Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power | Hacker News Reader

Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

economist.com

45 pointsWithinReason274 comments

This is something many people in the EU simply don't get -- I don't get it.

Germans have a basically a positive stereotype of being a scientific nation and all around clever lads -- this has enormous soft power and gives leverage to things like "Made in Germany" as a brand. This anti-nuclear stance in Germany is absolutely caustic to that projected image.

It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and replace it with fossil fueled plants. I love Germans and Germany but they're simply in the wrong on this and I don't know what the right way forward is.

I don't get the positivity surrounding nuclear power and the claim that antipathy is akin to antivax idiocy.

* It's eye wateringly expensive both to build and to decommission. Solar, wind and batteries are cheaper. Hornsea 2 produces the same power as a nuclear plant at half the price and with surprisingly low intermittency.

* Even if it were the same price, nuclear takes decades to build rather than years.

* Despite constant claims of its safety you wont find an insurance company in the world that will insure one without 99% of the cleanup cost being borne by taxpayer. Nuclear plants simply dont get built without taxpayer insurance and the nuclear industry refuses to take that risk themselves.

* If current history is anything to go by the risk of disaster is about 1 in 4000 per reactor year and the cleanup cost in Japan is around the $600-800 billion mark.

* It is possible to supplant it with green energy and Germany has done exactly that, which is why emissions have gone down.

* The idea that spending more money on a more expensive and slower to build form of green energy will help speed up the green transition is dubious at best.

Why is it so popular in spite of this? It helps offset some of the costs of having a nuclear arsenal (or puts you on the road to having one). This is a large part of why the US, China, UK and France are happy to pay up and take the risks while Germany and Japan threw in the towel.

> I don't get the positivity surrounding nuclear power and the claim that antipathy is akin to antivax idiocy.

Climate change is a (existential?) threat to humanity. There is only so much renewable energy generation capacity that can be constructed in any given year. If you shutdown a nuclear power plant, the demand it was servicing does not magically go away. So you need to something to meet that demand: that may be renewable, but if not enough can be constructed, then it could also mean running fossil fuels more.

So if you want to actually treat climate change as an important problem, why would you shutdown non-emitting source of power that you already have?

Keep the existing nuclear plants, shutdown the fossil fuel-based generators, and use the renewable power you're building to offset the retirement of the latter.

Once all your carbon-emitting generators are retired then consider shutting down the non-emitting nuclear generators.

At no point in the above process are new nuclear plants built.

>So if you want to actually treat climate change as an important problem, why would you shutdown non-emitting source of power that you already have?

In Germany's case because they saw what happened in Japan and made an adjustment to their projected risk assessments and decided it wasnt worthwhile.

It may have been the wrong decision, especially given the difficulty in measuring the risks involved but it wasnt an irrational decision.

Nuclear power has a small chance of going wrong but when it does it goes very wrong.

And when it did, Japan had to fire up all of its coal and natural gas.

"Germany's CO2 emissions from electricity estimated to rise by 13% in 2021"

* https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/germ...

"German energy demand, carbon dioxide emissions seen rising in 2021 -industry group"

* https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/german-energy-d...

"Germany’s energy consumption rising, renewables share falling in 2021"

* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-energy-consump...

I live 50km from a nuclear power plant. I don't worry about it at all.

>Germany's CO2 emissions from electricity estimated to rise by 13% in 2021

I'd have expected a larger spike in light of the end of lockdowns.

Tearing down existing nuclear power and constructing new nuclear power is two different things. To decomission nuclear power at a point where the country is still dependent on imported hydrocarbons is just a very strange. Just leaving (or extending the lifespan) of existing nuclear in a transition period seems like the least one should do in Germany's shoes.

One can have an endless debate about whether nuclear power plants and/or wind/solar/something else should be built. But to have the discussion about whether existing plants that are here NOW should be stopped, at the same time as Russia is using the energy crisis in Europe as an opportunity for a land grab is... crazy .

Very crazy, and unfortunately the example of Germany made my own country (Belgium) decide to commit the same awful mistake, which will be paid in full (in drastically increased CO2 output, enormous energy price increases and dancing to the tune of a Russian dictator).

I add to that list:

* Most countries have to import uranium exactly as they have to import oil. They don't have to import sun and wind.

* If a nuclear power plant seriously fails (2 accidents in 70 years) nobody and their nephew's nephew's will be able to live in that area. If a dam fails at least that ground is not lost forever.

* Building, managing and eventually decommissioning a nuclear power plant has its own CO2 impact if we do it using fossil fuels.

This is a fair assessment IMHO: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/nuclear-power-an...

> If a nuclear power plant seriously fails (2 accidents in 70 years) nobody and their nephew's nephew's will be able to live in that area.

People do live near Fukushima power plant. Regarding one of the nearby towns, Ōkuma: "In April 2019, parts of the town were deemed to have been successfully decontaminated, with residents allowed to return to these areas. [...] The actual population resident in the town was 2578 people". [1]

> If a dam fails at least that ground is not lost forever.

Relocating population for good is very much the case when it comes to dam _building_. [2]

Nuclear power does have pros and cons, but let's stop with fearmongering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ckuma,_Fukushima

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flooded_towns_in_the_U...

> Solar, wind and batteries are cheaper and money is limited.

How can you even estimate the cost of batteries? Insane amounts of batteries would be needed, capable of storing all of Germany's energy needs (including transportation and residential heating) for 10 days or so. That would be at least 10 TWh, as Germany currently uses about 550 TWh per year.

The global production of lithium ion batteries in 2018 was 290 GWh (1000 GWh = 1 TWh), expected to increase to 2 TWh per year by 2028 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247625/global-productio...).

In other words, even if Germany would buy every single battery produced on Earth over the course of 5 years, it probably wouldn't be sufficient to provide energy for 10 winter days without wind.

>We find that low-wind-power events are less frequent in winter than in summer, but the maximum duration is distributed more evenly between months. While short events are frequent, very long events are much rarer. Every year, a period of around five consecutive days with an average wind capacity factor below 10% occurs, and every ten years a respective period of nearly eight days. These durations decrease if only winter months are considered. The longest event in the data lasts nearly ten days.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab91e9

In your once in a lifetime event I'd be happy if we used a bit of gas. This is something, after all, that Japan also had to do for years after Fukushima went kaput.

Bear in mind also that demand for heating and transportation can be timeshifted. An Octopus tariff in the UK already allows for this. We've barely scratched the surface of whats possible here because electric grids are slow to evolve to this new reality.

"I'd be happy if we used a bit of gas."

Gas alone does not produce electricity. Gas power stations do. This means building enough gas power stations to cover power requirements of the entire country, then having them sitting most of the time idle there, "just in case".

This is the core of the problem: wind and solar need to be massively backed up. You cannot rely on them supplying even 5 per cent of their nominal capacity if the weather turns against you.

Such a massive backup is eye-wateringly expensive, too. And it consumes concrete and steel, two elements whose production is carbon-intensive.

>This means building enough gas power stations to cover power requirements of the entire country, then having them sitting most of the time idle

If you assume:

* We dont already have the infrastructure.

* Power cant be imported.

* Power usage cant be timeshifted.

* Power cant be stored in batteries.

* 10 day periods without wind and sun are routine.

Then yes, it might get expensive.

I forgot pumped storage which is apparently 8 TWh

https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/germany

Smart grid can solve this problem, when appliances will report of their needs and abilities to the grid, and then the grid will schedule power delivery to meet the demand.

What kind of appliances can wait for several hours? The only example I can think of are cars that are being charged over night.

Water heaters, cars, washing/drying machines, power walls, battery powered devices. Electric teapot, microwave, cooking stove can operate at half of power when demand is very high. They can report to and receive instructions from a smart power meter.

Well, then make it 5 days. That still needs more capacity than the global battery production per year.

Do you really want to bet there will be no viable battery technology for another 50 years? It's kind of a high value research topic right now.

50 years? I'd hope we have fusion power by then. But it doesn't look like there will be enough batteries for wind power in the next 20 years.

There is, however, plenty of hydrogen in seawater.

For one thing, nuclear gives you contingencies in the long run that other forms of energy don't provide, up to and including nukes. But nukes aside, if for any reason, we get some drastically different climate path (say, a big volcano erupts) than nuclear does not stop working like PV could.

Solar and wind are predicated on certain things staying one way, while nuclear is predicated on other things staying in a certain way.

Some of the nuclear plants that Germany is shutting down are < 40 years old. Their lifetime could well be prolonged for next 20-40 years. They already exist and sit there.

Instead, Germany chose the path of decommissioning, which, as you mention, is expensive - and produces no electricity. This was a purely ideological move.

> It's eye wateringly expensive both to build and to decommission.

If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better, https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

> Even if it were the same price, nuclear takes decades to build rather than years.

We are talking about closing existing plants. Also, stopping coal in 2038 is no problem, right?

> Despite constant claims of its safety you wont find an insurance company in the world that will insure one without 99% of the cleanup cost being borne by taxpayer.

Probably because of the stupid government regulations? See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#/media/File:Deat....

One of the relevant insurance... well, not companies. A company that acts for insurance agencies and others, doing actuary computations and such. Anyway, one of those was contracted to compute new insurance costs for nuclear power plants in Germany.

If the state no longer limits their liability, but instead applies the same rules to nuclear power plants as it does to other industry, then the average German plants would need to pay €2×10⁹ per year for liability insurance and would have no chance to sell power at anything close to market price.

They can't pay that much because no insurance agency has that scale, so that's out of the question. But even paying the maximum that an insurance agency will accept is out of the question, because even that would make the power too expensive.

My guess is that there'll never be built any, because the renewable fans will make enough noise about this subsidy that the no-subsidies part of the public will be against, and together that's a solid majority.

If the nuclear fans want to build, they have to find safer ways to build and operate, which IMO is an excellent state of affairs, ie. if new plants are built because they're safe enough to insure that's good, and if they're not because they're not, that also good. (I personally suspect that doing it with lower risk requires much research into much more safety-minded organisations than e.g. Tepco was, and if the nuclear businesses have focused on that in the past decade, I haven't noticed.)

€2⁹, so 512 euro a year?

I assume you meant some large number and that's probably because you are assuming they need to cover all kinds of exaggerated costs like lawsuits from people who get cancer or keeping radiation levels below the background level in case of a leak.

Oh, crap. Mind thought 2e9, fingers typed 2⁹. Edited. Thanks.

