Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/german-intellectuals-urge-state-to-keep-nuclear-plants-online/

by ericdanielski • 5 years ago

304 388 5 years ago

rob_c3• 5 years ago

Wish it was invest and expand and not please don't decommission. It's a win, win, win when played right...

legulere2• 5 years ago

That would be unwise though, considering that building nuclear power plants is slower and more expensive than wind and solar in Europe.

asdff4• 5 years ago

Wind and solar in europe aren't going to get them off of fossil fuels anytime soon, while nuclear has had that capability since its inception.

rob_c3• 5 years ago

That's a very poor argument against a very viable low carbon power source

junon4• 5 years ago

I'm a US expat living in Germany, and boy is the anti-nuclear sentiment real here. There have even been fights - physical altercations - between Green Party members at rallies for having differing viewpoints about nuclear.

Unfortunately, it seems those who are against are working with very outdated information and 'tropes' w.r.t. nuclear safety and whatnot. Quite unfortunate.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 years ago

a US expat living in Germany, and boy is the anti-nuclear sentiment real here

Is it the usual talking points on both sides? Or is there a Teutonic shade to the debate that doesn't surface in e.g. America?

ethbr02• 5 years ago

Being the front line of the Cold War, while both the US and USSR developed battle plans for where nuclear weapons would be detonated in your country during a war, probably lends shades to the debate that aren't present in other countries.

(Yes, nuclear power / nuclear weapons, but in the 70s that wasn't a clear distinction)

junon4• 5 years ago

Seems like the typical whataboutism regarding 1) waste and 2) Chernobyl.

Perhaps more informed people are having more nuanced conversation but I sure haven't heard it.

xg155• 5 years ago

German here. I can't really compare the viewpoints, but historically, the anti-nuclear movement has been an integral part of the german civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s. [1] I believe there have been two key events which have influenced this:

- Chernobyl. Being in close proximity, the event had a far stronger impact than in the US: There was widespread contamination from fallout drifting over from Ukraine and consequently restrictions in day-to-day life for many germans. As with covid: You tend to value a topic differently if it directly affects your life than when it just seems to happen on TV.

- Gorleben. [2, 3] Since the late 70s there have been efforts by the government to construct a permanent disposal site for nuclear waste in the Gorleben mine - against the explicit wishes of the nearby residents. This led to a decades-long resistance movement which tied into a general progressive movement for civil rights and an embrace of green technologies.

Those events mean that nuclear in Germany is both tied stronger to personal experiences and is much more aligned with political boundaries than it is likely in the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...

[2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomm%C3%BClllager_Gorleben (german only)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Republic_of_Wendland

ulnarkressty• 5 years ago

It mostly revolves around storing waste (in other people's back yards), and the mess the government and companies made of it - storing it improperly in mines, and the barrels rusting after some years / leaking waste.

Unfortunately from talking to some of my (really smart) colleagues, this issue is so deeply ingrained that they don't even want to look at other options, or don't really think about that this is a long term problem vs the urgency of climate collapse...

One article that goes a bit about this - https://www.dw.com/en/germany-may-not-see-proper-nuclear-was...

mistrial95• 5 years ago

very outdated information

no rush on that -- we have another 21,000 years of half-life to talk about it, right?

imtringued• 5 years ago

Outdated information is quite relevant for nuclear power plants. Fukushima was older than Chernobyl.

Every time someone tells me how safe modern power plants are I think "great, now get rid of all the old ones".

Turing_Machine3• 5 years ago

Longer half-life = less radioactive. By definition.

A half-life of infinity would mean that the isotope is not radioactive at all.

schleck85• 5 years ago

It's like a religion to some people. Has been this way for decades, certain folks never left the hippie ideology behind

pelasaco2• 5 years ago

its worse now. Because they are the majority in all media and are pretty aggressive too.

deepsun2• 5 years ago

I wonder how much of that is supported by Russian govt, because Germany is one of the largest customer for their oil and gas.

Factorium3• 5 years ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41447603

Former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder oversaw the shutdown of Germany's nukes.

Now he's on the board of Rosneft, a giant fossil fuel company controlled by the Russian Government.

thriftwy2• 5 years ago

Russia also wants to build a lot of nuclear plants around Germany so it won't profit from scaring the one who will eventually foot the bill.

tscherno2• 5 years ago

Nuclear was also promoted as save decades before Chernobyl and Fukushima by the lobbies. So is there a guarantee that it is safe this time around?

fsflover2• 5 years ago

It is statistically safer than almost anything even if you take Chernobyl and Fukushima into account.

goodpoint2• 5 years ago

It's not just a matter of safety of the plans themselves.

You need safety against external threats e.g. a nuclear plant can be targeted during war or by terrorists

You need safety around illegal dumping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Illegal_dump...

Also, extremely centralized energy production creates political risks (coups, corruption, hiding mismanagement)

Nuclear proliferation risk.

Investment risk: solar keeps getting cheaper and nuclear has very long ROI that might grow indefinitely

unchocked• 5 years ago

There are no guarantees. You need to compare vs. the safety of burning coal, for the climate and for human health. You need to compare it with how sure you are that renewables & storage will satisfy our energy needs tomorrow, or the safety of not having enough energy to go around.

That said, nuclear is pretty safe. I would live next door to a nuclear power plant, and if I did I would be likelier to die slipping in the shower.

Ericson231421• 5 years ago

To a first approximation, Fukushima did not cause any harm. I view the plant iself as a success story, given ancient reactor design etc. etc.

I think a lot of half-paying-attention people confused the reactor and the tsunami. Of course the news coverage and in-hindsight-unnecessary evacuation didn't help either.

0xbadcafebee2• 5 years ago

  > So is there a guarantee

A guarantee doesn't mean that the thing being guaranteed won't happen. A guarantee is a promise to pay someone back - when, not if - the thing you promised doesn't work. Anyone who gives you a guarantee has already saved up enough money to pay you off when the thing fails.

  > that it is safe

Safe compared to what?

People go insane about airline safety whenever one plane crashes, even though commercial passenger airplanes are 1000x safer than any other form of transportation. You could have a plane bombed, hijacked, whatever, every single day, for 10 years, and would still be 1000x safer than any other form of transport. People wouldn't think it was safe, though, because when it does fail, it fails spectacularly.

And that's the mentality of an anti-nuclear person. Who cares that the outcomes are almost always better? The one time it's not better is really scary, so I don't want it in my back yard.

thow-011872• 5 years ago

Controversial take, but even if we had a Fukushima-level disaster every 10 years, and just dump nuclear waste into the ocean (which sounds cavalier and hand-wavy, but we've been doing that for decades no discernible ill effect) - nuclear would still be a better option than coal for base load

himinlomax5• 5 years ago

Fukushima killed one (1). In the context of a massive natural disaster that killed 10000.

Three Miles Island happened years before Chernobyl and killed no one, because it wasn't a dodgy, duct-taped together soviet piece of junk.

