Predictions that the nuclear exit would leave Germany forced to use more coal and facing rising prices and supply problems, meanwhile, have not transpired. In March 2023—the month before the phaseout—the distribution of German electricity generation was 53 percent renewable, 25 percent coal, 17 percent gas, and 5 percent nuclear. In March 2024, it was 60 percent renewable, 24 percent coal, and 16 percent gas.
Overall, the past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide, a 60-year low in coal use, sizeable emissions cuts, and decreasing energy prices.
Yeah but if Germany hadn’t been so anti-nuclear, by 2023 it could have been (for example) 53% renewable, 5% coal, 17% gas and 25% nuclear. Comparing the dying tail end of nuclear to just after it finally died is not useful.
Possible, but it isn’t and it hasn’t been since the 1970is. Given that reality I think it has been going into a sensible direction, because coal has been steadily falling since early 2000. The push for renewables has been a very direct result of the anti-nuclear movement, without it there might not have been any wish to transition towards them.
Nuclear is affordable, efficient and proven. Abandoning it instead of promoting it was a dumb, conservative move that hurt everyone involved. Except Russian billionaires, of course.
Nuclear is only expensive and slow if you’re building reactors from 1960-s. Modern micro- and nano-reactors can be put in every yard in a matter of months if not weeks.
Except they do exist. Almost. First SMRs were scheduled to be deployed right about, but the pandemic fucked it up. The project is back on track though.
MNR study was finished in 2019, right before the pandemic. Feasibility was also finished during the pandemic and the development grants were awarded.
Nano-reactors are still a future, sadly, but if the investments will keep up it won’t be long.
It won’t have been long for a long time now. It’s not a feasible concept to rely on a maybe. We need massive amounts of clean energy now and the way to do that now is water, wind and solar. If these wonder reactors are one day reality that’s great.
France is a good example. They invest billions in their nuclear power. Still, their infrastructure is old and they can’t seem to build new reactors. It’s a money sink while “dumb renewables” are the cheapest most spammable energy source we ever had.
They already had it and it was working just fine. They tore it down and went full coal and some gas. Now wind and solar are taking over slowly, but it’s been years with more pollution and more radiation than any already working nuclear plant would have emmited.
That’s true. The original plans for phasing out nuclear energy encompassed huge investments in renewable energy. The government Merkel II then decided to keep using nuclear and not invest in renewables, then decided a year later to leave nuclear again without investing in renewables. That little maneuver not only cost huge amounts of compensation for the big energy companies but also nuked (haha) the German wind and solar industry to the ground.
The old reactors could have been used until their end of life, yes. The effects are exaggerated though. Nobody was going to build new ones. Not even France who rely heavily on nuclear energy has new reactors.
this ignores the key issue that in Germany, there was already an extensive and perfectly functional nuclear industry. In other countries with no nuclear infrastructure, renewables are definitely the better, cheaper, more scalable choice - but countries which invested big many decades ago are in a different position, and Germany’s deliberate destruction of their nuclear capabilities has left them dependant on fossil fuels from an adversarial state - easily a worse situation than small amounts of carefully managed nuclear waste while renewables were scaled up.
this ignores the key issue that in Germany, there was already an extensive and perfectly functional nuclear industry.
Shhh… anti-nuclear don’t want to hear this. They’d rather project, even though people are talking about how stupid closing down the current nuclear infrastructure and not advocating to build new ones!
I don’t support building new nuclear power plants, but it’s ridiculous to close down already existing ones given the threat of climate change. NPP should act more like stop gap until renewable energy can take over more effectively.
I’m not claiming it was smart to leave nuclear before coal. It wasn’t. But it is what happened and it was decided two decades ago. Nuclear is done in Germany and there is no point discussing it further. New reactors were not going to happen either way.
The idiots on here firmly believe that nuclear creates zero waste. In their deranged head there is no nuclear waste that will last for longer than humanity existed.
Compared to renewables, nuclear creates pretty much zero waste. The whole story of nuclear energy created less waste than one year of waste from solar panels alone.
Toxicity I believe is about equal. Storage requirements are a bit stricter for nuclear in terms of storage container requirements, but much much much less in terms of storage space. Overall, it is much cheaper to safely dispose of the nuclear waste then waste from solar power.
Thanks for this picture-perfect post of a nuke-stan / nuke-bot
Toxicity I believe is about equal.
I generally try to respect other peoples religion but yours is a threat to the ecosphere. I believe you know your statement is bullshit.
Storage requirements are a bit stricter for nuclear in terms of storage container requirements
People opposed to nuclear know this already but why do you think that is?
Follow up: How long does it need to be safely stored? Please note the number of years.
Humanity is about 300.000 years old, the Pyramids of Gizeh were build about 4600 years ago, the Vandals sacked Rome 1569 years ago, WW2 ended about 80 years ago. Now compare the those times with the time radioactive waste needs to be safely stored (and it definitely isn’t at the moment).
Note: radiation is not toxicity.
FYI: There are generally five types of toxicities: chemical, biological, physical, radioactive and behavioural.
To be fair radioactive toxicity stands a bit out because it is (in your wording) much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much more toxic than anything else possibly including ‘forever chemicals’.
Nuclear energy is not cheaper nor safer, you’re just kicking a toxic, radioactive can down the road.
