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Comment by _dain_ | Hacker News Reader

>The whole political position of this party rests on their fanatic opposition to Nuclear power.

Btw if anyone thinks this is exaggeration, it's not. They are evil fanatics:

https://twitter.com/giuliasaudelli/status/158097313099012505...

>"Nuclear power and fossil fuels brought us here. They caused this crisis, they are not the solution."

>Strong and at times emotional speech by Robert Habeck, after weeks under pressure. Defending his actions in government, but standing by Green values. He got a standing ovation.

Reality: the Greens and their allies spent half a trillion USD on the "energy transition" and turned off perfectly good nuclear reactors. Result: energy shortages and diplomatic submission to Russia. And now they blame nuclear for it. If they had spent that half a trillion on new nuclear reactors, Germany would be an energy superpower. As it stands, they're having to burn coal and wood to get through the winter.

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> Reality: the Greens and their allies spent half a trillion USD on the "energy transition" and turned off perfectly good nuclear reactors. Result: energy shortages and diplomatic submission to Russia.

Um no. Renewable energy is now actually cheaper than nuclear energy. You could build renewable energy + storage within the same range of cost. The problem is the former government shut down nuclear power plants and then did exactly nothing.

The nuclear power plants aren't perfectly good. They are very old and would need a lot of investment if run for more than a couple of month.

And germany isn't even near electric energy shortages. It's currently supplying france with a lot of energy.

If electric heating were used everywhere from now on, there would be an electricity problem. But for that the electric heaters are missing.

It's only recently cheap. It's true that if they had pivoted to Nuclear instead, they would not had these energy shortfalls and maybe even Russia wouldn't have felt they had the leverage to invade Ukraine.

The global output of battery storage isn't high enough to switch to solar/wind. Energy is a solved problem. It's a natural progression of mankind's command of energy. Wood->Coal->Oil->Fission. There's enough Uranium in the ground and oceans to supply humanity for million of years. We can't let a few accidents hold us back for ever.

>You could

Clearly Germany couldnt, otherwise they would decommission coal plants.

As I said, the former government startet the nuclear phase-out but they also didn't approve any new renewable energy sources for years.

Regardless of the type of power plant, it is totally stupid to shut down some and not allow any new ones to be built.

I would really like to celebrate the affordability of renewable energy but Germany has one of the highest electricity prices in the world.

The price before taxes and fees is absolutely not high in Germany. Only if you look at the final price, the statement is true.

But if production cost isn't the problem what difference would nuclear power make?

The decision to turn off nuclear plants in Germany was __not__ made by the greens. It was made years ago by the CDU after Fukushima.

Minority parties can make the governing parties do things. UKIP wasn't in government but they made the Conservative party promise a referendum, which the eurosceptic side won -- and that was in a FPTP system! The Greens weren't in government but they had a lot of influence in the Bundestag and in the various Länder. The anti-nuclear cause has been around for decades, they creep in everywhere like a fungus.

Merkel adopted the anti-nuclear stance to take votes from the Greens, and her administration accelerated the shutdown of Germany's nuclear power plants after Fukushima. Don't blame the Greens, although I do think they are a dogmatic single-issue party and don't see the forest for the trees.

> after Fukushima

And can we talk about how stupid and actively malicious it is to use the Fukushima accident as a reason for shutting down nuclear plants in Germany?

Fukushima: nuclear plant in a seismically very active region in very close proximity to the ocean where tsunamis are not really a rarity

vs.

German nuclear plants: not very seismically active (if at all), no tsunamis i've ever heard of, not counting floods as those are

1. easier to foresee and manage and

2. very much less intense than a sudden wall of water razing everything in its path.

Also in Japan you kinda have to build near the coast since its surrounded by ocean on all sides while being stretched out long and not that wide with mountains as a backbone in the middle. Germany on the other hand only has the North and Baltic Sea at its northern end then progressively gets higher above sea level the more south you go, ultimately ending at the northern end of the Alps.

This decision and especially this reasoning didn't make sense then and still doesn't nowadays. It was just a kneejerk reaction to retain voter support by exploiting the fear of the uneducated and the anti-nuclear crowd.

The Fukushima reactors and a lot of the german ones were built by the same company. They overlooked the flood risk on the japanese coast (which has huge tsunamis every few decades). What did they overlook elsewhere? After Chernobyl, politicians promised that western reactors could not possibly explode. Fukushima proved them wrong.

No, Fukushima proved them right.

Fukushima ended in no way like Tchernobyl did.

The Soviet power plan released radioactivity in the air, make an entire area inhabitable and killed a few dozen a people.

Fukushima did nothing of this, everything stayed inside the structure, no radioactivity went out.

As Fukushima had no recovery generators available (no fuel in them), it is a great proof that a totally out of control modern power plant is not deadly.

The Fukushima disaster cleanup cost a trillion dollars. Over a hundred thousand people were (at least temporarily) displaced. I would call this a pretty darn big failure.

The trillion dollar figure is a bit of a stretch and includes a lot of stuff that didn't need to happen or was double counted.

Less motivated reasoning gives about $300bn which would still be enough to easily replace every coal and oil plant in the country with renewables (as well as half of the gas).

Comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl is not really justified

Chernobyl: Core meltdown and catastrophic explosion of entire reactor. Caused by gross negligence when safety system disabled. Direct deaths: <100 Estimated indirect deaths: 4 to 16 thousand

Fukushima: Caused by 4th largest earthquake in history. No core explosion. Hydrogen explosion destroyed non structural part of building (this was by design). Core meltdown but largely contained. Contamination of air/water from venting to atmosphere. Direct deaths: 1 employee died of cancer Estimated indirect deaths: 300-2000

Your reasoning why nuclear accidents couldn't happen in Germany is moving the goalpost though. First the narrative was that they couldn't happen, then it was that they couldn't happen in western style reactors.

The reality is that nuclear reactors can lead to big events in unforeseen situations, like also Fukushima was. It's impossible to foresee what the cause for the next big event will be.

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