What if Germany had invested in nuclear power? | Hacker News Reader

What if Germany had invested in nuclear power?

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48 pointshaltingproblem100 comments

Even a lot of Dutch people don't know this but for decades the Netherlands was selling huge quantities of natural gas for bargain prices to anyone willing to pay.

Why? Because some very smart Dutch experts calculated that Europe would switch to nuclear so there was a limited window of opportunity to sell this soon to be useless commodity. And to add insult to injury just as the Ukraine crisis started all the gas fields were starting to run dry.

To give those experts some credit, they probably had overly optimistic assumptions that European countries would take the rational smart choice of nuclear, instead of being all over the place.

I’d agree, being wrong doesn’t mean the reasoning was wrong. They bet on the most likely and I would think it was at the time the most likely. Something less likely happened instead. Doesn’t make them stupid at all, it just illustrates that predicting the future is hard if not impossible.

I think part of Russia and Iran making moves right now is that, like the Dutch, they're seeing the window of opportunity for selling fossil fuel closing, and they're settling long-term grievances while the rest of the world still needs their resources and can't isolate them like North Korea.

Part of why the Energiewende was expensive was that it provided long term financial incentives for those who invested in renewables when they weren't yet economically competitive.

If you bought solar panels 20 years ago you received subsidies for every year since then at the prices of the past.

In a way Germany bankrolled a lot of the renewable development with this. Of course it wasn't viable to continue this so German government scaled back the scheme aggressively, which unfortunately killed the solar industry in Germany almost entirely (roughly 10 years ago).

Today everything has changed. Renewables are now cheaper than fossils and thus expanding at incredible rates. There is no point in turning back to nuclear power which just got worse and worse from their economics.

> Renewables are now cheaper than fossils

They're cheap because they're produced in China (>80% of worldwide supply) that runs on fossils (>80% of their energy). Try producing a solar panel using electricity from a solar panel and it becomes much more expensive. Use that new panel to produce yet another panel and it becomes prohibitively expensive. The whole thing is a mirage.

That claim is obviously absurd. If solar power now is cheaper than fossils then it’ll be cheaper to make them with solar energy going forward. Maaaaybe that’s why China itself is building an insane amount of solar energy within their own country.

It’s not like China has particularly cheap fossil fuels. They import most of it. A dependence they’re desperate to break I might add.

Yes, they also build coal power plants. But a little known fact is that they’re built more as a backup for renewables in the transition. Possibly also as a short sighted GDP boost (see: all the empty apartments they’ve built). Gas power serves that purpose in Europe, but China doesn’t have a lot of gas. Coal power isn’t great in that role but it does work.

The average coal plant utilisation rate has been steadily declining in China.

China just had its largest drop in fossil fuel power output since the pandemic, with the share of coal reaching a record low

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-clean-energy-pus...

> That claim is obviously absurd. If solar power now is cheaper than fossils then it’ll be cheaper to make them with solar energy going forward

It would be absurd if your statement "solar is cheaper than fossils" was correct in a general sense but it's not. It may be true in a limited set of countries like US or Germany but it's not where the solar panels are actually produced. They are produced in China where this statement doesn't hold.

The fact of physics is that energy ROI (how much kWh you can produce by spending one kWh) of coal cycle is much higher than ROI of solar panels. Solar panels can still make sense as long as the ROI is greater than one but they cannot be cheaper than coal unless you cheat (import panels from a country with much cheaper electricity).

Your logic only works if manufacturing of solar panels is an energy intensive tasks, which it isn't. The total energy expenditure of manufacturing, shipping and installing solar panels is recouped after operating the solar panel for roughly a year.

Solar panels are now cheaper than coal because you need to dig up coal and bring it to the power plant, which costs more than the 4cents per kwh which LCOE solar now costs.

It is energy intensive. Studies I saw give 2 to 8 years to offset the PV alone, not counting inverters and the rest. One case of a heavy hail during that time and a panel becomes a net energy loss, a pure damage to the environment.

> Solar panels are now cheaper than coal because you need to dig up coal and bring it to the power plant, which costs more than the 4cents per kwh which LCOE solar now costs.