IIRC the bulk is property. German power plants are located in densely populated areas with high property prices. If a plant renders a smallish area unlivable and BMW has to vacate and replace a factory there, BMW will not want to take a loss on that.

The risk of a nuclear accident affecting a large amount of land is very small - of the thousands of plants in the world, only a couple have affected more than a few square kilometers.

If you consider the affected area/MW to wind or solar it's clearly a net win. And there isn't a need to build nuclear plants in more densely populated areas than others.

I personally don't care how large the risk is, I care that the operator pays for it instead of the neighbours. The operator can discuss the risk with actuaries and engineers that work for insurance agencies.

Germany is well described as a mixture of densely populated and even more densely populated areas, with very few large and sparse areas. (There was a minor scandal a few years ago, after an airplane crash. Each airport has some sort of designated crash site, "dear pilot, if you can't avoid crashing, try to do it there". Some airport's site was near a village, because there was nothing uninhabited nearby.)

Another, separate response. A digression, really.

Some people appear to tick all three of these:

- My viewpoint is a scientific one

- The liability rules for chemical plants is fine

- The same rules would be too strict for nuclear plants

IMO anyone can combine any pair of those, but considering all three to be true is… very puzzling to me.

The problem with nuclear energy in Germany is, that "the big four" (energy companies) have filled their pockets with sweet, sweet nuclear-power-money and have externalized all the other costs since the beginning.

Insuring a nuclear power plant would cost 72 billion Euro/year [0] which gives a hint about how costly (and impactful) nuclear energy really is.

Also there's not really a lot of Uranium on earth. Take [1] for example and this impressive quote: "Given these projections, the uranium resource base [...] is more than adequate to meet low and high case uranium demand through 2040 and beyond. Meeting high case demand requirements through 2040 would consume about 28% of the total 2019 identified resource base"

So, 2040 is not that far, and if we build more nuclear power plants we get into that "high demand" area where we'll use 28% of all found Uranium by 2040.

Ok, maybe we find more, but maybe we won't. Water, sunlight and wind on the other hand... Not sure if we can run out of those easily.

Renewable energies are the one and only way to go. What's missing is smart(er) grids and sustainable, efficient and powerful solutions to save power once we create more than we use.

Why are those missing? Because nobody (as in the "the big four") needed those, when you could just burn more coal or build another "money printer" aka nuclear power plant.

So, nuclear energy in Germany is also always a long story of corruption and lobbyism par excellence.

[0] https://www.manager-magazin.de/finanzen/versicherungen/a-761... [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/worlds-uranium...

"that "the big four" (energy companies) have filled their pockets with sweet, sweet nuclear-power-money and have externalized all the other costs since the beginning."

Presumably the government entered those contracts willingly, though. I don't understand this framing of "have filled their pockets". If you really believe the money was squandered, blame the politicians giving it away, not the energy companies.

"So, 2040 is not that far, and if we build more nuclear power plants we get into that "high demand" area where we'll use 28% of all found Uranium by 2040."

Just like peak oil that never happened? But even if we run out, they keep saying we have 10 years to prevent a climate catastrophe, so 20 years would buy us a lot of time in comparison.

"a long story of corruption and lobbyism"

Corruption in what sense? Lobbyism is not illegal, and in fact presumably necessary. The greens are also "lobbying" for solar power and wind power.

Oh yes, they entered it willingly, so friends and they themselves could get a nice job in the steering board after their career. There's nothing "illegal" here, only immoral, but lots of that.

> If you really believe the money was squandered, blame the politicians giving it away, not the energy companies.

why not both? believe me, we blame the politicians plenty too :)

> Lobbyism is not illegal, and in fact presumably necessary

It's illegal (and immoral) in most of the world.

> [Lobbyism is] illegal (and immoral) in most of the world.

Care to elaborate what you mean by that?

Wikipedia describes lobbying as "the act of lawfully attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of government officials, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying

That in itself does sound neither intrinsically immoral or illegal.

Climate and environmental think tanks lobby in the same way as financial or industrial interests.

The very second paragraph from the link you posted reads:

"The ethics and morals involved with legally bribing or lobbying or influence peddling are complicated. Lobbying can, at times, be spoken of with contempt, when the implication is that people with inordinate socioeconomic power are corrupting the law in order to serve their own interests"

Here context is crucial: the sentence in the parent post was a response to "a long story of corruption and lobbyism".

In most countries it's illegal to hand money to politicians and its seen as corruption, with few strictly regulated exceptions.

In the US it's very different and the amount of money involved is staggering.

The term "a long story of corruption and lobbyism" is not referring to the legal and socially acceptable "lobbying" but the other one.

That makes no sense at all.

>Insuring a nuclear power plant would cost 72 billion Euro/year [0]

Half the cleaning cost of Fukushima, every year, per every power plant, sounds legit.

Germans have also the stereotype of strong environmental consciousness and there still doesn't exist a location for the permanent disposal site of the nuclear waste. This combined with the experience of botched constructions like the berlin airport and the problems with intermediate storage locations like Asse does not exactly strengthen confidence.

In theory, nuclear power may be safe, but in practice there is still too much room for corruption and bungling, which can have very long-term consequences.

> It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and replace it with fossil fueled plants.

That's not what's happening...

Nuclear has been mostly replaced with renewables, while fossil fuel generation has been in slow decline as well. You may disagree with that policy, but please get your facts right.

Please get your facts right. Coal is rising in Germany.

https://www.dw.com/en/coal-and-fossil-fuel-share-of-german-e...

That's just Q3 2021 compared to Q3 2020.

https://energypost.eu/germany-2021-coal-generation-is-rising...

The money quote:

Similarly, by the end of June 2021, generation from coal-fired power plants was 39 percent higher than in the first six months of 2020. However, generation from coal-fired power in the first half of 2021 was still below the levels seen in 2019.

This is a short-term development over a couple of months. You will always have ups and downs of all sources of energy and if you look into a short amount of time you can find any energy source growing or declining to support your argument. But the relevant question is what development is happening in the long run.

The third graph here gives you a good idea of the longterm developments of electricity generation in Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

What I'm seeing in those graphs is the same. Coal use rising from 2019 to now.

Nice source. What I dont understand is: How did nuclear power grow so much last year—and how was there so little growth in renewables?

The power at night and when the wind doesn't blow comes from either:

1. Batteries (insignificant) 2. Hydro 3. Nuclear 4. Fossil Fuels

Germany killed number three, and they did not build sufficient hydro or batteries to compensate. That means that they replaced nuclear with fossil fuels.

Now, they might not have built a new cool power plant for every nuclear power plant that they decommissioned, but had they not decommissioned that nuclear power plant, they could have decommissioned those fossil fuel plants instead. That is just as much a replacement in my mind.

Specifically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschland.sv... shows 1990–2020. There _is_ a slight uptick of fossil fuels in the immediate short-term of the 2011 phase-out plan, but it's they're now below the levels they were at then.

But, as others have said, if they'd maintained the level of nuclear generation the CO2 emitting fossil fuel plants could've been shut down instead.

Coal might not be rising as an industry but last year i'm pretty sure they had to spin up previously-closed coal plants because wind/solar wouldn't produce the required energy.Now in what universe is permanently shutting down all fossil fuel based energy sources a good strategy?It just becomes a national security risk.

And by the way for the climate-caring crowd: why haven't germans stopped N.S 2 with russia if they care so much about the climate?This is both an environmental and geopolitical hypocrisy: let's stop the entire continent more or less consume fossil fuels while we ourselves get it;oh yeah: and also becoming more reliant on russia while criticizing them at every step because that riles up our citizens and we earn easy poltical capital.

> Nuclear has been mostly replaced with renewables, while fossil fuel generation has been in slow decline as well. You may disagree with that policy, but please get your facts right.

Do you have a good source? I believe you are correct that the total share of fossils has decreased, but I also suspect that the OP might well be correct in that in the end a decent chunk of nuclear plant provided capacity will have to be replaced with fossil fuel plants, because Germany does not and will not have enough hydro (or storage) to compensate intermittency for other renewables. I'm also curious how legit the "biomass" share under renewables actually is, i.e. is it really net?

I think the correct formulation would be that most nuclear production over the year has been replaced by renewables, but on gray wind-less winter day like today I can see you are taking in all the Swedish nuclear power you can get [0].

[0]: https://energinet.dk/energisystem_fullscreen (Danish grid only, couldn't find any similar tools for the wider grid).

https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

"Nuclear has been mostly replaced with renewables, while fossil fuel generation has been in slow decline as well."

That's another way of saying, the German Gov't have decided to shut down nuclear power, while they still run fossil fuel power plants and bringing renewables online.

Given we're in a climate emergency, we need to shut down fossil fuel power plants first, while bringing up renewables online. Nuclear shouldn't have been prioritised.

Actually, we have been building and using coal and gas firing plants more excessively ever since the decision to shut down nuclear power. Right now, at least 19 gas-firing plants are being planned, most of them new plants[1]. It is true we also increased the amount of renewables, but those cannot provide the base load capacity continuously.

German Greens want you to believe we (Germans) are heading into a "right" direction and go 100% ecological, but they conveniently forget about that.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_und_im_Bau_bef...

The cost of renewables increase as their fraction of the overall mix increases, i.e. When the fluctuations become harder to be balanced by other sources, and more and more energy storage is needed to handle the fluctuations. Energy storage in that large of a scale is very costly and impractical. In reality what will happen is more and more natural gas usage, which is a bad thing.

Actually the full "product life cycle" of Nuclear apart from mining is fully publicly discussed in Germany. I think the most interesting parts are recycling stages - if done - and (tentative) final storage. Both are a disaster especially the latter one. The infamous Asse II salt storage has severe problems with water influx which was up to 12 m^3 per day and 30 leaks at some point. Even the proponents of Nuclear don't want a final storage in their Bundesland.

Also there have been several accidents independently in Fukushima, 3 mile Island and of course Chernobyl. Even more modern reactor designs solve some failure cases but really not all.

Germany is already at almost 50% renewables. That's practically risk-free and the technology is there. I mean just look at all the battery tech craze. That said, Nuclear is heavily subsidized and no insurance in the world insures a Nuclear reactor.

I'm German and I don't know what we're doing. Prices are insane right now. New electricity contracts cost 45 cents per kilowatt-hour. Heating my home (82 sqm) with electricity costs about 400 euros a month right now alone. This will obviously get better in spring, but I don't know how citizens with lower incomes handle it.

