Germany Rejected Nuclear Power -- and Deadly Emissions Spiked (wired.com) 231
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On New Year's Eve, while the rest of the world was preparing to ring in a new decade, employees of the German energy company EnBW were getting ready to pull the plug on one of the country's few remaining nuclear power plants. The license to operate the two reactors at the Philippsburg nuclear facility expired at midnight after 35 years of providing carbon-free power to Germans living along the country's southwestern border. The Philippsburg plant was the eleventh nuclear facility decommissioned in Germany over the last decade. The country's remaining six nuclear plants will go dark by 2022. To uncover the hidden costs of denuclearizing Germany, economists used machine learning to analyze reams of data gathered between 2011 and 2017. The researchers, based at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, and Carnegie Mellon University, found that nuclear power was mostly replaced with power from coal plants, which led to the release of an additional 36 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, or about a 5 percent increase in emissions. More distressingly, the researchers estimated that burning more coal led to local increases in particle pollution and sulfur dioxide and likely killed an additional 1,100 people per year from respiratory or cardiovascular illnesses. "Altogether, the researchers calculated that the increased carbon emissions and deaths caused by local air pollution amounted to a social cost of about $12 billion per year," the report says. "The study found that this dwarfs the cost of keeping nuclear power plants online by billions of dollars, even when the risks of a meltdown and the cost of nuclear waste storage are considered."
Nuclear energy is by far the safest form of energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Nuclear energy is by far the safest form of en (Score:5, Insightful)
If the public wasn't falling for Big Oil's nuclear is bad scare tactics, all our generating stations would have been retooled to modern reactor designs ages ago, and much of our power would be from Nuclear these days. For working at night, to being carbon neutral, it's a great energy source.
Re: Nuclear energy is by far the safest form of en (Score:4, Insightful)
> Those reactors are negative void coefficient reactors and no reactor created in the past few decades for power generation has been a negative void coefficient reactor.
It doesn't matter how long ago the reactor was created. What matters is whether reactors of this design are still running. Obviously Fukushima was still running when it melted due to a foreseeable earthquake-related event.
I expect there are probably other reactors in Japan of similar design that were running at the same time the disaster occurred (although hopefully they have now been decommissioned) and I'd expect that there are probably other reactors of the same design still operational somewhere in the world today.
Re: Nuclear energy is by far the safest form of en (Score:4, Informative)
But it does matter how old they are. I think the design life of unit 1 was 25 years, which meant it was 19 years past its design life. And I think the design life for units 2 and 3 were 30 years, in which case unit 2 was 8 years past its design life, and unit 3 was 7 years past. Had Unit 3 been decommissioned on its original schedule, the hydrogen explosion would have been avoided, and the three melted-down reactors would have all been safely inert by then.
There are only two reasons why so many of these reactors are in use well beyond their original design life:
The first one is a hard problem to solve, but it is a pure numbers game, i.e. you can bake it into the cost of providing power. Unfortunately, governments are wary of mandating that plants be decommissioned on schedule, because there's nothing to replace them.
So in effect, the NIMBY movement is directly responsible for causing the Fukushima disaster. How's that for irony?
NIMBY isn't a problem when you already have (Score:2)
This was 100% a money play, and that's why folks don't trust nuclear. There's so much money to be had that it's nearly impossible to keep the whole thing from being corrupted until there is a disaster.
If you want nuclear that's fine, but you need to make a reactor that can be run into the ground safely. Otherwise some businessman is always going to swoop in wi
Re:NIMBY isn't a problem when you already have (Score:5, Informative)
They're called CANDU. [wikipedia.org] Stop being a NIMBY. I live within 100km of 3 of them here in Southern Ontario, one of which is Bruce Nuclear(6500MW). Not only are they incredibly safe, but the generation cost AND refurbishment run under $0.09kWh over the lifetime of the reactor, in most cases it's around $0.05kWh. Cheap, safe, plentiful energy is already here.
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CANDU reactors are a beautiful, safe, efficient design. I wish we - in the US - would get our heads out of our collective asses and build ACRs en masse across the country. Build one right next door to me; I'm fine with it. Further, we need to eliminate the rule that disallows "waste" reprocessing. If it's energetic enough to be dangerous, it's energetic enough to power my blender. Keep feeding that stuff in until what's left is truly spent and easily shelved.
Re:NIMBY isn't a problem when you already have (Score:5, Interesting)
"They're called CANDU. [wikipedia.org] Stop being a NIMBY. I live within 100km of 3 of them here in Southern Ontario, one of which is Bruce Nuclear(6500MW). Not only are they incredibly safe, but the generation cost AND refurbishment run under $0.09kWh over the lifetime of the reactor,"
And when they dismantle it and store the crap for 184.000 years, is the cost of the armed guards for protecting it against terrorists included in those $0.09?
