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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

#321

Post by bayesian_horse »

dzikimarian wrote: post #272
bayesian_horse wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposition to nuclear power isn't a political ideology. You aren't for or against nuclear power because you don't generally like the people who are against nuclear power. I don't see the major arguments against nuclear power being negated by either climate change or the war in Ukraine. So no, there is no mistake. Nuclear power isn't the right way forward for Germany.

Of course it's political. Schroeder went with Greens for various reasons - some of them include his voters being coal miners on verge of protests. Others may be connected to him being on board of the Gazprom.

Something can become a topic of political decision without being a political ideology. The broad majority of Germans who where anti-nuclear are just not ideologically uniform and don't behave that way. We don't dislike nuclear power because we hate the proponents of nuclear power and vice versa. Of course there are exceptions.

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

#322

Post by funcDropShadow »

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…

> ... ignoring the fact that the disposal facilities were planned before they decided to prematurely close the plants.

That is not true, there are zero long-term storage facilities for nuclear waste in Germany. We only have short term and midterm storage facilities. That is the root problem. Nuclear power plants were build and operated without a plan how to dispose of the waste.

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

#323

Post by imtringued »

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…

It's kind of absurd that 16 years of Merkel were ignored in the article. She was the one who made the decision to shut them down. You can't just undo 11 years in half a year. If Germany wanted to have more nuclear power it would be better off designing a new nuclear power plant and building a dozen of them.

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

#324

Post by funcDropShadow »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #248
godelski wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to note that Chernobyl and Fukushima have quite different (multiple!) causal factors leading to their meltdowns. Chernobyl was mostly do to highly secretive nature of nuclear (with information actively being suppressed by the Soviet Union), lack of safety equipment, poor staffing, poor response time, and a lack of knowledge of physics (xenon spiking). People mostly chalk it up to incompetence, but sayi…

2 people died in Chernobyl at explosion time, 28 in the coming months, 30 in the coming years. None died in Fukushima. As far as people's lives are concerned, the death toll of the war in Ukraine is already two orders of magnitude higher. Economic costs are incomparable too.

Tell that to the families of the "exterminators" in Chernobyl. Tell them that it had nothing to do with radiation from Chernobyl that most of them died by cancer years after the accident.

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

#325

Post by captainmuon »

The Germany voters made the concious decision of trading a small amount of abstract wealth (economic growth) for more nuclear safety.

I find it strange that the strongest proponents of capitalism and parlamentarism have most trouble understanding this. We can choose with our wallets and our votes to produce less nuclear power, and we will not get brownouts, but the market will "swallow it up" and companies will just produce less energy intensive stuff, and more other stuff.

Also, the biggest problem is not random nuclear meltdowns. The problems are: Nuclear is very centralized, which is something we are trying to get away from. It has not been profitable without subsidies for a long time. It produces nuclear waste, which we still don't know what to do with. And as you can see with the recent events around Chernobyl, it is a liabilty in times of crisis. It is just not worth it.

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

#326

Post by bayesian_horse »

zeeZ wrote: post #287
bayesian_horse wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh right, nobody ever thought to include the cost and effects of producing the solar panels!! I'm joking of course.

But how green is building a nuclear power plant? I imagine there's a lot of heavy machinery involved and lots of concrete involved.

Those things are always factored in. Also the mining for the fuel has to be included, which is also quite expansive. The costs for decommissioning a plant seem to get underestimated a lot though.

There are sometimes calculations where nuclear comes out on top of renewables. But these calculations are hugely more complicated for the nuclear side, and require nothing going wrong, or at least not much more than in the past, which is a dangerous assumption in my opinion. And with nuclear you lock yourself in.

A country needs to build up a large nuclear industry to make it profitable (or pay extra for imports), and to decommission plants or stop building them ahead of schedule increases the costs.

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

#327

Post by yk »

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 way the author dismisses engineering concerns lets me strongly doubt that he is an expert. There is a discussion on fuel, spare parts and personal, where he basically says that he doesn't care.

The burning of nuclear fuel is actually very closely managed, fuel elements are regularly shuffled around because the ones in the center burn up faster than the ones at the edge of the core and the shuffling around is planned a long time in advance. So, when the end of life is planned for 2022 then the plan is actually to have the fuel spent at that date and you couldn't get much additional power out of it.

The same is of course true for spare parts. First of all, the industrial environment that supplies spare parts knows since 20 years about the plans to phase out nuclear and plan accordingly. They are actively trying to run out of spare parts right now, while of course all the maintenance task that get a rating of "should be ok for some time" get skipped in the power plants. That means, that they would need major maintenance right now, while the spare parts are planned to be not there and the industrial capacity to build spare parts has been re purposed or dismantled.

The same of course also for personal, they knew for a long time this was coming and planned their careers accordingly, though this is probably the least problem of the tree, but still that lets me doubt wether the author ever did plan a moderately complex project, let alone being an expert about nuclear power.

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

#328

Post by lobochrome »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #322
hedora wrote: post #56

Earlier 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…

> ... ignoring the fact that the disposal facilities were planned before they decided to prematurely close the plants. That is not true, there are zero long-term storage facilities for nuclear waste in Germany. We only have short term and midterm storage facilities. That is the root problem. Nuclear power plants were build and operated without a plan how to dispose of the waste.

To be fair the same is true for every power generation source that ever existed. CO2, coal slag, disused solar panels, composite rotor blades, all lack a clear strategy for long term disposal.

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

#329

Post by imtringued »

hedora wrote: post #146
barry-cotter wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The Fukushima plant was older than the Chernobyl plant, maybe we should just shut them down and build new ones to save us the cost of another nuclear exclusion zone?

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

#330

Post by dzikimarian »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #321
dzikimarian wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's political. Schroeder went with Greens for various reasons - some of them include his voters being coal miners on verge of protests. Others may be connected to him being on board of the Gazprom.

Something can become a topic of political decision without being a political ideology. The broad majority of Germans who where anti-nuclear are just not ideologically uniform and don't behave that way. We don't dislike nuclear power because we hate the proponents of nuclear power and vice versa. Of course there are exceptions.

> We don't dislike nuclear power because we hate the proponents of nuclear power and vice versa.

You're right. We need to go one level deeper on that.

Germans hate nuclear power, because they were subject to well constructed propaganda, that very well exploited Chernobyl events.

This propaganda was result of political plays, but did not called to any political views by itself. Thus the current situation, where most Germans think it's reasonable stance, while living surrounded by harmless nuclear reactors everywhere in Europe and burying thousands of people dying due to coal pollution.

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