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Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

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Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

#141

Post by imtringued »

Gondolin wrote: post #119
est31 wrote: post #9

It's very popular to criticize the Energiewende as a failure because it apparently failed to reduce CO2 emmissions of the whole country. And of course, it's true that Germany could have had greater reductions if nuclear was kept alive instead of coal. But the Energiewende actually changed Germany. Suddenly everywhere you go you have solar panel farms and many houses have them on their roofs and there are wind turbine…

I agree that Energiewende is important and that reducing the cost of renewable was sorely needed, but at the same time the decision to close the nuclear plants (rather than coal) was a gigantic mistake. 1) Because it costs a lot of lives. Coal + Lignite in Germany cost 8000 lives per year (funnily everybody also seems to forget that coal release more radiation in the air than nuclear plants). https://www.thelancet.co…

>It is friendlier to the environment (wind turbine kills a lot of birds, and solar panel take a lot of room from wildlife).

If you think nuclear power plants don't kill millions of animals per year then you must be living in some kind of fantasy land. Where do you think does the coolant for them come from and where does the waste heat get dumped to?

Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

#142

Post by imtringued »

jseliger wrote: post #2

Germany and California could already have near-zero greenhouse gas emissions from power production: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/11... . The technology already exists. The problems are chiefly political.

I don't see how that makes sense. How much nuclear does 600 billion € buy you nowadays? 20GW? 40GW? That isn't even anywhere close to the amount of energy Germany needs and the other half would still have to be generated with coal and completely negate any theoretical gains just like it happened with renewables. This crappy situation was caused by government inaction, not by choosing the wrong technology. Germany produces 45% of the energy with nuclear+renewables already but it didn't make a dent in it's CO2 emissions because coal emits 800g of CO2 per kWH and nuclear or renewables at most 12g per kWh (mostly emissions during construction). You know what would help? If they simply switched their natural gas plants instead. Germany would immediately see a 40% reduction in CO2 today (at least in the electricity sector) and since gas plants can do real time load following they wouldn't become obsolete when the renewable percentage rises in the future.

Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

#143

Post by imtringued »

Bombthecat wrote: post #15
jseliger wrote: post #2

Germany and California could already have near-zero greenhouse gas emissions from power production: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/11... . The technology already exists. The problems are chiefly political.

Still waiting for an answer what to do with the waste. Beside A) dumping in the ground and hope for the best B) some magic tech will pop which will solve the issue.

Honestly the waste problem isn't significant except in terms of economic costs. In my eyes the problem is that we try to shove all the waste into a single location. Letting 100% of the waste leak into ground water is terrifying but what if it was spread over 100 locations? Well it sucks but at least each location has 1% of the total risk.

Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

#144

Post by sonnyblarney »

wbl wrote: post #135
sonnyblarney wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven't solved the 'waste problem'. 1) Long term storage has some existential risks. Over very long time horizons, these risks become real. 2) Transportation, processing and storage: all of this operational stuff is totally ripe for accidents.

It doesn't. The impact of radiation is a rise in cancer rates which even if they substantially shorten lifetimes aren't X risk.

Your answer is basically 'radiation causes rise in cancer which can substantially reduce lifetimes is not a risk'.

I don't see how that's reasonable, I suggest you might have typed something incorrectly.

There are still quite a number of risks inherent in the Nuclear process that require only a few operational failures for disaster.

If very smart countries and operationally efficient countries like Japan screw up the risks, then anyone can. And that there were mitigating circumstances does not change the fact that Japan still had great governance and scientists and persisted with either risky models or a failure to measure the risk.

Basically, we'd need to suck the risk out of every part of the process in order for it to work well.

I think it's possible.

Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

#145

Post by petre »

anoncake wrote: post #132
petre wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chernobyl is the worst possible example. The RMBK reactor is an irresponsible politically motivated design without containment and a highly positive void coefficient, meaning that runaway nuclear reaction is possible. The reactor that blew up also had a design fault (which was fixed), it is quite unstable at low capacity and there was also human error that triggered the accident. http://www.world-nuclear.org/informat…

Chernobyl was caused by human error and irresponsibility. We have to assume that the design and operation of all reactors, present and future, will involve these factors. Everything humans do does.

That's why SMRs like NuScale Power's aim to reduce the number of staff and replace it with automation and passive safety features.

Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

#146

Post by hef19898 »

petre wrote: post #145
anoncake wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chernobyl was caused by human error and irresponsibility. We have to assume that the design and operation of all reactors, present and future, will involve these factors. Everything humans do does.