FYI: There are generally five types of toxicities: chemical, biological, physical, radioactive and behavioural.
Toxicity at least in scientific literature only refers to chemical toxicity. What even would be “physical toxicity”?!
To be fair radioactive toxicity stands a bit out because it is (in your wording) much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much more toxic than anything else possibly including ‘forever chemicals’.
If you went to eat unenriched uranium, you would die sooner (as in from smaller dose) from chemical poisoning than radiation damage (uranium is also chemically toxic). People not educated about the actual dangers of radiation tend to greatly over exaggerate its dangers.
Follow up: How long does it need to be safely stored? Please note the number of years.
For how long do you need to store toxic (by your weird definition I guess chemically toxic?) substances like lead?
Since they don’t have a half-life, until the heat death of the universe. So why does storage time only suddenly matter for nuclear waste?
Nuclear energy is not cheaper nor safer, you’re just kicking a toxic, radioactive can down the road.
Nuclear energy killed fewer people per kilowatt generated than hydro, wind, gas, and coal. Its just people like you spreading misinformation.
Here is a good video why nuclear waste is not the issue people like you make it out to be: youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
FYI: There are generally five types of toxicities: chemical, biological, physical, radioactive and behavioural.
Toxicity at least in scientific literature only refers to chemical toxicity. What even would be “physical toxicity”?!
Maybe, just maybe, you should have read the Wikipedia article you linked. Not only did I lift that sentence from there it also explains physical toxicity. Sometimes you should read past the headline.
( Skipping the rest of the BS and jumping to the grand finale.)
Here is a good video why nuclear waste is not the issue people like you make it out to be: youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
Oh, so you got your PHD from Youtube University^tm^ - I didn’t know that! My bad, you win!
JK, I like to get my info from different sources including but not limited to actual professors of physics (e.g. Harald Lesch) and they don’t agree with mister Youtube dude.
Finally we reached the stage of you throwing shit on the wall in the hope something sticks.
arxiv.org 1810.02865
Published by team working for Bangladeshi Nuclear energy providers and reads a bit like a promotion piece. It is cited nowhere but I’m sure their employer/customer was happy.
Assuming you did some research on this (who am I kidding though) you should have found at per each article you find that claims storage is safe you’ll find at least 2 incidents disproving that. If you’ll look at the corresponding Wikipedia page you’ll find these are mostly in developed countries or where they can be detected by developed countries. Surely this is just coincidence and not the tip of the proverbial iceberg…
I could drown you with links & articles of better scientific provenience but since that would be pointless I’d like to point out another fact to consider that doesn’t get discussed enough:
At current (nuclear energy) consumption level the global stockpile of fissionable material is estimated to provide energy for another 230 years. That seems a lot and would buy us and a couple of future generations time. Until you factor in Germany and others stopping all efforts to implement renewables, emerging countries doing the same and also the rising demand for electricity which is estimated to drive up current nuclear energy consumption by 20. Suddenly that lengthy period of 230 years is gone…
Fission and fossile both rely on finite consumables. All energy providers have pollution associated with them. Out of these however only renewable get their energy from the sun which is good for another couple of billion years. So the only option is to go all in on renewables.
Yes, at the very least Germany should have started decades ago but Germans decided they’d like a conservative Government for most of the past 40 years.
Published by team working for Bangladeshi Nuclear energy providers and reads a bit like a promotion piece. It is cited nowhere but I’m sure their employer/customer was happy.
Ok, never mind that the people with most expertise and practical experience will inevitably work in the nuclear sector. Lets give this one to you, since I really have no way of knowing if it is honest.
Way better than your 1st article but still drives on assumed probabilities.
Ok sure, its not perfect, but it is pretty good evidence without trying it in practice.
Please explain the relevance pertaining to this discussion.
Since I expected you would scoff at the theoretical papers, here is a practical one. The reactors left behind waste that was buried since before humans existed, yet there are no signs of leakage or discernible signs of health issues caused by it. Now again, sure. We did not exactly have Geiger counters around it to know there were no issues, but it is good evidence there are no catastrophic ones.
Given both theoretical and practical evidence, I would asses the dangers of sealed underground storage to be low.
If you’ll look at the corresponding Wikipedia page you’ll find these are mostly in developed countries or where they can be detected by developed countries. Surely this is just coincidence and not the tip of the proverbial iceberg…
Excellent, you brought articles with causality numbers yourself. Never mind that not many developing countries operate nuclear powerplant, maybe some countries dump their fuel there. Go ahead and multiply the casualties 5 times over. Add to it the low risk that underground disposal will not be perfectly safe and a relatively small area of land may become uninhabitable in the future.
Now compare that to the yearly deaths cause by air pollution that the coal and gas plants Germany had to reactivate to replace nuclear produce. Then add to it the certain future damage from climate change and tell me that was a reasonable trade-off.
At current (nuclear energy) consumption level the global stockpile of fissionable material is estimated to provide energy for another 230 years.
I never claimed nuclear should be a permanent solution and I really don’t want to start another long discussion.
PS: Oh right, almost forgot.
This article is by psychologists. Relevance?
This one might interest you if you intellectually understand nuclear is safer than fossil fuels yet you still feel afraid of it.
