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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Here in Germany many people simply are against wind-power-plants. They think they're ugly, loud, and dangerous.

The rule of thumb seems to be, "Everyone is against everything, but everyone still wants power, and preferably cheap power." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21992958

I think it’s just a little subtler than that: “I’m not against it in general, but not in my backyard/neighborhood/ town/state...”

There's a push back against NIMBYism with YIMBYism (Yes in my backyard!), but that's as fraught with politics as ever, with aspersions that everyone's in some elses' pocket. It's frustrating, to say the least.

But don't worry guys, we're only burning coal to produce 40% of our power!

At least we have a plan to turn that off at some point in the future (2038) now.

Something which can't be said about storing our nuclear waste for example...

Coal has waste that doesn't just go away too, not the same as nuclear, but way higher volume and it doesn't go anywhere... let alone all that carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere.

The thing is: it doesn't have to go anywhere. You grow nature on it and it's a hill in the end.

However nuclear waste HAS to go somewhere. It has to be taken care of ($$$) and probably for millennia to come by people and governments which can do stuff we can't imagine today.

Not even mentioning failed storage options we're face with today already like Asse...

When they say it's "not the same as nuclear" they really don't mean it's just harmless rocks.

Waste from a coal plant is (somewhat) radioactive, it's full of metals and generally very toxic. If you're lucky you can find some actual use for it, e.g. as a constituent for some construction materials that will fix it in place, but you aren't going to get "a hill in the end" in a human lifetime by insisting it doesn't need to go anywhere, you just get a toxic heap of unstable black dust. If you try to grow plants on it, plants that do grow will be extremely toxic, because the heavy metals and other pollutants are drawn up into the plant.

Nuclear waste is a trivial problem. The amount of waste is incredibly miniscule. The entirety of the US waste generated from nuclear power generation fits into a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high.

Next year when the last nuclear reactor goes down in Germany we'd have something around 15.000 tons. Since we're not the US of A with a hell lot of space and the fact that we've been looking for a spot for years now, it's not a trivial problem at all.

But maybe you can convince your government to take our waste and fix this "trivial" problem? I'm sure we'd be able to pay for it a nice sum and your current president looks like he might be stupid enough to actually do it.

17,000 tons of uranium is less than a 10x10x10 meter cube of uranium.

The US already has a disposal site constructed in the desert, but we're not using it yet. Europe also has a dig in Finland. Most of it stays on site because there's so little of it to store.

No, it stays on side because it's either not transportable (see Asse) or, as I said: there is no space for it.

FYI: Finland is not like an US state only because it's part of Europe. It's an independent country and they will not take foreign nuclear waste.

PS. those 17.000 tons are just the highly radioactive material. All together it will be 280.000 cubic meters when we're finished decommissioning.

What's hard about transporting it? The US manages to ship these just fine [1]. These casks can be transported via semi truck and shipping container [2]. Maybe Europe doesn't have as good waste container standardization.

1 https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

2. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/avery-w2/images...

Replies in comment, since HN is limiting my work VPN or something like that.

> Is this a straw man or did you really not understand what I wrote?

From your comment:

> No, it stays on side because it's either not transportable (see Asse)

You explicitly brought up ease of transport.

> I also put something in there. This word in the brackets. You might have googled it up where you'd come upon pictures like that: https://media1.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/1203828188/1.3595409/.... Instead, you chose to ignore the complete rest of the comment and all the comments I wrote before and only wrote a completely irrelevant answer to something you did not understand. Congratulations for this derailment.

You claimed that transportation was a barrier to storing nuclear waste, by cherry picking one specific failure. And I refuted this claim by pointing out that plenty of the world's largest nuclear operators transport waste just fine. This isn't derailment, quite the opposite.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

Is this a straw man or did you really not understand what I wrote?

Nobody want this shit. There is no place to transport it. None. We have to sit on it for millennia. Transport is not the issue here.

@your edit: >You explicitly brought up ease of transport.

I also put something in there. This word in the brackets. You might have googled it up where you'd come upon pictures like that: https://media1.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/1203828188/1.3595409/...

Instead, you chose to ignore the complete rest of the comment and all the comments I wrote before and only wrote a completely irrelevant answer to something you did not understand. Congratulations for this derailment.

EOD.

Should have countered that with links to Castor, and pictures of the mass demonstrations we have, when those are rolling. You know, like people cementing their arms or legs into rail tracks, dangling down from bridges over the tracks, and the huuuuge mass of police escorting that convoy on foot, thereby essentially making the transportation pedestrian, speedwise.

edit: but probably he wouldn't get it, because AFAIK that Yucca Mountian is unused for the same reasons as here. Local opposition...

edit: I don't know what to make to your picture of the Asse. THAT just shows our incompetence to responsible handling of the stuff. Maybe they are only full of old "Putzlappen"?

