131–140 of 281 posts
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Except they built them in a place that's pretty known for earthquakes. An earthquake in Germany sounds like science fiction.
There have been fairly large (VEI 6) volcanic eruptions in Germany fairly recently (at least by geological standards): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laacher_See
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…
I don't get the positivity surrounding nuclear power and the claim that antipathy is akin to antivax idiocy. * It's eye wateringly expensive both to build and to decommission. Solar, wind and batteries are cheaper. Hornsea 2 produces the same power as a nuclear plant at half the price and with surprisingly low intermittency. * Even if it were the same price, nuclear takes decades to build rather than years. * Despite…
* Most countries have to import uranium exactly as they have to import oil. They don't have to import sun and wind.
* If a nuclear power plant seriously fails (2 accidents in 70 years) nobody and their nephew's nephew's will be able to live in that area. If a dam fails at least that ground is not lost forever.
* Building, managing and eventually decommissioning a nuclear power plant has its own CO2 impact if we do it using fossil fuels.
This is a fair assessment IMHO: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/nuclear-power-an...
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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.
Uranium will last long enough by itself (around 90 years given current reserves) and far longer (thousands of years) once enough fast breeder reactors have been built to rework spent fuel into new fuel. This also takes care of the problem of storing spent fuel since the remaining waste is both far less in volume (less than 10%) as well as well as has a far shorter half-life. This means the remaining waste needs to be…
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/9/5/187/htm - this looks very much like it can kill a lot of us and I wonder how many will survive the following chaos.
I also still don't get how you are pro-nuclear and think climate-change is not an existential threat, but so be it. It makes it hard for me to take you seriously.
There's plenty of irrational fears about nuclear power, but there are also valid significant doubts about it. And this isn't really that much about the technology, but especially about everything around it. We haven't managed to decide on a place to store the nuclear waste, and all the plans decades in making have been thrown overboard entirely a few years ago. This is more of a political failure, but if we can't man…
Maybe you haven't but we have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
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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.
Coal use is up: https://www.dw.com/en/coal-and-fossil-fuel-share-of-german-e... Gas use is also up, at 400 €/MWh that goes to a dictator who is overtly planning invasion of Eastern Europe. The southern part of which is rapidly becoming a desert: https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/desertification-of... . This is not brave, or principled, or sophisticated. It's a death toll with slightly higher plausible deniabi…
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/styles/80...
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The problem with nuclear energy in Germany is, that "the big four" (energy companies) have filled their pockets with sweet, sweet nuclear-power-money and have externalized all the other costs since the beginning. Insuring a nuclear power plant would cost 72 billion Euro/year [0] which gives a hint about how costly (and impactful) nuclear energy really is. Also there's not really a lot of Uranium on earth. Take [1] fo…
"that "the big four" (energy companies) have filled their pockets with sweet, sweet nuclear-power-money and have externalized all the other costs since the beginning." Presumably the government entered those contracts willingly, though. I don't understand this framing of "have filled their pockets". If you really believe the money was squandered, blame the politicians giving it away, not the energy companies. "So, 20…
It's illegal (and immoral) in most of the world.
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…
Germany, like Japan is an occupied country since WWII. The US controls it. The US does not want Germany to have either rocket industry or nuclear industry, because that makes them capable of making nuclear bombs.
Also France and UK are terrified of Germany having a strong rocket or nuclear energy, and with good reason. They invented rockets and could make them much better and economically than they can.
So the US wants to dismantle Germany nuclear industry and make it impossible for them to make nuclear bombs because they don't have either the people or the industry to support it.
They will love to do that with France or UK too, if they could, but those countries will never do that, as they are much more independent that Germany is.
The real reason Germany prime ministers do what the US wants is because the US pressures them all the time with economic sanctions and they must comply or else...
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…
I don't get the positivity surrounding nuclear power and the claim that antipathy is akin to antivax idiocy. * It's eye wateringly expensive both to build and to decommission. Solar, wind and batteries are cheaper. Hornsea 2 produces the same power as a nuclear plant at half the price and with surprisingly low intermittency. * Even if it were the same price, nuclear takes decades to build rather than years. * Despite…
How can you even estimate the cost of batteries? Insane amounts of batteries would be needed, capable of storing all of Germany's energy needs (including transportation and residential heating) for 10 days or so. That would be at least 10 TWh, as Germany currently uses about 550 TWh per year.
The global production of lithium ion batteries in 2018 was 290 GWh (1000 GWh = 1 TWh), expected to increase to 2 TWh per year by 2028 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247625/global-productio...).
In other words, even if Germany would buy every single battery produced on Earth over the course of 5 years, it probably wouldn't be sufficient to provide energy for 10 winter days without wind.
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There have been fairly large (VEI 6) volcanic eruptions in Germany fairly recently (at least by geological standards): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laacher_See
While I had no idea that Germany was volcanically active (thanks for the link!), this doesn't seem to be an ongoing thing.
Mind you - nobody thought we got tsunamis in Scotland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
Just to make clear: I'm completely comfortable with nuclear power and I live reasonably close to the remaining operational nuclear power station in Scotland:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...
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Most sources I found on the topic seem to be as diverse as this one: [1] The estimates range from 80 years to hundreds of thousands of years, depending on the assumptions made, including: Possible sources (land mining, sea refining), current consumption level, efficiency of reactors. Where it is approximately this: Mining land uranium at current consumption (i.e., no new nuclear): 80-250 years. Refining uranium from…
Extracting Uranium from sea water might solve the fuel problem but it does not deal with the waste problem. Breeder reactors can deal with both by reworking spent fuel into new fuel and a bit of waste. The resulting waste has a far smaller volume and shorter half-life which means it needs to be stored for hundreds, not thousands of years. Combining the two - Uranium from the sea plus breeder reactors to rework spent…