Ok, never mind that the people with most expertise and practical experience will inevitably work in the nuclear sector. Lets give this one to you, since I really have no way of knowing if it is honest.
So If you buy a used car you only use the sales guys expertise as he knows the car best and don’t bother asking an independent mechanic? Got ya, bless your heart.
… Ok sure, its not perfect, but it is pretty good evidence without trying it in practice.
No, it’s just a couple of statistics. It’s better than the other piece but that’s a low bar.
<span style="color:#323232;">Please explain the relevance pertaining to this discussion.
</span>
… did not exactly have Geiger counters around it to know there were no issues, but it is good evidence there are no catastrophic ones.
Natural occuring radiation exists elsewhere as well. Intensity and containment are pretty important. You didn’t bring anything to the table.
Add to it the low risk that underground disposal will not be perfectly safe and a relatively small area of land may become uninhabitable in the future.
You have literally no idea what you are talking about. Never heard of underground aquifers for instance?
Now compare that to the yearly deaths cause by air pollution that the coal and gas plants Germany had to reactivate to replace nuclear produce. Then add to it the certain future damage from climate change and tell me that was a reasonable trade-off.
Straw man again, really?
<span style="color:#323232;">This article is by psychologists. Relevance?
</span>
This one might interest you if you intellectually understand nuclear is safer than fossil fuels yet you still feel afraid of it.
I’m only interested in factual evidence. You tend to only read headlines and that only partially while again peddling the fossil straw man.
PS: Oh right, almost forgot.
No, you tried to hide the iceberg. Didn’t work. How obviously bad faith are you trying to be?
<span style="color:#323232;">At current (nuclear energy) consumption level the global stockpile of fissionable material is estimated to provide energy for another 230 years.
</span>
I never claimed nuclear should be a permanent solution and I really don’t want to start another long discussion.
Sure because that one just ripped an iceberg-shaped hole into your HMS Nuclear Titanic. But keep on shilling.
Right, comparing safety to the other source that is currently available is straw man, just like bringing up how many lives seatbelts save when discussing seatbelt safety. Cope much.
Sure because that one just ripped an iceberg-shaped hole into your HMS Nuclear Titanic. But keep on shilling.
Now who is strawmaning. Sure, 230 years is such a short time, that nuclear can’t even be a transitional source. Also, it is absolutely impossible that nuclear fusion, fuel reprocessing or thorium reactors would be developed to a usable state in such a short time.
Since you seem to have run out of actual safety related arguments other than calling research papers low quality while every source you provided was a wikipedia article, I am done here.
Go an be a fossil fuel shill without even realizing it.
Or do you realize it? Were you speaking from experience before? Have happy fossil fuel bosses of your own?
You were done for before you started. Your sole way of ‘winning’ for your precious, precious nuclear fission is bringing up fossil fuels to steer the discussion away from renewables.
You’ve proven again and again that you only read headlines that you understand only partially. Your impotent ranting against ‘my definition’ of toxicity was especially entertaining.
The constant bad of your person culminates in claiming that I said that fissionable material good for only a short time which is a short 230 years. I did not. You constantly misinterpret and misrepresent facts. This can’t be blamed on your reading capabilities alone.
Again. At present consumption level fissionable material lasts about 230 years. That’s a massive amount of time and would make fission an option as risks and cost involved are outweighed by the benefits.
Then you factor in Germany and Japan going fully back to nuclear and rising demand for energy and realize you’re off by a factor of 20. Let’s be very conservative and say it’s a factor of 10. Since you either didn’t get that or tried to bury it in BS again:
230/10=23; 230/20=11,5
Result: fissionable material lasts 11,5 to 23 your if we followed your masters’ advice. Is very simple maths I’m sure you can follow.
I could now try to explain as to how long it takes to get a reactor on the net and how it would be active to short to make a dent. You’ll either not understand it or misquote it again.
Next you again throw another bunch of shit on the wall: technology we don’t have yet (fusion, thorium, etc). We might be able to build reactors using that hopefully within the next decade. Right know we don’t and we don’t know when we can. Shit didn’t stick, sorry.
Does the fission lobby pay you well for your service?
Then you factor in Germany and Japan going fully back to nuclear and rising demand for energy and realize you’re off by a factor of 20. Let’s be very conservative and say it’s a factor of 10. Since you either didn’t get that or tried to bury it in BS again:
What in the flying fuck are you talking about now. I was criticizing Germany taking offline already existing reactors, not saying to replace renewables with nuclear.
Your argument fell apart, can’t be always right. Move on. Stop embarrassing yourself.
2 x No it isn’t. I know you love your precious precious nuclear to death and back and you really really need to discuss coal to better shill for it. Nobody cares about your religion and your straw man.
Nuclear just means massive potential radioactive pollution as there is no secure storage for the radioactive waste. You are now going to claim there is proven safe storage, there just a couple of mishaps really.
Also, more importantly, there isn’t even enough fission material to sustain demand for significant time if Germany and others were to switch. But sure lets’s just skip and ignore renewables. Renewables pollute so much.
What the fuck are you talking about? Did you even bother to read the article?
“The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.
This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party—today the world’s most influential—which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats. This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022, and passed a raft of legislation supporting renewable energy.