Heating a home with electricity is simply immoral. It's all the emissions of burning coal, multiplied by 3 due to generator and transmission losses.

Besides, energy prices saw a steep rise in all of Europe, so it doesn't make much sense to blame the end of nuclear energy for it.

Also, just a single reactor has shut down so far, 11 days ago. A single plant shutting down isn't enough to influence prices to such a degree. Besides, prices were at current levels well before that.

> Heating a home with electricity is simply immoral.

Well, I built it last year, so I didn't know how much energy it would consume. Also, I'm still up to adding a photovoltaics plant on my roof and energy sources should be mostly green on windy and/or sunny days in Germany.

> Besides, energy prices saw a steep rise in all of Europe, so it doesn't make much sense to blame the end of nuclear energy for it.

I didn't blame nuclear specifically for it, but the German electricity politics are insane and far off from reality. Shutting down _any_ energy plant is a bad idea, considering how close we got to a blackout last year.

> Heating a home with electricity is simply immoral.

That's trivialising something complex. If coal is the source, perhaps. It's its way out though, and there'll come a point in the easily foreseeable future where to burn fossil fuel – gas, say – will be the least moral option.

> Heating a home with electricity is simply immoral.

Not if it uses a green energy source, e.g., nuclear.

Resistive heating is, heat pumps are okay.

Germans are sceptical especially because they view themselves as a nation of thinkers and scientists. They (rightfully) pride themselves on having developed the state of renewables not just for themselves but for everybody - wind, and especially solar. It's just a pity they lost the lead and trashed their solar industry (in my opionion, because of neoliberal ideology they failed to implement protectionist policies and stopped supporting the domestic industry too suddenly).

Germany didn't decide to replace nuclear with fossil. As a fairly wealthy nation, they decided to replace nuclear with renewables and accepting higher energy prices and the need to use less energy. Because they decided the price (it is not a risk, but a certain price) of having nuclear waste is too high. When discussing the nuclear vs renewable vs fossil triangle, we tend to forget that there is a fourth screw to adjust: demand for energy.

Although I've stopped replying to comments like yours 10 years ago, when the same sediment was prevalent at reddit and the nuclear-pushing thinktanks made their first steps in the new online world of consensus manipulation, I think it's a good time to remind you that nuclear power is still dangerous, Chernobyl happened right in Germany's back yard and the term "green energy" isn't some kind of take on Cherenkov radiation or fluorescence.

Luckily, a large part of Europe's population, mostly the older ones, vividly remember the horror or the nuclear clouds moving over their countries, the scarce and delayed information received about the accident, the ambiguous and conflicting information about the contamination of crops and food supplies.

Between global warming and cancer, I choose global warming. So did Germany and most of Europe. France and Britain need large nuclear reactors for breeding weapons materials, so there's no way around that.

All the bullshit justifications with safer new reactor technologies - keep them to yourself. If anything, besides more expensive, nuclear reactor designs have been getting bolder and bolder. Molten salts reactors are pushed as a safe alternative; a joke that would make any chemist shudder.

This is just a reminder that we still exist and our opinions haven't changed, our willingness to express them in an online world dominated by corporate indoctrination however, has.

> think it's a good time to remind you that nuclear power is still dangerous

In comparison to what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#/media/File:Deat...

> and the term "green energy"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464

> Between global warming and cancer, I choose global warming.

If you choose coal, you choose both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_environmental_impac...

> Between global warming and cancer, I choose global warming. So did Germany and most of Europe. France and Britain need large nuclear reactors for breeding weapons materials, so there's no way around that.

Oh, you will get cancer either way. Every now and then highly carcinogenic crude is spilled into the environment. The ashes from fossil fuels contain heavy metals and radioactive elements, and are much harder to store or reprocess than nuclear waste.

But as you say it's now all sediment(sic). So let's hope we manage to produce enough bateries in time to carry through somehow. Or, more realistically, have enough natural gas.

You have to remember that Germany is no longer a country. It is a state in the European Union and a member of the Eurozone.

The French do nuclear power so the Germans don't have to. Except the French are not doing enough - despite being the biggest exporter of electricity in the region.

Similarly California could be 'nuclear free' and put all the nuclear power stations in Oregon.

Germany is still the second largest net exporter of power - primarily to Poland.

Nope. The numbers are such that Germany cannot go back on this. We are committed to the non nuclear path now. And that’s okay. We’re going to make up the lost technology leadership in nuclear with competency in renewables. It’s fine and not the end of world.

I wouldn’t have done it the way Merkel did, I would’ve switched off coal first. But I understand why that wasn’t an option at the time. It’s what it is.

> But I understand why that wasn’t an option at the time.

explain

The renewables buildout was always tightly coupled with the nuclear phaseout in the political discourse.

The idea that you could've kept nuclear, still have the renewables buildout and close coal early wasn't a political position anyone in any relevant position was advocating for.

Right.

It wasn't a political option.

They could've done it, easily, and it was the sensible thing to do.

The slower phaseout of coal is about employment and, to a lesser degree, regional "identity" issues far more than energy.

The coal industry was at some point the country's largest. It's also older than all other in the industrial sector, since coal was the raw material fueling the industrial revolution.

As such, it became the raison d'etre for whole regions. The Ruhr area in west Germany grew from Iowa-level population density to New York State levels on coal. Unions, as a concept, got started in the coal mines. I recently saw a bunch of news broadcasts from the late 80s/early 90s and among 10 of them, eight or so featured labor issues in the sector. Until reunification, it was the most salient issue in politics.

It was right after the Fukushima disaster which was a last straw. Press coverage of nuclear energy by then was mostly negative thanks to Greenpeace and their campaigns against disposal of nuclear waste, history of Chernobyl explosion was still fresh, so politically keeping nuclear afloat was a risk. And of course, when calculating the real costs (i.e. including long-term nuclear waste storage and monitoring) it appeared not so attractive option to keep it.

There was no significant public will or movement to get out of coal 10 years ago. It was never even discussed.

Wind and solar are cheaper than nuclear. There is no solution yet to the final deposition of nuclear waste.

There may be a reduced need for final deposition, if the successive generations of reactors are good enough at recycling the fuel used by the earlier generations. I'm not sure what the limit for that is, but it might be possible to cut down on waste by a huge amount.

You know that are reactors that burns long life nuclear waste ?

Without any remainders? No? What would you call these?

Yeah, you just build peaker plants to help renewables. What are peaker plants? Fossil fuels (natural gas)

There are other means to buffer energy.

In my mind, a nuclear power plant staffed with German engineers is the least likely to have a nuclear accident.

The same was thought about japanese nuclear power plants

9.0 earthquakes and tsunami's are not that common in Germany.

But they could happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

Besides that something like this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdgasleck_in_der_Nordsee could also lead to a tsunami if it caves in.

Considering how many we have there it's not that unlikely:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_and_gas_fields_of_...

I doubt that german power plants are even built for that occasion.

Power plants are built according to the requirements of their location and history shows we fail in getting all the risk

Not to mention corruption and botching.

Which company would you trust to built and operate these power plants?

Vattenfall, Shell, Siemens, Facebook, Apple?

Ze Amish-Naderite-Quaker-Mondragonz!1!!

Edit: Alternatively Die Schwesternschaft des Heiligen Strahls, äh Scheins.

Except they built them in a place that's pretty known for earthquakes. An earthquake in Germany sounds like science fiction.

Uhm. Some "fiction" for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Germany

There is also post-glacial rebound in northern Germany with several fault lines, one of them roughly between Kiel and Lübeck. Where parts of Denmark, Sweden and Norway still slowly rise, while the outer parts bordering Northern Germany slowly sink, 'scratching' against it.

Also several large salt domes, producing sink holes which can be seen as lakes today. Interestingly, some of these are being explored today as energy storage solution, what could possibly go wrong?

edit: Besides that, flooding. Again and again

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Sturmfluten_an_der_N...

Pick your 'fiction or fantasy' ;->

Yes, and the built it to withstand and earthquake or a tsunami, unfortunately not both.

Because heavy earthquakes in Germany are unlikely the standards for german nuclear power plants aren't planned to withstand one because the planning is accordingly to the dangers of the location.

And that is the problem. We are building something that has to last decades if not centuries and if we miss something the damage is severe.

For example before satellite imagery ships were built according to the normal distribution of waves which said large waves are rare, freak waves nearly impossible. Stories about freak waves were even often dismissed as exaggeration or sailor's yarn. Nowadays we know freak waves happen a lot more often as we thought and ships are built accordingly but older ships have problems if a freak wave shows up or they simply sink.

There have been fairly large (VEI 6) volcanic eruptions in Germany fairly recently (at least by geological standards):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laacher_See

With a VEI 6 happening there, a lil' bit of radioactivity would be one of your lesser problems, I'd guess. One bigger potential problem would be damming the Rhine there, and flooding large areas behind that dam way upstream, with many large chemical plants. And then the flood downstream, if that dam breaks down.

While I had no idea that Germany was volcanically active (thanks for the link!), this doesn't seem to be an ongoing thing.

Well, the area is categorised as volcanically active - I doubt if it is a very serious risk.

Mind you - nobody thought we got tsunamis in Scotland:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

Just to make clear: I'm completely comfortable with nuclear power and I live reasonably close to the remaining operational nuclear power station in Scotland:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...

Fukushima weathered both a record breaking earthquake AND a record breaking tsunami simultaneously.

And still there were only a handful of deaths directly caused by it.

More people die because of wind turbines every year.

How many deaths per wind turbine, and how long is the location of a turbine accident to uninhabitable?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...

Nuclear deaths is 90 per TWh

Wind death toll is 150 per TWh

Solar 440/TWh

and leading the pack is Coal at 100000/1Twh produced

The question is, as always with nuclear: Do you want constant, verified, 100% certain deaths every day or do you risk a larger death toll that may or may not happen some time in the future?

For solar, it looks like falls from a roof are accounted, to make the number scarier. I see an asterisk near to the number for solar, but no explanation of it, nor break down of the number.

I asked for death per turbine not per TWh. Nuclear energy provides lots of TWh so it skews the statistics in their favor.

That's like comparing death by train accident or plane accident. Planes are better per kilometer but worse per hour.

And if the German way to run a secure nuclear facility is to shut it down, that may also tell you something.

As a German I (mostly) welcomed the plan to shut down the nuclear power plants (at least the majority of those) that we have. Not because of fear but because the plants that are/were in operation are in terrible shape and predate back to the 60s and 70s mostly, with some exceptions. This is true for almost all of western Europe, too.