In the last 30 years, the only nuclear power accident was Fukushima and again, caused just one victim. Fossil fuel depot fires have killed thousands more in that time.

LatteLazy2• 5 years ago

Everyone thinks the next gen of reactors will finally solve the issues the last 3/4 didn't. This is one of those generational issues because young people (I'm 37) hear promises and old ones have heard them before...

themaninthedark3• 5 years ago

What issues don't the new designs solve that you are worried about?

polishdude20• 5 years ago

Wow this really puts the show "Dark" into a different context. It's like a propoganda piece about the dangers of nuclear power.

proctrap2• 5 years ago

How about

- Germany trying to find a nuclear waste deposit since ages (that doesn't have to be evacuated due to ground water later on)*

- Failed nuclear plants we're deconstructing since ages and are paying millions every year to do so

- Nuclear fuel expected to be depleted in the next 100 years

- State and taxpayers always having to pay for the disasters of nuclear plants, while the gains are going to the companies

- French nuclear plants that had some interesting failures in the last years, while we can just watch and hope they're treated correctly. Meanwhile you're told "nono, everything is fine".

Theoretically nuclear power can be effective. Practically we're using corporations that want to profit and have a human factor. So no wonder it's not safe to operate in reality. The next fukushima could be at your door, with your government then also claiming the radiation to be safe, because they can't afford to keep people out of their work and houses for so long.

No nuclear company is insured for the real amount of money they'd have to pay for the next fukushima or Tschernobyl. Because there is no insurance for that amount of money.

* And USA still pouring money into a final solution for a underground storage

Also I don't give much about USA and their regulations. It's the country with stories like these: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/oil-... And oh wonder: https://truthout.org/articles/evidence-of-fracking-chemicals...

I could even suspect USA influence to prevent more solar money to china or gas/oil money to russia.

junon4• 5 years ago

Germany trying to find a nuclear waste deposit since ages (that doesn't have to be evacuated due to ground water later on)

Waste can be refined to safe levels these days. It's just not being done on a wide scale.

Failed nuclear plants we're deconstructing since ages and are paying millions every year to do so

We're paying unfathomable amounts of money dealing with carbon emissions - way more than millions, which is a drop in the bucket of taxpayer revenue, anyway.

Nuclear fuel expected to be depleted in the next 100 years

And? That's 100 years of clean energy and a more livable planet. 100 years for more research. 100 years for other forms of energy capture or generation.

It's 100 years of bought time.

State and taxpayers always having to pay for the disasters of nuclear plants, while the gains are going to the companies

"always" makes it sound like every week involves another nuclear "disaster". That's not accurate, at all.

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

There are a few other lists that are related but I imagine this is what you intended. Please study the amount of people affected, directly, by those incidents.

By contrast, the heat wave this year killed at least 2,300 people in India alone.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/india-he...

French nuclear plants that had some interesting failures in the last years, while we can just watch and hope they're treated correctly. Meanwhile you're told "nono, everything is fine".

Who is saying "everything is fine"? That's a seemingly extreme reduction of public outreach, especially since the IAEA has been trying to do good about being transparent with the world's nuclear operations.

No nuclear company is insured for the real amount of money they'd have to pay for the next fukushima or Tschernobyl.

While I don't disagree things could be improved there, I'm so tired of Chernobyl being used as some "all nuclear is bad" example. Chernobyl was a cost-cutting endeavor, and the design was known to be faulty well before it failed. It was implemented in an incredibly corrupt system and poorly operated. The safety measures were not developed yet, and regulatory committees simply didn't exist at the time like they do now.

Chernobyl ignored the science. It was, quite literally, a ticking time bomb. Yes, we could be doomed to repeat this if we so chose, but that's such a far reaching example that it's throwing the baby out with the bath water.

It's the country with stories like these:

This is entirely unrelated and FUD from two clearly biased publications.

I could even suspect USA influence to prevent more solar money to china or gas/oil money to russia.

This is speculation, fullstop.

bananabreakfast3• 5 years ago

First you say that corporations can't be trusted, then also the government can't be trusted when they say everything is fine?

Is sounds like you just have a problem with authority.

Even with all nuclear disasters included it is still a far safer energy source (in deaths per kWh) than any other we have ever developed.

And that figure about 100 years? Wildly misleading.

The same fact is true about oil. Except we keep discovering more, and we would with uranium as well if demand was increasing enough.

In addition, and most importantly, nuclear plants that reprocess fuel have enough supply to generate all of humanity's exponentially growing power needs for 10,000+ years.

jollybean2• 5 years ago

"Germany trying to find a nuclear waste deposit since ages"

That's politics.

"Failed nuclear plants"

That's not quite true and doesn't have to happen.

"Nuclear fuel expected to be depleted in the next 100 years"

This is just plain wrong. Maybe 1000 years even then, we are extracting a tiny fraction of the energy. As we get better, all that 'waste' is actually 'fuel'.

Far from a bad example, France is a good example.

If France were to have built 2x the capacity instead of stopping where they did, they might have already been Carbon Neutral.

Tsarbomb• 5 years ago

Here I am in Canada, in a city powered by the largest nuclear facility in the world by output, in a province where 60% of the power is Nuclear.

Please tell me more about how it is bad, or do you only cherry pick your arguments?

dr_dshiv• 5 years ago

Safe nuclear power needs German engineering.

topspin2• 5 years ago

Seems as though French engineering has been sufficient for nearly half a century now.

joconde• 5 years ago

On the contrary, our major nuclear R&D company messed up an extension of the Flamanville nuclear plant multiple times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

What’s not safe about the nuclear engineering in the UK or France?

nmehner2• 5 years ago

UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Radiological_releas... Between 1950 and 2000, there were 21 serious incidents or accidents involving off-site radiological releases that warranted a rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale, one at level 5, five at level 4 and fifteen at level 3. Additionally, during the 1950s and 1960s there were protracted periods of known, deliberate discharges to the atmosphere of plutonium and irradiated uranium oxide particulates. These frequent incidents, together with the large 2005 THORP plant leak which was not detected for nine months, have led some to doubt the effectiveness of the managerial processes and safety culture on the site over the years.

https://ehss.energy.gov/SESA/Files/corporatesafety/safety_bu... On April 20, 2005, a camera inspection of a feed clarification cell at THORP revealed that 83,000 liters of dissolver solution had leaked from a broken pipe (Figure 1) into the cell sump. The highly radioactive dissolver solution, consisting of approximately 19 metric tons of uranium, plutonium and fission products dissolved in nitric acid, was entirely contained within the stainless steel-lined cell. No personnel were injured as a result of this incident. However, the cleanup costs for this event are expected to exceed $500 million, and the THORP facility faces a lengthy shutdown (possibly even permanent closure).

France: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-reprocessing-t... Reprocessing also results in radioactive liquid waste: the French reprocessing plant in La Hague discharges 100 million liters of liquid waste (pdf) into the English Channel each year. "They have polluted the ocean all the way to the Arctic," Makhijani says. "Eleven western European countries have asked them to stop reprocessing."

