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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

#241

Post by fwn »

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.

> [Lobbyism is] illegal (and immoral) in most of the world.

Care to elaborate what you mean by that?

Wikipedia describes lobbying as "the act of lawfully attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of government officials, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying

That in itself does sound neither intrinsically immoral or illegal.

Climate and environmental think tanks lobby in the same way as financial or industrial interests.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#242

Post by fsflover »

locallost wrote: post #240
fsflover wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is less coal and less nuclear: 45% to 25% and 10% to 0%, respectively. The missing coal is probably replaced by the renewables. How does it matter? The 25% value is too high, and it could be much lower if not decreasing the nuclear. That's all I want to tell you. If you don't like the wording, you can change it as you wish. It's wrong to let coal go to 25% and not lower while removing nuclear. Nuclear shou…

Now we've made full circle because this question of yours is how we started the discussion. To this I can only repeat my answer: it matters because the exact opposite is being told, even in this thread in the top comment. If it didn't matter, this lie wouldn't be repeated ad nauseam. I think it matters that Germany's fossil fuel use for electricity went from 60% in 2010 to 40% in 2020. I also think it matters the US…

> I think it matters that Germany's fossil fuel use for electricity went from 60% in 2010 to 40% in 2020. I also think it matters the US went from 60% in 2010 to 60% in 2020

This is whataboutism. The fact that someone else is doing worse, doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for the better. There is no reason to switch off nuclear in Germany before switching off coal, except propaganda and irrational fear.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#243

Post by goodpoint »

fwn wrote: post #241
goodpoint wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> [Lobbyism is] illegal (and immoral) in most of the world. Care to elaborate what you mean by that? Wikipedia describes lobbying as "the act of lawfully attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of government officials, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying That in itself does sound neither intrinsically immoral or illegal. Climate and env…

The very second paragraph from the link you posted reads:

"The ethics and morals involved with legally bribing or lobbying or influence peddling are complicated. Lobbying can, at times, be spoken of with contempt, when the implication is that people with inordinate socioeconomic power are corrupting the law in order to serve their own interests"

Here context is crucial: the sentence in the parent post was a response to "a long story of corruption and lobbyism".

In most countries it's illegal to hand money to politicians and its seen as corruption, with few strictly regulated exceptions.

In the US it's very different and the amount of money involved is staggering.

The term "a long story of corruption and lobbyism" is not referring to the legal and socially acceptable "lobbying" but the other one.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#244

Post by locallost »

fsflover wrote: post #242
locallost wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we've made full circle because this question of yours is how we started the discussion. To this I can only repeat my answer: it matters because the exact opposite is being told, even in this thread in the top comment. If it didn't matter, this lie wouldn't be repeated ad nauseam. I think it matters that Germany's fossil fuel use for electricity went from 60% in 2010 to 40% in 2020. I also think it matters the US…

> I think it matters that Germany's fossil fuel use for electricity went from 60% in 2010 to 40% in 2020. I also think it matters the US went from 60% in 2010 to 60% in 2020 This is whataboutism. The fact that someone else is doing worse, doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for the better. There is no reason to switch off nuclear in Germany before switching off coal, except propaganda and irrational fear.

It would be whataboutism if Germany hadn't done squat, or even worse replaced nuclear with coal which is what you and a lot of people mistakenly think because you never look at data before having an opinion. But they started switching off both. That's why coal % is way down which is a success. In absolute numbers they used to produce almost 300TWh from coal and are now down to less than 150TWh. Again, tremendous progress. And it's really sad I have to repeat the same data over and over, and it doesn't get through. So much for rationality.

I repeat: if all the countries in the world would go their route, especially the developed countries, the world would be in much better shape. There is no counter to that because that's what the data says. Emissions way down, full stop. No threat of Fukushima like event because of reactors built 50 years ago. Full stop

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#245

Post by drran »

fsflover wrote: post #239
drran wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but we have multiple catastrophes already, despite the vanishingly small number of nuclear plants. If we want to increase the number of nuclear stations by 10x, we need to make them 10x safer just to keep the number of catastrophes at the same 1/30y level. Do you have an idea how to make a nuclear plant 10x safer comparing to today?

