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What comes out of a coal power plant is unburnt coal, which will contain some amount of carbon 14 which is slightly radioactive.
What comes out of a nuclear power station is water vapor. Which is not even slightly radioactive.
Therefore coal power stations output more nuclear material than nuclear power stations, which output none. We live in a world of idiots.
I think we should include nuclear waste in the output calculation of nuclear power plants. Just the high level waste from nuclear power plants is hundreds of thousands times more radioactive and toxic than coal plant output.
But your are right, we should move away from both of these: coal and nuclear power. And this is actually exactly what the German people want and what the government has decided. Ending coal burning is scheduled for 2038 and complete switch to renewable energy production is scheduled for 2045. This is called the Energiewende (Energy Transition) and here is the government’s page on this topic: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimaschutz/faq-energiewende-2067498
Google translate: https://www-bundesregierung-de.translate.goog/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimaschutz/faq-energiewende-2067498?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Germans agree with this policy and we even want it faster: https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/78-prozent-der-deutschen-wollen-eine-schnellere-energiewende-zr-92219363.html
Fission is still much less impactful in terms of environmental damage and hazard in the transitionary period.
I think this is only true if you have an adequate storage facility, since IMHO the hazards of storing high level nuclear waste for years on end on the surface level in sixteen different intermediate storage facilities all over Germany are greater for the people, animals, plants…the whole biosphere.
Fission waste is stored in pools and dry casks and never hurts anybody during normal operation.
Coal waste is belched into the atmosphere 24/7 and contains many bad substances aside from the radioactive ones.
Fission waste is stored in pools and dry casks and never hurts anybody during normal operation.
Right. During normal operation the risks are minute, but what about threat scenarios outside of normal operation? Starting on page 112 here’s a list of possible threat scenarios as compiled by the Fraunhofer institute: https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/isi/dokumente/ccv/2013/ETTIS_Deliverable_4_4_Catalogue of Threat Scenarios.pdf
Coal waste is belched into the atmosphere 24/7 and contains many bad substances aside from the radioactive ones.
That’s also true. But again, being in opposition of using nuclear power plants as long as there is no long term storage facility, does not mean I’m a coal proponent. Coal will be phased out in 2038 and the idea is to build 40 green hydrogen power plants, to enable the transition. There will be no new coal power plants build in Germany according to the current plan.
Coal will be phased out in 2038
More than 30 years too late… If, instead, these morons had phased out coal FIRST and relied on Nuclear for the transition, how much damage could we have avoided from the imesureable destruction climate change has caused?
I don’t know. I can also ask: How much damage could have been avoided if Chernobyl and Fukushima would have not been built. But IMHO this makes no sense since these hypothetical scenarios are not the topic of this discussion.
Nuclear waste is not even slightly as dangerous as you’ve been led to believe.
I don’t think that’s right. There is a real threat from e.g Plutonium 239 which is extremely carcinogenic and toxic in minute doses.
Here’s a collection of threats relating to nuclear power production and it’s waste starting on page 112: https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/isi/dokumente/ccv/2013/ETTIS_Deliverable_4_4_Catalogue of Threat Scenarios.pdf
You’ve links ETTIS’s risk assessment of nuclear accident likelihood and death count predictions. I would not say that ETTIS is exactly anti-nuclear, as they are pro-green. I could not find anywhere where they communicate their methodology to conclude that four nuclear accidents would occur over 50 years, but if its statistically-based I would say that would not be accurate for modern nuclear systems.
Bund is exactly the type of group the comic above is making fun of. They do not care about the actual chances of meltdown, or the overall safety of nuclear byproduct or nuclear plant operation. They only aim to decommision nuclear power production as much as possible.
I am not against hydrogen power. I do not view it as a feasible technology currently, though. It’s like fusion reactors - always 10 years away. Meanwhile, nuclear fission is here, we could be using it over coal and saving thousands of lives per year but we aren’t.
Renewables are good, but they still cause more fatalities to workers than nuclear plants, and the battery systems and solar systems currently make use nonrenewable rare earth minerals, so I question if renewables are actually as sustainable as advertised.
Chernobyl detonated due to an engineering oversight directly caused from government interference and cost cutting, and was only triggered when a test was rushed, being executed by a shift not trained to conduct the test.
Fukushima Daiichi had an engineering oversight in that they did not design it to withstand the largest earthquake in Japan’s history followed by a tsunami. Meanwhile, Fukushima Daiini was closer to the epicenter, and was able to avoid meltdown.
Even when considering the total number of deaths caused by nuclear plants from explosions, exposure, and health complications, nuclear has killed less than a percent of how many coal has killed. The insane level of opposition does not make sense, and seems to me to only be fueled by fearmongering and ignorance.
Maybe that’d be believable if the dumb fucks switched to something other than FUCKING COAL
But burning natural gas is still a-ok under this plan.
I don’t think that’s true. These are hydrogen power plants. The hydrogen will be produced in times of high yield from renewables and will be used during times of low yield from renewables in order to meet the energy demand
2038? My country stopped burning coal in 2020. This is a piss take by nuclear haters.
What’s your argument here? That this could have happened in Germany also? It’s true, but it didn’t happen here, so we have to deal with the situation at hand.