Re:NIMBY isn't a problem when you already have (Score:5, Insightful)
And when they dismantle it and store the crap for 184.000 years, is the cost of the armed guards for protecting it against terrorists included in those $0.09?
When they shutdown one of the first reactors back ~20 years ago, its components were reused in other reactors here in the province FYI. The stuff that's really dangerous gets reprocessed back into the fuel cycle. The low-radiation stuff can be simply stored on-site or used for bunker material until existing waste is ready to be processed. That's how we do it here in Canada, and Korea does it with our reactors, and how China is using those same reactors.
Know what one of the bonuses of CANDU designs are? They're also easy to modify for medical isotopes, incase we have NIMBY's like you that keep medical reactors shutdown for years or cockblock the entire system for so long that companies simply give up and throw the entire nuclear medicine industry into a panic. Like when Chalk River was shutdown.
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You won't find many folk who say "You want to replace that old, dangerous reactor with a new safe one? Hell no!".
That's exactly what people say. This is why people keep pushing the old nuclear power plants way way beyond their design life its because the NIMBY and BANANA crowd won't let them build new ones. Unfortunately the NIBMY and BANANA crowd also like electricity so we can't shut down old ones either.
If you want nuclear that's fine, but you need to make a reactor that can be run into the ground safel
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Also, decomissioning nuclear plants has been coming in at 2 orders of magnitude higher than promised.
And the public (who weren't born when the thing was built) pay the cost.
And no clawbacks on company profits or executive salaries and pensions.
When private insurance companies will cover the cost of decomissioning, *and* we have some kind of clawback or escrow provisions sufficient to eliminate over runs on decomissioning costs, then I'll be more comfortable with nuclear.
Until then, it's monstrously immoral.
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"a reactor in your back yard. You won't find many folk who say "You want to replace that old, dangerous reactor with a new safe one? Hell no!". "
That's also what the Hydrogen enthusiasts seem to ignore, nobody wants tanks or filling up stations in their neighborhood.
People even protest when gas stations offer liquid car gas or natural gas.
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Huh? From Wikipedia:
In what universe is that not a meltdown?
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The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had numerous construction anomalies that should have raised alarms both during its construction and during every subsequent inspection. It veered drastically from the reference design provided by General Electric and GE told them it was unsafe. They said it was fine and the Japanese regulators refused to do anything about it. Pretty much everyone involved knew they'd cut corners when they built that plant, but it was allowed to continue operating. And even with the
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Or you could simply say, "Nuclear power is theoretically safe... as long as humans who have political or financial motives to cut corners are not involved in the process." So no companies... and nothing run by the government. Which means it's not realistic.
(and that ignores the fact that humans also get sloppy over time even when they don't have a motive to cut corners).
(and it ignores the generations of multi million dollar annual costs to safeguard nuclear waste from criminals and terrorists).
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There are identical reactors still running in Japan. Some were re-started after extensive checks and some upgrades. Some were not because using newer equipment new geological faults and other hazards were detected that were unknown at the time of construction.
It's a controversial topic in Japan, and the country as a whole as been late to the renewable energy game. Japan is blessed with vast offshore wind resources, more than it needs for itself so it could go from being resource starved due to geography to
Re: Nuclear energy is by far the safest form of en (Score:5, Informative)
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And the problem at Fukushima was not its void coefficient, but bad management after it was scrammed in the safe and standard manner on warning of the earthquake. After a reactor is scrammed you have to continue pumping water through it for the next two weeks to pull off heat of decay during the time that can cause the core to melt. Because of bonehead management like having the reactor water connections not fit those of the local fire department, they ran out of alternative plans for bringing in water after
Re: Nuclear energy is by far the safest form of en (Score:5, Interesting)
If the public wasn't falling for Big Oil's nuclear is bad scare tactics, all our generating stations would have been retooled to modern reactor designs ages ago, and much of our power would be from Nuclear these days.
Not sure if that's only Big Oil & Coal Inc.
Already in the 80's politics in many countries moved away from nuclear due to pressure from environmental activists. Their main arguments the nuclear waste, and secondary the perceived safety issues.
While the nuclear waste issue isn't solved, it's also amazing how little waste a reactor produces. For a 500MW reactor it's in the order of magnitude of about one cubic meter (around 150 cubic feet) per year. Of course the supply chain, like the mining, pollutes some too, but it's peanuts compared to oil plants or even wind energy (wind energy has a recycling issue as those glass fibers strengthened composites are utterly non-recyclable, in the news somewhere last year).
It's sad to see that activist people in trying to save the planet actually helped destructing it, purely by being uninformed and affecting political choices. I can only hope the people that want to save the environment today learn from the errors made in the past, but that seems to be an upstream battle.
