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Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

nytimes.com

41–50 of 239 posts

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#41
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, it at least so far it worked well, they avoided releasing a lot of emissions and are now in a much better position to decide what to do next.

"...and are now in a much better position to decide what to do next." ...if you deliberately ignore the small "issue" of accumulated nuclear waste, that somehow has to be handled for the next couple of hundred years. For many people, this seems to be neglectable compared to the ugly sights of wind turbines.

So you think it's better to have massive quantities of CO2 and various pollutants (including radioactive ones) pumped into the atmosphere? How exactly is that better than a few buckets of nuclear waste?

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#42

The article misses to mention that Germany is actually quite active in fusion reactor research (eg. Wendelstein 7x the world's largest stellerator was just opened a few years ago). Its yet to be seen if fusion power will ever reach production level. But stating that Germany cut itself off of nuclear energy research is not exactly right.

Nuclear Fusion should be treated completely differently though.

It shares nuclear in the name and the similarities pretty much end there (the 'waste' from neutron activation of plasma facing components is negligible).

Fusion seems to be doing well these days with good progress on ITER, nice results from MAST and the approval of STEP. I remember Chen liked the idea of the Stellarator as it removed the need for the plasma current so perhaps we can expect good results from W7x as well.

The last thing I want is for fusion to have political issues due to being linked with fission power just because of the name.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#44

The pro-nuclear lobby likes to pretend it offers a clean solution. I really want to believe, as it would make things easy. Sadly, not only is nuclear not clean, the worst part is humans can't handle the required responsibility for this technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU

The French seem to have handled nuclear technology quite well for many decades now.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#45
post #11

Let's assume for a moment there would be no opposition to nuclear in Germany. How does nuclear energy help with climate change? Looking back to 2000, nuclear energy at peak was responsible for 32.1% of electricity production[1]. We'd need to at least double that. That would take a huge amount of money. More importantly it would take time. We can barely manage to build a single fucking airport in 1-2 decades. Building…

It seems like the answer is to simply outsource it to the French. Pay them to build and operate nuclear plants in Germany.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#46
Climate change is much in the news these days, but one important reason for it is never even mentioned: the “nuclear industry”.

A radioactive gas, Krypton 85, is released into the atmosphere by the reprocessing of nuclear reactor fuel rods. It is considered harmless because it rises to the upper atmosphere and will not come into contact with any life. There is now several million times as much KR85 as in 1945, at the start of the Atomic Age.

KR85 is a radioactive gas, and radioactive gases consist of charged particles. When charged particles enter a magnetic field, they migrate to the poles. The earth is a giant magnet, so the KR85 ends up equally at the North and South poles. There it interacts with the charged stream entering the earth's atmosphere from space, known to astronomers as the Wilson Current, a part of the Wilson Circuit, which keeps the earth charged up.

The discharge portion of the Wilson Circuit is lightning, most of which is in the belt of constant thunderstorm activity that circles the earth at the Equator. As the inflow of charge at the poles weakens, so does the amount of lightning decrease everywhere on earth.

And lightning is essential to plants. Plant life cannot use the nitrogen in the atmosphere unless it is "fixed" into compounds, which can be done by two processes: certain types of bacteria, and lightning strikes.

There are some plants that have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots and do not need lightning, but many plants, especially in tropical forest areas where there is normally a lot of lightning, are lightning-dependent, and cannot get enough nitrogen to thrive without lightning.

So the widespread use of nuclear power is decreasing the amount of lightning all over this planet, and causing deterioration of forests, especially in the tropics, from nitrogen starvation.

And that is the worst form of climate breakdown currently happening. The mass extinction of countless species of plant life all over the world is much more significant than all other effects of climate destabilization combined.

The increase in both frequency and severity of storms in the temperate and polar zones is also being augmented by the build-up of charge at the poles from KR85.

The strong tropical storms that form along the Equator are highly-charged systems. How far they travel from their birthplace along the Equator toward the poles is determined by two factors: The strength of the charge of the storm itself, and that of the pole that is attracting it. As KR85 builds up at the poles, these strong tropical storms are drawn farther from their normal home in the tropics and sub-tropics toward the poles, bringing with them tropical heat, as well as more frequent and stronger storm activity to areas not formerly accustomed to such weather.

The observations of decrease of ice in the polar zones and more frequent and severe storms in the polar and temperate regions is only one more symptom of the build-up of charge at the poles caused by radioactivity from the nuclear industry.

