Germany Drops Opposition To Nuclear Power 77
An anonymous reader shares a report: Germany has dropped its long-held opposition to nuclear power, in the first concrete sign of rapprochement with France by Berlin's new government led by conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
Berlin has signalled to Paris it will no longer block French efforts to ensure nuclear power is treated on par with renewable energy in EU legislation, according to French and German officials.
The move resolves a major dispute between the two countries that has delayed decisions on EU energy policy, including during the crisis that followed Russiaâ(TM)s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Berlin has signalled to Paris it will no longer block French efforts to ensure nuclear power is treated on par with renewable energy in EU legislation, according to French and German officials.
The move resolves a major dispute between the two countries that has delayed decisions on EU energy policy, including during the crisis that followed Russiaâ(TM)s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
That doesn't mean... (Score:3)
that they will build any of their own.
Re: That doesn't mean... (Score:2)
But it does open up additional opportunities for other EU countries to build their own.
Re: That doesn't mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are no restrictions on EU countries building their own, the point here is that France has long been trying to get nuclear power treated as equal to renewable energy in the EU legislative text. Nuclear fails to stand on its own in cost benefit analysis and would benefit greatly from text that puts it on par with renewables in terms of meeting EU energy goals.
It's a baby step at best.
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A lot of additional cost comes from all the delays due to objections.
That cost-benefit calculation might look shockingly different if people had les bias against the technology.
This might help normalize the situation.
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Re: That doesn't mean... (Score:1)
Nobody has yet figured out how to build power lines which connect to fantasy land.
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I can only assume you are referring to the 'clean' part of that statement.
Obviouslu nuclear isn't squeaky clean. Wind and solar arent either. We're always talking clean in relative terms. And since carbon emissions are the current big bad, I think the term is appropriate.
haha flamebait (Score:1)
The nuclear playboy clowns are the ones setting the world on fire with their antique technology.
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Nuclear has higher lifecycle CO2 emissions than wind or solar, because of site and mining considerations. They're not much higher in absolute terms, but they are much higher in relative ones.
No it doesn't liar. The median for nuclear is 12 g CO2 per kWh, wind is 11-12(on shore and off shore), and solar is 41. And that is from an IPCC lifecycle analysis. French nuclear is even lower since they use nuclear for the own enrichment. Wind and solar are in reality higher since they are intermittent, and they need something else to overcome their gaps in production.
nuclear also costs vastly more money, so we could do much more carbon reduction by not using it.
Germany has spent more than 500 billion euros on renewables to produce electricty dirtier than Texas. Germany Failed! If they spe
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Do you have a citation on the higher CO2 emissions from nuclear fission than wind or solar? Here's a web page with a few citations: https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
Here's a web page with a few citations on the cost of nuclear fission versus other options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If the proposed alternatives to nuclear fission is offshore wind and rooftop solar PV then I'd guess the people making such a proposal didn't look at any studies on costs.
If anyone wants to offer sources showing that nu
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Maybe they can import them from Iran.
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Re:That doesn't mean... (Score:4, Interesting)
that they will build any of their own.
Indeed they explicitly won't. The article is clear on that. It's actually the buried lede of this story, all the "nuclear renaissance" in Europe so far has amounted to "we won't shut down any more reactors right now". The only one truly pushing nuclear heavily is France and of course they are, it's the government's job to promote their own industry.
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that they will build any of their own.
If only there was a bunch of open land near the borders of Germany.
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They will not. None of the former opartors wants to do it. Because nuclear sucks ecconomically.
Plenty of workers (Score:1)
I'm looking forward the legions of Slashdotters who will quit their work-from-home coding and data jobs to move to remote rural areas for 40 years and devote themselves to hot, uncomfortable, 60 hour/week physical jobs with the added bonus of up to 5 REM/year of radiation exposure operating nuclear power plants.
Re: Plenty of workers (Score:3, Informative)
5 REMs? Are you talking about Chernobyl?
Typical radiation exposure for a nuclear worker is around 2.5mSv/year.
Typical radiation exposure for a resident of Denver is 10mSv/year.
So, no, I would probably not live near Chernobyl, but I would have no issue living near an American nuclear power plant.
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Plus, what happened in Chernobyl is physically impossible [cnet.com] at pretty much any other commercial nuclear reactor ever built. (Not to say other disasters can't, but even Fukushima didn't produce the catastrophic environmental damage of Chernobyl, and that was about as bad as it gets.)