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The deep ecology view, as it used to be called, is that we have overpopulation. So you do not, above all, build anything which gives abundant energy, especially abundant sustainable energy. This is why technology which supports growth is always resisted and ignored. Humans are just a cancer, they'll say, and until we reduce to half a billion, they are not interested in effective technology. So called renewables are just used to gradually erode our infrastructure. I think newer generations don't understand w
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> until we reduce to half a billion
Considering current projections are for 10-12 billion people by the end of the century, it appears they're in for a bit of a disappointment.
Just like the environmentalists who thought rising oil prices would force Americans to give up cars... as opposed to rising prices making oil shale profitable & turning the US in to a net EXPORTER of petroleum.
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The UK started moving away from nuclear in the 80s but not for environmental reasons. It was all down to cost.
Until then the government had funded nuclear power but the costs were spiralling out of control. One issue was that they tried to build a new, supposedly safer, reactor design but ran into huge problems that delayed it and multiplied costs.
So in the 80s it was all given to private companies, with a big fat subsidy and promise to pay for all the decommissioning costs. Even then it was a hard sell, th
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That's exactly what it is, too. People are falling for the classic "Appeal to Emotion" fallacy.
OMFGWTFBBQ ZOOMIES BAD, AAAAH! EVERYBODY PANIC!!!11!!
That's about what it amounts to.
We can and should design safer nuclear fission reactors, and we have plenty of experience to guide us in those new designs, and we should build and employ those reactors to save us from ourselves. Eventually I am confident we'll have fusion power, too. In the meantime we can continue to deploy so-called 'ren
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"scare tactics"
That's exactly what it is, too. People are falling for the classic "Appeal to Emotion" fallacy.
OMFGWTFBBQ ZOOMIES BAD, AAAAH! EVERYBODY PANIC!!!11!!
That's about what it amounts to.
We can and should design safer nuclear fission reactors, and we have plenty of experience to guide us in those new designs, and we should build and employ those reactors to save us from ourselves. Eventually I am confident we'll have fusion power, too. In the meantime we can continue to deploy so-called 'renewables' to fill in the gaps as we stop burning things to generate power, which is the most important thing we need to do.
Before we begin building new reactors we need to develop or employ the technology to handle the "little" waste they produce. Nearly every reactor in the U.S. ( i don't know about other countries) have pools they keep their spent rods in. These pools were originally meant to be temporary storage. Nearly 100% of spent fuel rods are still sitting in these pools and they are at or exceeding capacity with no clear solution in site.
And before we start the game of assigning blame let us not forget that it is still
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Re: Nuclear energy is by far the safest form of e (Score:2)
Big oil has been promoting nuclear (big oil is in the business of mining). Big green however has been promoting solar and wind which in Germany has proven unable to provide.
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You're pretty confused, but I appreciate your sentiment.
Firstly, the reactor at Chernobyl was an RBMK-1000 reactor, which had a very high positive void coefficient. What this means is that - in the event there's a void in the moderator (e.g. bubbles because it's boiling due to overheating) - the reaction accelerates rapidly. One of the changes made to all existing RBMK reactors following the accident at Chernobyl was a retrofit to the fuel assembly adding absorbers to cause a permanent negative void coeffic
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Glorious Soviet newspaper Pravda brought you real story back when Chernobyl was a topic. Said "our glorious hard workers at power plant Chernobyl managed to fulfill five year plan of power production in mere five milliseconds".
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Incorrect. Chernobyl was a positive void coefficient design, which is why it was so dangerous.
Fukushima Daiichi was a negative void coefficient design, thought to be much safer. Well, in fairness it was much safer, just not safe enough.
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Germany hasn't built a reactor since 1982. Which rather invalidates the point you were trying to make.
No, it doesn't.
If people want safe(r) nuclear power then they need to build nuclear reactors like those built in the 1980s, and not keep the ones built in the 1970s open longer.
Germany's policy of no new nuclear has caused more death, and a lower quality of life, by keeping their old nuclear power plants open while they scramble to build enough windmills and solar panels.
Germany will have to build new nuclear power plants or become reliant on Russian natural gas and whatever electricity they can import from
Re: Nuclear energy is by far the safest form of en (Score:5, Insightful)
You are criticising Germany for their nuclear power policy 40-50 years ago - that's ancient history.
No, I'm criticizing their continued policy of no new nuclear.
The policy of no new nuclear of 40 years ago is ancient history but their continuing this policy until today makes this open for criticism now. Had they changed this policy at any time in the last 40 years, and this includes just last year, then we would not be talking about this problem they are having now.
Germany will be building new nuclear power plants soon enough. They don't have any option to do otherwise. Well, they could cease to be an independent nation, that's perhaps the most likely outcome of failing to build new nuclear power plants soon.
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(What ever opinion you might have: Please do not moderate pure opinion statements without arguments or data "insightful". They are not.)
There is no indication that Germany will have to build new nuclear: The energy transition for electricity production works too well. Germany increased renewables from 105 TWh (17%) to 243 TWh (40%) pro year from 2010 to 2019 while decreasing lignite from 146 TWh to 114 TWh can hard coal 117 TWh to 57 TWh and nuclear from 141 TWh to 75 TWh. And there a simulation studies (
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In the UK there is a policy to build new nuclear, but it's failing because nuclear is so incredibly expensive. We just can't afford it.