I'd welcome building new modern ones as a substitution, though. Just look at what Asia, specifically India, does right now. Oh, and please shut down all fossil fueled plants with no exceptions forever.

> Not because of fear but because the plants that are/were in operation are in terrible shape and predate back to the 60s and 70s mostly, with some exceptions.

Some sources on that:

    For example, the Biblis NPP does not have any spatial separation of the power supply and control cables. A scenario like the one that actually occurred at the U.S. nuclear power plant at Browns Ferry on March 22, 1975, would therefore also be possible at Biblis: When searching for an air leak, the controller used a burning candle. The cables were surrounded by foam, which ignited on the candle flame. This was not detected until the foam was already burning and significant damage had already occurred to the power supply and control cables. As a result, the power failed and almost all of the plant's emergency cooling systems of the reactor were no longer functional. Only one emergency cooling system was still available in Unit 2. Without adequate cooling, a meltdown can occur because radioactive decays in the reactors continue to generate such high heat after shutdown that reactor vessels could not withstand it. In the case of Browns Ferry, a meltdown was prevented because two condensate pumps that were present but actually intended for normal operating for the normal operating system were switched on.

It's translated from a study on nuclear power plant insurances [0]. The section section about the security dangers of nuclear power plants was really interesting to read. The study also talks about things like rocket launchers aimed at nuclear power plants, the damage airplanes can inflict on them, risks of insider attacks, as well as the costs of a nuclear catastrophy. It's a good read if you know German.

[0]: https://www.bee-ev.de/fileadmin/Publikationen/Studien/110511...

Maybe the German nuclear power industry isn't doing so great at the moment either. So if you don't have a horse in the race or jobs on the line...

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C_Siemens_quits_the_nucle...

I think something that's not much noticed outside of the German-speaking countries is that there's a fairly large cultural movement that I would describe as naturist/esoteric ever since the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensreform

This influenced all kinds of German movements both on the left and right side of the political spectrum and for instance is the reason why nudism and homeopathy are so popular. I think it's also one of the explanations why COVID vaccination rates are currently lower than in Western and Southern Europe.

This also leads to all kinds of absurd things like "vitalized water"[1] being used in hospital water systems in Austria.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belebtes_Wasser https://www.isi-trade.ch/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Benefits...

It is about geopolitics.

Germany, like Japan is an occupied country since WWII. The US controls it. The US does not want Germany to have either rocket industry or nuclear industry, because that makes them capable of making nuclear bombs.

Also France and UK are terrified of Germany having a strong rocket or nuclear energy, and with good reason. They invented rockets and could make them much better and economically than they can.

So the US wants to dismantle Germany nuclear industry and make it impossible for them to make nuclear bombs because they don't have either the people or the industry to support it.

They will love to do that with France or UK too, if they could, but those countries will never do that, as they are much more independent that Germany is.

The real reason Germany prime ministers do what the US wants is because the US pressures them all the time with economic sanctions and they must comply or else...

I highly doubt those statements. The US controls (occupies?) Germany the last 76 years but allowed Germany to have nuclear power plants online for 60 years? I can't find evidence of any public US demands or economic sanctions.

Any evidence of this?

You don't get it because you don't know the facts. Nuclear was replaced by renewables and their coal use is way down. They also started the coal phase out which will run on a schedule just like the nuclear phase out.

Coal use is up: https://www.dw.com/en/coal-and-fossil-fuel-share-of-german-e...

Gas use is also up, at 400 €/MWh that goes to a dictator who is overtly planning invasion of Eastern Europe. The southern part of which is rapidly becoming a desert: https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/desertification-of....

This is not brave, or principled, or sophisticated. It's a death toll with slightly higher plausible deniability.

Coal use is way down, from 45% of their electricity in 2010, to 25% in 2020. Nuclear phase out started in 2011. Please don't spread misinformation - your article refers to Q3 2021. Here is the data (coal the bottom two):

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/styles/80...

my mother is still talking about Chernobyl today, it definitely left a mark especially when you had kids at the time

Chernobyl right now is biggest/safest wildlife preserve in Europe.

https://newsroom.iza.org/en/archive/research/how-the-chernob...

https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/accident-management/emergen...

Except of all the cancer incidence in the wild animal population despite their short lifespans, the massively radioactive furs... Yes it's the biggest preserve because nobody can live there.

Tell that to the victims of that catastrophe.

The "victims" were victims of Soviet policy, not of nuclear energy.

A majority of the deaths due to fallout would've been prevented if The Party would've admitted they messed up and told everyone to eat canned food for a few weeks. Iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days. Maybe even distributed more iodine pills for the population.

But nope, The Party could do no wrong and was always right, so they did nothing and said nothing.

This is a typical Western oversimplification of communist regimes. If there is a Party, it is to blame, of course. But you are wrong. The casualties of such incidents are coming not just from the poor immediate responses, but also from long term environmental, social and economic effects. Even if in Fukushima disaster people did not die from acute radiation syndrome, there are still several thousands of deaths attributed to the disaster. Same with Chernobyl, Mayak etc.

Yes, people died in the panic resulting from the evacuation in Fukushima. But is that the fault of nuclear power?

Do you "attribute" deaths caused by other energy production means the same way? Coal kills people every day. People die when installing wind farms, do they count?

Let me be more clear about my comment above: I was responding to a message claiming that nuclear disaster produced a wildlife reserve. I do not care about statistics and causes of death in this context, because they are simply irrelevant (and of course I know those facts). If someone said that Nazis postponed climate change by reducing population of Europe, would you be equally engaged in discussing the exact numbers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#/media/File:Deat...

I’m well aware of the statistics, but your link is irrelevant to my comment. It is simply insensitive to picturing Chernobyl as something beneficial for the environment.

You are trying to show something very unlikely as having a serious danger. Statistics is very relevant here.

What part of „insensitive“ did you read as misrepresentation of danger?

it's not only that. It's that the radioactive cloud doesn't care about borders

could you tell me, how long Uranium reserves last? Climate change aside (which will kill us all), Uranium-based fission power plants are just not solving the problem at hand: We are using far too much energy and increasingly have depleted the cache earth history hid for us.

If you're willing to do things like extract uranium from seawater (which IIRC is about 10 times more expensive than mining, but the cost of mining uranium is not a significant fraction of the cost of running a nuclear power plant) and reprocess used fuel, there's enough uranium for the next hundred thousand years.

https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac... if I interprete this correctly, it doesn't work.

Doesn't work yet but plausibly will in the future or if there's sufficient demand for it

you have enough uranium to last for hundreds of years if not thousands.

Most sources I found on the topic seem to be as diverse as this one: [1]

The estimates range from 80 years to hundreds of thousands of years, depending on the assumptions made, including: Possible sources (land mining, sea refining), current consumption level, efficiency of reactors. Where it is approximately this:

Mining land uranium at current consumption (i.e., no new nuclear): 80-250 years.

Refining uranium from sea: 5000-500.000 years.

Overall, it seems to me that just assuring that we have resources for hundreds of thousands of years is a bit misleading or at least undisclosed strong optimism.

I'd be happy to have a more scientific source with reliable information.

[1] https://bettermeetsreality.com/how-much-uranium-is-left-in-t...

Extracting Uranium from sea water might solve the fuel problem but it does not deal with the waste problem. Breeder reactors can deal with both by reworking spent fuel into new fuel and a bit of waste. The resulting waste has a far smaller volume and shorter half-life which means it needs to be stored for hundreds, not thousands of years. Combining the two - Uranium from the sea plus breeder reactors to rework spent fuel - should last until either nuclear fusion has become practical or our species has left this planet.

The costs for keeping waste for hundreds of years are currently not accounted for in the nuclear energy prices. In fact, they are not even properly estimated because we cannot make economic forecasts for centuries. So any decision that involves storing waste for hundreds of years is basically offloading the consequences of dealing with it to future generations. Obviously this is not a responsible way to handle such matters.

Where are those costs not accounted for? Where I live they are, and then some - nuclear energy was taxed extra [1] to pay for waste storage and handling as well as to pay for alternative energy sources. This tax was added at the end of the 90's and rescinded in 2019. By that time waste storage and handling had been paid off several times over.

[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4rnkraftsskatt

The article you are referencing is saying that the tax no longer exists. This is not a recipe for economically sustainable nuclear waste storage organization, is it?

The tax no longer exists - as I already stated when I noted it was rescinded in 2019 - because the costs of waste handling and storage have been paid many times over. In what way would milking money out of nuclear power generation be "sustainable"?

> The costs for keeping waste for hundreds of years

Do you know that you could fit the whole amount of nuclear waste on a ridiculously small surface? That's not for no reason uranium works: it's extremely dense in energy, and the same goes for its waste.

> Overall, it seems to me that just assuring that we have resources for hundreds of thousands of years is a bit misleading or at least undisclosed strong optimism.

there's also apparently asteroid uranium resources, and with SpaceX making it progressively possible to have payload delivered with economies of scale such industry may start in space once it makes economic sense.

Do we – if we build up Nuclear ten-fold? Looks like we've used ~3Mt up to now over 60 years. IAEA says there's 60Mt out when including 'unconventional' resources: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TE1843_web.pd....

Now, if we use 30Mt for the next 60 years, it doesn't look like enough Uranium for the next 1000 years... (even without considering the fact that those 50Mt of uncovential resources are probably not usable)

How does shutting down nuclear power plants help us to use less energy?

> have depleted the cachet earth history hid for us

Not sure that word means what you think it means.

thanks https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cache-and-cach...

Uranium will last long enough by itself (around 90 years given current reserves) and far longer (thousands of years) once enough fast breeder reactors have been built to rework spent fuel into new fuel. This also takes care of the problem of storing spent fuel since the remaining waste is both far less in volume (less than 10%) as well as well as has a far shorter half-life. This means the remaining waste needs to be stored for ~300 years instead of thousands.

> Climate change aside (which will kill us all)

That is a religious viewpoint, not based in fact. Either show the proof or retract it, statements like that add nothing to the discourse. It also makes it hard to take the rest of your question seriously.

>That is a religious viewpoint, not based in fact. Either show the proof or retract it, statements like that add nothing to the discourse. It also makes it hard to take the rest of your question seriously.

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/9/5/187/htm - this looks very much like it can kill a lot of us and I wonder how many will survive the following chaos.