Yes that’s exactly my point. You’ve been burning coal and will keep burning coal for over a decade because you turned off the nuclear. You should have kept them.
Still it didn’t happen and we have to deal with the situation at hand. I don’t think there’s value in discussing a scenario that is not reality in Germany.
Is it not possible to start them again?
I would also point out that people claiming that stopping nuclear was a success story for the environment are rewriting reality and that everyone else in other countries sees this.
No it’s not possible at the moment because there’s a law in place called the “Atomgesetz” which would have to be changed first and there is no support in the populace for that. Five of the six power plants that have been shutdown in the past few years could technically be restarted in 1-2 years but the 2000 personnel required are not available anymore, and won’t come back if there’s no perspective for next couple of years. This perspective does not exist in Germany at the moment, since the plan is to move to renewables and green hydrogen power plants.
The value is in holding the absolute morons and oil/fossil bootlickers accountable. By the way, you’ve been quite profilic in defending hydrogen and dismissing the fact that it was a huge mistake to close down nuclear power plants. You don’t happen to be an astroturfer by chance, do you?
No argument offered here. Ad hominem fallacy again.
Sure, but the difference is unburnt coal is a negative externality, and nuclear waste is a negative internality (I don’t think this is a word, but it should be). Unburnt coal is not handled by the people producing it, and it’s forced on everyone else. Nuclear waste is easily controlled and managed, and paid for by the people producing it. That’s part of the reason nuclear costs what it costs. It doesn’t hurt anyone and takes up a very small amount of space. Contained in a concrete container, you can stand around it, lick it, or do whatever else you want with it with essentially zero risk. The biggest issue with nuclear is just the bureaucracy that makes them take so long to build that they can’t help with the current issue, and that’s also why micro-reactors are being looked into more seriously lately.
Being against nuclear power does not make me a fossil fuel proponent. We should aim for 100% renewables. Also nuclear power very much hurt tens of thousands of people by causing cancer in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/lisbeth-gronlund/how-many-cancers-did-chernobyl-really-cause-updated/
Yeah, Chernobyl was a big mistake and a fluke. The odds of it happening were super low, and the issue has since been fixed so won’t happen again. Three Mile Island caused very little harm, and the second reactor kept operating for decades. (Chernobyl also had other reactors operating for decades.)
People die all the time. Solar kills more people than nuclear per kwh, believe it or not. No solution causes zero harm and/or damage, including renewable. We need to just utilize the best options available for any given situation and not ignore some because we’re emotionally swayed. Statistically, the nuclear power we have today is some of the safest, cleanest, cheapest energy sources available, but we’ve made it almost impossible to expand in a reasonable fashion, yet coal plants don’t have the same issue.
The half life of C14 is about 4500 years. Due to the age of coal, generally millions on years it tends to contain crazy small amounts of C14, just like petrol.
Crazy small amounts is still a larger amount than zero.
Meanwhile fly ash from coal is MORE radioactive than being near a nuclear plant.
All the comments about the nuclear reactor disasters remind me of a Vsauce video called Risk. . Michael talks about a hypothetical world where “one cigarette pack out of every eighteen thousand seven hundred and fifty contains a single cigarette laced with dynamite that, when lit, violently explodes, blowing the user’s head off. People would be loudly and messily losing their heads every day all over the world but in that imaginary universe the same number of people would die every day because of smoking that already do”. Nuclear disasters are messy, but affect less people than coal plants operating normally.
Yeah, but the only choice isn’t between smoking cigarettes and smoking dynamite sticks. Coal being bad doesn’t make nuclear good. Meltdowns aren’t the only bad things that nuclear reactors can cause. Where I live, people are losing their heads talking about how we need more nuclear power so we can get bigger electric cars to replace bicycles and public transport (not to replace cars with internal combustion engines, of course, because how else would people get on board with building infrastructure for giant electric sports cars than to let pre-existing rustbuckets roam free and keep gas stations in operation).
Don’t spoil the fun, people want to feel smart with no effort.
Coal being bad doesn’t make nuclear good
Except it does, because every single second that you’re running fossil fuels is causing more irreversible damage to our biosphere at a scale we can’t possibly contain, and you must produce electricity somehow. When demand is completely inelastic, a bad option can become a good option as long as there are worse alternatives.
Also burning coal, especially Lignite which is what Germany is burning, has very bad heating value and ironically contains lots of heavy metals and naturally occurring radioactive materials (radon, thorium, uranium, potassium).
All of that goes out the smoke stack into the environment. Radiation levels and cancer rates around coal power plants are significantly increased. But that seems to be no big deal for some ideologues.
It’s not a question of either using coal or nuclear power in Germany. The idea is to phase out coal power production by 2038 and replaced them by building 40 green hydrogen plants in order to be climate neutral by 2045 with renewables, which already are 52% of the German mix and the before mentioned green hydrogen plants.
Here’s a Google translation of a source about the energy transition in Germany:
by building 40 green hydrogen plants
Where would they get hydrogen?
The hydrogen is produced by employing renewables during times of overproduction.
Nuclear disasters are messy, but affect less people than coal plants operating normally.