Germany won't build any new nuclear, it's too expensive and they have better alternatives now. Anyway they have big industries reliant on renewable energy continuing to increase so a sudden pivot towards older, established tech that only one big company can provide would trash their economy.
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What possible reason could they have to build nuclear instead of CCGT?
Greta Thunberg
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The thing with nuclear power is that companies who want to build one, want it financed by the tax-payer. And they also won't accept carrying all the risk associated for it. The taxpayer would have to foot that bill, eventually.
The risk may be very low - but the expected value of the damages is beyond what any insurer could bear.
This is the free market at work, folks. Nothing to see here.
Also, nobody wants to be near the waste and nobody wants to have a waste-processing facility in their neighborhood either.
Re:Nuclear energy is by far the safest form of ene (Score:5, Insightful)
tell that to all the people at Chernobyl and Fukushima, there I said it.
Sure, as long as you tell all the people who died from mining and burning coal, drilling for oil and natural gas and the pollution from burning it, installers who fell off of roofs installing solar panels, those who died building dams and those who died when they failed.
Per kilowatt generated, nuclear is still the safest option. But like all other forms of power generation, it has it's issues. Solar is in a similar position that nuclear was in back in the 1950's. But there is no good solution for when panels reach EOL. Yeah, I know, they are virtually 100% recyclable. Except that's not what is happening nor is there any real program set up to deal with the current panels, let alone when 15 or 20% or our power comes from solar. They are going to the landfill because it's not financially viable to do anything else with them when they are no longer needed. Basically there is no plan for the waste, just like what happened with nuclear power back when it was going to save the world.
According to the Institute for Energy Research [institutef...search.org] there were 250 thousand metric tons of solar panel waste in the world at the end of 2016 and could be 78 million metric tons by 2050, According to them, rainwater has been found to be able to flush cadmium out of intact solar panels. That doesn't sound so great.
There's no free lunch when it comes to power generation. Once you scale any of the known methods up they have some major drawbacks. Nuclear just happens fail catastrophically when it does. But most of those failures could have been avoided if not for greed. Since uranium and plutonium are also used in warheads, it makes nuclear an extra scary boogeyman.
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nor is there any real program set up to deal with the current panels
I'm sure there is - at least around here. [reuters.com]
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But like all other forms of power generation, it has it's issues. Solar is in a similar position that nuclear was in back in the 1950's. But there is no good solution for when panels reach EOL. Yeah, I know, they are virtually 100% recyclable. Except that's not what is happening nor is there any real program set up to deal with the current panels, let alone when 15 or 20% or our power comes from solar. They are going to the landfill because it's not financially viable to do anything else with them when they are no longer needed. Basically there is no plan for the waste, just like what happened with nuclear power back when it was going to save the world.
What we need is the development of high tech, large scale, efficient, recycling plants.
It's seems like the perfect timing for the perfect opportunity. Think about it, overwhelming abundance of waste of all forms. Most of it you could get for almost nothing if not free.
Nearly unlimited raw materials with potentially much lower refinement costs.
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What we need is the development of high tech, large scale, efficient, recycling plants.
It's seems like the perfect timing for the perfect opportunity. Think about it, overwhelming abundance of waste of all forms. Most of it you could get for almost nothing if not free.
Nearly unlimited raw materials with potentially much lower refinement costs.
Just one problem. Recycling requires lots of energy. And if energy is costly, its cheaper to make new stuff than to recycle old stuff. Except for Aluminium, almost all materials are currently in this situation. If we had lots of cheap CO2 free energy (where would we ever get that), then we can lower the cost of power which both makes more recycling efforts cost effective. It also has the nice side effect of reducing the amount of fossil fuel exploration as its more cost effective to drill when energy i
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It's worth pointing out here that TFA is wrong. Nuclear in Germany is not carbon free, far from it.
Also the Institute for Energy Research you cite is a Koch front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
No kidding (Score:2)
Of course they did, nuclear powerplant emissions are effectively 0 in the short term, and everything else is non-zero.
Re: No kidding (Score:2)
There is no requirement to store nuclear energy, let alone waste energy storing it.
What we have buried in mountains is unspent and military-grade nuclear power, it's not only perfectly usable, it is actually not very harmful (hence why you can swim in a pool of spent fuel rods), but it could be used for nefarious purposes in sufficient quantities and with the right tools which even Iran and North Korea is finding very difficult to do.
should have been linked to renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
On a one for one reliable baseload capacity replacement basis.
All very doable. Challenging but doable, with smart grid technology helping ensure the power stability and energy availability.
The shutdown schedule should have been thus mandated to be on a net-zero GHG increases basis.
