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Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
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Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the biggest ask the article is making in an unreasonable way is to somehow find millions of contractors who can actually go home by home and refit the heating systems in a timescale that'd actually be relevant for the war in ukraine. If Germany wanted to switch everyone over to a different kind of lightbulb they'd need to ensure the production capacity to make the new bulb exists and set up logistics to actua…
This was a great answer and well thought out! Thanks for taking the time. My only rebuttal is heat pumps can heat the air directly. No need for a radiator or plumbing.
But German homes already have pipes to move hot water for heating. German homes also usually are made of concrete or stone, not wood sticks and sheet rock. It would be an enormous effort to put air ducts in that instead. If that's even possible. A quite frankly most Germans wouldn't want air to be blow around their rooms. All Germans who visit my home in the US are weirded out by the blown air and also complain about the noise.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#233What 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…
Without disagreeing per se, some of the reasoning is dubious.
Studying something in grad school likely makes you familiar, not an expert. I would be skeptical of anyone without at least a decade of industry experience. No one becomes an expert by going to grad school; you have to build real things under real constraints. I went through a selective hard sciences program (coincidentally including nuclear chemistry) and industry people forgot more than we ever learned.
School creates confident sounding opinions but it rarely creates deep domain expertise. I would put more value in the opinions of people that have built or worked on real systems.
And to be clear, I am broadly pro-nuclear. I think it is a critical part of the energy mix that has been maligned on anti-scientific grounds by parties with an agenda separate from providing clean, inexpensive energy.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germany basically didn't have central air heating. There is no way to deliver that to each room in a simple retrofit. You can't even do widow AC style units.
Minisplit heat pumps solve this problem. You run compressor lines from shared outdoor compressors to each room, and each room gets its own thermostat / blower. They're relatively affordable and extremely popular in places where retrofits of buildings without central air are common.
German homes already have pipes that go to every room for heating and already have pipes in the floor or radiators installed. Most people wouldn't want air to be blow around and wouldn't want a compressor outside. This would totally clash with German housing standards.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#235What 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…
> Greens are no longer unconditional pacifists and anti-nuclear hippies
No, they're just anti-nuclear hippies.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> require quite a lot of conditions that simply are not met by many older buildings. Such as?
A vapor-compression heat pump generates hot air. But many old buildings transmit heat using hot water. This only works if the water is quite a bit hotter than a heat pump usually gets, because the water heats by blackbody radiation, the radiation power is proportional to T^4, and the effective surface area of the existing radiators is calibrated to the old drive temperatures. Heat pumps are a drop-in replacement if y…
> But many old buildings transmit heat using hot water
I thought hot water heating was still by far the norm in Germany for homes with new homes having water heated floors. Has this changed recently?
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#237That reads like a nuclear-fan-boy article. No, we can't just waive security requirements to modernize the old plants and keep them save. No, I don't see where you could eliminate all the Russian gas just with those reactors already standing.
The war in Ukraine remains us of one thing: You don't want unpredictable things to happen around a nuclear plant. Nuclear power can be relatively cheap. If you subsidize it heavily. If you scale it up (and thus the risks) to drive down costs. If and only absolutely nothing goes wrong. No unforeseen natural catastrophes. No other "impossible accidents" of the kind that keep happening. Absolutely no possibility for ill intentions...
Stopping the import of Russian gas now instead of allowing more time does absolutely nothing for Ukraine except for a little bit of moral support, while tanking the German economy. Russia is already in a downward spiral.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#238What 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…
Fans of nuclear power really love those "negligible" risks, don't they? The general public not so much. Certainly not after "impossible accidents" keep happening. And then the nuclear fans say "Now it's all better, pinky promise with cherry on top!" Well...
No, the author doesn't seem to be an expert. Also for his claims you don't need a nuclear engineering background, you need economics.
If the political party doesn't matter, the author shouldn't have made false accusations against the Green party and used those as "support" for his argument.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#239That reads like a nuclear-fan-boy article. No, we can't just waive security requirements to modernize the old plants and keep them save. No, I don't see where you could eliminate all the Russian gas just with those reactors already standing. The war in Ukraine remains us of one thing: You don't want unpredictable things to happen around a nuclear plant. Nuclear power can be relatively cheap. If you subsidize it heavi…
Honestly, I would gladly take 10 major Chernobyl-style accidents each year than what's coming with climate change. It's way, way worse.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Without disagreeing per se, some of the reasoning is dubious. Studying something in grad school likely makes you familiar, not an expert. I would be skeptical of anyone without at least a decade of industry experience. No one becomes an expert by going to grad school; you have to build real things under real constraints. I went through a selective hard sciences program (coincidentally including nuclear chemistry) and…
Ah yes, completely unscientific... Like the Russian soldiers who dug trenches in the "red forest" near Tschernobyl, got radiation poisoning and scattered the stuff all over the place where people still have to work to contain the impossible accident that happend decades ago.
Yes, things like that and "Oh, from now on nothing will happen, science says so!"scares the shit out of people. Anti-scientific? There is just no public support for storing the waste anywhere near where people live. And there isn't a safe site in Germany anyway.
Safe nuclear reactors may be decades away from broad commercialization.