I also still don't get how you are pro-nuclear and think climate-change is not an existential threat, but so be it. It makes it hard for me to take you seriously.

Climate change is not an existential threat because climate change is something which the human race has been subject to since forever. Sometimes the change was radical, sometimes subtle. Radical as in glaciation, subtle as in the "Little Ice Age" or the warmer periods which saw the flourishing of the Roman and Viking civilisations - which, incidentally, both declined once the climate turned cooler. Humans are adaptable animals and will make it through the effects of whatever turn the climate makes this time as well. Thinking otherwise is just silly doomsday prophetising.

This is, by the way, also why I am pro-nuclear. It is clear that there are better ways of generating electricity than burning fossil fuels (which lead to environmental pollution/destruction as well as often subsidising less savoury regimes (and companies)). I'm also for putting PV panels on top of roofs an other "unused" surfaces while I see "solar farms" as a waste of space unless established in deserts or similar areas.

I'd suggest to read [1] some [2] books [3] and think this whole "we're all going to die" thing over. Yes, die we will, all of us, but not for the reason or in the way many people seem to think.

[1] https://www.unsettledsciencebook.com/

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56643992-false-alarm

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50173134-apocalypse-neve...

Maybe outside the EU... Germany doesn't have a positive image inside the EU at all.

A nation of conservative Luddite bureaucrats ruling over the EU, and a puppet for the Americans. Meanwhile they extort and damage other EU nations with the ECB policies and push mass immigration to lower wages and destroy trade unions.

As a german, can't agree more. From what I get talking to people is, that they have an irrational fear of a nuclear holocaust and nuclear waste.

Why «irrational»? It just to add color to your message, or you truly believe that radiation contamination is harmless?

People are bad at statistics.

The probability of a catastrophic event in a modern nuclear plant is vanishingly low. Even the overworked ancient plants from the 60's and 70's we are currently running are exceedingly safe.

People will rather take constant death from coal power than risk a low-probability event.

Yeah, but we have multiple catastrophes already, despite the vanishingly small number of nuclear plants. If we want to increase the number of nuclear stations by 10x, we need to make them 10x safer just to keep the number of catastrophes at the same 1/30y level. Do you have an idea how to make a nuclear plant 10x safer comparing to today?

It looks like the all time death toll of nuclear power so far is <20,000 total. Meanwhile coal plants kill 30,000 per year in Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiatio...

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/air-pollut...

It's because we ran away from contaminated sites.

> Do you have an idea how to make a nuclear plant 10x safer comparing to today?

Yes. All the reasons for the catastrophes are well known.

There are 1) known reasons for known catastrophes, so we can protect against them, 2) unknown reasons for known catastrophes, so we need to make a guess, and 3) unknown reasons for unknown catastrophes, which are not happened yet, including state sponsored attack on a nuclear plant. We cannot be prepared for unknown unknowns, so we need to plan for the worst case scenario. The worst-case scenario for nuclear plant is continent scale Red Forest (about 1M Chornobyl's).

Do you know how to reduce continent scale threat to just the size of a nation or a town?

Nuclear fusion or LENR can do that, because of small amount of radioactive materials and no positive coefficient by design, but how you can do that for massive fission?

We know how to build safer nuclear now than we did 60 years ago when the current gen were mostly built.

Current generation nuclear plants default to off, they need active operation to stay on. If something goes wrong, they automatically, without any intervention by anyone, go offline.

They are also designed to withstand collisions from aircraft and multiple other attack vectors: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1159_web.p...

> We know how to build safer nuclear now than we did 60 years ago when the current gen were mostly built.

I will reword my question: How we can make nuclear safer by 10x in next 10 years? We need them to be 10x safer if we want to have 10x more nuclear plants.

Not sure I would describe a fear of nuclear holocaust as "irrational" - had the Cold War gone hot Germany would have been very heavily targetted.

Mind you, I'm not saying that justifies the current fear of nuclear power but then again it doesn't really surprise me. Maybe it's just a lingering fear of anything with "nuclear" in the name.

We live at the dawn of cyberterrorism, I'm glad we are stepping out of nuclear now.

Not only cyber. A nuclear power plant makes an excellent target for terrorism or war.

Even if the attack is completely unsuccessful it would cause panic.

Furthermore, highly centralized electricity generation makes the distribution network very vulnerable as well.

It's not impossible to purpose-build hardened, incompatible, read only systems that can submit telemetry to the outside world while only providing actual control on-site (or via restricted channels). Stuxnet wouldn't have happened (or would have been a very rare event) if they built their system this way.

Stuxnet happened despite being air gaped. Regardless, I am confident you can place physical safeguards that could not lead to nuclear emissions even in the event of loss of control over the computer systems.

It happened despite being air-gapped, because they used general purpose hardware and software. If their systems were built on purposely incompatible hardware and software (as I proposed) and could mainly communicate using a serial console, the attack surface would be much, much lower, and the attacks would be much, much harder.

Having worked on for a short stint with some power plant control systems, I can say that, at least the systems I worked with, were quite niche. The actual control was happening on these racks that ran a VxWorks OS on some Motorola, I think they were, MCU's. Despite this, the systems were interfaced with some Windows machines that did supervision. When they were operating, they had redundancies, and were quite locked down. Of course, at that time, I was a noob and did not understand _everything_ that was going on in there.

Actually, now that I think of it, the WDPF system it was derivated off was used in some nuclear power plants as well.

Regardless, what I wanted to say was... being obscure, while it makes things mildly harder for skiddies is not a big deal for state actors or more resourceful attackers. The Stuxnet was highly targeted and they got access to specific vulnerabilities in the Siemens DCS systems that were running there. Just having exotic systems is no guarantee. I agree, obscurity is a layer of defense in depth, but no guarantee. Surely you don't suggest they use a new purpose built HW for each control system design. Also, control systems DO need to have their SW updated as well. It's obvious you can't make it hard read only. You do have physical lockout mechanisms for this though.

Here's a radical idea: Maybe your potentially dangerous industrial machinery does not need to be directly connected to the internet?

Hopefully the few computers needed do not use generalist OSes and aren't connected to the Internet either ?

IIRC, some nuclear readout panels were accessible over the public internet using badly secured VNC, so I think that's not the case.

I assume you never worked in security.

Should we be concerned then about nuclear weapons to be hacked too ?

Not to the point of detonating them - they have a lot of physical safeguards.

And why you need any electric central connected to internet ?

History:

1986 - Chernobyl happened. Wasn't our fault, but we got the fallout for it. Poisoned drinking water, people in quarantine and everything. And we were the lucky ones, the map for the East doesn't look any good. [4]

1991 - The "Schnelle Brueter" (SNR-300 / Kalkar) almost went up during a test. Political debate around investing additional 105 Mio DM was happening, but due to Chernobyl was leading against it. [5]

~1989 The THTR-300 (Thorium High Temperature Reactor) was spreading radioactive particles in the surrounding area, poisoning soil, water, and people. Additionally it was emitting too much radiation through burned particles [1]

1969-1998 - The SBH-Uran (Siemens Brennelementwerk Hanau) was closed down. The reactor didn't fullfill the legal requirements for handling enriched Uranium, and Siemens couldn't prove that they can fullfill them afterwards. [2]

1972-2011 - The KKW/AKW (Kern/Atomkraftwerk Kuemmel) was having a meltdown in 2005. 2 years later during cooldown phase, there was a fire, leading almost to an explosion. [3] The aftermath was poisoning surroundings with radioactive particles, as always.

--- --- ---

Note that years of cooldown is literally by-design and cannot be avoided. During the phase of an almost-meltdown and a cooldown phase afterwards, everything is at-high-risk for _YEARS_ where everything can literally explode any second if not done correctly. And these are only the cases I personally know about during my lifetime, there are probably more that never made it public and were successfully contained.

So yeah, as a German I'm pretty much against radioactive reactors. This shit is highly unstable tech and should be treated as such. Especially given the lack of cybersecurity and/or outdated and unstable/never-even-patchable tech stacks running this.

Also: France is putting their reactors on their Far-East border for a reason. Winds are more than 90% of the year from North-West to South-East, so I'd say they want the tech but don't want to deal with the aftermath.

Also: Where do you store the radioactive trash? Simply where you bury all your plastic - in landfills - and build some homes over them to ignore it for a couple generations... or what? Ever thought about trash that needs to be sealed off and contained for _hundreds of years_ to come?

I'm not saying coal plants are favorable (they're definitely not), but things like the NIF or established green tech like solar/wind energy makes far more sense to me - considering the risk tradeoffs.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300

[2] https://www.atommuellreport.de/daten/detail/rbu-hanau.html

[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Kr%C3%BCmmel

[4] https://www.umweltanalysen.com/wissen/tschernobyl/

[5] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Kalkar

You've got French nuclear reactor positions and major winds wrong, they are evenly localised depending on major rivers and near the sea [1], and the winds are way more complex than you suggest [2], this is not the jet stream. Also deep geological buring is a solved issue. Also germany is making France with the pollution from coal [3].

[1] https://www.irsn.fr/FR/connaissances/Installations_nucleaire...

[2] https://p4.storage.canalblog.com/42/20/127041/23073496.jpg

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZB0KuGdvjg

In my opinion Europe's decommissioning of nuclear plants, particularly in Germany, is the greatest geopolitical blunder in recent history.

The EU is now completely dependent on Russian goodwill to power their infrastructure for the next few decades, and have given up all leverage they had to push back on Russian power plays.

At the very least they should've kept the plants operational and operating at minimum capacity for redundancy to mitigate this factor. We have no idea what the political landscape will look like thirty years from now, and Russia hasn't exactly been a stable or kind neighbour in modern history.

https://www.euronews.com/2021/11/01/europe-must-reduce-its-d...

> The EU is now completely dependent on Russian goodwill to power their infrastructure for the next few decades, and have given up all leverage they had to push back on Russian power plays

An important datapoint here is that ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder moved on to the board of Nord Stream AG and of Rosneft, after pushing for building the Nord Stream pipelines.

How this didn't get Germans out into the streets, I have no idea.

Not only that, but it was also his government that took the decision to phaseout all nuclear power.

Oh, that's easy: Many Germans do/did not see Russia as the big bogey the Americans are - especially in times when the US is a less than reliable partner. Those Germans do think that a mutually beneficial partnership can be formed with Russia.

Not using the chance of a German-friendly Russian president (Putin served in East Germany) to deepen that relationship is often considered a blunder of the Merkel years.