You're taking again the LCOE of solar produced from coal. Digging up coal and bringing it to the plant requires very little energy.

Yes, it is common to forget the whole supply chain and externalities.

But fossil fuels have the externalities of destroying our planet.

What I highlighted and was also answered in other comments, is that many times people focus in a local supply chain (e.g. Germany) without taking into account the whole supply chain (e.g. including China). Country X statistically reduces its fossil fuels because it is relying on country Y which isn't.

This is sad but we can find some solace in that providing demand/an initial market by this, it basically jumpstarted the mass-production of photovoltaics, leading to price decline and thereby mass-adoption of solar power in my opinion.

> Renewables are now cheaper than fossils

price of energy production != cost of energy

Lazard 2023 estimates that solar and wind in the California grid costs 2/3 times more than when just considering the LCOE. Solar and wind production can be cheaper, but the final price is way higher.

I must be reading Lazard 2023 wrong because the LCOE for wind and utility scale solar seems almost half of the other sources. What am I missing?

When taking into account the "Cost of Firming Intermittency" the total cost can go up by 2/3 times in the "CAISO" case at page 8 of Lazard 2023, which is higher than LCOE for existing nuclear and to some LCOE estimates for new nuclear.

In addition to that, there are additional costs (integration costs) that are not considered in LCOE; for example, you can build PV power plants in sunny places, but that might not be where the electricity need is, so the network should be upgraded as well. All these costs are highly dependent on the penetration of intermittent sources and on the grid, and this is why the price of the electricity can be very different from the cost of electricity. I can produce electricity very cheaply, but maybe no one needs that. This is why Germany sometimes have negative prices, so it actually pays with subsidies the consumption of energy in neighbourhood countries, and then the price can skyrocket, which is why Sweden recently blocked a new connection towards Germany, "where the electricity market today does not function efficiently" (Energy Minister Ebba Busch).

I am sorry to say that I don't understand why solar without battery and solar+battery leads to different cost for firming in the Lazard. Shouldn't solar with battery already be pretty firm?

Remember we primarily want to reduce carbon emissions and we do have a lot of fossil plants already around.

Short answer: no, they are not (read footnotes 1 and 2)

CAISO, 1st column, 1st bar: - blue is the cost of solar - beige is the cost of firming intermittency using gas

CAISO, 2nd column, 1st bar: - blue is the cost of solar+battery (max 4 hours) - beige is the cost of firming intermittency using gas

Using batteries improves the ELCC (contribution to meet peak demand), but it is not enough, so it has to be compensated somehow. Want to get a higher ELCC? Get a larger battery (and install more solar panels). Be aware, this is not a linear relationship: getting from 10 % to 20 % of renewables is cheaper than getting from 70 % to 80 % (this is why the costs are lower when the penetration rate shown in the slide is low). You reach a point where you just waste energy or need to pay to use it, like in Germany, Netherlands or Denmark.

There is no best energy source. There are different networks, energy mixes, needs, etc. Under CAISO, it is just more convenient to go with nuclear. Under SPP, solar has a very high ELCC and a very low penetration, which makes it convenient just to install solar, but up to which percentage?

Overall, some mix of renewables and nuclear, depending on the network, seems a reasonable solution. Otherwise we would need to go with fossil power plants to meet the remaining demand (carbon capture seems wishful thinking) or to over provision renewables while building incredibly large storage systems (be aware that there are places where fluctuation are not on a daily or weekly basis, but on a seasonal basis - good luck storing the energy for ~3 months using lithium ion batteries because you live in a polar region).

The book "How to avoid a climate disaster" (Bill Gates) has a chapter just for that. I would recommend it.

But it’s not only about economics of the power production itself, having a source of stable energy like nuclear is also critical for national security (strategic, economic development, stability)

Russia controls almost 40% of the uranium conversion capacities and 46% of the enrichment capacities. China is also controlling some amount, leaving only 36% of the conversion (Canada, France) and about 42% of the enrichment capacities under control of allies.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-nuclear-power-industry-graphi...

And why is that?