Germany: https://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/meetings/2018/marc... Since 1991* increasing inflow of brine from the Southern flank Since 1994* reports on contaminated brines (3H, 137Cs)

open-source-ux• 5 years ago

"Safe nuclear power needs German engineering"

France and Germany jointly developed the European Pressurised Reactor (EBR). In France, development was led by Framatome and EDF, and in Germany by Siemens.

There are currently 3 nuclear plants under construction (or almost ready for operation) using EBR in Europe - they are in France, Finland and the UK.

Unfortunately, all three plants are over-budget and over-schedule.

The UK plant (Hinkley Point C) is expected to provide 7% of the UK's electricity when it is operational in 2026. It is designed to run for at least 60 years. (Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-58724732)

988747• 5 years ago

France has just made an offer to build 4-6 such reactors in Poland. I really hope our government takes the deal, cause we need nuclear power. Even if it also ends up over-budget and over-schedule that's still good thing to have such modern reactors.

duped• 5 years ago

Like low emissions diesel engines did?

freemint9• 5 years ago

The motors were capable of hitting the spec as it did during testing, after flipping a few bits in the software the car just has a few PS fewer.

qqtt• 5 years ago

The discussion and debate about nuclear energy needs to be a constant war of attrition against the long held and stubborn inertia of anti-nuclear sentiment.

This letter signed by 25 "intellectuals" (oddly vague name for writers and journalists) is part of the puzzle insofar as it gets the discussion into the news. But unless there is a sustained conversation which carries the attention of the public and really drives and beats back the misinformation back to the shadows, nothing will change.

The same tired anti-nuclear talking points need to be systemically deconstructed and refuted over and over again until it is pushed into being a fringe belief.

Unfortunately humans are really not set up to have these conversations about "boring" things like global warming and nuclear energy. Unless there is a crisis front and center (like the pandemic) it is hard to reverberate change throughout society.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but watching all this play out is like witnessing a devastating car crash happen in slow motion, and being helpless to do anything to prevent it.

kazinator• 5 years ago

The Cold War takes a lot of the blame: everything from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, to the subsequent ugly arms race, to bomb testing and its environmental effects. Plus events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Generation X kids were born into an era which felt the threat of global nuclear war, and those people are decision makers today.

Ericson231421• 5 years ago

Frankly, non-nuclear is austerity in disguise. "Too cheap to meter" electricity is like full employment, objectively better but a huge target politically. It's not a coincidence that US gave up on both at the same time.

https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf does justice to the full employment situation, and the same arguments apply. In the econ case it's kind of incredible we filled our minds with nonsense to convince ourselves the thing we had been doing is no longer possible. I suppose the nuclear hysteria served the same roll.

To be clear, I am not trying to argue some sort of conspiracy here. I think it all happened organically, which is frankly even more fascinating. Shows that "truth is endogenous" and the post-modernists had a point long before people whined about Trump.

proctrap2• 5 years ago

Why invest into something that will only last 100 years in fuel, take 30k years to deconstruct and may blow into your face at every point in time. Sounds insane.

CyanBird6• 5 years ago

Biggest issue with older nuclear plants is the material degradation as a consequence of radiation, after a some decades of constant irradiation steel can become as brittle as glass, which is not only not reversible, but it also means that the actual rebar and concrete surrounding the core becomes damaged and the only way to replace that is to rebuild the whole core

I am rather against setting up new reactors, given that they are so centralized on the matter of costs, management, overruns and of course safety, the more safe you try to make them, the slower to build and more expensive they will end up being which is far from an ideal situation, but I am of course fully in favor of refactoring old ones, but it is important to understand that even when there might be political will to redactor them, that might just be technically unfeasible

lamp9872• 5 years ago

Safety concerns are moot when the coal alternative will kill orders of magnitude more people.

topspin2• 5 years ago

All of the above is politically moot as long as leaders and parties can get away with bandying around fantasy land policies of running major industrial economies exclusively on renewables.

Perhaps this story is a tiny glimmer of hope that one day it won't be possible to get away with that cop out. We've wasted a lot of decades just to get this far though.

CyanBird6• 5 years ago

But your own point is itself moot, given that we are not comparing nuclear to the dirtiest most lethal of fossil fuels, but nuclear to composite solutions of renewables+batteries/electricity storage or renewables+natural gas

outworlder3• 5 years ago

the more safe you try to make them, the slower to build and more expensive they will end up being

That doesn't follow. We have countless examples across multiple industries on technologies that became cheaper and safer at the same time.

If you try to make the old designs safe (created for weapons manufacturing first and energy production second), then sure. However, there are newer designs that are cheaper to build and safer to operate (can't 'meltdown', for one).

"Refactoring" old designs is not aways feasible. You are very limited in what you can do. Maybe you can replace the core with a similarly sized one, but what about everything else? Any significant changes in (say) your cooling system and you are now looking at an entirely new plant.

CyanBird6• 5 years ago

That doesn't follow. We have countless examples across multiple industries on technologies that became cheaper and safer at the same time.

Well, that is because nuclear energy is unlike "multiple technologies and industries", it is a highly politiced industry which when it has failed, it has done so spectacularly and at high localized costs

All the updates and changes after high profile accidents such as Fukushima are highly expensive same with review of being built and existing reactors which bloat budgets and schedules, this is precisely one of the big issues Westinghouse and Toshiba had post fukushima

Currently on a bus, so I can only answer to the initial excerpt, when I get home I'll see if I can answer the rest

petre3• 5 years ago

I think you are making a cofusion between thermal fission reactors and fast reactors where neutron radiation is indeed a problem. Rebar and concrete in fission plants ages due to thermal stress plus the usual culprits (humidity, oxygen), not necessarily neutron radiation.

CyanBird6• 5 years ago

This is not entirely correct, alpha and beta radiation damage the crystaline and quasi-crystaline structures of metals and other materials

Even when the reactors themselves, generally rest on light or heavy water, the steel, titanium and other metals and materials nearby the pellets or rods suffer greatly as a consequence of radiation, so it is not a matter of just neutron degradation, but a generalized problem of the physical interaction between radiation and the molecular structures of the materials

Sadly for my case, my materials science course on University was very, very weak, but last year I found this MITOpenCourse which covers this topic on detail, I would highly recommend it to absolutely everyone interested on the topic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZjVUWMEz0

2ion• 5 years ago

The money cost of 10 all-new nuclear reactors is minor when compared to the economic cost of electricity prices doubling and tripling again, gas and oil prices doubling again until EOY 2022. Rolling blackouts are not unreasonable to expect.

Industries have moved east and west from Germany because energy is just too expensive (besides too expensive labour due to high state quota as well). In Brandenburg, Chemical plants are threating to shut down because gas prices are out of whack (50% of gas price is tax). This is an extremely high cost for a national economy to pay.