That, in turn, turbocharged the national deployment of renewables, which ballooned from 6.3 percent of gross domestic electricity consumption in 2000 to 51.8 percent in 2023”
Ah yes, the arch-conservatives, the Greens and Social Democrats.
Might I add a point on the cost from MMT perspective. So long as there’s enough people and materials to build nuclear plants so that we aren’t competing for them with other industries to any significant extent, we can print the money needed to build the plants without any significant effect on inflation. This of course is also true for any other plants or installations.
It was also a geopolitical attempt to get some economic leverage on Russia iirc. Obviously massively backfired when it turns out tyrants are willing to sacrifice profit for power.
Interesting. I read many articles about Germany doing the opposite and investing into coal mines the last years. Maybe I am misinformed. I recalled some big anti coal protests last year
Germany invested some cash in coal, but also invested a shitton more in renewable energy, thus making coal’s share of the energy pie smaller than before they axed nuclear.
God dam people are fucking stupid nuclear is safer then coal wind and solar and better for the planet youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU here is my source and if you want his ask him
The problem is the waste. Germany has radioactive waste and it couldn’t find a suitable place to deposit it for over 30 years. I think it’s still somewhere on rails or in temporary storages. It’s horrible and they don’t want to collect more of it.
Nuclear waste is a potential issue. Fossil fuel waste is a major issue right now.
The fact that the waste for nuclear is entirely contained is very good. It allows us to place it in permanent storage location like the one in Finland from your video, and perhaps even launch it off the planet in one or two centuries. There is no containing co2, only reducing.
Putting highly radioactive waste on a rocket is a bad, bad idea.
And guess what: solar and wind have neither CO2 nor nuclear waste as a product, and are cheaper to build and operate as well. Nuclear is comically expensive, and only gets by with massive state subsidies
And guess what: solar and wind canot take care of base load. Only oil, gas, coal, or nuclear can be run 24-7 with varying output in response to demand. Choose one.
Pumped hydro storage requires massive dams to be constructed and massive amounts of habitat to be turned into artificial lakes. Also, we literally don’t have enough water for that to be viable anywhere but the coasts
All of that is a solvable problem. We need to modernize the energy grid, because over large distances surplus and demand more easily equalize. Domestic energy consumption is fairly easy to cover with renewables and small to intermediate scale energy storage. The big consumers are heavy industry, and most of that can easily adapt by only running when there’s a surplus. With how cheap renewables are, they’d likely even save money in such a scenario
Yeah, it’s safer than coal, on the same level as solar and wind. But it’s fucking expensive to achieve that equality! You can build 5 times the solar or wind capacity for the same price!
I’ve heard some problems with it (pumped hydro) that I don’t recall all the specifics that’s why we see other things like batteries (or all the others jeez).
This safety comes at a cost, literally. It’s fucking insanely expensive to keep it safe. Yet it can and has failed. Also, fissile material needs to come from somewhere. Guess where that is? Also, how much of it is still available? Nah, fuck nuclear power.
Yup. A significant amount of the fissile material in Europe used to come out of Russia. France, who is commonly held up as the arch-defender of nuclear power, is now fighting basically colonial wars in Africa for this stuff. There's a finite amount of it, it's costly to extract, costly to refine, costly to transport. Even before you've generated a single kilowatt of power, you've already done a lot of damage to the environment just for the fuel.
Gee whiz, I wonder what’s worse for the environment open pit strip mining entire mountains for coal or a few smaller mines targeting uranium deposits. As for thorium, we don’t even need to mine it. It’s fucking everywhere.
This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022
The red-green coalition did not announce the 2022 date. They (Greens/SPD) announced a soft phase-out between 2015-2020 in conjunction with building renewables. This planned shift from nuclear to renewables was reverted by Merkel (CDU = conservatives) in 2010. They (CDU) changed their mind one year later in 2011 and announced the 2022 date; but without the emphasis on replacing it with renewables. This back and forth was also quite the expensive mistake by the CDU on multiple levels, because energy corporations were now entitled financial compensation for their old reactors.
I’d like to add, my view. I’m from Lower Saxony and in an area nearby they tried for years to establish a temporary storage for the high nuclear waste. I never trusted the notion that the temporary storage will be save, properly maintained and kept from leaking into the local water supply.
Add to that, that we have had very old reactors who were constantly extended rather than properly renewed. Further emphasising that they won’t care proper for the waste products.
Then Fukushima happened, the movement for anti nuclear gained massive momentum. I assumed of course that the lack in energy will be compensated by building renewables and subsidising homeowners to build their own solar on their roofs. Why wouldn’t we, we were already talking about increasing renewables to safe the climate.
The announcement came that atom is being phased out. Big hooray for everyone who had to live next to the old plants or in areas where end-storage ‘solutions’ were.
Aaaaaaaand they increased the god damn coal which is way worse and really no one wanted but the lobby for coal and fossile fuels.
Now lots of ppl. on the internet always advocate for nuclear, but never address the fears of the ppl. properly.
The thing is, having a high nuclear toxic waste storage in your local area is shite just as shite it is to have the damn ash piles from coal.
If nuclear really wants to make a proper comeback, in my opinion the first thing they need to solve is the waste. We have too much of it already and have solar, wind and water (tidal preferably over damns because those fuckers can break if not maintained proper) who do not create any nasty waste and by products.
