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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

#221

Post by a_bonobo »

dkbrk wrote: post #84
fabian2k wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's nothing really to solve. Dry-cask storage can be used long term. The waste is secure, easily monitored, and if at some point in the future reprocessing makes economic sense that can be done too.

>The waste is secure

People don't remember the Hanau scandal of the 80s/90s.

It was the 'Atomic village' of Germany, home to the two largest nuclear companies of Germany (one was, funnily, called Nukem). Their managers were accused of taking bribes, selling radioactive waste for weapons, and mislabeling atomic waste for cheaper disposal (including just chucking it into the sea!). It's one of the reasons why the early Green party was so anti-nuclear, there was no trust.

Atomic waste can be securely stored, but there will always be corners to be cut to make a quick buck.

There's a German language summary here: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/hanau-der-anfang-vom-en...

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

#222

Post by mikeyouse »

barry-cotter wrote: post #207
croes wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how can we avoid incompetence in the future?

Don’t have the politicians in charge tell people to over ride multiple safety procedures. Actually pay attention to safety in some fashion.

Oh good - we just need to change human nature and fix endemic political corruption. Good thing none of that exists near the US nuclear industry.

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2204/ML22040A111.pdf

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

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/flynn-backed-plan-...

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

#223

Post by Glawen »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #205
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…

Correct. From a German perspective, it is also easier to support France in maintaining its Nuclear Power Plants (and focus on renewables at home), than to resurrect the few German ones.

From a French perspective, the fight over nuclear green taxonomy did not went well here. And now that they suck Putin's d** I start wondering if Germany is an ally, or a foreign agent leech.

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

#224

Post by adrianN »

photochemsyn wrote: post #145
steve_taylor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't battery storage the baseload solution for renewable power? And it doesn't have to be lithium batteries, there are cheaper alternatives if you don't need the batteries to be that small.

Battery manufacturing, at least with the chemistries we have available right now, won't scale to the point where we can store several weeks worth of power in the foreseeable future. Afaik Power2Gas is the only currently available technology that can be scaled relatively quickly. Most countries already have the infrastructure for strategic gas reserves.

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

#226

Post by dirkt »

hedora wrote: post #179
photochemsyn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ran that through Google Translate, here's a fundamental point: > "An extension of the service life would not make Germany less dependent on Russian natural gas, since gas is only used to a small extent for electricity production in Germany, adds König. In addition, Russia is an important supplier of uranium and fuel elements, which are absolutely necessary. In view of the fact that the six active nuclear power plants…

The article is calling BS on this exact paragraph. Replacing 12% of the electricity supply with something other than Russian gas, along with the other measures being taken, is enough to eliminate 100% of Russian gas imports. Enough nuclear fuel could be easily shipped to Germany, unlike the necessary natural gas.

Here [1] are statistics on usage of natural gas in Germany.

Roughly 1/3 is used for heating, 1/3 is used by the industry. None of those can be replaced by electricity in the short run, nuclear or otherwise. Probably only part of that could even replaced by electricity in the long run. Only 14% is used for power generation, but this part is for the "we need more power right now for current demand, and not more power in 10 hours after we've started the nuclear plant".

> Replacing 12% of the electricity supply with something other than Russian gas, along with the other measures being taken, is enough to eliminate 100% of Russian gas imports.

Completely wrong, sorry...

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37985/umfrage...

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

#227

Post by Ma8ee »

barney54 wrote: post #133
cycomanic wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what if they died of the evacuation, the nuclear accident caused the evacuation. I find this argument mind-boggling, because people didn't die directly of radiation exposure it is somehow ok that Japan had to evacuate a significant population? If this would happen e.g. to Krümmel you'd have to evacuate the second largest city in Germany, that's 2 million people.

The point is that the people didn’t need to be evacuated.

Why do you think so? To me the argument sounds like:

> no one died of radiation, since they were evacuated. The people who did die, because of the evacuation, shouldn’t count because they didn’t die from the radiation. The evacuation wasn’t necessary, which is proven since no one died from radiation.

And the notion that more people would have died from the radiation if they didn’t evacuate is just ignored. Well, no one died in the fire. The only people that died did because they jumped from windows. But that no one died in the fire proves that the fire wasn’t dangerous and they didn’t need to jump in the first place.

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

#228

Post by Ma8ee »

barry-cotter wrote: post #207
croes wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how can we avoid incompetence in the future?

Don’t have the politicians in charge tell people to over ride multiple safety procedures. Actually pay attention to safety in some fashion.

So as long as we make sure that only competent and sane people get elected to political posts, we are safe. That will make me sleep well at nights.

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

#229

Post by ajmurmann »

Archelaos wrote: post #187
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…

One should also not forget that Germany's nuclear industry is identical with its fossil-energy industry: RWE, Vattenfall, E.ON/PreussenElectra, EnBW. (STEAG is the only major fossil-energy company that was not involved in nuclear energy.) The situation Germany finds itself in today is the direct result of these companies lobbying the various Merkel governments between 2005 and 2021. Instead of relying heavily on rene…

That nuclear power plants are operated by fossil-energy companies explains why I keep hearing from Germany that the companies running the nuclear plants have no interest in expanding their life at this point.

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

#230

Post by Ma8ee »

hedora wrote: post #167
cycomanic wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pyramids? (Granted, the contents were not highly dangerous, but they would have been adequate for nuclear waste storage until at least now.)

And most of them were looted.
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