Another side-effect of particular consequence in the Arctic is the damaging ultra-violet radiation that has been observed reaching the surface of the earth from above. It seems to be from beyond the atmosphere, and is conventionally thought to be from outer space, and reaching the surface because of a thinning of a filtering layer of ozone, but is actually being produced in the upper atmosphere by the interaction between the influx of charge of the Wilson Current, and the layer of KR85 that now exists there.

The conventional explanations being thought up to explain what is happening in the atmosphere fall far short of the mark. So far, none of the mainstream scientific community has dared to mention the possible role of radioactivity in causing the breakdown of the climatic regime that has prevailed for the last 5,000 years or so. A large part of the reason for this glaring omission is the lack of any mechanism understood by orthodox meteorology that could account for the observations.

There IS a well-worked out theory that explains all the manifold observations, and is supported by enough solid evidence to be convincing to anyone who examines it objectively. But the history of this theory, along with the personal reputation of it's originator, ensures that it will not be examined at all. That, however, is a defect in the education of the scientific community, not a defect in the theory.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#47

I absolutely hate this narrative of the demise of nuclear energy largely being politically motivated because nuclear energy is not just falling in Germany, it's diminishing virtually across the entire world (with very few exceptions). It's true that Germany has a historical anti-nuclear and green sentiment but other countries are no different. Nuclear energy may be clean, but it is also exceedingly expensive and unab…

It was politically motivated to shut down the plants early and rely on coal.

Using the existing nuclear that you have for an additional decade or longer is much better than switching to coal.

A lot can happen in a decade.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#48

Germans do not have to decide between Nuclear Energy or Climate Catastrophe. They have to decide between the potential risks of radioactive pollution or the impairment of landscape by wind turbines and power lines. There is not much tragedy in this decision.

Oh, we have decided.

Germany has by far the dirtiest energy produciton in Western Europe. On average, every German citizen produces almost twice as much CO2 than the average French or Brit:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

And talking about risks: Brown coal ist BY FAR the most dangerous form of energy:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#49
post #44

The pro-nuclear lobby likes to pretend it offers a clean solution. I really want to believe, as it would make things easy. Sadly, not only is nuclear not clean, the worst part is humans can't handle the required responsibility for this technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU

The French seem to have handled nuclear technology quite well for many decades now.

If by "handling well" you mean examples like buying the Belgian energy sector and then buying the Belgian politicians with generous revolving doors to keep open extremely dated and deteriorating reactors in Wallonia (Thiange) and Flanders (Doel) and playing deaf to the objections of neighboring states scared shitless of having these things operating in a dilapidated state so close to their borders, then yes, I guess they are doing a-ok.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#50

Sadly, the anti-nuclear movement in Germany is very strong. Germany also has a declining Coal industry. So after Fukushima shrewd politicians moved to shutter nuclear plants and return to coal. The worst part? German coal is some of the worst in terms of sulfur and pollutants.

> So after Fukushima shrewd politicians moved to shutter nuclear plants and return to coal. That's not true. The phasing out of nuclear energy was decided in the late 90s after the Social Democrats and Greens had taken over the government. This was part of a larger green energy package. This had been a major issue for the Greens since at least the 80s when the party was founded. The Merkel government attempted to rol…

Yeah, well, the phasing out of coal has been decided long time even before that - and still nothing happened. So “was decided long time ago by the Green party” is more a “who cares - I believe it when I see it”. Merkel made it happen for real (unfortunately).

The decision to end nuclear power has been one of the “Merkel just decides without really caring” decisions. Germans are not entirely stupid. We have lived through Chernobyl, we know what a Tsunami is - the French and Belgians run much more unreliable reactors in direct vicinity of large densely populated areas. It was not “the will of the people” - but Merkel. Just like the end of the compulsory military service, the bailouts for southern Europe, the refugee crisis... Nothing democratic about that. The German public has nothing to say in these decisions and I don’t recall that ANY of these topics were actually discussed agenda points by any party. The stock prices of publicly traded energy companies folded - keep in mind: they PURCHASED the power plants from the government and were then told to shut them down. The stock price development is an economic reflection how fair the “compensation payment” was.

Electricity prices are now about 30 Ct/kWh in Germany. That is 50% higher than the UK and 100% higher than France. And they keep rising.

I would not infer that Bild headlines (aka the German Sun) are “public opinion”. Of course nuclear power was discussed quite heavily - but ever rising electricity prices, coal’s contribution to electricity remaining flat and the increasing resistance against wind farms certainly paint a more differentiated picture.

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