Not just that, but the disasters we do have with nuclear plants are with old ones. Fukushima was built in 1971, 40 years before the 2011 incident. The meltdown it experienced wouldn’t just be more difficult in modern reactors. It would be impossible by design. We should be building new nuclear partially to retire old dangerous plants.
I understand that it’s supposed to be a shitty comic and not a balanced, reasonable take, but if you’d like to hear a German perspective anyways:
I’m not aware of any official representative lobbying other countries to end nuclear, except of course in nations that build their totally safe reactors near our border. I’m also not aware of us being awarded or recognized for our stance. Individual Germans, like me, will of course have been fed different propaganda than you and will argue accordingly.
No one here likes the coal generators. And with how much cheaper solar is these days, they’re definitely on the way out. But we don’t have a dictatorship anymore, luckily, so even obviously good paths will face pushback, like from entire regions whose jobs are in the coal industry.
We’ve just been able to get a consensus on abolishing nuclear much more quickly for multiple reasons:- Chernobyl directly affected us, including the people running our country. Russia also attacked nuclear reactors in the Ukraine, which certainly reminded people of Chernobyl.
- At the start of the Ukraine war, it was unclear whether Russia might also launch attacks on us, including our nuclear reactors.
- Russia also cut off our natural gas supply. We have practically no own Uranium deposits either, so reducing dependence on foreign nations was definitely in our interest, too.
At the start of the Ukraine war, it was unclear whether Russia might also launch attacks on us, including our nuclear reactors.
Russia hasn’t attacked any nuclear reactors in Ukraine for obvious reasons. The notions that Russia would attack nuclear reactors in Germany is pure absurdity that no sane person could believe.
Russia also cut off our natural gas supply. We have practically no own Uranium deposits either, so reducing dependence on foreign nations was definitely in our interest, too.
That’s a straight up lie. Russia never cut off gas supply to Germany, and in fact has repeatedly stated that one of Nord Stream pipelines is operational. German government is choosing to buy Russian LNG through third parties instead of buying pipeline gas directly.
Well, I don’t know what to tell you. These things have been broadly reported here in Germany. Whom of us was mislead, doesn’t matter for explaining why us Germans have a different stance on things.
Here’s two random articles, but I can send a whole list of links, if your search engine isn’t turning up anything:
Ah yes, “Ukrainian officials say”, very credible source. Weird how IEA never found any evidence of Russia shelling ZNPP though. And yeah, once you stop paying for a product the delivery stops. That’s how business works.
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Russia stopped delivering gas to 5 european countries in May 2022 because those countries refused to pay in rubels.
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Then they announced in June 2022 that they would only deliver half of the agreed-upon volumes to Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia and Italy.
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In September 2022 Russia stopped gas transfers via Nord Stream 1 completely, “because of technical difficulties”.
Those are facts. Russia stopped these gas transfers. No one else.
Russia stopped transfers because Europe refused to pay in a currency Russia could use. Funny how you forgot to mention that the west froze Russian foreign assets there.
Now, Europe is still buying Russian gas, but via resellers while lying to the public.
Those are the actual facts.
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The lobbyist groups involved are very PRO-nuclear, hence why there’s so many nuclear posts on literally every single social media platform.
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Foreign dependance is just false. In own country produced coal is clearly less foreign dependant than importing uranium.
All your other points are up for debate and by far not as black and white or right and wrong as you seem to believe.
We are yet to see these fancy schmancy super reactors online in Europe. Just about every new nuclear construction site in Europe in the past 15 years has become nothing short of a financial bottomless pit.
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I’ve heard that Germany today has problems with expertise to operate nuclear sites. Not sure how much of a problem that would be, though.
British new reactors are by now more then a decade overdue and budget is spiralling out of control massively. So massively it’s causing the need for diplomacy between France (EDF) and Britain to get involved.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cost-edfs-new-uk-nuclear-project-soars-40-bln-2023-02-20/
Same tendencies are in all European countries that tried nuclear project recently: way over budget and massive delays. Only France is somewhat better exception. Belarus is a dictatorship, if they say reactor go, reactor go. This is exactly what is meant with some fears surrounding nuclear energy. Chernobyl was real. It’s not a coincidence it happened in the USSR.
If I say ALL other points you made are not so black and white, I do not have the obligation to specify nor to elaborate. Things are rarely binary good vs evil in this world. Every energy source has advantages and disadvantages. Pro-nuclear voices are often blind for the risks, they are very tiny in possibility and very large in potential consequences at the same time.
Thorium, smr etc is still a pipedream at this point.
It is a valid strategy for a country to invest into proven technology like better insulating homes, optimising network, supporting more wind and solar and combining it with importing foreign hydrogen. This choice does not make Germany or other European countries retarded as is often portrayed. The mistakes are make in the timing, and in the reliance on 1 single foreign supplier (Russian gas), not in the fundamental choice itself to move away from nuclear. The move away from nuclear was very widely supported in German democracy. And it is valid to say this was an environmental choice: no, we don’t know what to do with the small fraction of very long lasting waste in the long term, a fact still ignored all the time by the pro-nuclear voice.
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What does Chernobyl have to do with Germany deciding to appease a few billionaires and burn more coal?
I’m not aware of those billionaires caring whether they get paid to burn coal or paid to build solar farms.