Sweden has a lot of Uranium but mining it is politically a dead end, and has been since Chernobyl.

While this study is very interesting, the way the Energiewende itself was applied was also not ideal. Some of the steps in the Energiewende were not applied properly, probably because the German government at the time was center-right and had conscious or unconscious biases in favor of coal and gas generations.

It would have been interesting to compare the reasonable benefices of a properly-done nuclear path with the reasonable benefices of a properly-done renewable path (properly-done renewable path being constructed the same way: triangulating the situations in other countries), instead of comparing it with what really happened with the German renewable path.

There's nothing "right wing" about coal and gas power generation.

Coal and gas is "what we always did", which sounds like the dictionary definition of the word "conservative" to me.

Apart from that, at least in the context of German politics center-right ideology is "help the companies and everyone will prosper" and center-left ideology is "help the people and everyone will prosper". And with the amount of corruption evident in the center-right party that's morphed into "help the companies the high-ranking politicians are close to", which includes multiple companies heavily invested in coal and gas and few with serious commitments to green energy.

Hmm, seems to me historically the left has been at the forefront of protesting against nuclear anything, while conservatives have been promoting it even for energy supply. That is an instance of conservatives promoting something new, while the left has been wary of it.

Things are obviously not as simplistic. The left was also promoting something new: the renewable and less consumerist society where people are less wasteful with energy and more conscious about not screwing up the environment. Nuclear is an appealing option for people who want to maintain the consumerist society and/or avoid calling into question the fact that the current ways of working may not be ideal.

I think the right was both okay with nuclear, but still also sympathetic to coal and gas industries.

Also, not sure that "conservative = against something new" is the correct understanding of the usual definition of the conservative. The conservative is usually to maintain the traditional balance of power where bosses get the big slice of cake. If their rich friends are coming with something new that profit to the communities currently in power, the conservative is usually totally up for it. And if we are currently in a situation where the cake is more equally distributed, they usually are totally for new things that re-give power to the previous elite (it looks "new", but the goal is to come back to what existed in the past).

> The conservative is usually to maintain the traditional balance of power where bosses get the big slice of cake.

That may be the usual definition of Conservatism in 'progressive' circles but it bears no relation to the actual definition. Also, this is now the second time in less than a week that I see someone coming up with something resembling this definition of Conservatism. See my previous reaction [1] to this failed definition of the term for an example of what the term really covers.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249430

Not sure how this interview contradicts what I was saying. All good ol' monarchist Scruton is doing is using politically correct language to explain that he likes the traditional balance of power and that he wants to maintain it. (and funny, isn't it, that those people who are according to you not at all for maintaining the traditional balance of power where the bosses get the big slice of cake happens to often be pro-monarchy, the caricatural system that comes to mind when someone needs to think of a traditional balance of power where the bosses get the big slice of cake)

But also, there is a logical flaw. You are saying that some people are building their own definition because it is convenient for them, by 1) lying to themselves about the real reason of their choice (the left-wing person will pretend they act like that because it's "fair and good" instead of admitting it's because they like to think they are better than the others), 2) finding stuffs to paint people they don't like in a bad way.

If such people exist in the left, than such people exist in the right. But the question is: who are they, in the right? In his interview, Scruton mentions several times the left-wing people, always to explain how wrong they are, and explains how virtuous it is to be conservative.

Don't get me wrong, it does not mean that my understanding of conservatism is correct. But if you want to convince me, please provide someone who is not obviously so biased. Someone who, for example, does not do swooping generalization to put all of the left-wing people in the same negative bag. For example, someone who see the good and the bad in both left-wing and right-wing, not someone who his experience of the most censorious and oppressive society was Californian hippies while at the exact same time there were so much oppression with racism, strike repression, anti-gay, ... (don't get me wrong, the Californian hippies were bad, but, come on, a neutral person that would have been talking about oppressive society would have mentioned that the Californian hippies were maybe not as bad in the grand scheme of things as all the other oppression that existed at the time)

> Coal and gas is "what we always did", which sounds like the dictionary definition of the word "conservative" to me.

Would you call the Luddites "conservatives", too? Including the modern ones who want to block new technology that might displace jobs?

