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Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

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Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

#61

Post by pytester »

Tenoke wrote: post #13
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this isn't a very popular opinion, but I've always thought that was a hugely stupid idea in the first place. Instead of shutting down nuclear power plants, we should have doubled down on them and spent more money on research to make them safer (as I understand it, there's still many unexplored concepts to make nuclear power much safer and reduce nuclear waste) and more efficient. The sad truth is, that decisio…

>I know this isn't a very popular opinion, but I've always thought that was a hugely stupid idea in the first place. Instead of shutting down nuclear power plants, we should have doubled down on them and spent more money on research to make them safer (as I understand it, there's still many unexplored concepts to make nuclear power much safer and reduce nuclear waste) and more efficient. It's a very common opinion am…

>>spent more money on research to make them safer

>It's a very common opinion among people who have researched this significantly

The nuclear industry has spent a lot on PR to convince the public that they're safer but so far criminal liability for accidents is still minimized and the liability cap (i.e. free government insurance for accidents) is still incredibly low.

I'd personally be more convinced of their frequent protestations that they're 100% safe if they lobbied to increase their own liability rather than engaged public relations firms to put a happy face on their industry.

Actions do speak louder than words, don't you think?

Moreover, if you raised the liability then the research into making them safer ought to more or less take care of itself. The greatest incentive for executives is avoiding criminal liability.

Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

#62

Post by bildung »

wrkronmiller wrote: post #49
bildung wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear simply is too expensive. France is a good example: Most of the energy in the country is created by nuclear plants, which are old now and have to be decomissioned. Compared to other countries nuclear has an ok image in France, yet they don't plan to build new plants. The Flamanville site is in the process of building an EPR unit, and already has 300% cost overruns [0]. The official prognosis for 6 new plants (…

Wind turbines don’t solve the base load problem though...

Actually, they do: "In this study, benefits of interconnecting wind farms were evaluated for 19 sites, located in the Midwestern United States, with annual average wind speeds at 80 m above ground, the hub height of modern wind turbines, greater than 6.9 m/s (class 3 or greater). We found that an average of 33 % and a maximum of 47 % of yearly-averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric power."[0]

The more turbines, the higher that percentage becomes. (For comparison, French nuclear plants also only produced power a bit over 70% in 2016/7)

[0] = https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.475...

Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

#63

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

detaro wrote: post #50
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Single event" that people were reacting to would be Fukushima, recently beforehand. IMHO it's not an "outlier" single event, not after Chernobyl. The track record matters. But it is on the other side of the world. Unlike Chernobyl.

But that's not what happened. Fukushima merely turned the Merkel-governments attempts at weakening the already-decided and widely supported exit plans (which had been created following decades of a slowly growing anti-nuclear movement) from unpopular (even before Fukushima, a majority supported the existing exit plans and disagreed with the Merkel policy) to entirely politically nonviable. But somehow people think on…

I'm not disagreeing, just pointing out that when the grandparent post says "emotional reactions to a single event", they are talking (correctly or not) about the Fukushima event, not Chernobyl.

A response that "Chernobyl wasn't on the other side of the world" is either misunderstanding which event entirely, or skipping a whole lot of necessary preamble about it not being a "single event" at Fukushima.

Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

#64

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

seqastian wrote: post #44
Tenoke wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I know this isn't a very popular opinion, but I've always thought that was a hugely stupid idea in the first place. Instead of shutting down nuclear power plants, we should have doubled down on them and spent more money on research to make them safer (as I understand it, there's still many unexplored concepts to make nuclear power much safer and reduce nuclear waste) and more efficient. It's a very common opinion am…

Not being able to explain it to the general public like they are three years old is one of the mayor flaws of nuclear.

Renewables aren't explained any differently though; and many people, sadly, don't really care to listen to any explanation; they just have an image in their minds and are happy with that.

Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

#65

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

jka wrote: post #36
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this isn't a very popular opinion, but I've always thought that was a hugely stupid idea in the first place. Instead of shutting down nuclear power plants, we should have doubled down on them and spent more money on research to make them safer (as I understand it, there's still many unexplored concepts to make nuclear power much safer and reduce nuclear waste) and more efficient. The sad truth is, that decisio…

I'm of the opinion that nuclear reactors are generally safe when good engineering and operational practices are adhered to, and do understand that they're a reliable, significant power source. The main two issues which lead me away from nuclear at the moment are: - Externalities: even though I've read about various ways to store/dispose of nuclear waste long-term, I've yet to hear of a solution that seems clearly saf…

> Externalities: even though I've read about various ways to store/dispose of nuclear waste long-term, I've yet to hear of a solution that seems clearly safe -- especially compared to the alternative of not producing nuclear waste in the first place.

Nuclear waste used to be my main reason for not liking nuclear power. The thing is, if you're gonna argue that way, what about CO2? It stays in the atmosphere for far longer, unless we find some good way to actually put it underground again, which atm wejust don't.

The benefit of nuclear waste is that there's far less of it, so putting it underground is actually viable.

And it's not even like renewables don't have their own environmental problems; just look at how many bats and birds are killed by wind turbines.

Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

#66

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

lispm wrote: post #31
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember it correctly, almost nobody was talking about Chernobyl at the time because everyone knew that was just a mix of stupidity and the level of understanding at the time just being vastly different from today.