> FYI: Finland is not like an US state only because it's part of Europe. It's an independent country and they will not take foreign nuclear waste.

For what its worth, this isnt too far off from reality in the US. Nevada is a US state, but they wont take "foreign" nuclear waste from other states (and they dont generate their own, in part because water is scarce in the state). Intermediary states dont want to have waste transported through their borders either.

edit: in case it wasnt clear, the US has a partially constructed waste depo in Nevada that was abandoned a decade ago for largely political reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

2038 is diabolically awful - the UK already goes thousands of hours a year without any coal power online, with a right-wing government that has no particular focus on climate issues.

Issues with storing nuclear waste are almost entirely (as far as I'm aware) idiot policy from past rushes to generate weapons material and NIMBY-ism.

Nuclear waste isn't harmless, but coal power stations kill people every day.

Good for you! Congratulations!

Most of us in Germany would also love to see this happen earlier.

Unfortunately the exit date is a political decision based upon the fact that the regions where jobs in coal would be lost are already tending towards a really really right party here and they are very much pro coal. So going faster is not really an option here since you can be sure that them winning, would revert those decisions very fast.

> Issues with storing nuclear waste are almost entirely (as far as I'm aware) idiot policy from past rushes to generate weapons material and NIMBY-ism.

Well that's not true. As most of the times when downplaying nuclear waste is concerned.

The last time we chose a nice salty mine to store the stuff, it started having holes here and there with a nice groundwater inflow that now needs to be pumped out and as always with nuclear power: in the end it's the taxpayer who needs to jump in and pay it all. Isn't that nice? All that money that could be invested into renewable energy, expanding grids and other nice things is now being wasted upon fixing errors from an era where everybody believed nuclear is the way to go.

Good we're past that now.

PS. that "nuclear vs. coal" story the nuclear lobby is pushing so much lately is an ignorant myth because of the reasons I've outlined above. Not a single coal plant would have been turned off if we'd left nuclear run on and ignored the environmentalists who are against nuclear AND coal in this country so there is absolutely no reason to build arguments based upon this myth.

And by doing so, we produce twice as much CO2 per capita as France or the UK. While having one of the most expensive electricity in Europe, because we pay a huge "renewable energy tax".

I wanted to double check as this seemed potentially affected by industry and other sources of CO2 emission, but as you implied, the CO2 emissions are actually much higher per unit of energy produced than in France. That's rather incredible to me.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/overview-...

France, to a first approximation, runs on nuclear power.

Yup. Big Nuclear fleet. Most of France's base load is just a bunch of fission reactors, very high efficiency, very low CO2 emissions. Germans are scared of them, decided to just burn lots of coal instead.

The UK imports a bunch of this cheap nuclear electricity from France, we have a 2GW bi-directional line. In principle that line could sell power from our gas turbines in mid-winter if France needs the extra power to keep things running, but most of the time it imports French nuclear power because it's much cheaper than our gas. Our own nuclear fleet is too small for our base needs (6-7GW of nukes compared to ~18-20GW base)

Germans are scared because there are reactors which have been overdue for years now and because of of accidents and underreporting that happens and threatens them. No sane person would blame them. This is no backwater terrain in some former soviet republic. This is the middle of Europe.

Luckily, they'll finally be decommissioned now as France turns towards renewables: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-france-nuclear-reactors-macron...

And we don't burn just any coal. Of course it's brown coal, the worst kind of coal when it comes to pollution.

But that's the price we pay for rapidly switching off all our nuclear plants and heavily subsidizing low efficiency inland wind farms.

That's the result of too much ideology in energy politics.

Germans are scared of them, decided to just burn lots of coal instead.

I think it's less about being scared and more about the eye-watering cost of storing waste responsibly.

However, the direction in France seems to be to replace part of nuclear with renewable. But building wind and solar power (hydro is already maximized to my knowledge) means the nuclear plants have to reduce their power output when there is wind and sun, so basically they are used to save uranium. But uranium is cheap, what is not is building the actual plant. So it just increases nuclear price per MWh since they have to produce less over time to make room for wind/solar power.

So basically by building renewable we are reducing nuclear power's viability on the grid. Since there does not seem to be viable storage option (if there was we'd be building that instead of gas power plants everywhere), running only on renewable is not possible. So I really don't see the point in using renewables as we do when electricity is already low-carbon.

Everyone who says that should be forced to live without electricity or live within a hundred meters of a coal or nuclear plant for a year.

Out of sight out of mind has had some very large consequences.

I live near a wind-farm and I think they are ugly. Rolling hills spiked with giant windmills instead of natural rolling hills. A true shame. I'm not opposed to to renewable energy and I doubt all the impending down-voters have installed two solar systems on two different houses, as I have.

I wouldn't have expected that.

Thankfully the area I'm thinking about has since chosen to invest / had folks invest in wind power.

And they cause cancer!

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