There’s various nuclear reactors that have been built in Europe in the last 10-20 years. They’ve all gone crazily over budget. Yet every time the answer is that it was the wrong technology and other excuses. Nuclear is NOT cheap.
Because of the large initial capital cost the time until it breaks even is also quite long. You’d better hope that solars cost reduction trend stops pretty soon because on top of the construction time it’s going to take you 10 to 18 years to break even. If you’re out priced before then you now have a very expensive stranded asset.
And because it’s politically controversial, you can expect delays of many, many years for new builds in most democracies. Which is precisely why conservatives have been pushing it, because it allows coal and gas to dominate for a bit longer.
I’m not especially anti-nuclear power overall, but temporary storage sounds like a terrible idea. Transporting nuclear waste twice means twice the possibility of something catastrophic happening.
You wildly overestimate the danger nuclear waste represents.
First, transportation is done in small amounts at a time, completely encased in concrete and steel, and is of no risk of exploding: the only danger would be spillovers, which would call for expensive cleaning operations.
Next, storage. The whole waste produced by 60 years of nuclear waste in France amounts to only a few swimming pools of dangerous material. If this material was actually fully useless, we could ditch it in geological layers underground where it would become soon unreachable and dispersed, posing no discernable danger for the upcoming few billion years.
Furthermore, the only reason we don’t ditch this nuclear waste right now is that this material can still be useful for plenty of uses that are not yet economically viable, but could be in the long term, such as energy generation with low-yield reactors.
Since your articles behind a paywall, I cannot read it. However, I can guarantee you as what you’re describing was in a barrel. It was low level waste. So likely a mixture of propellants or other chemicals that had been exposed to a reactor environment and then disposed of in a sealed barrel. High-Level nuclear waste is solid metallic-like substances that are encased in glass, steel and concrete. There’s nothing to explode.
The dump, officially known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, was designed to place waste from nuclear weapons production since World War II into ancient salt beds, which engineers say will collapse around the waste and permanently seal it. The equivalent of 277,000 drums of radioactive waste is headed to the dump, according to federal documents.
The information you provided was not sufficient so I googled
The suspect drums contain nitrates and cellulose, which are thought to have reacted to cause the explosion in February
It was low level waste mostly americanum dissolved into the mixture of nitrates and cellulose. The barrel did not explode as much as the lid popped off.
WIPP is for low level transuranic waste from DOE projects, just FYI. Not super toxic stuff. They ship it in these super tough containers that they test by dropping on a spike and putting in a furnace. Wild to watch.
Redd… err Lemmy believes in the doctrine of safe, clean, wasteless nuclear. Even if there was waste it is completely harmless, not a big deal, please look the other way. They can be no other God… I mean viable alternative for generating energy. Also, did you know this straw man … I mean coal spreads nuclear isotopes too?
Careful. You are waking all the people telling you that it isn’t much waste that those power plants produce and its so easy to store it long term.
The same people that like would oppose a storage like that in their own neighbourhood. I feel often people from outside Germany forget how densely populated it is, it is very hard to find area not somehow close to anyone.
And I would also never trust the promise that this storage next to my home is very definitely going to be so so safe an great.
Those people compare the waste from nuclear and the storage compared to the waste of coal and that storage (which is in the local area and global atmosphere).
Compare the waste amount per GWh produced how the waste is stored and you will see why some thinks nuclear is better than coal
I will happily sell the land under my house to let you store sealed vessels of nuclear material. There permanently. I can do that with 100% confidence because I understand the science involved in the matters. If it’s buried deep enough in a proper container, there is no risk.
If it's so simple, why did a highly developed nation find no solution for it over the course of decades? There are no perfect containers that don't leak, there is no perfect storage location that doesn't have a chance of contaminating groundwater. The real world doesn't work like that.
It’s not considered worth undertaking such an initiative when most nuclear power plants have no problem just leaving the heavy (solid concrete and steel) casks as they are. They are not some looming threat, and they just sit there, outside, taking up a pretty small amount of space on the plants’ property. Nothing else is done because there is no real incentive to move them; no one cares.
Thankfully we have this miracle invention called paint . You can hit one of these things with a train and you’ll kill the train. The flask will be fine. youtu.be/1mHtOW-OBO4?si=_VEjko6YDyKfnz31
We do do this all the time. This is currently the solution. We put it in giant flasks and store it on site because ninnies like you won’t let us bury it
I mean, the containers are steel filled with concrete. We also leave our bridges and buildings outside, exposed to the elements.
The place in the world you are most likely to know the exact amount of radiation you are receiving at any moment is probably at a nuclear power plant. Its not like they just abandon them and never check on them or anything. They sit out in the open just… chillin. Being generally monitored but mostly just… chillin.
Literally go fuck yourself with a spent fuel rod. Your idea of a gotcha is that you can state that I wouldn’t do it and then when I say that I would do it, you tell me I’m a liar.
Mind your language. I can likewise say you only responded to “gotcha” me yourself.
That said, in this case I definitely feel a “put your money where your mouth is” is very much warranted. Because I have not heard of anyone anywhere doing exactly what you are offering. But I knew posting my opinion on this is going to end me up talking about this topic, so that’s all I got to say to you.
Good luck getting your personal radioactive waste storage, would earn you a pretty penny. Best of luck to you!
