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Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

economist.com

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Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#51

Post by DuskStar »

fock wrote: post #12
s_dev wrote: post #4

This is something many people in the EU simply don't get -- I don't get it. Germans have a basically a positive stereotype of being a scientific nation and all around clever lads -- this has enormous soft power and gives leverage to things like "Made in Germany" as a brand. This anti-nuclear stance in Germany is absolutely caustic to that projected image. It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and repl…

could you tell me, how long Uranium reserves last? Climate change aside (which will kill us all), Uranium-based fission power plants are just not solving the problem at hand: We are using far too much energy and increasingly have depleted the cache earth history hid for us.

If you're willing to do things like extract uranium from seawater (which IIRC is about 10 times more expensive than mining, but the cost of mining uranium is not a significant fraction of the cost of running a nuclear power plant) and reprocess used fuel, there's enough uranium for the next hundred thousand years.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#52

Post by dagothur »

hn_throwaway_69 wrote: post #17

>An mp from the Social Democratic Party (spd), which leads the governing coalition, compared nuclear supporters (ludicrously) to anti-vaxxers. Edit: Oops, misread it.

I think you are confused? The quote is about nuclear supporters being ludicrously compared to anti-vaxxers. And from your comment it seems that you agree that nuclear power is safe.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#53

Post by BlueTemplar »

rizkeyz wrote: post #22
benjaminsuch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a german, can't agree more. From what I get talking to people is, that they have an irrational fear of a nuclear holocaust and nuclear waste.

We live at the dawn of cyberterrorism, I'm glad we are stepping out of nuclear now.

Hopefully the few computers needed do not use generalist OSes and aren't connected to the Internet either ?

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#54

Post by locallost »

s_dev wrote: post #4

This is something many people in the EU simply don't get -- I don't get it. Germans have a basically a positive stereotype of being a scientific nation and all around clever lads -- this has enormous soft power and gives leverage to things like "Made in Germany" as a brand. This anti-nuclear stance in Germany is absolutely caustic to that projected image. It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and repl…

You don't get it because you don't know the facts. Nuclear was replaced by renewables and their coal use is way down. They also started the coal phase out which will run on a schedule just like the nuclear phase out.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#55

Post by BetterGeiger »

tokai wrote: post #19
haunter wrote: post #6

The Wikipedia article gives more answers than this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...

I remember the blockades of transports of nuclear waste. One of the arguments was that it was dangerous to transport said material. But I never understood how complicating the transport helped anything.

Here we are, talking about the waste, even though the waste is pretty easy to deal with. That's what it accomplished.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#56

Post by Zardoz84 »

stewbrew wrote: post #34
emptyfile wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I understand why that wasn’t an option at the time. explain

Wind and solar are cheaper than nuclear. There is no solution yet to the final deposition of nuclear waste.

You know that are reactors that burns long life nuclear waste ?

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#57

Post by [deleted] »

hannob wrote: post #18
s_dev wrote: post #4

This is something many people in the EU simply don't get -- I don't get it. Germans have a basically a positive stereotype of being a scientific nation and all around clever lads -- this has enormous soft power and gives leverage to things like "Made in Germany" as a brand. This anti-nuclear stance in Germany is absolutely caustic to that projected image. It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and repl…

> It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and replace it with fossil fueled plants. That's not what's happening... Nuclear has been mostly replaced with renewables, while fossil fuel generation has been in slow decline as well. You may disagree with that policy, but please get your facts right.

[deleted]

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#58

Post by jwr »

eckesicle wrote: post #9

In my opinion Europe's decommissioning of nuclear plants, particularly in Germany, is the greatest geopolitical blunder in recent history. The EU is now completely dependent on Russian goodwill to power their infrastructure for the next few decades, and have given up all leverage they had to push back on Russian power plays. At the very least they should've kept the plants operational and operating at minimum capacit…

> The EU is now completely dependent on Russian goodwill to power their infrastructure for the next few decades, and have given up all leverage they had to push back on Russian power plays

An important datapoint here is that ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder moved on to the board of Nord Stream AG and of Rosneft, after pushing for building the Nord Stream pipelines.

How this didn't get Germans out into the streets, I have no idea.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#59

Post by numlock86 »

s_dev wrote: post #4

This is something many people in the EU simply don't get -- I don't get it. Germans have a basically a positive stereotype of being a scientific nation and all around clever lads -- this has enormous soft power and gives leverage to things like "Made in Germany" as a brand. This anti-nuclear stance in Germany is absolutely caustic to that projected image. It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and repl…

As a German I (mostly) welcomed the plan to shut down the nuclear power plants (at least the majority of those) that we have. Not because of fear but because the plants that are/were in operation are in terrible shape and predate back to the 60s and 70s mostly, with some exceptions. This is true for almost all of western Europe, too.

I'd welcome building new modern ones as a substitution, though. Just look at what Asia, specifically India, does right now. Oh, and please shut down all fossil fueled plants with no exceptions forever.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#60

Post by gsnedders »

hannob wrote: post #18
s_dev wrote: post #4

This is something many people in the EU simply don't get -- I don't get it. Germans have a basically a positive stereotype of being a scientific nation and all around clever lads -- this has enormous soft power and gives leverage to things like "Made in Germany" as a brand. This anti-nuclear stance in Germany is absolutely caustic to that projected image. It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and repl…

> It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and replace it with fossil fueled plants. That's not what's happening... Nuclear has been mostly replaced with renewables, while fossil fuel generation has been in slow decline as well. You may disagree with that policy, but please get your facts right.

Specifically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschland.sv... shows 1990–2020. There _is_ a slight uptick of fossil fuels in the immediate short-term of the 2011 phase-out plan, but it's they're now below the levels they were at then.

But, as others have said, if they'd maintained the level of nuclear generation the CO2 emitting fossil fuel plants could've been shut down instead.

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