They are big capitalistic industries that were well established in the market, and right-wing tends to think that free market is a good thing and that state should not constraint the market. Right-wing politicians tend to be more friendly with successful big industries leaders, either because they are part of their circle or because they see successful company leaders as deserving to have a bigger say in the political decisions. Right-wing tends also to be conservative, so be less in favor in socio-economical changes.

Coincidentally (to the fact Germany is actively phasing out nuclear) Germany is the very country I would trust to run nuclear power plants without worry - every other nuclear-powered nation seems less good at quality and safety, the safety measures Germany applied seemed really good.

Yet nowadays it appears Germany essentially outsources nuclear power generation to its neighbors who would still contaminate Germany in case of a nuclear incident at their land.

> Coincidentally (to the fact Germany is actively phasing out nuclear) Germany is the very country I would trust to run nuclear power plants without worry - every other nuclear-powered nation seems less good at quality and safety, the safety measures Germany applied seemed really good.

Could you expend on this? What are you basing this on? Germany has an international reputation of being competent and serious about safety, but that often feels more like a myth than reality IMHO. Pretty happy to live in the country, but it’s clear at this point the country failed to live to its reputation for the past 2 decades. Germany failed to maintain and develop almost all its large infrastructure projects.

Small anecdote: I live in Hamburg, one of the richest and most developed city (love the place btw, really underrated), I finally got fiber for my internet connection just a few months ago. And we are parts of the very lucky few! I had fiber in my home country of Switzerland in 2010.

I don't mean the reputation of doing everything great which obviously is a myth. I am speaking specifically about the German nuclear installations safety standards.

Understood, and could you cite something in that regard? Or mention something a bit more specific

Toyota - level reliability, train schedules that describe expectation, not ambition, speaking as a German I would have had a lot more trust in Japan running reactors.

I guess the difference is the Earthquake threat

As a german, I cannot speak for the situation in other countries, but Germany handled nuclear energy really poorly, especially the waste[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

> Yet nowadays it appears Germany essentially outsources nuclear power generation to its neighbors

If German voters had anything to say about other countries' power generation our neighbours would also be shutting down their reactors, or at the very least replacing their worst reactors.

But as it happens German voters have very little say in how other countries run their energy grid. And the people in charge of actually running the German energy grid don't care as much, they are just happily buying and selling energy to keep the grid stable. And in the last 20 years there has only been one year where Germany has imported more electricity than it exported, so it's not like we outsource our grid

There is a way you can influence a thing neighbors do - just do it yourself so good (also in terms of economic efficiency, besides safety and quality) they would prefer to rely on you instead of doing it themselves.

>Germany is the very country I would trust to run nuclear power plants without worry

Under what assumptions? Not accusing of believing stereotypes, but most german megaprojects and public works have not been faring well. I don't believe there is one scenario in which Germany would be more trustworthy in regards to nuclear power than its neighor, France.

Perhaps I am under the influence of stereotypes as I haven't explored the subject thoroughly enough. But this is not the general Germany quality stereotype, I specifically mean the nuclear tech.

Imagine diselgate but with nuclear waste

Aren't nuclear power plants generally ran by enterprises which are less concerned about sales and stocks than car manufacturers are?

As everybody was saying, their idea was silly at best. Good there's a study for that now

What I don't understand is France: they have a controlled energy price but their nuclear provider has a lot of debt.

And they need to start rebuilding new.ones.

So was it smart in France? Besides the obvious advantage regarding CO2

They needed to build new ones decades ago but didn’t. It’s way too late now. Young people were pushed away from the industry, and now the country doesn’t have a skilled workforce anymore and mostly only has old reactors that cost more and more money every decade to maintain.

The whole history of nuclear in Europe is incredibly sad, we stopped developing and investing after some early success, and with almost no serious consideration of future problems. And all of this has been known and discussed openly for decades.

The amount of debt is not directly correlated to the health of a company: most companies have debts, and building nuclear reactors is very capital intensive. EDF net income for 2023 is 10B €, while for H1 2024 is 7B €. From 2007 to 2024 always had a positive net worth except for 2022. France is a net-exporter, with cheap, reliable and low emission electricity. Germany is almost the opposite of that.