There are some rumors (on HN) that Pukin and frau Ribentrop are brother and sister by mother, and that their mother was soviet agent.

Keeping the plants operational at minimum capacity mean having to pay for them but not being able to use them for real. I don't think it makes economical sense. Though the German energy mix already doesn't make much sense.

My understanding of nuclear power economics is that the bulk of the cost is incurred at construction, and that you can maintain minimal capability at a comparatively affordable rate. Closing operational reactors makes no economic sense either, and the argument in Germany has mostly been environmental and safety related (since the accident in Fukushima).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...

Could you tell me, where we get our oil from? And how we heat our homes with nuclear? We never had any leverage except for the mighty dollar (and nukes and the fact that socialism doesn't need to kill before) and the US is working steady on removing that lever.

Why do you need oil if you have electicity for dirt cheap? Expand the power lines and push for electic motors everywhere. Also I'm pretty sure running current through a big transistor dissipates plenty of heat, I mean, you know about electric stoves right?

nuclear is far from dirt-cheap. And we don't currently do it in Germany (France does and its grid nearly goes down every other winter). So, where will we get all this fresh uranium from (and the reactors to stick it into)?

> where will we get all this fresh uranium from (and the reactors to stick it into)?

Uranium isn't currently that scarce, and the topic of the day is "why are germany shutting down functioning reactors prematurely".

> And how we heat our homes with nuclear?

The time to start converting ALL of these homes that are heated with hydrocarbons was twenty years ago. It's hard to believe it's still a thing, but I'm in another 20 years we'll be having this discussion. "How on earth can we heat homes without oil and gas? that sounds impossible".

Why would you need (that much) oil when you can run passenger cars, trains, industrial processes, and house heating using electricity? The remaining fuel will be required for only a handful of things, with main consumers being aviation and other transportation where Li-ion is insufficiently energy dense.

Heating water with electricity and with it homes is a solved problem.

> And how we heat our homes with nuclear?

Resistors and/or heat pumps.

There's plenty of irrational fears about nuclear power, but there are also valid significant doubts about it. And this isn't really that much about the technology, but especially about everything around it.

We haven't managed to decide on a place to store the nuclear waste, and all the plans decades in making have been thrown overboard entirely a few years ago. This is more of a political failure, but if we can't manage to fix this part in decades maybe we shouldn't produce even more nuclear waste we have no place to put.

How economical is it, if you include the costs of removing the irradiated plant in the end. It's kinda impossible to get unbiased numbers here as everyone has an agenda, but you can't just ignore that part of the costs and put it on the public.

The safety is a combination of the technology and the people and processes running the entire thing. I personally the technology is probably something we could figure out well enough, but I don't have that much trust in the softer parts here for a technology where you have a very small risk for a very large amount of damage.

Nuclear waste is a non-issue; I wish we could have one article about nuclear power without someone bringing it up since there is really nothing left to discuss about it.

The reason it's a non-issue is there is so little of it. All the nuclear waste ever produced could fit in one Amazon warehouse. In the worst case it could be stored onsite with 10 layers of protection and it still wouldn't be a significant expense.

Also, because the most reactive waste will decay the fastest, it quickly gets less dangerous with time.

> We haven't managed to decide on a place to store the nuclear waste

Maybe you haven't but we have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

> We haven't managed to decide on a place to store the nuclear waste

https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

I am going to call bullshit on the nuclear waste storage problem. Nuclear waste is incredibly dense, and we could simply dump low level solid nuclear waste in the ocean (gasp!) High radioactive waste is incredibly dense.

Nuclear waste is dumped into the ocean already, contaminating fish: Fukushima, La Hague, nuclear bomb testing, etc. etc. We need a second ocean.

https://www.dw.com/en/fukushima-how-the-ocean-became-a-dumpi...

Yes, and if you read the article carefully, it's not really an issue. Sure they say "A single becquerel that gets into our body is enough to damage a cell that will eventually become a cancer cell," but that's like saying the only acceptable risk is zero, so at odds with reality. The fixation on nuclear waste is amazing, considering we get more radioactivity in the atmosphere from coal and loads of people die because of coal every day. People seem awfully chill about that.

I can understand the logic that both natural gas and nuclear aren't green. I think its flawed but I understand it.

However, if the new German government decides that nuclear is not green, but natural gas is green, then we have to seriously consider that vested natural gas interests are buried deep in German politics and have been for decades. The idea is completely perverse.

there is no such thing as green energy anyway. solar panels need dirty solar cells manufacturing to work. wind power need turbines which means metallurgy which means fossil fuels to make them.

What the point in being this pedantic? Green energy is energy that has a significantly lower negative impact on the environment. In 50-100 years maybe wind and solar won't be considered green anymore, but at this moment they are. There's no activity without an impact on the environment.

"Green" doesn't mean completely pollution free. It means that the net product is positive: we get more energy out of it than we would just by burning the fuels used to make them.

I agree, that is why I think the logic is flawed.

Either green just means no CO2 or nothing is green.

Go ask the citizens of Serbia what they think of the new Rio Tinto lithium mine opening in their country, which is touted as helping the European green revolution and all these giga factories that are being built.

Easy to have green energy in the EU when the pollution of building batteries is in Serbia or China.

meh. green != free lunch

“Why areGermans so jittery about an extremely expensive source of power, that continuously gets more expensive with time, that has long term effects the likes of which another strong engineering country is still dealing with 10 years after their disaster, that even if it does solve their immediate power solutions will never be a global solution because Germany along with the handful of existing nuclear nations will, by treaty, severely punish any other country that tried to become nuclear”.

So, to rephrase, why are Germans jittery about a terribly expensive solution that they and a few handful of other countries won’t even allow to be a solution for the vast majority of the world where most people actually live and which can at the drop of a hat blow up the entire planet.

I’m entirely convinced that if the US didn’t subsidize so many people’s nuclear engineering education we wouldn’t even be having this discussion because it’s almost entirely self serving nuclear engineers who keep demanding that we invest in the most expensive source of renewable energy instead of the myriad of cheaper options.

Blow up the planet? This was never a possibility.

Continent-wide Red Forest can be achieved with just one nuclear plant.

Germans fear nuclear power because of actual events. All people in their 30s have parents that were confronted with a situation similar to what we have now during the pandemic. They had to keep their children indoors and fear for their health. There were regular reports on radiation in the news, playgrounds were closed etc. "No milk, no mushrooms, no playing outside" https://www.gettyimages.de/detail/nachrichtenfoto/closed-off...

(Article does not attempt to answer the question posed in the headline)

Indeed. What a shitty article.

german here. i’ve been to some anti-nuclear protests in my time, and i still think it’s dangerous technology. i still think it should not be termed “sustainable”, mainly because of the unsolved waste question, but also in a small part because of the large possible damage from, admittedly unlikely, accidents.

however, i do recognize the dilemma of having to go emission-neutral, like, you know, yesterday, and not having the technology to power everything from truly renewable sources right now. from what i hear it would be possible for germany to do without nuclear (unlike, e.g. france, who are highly dependent on it), with feasible effort. a problem with nuclear power plants is the timescales involved for building, running to break-even and deconstructing such a plant. almost all other power sources have less “inertia” — you can put them up and tear them down and clean them up much quicker. that’s my main worry, that continuing with (and re-investing in) nuclear will carry us on a trajectory that makes us stay with it out of laziness and investment/revenue interests longer than strictly necessary.

i also do realize that my opinions are also a product of the culture that i come from, and that i might be rationalizing, but i am confident that people do underestimate the nuclear waste issues because of the timescales involved.

> unsolved waste question

Why is it unsolved?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...

Here's some information about nuclear in terms of safety and environmental cleanliness in the context of other common energy sources (https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy).

From what I can tell from this data as well as other sources I've seen in the past, it seems to be by far the most environmentally friendly as well as the safest form of reliable i.e. non-intermittent energy.

Coincidentally, one of the safest sources of energy also produced the most dangerous and long-lasting problems, for which the only solution so far is to run away and leave the land empty. Luckily, we still have plenty of land to move in. For example, if something serious will blow up in Europe (non-zero probability), we all can immigrate to the USA.

I blame the Simpsons. Nonstop slander against nuclear science in every single episode, for almost thirty years. Literally every single episode, it's in the opening sequence. How can you watch the Simpsons, if you think they're funny, and you trust them, and not think nuclear science is shit?

> and you trust them

Who's trusting the Simpsons? The whole joke is they're dysfunctional.

No not the characters themselves, the point of view. Like if they show you an opening sequence where the first thing you see is Bart Simpson spelling out by rote a line that is funny and does change episode to episode, then Homer Simpson fumbling a stereotypical regulus, like is it supposed to be radium, which does glow green, or more likely uranium, which is what powers a nuclear plant? It doesn't matter. You trust that someone who just told a funny joke will tell another funny joke, so you laugh without thinking it over.

Humor sandwich.

I feel like the simpsons make nuclear look great. You have homer, the lovable idiot, who is a Nuclear safety inspector for the plant, and, even though he is completely underqualified for the job, the plant still has never had a meltdown.

Yeah it did, he impedes it by blocking the pipe with his ass I think, and Mr. Burns congratulates him on turning a "[potential] Chernobyl into a media Three-Mile Island." Then there's all the three-eyed fish, Mr. Burns irradiated into looking like an alien, all sorts of stupid gags. Maybe some of them were funny.

Anti-nuclear sentiment predates the Simpsons by at least two decades.

The Wikipedia article gives more answers than this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...

I remember the blockades of transports of nuclear waste. One of the arguments was that it was dangerous to transport said material. But I never understood how complicating the transport helped anything.

Here we are, talking about the waste, even though the waste is pretty easy to deal with. That's what it accomplished.

It doesn't mention that Schröder became a close friend of Putin, runs Russian energy companies and is most likely a multi-billionaire.

Nuclear energy is expensive and unnecessary.

A mix of renewables, coupled with battery and hydrogen-from-seawater energy storage technologies, will be cheaper, less capital-intensive, easier to maintain, and far easier to sell politically. It also has no nuclear proliferation concerns.

There was concern that battery and hydrogen storage technologies would not be sufficient, or would not work practically, but as pilot projects are coming online, it's becoming clear that the engineering challenges involved are fairly straightforward.