Major consumer energy seller E.on has stopped selling household gas delivery contracts. Transportation cost in gas, diesel and electric car terms is skyrocketing as well. This makes all goods that are getting shipped more expensive. Germans are the poorest people of Western Europe. After tax, salaries are quite low. €500 to a €1000 more in yearly energy cost is a significant burden on many households, dampening spending in any other area including long retirement saving/investing.

All of the above will deconstruct industries, ruin household finances of the already pressured middle and lower class, and set the expectations for years to come when it comes to regulatory politics --- which during the past 20 years were the equivalent of shitposting on 4chan, just dressed up in nice suits and sitting in ideologically blind party councils.

10 all new power plants are chump change compared to that.

CyanBird6• 5 years ago

Oh yeah, it might very well be the case for 10 "all new" nuclear plants

The issue is that because as I mentioned above, you have a cursed trifecta, you can't have reactors be "safe", "reasonably priced" and "without schedule overruns" at the same time because all of these are inherently conflicting interests such as the Westinghouse/Toshiba collapse has shown, just yesterday there was a thread here in HackerNews of all the corruption inherent to the project, how even when they knew that it was impossible to meet deadlines they still kept saying that they would do it, because of highly profitable tax rebates linked to the run-up to the accorded milestones

Only "happy" cases where several reactors have been built on schedule might be France, or right now in China, but both of these where done from a government "national defense" perspective, not from anywhere near to be free-market schemes, the UK I believe also recently canceled a sets of Nuclear reactors again, for safety concerns after Fukushima which led to slight re-designs and therefore schedule and cost overruns

It would be neat if this werent the case, but here we are, and closing ones ears and eyes wont make these structural problems go away either

petre3• 5 years ago

Good luck with the Greens now as the #3 party. The authors of the letter are right, Germany will miss its 65% emissions target and politicians will try to fix this with carbon credits and other policy BS which of course doesn't quite work in practice, since clean electricity doesn't come out of thin air.

pelasaco2• 5 years ago

Facts < Feelings, unfortunately...

nivenkos• 5 years ago

Yeah, and you see them dragging Europe backwards with trying to exclude Nuclear from being classed as renewable energy, but to include natural gas.

Nevermind the hugely powerful car industry.

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

Michael Shellenberger's TED talk from 2017, "Why I changed my mind about nuclear power", is still relevant: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_change...

He also has a great Substack where he writes on a variety of topics, including nuclear power. He just wrote an article titled "Nations Go Nuclear As Prices Spike & Renewables Fail" that is timely: https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/nations-go-nucle...

coyotespike• 5 years ago

I like Shellenberger's nuclear advocacy, some of his writing is pungent and balanced.

Regrettably he is unreliable in much of his other climate advocacy. He seems to have been radicalized by climate alarmism and has swung too far the other way, espousing poorly supported lukewarmist positions.

leifg• 5 years ago

The original letter is in German and behind a paywall.

Here is an English translation: https://cleanenergyrevolution.org/publications

schleck85• 5 years ago

It's worth noting that nuclear is really expensive when factoring in insurance and disposable, a lot more so than wind and solar.

The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...

thewarrior• 5 years ago

Cost is irrelevant if you can’t store the energy generated. Nuclear is predictable and carbon free. Look at France.

Gwypaas9• 5 years ago

Solar + 4 hours of storage clocking in at $40/MWh in ideal conditions. Substitute for windpower and some worse conditions and nuclear energy still look awful from a cost perspective.

https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...

KennyBlanken3• 5 years ago

Nuclear is massive-grid-scale base load only in a world that does not need more base load nor massive grid-scale generation. Everything about nuclear is slow, difficult, expensive, dangerous. They are increasingly not handling climate change well. They are decade-scale projects that take a long, long time to become carbon neutral; we cannot wait that long.

* Solar and wind are here to stay and they mean we need fast-reacting spare capacity and storage. Nuclear power plants are very slow to react and because they are so monumentally expensive they have to run at as high capacity as possible, as much as possible. They are strictly base load.

* Siting a nuclear power plant is very difficult just in terms of geology. Siting a nuclear power plant is very difficult grid-wise as well, because they are only cost-effective at massive scale. Super-high-voltage DC transmission systems can help, but they only tack on more to the project cost. You can't just inject gigawatts of power anywhere you want. And it isn't just injection that is the problem. Nuclear power plants that are not producing power need massive amounts of electricity to get things like cooling pumps running or keep them running until everything is up to temperature and you can get the turbines up to temperature and speed. Then there's the matter of needing sufficient cooling - usually done via river, ocean, or lake. Except climate change and other factors are making those sources of cooling increasingly unreliable (for example: invasive species like zebra mussels have made life hell for a lot of power plants)

* Nuclear power plants require lots of highly trained people to design, operate, and maintain. More power plants means more of them. Training them up isn't a short term affair. Solar and wind require far less of all of this. And frankly, I have serious doubts about societal stability in 20-30 years, and nuclear power plants are not even remotely friendly to any sort of societal instability. Not just in terms of security, but upkeep. They have very complex, deep supply chain needs.

* Building nuclear power plants from the start of planning to grid synchronization takes a decade or two, and it then takes another decade or so for the plant to become carbon-neutral in part due to the massive amount of concrete they require. Right now, we need to be reducing carbon footprint as much as possible, as fast as possible. Not causing huge increases in carbon footprint that will only balance out well past catastrophic climate conditions.

* Nuclear reactor containment vessels can only be constructed by a small handful of facilities and their capacity is very limited, and by and large already spoken for. We can't just wave a wand and start building more reactors tomorrow. Or even in the next several years.

* Nuclear waste may be a "solved" problem tech-wise as nuclear power proponents are fond of saying, but reality is that nuclear waste is a huge problem. Even short-term storage is a problem, as demonstrated, again, by Fukashima where fuel cooling ponds caught on fire.

Time and time again we demonstrate that we are not responsible enough to handle nuclear power; we've had numerous military nuclear power disasters; the commercial ones haven't stopped, either. A "1st world" country, arguably one of the most technologically advanced ones around, repeatedly bumbled every aspect of Fukashima, starting with the plant's design, its maintenance and procedures, and the response to the incident. What was Japan's excuse?

How many Mulligans does nuclear power need?

You know what happens when a solar or wind power plant is incompetently designed or run? A bunch of people lose lots of money. You don't end up with thousands of square miles of land uninhabitable. You don't need people with years of training supervising a bunch of solar panels. Maintenance on a wind turbine is a standard-industrial-equipment sort of job, no bunny suits required.

You know what happens when a country with solar or wind power has a government that is full of incompetent suit-stuffing chair-warming morons, or gets taken over by a despot dictator, or has an economic collapse? Nothing.

If you want to look to the future in power grids, look at the iron chemistry liquid batteries that are non-toxic and almost trivial to deploy at electrical substations. They can provide spare capacity at the neighborhood/regional level while helping balance distribution loads and allow those neighborhoods to continue to function in isolation in the event of transmission grid problems.

