China is very aggressively expanding its coal use - despite using as much coal as the rest of the world combined already. It's presently adding more new coal generation than exists in the entire EU.
That's today, given the pace China works at they could easily commit to phasing out coal by 2037 and mean it too. They've already started planning for moving on from it. It's also entirely likely they could have less coal use (excluding steel and industrial uses) than from power stations than Germany in 2037 (1 year before Germany commits to phase it out)
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/10/Cumulative-CO2-tr...