Fission power has its uses - the energy density is unrivalled, so will continue to have military and spaceflight applications - but its moment as a major component of the energy mix is coming to a close. Current new reactor builds in some western countries - Hinkley Point C in the UK, for example - are insurance policies that may well never end up on the grid, or may eventually operate as the only reactor in that country's energy mix. The complete lack of urgency with these new builds demonstrates the 'wait-and-see' approach.

> A mix of renewables, coupled with battery and hydrogen-from-seawater energy storage technologies, will be cheaper, less capital-intensive, easier to maintain, and far easier to sell politically.

What will make it cheaper than nuclear power? Right now, it's more expensive than French nuclear power. And Germany doesn't even have storage technologies and has mostly concentrated on the low-hanging fruits. Off-shore wind and tiny solar installations on every residential root will be far more expensive that what has been done so far.

Siemens is currently building a pilot offshore wind-to-hydrogen plant, with an estimated in-service date of 2024. They're not the first to get a plant into service, but that's a lot quicker than a new nuclear plant. Is Siemens German enough? There are several other European energy and engineering companies also racing to do it, Shell and Total for example, and quite a few in the US and China.

Offshore wind is currently modelled as more expensive per kWh over its lifetime (LCOE) than nuclear, but solar PVs and onshore wind are considerably cheaper. All three (especially PVs!) are reducing in price over time, whereas nuclear is becoming more expensive, primarily due to changes in safety requirements post-Fukushima.

Importing nuclear power from France is especially cheap because the French reactors are already paid off - what Germany is paying is the marginal costs of generation, plus profit margin. New nuclear capacity is far (5-10 times!) more expensive, because nuclear requires such huge capital investments. France's reactors are beginning to come to the end of their lifespan, and as they are shut down, excess capacity will decrease and the price of importing French nuclear energy will increase substantially. France, like everywhere else in the western world, doesn't seem all that keen on replacing the reactors, and even if they do, energy from new reactors would need to be priced to pay off the capital costs.

> All three (especially PVs!) are reducing in price over time, whereas nuclear is becoming more expensive

That's speculation. Nuclear could become much cheaper over time if standardized reactor designs are used.

Also, I don't believe that PVs will become cheaper over time. The hardware itself certainly, but installation and maintenance is already more expensive than the panels themselves.

> Importing nuclear power from France is especially cheap because the French reactors are already paid off

That's a weird argument. Do they offer discounts because their reactors are paid off?

What's the obsession of the Economist with nuclear power? At this point it's legacy technology; no one is building a nuclear plant with a 50 year lifecycle for many many billions if you have to expect that it is going to be entirely supplanted by regenerative power within half of that. To produce power at a price point that is already not viable today.

Archive link: https://archive.fo/PAGLk

As a European the main problem that i see, is that even if we assume Natural Gas and Nuclear are both equally bad, relying on natural gas make the EU reliant on russian gas furniture. And this in turns means that we can never take a hard stance against Russia, or else the pipelines will receive less, something that is already happened this year and that made electricity cost skyrocket in countries heavily reliant on energy import, like Italy.

I see this as a combination of Germans valuing risk aversion more than progress on just about any topic, including reducing carbon emissions combined with an extreme NIMBY / not-invented-here mindset.

The Greens will tell you they can run the country on renewables but will then sacrifice energy independence when the can't make up the difference between supply and demand.

This is why Germany has the most expensive energy costs in Europe. This is why Germany can do exactly nothing to keep Russian interference in-check. And it is also why they continue to prop up coal-produced energy production while still thinking they can lecture other countries on how to achieve sustainable and renewable energy independence.

The stereotype of Germans being driven by science is simply not true (anymore). It has been replaced by complacency and the inability to be optimistic about the future.

What is the alternative to nuclear power for Germans?

People want to control carbon emissions, people want clean power, people want cheap power, people don't want to take any potential (small) risk.

That is really hard.

I'm used to seeing a lot of misinformation related to Germany and nuclear power, so here are some facts in advance:

1) coal use went way down since they decided to switch off the nuclear plants. people assume it was replaced by coal, but this is false

2) emissions are down

3) phase out of coal was started last year and is on schedule to last until 2038

4) renewable use is way way up

5) they are one of the largest exporters of electricity in Europe

There is no doubt that the next decade represents uncharted territory, but thus far they really moved the needle. Can it be done this way is a reasonable question, as are doubts. But an automatic dismissal is irrational in light of the evidence. Especially compared to e.g. the US which hasn't budged from 60% fossil fuels for electricity in the last decade.

> 1) coal use went way down since they decided to switch off the nuclear plants. people assume it was replaced by coal, but this is false

How is this relevant? There is still a lot of coal used and it could be much less if the nuclear was in use.

> 3) phase out of coal was started last year and is on schedule to last until 2038

It's definitely too late for the climate.

It's relevant because people are assuming otherwise and are stunned that someone would do such a thing that in reality exists only in their imagination. See current top comment:

It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and replace it with fossil fueled plants

False. Simply false.

To me it's equivalent. The removed nuclear energy is replaced with coal. It doesn't matter even if overall it's decreasing. It could decrease much more. Actually, it's not even decreasing: https://www.dw.com/en/coal-and-fossil-fuel-share-of-german-e...

No, coal as a percentage of their electricity production went down from 45% to 25% in 10 years. They removed nuclear and coal and replaced both with renewables (coal is the bottom two). Data: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/styles/80...

> coal as a percentage of their electricity production went down from 45% to 25% in 10 years.

Couldn't it go to 5% by using nuclear?

See, so as usual we land in goalpost shifting land. First comes the shock that somebody would replace nuclear with coal, but when this is refuted, instead of relief comes further criticism why it's still wrong. I won't bother anymore, since there were other things to consider in the nuclear phase out, and the goalpost shifting will continue until judgement day. I will leave you with a thought: If you wonder how bad Germany is doing, imagine that the US was at 60% fossil fuels 2010, and stayed there 2020. Germany is doing way more for the climate.

> First comes the shock that somebody would replace nuclear with coal, but when this is refuted

No, my original argument was about stronger reduction of coal by using nuclear, no matter that it's already decreasing. You just didn't understand me (or shifted the goalpost?).

Upd: I see that you avoid answering this question all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768086.

You asked why does it matter that coal use is drastically down, when it could be even less. I answered that it's because people don't get that this actually happened, and repeat the opposite of what is true. As proof for this, check the top comment in this thread that makes the false claim nuclear power was replaced by coal. So obviously it is important. Apparently there are enough people to not only write that Germany's coal use went up, but also to upvote it. To this you replied with a link that you did not understand, and again repeated the claim that nuclear was replaced by coal. Quote: "The removed nuclear energy is replaced with coal."

False. If the removed nuclear was replaced by coal, coal % of the produced electricity would go up. In reality nuclear % went down, was replaced by renewables, and coal % also went down, also replaced by renewables. As a result of this, carbon emissions are way down, despite the nuclear phase out. Yet another thing that people like to falsely claim.

And of course as usual, once we establish what is actually going on, the goal posts get shifted to "well it could be even better". There is nothing to avoid really, my position on that I've posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29770486.

But don't pretend you're having a rational debate. You don't check the numbers to form an opinion, you google for links to prove your point which is based on the wrong data, don't adjust your opinion when you see the data and instead shift the topic to something else. So there is nothing to discuss there.

> If the removed nuclear was replaced by coal, coal % of the produced electricity would go up.

False. Coal went from 45% to 25%. The remaining 25% are needed to cover closing nuclear. This is what people mean when they say about coal replacing nuclear. We could remove coal completely (or significantly more) if not stopping nuclear. Total coal percentage doesn't matter.

Compare two possibilities:

1. Coal 45% to 25%, nuclear 10% to 0%.

2. Coal 45% to 0%, nuclear 10% to 55%.

In both cases coal usage is decreasing, but in the first case, nuclear is (partially) replaced with coal. In the second case, coal is replaced with nuclear.

There is less coal produced electricity and less nuclear. How on earth is coal replacing nuclear? What is replacing the missing coal? Wishful thinking?

By that logic you could also make the case that nuclear replaced coal.

Yes, there is less coal and less nuclear: 45% to 25% and 10% to 0%, respectively. The missing coal is probably replaced by the renewables. How does it matter?

The 25% value is too high, and it could be much lower if not decreasing the nuclear. That's all I want to tell you. If you don't like the wording, you can change it as you wish. It's wrong to let coal go to 25% and not lower while removing nuclear. Nuclear should not have been removed before coal.

Same thing is said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890760.

Now we've made full circle because this question of yours is how we started the discussion. To this I can only repeat my answer: it matters because the exact opposite is being told, even in this thread in the top comment. If it didn't matter, this lie wouldn't be repeated ad nauseam.

I think it matters that Germany's fossil fuel use for electricity went from 60% in 2010 to 40% in 2020. I also think it matters the US went from 60% in 2010 to 60% in 2020 (although I didn't check the US numbers in detail, so I might be slightly off). So in this regard, what Germany is doing is an obvious success, but reality does not fit to agendas. If everybody was doing this, the world would be in much better shape. Instead those that do well, are criticized for not doing better, mostly on wrong assumptions and bad data. That's just weird.

> I think it matters that Germany's fossil fuel use for electricity went from 60% in 2010 to 40% in 2020. I also think it matters the US went from 60% in 2010 to 60% in 2020

This is whataboutism. The fact that someone else is doing worse, doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for the better. There is no reason to switch off nuclear in Germany before switching off coal, except propaganda and irrational fear.

It would be whataboutism if Germany hadn't done squat, or even worse replaced nuclear with coal which is what you and a lot of people mistakenly think because you never look at data before having an opinion. But they started switching off both. That's why coal % is way down which is a success. In absolute numbers they used to produce almost 300TWh from coal and are now down to less than 150TWh. Again, tremendous progress. And it's really sad I have to repeat the same data over and over, and it doesn't get through. So much for rationality.

I repeat: if all the countries in the world would go their route, especially the developed countries, the world would be in much better shape. There is no counter to that because that's what the data says. Emissions way down, full stop. No threat of Fukushima like event because of reactors built 50 years ago. Full stop

You repeat the data but don't understand its implications. Reducing coal to 25% while reducing nuclear to 0% goes against the environment, even though it's better than other countries. It should've been vice versa, 0% coal, 25% nuclear.

Less coal is good for the environment, as is less nuclear. Or was Fukushima good for the environment? Of course you realize this for both, you wouldn't otherwise make up that they replaced nuclear with coal, and ignore mentioning Fukushima even once.

> as is less nuclear

This is false: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987.