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And you'll be living in the toxic waste dump full of worn out solar panels, lithium batteries, and windmills, next door to the strip mines that produce the rare earths needed to make them, right? Right?
Cuz otherwise, you're just another batshit crazy (and I do mean mentally ill) leftie fascist who gets off on hurting people, like all the lefties. Parasites who know full well their very existence damages other people's lives, and the only way to feel less like pathetic losers is to drag everyone else down to
Reopen the reactors! (Score:3, Insightful)
If they really didn't oppose nuclear power then they wouldn't be shutting down perfectly good nuclear reactors in Germany or preventing the locals of using it. A better description is that Germany is reluctantly turning a blind-eye to nuclear power because they have no other choice.
Re:Reopen the reactors! (Score:4, Interesting)
If they really didn't oppose nuclear power then they wouldn't be shutting down perfectly good nuclear reactors
The Germany government that made this decision didn't shut down a single reactor. Not one. In fact they were critical of the previous government for closing the last three, but only because energy prices where high at the time it was done.
The story here is that Germany was opposed to calling nuclear power green and lumping it in with green subsidy programs with the rest of the EU, something that France has been heavily pushing since they would be the ones building them and thus their industry would profit if EU legislation promoted their somewhat unique product in Europe.
As for your title, it's a bit silly. Germany closed and decommissioned its reactors. They weren't mothballed in the hope that something will change in the future. Reopening an already shuttered nuclear facility is a monumental task. Also you are ignoring the age of there reactors. These should be replaced with new ones, not having the old ones re-opened. It's the equivalent of putting old cars without seatbelts back on the street rather than building new cars - it will end badly. End of life is a thing, despite how people choose to ignore it and the vast majority of Germany's nuclear power industry fitted that description to a T (although a couple of stations were still in relatively good condition).
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The story here is that Germany was opposed to calling nuclear power green and lumping it in with green subsidy programs with the rest of the EU, something that France has been heavily pushing since they would be the ones building them and thus their industry would profit if EU legislation promoted their somewhat unique product in Europe.
TFA is paywalled, so I can't confirm, but TFS says:
Berlin has signalled to Paris it will no longer block French efforts to ensure nuclear power is treated on par with renewable energy in EU legislation, according to French and German officials.
That doesn't sound like Germany has suddenly agreed to label nuclear energy as "green" or "renewable" -- just to treat it the same way as renewables are in EU legislation. Someone with access to TFA, please confirm.
Re: Reopen the reactors! (Score:2)
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I have my doubts on this given the number of announcements of nations willing to build more nuclear power plants. I suspect these nations did their own studies on what is the lowest cost and lest time consuming options. Am I to believe some internet rando over a government agency with people that specialize in such studies?
But we are supposed to uncritically believe some internet rando (you) that at all of these nations did their own studies on what is the lowest cost and least time consuming options and that these decisions were done without the influence of corruption and were not influenced by conservative political ideology that dictates solar energy is somehow tainted by communism or some other asinine political bullshit like that? A equivalent renewable plant can be built at worst for the equivalent amount of money assu
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The Germany government that made this decision didn't shut down a single reactor. Not one. In fact they were critical of the previous government for closing the last three, but only because energy prices where high at the time it was done.
LIES. They are on record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
the Greens achieved a major success as a governing party through the 2000 decision to phase out the use of nuclear energy.
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A better description is that Germany is reluctantly turning a blind-eye to nuclear power because they have no other choice.
Maybe it's just the reich thing to do. :-)
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There are no "perfectly good reactors" in Germany. You are a clueless idiot for claiming that. Incidentally, none of the power companies owning them wanted to keep them running without mountains of government money before as nuclear is just an excessively bad deal ecconomically.
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RIIIIIIGHT.... [brusselssignal.eu]
It's about time (Score:4, Insightful)
You can blame the Merkie government for their deference to Russian gas for the lack of nuclear power in Germany. Fukushima was just a convenient excuse. It's also a pipe dream to think we can run the world on solar and wind alone, the physical environment just won't allow it.
Re: It's about time (Score:2)
Germany's internal policies of self-hatred led them to the confused idea that war would never return to Europe unless it was at the hands of the Germans. A bit of that old racial superiority complex kicking in, I'd say.
Re:It's about time (Score:4, Interesting)
It's also a pipe dream to think we can run the world on solar and wind alone, the physical environment just won't allow it.