Yes, let’s reverse that and and make ourself dependent from Russia again…
Also, coal production has been doing nothing than falling since we made the switch. Renewables have been the major energy source 2023, for the first time, and are only prosepected to grow, while Germany is transitioning away from coal. One of the main reasons for the increase in coal in 2022 were the outages of frech nuclear plants…
After coal-fired power plants in Germany ramped up their production in 2022 due to outages of French nuclear power plants and distortions in the electricity market caused by the war in Ukraine, their share in electricity production fell significantly in 2023. Due to the drop in exports of coal-fired power and this years favorable wind conditions, electricity generation from coal-fired power plants in November 2023 was 27% below the generation in November 2022.
You can look at the graphs here to see how coal is already back to where it was pre-shutdown.
And as can be seen here, Germany has been able to cover their baseload only with renewables more and more. This is expected to increase, as renewables are growing and battery technology advances.
Germany is still entirely dependent on Russian LNG, so not sure what you’re talking about there. Also, seems like you conveniently forgot that Germany imports electricity from France where most electricity production is done using nuclear power
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/germany/electricity-imports-and-exports/electricity-imports-france
Germany imported Electric from France during summer 2023, due to lower energy costs in neighboring countrys and high Co2 certificate prices.
In total, Germany has been a net Exporter for Energy in 2023.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/germany/electricity-imports-and-exports/electricity-balance-france
And while Germany has been an importer from France in general, this switched in 2022 when France nuclear reactors had to be shut down due to a record warm summer, showing how nuclear is not fit to withhold the stresses of the climate crisis upon us.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/germany/electricity-imports-and-exports/electricity-balance-france
As too your other statement I’d like to ask for a source. I found nothing pointing towards this.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-imports-from-russia/
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-28/russian-oil-is-still-powering-europe-s-cars-with-help-of-india
- https://ieefa.org/resources/eu-turns-blind-eye-21-russian-lng-flowing-through-its-terminals
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-01-27/europe-s-energy-security-at-risk-due-to-reliance-on-us-natural-gas-exports
- https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-energy-secretary-claire-coutinho-eu-showdown-russia-gas/
- https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/lng-imports-russia-rise-despite-cuts-pipeline-gas-2023-08-30/
- https://euobserver.com/green-economy/157627
- https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-countries-continue-import-1bn-russian-arctic-lng-every-month
While up to a dozen EU countries have received Russian LNG since February 2022, the key importers remain Belgium, Spain, and France, which together account for 88 percent of the EU’s Russian LNG imports during the last 10 months.
Not a single link even mentions Germany…
It’s like you believe Germany exists in a vacuum and can’t comprehend that LNG that EU purchases also goes to Germany. 😂
It like you are not able to provide a single source for that claim. I am happy to admit that it does (I honestly don’t know), but at the moment youre source is “Trust me bro” and given the quality of your replies in this thread to me and others I, very politly, choose not to do so.
If you’re gonna troll at least troll about something that people can’t google in like 2 seconds 😂 https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-dependence-imported-fossil-fuels
Last summer France imported large amounts of electricity from neighbours. Dry hot summer make rivers run dry which causes reactor shutdowns while demand is high because of airco. More solar in the french mix woild have filled the gap.
There is no 1 single magic bullet in the energy situation. It’s an energy mix and always will be a mix. Nuclear is not the one magic fix it all today solution.
Nobody is advocating for any silver bullet here. I think there needs to be an energy mix from different sources. Nuclear and renewables complement each other. It’s also worth noting that China is already experimenting with thorium reactors that use molten salt for coolant and don’t need water.
Yes, let’s reverse that and and make ourself dependent from Russia again…
You mean gas?
How so?
Big fat Miller’s pipe
Also, coal production has been doing nothing than falling since we made the switch
Hahahaha… is it really this easy to dupe Germans?
You tell me.
Cool. Here’s a picture of me on the moon.
Ftfy
Meanwhile Germany has more than twice the renewables than the US (and still more than their renewables and nuclear combined), and is set to quit coal entirely by 2038. Still too slow, but how about instead of shilling the dangerous¹ technology that is nuclear, you start pointing fingers at those doing next to nothing to change for the better?
¹ not necessarily during regular operations to regular people. But since Germany doesn’t have uranium it would introduce foreign dependencies, nuclear power plants are high value targets both for terrorism and state warfare, as seen in Ukraine. There is no safe way to store nuclear waste long-term. Mining of uranium is furthermore massively harmful to workers and the environment.
Everything we do is harmful. Using more coal is even worse. The very dirty coal that Germany is using worse worse. Depending on the method of mining coal, it is massively harmful to the workers. I don’t think the method Germany is using is as bad as say the method the Appalachian miners used.
That’s why Germany wants to phase out coal next after nuclear energy production has been phased out in 2023. In 2038 coal is planned to be completed passed out and be replaced by climate neutral energy consisting of renewables and green hydrogen gas power plants until 2045.
BTW mining uranium is in no way better than mining coal: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-health-and-environmental-impacts-mining-and-enriching-uranium
The UK hit zero coal in 2020 without even trying. 2038 is actually a piss take. If you used nuclear like France and China you would be able to do it much sooner lol.