Factorium3• 5 years ago

Current wholesale electricity prices in Germany are $194/MWh:

https://www.energylive.cloud/

How much does Germany spend on the military? Cancel it, and spend the money on nuclear power. Otherwise Germany has a significant strategic weakness (gas imports) to Russia, its only realistic enemy.

Gwypaas9• 5 years ago

Wholesale energy is priced by the marginal cost, gas peaker plants come in at $150 - $200/MWh so not a surprising price to level out on.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

schleck85• 5 years ago

I don't think canceling an already tight military budget in favor of a power source that could be devastating when hit by an airstrike is a good strategy

nradov3• 5 years ago

Germany already spends so little on their military that they have been in breach of their NATO treaty obligations for years.

0xbadcafebee2• 5 years ago

We've literally just been through an entire energy crisis in Europe that was exacerbated due to inconsistent wind.

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Europes-E...

  The UK is suffering the most from the drop in wind power output, caused by mild weather. The country, which prides itself on its wind capacity and whose Prime Minister last year said wind farms could power every home by 2030, produced less than 1 GW of wind power on several days. This compares with a generation capacity of 24 GW, according to ICIS senior energy economist Stefan Konstantinov.

Cheap isn't as important as reliable. It's not like these countries have no money.

Ericson231421• 5 years ago

Just-in-type supply chains are "cheaper" too.

rsj_hn4• 5 years ago

There is this cycle where this is blamed on a combination of Brexit and global warming, so they want to shift to even more wind/solar, causing even more outages, and it's a positive feedback loop.

One would think that if you seriously believed that the climate is going to rapidly change, then you would seek out climate-independent sources of energy. It's like predicting the world will be in drought but then advocating for more hydro power. But perhaps I don't understand the full nuances of European politics.

kinjba11• 5 years ago

I'm reminded of the Tom Scott video mentioning how parts of the grid is simply not up to the task yet to get wind energy from high-wind areas into the mainland.

'The islands with too much power' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UmsfXWzvEA

neals• 5 years ago

But what if you put in the health en enviromental cost of nuclears direct competitor: coal.

Because at the moment, wind isn't doing so well, there being a wind-drought for the last few months and all.

cbmuser• 5 years ago

It’s worth noting that you are confusing system costs and levelized costs of electricity.

Cheap wind and solar electricity is absolutely useless if it cannot be produced on demand.

Nuclear produces electricity 24/7, independent of weather with no backup required.

The kWh costs 30 cents in Germany, but 15 cents in France.

eecc3• 5 years ago

Nuclear produces electricity 24/7, independent of weather with no backup required.

When the plant is not offline…

jhgb17• 5 years ago

with no backup required.

Not true.

The kWh costs 30 cents in Germany, but 15 cents in France.

International comparisons are useless without comparison of pricing structure. That includes for example the tax regime, fees mandated, etc.

aagd6• 5 years ago

The electricity that is produced at night is sold cheaper in Germany, as it's mostly not used anyway - mostly because storage is difficult. But since the world is currently being filled with an abundance of large batteries like in electric cars, this energy loss will decrease over time. These batteries could also compensate peaks in demand.

Tade0• 5 years ago

Nuclear produces electricity 24/7, independent of weather with no backup required.

Actually, no. Heatwaves can and did disable thermal plants in the past:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...

This is an problem that will only be intensified by climate change.

Ericson231421• 5 years ago

Let us not submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income … Why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital … an ample theater, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, cafes, and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford. … We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life? …

-- John Maynard Keynes

eutectic• 5 years ago

A nuclear power station is not exactly a university or an art gallery.

schleck85• 5 years ago

Are you saying we should ignore the economic aspect of everything?

rks404• 5 years ago

holy hell that's a great quote

archsurface• 5 years ago

Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford. … Little did John know the future would bring such wonders as HS2, lockdowns, the Ethiopian spice girls, NHS, a fake property market, ... a very different world.

sofixa• 5 years ago

Thank you for this quote, it's a great one, saving it.

PaulHoule2• 5 years ago

The expensive part about nuclear power is the initial construction.

The cost to keep a reactor that's already been built going is low.

baq3• 5 years ago

Time component can’t be disregarded, though. You can build, operate and decommission a wind farm or a solar plant in the time it takes to sell the first watt from a nuclear plant.

wavefunction• 5 years ago

Why is nuclear considered in contrast to solar and wind? Nuclear energy will allow humanity to move off of petrochemical energy sources much more quickly and given the looming ecological catastrophe the costs of nuclear energy are very reasonable.

tomp• 5 years ago

Reuters journalists also probably say that the markets are efficient.

Out here in the real world, people are paying $200/MWh and hedge funds are making billions.

xbar• 5 years ago

No. It is not worth noting any such thing.

The need to keep nuclear in the short term is based solely on the urgency of the climate crisis.

Cost is irrelevant in the face of extinction.

We have a couple centuries to figure out wind and solar economics if we convert all coal and gas to nuclear immediately.

himinlomax5• 5 years ago

And wind/solar is also very expensive once you reach 20% and need storage.

arcticbull2• 5 years ago

Does the cost include full lifecycle analysis?

For instance, wind requires mining huge quantities of rare earth metals in open-air hellscapes in Mongolia, referred to as "the worst place on earth." [1] The two hundred meter tall towers and their giant blades are also built of fiberglass (an epoxy/glass mix) which cannot be recycled and are instead buried. [2]

Similarly solar panels are often made with cadmium and tellurium, and various other toxic chemicals which leech out of the panels when placed into landfills. The US for instance has no solar panel recycling mandate except in Washington State. The world already has a massive e-waste problem.

By 2050, there will be 78 million metric tons of solar panels to dispose of. [3]

Solar panels then have to be supplemented with vast quantities of lithium for temporary storage.

Solar and wind aren't "green" they're "less black."

Nuclear produces 2000 metric tons of waste per year in the US while amounting to 20% of the entire grid, 0.85TWh per year.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...

Tostino• 5 years ago

That first link was quite a read. Thanks for that.

tannhaeuser• 5 years ago

No way with the Green Party part of gov. They've literately started out with "Atomkraft - Nein danke" stickers in late 1970s. Mostly seen on cars, then and today.

_Microft• 5 years ago

You have to understand the context that the anti-nuclear movement came from.

First, nuclear weapons had been demonstrated as devastating by killing tens of thousands in Japan. Then the superpowers engaged in a nuclear arms race. A small town in Germany's Hesse was even assigned coordinates 0/0 in NATO maps because it was expected to be nuclear ground zero in case of a push of the Soviets through the Fulda Gap. Add Chernobyl to the mix that showed that even civil use of nuclear power can be dangerous and you get a universal, blanket rejection of all things nuclear. It's really not surprising. Rejection of nuclear power plants might not make a lot of sense nowadays in a stable and developed country like Germany but it is understandable once you look at the history.

rsj_hn4• 5 years ago

And this is why Germany has increased its coal use - Germany hates nuclear more than coal.