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The odd thing is that they did, kinda. Germany has been giving out HUGE incentives for installing home solar for awhile now, and have been paying for that with an additional surcharge on their electric bills. It's also one the reasons why electricity in Germany is so expensive compared to many other nations in the EU.
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and have been paying for that with an additional surcharge on their electric bills.
The renewable-energy surcharge, assessed against residential customers to pay for guaranteed prices to 'green' energy producers, has climbed 770% since 2006, and German households pay 50% more for their electricity than they did then -- roughly three times what Americans pay for their electricity.
Nobody wants Windmills (Score:2)
Windmills are a controversial in Germany -- they clutter the landscape.
But I suppose that they can just buy their power from France. Solves it nicely.
Re:Nobody wants Windmills (Score:4, Insightful)
The fun thing is that the last years, France had to import quite a bit of electricity from Germany, both in the Winter (their nuclear power plants did not produce enough power) and in the summer (it got so warm they had to shut down nuclear power plants because of insufficient cooling).
Yes, for about a total of 7 days over a decade. You are missing the 30 months during that same period where the power flowed in the other direction. But do go on and tell us about how the plural of anecdote is data.
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If Germany was intent on getting out of nuclear due to radiation catastrophe risk, it would have been better served to link the schedule of shutting down to a schedule of rapidly increasing wind, solar, grid-storage, and HVDC transmission line development.
Uh...they literally did. This is the result. [energytransition.org]
"Study" is a bit heavy on bullshit. (Score:2)
It shows marginal increase in use of fossil fuels, with the reduction of the numbers of all fossil fuel plants except those running on natural gas.
Meanwhile, renewable power almost tripled, covering and outpacing the reduction in nuclear and hard coal electricity, by some 21.9 TWh annually.
While lignite use went up by 7 TWh, gas by 18.7 TWh and oil by 1.9 TWh annually.
As total capacity and production increased, and wholesale prices and electricity imports went down.
I.e. Coal use went up by 5.34% (lignite) a
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Oooops...
It should say "I.e. Coal use went up by 5.34% (lignite) and DOWN BY 11.07% (hard coal)..."
Re: "Study" is a bit heavy on bullshit. (Score:2)
Please do write a paper on it. Germany's pricing for energy has increased significantly while the total energy consumption from green sources has barely budged.
What you're quoting is energy production capacity. Sure they have a theoretical capacity to produce green energy, but at the wrong times at which point (a few days/year) they sell excess capacity at negative prices.
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Your chart shows that despite massive investment in renewables, the fossil baseload has not significantly budged.
"The fossil baseload" has decreased from around 380 TWh in 2003, when the phaseout was agreed upon, to around 280 TWh in 2019. This is *despite* the decrease of nuclear generation from around 170 TWh to around 75 TWh in the same period.
And because of cuts in the nuclear baseload, Germany is belching more carbon than ever.
This is demonstrably false, see above. All that the nuclear phaseout did was to slow down the decrease in carbon emissions from the electricity sector; it didn't reverse ti.
many power plants that are built to run on it exclusively now burn anthracite imported from West Virginia
Tough luck there; hard coal generation exhibits the fastest decrease in Germany because of high hard co
They are burning Lignite! Diry Dirty coal (Score:2)
If they kept their nuclear they could have phased out the lignite.
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How exactly? The only storage technology currently available to carry renewable power across a dunkelflaute is pumped hydro and Germany doesn't have a lot of terrain for that.
http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/gl... [anu.edu.au]
For HVDC Europe is small, so you could argue they could do it within an EU context. Germany alone though, I don't see how.
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It was linked to renewables but not with the correct timeframe. The political pressure to shutdown nuclear was strong and wasn't waiting around for wind to be built.
I do question the results of the study since every source I've seen shows Germany has lower emissions now than before they started the shutdown, although they had brief uptick in coal consumption during 2 years following the shutdown, they've reduced coal consumption year on year for the past 6 years running and replaced those (as well as their
Re: should have been linked to renewables (Score:2)
Germany has done a good job at hiding and obfuscating their failed energy policy.
They have set up trading systems within the EU and UN where they will pay money to transfer their emissions to other countries. All their government operations are carbon neutral because they paid off another country (typically certain Asian and East European where emission reports are flexible) to take the carbon.
This doesn't scientifically reduce the stuff they have in the air, but it lets them report that they do. Welcome to
It was the will of the people (Score:5, Interesting)
It might have been stupid and it might have raised their power prices and their emissions but it _was_ what the public wanted.
There were plenty of polls, after the fukashima accident public opinion turned against nuclear power. When 80% of the country is against it, it simply doesn't matter if they are wrong or it's a bad idea.
