191–200 of 281 posts
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Do you really want to bet there will be no viable battery technology for another 50 years? It's kind of a high value research topic right now.
50 years? I'd hope we have fusion power by then. But it doesn't look like there will be enough batteries for wind power in the next 20 years.
german here. i’ve been to some anti-nuclear protests in my time, and i still think it’s dangerous technology. i still think it should not be termed “sustainable”, mainly because of the unsolved waste question, but also in a small part because of the large possible damage from, admittedly unlikely, accidents. however, i do recognize the dilemma of having to go emission-neutral, like, you know, yesterday, and not havin…
Why is it unsolved?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
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9.0 earthquakes and tsunami's are not that common in Germany.
I doubt that german power plants are even built for that occasion. Power plants are built according to the requirements of their location and history shows we fail in getting all the risk Not to mention corruption and botching. Which company would you trust to built and operate these power plants? Vattenfall, Shell, Siemens, Facebook, Apple?
Edit: Alternatively Die Schwesternschaft des Heiligen Strahls, äh Scheins.
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…
A nation of conservative Luddite bureaucrats ruling over the EU, and a puppet for the Americans. Meanwhile they extort and damage other EU nations with the ECB policies and push mass immigration to lower wages and destroy trade unions.
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The same was thought about japanese nuclear power plants
Fukushima weathered both a record breaking earthquake AND a record breaking tsunami simultaneously. And still there were only a handful of deaths directly caused by it. More people die because of wind turbines every year.
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The "victims" were victims of Soviet policy, not of nuclear energy. A majority of the deaths due to fallout would've been prevented if The Party would've admitted they messed up and told everyone to eat canned food for a few weeks. Iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days. Maybe even distributed more iodine pills for the population. But nope, The Party could do no wrong and was always right, so they did nothing and said…
This is a typical Western oversimplification of communist regimes. If there is a Party, it is to blame, of course. But you are wrong. The casualties of such incidents are coming not just from the poor immediate responses, but also from long term environmental, social and economic effects. Even if in Fukushima disaster people did not die from acute radiation syndrome, there are still several thousands of deaths attrib…
Do you "attribute" deaths caused by other energy production means the same way? Coal kills people every day. People die when installing wind farms, do they count?
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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
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Oh, crap. Mind thought 2e9, fingers typed 2⁹. Edited. Thanks. IIRC the bulk is property. German power plants are located in densely populated areas with high property prices. If a plant renders a smallish area unlivable and BMW has to vacate and replace a factory there, BMW will not want to take a loss on that.
The risk of a nuclear accident affecting a large amount of land is very small - of the thousands of plants in the world, only a couple have affected more than a few square kilometers. If you consider the affected area/MW to wind or solar it's clearly a net win. And there isn't a need to build nuclear plants in more densely populated areas than others.
Germany is well described as a mixture of densely populated and even more densely populated areas, with very few large and sparse areas. (There was a minor scandal a few years ago, after an airplane crash. Each airport has some sort of designated crash site, "dear pilot, if you can't avoid crashing, try to do it there". Some airport's site was near a village, because there was nothing uninhabited nearby.)