Oh, it’s bullshit, don’t get me wrong. But nuclear is not changing that, the UK has less than 10% as well.
Besides, nuclear power station take a minimum of 20 years to construct, so even if we reversed course, we wouldn’t have them running until the 40s. Contrast that with less than 5 for most renewables. Nuclear is also really expensive, so we could instead invest the money into a better and more flexible grid.
Nuclear is not the answer to climate change. Let existing plants run until coal is gone, then shut them off in favor of renewables.
But nuclear is not changing that, the UK has less than 10% as well.
What are you lying for? It’s around 16% as of 2020. They are building more as well
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
I was using the live data from today, no need to accuse me of lying. It has risen from 9.7% to 12.2% in the meantime, however: https://grid.iamkate.com/
You could have scrolled down and hit the year tab to get a more representative number, which is around 14%. Taking the daily value doesn’t make much sense now does it?
If that’s the level of pedantry you want to argue about, sure. It doesn’t change the fact that nuclear isn’t the backbone of the UK grid, and that it is not feasible to bring it back in Germany, and that it never was and likely never will be economically competitive, especially not with renewables getting cheaper every year.
That is to say nothing about security risks, political dependencies and environmental impacts.
It’s produced more power than coal, biomass, solar, and hydro combined this year and is the third largest behind wind and gas. There are plans to do more. This is in a country that isn’t that into nuclear. In France over 70% is nuclear.
Economically competitive doesn’t mean it’s the best option. Renewables are basically useless without significant investment in energy storage. They also need replacing more often. Add these two together and you have very significant environmental and economic issues with “green energy”. That’s why countries like France and China are invested in nuclear and why everyone wants fusion.
Nuclear plants are uneconomical and produce nuclear trash we dont have the storage for. It was the best decision we could do shutting them down. Lemmy and reddit are so far into nuclear power propaganda they dont even see the actual mistake we made. It was not to shut down nuclear. It was stopping investing in our very successful solar tech.
produce nuclear trash
If by “trash” you mean “free energy”.
we dont have the storage for
Dig hole -> put stuff in hole -> cover hole -> wait a few years -> dig stuff out of hole and use in newer, more efficient reactors
in our very successful solar tech.
You mean the solar tech that requires rare earth minerals and causes untold damages in mining?
I don’t think german engieneers are worse than russian ones in terms of extracting good stuff from “trash”.
Yeah at a key moment. Why did they pull the plug? Germany was on track to be the world leading solar producer…
I understand and support the idea. Even though nuclear power can significantly reduce carbon emissions, it might put lives of millions at risk
It might out millions of lives at risk (extremely low risk) whereas we know that CO2 from burning coal is putting billions of lives at risk.
It’s literally safer than wind
This is the list of the thirty worst accidents in civilian nuclear power plants. These have all been categorised as having caused substantial health damage. There is a definite risk in using nuclear energy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents
The above data include accidents. You are literally killing people by not going nuclear. Nuclear accidents are highly publicized but if (hypothetically) one person dies for every wind installation but they never make the news, it’s a death by a thousand cuts, and nuclear comes out ahead. That is hyperbolic but it’s emblematic of the situation, look at the fucking numbers. Nuclear is safer.
It’s not a choice of either nuclear or coal power. We have to and we as a society decided to phase both of them out. Because of the concerns regarding nuclear energy production and the waste being produced, Germany opted for phasing out nuclear power production in 2023 and aims to phase out coal power production in 2038 in order to get climate neutral by 2045 by using renewables energy in conjunction with green hydrogen power plants, of which forty are planned to be build in the foreseeable future.
Nuclear power production is not risk free, and there have been massive contamination of ground water in Germany in the old storage facility “Asse”. The situation in there is so horrific, that it has been decided to get all the nuclear waste out again and store it on the surface again.
I don’t think the effects of mistakes like these in handling nuclear waste are included in the before mentioned data. As are the possible horrific scenarios with high level nuclear waste stored on the surface.
“Massive contamination”, “horrific”, and yet the article points out most of the seepage is radiologically harmless. It is important to clear out the mine and it will be really expensive, I won’t deny that, but let’s not scaremonger and act like it’s Chernobyl 2. As well, let’s not pretend that new nuclear projects would suffer the same problems. A functioning country would see this mistake, regulate how waste can be stored, and that would be the end of it. As many other countries have done.
Let’s be clear: nuclear waste is a solved issue. We know how to store it safely, we know how to reprocess fuel to make it safe within hundreds instead of thousands of years. Whether or not we do that is an entirely political question.
Regarding the safety of surface level waste: https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU
And what then is the alternative? Wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine. Battery storage would be prohibitively expensive and the amount of lithium required to be mined to supply an entire country’s electricity storage needs would be horrendous for the environment. Hydroelectric storage is ecologically devastating to a scale the public is largely unaware of and geography-dependent.
I am very skeptical about green hydrogen because it is far too politically easy to sweep the source of your hydrogen under the rug under bureaucratic obfuscation and the most economically viable method to produce hydrogen is to use fossil fuels and emit CO2 in the process, making it not really green.