So it had debt. How will they finance the rebuilding?

Of course it has debt, as almost every company and state :)

EDF got loans from banks and money on the market, based on the fact that investors thinks it is a good investment. That is economics 101 and holds true for all publicly traded companies. The numbers are freely available on the internet, as prescribed by the law for all companies listed.

The debt also went down in 2023. It is worth to remember that EDF is forced by the French government to sell cheap energy, below market price, to protect consumers from rising energy prices (caused by the high reliance of other countries on natural gas from Russia - like Germany that phased-out nuclear in the meanwhile).

Nuclear is also treated differently from renewables when it comes down to low-emission investments by the various EU investment funds, and cannot compete in bidding rounds together with renewables (which drives the prices up, as there is way more demand than offer, so it makes no sense to compete). If the EU commission decides that there should be technological neutrality on low-emission power plants, EDF would be in a quite good position.

If you are so sure that EDF will not be able to finance its debt or build new reactors, you can bet against it by short it and, if your analysis is correct, make quite some money.

I think it is acknowledged in the energy sector that France drove itself in a dead-end (and I'm not sure how they are going to get out of it). There was a lot of reasons, including their botched electricity nationalization and the fact that electricity companies banked on short-term profit rather than longer-term stability (hoping that the state will save them and pay all their debt when it is needed).

It does not mean that a nuclear path would have always led where France is, the same way a renewable path is not always leading to where Germany is.

Generally, French is becoming Italy II with its debt, and this has a lot do with its labour market.

Germany, to this day, has been unable to fix their nuclear waste treatment. There is no single approved upon solution for radioactive waste and recently it became clear that even some facilities need to resurface and relocate waste which, again, has no clear path after decades. I'm sceptical that any of the recent "influencer campaigns" (it feels like that for me watching x/ twitter) have ever addressed this.

Do you have a source for this?

you'll need to translate this and it's just an intro https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Marodes-Atommuell...

"Search for final repository could drag into 2070s" https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-do-nuclear-w... (contains many official sources)

https://www.endlagersuche-infoplattform.de/webs/Endlagersuch... (Infopage of the German Gov.)

Thank you for your reply.

The study misses the point I think (I only glimpsed over it). But Germany invested early into renewables at a time where they were still very expensive. The goal was to create an economy of scale and bring down the price. This was expensive for Germany but ultimately very successful: renewables are now very cheap. The same thing never worked with nuclear in the past.

Well, every time it was tried there was an inconvenient nuclear incident that soured political will.

The Offshore Power Systems plan for a Blount Island (Jacksonville, FL) reactor mass-production facility [0] is a fascinating what-if in nuclear history.

If the oil crisis hadn't severely curtailed electrical demand and hit the economy (1973) and Three Mile Island hadn't partially melted down (1979), we might finally have gotten to see what standardized reactor production at scale looked like.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems

With technology so old and with so many plants which were built in the past, it should not need a huge political will anymore to be successful. But it is still so expensive that it has simply no chance on the market. In contrast, renewables are now cheap. And this is what Germany achieved with its - certainly substantial - investment.

The only countries that have achieved economies of scale in nuclear reactor design/build after the 1980s have been France and China. [0]

Other countries built one reactor here or there, while continually shifting regulations and/or political support, and then were surprised it was shockingly expensive.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_statio... (sort by Began Operation date)

One country should have been enough to create an economy of scale. And yet even France's nuclear industry went almost bank rot from building new reactors despite all the experience from the past.

Unfortunately, scale isn't global given how many of the regulatory limiting factors are country-specific (and even worse, site-specific).

But not even in France it it not cheap and the "regulatory limiting factors" are partially true, but also partially an excuse and not the only factor which makes nuclear expensive.

Then they could have giant piles of nuclear waste, that they have no idea how to dispose of, just like france...

Germany also has giant piles of nuclear waste and doesn't even know yet where to store it permanently. Recently an assessment concluded that the process to select such a storage facility might take at least until 2074! [1]

[1]: https://www.base.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/BASE/DE/fachin...