> Do you have an idea how to make a nuclear plant 10x safer comparing to today? Yes. All the reasons for the catastrophes are well known.

There are 1) known reasons for known catastrophes, so we can protect against them, 2) unknown reasons for known catastrophes, so we need to make a guess, and 3) unknown reasons for unknown catastrophes, which are not happened yet, including state sponsored attack on a nuclear plant. We cannot be prepared for unknown unknowns, so we need to plan for the worst case scenario. The worst-case scenario for nuclear plant is continent scale Red Forest (about 1M Chornobyl's).

Do you know how to reduce continent scale threat to just the size of a nation or a town?

Nuclear fusion or LENR can do that, because of small amount of radioactive materials and no positive coefficient by design, but how you can do that for massive fission?

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#246

Post by hagbard_c »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #212
hagbard_c wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The tax no longer exists - as I already stated when I noted it was rescinded in 2019 - because the costs of waste handling and storage have been paid many times over. In what way would milking money out of nuclear power generation be "sustainable"?

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#247

Post by goodpoint »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #200
goodpoint wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you never worked in security.

Should we be concerned then about nuclear weapons to be hacked too ?

Not to the point of detonating them - they have a lot of physical safeguards.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#248

Post by xboxnolifes »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #13

I blame the Simpsons. Nonstop slander against nuclear science in every single episode, for almost thirty years. Literally every single episode, it's in the opening sequence. How can you watch the Simpsons, if you think they're funny, and you trust them, and not think nuclear science is shit?

I feel like the simpsons make nuclear look great. You have homer, the lovable idiot, who is a Nuclear safety inspector for the plant, and, even though he is completely underqualified for the job, the plant still has never had a meltdown.

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#249

Post by theshrike79 »

drran wrote: post #245
fsflover wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have an idea how to make a nuclear plant 10x safer comparing to today? Yes. All the reasons for the catastrophes are well known.

There are 1) known reasons for known catastrophes, so we can protect against them, 2) unknown reasons for known catastrophes, so we need to make a guess, and 3) unknown reasons for unknown catastrophes, which are not happened yet, including state sponsored attack on a nuclear plant. We cannot be prepared for unknown unknowns, so we need to plan for the worst case scenario. The worst-case scenario for nuclear plant is…

We know how to build safer nuclear now than we did 60 years ago when the current gen were mostly built.

Current generation nuclear plants default to off, they need active operation to stay on. If something goes wrong, they automatically, without any intervention by anyone, go offline.

They are also designed to withstand collisions from aircraft and multiple other attack vectors: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1159_web.p...

Re: Why Germans remain so jittery about nuclear power

#250

Post by RealityVoid »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #219
RealityVoid wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having worked on for a short stint with some power plant control systems, I can say that, at least the systems I worked with, were quite niche. The actual control was happening on these racks that ran a VxWorks OS on some Motorola, I think they were, MCU's. Despite this, the systems were interfaced with some Windows machines that did supervision. When they were operating, they had redundancies, and were quite locked down. Of course, at that time, I was a noob and did not understand _everything_ that was going on in there.

Actually, now that I think of it, the WDPF system it was derivated off was used in some nuclear power plants as well.

Regardless, what I wanted to say was... being obscure, while it makes things mildly harder for skiddies is not a big deal for state actors or more resourceful attackers. The Stuxnet was highly targeted and they got access to specific vulnerabilities in the Siemens DCS systems that were running there. Just having exotic systems is no guarantee. I agree, obscurity is a layer of defense in depth, but no guarantee. Surely you don't suggest they use a new purpose built HW for each control system design. Also, control systems DO need to have their SW updated as well. It's obvious you can't make it hard read only. You do have physical lockout mechanisms for this though.

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