The Fukushima and Chernobyl are included in all statistics for nuclear. Even then, it's the most safe, green energy source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874421 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324974.

I did not make up that coal replaced nuclear. It's the fact which you are unable to accept. Let's come back to our examples.

Possibility 1. Coal 45% to 25%, nuclear 10% to 0%. Why is coal not at 0%? Because the renewables are not enough to cover the energy usage! This is why coal is still there. In other words, coal (partially, along with the renewables) replaced the removed nuclear, despite they both are used less.

I already asked and got no answer: if both coal and nuclear are down, can we say that nuclear replaced coal, or did coal only replace nuclear? If coal replaced nuclear, what replaced the missing coal? Nuclear?

Nuclear is so green, the japanese people will shell out $200B for the cleanup of the mess. So much for that argument.

> if both coal and nuclear are down, can we say that nuclear replaced coal, or did coal only replace nuclear?

IMHO it depends on the purpose of the decrease. If it's about green energy, then removing the nuclear while keeping the coal is a wrong choice (see links above), and the remaining coal was chosen to be kept instead of the remaining nuclear. I would call it "coal replaced nuclear". You may have a different opinion on the semantics. It doesn't matter much. What matters is the wrong choice which led to unnecessary CO2 and radiation in the air (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Damage_to_human_health).

> Nuclear is so green, the japanese people will shell out $200B for the cleanup of the mess. So much for that argument.

There is a difference between an anecdote and reliable statistics.

> if both coal and nuclear are down, can we say that nuclear replaced coal, or did coal only replace nuclear?

> Nuclear is so green, the japanese people will shell out $200B for the cleanup of the mess. So much for that argument.

There is a difference between an anecdote and reliable statistics.

Of course there is a difference, that's why somebody posted the estimate (in another comment) that the insurance of one nuclear power plant would be around 70 billion per year. And we know from another recent story, that people doing those estimates are really good at math.

You can call it any way you want, but the question remains. If there is less coal use now than before, and coal was used to replace the reduced nuclear, what replaced the coal? It has to be nuclear, no?

> It has to be nuclear, no?

No, it can be renewables.

> the insurance of one nuclear power plant would be around 70 billion per year. And we know from another recent story, that people doing those estimates are really good at math.

The insurance takes into account huge costs unreasonably added by politicians. This is not what you should look at for a scientifically sound comparison.

There are 100 black, 100 brown and 100 green balls. We take out 50 black and brown balls, and replace them with 100 green balls. But wait, actually the brown balls replaced the black balls because that's the idea I like. But liking has nothing to do with math. Something that decreased needs a replacement, it cannot be a replacement itself, since it was already there.

You don't even understand how insurance works. Added costs or whatever have no influence on the potential payout after an accident would occur. When even something nuclear proponents call benign like Fukushima costs $200B to cleanup imagine how much Chernobyl would cost today. We are easily talking trillions. Insurances are not lobby driven business like nuclear plants, whose main business model is dumping external costs on the public. E.g. nuclear waste, accident cleanup etc.

The difference from your balls is that different "colors" have real-world, serious consequences. When you choose to remove harmless "balls" but not to remove actively harmful "balls", you effectively endorse the latter ones. This is not just a theoretical thing. Due to this choice, millions and millions of tons of CO2 and a lot of radiation were released into the environment and billions of euro put into the pockets of the coal lobby.

> like nuclear plants, whose main business model is dumping external costs on the public.

Actually, this is even more true for the coal. According to available statistics, coal results in more deaths, more CO2, more damage. I admit that I don't know how the insurance works. Where do all those costs for nuclear insurance come from, while the coal insurance is cheap and more damaging?

> When you choose to remove harmless "balls" but not to remove actively harmful "balls

Yet somehow there is less of what you call harmful balls. What happened to them if they weren't removed? Are you always in disagreement with reality or is this an exception? This is even weirder than the person that claimed a decrease is an increase because it wasn't big enough.

> Yet somehow there is less of what you call harmful balls.

Ok, maybe you understand it better if I reformulate: When you choose to remove more harmless "balls" and less harmful "balls", it means you support the latter, even if both numbers decreased. How else would you call it if not supporting? Those got money and resources which they should not have obtained.

> Yet somehow there is less of what you call harmful balls. What happened to them if they weren't removed?

In this hypothetical case, they would be also be unreasonably supported, even stronger. It's better now than that, but not nearly good enough.

Personal attacks are against HN rules. It's always easy to claim that the opponent is stupid and you are a genius. Try to understand instead (as I do).

It's not a personal attack to say it's weird to call removing something, I quote: "not to remove actively harmful "balls"". If calling this weird is against HN rules, I don't want to be here in that case.

This is really only about you googling for stories that coal use in Germany went up, reading half the headline and not realizing it's not saying what you want it to say, and that coal is in fact drastically down. To call yourself understanding in that case is, uh... So now I am faced with a living breathing example of backfire effect, which is potentially annoying, but not really as the bottom line is this: last year renewables almost 300GW of new capacity, nuclear roughly 0GW (I did not actually check the numbers, but am pretty confident it's almost 0 since it almost always is). To quote Amory Lovins: "it's game over".

> that coal is in fact drastically down

Did I say otherwise? I didn't. I said it's not down enough, even if you think it's down "drastically".

I didn't understand one thing. Do you actually accept or deny that due to not enough decrease of coal the world got a lot unnecessary harmful CO2 and radiatioin, or not?

> To quote Amory Lovins: "it's game over".

Maybe in Germany, but not necessarily elsewhere.

> Did I say otherwise? I didn't.

Um, no, you did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890517

"actually it's not even going down"

Googling for proof that should validate your wrong beliefs is not called understanding. It's called reinforcing my wrongly held beliefs.

So after saying "removing something" means "not removing something", now saying "it's not even going" down means "I never said it's not even going down". Am I again breaking HN rules by repeating the contradicting things you keep saying?

New capacity in nuclear worldwide last year was roughly zero. There is around 50GW of in construction nuclear currently that will be finished god knows when and, which is about 1/6 of renewables that got deployed last year without a lot of fuss, being over budget and late. It's very much game over, and poor mental gymnastics you're showing here cannot change that.

> Um, no, you did.

>Googling for proof that should validate your wrong beliefs is not called understanding.

I didn't Google for the proof. I am well aware of the confirmation bias. I simply took this reference from the same discussion, different thread. Moreover, my original argument wasn't based on this reference and I'm ready to stand corrected if it's wrong. It doesn't matter whether it goes down on not in the end. What matters is the choice which harms the health of people and the environment.

It's very sad if you are right about the end of nuclear. I see no reason for that except unscientific fears, and many scientific reports suggest that nuclear is the solution to the climate change.

Right, it doesn't matter, therefore you post the misunderstood link that it went up. Yet another contradiction. Of course it matters, you wouldn't have posted it otherwise.

You see no reason because you generally don't look at facts and numbers, and this is quite clear. Nuclear is stupid expensive and slow, and investing in it is guaranteed to prolong the death of coal. We have neither the time nor the money to deal with it. Germany is living proof that you don't need it to get rid off coal.

Even if you're the smartest person in the world, you are not smarter than the majority of mankind that is currently looking the other way. If you don't understand the reasons, try to understand first. The mountain is not coming to Muhammad, so Muhammad will have to go to the mountain. Happy trails.

> Germany is living proof that you don't need it to get rid off coal.

This is just bullshit. Germany is a living proof that removing coal before removing nuclear results in unnecessary damage to the environment and money to coal plant owners: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/01/14/germany-dramatic.... I showed you proofs that nuclear energy is a green energy. You didn't provide any links against this point at all.

> Even if you're the smartest person in the world, you are not smarter than the majority of mankind that is currently looking the other way.

This is false: https://listoffallacies.com/appeal-to-majority aka the Bandwagon Fallacy.

I see that you are also full of bias against nuclear. You also don't have any scientific arguments and just playing with words and trying to find problems in my logic (which do exist, but they don't negate my main point). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

It's just not interesting to argue with you anymore.

You should've picked up by now that my argument is mostly economical. If you can do one thing fast and cheap, and the other slow and expensive, every rational person knows what to do, and it has nothing to do with science. I've repeated multiple times:

- it's a fact building nuclear is expensive even when it's on budget, and it's costs can balloon to ridiculous levels

- it's a fact it's slow even when it's on time which it can really blow up

- it's a fact the costs of Fukushima will be multiple hundreds of billions of dollars.

- it's a fact that had Japan switched off their plants in 2010 and invested $200B in renewables you would've called them crazy, but this would've been an amazing call for them

- it's a fact that most of Germany's plants were old and planned for decomissioning anyway

- it's a fact nuclear plants get decomissioned all over the world because of the same reasons. it's likely that nuclear capacity added for last year is negative since more was decomissioned than added

- it's a fact Germany will have to pay €170B in the next decades for the storage of nuclear waste. this number would've only been higher without the forced decomissioning. instead the public invested in renewables with amazing results

So those are all facts. The rational people around the world, that invest their $$$, have looked at facts and numbers and called your "scientific" reasoning total nonsense.

> they are one of the largest exporters of electricity in Europe

any source for that claim?

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...

What do these negative values mean?

That they exported more than they imported. All countries (or I guess at least) both import and export electricity depending on their needs. In the end the total says if you imported more or exported more.

s/Germans/people everywhere/.

> A disaster, say critics.

Not a disaster, say others.

> Nuclear power entails hardly any carbon emissions and offers consistent baseload supply, unlike intermittent renewables.

The opposition to nuclear power generation was not based on carbon emissions, so this is a Red Herring.

> bureaucracy and bottlenecks are slowing the rollout of renewables

So, that seems to be the main problem. The German government knew it was facing the deadline but neglected to prepare for it.

paywall-free: https://archive.is/PAGLk

>An mp from the Social Democratic Party (spd), which leads the governing coalition, compared nuclear supporters (ludicrously) to anti-vaxxers.

Edit: Oops, misread it.

You read it wrong. It's the nuclear SUPPORTERS that are compared to anti-vaxxers, not opponents.

Indeed I did. How embarrassing.

I think you are confused? The quote is about nuclear supporters being ludicrously compared to anti-vaxxers. And from your comment it seems that you agree that nuclear power is safe.

Yes, I misread it. My bad.

> compared nuclear supporters (ludicrously) to anti-vaxxers

> Both refuse to accept the views of scientists.

Are a lot of mainstream scientists against nuclear?

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