Remember the German people experienced directly the results of the Chernobyl disaster, milk and dairy was tainted for years within a circle of countries that supplied Germany and there was a lot of agricultural products in their market with isotopes that weren't safe for children. The average German dealt with this daily for decades afterwards giving them a unique exposure to the risk. They accepted that it was simply a soviet thing and that it couldn't happen in the west right up till Fukashima put a lie to that assumption. If the country with the most nuclear power (and presumably some of the best oversight) in the world can have an accident of that scale how could Germany fair with several very old plants? That's why the public turned against nuclear over night.
Re:It was the will of the people (Score:4, Insightful)
There is very big difference - Japan is near ocean, and has tsunamis and earthquakes, while germany has none.
Re:It was the will of the people (Score:4, Interesting)
We've had designs for sodium cooled reactors since the 1960's that would have made 3 mile island, chernobyl and fukushima impossible.
The EBR 2 for example.. in the 80's a couple of tests were run:
1: the coolant pumps were shut down while the reactor was at full power
2. shutting off the secondary cooling system (on the same day!)
The reactor was designed so that overheating (the result from both tests), thermal expansion would cause the reactor to shut down without any intervention. And this was built in the early 1960's.
The FUD that nuclear is subject to basically boils down to looking at insane designs that were chosen for .. reasons, despite much better alternatives being available -- and assuming that's the only way it can be done.
Re:It was the will of the people (Score:5, Interesting)
None of that logic mattered. They saw a country with a lot of nuclear power experience and a lot of wealth have a major disaster. This wasn't a poorly maintained 50 year old Soviet plant.
You can't disregard the German experience with Chernobyl, they had firsthand experience with radiologic contamination and what it meant to the food chain and thousands of industries. Their politicians had also told them Chernobyl could never happen in the west, that it was the result of the decaying Soviet system. When they saw Fukashima the public saw something they never wanted to risk.
If you are curious look at how quickly the protests started after Fukashima. The German public felt they'd been lied to and that the risk wasn't worth the cost savings. This likely wouldn't have happened elsewhere, you didn't see similar protests in Sweden (arguably far more impacted by Chernobyl) or France. It was a unique result because of how the public was sold on nuclear power post Chernobyl. When the government tells you for 30 years that it can't happen and then it does you can toss all public support out the window, facts be damned.
Re: It was the will of the people (Score:4, Insightful)
Chernobyl was the worst disaster possible and handled improperly, yet there was no risk outside the immediate vicinity of the plant. There have been no radiation issues or increases in cancer from Chernobyl across Europe.
Fukushima was likewise a tempest in a teapot, more people died due to the forced and failed evacuating of the area than to any effect the radiation could've feasibly had. The media showed crazy flows of radioactive spread in the ocean which didn't happen and didn't mean anything because the ocean is huge and already mildly radioactive.
We've had various nuclear events across the last 100 years. Nevada, Russia, Japan (x3), New York City, Bahamas - I don't see any of those places void of life and people or anywhere more dangerous due to radiation.
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There is very big difference - Japan is near ocean, and has tsunamis and earthquakes, while germany has none.
It wasn't a tsunami that took down Chernobyl. It was the stupidity of people. Don't ever equate "risk" to a single scenario. Risk is the culmination of all possible scenarios and their probabilities.
Re:It was the will of the people (Score:5, Insightful)
" When 80% of the country is against it, it simply doesn't matter if they are wrong or it's a bad idea."
Do you really believe that?
Because I'm going to guess if you phrase the question correctly, you could get 80% agreement from a selection of the American body politic to pretty much anything.
Re:It was the will of the people (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember the German people experienced directly the results of the Chernobyl disaster
That's like saying we need to stop flying all the airplanes because of some crashes with the 737 MAX.
Not all reactors are built the same, and the RBMK design at Chernobyl was a very unsafe design and unique to the Soviet Union. There will not be another accident like at Chernobyl because those reactors do not exist any more. All the RBMK reactors have since been dismantled or so heavily modified that they aren't the same kind of reactor any more.
If the public is opposed to nuclear power then this is because of some widespread FUD about nuclear power. I'm sure the natural gas and solar industries would be quite pleased to see this FUD spread far and wide.
What the public got for buying into this FUD is higher energy costs, more pollution, greater reliance on foreign energy, and the destruction of their domestic nuclear power industry which will be difficult to rebuild. Oh, and more dead people.
Re: It was the will of the people (Score:2)
You can say plus Chernobyl. More people died from the explosions and evacuation than the radiation. Even so, the USSR regime was forcing hundreds of prisoners and military to work inside the core of the reactor to clean up and safe face in the first days before international inspections were done, completely unprotected. And less than a dozen died to radiation poisoning.
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> There were plenty of polls, after the fukashima accident public opinion turned against nuclear power. When 80% of the country is against it, it simply doesn't matter if they are wrong or it's a bad idea.
You are writing an epitaph for the human race, you realize.
Re:It was the will of the people (Score:4, Informative)
There were plenty of polls, after the fukashima accident public opinion turned against nuclear power. When 80% of the country is against it, it simply doesn't matter if they are wrong or it's a bad idea.