“Every day, 13,000 liters of water flow into the Asse II nuclear waste storage facility in Lower Saxony, which is in danger of collapsing”
“There are quite a few quantities. If you just think about it: these 102 tons of uranium, 87 tons of thorium, then these 28 kilograms of plutonium. And then we have a mix of many different chemotoxic agents and pesticides. We have about 500 kilograms of arsenic. And plutonium is not only radioactive, it is deadly even at the size of a grain of dust. You shouldn’t even think about what would happen if this shaft were to flood, that would still be possible. And the mountain really pushes upwards due to its pressure. Into the groundwater. That’s a catastrophe.”
“These are waters that have direct contact with the radioactive waste, they run through a storage chamber and there we obviously have different pollution than with this water, which we collect up here…”
“We have pictures from the chamber where we see, among other things, a yellow metal barrel that was squeezed between a concrete barrel and a chamber wall, meaning it was completely destroyed by the rock mechanical pressure. And we have also seen damaged lost concrete shields.”
Source: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/marodes-atommuelllager-die-wachsende-gefahr-von-asse-ii-100.html
There is no long term storage site for high level nuclear waste in Germany. So the issue of nuclear waste is clearly not solved.
Intermediate storage facilities for high level nuclear waste are a security concern:
https://www.bund.net/themen/atomkraft/atommuell/zwischenlager/
Google translation: https://www-bund-net.translate.goog/themen/atomkraft/atommuell/zwischenlager/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
As stated before the idea is to employ renewable energy to produce green hydrogen for use in gas power plants. If you have no more coal power plants which is the target for 2038, you can not use it for hydrogen production. Germany wants to be self sufficient with regard to energy production, so we will have no other way to produce the hydrogen.
You are right in being sceptical, but IMHO the strategy is viable and can be implemented. And producing zero nuclear waste and be climate neutral at the same time is something we will have to achieve in the near future.
That’s an american vision. Let’s see what you’d say if half of your relatives were victims of the Chernobyl
Those are global death rates not death rates in the United States.
What does Chernobyl have to do with modern reactors. Not to mention that even Chernobyl was a result of a poorly thought out experiment as opposed to some inherent flaw in the reactor.
That’s objectively untrue. The RBMK reactor type as it was used in Chernobyl has a design flaw. It’s called the positive void effect:
This positive coefficient was another key aspect of the RBMK in reactor unit 4 of the Chernobyl power plant. In the events of the accident, the excess production of steam (meaning an increase of voids) caused the void coefficient to become unsafely large. When the power began to increase, even more steam was produced, which in turn led to an increase in power.[2] This led the reactor to produce over 100x its rated power output, causing extreme temperatures and pressures inside the core, and causing failure.
What caused the accident?
The positive void coefficient was directly responsible for the disaster: During low power operations the effect caused water vapour bubbles to be created in the reactor. Because of the lower density of the vapour the moderation of the reaction did no longer work and the reactor spiraled out of control. All the while there was no feedback to the control room about the increased reactivity, so the personal had no chance to assess the situation correctly. This lead to the uncontrolled chain reaction and the explosion of block 4.
After a while Nikolai Steinberg conducted an experiment in the other blocks of Chernobyl which showed that the positive void coefficient was causing the reactor to spiral out of control in low energy production scenarios.
Sources:
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28271/chernobyl-chapter-i-the-site-and-accident-sequence
There’s a really good documentary about that, but alas it’s in German: https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfinfo-doku/tschernobyl-die-katastrophe-paradies-100.html
Nikolai Steinberg also coauthored a book about the accident: https://www.perlego.com/book/3418623/chernobyl-past-present-and-future-pdf
To sum up, there was an experiment conducted that caused the disaster, as opposed to it being a result of normal operation of the reactor.
That’s right but Chernobyl wasn’t the only incident. There was one in Japan too…
Ah yes, I totally forgot about all those land tsunamis Germans have to worry about.
There are other hazards as unlikely as Tsunamis.
do tell
The data include accidents. You might feel differently about wind if a loved one died doing a wind turbine installation. The logic goes both ways. I will reiterate: it’s literally safer than wind. Look at the fucking numbers and not your feelings.
People are really bad at calculating risk. Everyone will die from climate change. Some people might die from a radioactive leak.
Climate change is this nebulous thing that feels impersonal and a lot of people kind of don’t even really believe in so they think it’s an acceptable compromise.
We can not use nuclear energy as long as we do not know what to do with the waste. IMHO it’s as easy as that.
We’ve known what to do with the waste for a long time now. Also, when you use fossil fuels you’re just directly polluting the environment.
There is no current facility for storing nuclear waste in a safe manner in Germany. Most of the high level waste is stored on the surface near the waste production sites. Let’s take a look at the dangers of plutonium-239: If inhaled a minute dose will be enough to increase the cancer risk to 100%. If ingested a minute dose is almost as dangerous because of it’s heavy metal toxicity. It’s half life is about 24k years. “It has been estimated that a pound (454 grams) of plutonium inhaled as plutonium oxide dust could give cancer to two million people.” (1) So IMHO it’s very irresponsible to create more nuclear waste, as long as we as a society have no way to get rid of it in a safe manner. 100% renewable is achievable and I think we should concentrate on this path since it will be safer and also cheaper in the long run. (2)(3)
Sources:
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239
2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Ok, so instead digging up coal mines, Germany could’ve spent time making a facility for safely storing processed nuclear fuel like many other countries have done. The amount of fear mongering about nuclear power while it’s being widely used around the world and having been shown as one of the safest sources of energy is mind boggling. I guess in your opinion what we should do is keep destroying the environment by using fossils while ignoring practical alternatives.
