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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

#201

Post by marax27 »

pmontra wrote: post #132
pydry wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I add to that list: * 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 CO…

> 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.

People do live near Fukushima power plant. Regarding one of the nearby towns, Ōkuma: "In April 2019, parts of the town were deemed to have been successfully decontaminated, with residents allowed to return to these areas. [...] The actual population resident in the town was 2578 people". [1]

> If a dam fails at least that ground is not lost forever.

Relocating population for good is very much the case when it comes to dam _building_. [2]

Nuclear power does have pros and cons, but let's stop with fearmongering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ckuma,_Fukushima

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flooded_towns_in_the_U...

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#202

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

goodpoint wrote: post #136
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> Lobbyism is not illegal, and in fact presumably necessary It's illegal (and immoral) in most of the world.

That makes no sense at all.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#203

Post by djpr »

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.

"Nuclear has been mostly replaced with renewables, while fossil fuel generation has been in slow decline as well."

That's another way of saying, the German Gov't have decided to shut down nuclear power, while they still run fossil fuel power plants and bringing renewables online.

Given we're in a climate emergency, we need to shut down fossil fuel power plants first, while bringing up renewables online. Nuclear shouldn't have been prioritised.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#204

Post by pydry »

throw0101a wrote: post #182
pydry wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't get the positivity surrounding nuclear power and the claim that antipathy is akin to antivax idiocy. Climate change is a (existential?) threat to humanity. There is only so much renewable energy generation capacity that can be constructed in any given year. If you shutdown a nuclear power plant, the demand it was servicing does not magically go away. So you need to something to meet that demand: that may be…

>So if you want to actually treat climate change as an important problem, why would you shutdown non-emitting source of power that you already have?

In Germany's case because they saw what happened in Japan and made an adjustment to their projected risk assessments and decided it wasnt worthwhile.

It may have been the wrong decision, especially given the difficulty in measuring the risks involved but it wasnt an irrational decision.

Nuclear power has a small chance of going wrong but when it does it goes very wrong.

And when it did, Japan had to fire up all of its coal and natural gas.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#205

Post by ivan_gammel »

fsflover wrote: post #167
ivan_gammel wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m well aware of the statistics, but your link is irrelevant to my comment. It is simply insensitive to picturing Chernobyl as something beneficial for the environment.

You are trying to show something very unlikely as having a serious danger. Statistics is very relevant here.

What part of „insensitive“ did you read as misrepresentation of danger?

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#206

Post by formerly_proven »

japanuspus wrote: post #189
hannob wrote: post #18

Earlier 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.

I think the correct formulation would be that most nuclear production over the year has been replaced by renewables, but on gray wind-less winter day like today I can see you are taking in all the Swedish nuclear power you can get [0]. [0]: https://energinet.dk/energisystem_fullscreen (Danish grid only, couldn't find any similar tools for the wider grid).

https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#207

Post by formerly_proven »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #111
marvinblum wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm German and I don't know what we're doing. Prices are insane right now. New electricity contracts cost 45 cents per kilowatt-hour. Heating my home (82 sqm) with electricity costs about 400 euros a month right now alone. This will obviously get better in spring, but I don't know how citizens with lower incomes handle it.

Heating a home with electricity is simply immoral. It's all the emissions of burning coal, multiplied by 3 due to generator and transmission losses. Besides, energy prices saw a steep rise in all of Europe, so it doesn't make much sense to blame the end of nuclear energy for it. Also, just a single reactor has shut down so far, 11 days ago. A single plant shutting down isn't enough to influence prices to such a degre…

Resistive heating is, heat pumps are okay.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#208

Post by alkonaut »

pydry wrote: post #62
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…

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…

Tearing down existing nuclear power and constructing new nuclear power is two different things. To decomission nuclear power at a point where the country is still dependent on imported hydrocarbons is just a very strange. Just leaving (or extending the lifespan) of existing nuclear in a transition period seems like the least one should do in Germany's shoes.

One can have an endless debate about whether nuclear power plants and/or wind/solar/something else should be built. But to have the discussion about whether existing plants that are here NOW should be stopped, at the same time as Russia is using the energy crisis in Europe as an opportunity for a land grab is... crazy .

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#209

Post by ivan_gammel »

theshrike79 wrote: post #196
ivan_gammel wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, people died in the panic resulting from the evacuation in Fukushima. But is that the fault of nuclear power? 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?

Let me be more clear about my comment above: I was responding to a message claiming that nuclear disaster produced a wildlife reserve. I do not care about statistics and causes of death in this context, because they are simply irrelevant (and of course I know those facts). If someone said that Nazis postponed climate change by reducing population of Europe, would you be equally engaged in discussing the exact numbers?

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#210

Post by alkonaut »

fock wrote: post #20
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…

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?

The time to start converting ALL of these homes that are heated with hydrocarbons was twenty years ago. It's hard to believe it's still a thing, but I'm in another 20 years we'll be having this discussion. "How on earth can we heat homes without oil and gas? that sounds impossible".

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