Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by mitchty » Wed, Jan 08, 2020, 7:23 PM UTC

plupopit wrote: post #23

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.

In common parlance nuclear tends to mean nuclear fission, not nuclear fusion.

Though the "technically correct" aspect is that they're both nuclear reactions. I'd say its important to say that they're not cutting themselves off of nuclear fusion research.

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

#92

Post by hardoncollider » Wed, Jan 08, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

masterofpuppets wrote: post #81

fhars wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Updated studies indicated the reactor was vulnerable to tsunami, but were ignored. Repeatedly. And this is why nuclear power is fundamentally unsafe: the operators have conclusively proven that they just cannot be trusted. Repeatedly.

The Fukushima accident had more to do with the culture in Japan than the industry globally[1]. The government and the regulator were basically in bed with TEPCO. 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/...

If the US inspections of offshore oil rigs are any indication of our lack of ability to fix things obviously broken, I can't imagine nuclear power plants would be any different, except the risk in a nuclear scenario would be amplified.

Indeed, this does follow a global pattern.

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

#93

Post by yourapostasy » Wed, Jan 08, 2020, 7:27 PM UTC

Christmas-8 wrote: post #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…

This is wild, can you please point to the literature that links Kr85 release into the environment leads definitively to decreasing the atmospheric charge? I was able to source descriptions of how nitrogen fixing is performed by lightning [1], and that Kr85 is released in nuclear fuel re-processing [2], but that Wikipedia article leads to a study [3] that says the release increases conductivity with uncertain meteorologic effects, so I'm stymied trying to look up more detailed explanations of the mechanism behind your fascinating description.

[1] https://wxguys.ssec.wisc.edu/2018/07/09/lightning/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton-85

[3] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994AtmEn..28..637H/abstra...

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

#94

Post by looping__lui » Wed, Jan 08, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #74

looping__lui wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thro…

Coal's contribution to German electricity is not flat. It declined markedly in 2019: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/drop-coal-use-pushes-ge... German electricity from coal is down 35% since 2010 and 46% since 2000: https://www.bdew.de/media/documents/20191212-BRD_Stromerzeug...

You are correct. I looked up the energy sources after I read the article on CO2 and added up the fossil fuel ones for the past 10 years: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/156695/umfrag...

I remembered the “very steep decline in nuclear energy whilst fossil fuel kind a went down less”

So, yes: we are way down on coal.

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

#95

Post by Melting_Harps » Wed, Jan 08, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

fbender wrote: post #85

beloch wrote: post #71

"Nuclear energy, to start with, is ultimately not safe, and the Germans have always been particularly uneasy with it. After the nuclear accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan in 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the “Atomausstieg,” the exit from nuclear energy once and for all. Why? Because, as Ms. Merkel put it back then: “The residual risk of nuclear energy can be accepted only if one is convinced th…

But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. This is mostly because human imagination is limited and humans are fallible, and what‘s not covered by the previous two is lack of kn…

> But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening.

Agreed. The consequences of Nuclear energy last millions of years, not Human lifetimes, to this day we still have not felt the true impact of Fukushima's contaminated water run off into the Pacific, nor the contamination of the food and soil the epidemiology of Nuclear fallout was abysmal in 2011, and was done by Soviet's. Sudden heart failures as well as birth defects, and other maladies of children are stauncly being hidden from the Media as they were ramping up the efforts for the Olympics, not to mention the People have not been able to return Home to their and remian in a make-shift refugee camp, and seen as 'less than' in Japanese society: look up the Hibakusha from WWII, and the same stigma applies now. I think TEPCO/Nuclear Village and the Abe cabinet are just waiting from them to die to make it all go away so they can get back to how things were.

> Merkel's decision ignored the truly extraordinary circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, which was triggered by an earthquake and tsunami that, each individually, exceeded the design parameters of the reactor, which was 40 years old at the time of the disaster. Updated studies indicated the reactor was vulnerable to tsunami, but were ignored. Repeatedly.

First, if you are going to pull out her education in physics and then discount it, have a basis for doing so. And at least make the obvious correlation to the political decision that France is right next door and produces 379.1 TWh/71.6% of their entire energy production, so they will continue to just buy just buy it from them--I lived in S. Germany near the French Border and it that was common practice. With that said, I have a Biology background and just looking at how it devastated one of the most abundant Ag lands in Japan I'd say Humans are too fallible to have access to this tech to be able to use it on this planet. For Mars, sure, that makes total sense, but not here. We have way more, and better options.