No, my opinion is that we can not use nuclear energy as long as we do not have a long term solution for our nuclear waste. There is no such facility in Germany and a large portion of the waste is currently stored on the surface, partly in heavily populated areas like Philippsburg near Karlsruhe, a city with ~300k inhabitants.
https://www.base.bund.de/DE/themen/ne/zwischenlager/standorte/standorte_node.html
Again, such facilities can be built. It’s a choice not to do so. Also, Germany could use alternative fuels like thorium the way China is doing now with their molten salt reactors.
There is no such facility in Germany. As long as there is no facility for storing the radioactive waste, I don’t think we should produce more nuclear waste.
It’s true that liquid salt reactors are more fuel efficient than light water reactors and the waste is more short lived, but still it produces high level waste with even more radioactivity in the short term.
“All other issues aside, thorium is still nuclear energy, say environmentalists, its reactors disgorging the same toxic byproducts and fissile waste with the same millennial half-lives. Oliver Tickell, author of Kyoto2, says the fission materials produced from thorium are of a different spectrum to those from uranium-235, but ‘include many dangerous-to-health alpha and beta emitters’.”
What part of such a facility could be built are you still struggling with?
When you strip mine massive tracts of land for uranium, transport the uranium, refine the uranium, transport it again to the power plant, transport it a 3rd time to the waste management facility, and transport it a 4th time to the storage facility where it WILL invariably leak (they always do), you’re not doing the environment too many favors either.
It’s like why even bother trying to explore solar or wind or hydro power? The nuclear lobby has obviously been very successful in convincing people online that no such power sources exist.
Just wait until you find out where coal comes from, and what they do with the waste.
Uranium is so incredibly energy dense that the issues of mining and transport are absolutely minimal compared to coal. There are also reactors that are capable of burning up the majority of the waste, but we’re scared of them because they happen to also be good at making weapons-grade material.
We need base load power. Here on the Canadian prairies we have tons of renewables. Yet there was a recent power crisis on a cold, dark January night because in that situation, none of the renewables are any use. Nuclear is that solution, and the other is natural gas peaking that is only run in emergency situations. Shooting for true “zero emissions” is an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good.
Nobody is arguing against using other sources of energy complimentary to nuclear power. However, the reality is that nuclear is one of the best options available to us.
You can put nuclear waste in a box and decide what to do with it later. CO² is less helpful that way.
We already have carbon storing technology. Also, you wanted subscript for the 2.
I didn’t say we didn’t have carbon storing technology, but if you aren’t aware that it’s more difficult to recapture carbon than to put spent fuel in a box, you probably should read past the first paragraph of whatever Wikipedia article you found.
No no no, they definitely meant “carbon monoxide squared”.
This is an interesting documentary about the topic: Into eternity. The documentary has a depressing and ephemeral feeling, but I find it extremely amusing that we are taking steps to protect people that will live thousands of years from now.
Taking decisions like “nuclear or not nuclear”, “how to dispose the waste”, etc. is hard, but doing so ignoring the people that invest their whole life studying the topics is just dumb.
I do think we should protect coming generations from our nuclear waste and I do not think this is ridiculous at all. In the same way we should leave our children with a world with a livable climate we should not leave them with a heritage of tons of highly radioactive material stored on the surface because we have no long term storage facility.
Completely agree with you on the first part. My point is that:
- Long term storage in a non-trivial thing to do, from a technical, social and ecological POV. However, it can be build, as shown in the linked documentary.
- Not going nuclear has disadvantages (that IMO out number the advantages).
- Going nuclear also has disadvantages. Thus, the view of experts on the field has a big importance of the topic. In this matter, the consensus I most commonly find in the physicists community is that nuclear is a energy source that should replace carbon/coal, but needs to be complemented with solar/wind/water/thermal, not just disregarded.
I would like to add that I did not try to call you dumb, I’m sorry if that’s the way it ended up sounding like. The dumb part was directed to the people in charge of the decisions, not you.
Yes I agree. It is possible to build long term storage facilities and there is one operating in Finland for example. And the finnish people in the region actually welcomed the facility. But the situation is very much different in Germany. Whenever plans for a such a facility became public massive protests ensued and the projects became politically unfeasable.
Of course we should listen to the experts in the field, but even they had no success in convincing the populace of a possible site. I’m convinced that we need such a facility and that it should be a scientific emotionless process. But this is currently not possible in Germany. And as long as there is no such consensus and we don’t have such a facility, I think it’s irresponsible to produce more nuclear waste and leave it on the surface for the coming generations to take care of.
The German plan for the “Energiewende” (Energy Transition) is to phase out coal until 2038 and become 100% climate neutral by 2045. The current plan is to do that using a mix of renewables and hydrogen power plants which will substitute the current coal power plants.
https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Dossier/energiewende.html
Google translate: https://www-bmwk-de.translate.goog/Redaktion/DE/Dossier/energiewende.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
How much nuclear waste do you think is being created?