That's why SMRs like NuScale Power's aim to reduce the number of staff and replace it with automation and passive safety features.

Which again is written by humans. Boeing anyone? All you can do is reducing the risk not eliminate it. Chernobyl was clearly on the high risk side of things. Doesn't mean new reactor types are zero risk so.

Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

#147

Post by adrianN »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #104
ccffph wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have already solved the nuclear waste problem. The issue is that nobody wants to bury it in their backyard, so to speak. Waste containers are incredibly safe and secure, and modern fuel waste is much safer than gen 1 fuel waste. People like feel-good shiny solar panels and wind turbines over concrete near-zero emission solutions.

We haven't solved the 'waste problem'. 1) Long term storage has some existential risks. Over very long time horizons, these risks become real. 2) Transportation, processing and storage: all of this operational stuff is totally ripe for accidents.

What's the existential risk? The absolute worst case that I can imagine is that all the waste somehow ends up in the ground water. That would be extremely bad, but localized to the area where the waste is stored.

Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

#148

Post by petre »

hef19898 wrote: post #146
petre wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why SMRs like NuScale Power's aim to reduce the number of staff and replace it with automation and passive safety features.

Which again is written by humans. Boeing anyone? All you can do is reducing the risk not eliminate it. Chernobyl was clearly on the high risk side of things. Doesn't mean new reactor types are zero risk so.

Nothing is zero risk. It's just facts of life that we have to deal with. We can do risk mitigation so that the risks are minimized as much as possible. There is also the risk of smog deaths, heavy metal posioning and climate realted disasters if we continue to burn coal. Would you rather have the risk one nuclear accident per 3704 cumulative reactor-years of commercial nuclear power operation [1] or the guaranteed risk of 800,000 premature deaths per year globally [2] attributed to normal coal power operation?

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2016.1...

2. https://endcoal.org/health/

Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

#149

Post by Gondolin »

ranbumo wrote: post #139
Gondolin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not zero CO2 output in 2050 but about 65% reduction only, or 80% if a 25% reduction of electricity consumption is achieved. This is 1) too late, 2) not even on par with France's electricity C02 production. And a nuclear accident would not involve closing the whole country, it would involve an exclusion zone of 10-20 km (Fukushima exclusion zone is 20km, but it include zones where the residue radioactivity is…

When you put it this way, you might as well say that a major accident that takes out half of Western Europe would be neglige in comparison. German plants are old. There's issues with a few of them. Decommissioning them seems inevitable. The question is whether building new nuclear plants, at probably about 15+ years for the first plant to start operations, is really a better option than investing in renewables?

Again, a major accident would not take out half of Western Europe, this is fear mongering. A major accident would be severe, with a large exclusion zone and a lot of economic damage, but sill kill less than coal kill in Germany each year. And Germany was still constructing new coal power station in 2018!

I am not saying that Germany should invest in nuclear instead of renewable, but in nuclear along with renewable. And yes 15 years is a long time, but still a lot less long than 30 years (and Germany lost 10 years by being stubborn about nuclear).

And other countries that want to do a energy transition should not make the same mistakes as Germany. And political parties in France that want to close nuclear plants are environmentally severely misguided.

Re: Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables

#150

Post by Gondolin »

imtringued wrote: post #141
Gondolin wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Energiewende is important and that reducing the cost of renewable was sorely needed, but at the same time the decision to close the nuclear plants (rather than coal) was a gigantic mistake. 1) Because it costs a lot of lives. Coal + Lignite in Germany cost 8000 lives per year (funnily everybody also seems to forget that coal release more radiation in the air than nuclear plants). https://www.thelancet.co…

>It is friendlier to the environment (wind turbine kills a lot of birds, and solar panel take a lot of room from wildlife). If you think nuclear power plants don't kill millions of animals per year then you must be living in some kind of fantasy land. Where do you think does the coolant for them come from and where does the waste heat get dumped to?

Some plants have a closed cooling system. And the million figure count fish eggs, which is somewhat cheating. And if you take into account the reduced wildlife area due to solar panel and wind farm needing more space than nuclear plants, I stand by my statement that nuclear is more environmentally friendly per GWh (but I do concede that solar panels in desert and offshore wind turbines are even better than nuclear for the wildlife).

But in all this we should remember that environmental impact of fossil based electricity is an order of magnitude worse anyway.

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