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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

#211

Post by alkonaut »

fock wrote: post #114
Mystlix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need oil if you have electicity for dirt cheap? Expand the power lines and push for electic motors everywhere. Also I'm pretty sure running current through a big transistor dissipates plenty of heat, I mean, you know about electric stoves right?

nuclear is far from dirt-cheap. And we don't currently do it in Germany (France does and its grid nearly goes down every other winter). So, where will we get all this fresh uranium from (and the reactors to stick it into)?

> where will we get all this fresh uranium from (and the reactors to stick it into)?

Uranium isn't currently that scarce, and the topic of the day is "why are germany shutting down functioning reactors prematurely".

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#212

Post by ivan_gammel »

hagbard_c wrote: post #163
ivan_gammel wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs for keeping waste for hundreds of years are currently not accounted for in the nuclear energy prices. In fact, they are not even properly estimated because we cannot make economic forecasts for centuries. So any decision that involves storing waste for hundreds of years is basically offloading the consequences of dealing with it to future generations. Obviously this is not a responsible way to handle such m…

Where are those costs not accounted for? Where I live they are, and then some - nuclear energy was taxed extra [1] to pay for waste storage and handling as well as to pay for alternative energy sources. This tax was added at the end of the 90's and rescinded in 2019. By that time waste storage and handling had been paid off several times over. [1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4rnkraftsskatt

The article you are referencing is saying that the tax no longer exists. This is not a recipe for economically sustainable nuclear waste storage organization, is it?

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#213

Post by emptyfile »

hannob wrote: post #30
emptyfile wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The renewables buildout was always tightly coupled with the nuclear phaseout in the political discourse. The idea that you could've kept nuclear, still have the renewables buildout and close coal early wasn't a political position anyone in any relevant position was advocating for.

Right.

It wasn't a political option.

They could've done it, easily, and it was the sensible thing to do.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#214

Post by throw0101a »

pydry wrote: post #204
throw0101a wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 irra…

"Germany's CO2 emissions from electricity estimated to rise by 13% in 2021"

* https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/germ...

"German energy demand, carbon dioxide emissions seen rising in 2021 -industry group"

* https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/german-energy-d...

"Germany’s energy consumption rising, renewables share falling in 2021"

* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-energy-consump...

I live 50km from a nuclear power plant. I don't worry about it at all.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#215

Post by marmarama »

tjansen wrote: post #188
marmarama wrote: post #155

Nuclear energy is expensive and unnecessary. A mix of renewables, coupled with battery and hydrogen-from-seawater energy storage technologies, will be cheaper, less capital-intensive, easier to maintain, and far easier to sell politically. It also has no nuclear proliferation concerns. There was concern that battery and hydrogen storage technologies would not be sufficient, or would not work practically, but as pilot…

> A mix of renewables, coupled with battery and hydrogen-from-seawater energy storage technologies, will be cheaper, less capital-intensive, easier to maintain, and far easier to sell politically. What will make it cheaper than nuclear power? Right now, it's more expensive than French nuclear power. And Germany doesn't even have storage technologies and has mostly concentrated on the low-hanging fruits. Off-shore win…

Siemens is currently building a pilot offshore wind-to-hydrogen plant, with an estimated in-service date of 2024. They're not the first to get a plant into service, but that's a lot quicker than a new nuclear plant. Is Siemens German enough? There are several other European energy and engineering companies also racing to do it, Shell and Total for example, and quite a few in the US and China.

Offshore wind is currently modelled as more expensive per kWh over its lifetime (LCOE) than nuclear, but solar PVs and onshore wind are considerably cheaper. All three (especially PVs!) are reducing in price over time, whereas nuclear is becoming more expensive, primarily due to changes in safety requirements post-Fukushima.

Importing nuclear power from France is especially cheap because the French reactors are already paid off - what Germany is paying is the marginal costs of generation, plus profit margin. New nuclear capacity is far (5-10 times!) more expensive, because nuclear requires such huge capital investments. France's reactors are beginning to come to the end of their lifespan, and as they are shut down, excess capacity will decrease and the price of importing French nuclear energy will increase substantially. France, like everywhere else in the western world, doesn't seem all that keen on replacing the reactors, and even if they do, energy from new reactors would need to be priced to pay off the capital costs.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#216

Post by jgb1984 »

alkonaut wrote: post #208
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…

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…

Very crazy, and unfortunately the example of Germany made my own country (Belgium) decide to commit the same awful mistake, which will be paid in full (in drastically increased CO2 output, enormous energy price increases and dancing to the tune of a Russian dictator).

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#217

Post by DuskStar »

fock wrote: post #94
DuskStar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't work yet but plausibly will in the future or if there's sufficient demand for it

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#218

Post by mtmail »

cracrecry wrote: post #137
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 is about geopolitics. 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 tha…

I highly doubt those statements. The US controls (occupies?) Germany the last 76 years but allowed Germany to have nuclear power plants online for 60 years? I can't find evidence of any public US demands or economic sanctions.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#219

Post by selfhoster11 »

RealityVoid wrote: post #153
selfhoster11 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible to purpose-build hardened, incompatible, read only systems that can submit telemetry to the outside world while only providing actual control on-site (or via restricted channels). Stuxnet wouldn't have happened (or would have been a very rare event) if they built their system this way.

Stuxnet happened despite being air gaped. Regardless, I am confident you can place physical safeguards that could not lead to nuclear emissions even in the event of loss of control over the computer systems.

It happened despite being air-gapped, because they used general purpose hardware and software. If their systems were built on purposely incompatible hardware and software (as I proposed) and could mainly communicate using a serial console, the attack surface would be much, much lower, and the attacks would be much, much harder.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#220

Post by pydry »

throw0101a wrote: post #214
pydry wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 irra…

"Germany's CO2 emissions from electricity estimated to rise by 13% in 2021" * https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/germ... "German energy demand, carbon dioxide emissions seen rising in 2021 -industry group" * https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/german-energy-d... "Germany’s energy consumption rising, renewables share falling in 2021" * https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-energy-…

>Germany's CO2 emissions from electricity estimated to rise by 13% in 2021

I'd have expected a larger spike in light of the end of lockdowns.

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