What is the alternative to nuclear power for Germans?
People want to control carbon emissions, people want clean power, people want cheap power, people don't want to take any potential (small) risk.
That is really hard.
Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power
91–100 of 281 posts
Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ?
IIRC, some nuclear readout panels were accessible over the public internet using badly secured VNC, so I think that's not the case.
Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power
#93In 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…
Could you tell me, where we get our oil from? And how we heat our homes with nuclear? We never had any leverage except for the mighty dollar (and nukes and the fact that socialism doesn't need to kill before) and the US is working steady on removing that lever.
> And how we heat our homes with nuclear?
Resistors and/or heat pumps.
Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac... if I interprete this correctly, it doesn't work.
Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power
#95This 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…
Actually the full "product life cycle" of Nuclear apart from mining is fully publicly discussed in Germany. I think the most interesting parts are recycling stages - if done - and (tentative) final storage. Both are a disaster especially the latter one. The infamous Asse II salt storage has severe problems with water influx which was up to 12 m^3 per day and 30 leaks at some point. Even the proponents of Nuclear don't want a final storage in their Bundesland.
Also there have been several accidents independently in Fukushima, 3 mile Island and of course Chernobyl. Even more modern reactor designs solve some failure cases but really not all.
Germany is already at almost 50% renewables. That's practically risk-free and the technology is there. I mean just look at all the battery tech craze. That said, Nuclear is heavily subsidized and no insurance in the world insures a Nuclear reactor.
Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Please get your facts right. Coal is rising in Germany. https://www.dw.com/en/coal-and-fossil-fuel-share-of-german-e...
That's just Q3 2021 compared to Q3 2020.
https://energypost.eu/germany-2021-coal-generation-is-rising...
The money quote:
Similarly, by the end of June 2021, generation from coal-fired power plants was 39 percent higher than in the first six months of 2020. However, generation from coal-fired power in the first half of 2021 was still below the levels seen in 2019.
Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power
#97This 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…
One of the relevant insurance... well, not companies. A company that acts for insurance agencies and others, doing actuary computations and such. Anyway, one of those was contracted to compute new insurance costs for nuclear power plants in Germany.
If the state no longer limits their liability, but instead applies the same rules to nuclear power plants as it does to other industry, then the average German plants would need to pay €2×10⁹ per year for liability insurance and would have no chance to sell power at anything close to market price.
They can't pay that much because no insurance agency has that scale, so that's out of the question. But even paying the maximum that an insurance agency will accept is out of the question, because even that would make the power too expensive.
My guess is that there'll never be built any, because the renewable fans will make enough noise about this subsidy that the no-subsidies part of the public will be against, and together that's a solid majority.
If the nuclear fans want to build, they have to find safer ways to build and operate, which IMO is an excellent state of affairs, ie. if new plants are built because they're safe enough to insure that's good, and if they're not because they're not, that also good. (I personally suspect that doing it with lower risk requires much research into much more safety-minded organisations than e.g. Tepco was, and if the nuclear businesses have focused on that in the past decade, I haven't noticed.)
Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wind and solar are cheaper than nuclear. There is no solution yet to the final deposition of nuclear waste.
Yeah, you just build peaker plants to help renewables. What are peaker plants? Fossil fuels (natural gas)
There are other means to buffer energy.
Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power
#99I'm used to seeing a lot of misinformation related to Germany and nuclear power, so here are some facts in advance: 1) coal use went way down since they decided to switch off the nuclear plants. people assume it was replaced by coal, but this is false 2) emissions are down 3) phase out of coal was started last year and is on schedule to last until 2038 4) renewable use is way way up 5) they are one of the largest exp…
> 1) coal use went way down since they decided to switch off the nuclear plants. people assume it was replaced by coal, but this is false
How is this relevant? There is still a lot of coal used and it could be much less if the nuclear was in use.
> 3) phase out of coal was started last year and is on schedule to last until 2038
It's definitely too late for the climate.
Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power
#100In 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 h…
Oh, that's easy: Many Germans do/did not see Russia as the big bogey the Americans are - especially in times when the US is a less than reliable partner. Those Germans do think that a mutually beneficial partnership can be formed with Russia.
Not using the chance of a German-friendly Russian president (Putin served in East Germany) to deepen that relationship is often considered a blunder of the Merkel years.