Sidenote: I lived near SONGS in S. OC, which had a leak happen around the same time as 3/11.

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

#96

Post by lispm » Wed, Jan 08, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

pthreadses wrote: post #30

DasIch wrote: 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…

There were great strides in increasing the overall percentage of renewable power. If the proportion of nuclear power had stayed constant, that would mean usage of coal could have been reduced even further than it already has been, which helps fight climate change.

That's not how it works. Energy production is a huge market with lots of political corruption and huge amounts of money involved.

Nuclear AND coal is both owned by a few monopolistic companies. In Germany there were four regions for electricity production and these four companies each owned one: basically all production and distribution of electricity.

None of these companies had any interest to invest in renewable energy or to open up their markets for competition. Politicians were given jobs in these companies after their political career.

It took literally decades to break up this system and the Energiewende was the first movement towards open energy markets, competition and renewable energy production. It's a system which takes decades to reform and rebuild. Whether nuclear or coal is first to go out is a minor issue over that time scale.

The money invested into renewable created a lot of effects which will drive down electricity prices in many other countries much faster than nuclear will do. Germany served as a first example how to build up technology, increase efficiency, etc. For example, the real benefit for solar will not be in Germany, but in many other countries which have lots of sunshine and lots of ways to deploy that kind of lower tech - compared to extremely complex nuclear technology.

And this was kickstarted here.

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

#97

Post by lispm » Wed, Jan 08, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

close04 wrote: post #87

lispm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has invested zillions in Nuclear. Breeder technology, Thorium pebble bed reactor, storage sites... Failed costly experiments. Nuclear is simply not cost effective in a democratic society.

> Failed costly experiments. The battle for finding cancer cures had so many dead ends but it's the worthiness of the cause that keeps you going. The promise of single power plants able to produce an almost endless supply of cheap, clean(ish?) energy still tickles the imagination more than vast swaths of land covered by PV panels or wind turbines. > Nuclear is simply not cost effective in a democratic society. Democr…

> The promise of single power plants

Such a promise does not produce any power and does not scale.

> Just because we failed to make the tech cost effective until now doesn't mean it cannot be and never will be.

We are making solar and wind cost effective. It's already happening. In scale.

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

#98

Post by yourapostasy » Wed, Jan 08, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

plupopit wrote: post #23

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.

Matthew J Moynihan's response to a Quora question [1] points out there are general fusion physics and engineering problems regardless of the reactor design that remain open questions starved for data points. If anything going by his response, it isn't the type of reactor that matters now as much as getting more research data. We don't have a spare trillion to throw into fusion research, but we certainly do have enough tens of trillions to prop up all the central banks in the world [2].

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-merits-and-drawbacks-of-t...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrich/2016/09/12/the-18-tri...

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

#99

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Jan 08, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

lispm wrote: post #88

Spooky23 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Merkel government attempted to roll some of that back in 2010, but was blindsided by the Fukushima accident that caused public opinion to become much more polarised again w.r.t. nuclear energy. In a democratic society, the will of the people is relevant. Fukushima caused the end of nuclear energy in Germany.

> Fukushima caused the end of nuclear energy in Germany The end of nuclear was decided by the red/green government a few years earlier. The conservative successor government (Merkel) tried to reverse that decision and after Fukushima they joined the German mainstream position to end nuclear and to invest further money into a new type of distributed electricity production with the focus on renewable energy.

> The end of nuclear was decided by the red/green government a few years earlier. The conservative successor government (Merkel) tried to reverse that decision and after Fukushima they joined the German mainstream position to end nuclear and to invest further money into a new type of distributed electricity production with the focus on renewable energy.

... thus ending it.

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

#100

Post by jiub » Wed, Jan 08, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

beloch wrote: post #71

"Nuclear energy, to start with, is ultimately not safe, and the Germans have always been particularly uneasy with it. After the nuclear accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan in 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the “Atomausstieg,” the exit from nuclear energy once and for all. Why? Because, as Ms. Merkel put it back then: “The residual risk of nuclear energy can be accepted only if one is convinced th…

Removing the radioactive material from Fukushima is going to take forty years. Parts of the area around Chernobyl will be unsafe for the next 20,000. It doesn't matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.