When that changes, and someone is adult enough to realize that tough trade offs have to be made rather than relying on finger-wagging austerity, then Germany will migrate out of coal.

My bet is that we'll get more scolding, hand-wringing, and continued coal use well into the 2040s if not beyond.

aagd6• 5 years ago

The view I share with a majority of Germans: Costs of nuclear energy are very much a burden that future generations will have to carry. A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price. It is also clear now that the the companies running the plants will not pay for the deconstruction of the plants after they reached their end of life. Tax payers have to pay for this, and a large part of the remains will need to be stored safely for millenia as well. This is the opposite of sustainability and fairness towards future generations. Worldwide there still exists only a single final storage solution for nuclear waste - in Finland for the finish waste. In densly populated Germany the search for a storage site has been going on since the late 1950s, so far without success. All this on top of the risk of a system failure that would devastate huge territories. In a country where, as we've recently seen, simple emergency warning systems are basically non-existent and fax is still the main communication tool for the authorities...

izacus3• 5 years ago

The Germans have switched from nuclear to coal. Can you cut this "future generations are going to have to carry the cost" when the alternative is literally helping destroy the whole planet's ecosystems? Not to mention they spew up significantly more radioactivity in the air than nuclear powerplants.

A 30x30m pool of radioactive fuel is nothing compared to what their powerplants are doing to the future of young generations. Is cancer caused by coal particulates really something you wish on people around you?

aagd6• 5 years ago

In Germany renewables are at over 42% in 2021, despite a 'conservative' government that for decades has blocked the development of windfarms and solar for the benefit of the coal and nuclear lobby. That kind of lobby-work is the actual problem here. The way forward is renewable energy. The huge difference is that the source of renewable energy is free and basically limitless.

svara• 5 years ago

I agree it would have been better to phase out coal before nuclear, but it's not correct to say that there was a switch from nuclear to coal.

The switch was from nuclear to renewables. Coal was stable for a long time, and is now decreasing. Coal is currently scheduled to be phased out by 2038.

Source: Quick Google image search for the power sources over time plots.

jhgb17• 5 years ago

The Germans have switched from nuclear to coal.

No, they did not. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...

xg155• 5 years ago

Coal is being phased out until 2038 if not earlier.

The future is neither coal, nor nuclear.

inter_netuser• 5 years ago

There is no "waste".

Waste is just partially burned fuel. There is only ONE reason why it exists.

We made a political choice that storing partially burned fuel instead of reprocessing is safer than allow people have technology that can also create nuclear weapons.

UncleOxidant• 5 years ago

Aren't there newer nuclear technologies that use alternative fissionable materials that have much shorter half-lives?

loeg5• 5 years ago

To risk oversimplifying: the really harmful stuff has very short half-lives, and the stuff with long half-lives isn't especially harmful.

eecc3• 5 years ago

If you’re referring to Thorium and pebble bed, they’re both not proliferation safe and have their issues with ecological confinement of highly active waste.

So unfortunately they never managed to overcome the initial “should we even seriously try it” cost/benefit analysis

asdff4• 5 years ago

The costs of the status quo are also beared upon by us and future generations. Instead of the waste product being contained in a controlled environment, it is dispersed into the atmosphere and breathed in by millions of Germans, where it will continue to warm the world for future generations to attempt to right our wrongs before its too late. Even if emissions stopped globally today, temperatures would continue to rise due to greenhouse effect just from what is already present in the atmosphere. I fear for a world where climate change advances faster than our ability to adapt our foodstocks to it, that world is not as far away as you might think, especially with the left's resistance toward species saving technologies such as nuclear power and genetically modified organisms.

ars2• 5 years ago

A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price.

It's completely unnecessary to do that. So many people have this misconception.

If you combine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor you burn up everything, leaving very little waste.

xg155• 5 years ago

From your very own linked Wikipedia page:

In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries".

freemint9• 5 years ago

But radiated concrete from the reactor housing doesn't burn that well.

wazoox2• 5 years ago

Nuclear energy kills about zero person per annum. Coal itself kills at least 50000 Europeans every year. Even taking into account the worst case scenarios such as Chernobyl, coal (and fossil fuels generally) is several orders of magnitudes more dangerous than nuclear.

I just don't get this mindset. People prefer killing literaly millions of persons right now while there's a safer alternative. That's incredible, really.

suetoniusp• 5 years ago

There is a safer alternative in the short term. The two are comparable in the long term for safety. Also "Coal itself kills at least 50000 Europeans every year." is far from a truth. Coal may have increased the chance of death by some amount for at least 50000 Europeans every year is more correct.

znd• 5 years ago

The marginal cost of storing a few years worth of spent nuclear fuel doesn't seem that high, as you have to find a place to store the waste already generated anyway. I for one would accept other countries spent fuel to be stored in Finnish bedrock. Might be hard politically, though.

Ensorceled• 5 years ago

This is a like a preposterous version of the trolley problem ... "The trolley can continue down the nuclear track and maybe, perhaps, kill people far into the future or you can switch to the coal track and continue to kill thousands now and maybe destroy the planet"

And people are choosing to switch.

titzer3• 5 years ago

A typical large nuclear plant will produce 3 cubic meters of solid waste in a year. That's a little bigger than a refrigerator.

A lot of solid waste can be reprocessed, though doing so requires regulatory and logistical challenges to be solved that apparently only France has figured out.

Nuclear waste, comparatively, is not the problem. The risk of accidents, proliferation, and the generally higher cost of engineering are. Every energy technology produces waste, too. As others have mentioned, coal-fired plants produce literally thousands of times the radiation of a nuclear plant, blasting that right into the atmosphere in the form of radioactive fly ash, as well as huge amounts of CO2 and particulates. The production of solar panels is not waste free. Nothing is waste free.

The nuclear waste argument is a distraction. Nuclear power, of all the options, all things considered, leaves the smallest scar on the planet of all the options available to us. Solar panels, wind, hydro, they all require land use changes that are a big impact on the planet. Uranium mining is comparatively small in terms of its impact. So IMHO nuclear is the best option.

drran• 5 years ago

Do you include atomic station itself after EOL into your calculation?

Ericson231421• 5 years ago

The background issue is that Germans, with their harmful surpluses, all this talk about costs, seem to completely misunderstand economics.

----

I get that the Cold War hurt a lot in Germany. I've met my distant relatives stuck on both sides of the iron curtain, for example. That would have made issues of proliferation and whatnot extra salient.

But the fact of the matter is that the environmental problems we face now completely dwarf whatever environmental problems were being chased after then.

You have to realized that when you thought you were fighting the end-game boss, but you were actually fighting the mid-game boss which is the minion and now the big boss has shown up, everything changes.

-----

Please connect those necessary readjustments to thinking more critically about economics and whole-system things in general, to connect my two points, and we'll all be very happy.

michilehr• 5 years ago

Totally agree.