There is exactly one country on earth that has found a permanent storage for its nuclear waste. For all we know Germany might still be amoung the first countries to find one.

At this point we better find a way to slingshot it into space (SpinLaunch?)

People wouldnt like it because it sounds stupid, but sending radioactive waste deep at the bottom of oceans would work pretty well

Those "giant piles" are abysmal compared to the damage done by coal plants which they keep running.

You should take a look at how they dumped the earlier waste. It’s not something I’ve seen mentioned in these discussions: https://amp.dw.com/en/germanys-leaking-nuclear-waste-dump/vi...

After learning about Asse I totally understand why the Germans are so negative to nuclear energy. It’s not just Chernobyl that scarred them.

Good thing no one is doing that anymore?

Coal even releases nuclear isotopes into the air.

Or the long term ecological damage of solar panels.

https://www.ecowatch.com/solar-environmental-impacts.html

"create solar panels is still nowhere near that of traditional energy facilities, and it is quite small when compared to oil drilling, fracking or coal mining"

Did you post it to indicate that solar is bad or that it is also not 100% perfect?

That solar is not perfect and not as effective as nuclear, which actually easily produces energy surpluses whenever needed and can provide the energy that is required to mine it. As opposed to solar, which still relies on fossil fuels due to the minimal adoption of nuclear, while also introducing its own environmental impacts.

"If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 34 grams"

https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch

34 grams per person times 3.4e8 people is a bit over 1e10 grams, or ten thousand tons a year? That’s back to sounding like a lot.

World gold production is three thousand tons a year, for one comparison.

The link compares with the waste from coal, which is still used instead.

Is that a lot or very little?

In any case, nuclear is a technology of the XX Century. The future is wind and solar.

The future needs to first invent cheaper, more available, and more efficient energy storage before we can replace the old power plants.

That fusion is the technology of the future does not mean we should dismantle what functions today.

Would you be able to store a few kg (after decades) somewhere in your flat/house?

I would say yes easily.

"Hey we're is your nuclear waste?" "It's under my bed"

I’d rather not have nuclear waste under my bed.

Do you mind keeping my share as well?

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

> Is that a lot or very little?

Read on my link. It's very little.

How so? As far as I can see, wind and solar are both inefficient, requiring fossil fuels to set up, and particularly with solar panels have long term environmental impacts that we have yet to solve. The panels are difficult to recycle and are not being recycled, and the method to create them leaves incredibly toxic compounds that are difficult to dispose of. While nuclear is incredibly energy dense, far safer than the many coal plant we need to supplement poor “green” energy production, and is comparatively easy to deal with the waste of.

That article makes to common error to only define spent fuel as nuclear waste - fuel is just a subset of that.

So what are the numbers?

It does seem like renewables are taking over. But I do wish nuclear had had more fuel cycle ambitions.

America's Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) used on-site pyro processing, and was able to process & burn a colossal amount of the waste (where-as breeders typically pull out & refine only plutonium, also a proliferation risk). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Onsite_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#Pyroproce...

We had so many interesting options for how to do nuclear in a responsible long term way. But so much of the world has seemingly been uninterested in funding the r&d.

Isn't it possible to engineer plants which use this waste for fuel?

Yes, breeder reactors can feed on waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

China has the plan to achieve closed nuclear fuel cycle, and there are new breeder reactors being put online to move the country closer to that goal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600

Why is anybody troubled by the waste then? Why won't they just build some reactors of this kind?

Because nuclear waste is not just spent nuclear fuel: intermediate-level waste and some forms of high-level waste (reprocessing spent nuclear fuel seems to generate new waste) still need storage solutions. The Asse II scandal concerned the unsuitable storage of intermediate waste.

For some reason some people only speak about the fuel when discussing waste, not the rest of it. I don't know why.

Generally a lots of misunderstandings regarding radioactive waste, but also breeder reactors are still fairly experimental.

I've read about breeder reactors in a German kids book in the nineties. How long do they have to be "experimental"? No surprise the nuclear industry is so weak when the progress is kept so slow (I used the word "kept" because the thing we are discussing can hardly be considered a bleeding edge advance).