There was a research out of the US that said the US could run entirely off nuclear for the next century using just nuclear waste that already exists.
If you read that and were like “EXACTLY. It’s so much waste” just know that waste is virtually all from nuclear weapons.
Sorry but I do not understand what you are trying to say there. Can you elaborate please?
The waste already exists. Might as well use it.
We currently have no real way to recycle spent fuel. Only a small percentage of nuclear waste can be recycled and it’s very expensive to do so, that’s why there are only two countries currently recycling fuel: France and Russia. Sellafield in the UK has been closed in the Fukushima aftermath. In France only 10% of nuclear fuel is recycled material using the purex process, which can also produce weapons-grade plutonium and therefore also raises different concerns.
https://www.goodenergycollective.org/policy/faq-recycling-nuclear-waste
Nuclear weapons are not spent fuel.
We currently do not know what to do with the waste from coal and other fossil fuel plants either though. At least nuclear waste is local and manageable. Dumping all the fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere is not working well, and is almost impossible to clean up.
This is true and that’s why Germany decided to phase out fossil fuel and nuclear power production. Fossil fuel based power plants will be phased out 2038 and Germany aims to be climate neutral by 2045 using a mix of renewables and green hydrogen power plants.
France and Japan just fire more reactors with the waste. Been doing it since at least the 70s
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Putting it in the ground is a viable solution. And it doesn’t damage the environment for it to be in there and it’s not like it’s going to escape.
At some point in time will develop the technology to do something else with it but for now putting it in big concrete containers underground is a viable solution.
Yes, but there is no such facility in Germany.
There’s also no such facility in France yet they have nuclear power stations. You see we have these things called trucks that can move things from one country to another so we have one facility in Denmark which is perfectly suitable for everyone’s needs it’s geologically stable and in an old salt mine. You don’t want lots of distributed locations you want one convenient location.
This happens when you move CASTOR containers which carry spent nuclear fuel in Germany, that’s why it is most of the time stored next to the production sites. https://www.google.com/search?q=castor+transporte+deutschland+proteste&client=firefox-b-m&sca_esv=cd5515df3b07dc25&sca_upv=1&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj_xNWd1LWEAxUGgf0HHSk7DekQ_AUIBygC&biw=414&bih=790
Because Germans choose not to built it being ideologically driven imbeciles that they are.
So now you’re attacking a whole people, without offering arguments.
I’ve literally explained the argument in my comment. Germans CHOOSE NOT TO BUILD such facilities. The fact that you feel attacked when people state basic facts about your people is frankly hilarious.
Basic facts like all Germans are imbeciles? These are opinions, not facts.
Yes we chose not to build such facilities and that’s why we should not produce more nuclear waste. This is exactly my argument you failed to respond to.
It’s a fact that investing in coal while dismantling nuclear power infrastructure is not a sign of intelligent behavior.
“we should use nuclear because coal is bad” flawless logic
It’s making fun of Germany shutting down nuclear plants and then making up the difference with coal and other worse polluting options
Setting aside the usual discourse around STARTING to use a nuke plant: shutting one down to be replaced with coal or similar is objectively the bad environmental move
surly the solution is green energy sources and cutback on energy consumption and not nuclear.
Because
- it takes 10-20 years to build a nuclear powerplant, so it doesnt solve anything today.
- it cant be run profitable unless the taxpayer pays for the construction and the deconstruction and the disposal of the waste,
- it needs a huge amount of river water for cooling which is not safe for climate catastrophe, because the rivers dry up at least temporarily, e.g. france
Yes, because nuclear is significantly cleaner, safer, and provides more power than any alternative.
I don’t think that it’s safe. I do think having sixteen intermediate storage facilities on the surface with high level nuclear waste is a massive security concern that we should address immediately. As long as we don’t have a long term solution in Germany, we should not produce more nuclear waste. That’s why it has been such a long running open question: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management
Meanwhile Fukushima still uninhabitable and currently as we speak dumping tritium into the ocean
Fukashima is not uninhabitable, neither is Chernobyl/Pripyat, you won’t just die from entering the area without any protection.
Very few health issues have been detected as a cause of the Fukashima nuclear disaster:
It is the fear of radiation that makes us call it uninhabitable, this is an older documentary, but it is still valid and is still important:
They get many tsunamis in Germany?
The ocean water off Fukushima of sufficient concentration to be a health risk?
Lol
That’s because Tsunamis are the only risk to a nuclear reactor? I’m sure you have the capacity to think of other hazards as well.
Oh I thought we were bluntly applying everything to Fukushima, as the person I replied to did
Sure but fossil fuels about to make the whole planet uninhabitable… And massive oil spills in the ocean are much too common
But solar and wind don’t. Why must we use nuclear. We could weatherproof houses and paint rooftops white. There are a million solutions that don’t require me to get radiation poisoned
dumping tritium into the ocean
Despite what Chinese propaganda keeps saying, it’s very safe amounts. Less than just safe… negligible. The IAEA has been monitoring levels in the area and tritium levels haven’t even gone up detectably. Tritium also has a fairly short half-life of 12.5 years.