Post-Fukushima polls are irrelevant since the scheduled phaseout became the law almost ten years before Fukushima.
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The Chernobyl death toll [wikipedia.org] is estimated as being 4000 lives. In total. At 1100 deaths per year it won't take long to surpass this.
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It was what the answer the public wanted, but that answer wasn't the best answer to the problem the public wanted solved - if you believe that problem was to reduce some combination of CO2 emissions and safety risks.
There are a lot of very complicated problems whose solutions are not obvious. Our present systems of government are not very effective at solving those types of problems.
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Germany is a republic and it wouldn't have mattered. The 20% of the population that didn't care couldn't resist the will of the 80% that did care and cared a whole lot. People cared so much about this they were willing to pull the whole government down to get it to happen.
And still no place for nuclear waste was found (Score:2)
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Fire it into the Sun. Ain't nobody living there.
Unfortunately we don't have the technology to do this with the large quantities of nuclear waste(you need at least 2-3 times the energy to put something into the sun than put it on the surface of the moon). And even for small quantities it would be costly beyond measure. And if one in a hundred rockets go wrong (BANG!) it would be BAD.
Germany is shutting down all coal power plants... (Score:5, Informative)
This analysis ignores the fact that Germany is on track to shut down all coal power generation plants, reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to 55% of their 1990 levels. So they're not really shifting nuclear to coal, they're shifting everything to renewables and natural gas, which is far less polluting than coal, and far less risky than nuclear power. https://www.aljazeera.com/ajim... [aljazeera.com] .
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The entire analysis seems strange. Germany had precisely 2 years of uptick in net coal consumption, and those were the year of the first wave of shutdowns and the year immediately following. Since then there's been a steady string of nuclear reactors being shutdown as well as a year on year drop in coal consumption, which is now far lower than it was before the nuclear shutdown begin.
The entire story smells. /disclosure: I'm currently working on a major project that exists solely because the government is s
Moderation in all things (Score:5, Insightful)
Nukes would be bad if we only used them. But our problem is the too much fossil fuels. As such, getting rid of nukes leads to major problems.
Coal plants create more radiation and radiation related deaths than nukes do. Kill coal, save the nukes.
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I have to say I really enjoyed that website. I wish the US had something like it, let alone had such good numbers.
I also have to LOVE the description for Hydro, which includes:
".. provides very useful power (if it's rained recently!)...."
Most of the US hydro runs pretty constantly, as long as it is not a drought year.
Huh? (Score:2)
"Altogether, the researchers calculated that the increased carbon emissions and deaths caused by local air pollution amounted to a social cost of about $12 billion per year," the report says "The study found that this dwarfs the cost of keeping nuclear power plants online by billions of dollars, even when the risks of a meltdown and the cost of nuclear waste storage are considered."
While I will agree that since the Germans have the damn things bought and paid for it would have made sense to keep the Nuclear plants round for a while longer and phase them out last. But, how do they reach the conclusion that cleaning up a nuclear power plant meltdown will cost less that $12 billion? If one of the German nuclear plants melts down the ~EUR 3 billion the operators have to pay out is dwarfed by the potential costs, the cost of the Fukushima disaster is currently at around $200 billion and co
Cost of people... (Score:2)
The Green Nuclear Deal (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully America can avoid this. I'm seeing Republicans support what's been called the "Green Nuclear Deal".
https://www.axios.com/climate-... [axios.com]
The Republicans are giving their counter offer to the Democrats "Green New Deal". This means planting more trees, better management of plastic waste, and more energy from nuclear and natural gas. We saw what happened in Germany, it would be wise to not repeat their mistakes. The Republicans aren't all on board with the Democrats on there being a "climate crisis", they only agree that pollution in the air and water is a problem.
So, what's the problem then? The Democrats will not support nuclear power. Why? Because they are ignorant, foolish, or have something in mind for our energy policy besides lowering CO2 emissions.
Here's what's going to happen, the Democrats will lose on this. The Democrat's energy policy is not viable, but the Republican's plan will work. The Republican's plan will reduce CO2 output, even if that is not an intended goal.
I don't care if the the Republicans and Democrats can agree on why we need a new energy policy, only that they agree on the plan to solve the problems. The Republicans can keep denying that global warming is not a problem while building nuclear power plants. The Democrats will have to agree to build new nuclear power at some point, because the lights will go out, or we end up like Germany, if they don't.
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Nearby French Nuclear plants (Score:2)
FALSE! RWE lobbied! (Score:2, Insightful)
RWE is our large lignin mining corporation. The dirtiest fucking fossil fuel, mined by the dirtiest fuckin fuel fossils.
They loobied the government to deliberately stifle renewables to death.
The got wind turbines banned 3km around every settlement. Which, in dense Germany, means EVERYWHERE. (I think there is one tiny patch left in Bavaria.)
