191–200 of 480 posts
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…
From the article: 1. Legal hurdles. "The previous law was changed to close the nuclear power plants after Fukushima." 2. Safety. "To keep the reactors open in 2023, Germany would need to accept accelerating the risk assessment and maybe living without some retrofittings." 3. Fuel. "The reactors would then need new fuel, which would take 12-15 months to arrive, and would require a doubling of manufacturing capacity."…
lol completely wrong, the guy in charge of the energy policy in Germany is a major benefactor of GAZPROM so he made Germany entirely dependent on it.
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> This risk is hard to quantify, it can materialize in unexpected ways (just like nobody expected Chernobyl or Fukushima) and it will cost such rich and densely populated country as Germany trillions. You know everyone who died from Fukushima died from the evacuation not radiation, right? You know more people are killed in Germany every year from coal pollution than have died as a result of Chernobyl in total?
Also, Chernobyl was due to a completely incompetent plant manager. They intentionally disabled many fail safes in order to get the plant into a vulnerable state.
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> This risk is hard to quantify, it can materialize in unexpected ways (just like nobody expected Chernobyl or Fukushima) and it will cost such rich and densely populated country as Germany trillions. You know everyone who died from Fukushima died from the evacuation not radiation, right? You know more people are killed in Germany every year from coal pollution than have died as a result of Chernobyl in total?
Also, Chernobyl was due to a completely incompetent plant manager. They intentionally disabled many fail safes in order to get the plant into a vulnerable state.
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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…
He has a couple of masters in non-nuclear engineering and an MBA with a focus on psychology. He is not a nuclear expert nor does he have the scholastic background to say he is. I’m not an expert in all but a few of the topics I studied in graduate school, and without a doctorate degree a great deal of people wouldn’t consider me an expert at those, either.
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…
Have you been to Germany? As a non-German who has lived there, I wouldn’t trust government to make good well-founded decisions in the interest of their voters.
The question currently is not gas vs nuclear at the moment. Building new reactors does not make any sense, given the current risk/cost/value IMHO: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/
Running the remaining reactors that account for a fraction of Germany's energy production longer probably does not solve much. Particularly heating in Germany cannot be switched easily to gas. For power gas particularly addresses peak energy production from what I know. If you do not want to build back renewables that are fluctuating there is a need for gas currently. As it is about coal vs nuclear it is a bit of a different story.
Here we might come to the part were we might see politics failing in Germany, but this is very much because coal mining is a very central element to Germans culture. Government really only represents it's citizens. I think this is a good thing. I do not want to live in another country regardless of the political party currently ruling.
Looking at countries >80M citizens where are the more trustworthy governments???
> I’m lucky to understand the risks that they’re talking about > since I studied them in grad school. They’re talking about > a baseline risk of serious accident of around 0.001%, or > one in 100,000 years Why are people still referring to these numbers when talking about nuclear safety? They are obviously off by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. We build about 250 nuclear plants over the past 50y, and we had two disasters…
I argue this is not the fault of the plant designer or technology. With enough effort, almost anything can be turned into a bomb.
Accident 2 (Fukushima): Plant designers ignored tsunami warning signs in the area, and also put the backup generators underground in a costal area. This was a screw up in the risk model's input.
Ignoring that, 250 * 50 = 12,500, so the prediction is within an order of magnitude.
The choice is between running 6 plants for a year or two with those odds, or actively funding ongoing genocide. This isn't a particularly difficult instance of the trolley problem.
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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…
I think it makes you pretty knowledgeable. Expert is a bit vague. Many would consider expertise in having extensive knowledge beyond that of the public. If he studied in undergrad he'd have this. He'd get more in grad school. But if we're talking expert as in "leading expert" then no, he clearly isn't that. But by your own definition, it means that the politicians that made these evaluations and decisions themselves were not experts. If a full professor does not qualify then even a PhD in nuclear physics but working in politics certainty does not qualify.
So I'm a bit confused by this comment. I appreciate an appeal to experts as opposed to assuming that we here on HN know better, but I feel this comment moved the goal post too far and just shifted the decision to experts in an inconsistent manner.
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I think this is moving the goalposts. According to you it's not enough to have the qualifications, you need specific ones in specific sub areas. What's to stop you dismissing him by dividing it up even more if it turns out he's actually studied the right area? To me it sounds a bit like when anti vaxxers dismiss doctors who aren't epidemiologists, or when people dismiss Krugman because he's a trade economist and not…
So the actual quote is: > I studied nuclear energy generation in my two MSc in Industrial Engineering. which to me sounds not like he actually did a masters in nuclear power generation, but took some courses during his masters. But even if he did, that doesn't make him an expert, whom of the software developers here would let a grad student come to their company and say "I did a masters in CS I will tell all of you h…
Isn't this... how you hire people?
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You say that with great confidence, can you give any examples where people have securely stored highly dangerous things for 100s or 1000s of years?
The quantity of highly radioactive waste honestly isn't that large. It probably won't have to be stored that long; per [0] (turn on captions if you don't speak Dutch) that volume, given current energy usage in a first world country like the Netherlands, might amount to that of an apple per lifetime . That's tiny! Given advances in spaceflight in recent decades, we might be able to affordably send that amount of radio…
Burying it deep down in the earth is far safer. Sure, someone might eventually dig it up someday, but that'd be limited exposure in a confined area.