The Wikipedia article covers the development pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

In short:

> Breeders were at first found attractive because they made more complete use of uranium fuel than light-water reactors, but interest declined after the 1960s as more uranium reserves were found[2] and new methods of uranium enrichment reduced fuel costs.

> Why is anybody troubled by the waste then?

Greenpeace had a point back in 1970-ies, but the message got into a myth and subsequent advancements in technology have not been popularized enough to change the public perception.

No need to downvote. At least France is developing a disposal site in Bure. But they will need a second site for the highly active waste of the 50+ NNPs.

EDIT: changed 80+ to 50+

I suggest another study, albeit very hard to do: what if Germany have chosen de-urbanisation, observing that in the denser Nederland 81.3% of citizens live in homes not apartments, like in Belgium (77.6%) or France (62%) pushing a nation-wide program to build new homes (meaning "A class", well insulated, air-tight, with good windows, heat-pumps for heating, cooling and hot water) etc modeled as a State run real estate exchange a classic home against a new one, with some constraint like:

- similar size, more allowed but at citizen expense

- build in a locally hydro-geologically stable place (meaning a flood/landslide can arrive nearby but not in the home)

- only offered for PERSONAL properties, or SME enterprise direct property, not allowed to be rent for 5 years at least after that bonus

Obtaining as a result a sharp decrease in winter consumption for heating, summer consumption for cooling, and a bit of renewable to shift a bit of load AND a bit of semi-smart grid meaning a classic "low tariff" with pilot wires for appliances like hot water heater etc that in a new home could run a bit independently from the heated water usage?

IME, having built a new home, I can state a mean of 1/7 to 1/10 overall consumption compared to an old one, meaning at large an enormous reduction in energy consumption and a bit of semi-autonomy allow for less urgent intervention in case of service issues witch in general means much lower costs and easier evolution for the service side. Aside building resilience and what we damn need for future evolution.

A small notes for those from USA: in UE there are no USA-style suburbs, meaning even in spread living homes and commerce are normally mixed, so you normally do not need to travel much for anything, and you don't need to go to the nearest city for anything because anything is actually spread like homes. Cities on contrary are MUCH more dense than USA, to the point is practically impossible re-building simply because the construction site would disrupt the surrounding circulation in such impacting ways to be doable only in case of collapse risks.

A last note for all: so far many state cities cost less than living spread but there is NO REAL STUDY on that topic, especially for MODERN cities (buildings built with elevators, HVAC, ventilation, fire and seismic safety, energy performances etc etc etc not classic "just a set of stacked boxes and some stairs"). IME and IMO having done some very basic computing a MODERN set of small homes consume less alone than an equivalent building of apartments and urban infra around (sewers, drinking water, electricity, roads) cost LESS as well for spread areas where infra a smaller instead of having to sustain density.

Do you have sources for your calculations? Because that sounds pretty much not possible for a set of small houses to compete with dense city neighborhoods

My home project, data from a friend in constructions for a 3-floors (6 units) and 8 (32 units) computing the wood frame, windows, ventilation, heating, ... of my home vs iron, cement, sand, ... for the condos.

Even if I have a concrete tile roof and a large home respect of the tested units the raw materials used are MUCH LESS for the home, and MUCH MORE recyclable and much less energivore to be produced. Only human labor it's less for condos, meaning less hours and manpower or the construction enterprise earn MORE from big stuff than from home, but use more raw materials who need more energy to be produced and deployed than home. Similar is esteemed for public services (a simple water pipe, no sewer etc).

Unfortunately while I can share my home project I can't share condos project, but I think you can easily find some a redo the same computation. It's far from being a real comprehensive study but the delta is so big for NEW buildings (counting seismic safety, fire safety, electricity, hydraulic, ... not like a condos from the 1930) that's enough.

You can complete the game observing who need the city model (financial capitalism) and who die without it (idem) you'll easily find why such narrative exists. The step from the push to cloud+mobile vs the connected desktops model and towns vs single family homes follow the very same logic and have the very same effects on the society.

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