"Der Graslutscher" has written 6 parts about "Energy transition in 10 years". Sorry it is in german but it is worth reading.

https://graslutscher.de/how-to-energiewende-in-10-jahren-tei...

rib3ye• 5 years ago

The "hundred thousand years" argument is one I hear a lot, but why do we all assume 1. our civilization will last more than 1,000 years. 2. there will be no new tech to address the issue in the future? The estimated time until catastrophic climate change are MUCH sooner than that.

gjhh244• 5 years ago

Nuclear is problematic, but it should not be phased out as long as there's fossil fuel used in energy generation. All efforts should go into replacing fossil fuels for now.

627467• 5 years ago

So, 100 thousand years is not long enough to find a use of disposing nuclear waste but it is enough to try to terraform earth to undo the changes enacted from NOT using nuclear?

louissm_it• 5 years ago

I’m sorry but no. The future costs of nuclear are comparatively irrelevant if you consider the immediate doom our climate and thousands and thousands of species are facing because of burning fossil. If a 100 nuclear disasters happen in the next 5 years it will still do less damage than coal.

There is simply no more time, the only option is to stop burning at any and all costs.

janmalec• 5 years ago

The view is based on some false assumptions. Nuclear reactor fuel can be efficiently recycled. Besides, the reason why storage of nuclear fuel is expencive is because nuclear industry actualy takes care of biproducts of operation, unlike other industries that produce equally or more dangerous chemical waste. It is also not true that a system failure would "devastate huge territores". No PWR accident had major consequences on human health, even in Fukushima there were no fatalities from radiation. Statistically nuclear power is the safest form of electricity. The largest storage battery (Australia) can replace a NPP for about 10 seconds. In winter you might have no sun and wind for weeks. This is why you are, and will continue burning fossil fuels in Germany.

beeboop2• 5 years ago

How is something so entirely wrong the top comment on this? Waste storage is not even close to a problem for nuclear and even having the option to store the extremely minimal waste is basically a miracle compared to the disaster that is coal, which stores the waste literally everywhere, including the air we breathe

Valakas_• 5 years ago

Storing nuclear waste for millennia? How long ago was the first nuclear reactor activated? Do you really think in one thousand (!) years we will be using 2020's technology? In a thousand years nothing we see today will be even vaguely familiar.

raxxorrax• 5 years ago

The only advantage is the reduced CO2 emission, economically nuclear energy isn't viable. Sure, safety regulations play a huge part here, but they aren't optional.

Every form of energy production has disadvantages, but I cannot really say that ending nuclear was a mistake if it isn't just exchanged for coal and I don't believe this is the case. Maybe we could have opted to let remaining plants run for longer, but Germany actually never had that many of them anyway.

Uranium isn't available anywhere and some say it may deplete at some point. I think this problem is not in focus because nuclear is still a small part of overall energy production. But it could very well be a problem, especially if countries increase nuclear.

edit: A bit disappointed in Theo Sommer here. I think he got swept up by wrong information about costs and benefits here. Otherwise a great writer.

edit 2: They just argue to keep plants running, that might be a sensible decision, depends on the numbers.

kensai• 5 years ago

There are so many solutions for the safe storage problem and very little research. I believe if we think out of the box, the problem will be solved relatively easily and effectively.

Just bury them to hell: https://www.deepisolation.com/

rb2k_• 5 years ago

A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price

People always mention that as an argument. I'm pretty sure that we could figure out a solution if we actually worked on it. Given how far we've come over the last 100 years, I don't see this as a problem that we couldn't solve over the next 100 years.

silexia• 5 years ago

Oil and gas plants are far worse. They kill tens of thousands TODAY and produce long lasting poisonous waste that affects everyone now.

Nuclear waste is easy to store and not voluminous compared to oil and gas waste. The US for example designated a waste mountain in Nevada that could store all of our waste but is not using it yet due to politics.

Nuclear is FAR safer than oil and gas and even the worst tragedies like Chernobyl or 3 Mile Island did a tiny fraction of the damage oil and gas to every year.

blablabla123• 5 years ago

Germany is in danger of missing its 2030 climate target, despite all its efforts

Which efforts? Germany might look quite progressive when it comes to renewables but lacks a holistic strategy. Energy storage is not discussed at all.

It's good that the Greens are part of the government again to put in larger restrictions but they'll be limited by the other 2 parties. Real change is probably going to be provided by companies like Tesla which actually provide a solution to the storage problem.

Also the article is behind a paywall and from Welt which is from the same publisher as the notorious yellow press publication Bild. Die Zeit (Former editor-in-chief of it is mentioned) hasn't put it on its start page.

retrac• 5 years ago

One generally underappreciated aspect to nuclear energy opposition is the intrinsic link to nuclear weapons. Some of it is scientifically illiterate nonsense (a lot of people seem to think power reactors can have a nuclear explosion). And some of it is just historical association. But some of it is a lot harder to dismiss.

A world without nuclear reactors or enrichment facilities is a world without nuclear weapons. Any medium or large industrialized country with power reactors could build nukes very quickly. It's bad enough half a dozen already have. This notion keeps some people up at night, I think. If you consider nuclear weapons to be an existential threat to the species -- perhaps worse than climate change -- then building infrastructure that would allow their more easy construction might seem like madness.

Ericson231421• 5 years ago

Global warming is worse than proliferation --- it is certainly harder to undo.

Ericson231421• 5 years ago

Also, I would expect more positive feelings about existing fission to increase R&D into thorium, fusion, etc., which do not have proliferation concerns.

asdff4• 5 years ago

Then we will continue wringing our hands about the would be nuclear apocalypse while species continue to die, crops fail, seas rise, temperatures warm, and billions of humans starve to death in the mean time. There is justified fear and irrational fear, and this is irrational. It should probably be noted that the firebombing of Tokyo with conventional weapons was more deadly than the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki.

rich_sasha4• 5 years ago

The he cat is out the bag I’m afraid, the only way nuclear weapons disappear is if they become obsolete, like mustard gas.

It’s an interesting though actually, that coming up with new, presumably more deadly weapons, can lead to a less horrendous world.

tim3334• 5 years ago

The trend has been to more specific weapons that can pick off the bad guys while missing the civilians. Drones and the like. Hopefully not Slaughterbots.

Slade1• 5 years ago

Would a world where we took initiative to reduce civilian air travel in preference of trains and boats also lead to the military no longer producing fighter jets?

burnished• 5 years ago

It would do a lot, yeah. Boeing services military and commercial contracts. If instead of commercial airlines taking off (lol) they just.. didn't, then even with an interested military you would have fewer engineers, smaller & poorer companies, just generally less advancement and less production.

Your question is good but it doesn't have the answer you seem to think it does! These things feed into each other, so while it might be unreasonable to say "no commercial airlines means no military air vehicles" (I hesitate to say fighter jet because I do think that would be a casualty), it would also be unreasonable to say that "no commercial airlines means no impact on military air technology".