So basically the reason Germans got rid of nuclear energy is that they don’t trust Germans to do it. Makes sense.
If nuclear really wants to make a proper comeback, in my opinion the first thing they need to solve is the waste.
Could buy expert assistance in nuclear energy from Russia instead of gas (partially laundered via Azerbaijan, as if that were better than Russia). Or from France. Or from USA.
I mean, Russia is better than them due to the culture of kickbacks and bribes. That makes deals more likely to happen and makes German politicians happy.
Just so you know, the ash particles in soot from coal power plants, regularly spewn into the atmosphere and stored in open-air dumps represents a far more real radioactive danger than nuclear waste does.
The real problem is that there are no renewable solutions for base load, nuclear is the best we’ve got. Renewables are good, but they’re spotty, you can’t produce renewable power on demand or scale it on demand, and storing it is also a problem. Because of that you still need something to fill in the gaps for renewables. Now your options there are coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. That’s it, that’s your options. Pick one.
If we can successfully get cold fusion working we’ll finally have a base power generation option that doesn’t have (many) downsides, but until then nuclear power is the least bad option.
So yes, if you tell them “no nuclear”, you’re going to get more coal and gas plants, coal because it’s cheap, and gas because it’s marginally cleaner than coal.
Why? It’s an active area of research with several companies and universities trying to solve the problem. There’s also a chance hot fusion succeeds although to my knowledge nobody has actually gotten close to solving that particular problem either. Tokamaks and such are still energy negative when taken as a whole (a couple have claimed energy positive status, but only by excluding the power requirements of certain parts of their operation). I guess maybe I should have just said fusion instead of cold fusion, but either way there are no working energy positive fusion systems currently.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not claiming that anyone has a working cold fusion device, quite the opposite. Nobody has been able to demonstrate a working cold fusion device to date. Anybody claiming they have is either lying or mistaken. But by the same token nobody has been able to show an energy positive hot fusion device either. There’s a couple that have come close but only by doing things like hand waving away the cost to produce the fuel, or part of the energy cost of operating the containment vessel, to say nothing of the significant long term maintenance costs. I’ve not seen evidence of anybody getting even remotely close to a financially viable fusion reactor of any kind.
Cold fusion doesn’t work. It’s self contradicting once you learn the very basics of fusion. It was billed as a solution to dealing with the difficulties of material science and the heat generated by hot fusion.
Also, the simplest solution dealing with energy demands is to reduce our demand, but the people in the media demand perpetual growth.
Yeah the difference is hot fusion works, see: the sun. Cold fusion would require a fundamental change in how we understand physics works. It’s junk science.
Hmm, it’s true that cold fusion would need some kind of physics breakthrough, although I think it might be going too far to call it junk science. To be entirely fair energy positive hot fusion also requires some kind of physics breakthrough though, although potentially a far less extreme one.
The Sun works because of its mass which generates the necessary temperature and pressures to trigger the fusion. Replicating those pressures and temperatures here though is incredibly energy intensive. In theory, on paper the energy released by the fusion reaction should exceed those energy requirements, but when you factor in that doing so requires exceedingly rare and expensive to create fuel most if not all of that energy surplus vanishes. Nobody has been able to prove that they can get more energy out of the reaction than the energy cost of creating the fuel and triggering the reaction, so until that happens hot fusion is far from proved either. There’s a few research projects that look promising, but it’s far from guaranteed that they’ll pan out.
Hydro is good when it’s available but also has some significant problems. The biggest is that it’s an ecological disaster even if the reach of that disaster is far more limited. The areas upstream of the dam flood while the ones downstream are in constant danger of flooding and drought. In the worst case if the dam collapses it can wipe entire towns off the map with little or no warning. It is objectively far more dangerous and damaging to the environment than any nuclear reactor. The only upside it has is that it’s effectively infinitely renewable barring massive shifts in weather patterns or geology.
All of that is of course assuming that hydro is even an option. There’s a very specific set of geological and weather features that must be present, so the locations you can power with hydro power without significant transport problems are limited.
It’s certainly an option, and better than coal, oil, or gas, but still generally worse than nuclear.
Nuclear is not an option since it can not be scaled up and down fast enough to follow changes in demand (or the changes in very predictable renewable output) , so you’re left with pumped storage, grid interconnectivity , and demand shifting until we can cheaply use the excess in renewables to make synthetic fuels.
What kind of crack are you smoking? The entire point of the nuclear is so that it can take the base load that we rely on Fossil fuels to cover so that we can use renewables and battery storage in combination with nuclear power to meet peak demand.
The entire point of the nuclear is so that it can take the base load
The idea to cover baseload demand with its own baseload power generation is an outdated concept though from a time when demand was inflexible and generation could be controlled to fit. Now that generation is dynamic, having baseload power generation is the opposite of what’s needed. We need flexible backup generation and more flexible demand to bring down baseload demand.
I’m on renewable crack, you should try it sometimes. I promise it is only slightly addictive.
My point is that nuclear is only good for base load unless there is storage and if you want to use renewables to cover peak demand then you also need storage. but if you have storage then there is no reason not to use 100% renewables
You can also chose to use 100% nuclear, either enough to cover peak demand (and throw away the rest when not needed) or in combination with storage. It just going to be so much more expensive…
We also shouldn’t just focus on generation, but also on consumption. If we had a smarter grid that could shift demand to fit the dynamic power generation of renewables better, that should reduce the required capacity for backup power generation quite a bit.