And solar power's tax incentives got killed too. Despite working and doing what they should.
Meanwhile, they keep strip-mining Germany's nasty "too shitty to even deserve
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This is a RWE thing. They are directly responsible for that emissions spike.
What emissions spike? [cleanenergywire.org]
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Wrong. The government is only discussing it, the number is 1 km, not 3 and it has already disappeared from the latest draft.
Who exactly has appointed you to speak for the whole country? I don't hate RWE. I don't care about them.
Wind and solar don't work in Germany (Score:2, Informative)
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on hot summer days when the wind blows
Go away, troll. You're very obvious. Everyone knows that in Europe, wind generation is the strongest on winter nights, not on summer days.
because (Score:5, Informative)
The environmentalist movement is anti-environment. It works to close down clean nuclear power and is only a front for the oil, gas and coal producers which compete with nuclear.
Over the last three years, the five largest publicly-traded oil and gas companies, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total invested a whopping one billion dollars into advertising and lobbying for renewables and other climate-related ventures.
More here [forbes.com].
Don't buy in before you check the numbers (Score:5, Informative)
It's clearly that this study was written by people supporting nuclear energy, and if you look at the numbers it seems they are right, at first.
During the aftermath of the Fukushima incident from 2011 - 2013 specific CO2 emissions grew, as older nuclear power plants were shut down rather rapidly, by a change of heart of former pro nuclear Angela Merkel.
However after that, specific CO2 per kWh produced has a negative trend, slow which also has to do with slow adapting of grid to transfer more power (from windy north to stale south).
The problem with nuclear energy is, that it is an inverted junkie that just cannot stop producing energy, because of its slow reaction times and thermal stress cycles cutting the life time expectancy, and thus will hinder any renewable energy production that is if depending on wind and sun to be introduced to the grid.
This is the french dilemma, with an aging fleet of nuclear power plants, they just can't really reduce power output of nuclear power plants and they are giving away energy - nearly for free but cannot really adapt to renewable energy as they cannot integrate such.
What makes nuclear energy also problematic is that nuclear power plants have a low Gigawatt time to grid - meaning you need so very long to build a plant instead of other plants.
https://energy-charts.de/energ... [energy-charts.de]
trend of specific CO2 emissions per kWh:
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de... [umweltbundesamt.de]
destructive politics (Score:2)
Germany's politics for the past 20 years have been actively destructive to the country. Energy is only one of them. (source: I am German)
You would think that someone would stand up and say "don't you think that's completely bonkers?" among the government, but apparently they're all too high for that.
So what's happened is that nuclear has been shut down after Fukushima (the 3rd 180 degree turn of opinion by the same government on the same subject, by the way), while coal continues to get heavy subsidies, whi
Re:NIMBY here (Score:5, Informative)
You might try a little perspective on the matter. Not sure where you're getting "high risks" from. High risk compared to what?
4 people are estimated to have been impacted by radiation from the Nuclear Power plant portion of the disaster. One has since died. 40 more people were evacuated from a hospital in the area, so you could potentially link them as well.
More than 18,000 people died in the quake and tsunami at Fukushima. In terms of deaths related to the earthquake and tsunami, the people related to the nuclear plant incident are still people, but they're also a rounding error.
In terms of deaths per TWh of energy production, the safest is nuclear, oil and coal is in the middle, while rooftop solar is worst because relatively lots of people die when they're working on roofs. So if you're concern is risk and saving lives, ban rooftop solar and convert everything to nuclear.
Sorry, but this is exactly what I'm talking about (Score:2)
There's also the niggling thought that many the gov't is lying and the city isn't yet safe, and we'll find out in 20 year
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You aren't a NIMBY. That's not what a NIMBY is. NIMBY means "Not In My Backyard" and refers to someone who says the technology is safe and tells everyone else to use it, but objects when one is proposed nearby them. An example would be someone who supports offshore wind power, then fights the zoning permit because it blocks their ocean view. Or someone who wants everyone to stop burning fossil fuels, but objects to a nearby wind farm because it lowers their property value.
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Fukushima and my general distrust for businesses (who will always cut a corner to save a buck) are what make me a NIMBY.
It sounds like you are more of a BANANA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If the objection was over a nuclear power plant in your backyard then that's a NIMBY. If the objection is over building a nuclear power plant anywhere then that's being a BANANA.
can anyone here change my mind?
If your stance was based on intelligence and knowledge instead of ignorance and emotion then nobody would have to convince you of anything.
What I'm getting at is this: Nuclear power carries high risks.
Compared to what? This means nothing unless compared to alternatives.
I don't see articles written that explain how I could know quickly and easily and without spending hours studying the subject whether a proposed reactor design is safe or not. Instead my concerns, which were born out by Fukushima in spectacular discussion, get dismissed with a stream of techno-jargon that's to be blunt off-putting.
Oh, noes!!! We can't expect you to have your stance