You might think, hey, the military has got some strong advancements the rest of us don't even know about, whos to say that wouldn't be the case? Well, the people working on that tech went to college and got educations in a field that had employment opportunities, and likely would not have if those opportunities didn't exist. Just think about all the supporting industries that are very specific. The aluminum alloys, the manufacturing methods for these high tolerance parts, the electrical systems, the fuel systems etc. You just aren't going to get very far without a civilian populace implicitly backing the effort.

jrsdav• 5 years ago

I am calling out my ignorance here, but are there not reactor types that don't require enriched uranium? Sodium-cooled, Molten Salt, etc. I'm curious about the current state of reactor technology and if it addresses your concern.

rich_sasha4• 5 years ago

They all need some enrichment, but then apparently it’s still very hard to go from a civilian reactor to weapons-grade uranium. Just, I guess, much easier than from a heap of coal.

I understand that with adequate supervision from the IEA proliferation is generally a non-issue.

jollybean2• 5 years ago

Nuclear Enrichment is kind of hard actually. Nobody's going to get away with it without others knowing.

The risk if Nuclear Energy proliferation is the waste being used in a dirty bomb.

Nuclear waste spread out in Manhtatten might not kill people, but it could make the city, or parts of it unlivable for a long time. At minimum a big disaster.

So in order for the Nuclear future to work, we'd need to set standards that have teeth.

The issue is not Canada or Germany, it's Venezuela or Colombia where there is corruption, political instability, lack of oversight, and then a local antagonist can sneak in and grab materials. Cover ups, finger pointing, refusing to allow inspectors in lest they assess the level of corruption, it all falls down while the baddies take their stolen gear to other, more ideological bad actors.

There are long term storage issues but I think those can be worked out.

Nuclear Energy is basically free Energy to any group of people civil enough to manage it.

freemint9• 5 years ago

Can we be civil enough under capitalism? Under the soviet union we couldn't. What does Fukushima tell us about that question?

Ericson231421• 5 years ago

Neverminding the politics and legalities, is it technically possible to "un-decommision" the plants already closed? Or our too many blueprints lost, people retired, etc.?

Forgive the optimism, just trying to think ahead.

mrich• 5 years ago

Too late, they blew up the Philippsburg power plant 30km from my home last year:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zsSswlxThqo

One of the blocks was really old so I'm glad to see it go. I'm in favor of building new, safer reactors. Bill Gates is an investor in a startup that developed such a design, but it will probably be hard to get it tested.

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

China apparently also has made advances.

k__• 5 years ago

If I look how close to the German border France built their nuclear plants, we could just have kept ours...

newman555• 5 years ago

not again. I can’t go through 641st “nuclear vs solar/wind” thread on HN about :)

Isn’t this an objective data driven problem and we can decide what’s better for short / medium / long term?

veddox2• 5 years ago

Isn’t this an objective data driven problem and we can decide what’s better for short / medium / long term?

No, such questions never are. Even if you could remove the prevailing strong emotional responses from the debate (humans aren‘t always rational), you would still find that at heart, the debate is not about technology but about values. What targets are we actually aiming for, and why? If you can‘t agree on what the problem is, you aren‘t going to find a common solution. And worse: often such issues pose multiple problems, the solutions for some of which may actually make the others worse. So how do you deal with these trade-offs? What do you prioritize?

Nuclear power is a hard problem not because we don‘t know the solutions, but because we can‘t agree on which problems are the most urgent. And again, that’s not a question about technology, but about values.

cure2• 5 years ago

It may be pragmatic - but politically tough - to keep the nuclear plants open longer, if that can be done safely, and invest heavily in renewables + storage to take all that awful lignite/coal power generation offline. And phase out the nuclear plants once enough (storage) capacity has been built.

I wonder if people have modeled for how fast that could be done, and how expensive it would be. We have the technology (cf. grid scale storage, there is a fascination array of options, several of which are tried and tested), it's "just" a matter of scaling it up.

The current plan only phases out coal by 2038 which seems... way way way too late. Cf. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/spelling-out-coal...

rektide• 5 years ago

emblematic imo of an extremely & admittedly fairly deserved high level of distrust of our general ability to take care of/maintain things.

poetaster2• 5 years ago

In Germany, Fusion and not Fission is the future (ducks and runs).

andbberger4• 5 years ago

All the nuclear threads here are the same, and they're all deeply frustrating. HN isn't exactly a bastion of liberal speech (here fucked up conservative hot takes reign supreme) - but ostensibly the populace is more technically literate than average. Yet it's the same stupid bullshit every time.

It's dangerous!!11!! fukushima! chernobyl!1!!

nope look at some statistics it's very safe

ok, the waste!11! scary spicy rocks!! glowing cats! landscape of thorns!!11

nope just bury it like finland, or leave it in the pool

ok ok only finland is special enough to dig holes for spicy rocks

...

it's expensive!!!11! it's too expensive!! the future is wind turbines and solar panels and turning bolivia into a giant battery

The water is lapping at our feet. We are doomed.

arcticbull2• 5 years ago

This has been my experience too, speaking as someone who's usually the ">" line.

f7ebc20c97• 5 years ago

Does a hypereducated liberal democracy even work in the long run, or will a morally relativist people aloof from reality argue over lifeboats and bilge pumps forever until the ship sinks and they all drown?

tim3334• 5 years ago

We've had nuclear power for 70 years and it hasn't exactly stopped CO2 emissions or made electricity too cheap to meter, and is much the same deal as it was 20 years ago.

Solar etc. on the other hand is growing rapidly and exponentially.

andbberger4• 5 years ago

what are you talking about the nuclear power plants of the world have prevented gigatons of CO2 emissions and could have gone a lot further if the decision makers weren't a bunch of nincompoops who share a bed with the oil lobby.

ilyich• 5 years ago

I wish I could upvote your comment a hundred times. I am astonished to see such technically literate populace just repeating mainstream bullshit propaganda instead of having their own thoughts. And it's not only regarding the nuclear but also about many other topics, especially politically charged.

beeboop2• 5 years ago

HN is surprisingly conservative sometimes. I see plenty of anti vaxxer takes, subtle and less than subtle transphobia, and general empathy lacking libertarian attitudes

poetaster2• 5 years ago

China consumes over 4 billion tonnes of coal a year. Germany less than 300,000 million. Now, the best course of action is to get VW out of the chinese market to reduce emissions there! Win, win!!!

m0zg• 5 years ago

France, too: https://www.ft.com/content/d06500e2-7fd2-4753-a54b-bc16f1faa.... Looks like cooler heads might actually prevail there.

reacharavindh• 5 years ago

I know that Germany already invested quite a bit in wind and solar energy. I wonder if Germany, being a rich, progressive, social country, simply side-step all the criticism like what is on this thread by issuing a moratorium on all the existing nuclear reactors - say 6 months, and invest completely in solar and wind over the 6 months to add capacity?

Germany’s geo location makes it possible to be part of the EU power grid sharing the renewable power across neighbours to make it all work. The political cost of such a drastic measure would actually be a nett positive in a country like Germany I hope.

If only politicians stop thinking short term and be the leaders they are expected to be …

Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

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