Base load is the lowest amount of power that gets used throughout the whole 24 hour period of a day, usually between 02:00 and 05:00. This usually runs hospitals, data centres and other critical infrastructure. The pick-ups during the day, peaking in the mornings, midday, and the biggest one in the evening is consumption by businesses, homes, schools, and basically everyone else.
This increase in demand draws more power from the generation side of the grid and drags the grid frequency down (50 Hz here in the UK & Europe, 60Hz in North America).
So the base load needs to increase output to accommodate these slower pick-ups to balance the frequency and if there is a sudden spike (like everyone boiling the kettle at halftime during a football match) then an quick response power system like hydro storage is used to quickly deliver power.
And when demand lowers, the grid frequency increases so you need to reduce the amount of power being generated else you’ll burn out the equipment being used to transmit and distribute the power.
Now technically it is possible to balance the grid frequency using just renewables if you have enough of them, for example you just apply the breaks on wind turbines you don’t need to generate power.
However, and this is the kicker, peak power generation from renewables like wind and solar won’t align with the demand for the power.
And changing people’s habits based on what power is available would be practically impossible. “Sorry lads, no football today the wind isn’t blowing fast enough”, “Sorry madam, we can’t perform an MRI today, it’s overcast and still and we’ve already used our carbon credits running the emergency coal/gas/diesel generators we have on site and we can’t spare the power” etc.
A smarter grid helps balance the supply by better predicting the demand through data collection and work out which areas are consuming more power than others.
If we have enough energy storage to store excess power from renewables to be used during high points during the day then great, we can do away with base load power stations.
But all of the technologies for grid-scale power stages are still in the research and prototyping stage. And no, Lithium Ion batteries are NOT suitable for grid-scale storage because their capacity is effected too much by temperature variations and they can’t be deep cycled (fully discharged and fully recharged).
So the result is we will need some form of base generation in the near term. This is why a lot of Europe has switched to Gas Generation. Because it produces much less pollutants than coal or oil burning (though only slightly less CO2) and they’re much quicker to build, a year or two, than traditional nuclear power stations which take about a decade.
Oh yeah, I kind of skipped over that, but I actually meant that more flexible consumption helps bring down baseload demand, and in turn the need for backup generation as well once we reach that point where that matters.
Really good explanation of the issue though. Personally, I’m a bit more optimistic about being able to be more flexible demand. Particularly EVs and heat pumps are two areas where a smart grid can help shape demand without even being noticed by the people (apart from cheaper tariffs) as long as the car is fully charged in the morning and the room temperature is maintained.
Yes a smarter grid with dynamic control over high powered devices like heat pumps and EV/Hybrid Car-to-Grid chargers to actively control consumption would be a good idea.
Heck, there’s even been trials for micro-grids with local power generation being distributed out with something called Open Energy Monitor to schedule in things like washing machines and dryers for members of the small community co-operative that run the micro grid.
The biggest cost with EV Car-to-Grid is the cost of the vehicle and then after that, if your house / business premises is older than roughly 30 years, the power cables into the house are not rated for the power delivery and will have to be replaced.
With heat pumps you again have the issue of the cost of the heat pump itself and the installation.
Both are solvable but it will require large amounts of government grant money to do so.
It’s worth noting that even counting in all the damage from Fukushima and Chernobyl and all the issues with storing nuclear waste long term (which isn’t nearly as hard as people make it out to be), Nuclear is still as safe as wind and solar energy.
Now follow the link and look at the numbers for the (mostly brown) coal that replaced it (much of who’s damage is caused by the nuclear materials in it’s ash), and the picture is pretty damn clear. Coal kills at 1000 times the rate of nuclear.
When I was a kid, Chernobyl happened. We weren’t that far away and although I was very little I still remember the fear and uncertainty in my parent’s faces. The following years were marked by research about what we can no longer eat, where our food comes from, etc
I also remember the fights about where to store nuclear waste.
I don’t want to burn coal. I am pretty upset about what happened to our clean energy plans. But I will also never trust nuclear again. And I think, so do many in my generation.
It’s emotions, not logic. Especially to protest the existence of cars and trying to rid the world of them. In exchange for, say, horses which would kill even more people. All because of a drunk driver (better analogy would be a drunk driver that had a blow device but managed to bypass it).
Yeah, and? Are you discounting how powerful emotions can be versus logic? There’s an entire industry (psychology) around this and they still haven’t solved it.
There are still large areas in southern Germany where you’re not allowed to eat wild mushrooms and every boar that is hunted must be tested for radiation. That is because of the fallout from Chernobyl 38 years ago and 1400 km away.
Please do note the official warnings of the BFS (Federal Office for Radiation Protection). Contamination of forests with Caesium-137 is a health risk in many southern Bavarian forests. It's half-life period is 30 years. The disaster was in 1986. That means it's still roughly half of it there and the layered forest grounds preserve radiation well.
If you're a mushroom forager on vacation in southern Bavaria - just don't do it. Or at least inform yourself which types of mushrooms you shouldn't eat in particular for radiation reasons.