It could be done with superconducting intercontinental power lines and storage. You may say that's not a realistic solution, but it's still slightly more realistic than adding nuclear capacity to the grid on a timescale that would be relevant to addressing global warming.
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adding nuclear capacity to the grid on a timescale that would be relevant to addressing global warming.
Everyone is using 2050 as a benchmark for net zero. That is 25 years away. Yes, we should have started much sooner. There will be plenty of opportunity to assign blame, but still better to start later then never. Putting it off even longer won't have a better result. 15 years from now you may still be saying there is not enough time, but you are not fooling anyone.
Re: It's about time (Score:3)
Just like the old proverb. "The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today."
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A nuclear power plant is not like a tree, it's not something where you can bury a seed in a suitable place, forget about it, and expect a tree in a couple of decades with no effort if nothing disastrous happens. It requires decades of constant effort that must go according to plan with no unforeseen problems to avoid further delays or even total cancellation, during which time the grid will continue to be powered by fossil fuels:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
To repurpose a saying about Everest climbers,
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Keep in mind that the slow permitting and build time doesn't just mean you have to wait a fixed amount of time to get a nuclear plant ready to go like popcorn from a microwave, it means vulnerability to further delays and even cancellations. The incredibly slow process of taking a nuclear power plant from idea to functioning power source leaves it vulnerable to fairly uncommon situations like war, natural disasters, economic collapses, changing societal attitudes (as often happens after notable nuclear disa
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Keep in mind that the slow permitting and build time doesn't just mean you have to wait a fixed amount of time to get a nuclear plant ready to go like popcorn from a microwave, it means vulnerability to further delays and even cancellations.
China has no issues with this. Red tape is a western problem, and it applies to renewables too. I get a good laugh out of people protesting and challenging offshore wind using the same tactics as the anti-nuclear crowd. They are all the same kind of people.
Meanwhile renewable power systems like wind, solar and tidal can be whipped out and dropped into place like a camping chair in comparison, often within a single leadership term of a democratic country.
A democratic country with import contracts as backup. There is another thread on /. today discussing Denmark and their lack of inertia. Raw renewable energy is cheap. The storage, transmission, synthetic inertia, grid following inverters and other t
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p>It could be done with superconducting intercontinental power lines and storage. You may say that's not a realistic solution, but it's still slightly more realistic than adding nuclear capacity to the grid on a timescale that would be relevant to addressing global warming.
Just for solar you would need to cover an area equivalent to the size of Spain and that just meets the current needs if you want storage you need to increase that to fill the storage. Then what's the environment impact for all those batteries? The super conducting thing that doesn't exist won't be available before Fusion comes on line commercially. I'll put a long bet on that.
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Storage doesn't necessarily mean batteries, but we have to weigh whatever's needed for storage against all the fossil fuels that will need to be mined and burned for decades while we wait for new nuclear power plants to hopefully make it all the way to producing electricity.
We have the technology to make superconducting intercontinental power lines right now, net-positive fusion power is barely crossing the line from science fiction to early lab experiments. I'd put my money on the Wires in Cold Tubes.
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50 years if you try to re-power it with nuclear, maybe 5-20 if you try to re-power it with renewables.
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You can blame the Merkie government for their deference to Russian gas for the lack of nuclear power in Germany.
The Merkel government had nothing to do with it. You can blame the popular will of the people for this. Shutting down nuclear power was an overwhelmingly popular policy in Germany. The Merkel government was objectively pro nuclear and the decision to shutdown nuclear plants only occurred after multiple massive sustained protests involving literally 100s of thousands of people each time. The Fukushima disaster catalysed the protest movement and the government changed its policy. So popular is that view that
So it wasn't a terrible idea (Score:2)
Those kind of connections are why India and Pakistan haven't started a full-scale war between themselves. Potentially dragging the rest of the world into world war III
The problem is Russia is such a lockdown terrifying dictatorship that Putin couldn't care less about how much suffering his people
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You are an idiot. Nobody ever claimed the world would need to be on wind and solar only. Except you.
Greens, the time to apologise is now. (Score:1, Troll)
Hopefully, now the world has seen how stupid you were (and probably still are), there is still time to save the planet.
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Greens had no effect on global warming, as is evident from graphs of CO_2 concentrations, assuming you believe global CO_2 is the key to global warming.
What the Greens did, however, achieve, is sky high energy prices in Germany and other places in Europe, as well.
