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Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

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Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#61

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Retric wrote: post #32
JamesBarney wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Ukraine isn't a nuclear power. And there are no circumstances where you're better off fighting an adversary that supplies all of your energy than having your own nuclear reactors.

Moving the goalposts doesn’t actually solve this issue. If you can’t conceive of a situation that having a nuclear power plant inside your country is dangerous you simply don’t know enough about them. Sabotage of a spent fuel cooling pond could get really nasty. It’s not the kind of risk anyone is taking that seriously for reasons I agree with, but it’s definitely possible.

Just because one concieved a fantastic scenario doesn't mean it should be taken seriously. There is no evidence of such sabotage being ever attempted or planned - and thats a serious problem for your argument because various agencies have tried all kinds of shit from hypnosis to investigating supernatural abilities during the cold war.

There are more straight forward ways to cause damage.

It is quite staight forward to poison food supply chain, water supply, a dirty bomb is easy to make amd acessible to many rogue states

Why would Russia go through the trouble of infiltration and covert ops of a well-secured and monitored installation that is in the middle of nowhere and will d9 minimal damage, if they have chemical weapons, Bioweapons, can make dirty bombs and have nukes at their disposal?

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#62

Post by incomingpain »

>Since the Bucha massacre was made public, Germany has financed the Russian government by paying nearly $1.5B for its gas1.

What's the number for since the war began? It's higher right?

That's a lot of coal per year...

20 years to get 20% wind and solar.

Tesla just opened their factory. VW has a nice selection of EVs; Taycan is beautiful!

Don't fathom how they could fix their situation. Too bad they didn't have someone tell them exactly what they should do only 4 years ago.

"We're supposed to protect you against Russia but they're paying billions of dollars to Russia?" Nobody-At-All asked. "I think that's very inappropriate."

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#63

Post by steve_taylor »

choeger wrote: post #3

Being anti-nuclear is deeply engrained in the DNA of Germany's green party. Even more so than climate change. In fact, when the anti-nuclear movement started, climate change wasn't even a topic. In other words, the only thing that needs to happen is the German green party to admit a mistake in fighting nuclear power harder than fossile fuels...

It’s not just the German greens. Australia’s greens are staunchly anti-nuclear despite it being the only viable solution to the baseload problem, which renewables haven’t yet solved.

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#64

Post by dathinab »

mantenpanther wrote: post #37

I went to school in Austria in the 80s/90s. The anti-nuclear stance was a big part of education (I assume similar to Germany). We had to read stories like Die Wolke (The Cloud) and were terrified and somehow traumatized in a young age. We discussed this stuff for hours. Also a final deposit site was planned in the mountains in my area, so after Chernobyl there was a big activism against it - thousands of people conne…

I went to School in German,

and at least where I went to School in the 2000s discussion of pros and cons of nuclear power where covered a lot but where rather objective.

Most strong anti nuclear movements in my generation (and local area) came from associations outside of school, e.g. parents.

As far as I can tell there was a very strong anti-nuclear movement in the generations which are now 50-70 or so, i.e. the Generation which currently probably has most influence in the politics.

Through in defense of the Green party it was not them but the CDU (~moderate conservative party) which did speed up the shutdown of nuclear power after (somewhat?) reassessing the safety of German power plans after Fukushima. Given that the CDU is very business orientated and this wasn't good business this says a lot about the state of the remaining nuclear power plants IMHO.

EDIT: As a side note IMHO the German Green party are hypocrites, don't think of them as a strongly environmental focused party. They pretend to be one but in the end aren't really that. (Through environmental protection still matters for them anyway.)

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#65

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Johnny555 wrote: post #58
cft wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Russia was willing to attack NATO, it would drop actual nuclear bombs, that are way more lethal than destruction of nuclear plants

But that would almost certainly trigger nuclear retaliation... if they drop conventional bombs on nuclear plants, the retaliation level is is much less clear.

Same argument applies to dirty bombs and chemical weapons or anthrax. Which are much more readilly avaliable and could be used to attack cities - whereas a nuclear plant is the countryside is going to do comparatively little.

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#66

Post by dataflow »

hedora wrote: post #56
ivan_gammel wrote: post #33

What I read in this article is that German government did a thorough analysis, but the author dismisses the conclusions of it because the tolerated risk level there is too low and because it’s done by a minister from the Greens party. If this was written by an expert, that could make some sense, but it is not. Nuclear plant is not a startup, where you can just skip the QA part to release faster or put a not working c…

You're repeating some of the excuses the article addresses. - The author says they studied nuclear in grad school, and are probably therefore an expert. - They quantify the additional risk of meltdown due to delaying new safety regulations. It's negligible compared to operating plants according to the new regulations. - Their proposal would increase Germany's stockpile of nuclear waste by 3%, which is surely within e…

> The author says they studied nuclear in grad school, and are probably therefore an expert.

That's not how it works. Just going to grad school (and it appears this is just for a Master's) doesn't imply you're suddenly an expert on an entire discipline. Even full professors don't generally claim to be experts in their entire fields; they become experts in their niches sub-fields/areas of research. You'd need to know what topics someone has actually studied, what their work/research was like, etc. before you can assume they're an expert in the areas you care about, and that information isn't given here.

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#67

Post by fabian2k »

hedora wrote: post #56
ivan_gammel wrote: post #33

What I read in this article is that German government did a thorough analysis, but the author dismisses the conclusions of it because the tolerated risk level there is too low and because it’s done by a minister from the Greens party. If this was written by an expert, that could make some sense, but it is not. Nuclear plant is not a startup, where you can just skip the QA part to release faster or put a not working c…

You're repeating some of the excuses the article addresses. - The author says they studied nuclear in grad school, and are probably therefore an expert. - They quantify the additional risk of meltdown due to delaying new safety regulations. It's negligible compared to operating plants according to the new regulations. - Their proposal would increase Germany's stockpile of nuclear waste by 3%, which is surely within e…

The author is misrepresenting or misunderstanding the nuclear waste argument in the report. The report says that you have to consider the costs of storing the waste if you want to run the reactors longer than planned, that's it.

And we have not solved the storage at all in Germany, there is no plan yet on where to put long-term storage for nuclear waste. This is certainly a solvable problem, but the fact that it has not been solved until now does not inspire confidence.

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#68

Post by ClumsyPilot »

galooomot wrote: post #20

Nuclear waste anyone? Case closed. That alone should be reason enough to sympathize with the german position.

CO2 anyone? Case closed. Unlike nuclear waste that sits in on one place and doesn't move, CO is destroying ecosystems across the world

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#69

Post by diordiderot »

fabian2k wrote: post #47
merb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the article also doesnt mention france's gas consumption, which was mostly about electricity, while german uses the gas 50:50 (heat and electricity). basically nuclear won't replaces gas and gas won't replace nuclear. if we want to discuss about electricity generation, coal is the thing that germany could reduce with nuclear, but not gas. it's always the same thing about these articles, blame germany for a mistake (s…

The sentence about simply replacing gas with heat pumps is almost delusional. You can't just switch out the main heating system for an entire country. Heat pumps require quite a lot of conditions that simply are not met by many older buildings. And even if that weren't an issue, there is still the sheer scale of the problem.

> require quite a lot of conditions that simply are not met by many older buildings.

Such as?

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