For sure, but there are places in Germany and everywhere in Europe where you shouldn’t be eating or drinking anything that comes out of the ground because of coal emissions, and places you can’t do anything in because of the gigantic coal mines. And that’s still currently happening and will keep happening for the foreseeable future.
The best thing to do when you fall off a horse, is climb straight back up on it. Rejecting almost limitless power because of an accident almost 40 years ago is foolish to me. Luckily research didn’t completely stop and modern plants are a lot safer with a lot of medical applications for the waste.
Even the Russians aren’t making nuclear disasters. They attacked and took control of the Zaporizhzhia plant, but there was no impact to nuclear safety.
Not saying it’ll always be like this, and we might be less lucky next time, but at this point it looks like they’re not trying to have Chernobyl 2.0.
There is some nuclear waste that Germany wasn’t able to bury for over 30 years, because not a single site is safe. Maybe earthquakes and tsunamis aren’t the only problems.
If the car is safe (checked every year), you know the rules (that are in the law) and behave safely (keep the rules), not much can happen.
Also 300 km/h is quite rare. 200 km/h is not.
It’s basically the same as with nuclear plants. They weren’t safe to run, because the rods were old and they couldn’t prove that storages are safe. And people voted for parties that support clean energy, especially doesn’t produce harmful waste.
But the horse still has a broken leg (End-Storage) and noone really knows how to fix that at the moment. Maybe give the horse some drugs to make the leg stronger (Transmutate the materials from long to moderately-long half-lifes), but we still need to support it in the end.
The move to coal was absolutely stupid, the CDU (which is currently gaining some traction.. again), dialed back on renewables which should have replaced some of the capacities lost to nucelar.. and then decided a new coal plant was a great idea too.
Probably some corruption.. sorry "Lobbying"-work behind that.. its not like the Experts (which were paid pretty well) told them that was a bad idea..
Maybe some more modern nucelar plants might work.. but its unprofitable (probably always was, considering the hidden costs on the tax payers already), so needs to be heavily state-funded, same with storage (plus getting all the stuff out of the butchered storage Asse, putting it somewhere else)
I am open to it, but dont see it happening. And storage.. no hopeful thoughts about that either, i dont think the current politic structures are well suited to oversee something like that from what we have seen from other storage-locations that are or were in use.
I'd also love some more plans for big energy storage aswell as new subsidies for the energy grid and renewables. The famous german bureaucracy is obviously also not helping any of this.
Subsidizing reactors to run off waste would be fine. Better than burying it. I’m actually against building new nuclear for general power (for economic reasons), but support reactors for this purpose. The waste is sitting right there already, and we have to do something with it.
All of the nuclear waste produced by all of the nuclear power plants ever produced could fit on the area of about the size of a football pitch. Storing nuclear waste, isn’t the massive problem. People say it is. It could be easily disposed of by digging a very deep hole and sticking it in it.
It’s not ideal, sure, but it’s not exactly a huge problem either.
And that hole would of course not deform at all or release the products into the environment over some amount of time?
We already have that problem.. They tried more or less simply burying it in Asse, which spectacularly failed and now has to be brought back up.. paid by the government (so us) of course
Not if it’s deep enough and properly encased. And even in the extremely rare occasion there are mistakes made with improper storage or unforeseen environmental changes that require re-storage, the environmental impacts are still negligible.
The fear mongering around this is absurdly overblown.
I’m not going to pretend I know what Germans are thinking but I thought the author made a strong case about why they’d dislike nuclear. Doesn’t matter how great it is when it’s unpopular.
I’m from Germany and I’m pretty sure we won’t go back. I do think that the decision was populistic and blindly actionistic in the light of Fukushima (like almost all political decisions in the last decades) and we’ll reap the rewards of that in the coming years.
You sure gobbled up that Putin propaganda pre-war. But now it’s 2023 and Germany still stands. How much time will have to pass until you people realize the extend of Germany‘s energy dependency was vastly overestimated? France with their nuclear grid is now importing more energy from Germany than the other way around. And if you think that‘s only temporarily you should take a closer look.
Yes France imports cheep renewable energy from Germany when they have a glut of it they cant use, but that just means they sell on their nuclear power at a profit to places like Italy and the UK, and then when Germany doesnt have excess renewable production they sell to them at a profit too.
You got it mixed up. In a twist of irony France‘s nuclear power plants have been proven unreliable due to droughts in recent years. They are too water hungry to be used in dry summers without wrecking the environment completely and so they‘ve been forced to buy more reliable green energy in recent years. Solar and wind energy is cheaper and more reliable.
Did you even look at the linked article? France (and their majority nuclear generation) are the EU’s top energy exporter. Yes they had an awkward year in 2022 when a combination of covid delayed maintenance and drought caused them to lose about 13% of generation for the year.
Spain is already phasing out nuclear energy currently and Sweden wants to do it after sufficient renewables are built. Among many other states.
Nuclear is just not profitable compared to renewables. France is exporting at a loss if one would consider all associated costs (privatization of profits and socialization of losses is creating bad incentives).
If you add a bunch of non-tangible costs on to one side of a comparison and not the other it makes that side look worse yes. You could make exactly the same argument saying if you considered generation reliability, land use and the need for grid updates and storage then renewables are far more expensive than nuclear, but that would be equally one sided.
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