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Greens had no effect on global warming
Greens are why the world has 400 reactors and 12,000 thermal coal plants.
Greens aren't your problem (Score:4, Interesting)
France has been able to do it but they are a very weird country. When they tried to raise the retirement age to 64 they had riots in the streets. They actually made their ruling class back down. Here in America they bumped it to 67 and we didn't even blink.
Germany might be okay for a while because of their long-standing history of good engineering practices but I have to admit I would still be a bit nervous with how much neoliberal economics they've got.
I keep coming back to Fukushima which only happened because a handful of CEOs cut corners they were explicitly told not to cut by the engineers.
There's two things that get me with fukushima.
The first is that the city had to be evacuated from 10 years and everyone lost everything property wise.
And the second is public blamed the engineers.
Let me repeat that because it's confusing the people. The public blamed the engineers.
Not the CEOs that we know factually caused the disaster. They got away Scott free. The public blamed the engineers.
Frankly unless you have a culture that is so unlike the rest of the world that you can tell your ruling class, the ceos, to go fuck themselves when they want to raise the retirement age to 64 you have no business running nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power is a social problem not a technical one and that's really hard for people here to wrap their heads around. Nerds don't do well with social problems.
Re:Greens, the time to apologise is now. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, yes. This lie again. Feeling the guilt over your own wrongdoings?
All it takes (Score:2)
is the threat of a blackout to change your mind (spain). But the real problem is them ditching nuclear in the first place, it's going to cost them a lot to get it back up an running. If people could only be sensible.
great (Score:2)
Great. As a former nuclear skeptic I've come around 180, build them out.
Slashdot doing a 180 (Score:2)
I just want to mention that the Denmark article had a bunch of "nuclear lies" posts, and this one seems to have brought out the proponents.
I wonder if anyone on Slashdot has any idea of what they're talking about.
Yeah, we need as many zero-carbon options as possible is all I have to say. All of them, without preconceptions.
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No. We need working, cost-effective zero-carbon options. We do not need old, failed tech that is excessively expensive, bad for the grid and comes with a host of other problems.
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No. We need working, cost-effective zero-carbon options.
Well since there are zero examples of a country deep decarbonize with solar and wind, you must mean nuclear when you said "We need working, cost-effective zero-carbon options"
Germany spent 500 billion euros on their energy transition and failed
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Nuclear proponents are all willing to push fission reactors as much as they can, but are unwilling to take any responsability if something goes wrong. And when something goes wrong with this type of reactor, it goes really wrong. At least with a wind farm, even if something goes catastrophically wrong, the worst that can happen is a few cows get beheaded.
And no, leaving the problems of nuclear waste and soil and ground water contamination to future generations to deal with is not acceptable.
Let's face it: C
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So yes, keep current uranium/plutonium fission reactors operational if you must. But do not build new ones. And start deploying new nuclear capacity when, and only when, the new technology is ready.
You ask the impossible, and I suspect you may know this. How is anyone to prove new nuclear fission technology is "ready" without building some prototypes? Isn't that how we prove new aircraft, cars, or most anything else is "ready"?
There's no development of a new technology without building some real world examples and then testing them. What do you propose as an alternative? Computer simulations? How do we know the simulations are accurate without some real world prototypes to set the parameters for
a bit late... (Score:2)
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They are all destroyed. But this is meaningless posturing for the nuclear morons in their voter propulation only. They know nuclear is an old, failed tech.
France is ludicrous (Score:1)
Re: France is ludicrous (Score:1)
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Used fuel(aka nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant) is a total non problem. Zero deaths ever. It decays exponentially(meaning all of those dangerous for 1000's of years statements are lies). It is solid meaning it can never leak. And we can fit all of it in a building the size of a walmart.
Meanwhile the waste from fossil fuels and biofuels kill 8.7 million people a year, yet here you are worried about something with kill count of zero. Your priorities are fucked!
The conservative assholes... (Score:2)
... always quick to spend other people's money.
Can editors avoid pay walls please? (Score:1)
The fine article is behind a pay wall, here's something I found that appears to be similar:
https://oilprice.com/Latest-En... [oilprice.com]
I don't see why the EU should not put nuclear fission on equal footing with wind and solar in their effort to reach net-zero CO2 by 2050. That's 25 years away, more than enough time to build a sufficient fleet of nuclear power plants to replace coal and natural gas for producing electricity. That's likely enough time to get to using nuclear fission to produce synthesized hydrocarbons