If I remember correctly the German public was very well aware of radioactive pollution and the fact that many old and unsafe reactors were operating in and around Germany. For example in Greifswald an electrician caused a damage of roughly 500 Million DM on a reactor, by doing a demo creating a short circuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Again, this is just how I remember things, but I think many people weren't convinced that something like chernobyl could still happen with "modern technology" (whatever people imagined that to be) and it was mostly fukushima that proved to them that the danger hadn't gone away over the years thanks to some abstract notion of "technological progress".

That's what I mean by "single event". Of course, the informed person would not have made a decission based on just that one incident, but it's what I suspect large parts of society did.

Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

#67

Post by nickcw »

fsh wrote: post #20
_n_b_ wrote: post #3

This seems nearly unachievable--and will punishingly expensive--if they don't reverse their nuclear phase-out.

Nuclear energy has never exceeded a few percent of the world energy production. Most of it is heavily government subsidized and/or part of nuclear weapons programmes. Since Uranium is a finite resource, it is not at all clear if supplying the world's demand using nuclear power would be sustainable for more than a few years. Many types of breeder reactors have been proposed and tested over the decades, but so far with…

There is lots of Uranium in the sea and we use it very inefficiently at the moment, so potentially Uranium based power can be sustainable almost indefinitely.

I recommend reading this chapter from "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" by David JC MacKay if you want to know more (with calculations!). It is an excellent book for reading about the facts of energy generation.

See: https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml

Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

#68

Post by fsh »

nickcw wrote: post #67
fsh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy has never exceeded a few percent of the world energy production. Most of it is heavily government subsidized and/or part of nuclear weapons programmes. Since Uranium is a finite resource, it is not at all clear if supplying the world's demand using nuclear power would be sustainable for more than a few years. Many types of breeder reactors have been proposed and tested over the decades, but so far with…

There is lots of Uranium in the sea and we use it very inefficiently at the moment, so potentially Uranium based power can be sustainable almost indefinitely. I recommend reading this chapter from "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" by David JC MacKay if you want to know more (with calculations!). It is an excellent book for reading about the facts of energy generation. See: https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/p…

Sure, there are plenty of interesting proposals for Uranium extraction and breeders. What worries me is that despite decades of large-budget research, most of them have never been successfully demonstrated. I don't think that hoping for all the technological problems to disappear is a very good strategy.

On top of that, even with current easily accessible Uranium sources, nuclear energy is significantly more expensive than both fossil fuels and renewables. I don't see that getting better with even more complicated reactor technologies.

Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

#69

Post by lispm »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #66
lispm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly the German public was very well aware of radioactive pollution and the fact that many old and unsafe reactors were operating in and around Germany. For example in Greifswald an electrician caused a damage of roughly 500 Million DM on a reactor, by doing a demo creating a short circuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Again, this is just how I remember things, but I think many people weren't convinced that something like chernobyl could still happen with "modern technology" (whatever people imagined that to be) and it was mostly fukushima that proved to them that the danger hadn't gone away over the years thanks to some abstract notion of "technological progress". That's what I mean by "single event". Of course, the informed perso…

Three Miles Island was widely discussed. I don't think people thought that this could not happen here. Just the opposite, since a lot of the early nuclear technology and plant designs in Germany came from the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

I think lots of people were aware that complex technology has lots of risks which were there, but largely ignored. The industry claimed that they can handle the risks it was willing to handle and/or which were thought to be actual risks. There are a lot of risks associated with large/complex technical systems, caused by natural disasters, malfunctioning technical systems, aging technical systems, users making unintentional errors, users making intentional errors and bad actors. Some of these risks were just ignored. For example for many years nuclear power plants were built with no or very weak protection against plane crashes.

For example, how realistic is the risk that a large passenger aircraft can/will be flown into a nuclear power plant? Military planes will then shoot it down before reaching a plant?

Before 9/11 many in the industry would have thought that this risk is nothing they need to deal with and only small plane crashes were thought to be important to deal with. Then also a Lufthansa pilot was flying a plane into the ground and crashed it in France, killing all people on board. Once those events happened, the regulators take it much more seriously - even though parts of the public was already thinking that these events are possible.

Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable

#70

Post by pintxo »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #65
jka wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm of the opinion that nuclear reactors are generally safe when good engineering and operational practices are adhered to, and do understand that they're a reliable, significant power source. The main two issues which lead me away from nuclear at the moment are: - Externalities: even though I've read about various ways to store/dispose of nuclear waste long-term, I've yet to hear of a solution that seems clearly saf…

> Externalities: even though I've read about various ways to store/dispose of nuclear waste long-term, I've yet to hear of a solution that seems clearly safe -- especially compared to the alternative of not producing nuclear waste in the first place. Nuclear waste used to be my main reason for not liking nuclear power. The thing is, if you're gonna argue that way, what about CO2? It stays in the atmosphere for far lo…

Seems there are by several orders of magnitude more birds killed by cats than wind turbines.

Birds killed by x in the US annually [1]:

- wind turbines: - Domestic and feral cats: > 210m

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...

They have no comparable numbers for bats, but it seams the industry is working on active counter measures.

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