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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

#451

Post by silexia »

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…

Major PR investments are made by oil dictators to undermine the only real competition they face: nuclear. Nuclear has killed a few hundred people in it's whole history while oil pollution kills millions a year and is controlled by the most evil humans on our planet.

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

#452

Post by Ma8ee »

hedora wrote: post #447
Ma8ee wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most of them were looted.

So what? If, 500 years from now, future generations want to use today's waste in advanced reactors, what's the problem?

The problems would be if someone in the future looted some ancient artefacts they didn’t understand.

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

#453

Post by ivan_gammel »

belorn wrote: post #448
ivan_gammel wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The discussion around Fukushima is not about the loss of land that got rendered uninhabitable, it is exclusively focused on the loss of life. This conversation is happening in response to my mentioning of Fukushima (see the thread above). I did not focus exclusively on the loss of life and do not see why the discussion should be restricted to that topic. Nevertheless, "uninhabitable" means people cannot live there s…

Are you saying that its acceptable that an energy source is creating large areas of uninhabitable land, as long as it slow enough that people can plan for it? Quickly moving people from the dangerous area is undesirable, but as I said previously, California did exactly that. It would be interesting to see an estimate on how many died from it so we could make an apple to apple comparison. When looking at energy source…

> Personally I kind of dislike the idea of funding civilian slaughter and Russian quest for lebensraum.

Germany stopping buying gas now will neither stop the war, nor it will prevent Russian military from receiving money from Russian government. Everyone who repeats this idea as you do is just diverting the discussion from other options.

Yes, you may feel some moral obligation to cut off economic ties to Russia, but there are always stupid moral choices (doing more harm than good) and reasonable ones. Continuing with nuclear, stopping gas imports are both stupid choices. Locking cash paid for gas on an escrow account in neutral country could work better. Accelerating investment in renewables and energy conservation, cutting red tape, shipping heavy weapons and offering other support to Ukraine are more pragmatic and impactful options.

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

#454

Post by belorn »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #453
belorn wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that its acceptable that an energy source is creating large areas of uninhabitable land, as long as it slow enough that people can plan for it? Quickly moving people from the dangerous area is undesirable, but as I said previously, California did exactly that. It would be interesting to see an estimate on how many died from it so we could make an apple to apple comparison. When looking at energy source…

> Personally I kind of dislike the idea of funding civilian slaughter and Russian quest for lebensraum. Germany stopping buying gas now will neither stop the war, nor it will prevent Russian military from receiving money from Russian government. Everyone who repeats this idea as you do is just diverting the discussion from other options. Yes, you may feel some moral obligation to cut off economic ties to Russia, but…

The risk that continuing buying gas from Russia will cause more war and further destruction is higher than the risk that continuing operations of nuclear power will cause a nuclear accident.

We can call names if we want. Continuing heating the planet up by burning fossil fuels when we have a cleaner option is stupid and history won't look favorable to fossil fuel advocates. There is a mass extinction occurring all over the world, especially in the oceans, just because people are afraid of a once in 100,000 year risk that with modern technology is even smaller risk. There has never been a earthquake recorded in Germany that has been large enough to interfere with German nuclear plants. Utterly madness how afraid people are to something which won't occur.

Conflict resources are internationally known to be a factor in war, in contributing to war, and to prolong wars. It doesn't matter if the aggressor is an IS, some warlord in Congo, or Russia. A major tactic dealing with IS was to cut their funding, and while it did take many years, the effect of cutting IS funding is rarely disputed.

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

#455

Post by MagnumOpus »

dirkt wrote: post #226
hedora wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

German nuke plants (just like French ones) are load following and can go from near-zero to full load in 15-30 minutes.

They are usually not used that way because their base load is needed.

Also, if you do not know that, you might reflect about what other facts relevant to forming an educated opinion on the topic you are missing.

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

#456

Post by kaba0 »

froh wrote: post #315
CamperBob2 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the politicians who made the decision were any more qualified?

Chancellor Merkel holds a PhD in quantum physics, I think she knew how to read scientific papers, statistics, probabilities.

So any other countries’ pro-nuclear decision was made by politicians only, not knowing much about the topic?

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

#457

Post by kaba0 »

nl wrote: post #274
godelski wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what if they died of the evacuation, the nuclear accident caused the evacuation. I wasn't aware that the nuclear accident caused massive flooding (the person you're responding to is saying that everyone died from the tsunami, not the radiation). Your point still stands about large economic costs to exclusion zones, but I don't feel you responded in good faith. As per the article (and as someone who actually did…

In Ukraine a nuclear power station was recently shelled with artillery. If a power station was shelled in Germany what measures would avoid an exclusion zone? And to be clear, there are plenty of groups that would deliberately cause an issue exclusion zone.

How is it different than shelling a water dam? I would wager it is much easier to do huge harm that way than to shell a concrete hull made to withstand two planes simultaneously hitting it, or even cutting the main pipe in half, which will still safely shut down the plant. The only real (and exceptionally tiny) risk with modern nuclear plants is some contamination, but it needs several several fuckups to happen even with a goddamn tsunami hitting it

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

#458

Post by kaba0 »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #242
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?

If nobody provably died because of the Fukushima accident, it was because of expansive and costly evacuations. The Japanese minstry of trade estimates the cost of the cleanup to $187 billion, though I'm not sure if that really includes everything. And that number is certainly not the upper bound on what could happen when other plants have similar or worse accidents. It's a very small risk with a huge downside. The fa…

Is the cleanup related to nuclear, or the whole tsunami?

Also, how is it underestimated? There was an exceptionally huge tsunami there, and even with that there would have been no trouble given the backup-generators would work well and even then, only a slight radiation exposure happened. There have been orders of magnitude more failures in other power plants causing much bigger damage (not even counting the environmental effect of them!).

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

#459

Post by ivan_gammel »

belorn wrote: post #454
ivan_gammel wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I kind of dislike the idea of funding civilian slaughter and Russian quest for lebensraum. Germany stopping buying gas now will neither stop the war, nor it will prevent Russian military from receiving money from Russian government. Everyone who repeats this idea as you do is just diverting the discussion from other options. Yes, you may feel some moral obligation to cut off economic ties to Russia, but…

The risk that continuing buying gas from Russia will cause more war and further destruction is higher than the risk that continuing operations of nuclear power will cause a nuclear accident. We can call names if we want. Continuing heating the planet up by burning fossil fuels when we have a cleaner option is stupid and history won't look favorable to fossil fuel advocates. There is a mass extinction occurring all ov…

> Utterly madness how afraid people are to something which won't occur.

What you are doing here is a perversion of facts and opinions. Nobody is afraid of a nuclear incident caused by an earthquake in Germany. Nobody in this thread was talking about it. The examples of Fukushima or Chernobyl were provided only as examples of unforeseen events, that illustrate why safety must be taken seriously, why any „acceleration“ is dangerous and why actual risks and costs can be higher than some people wish to see.

>The risk that continuing buying gas from Russia will cause more war and further destruction is higher than the risk that continuing operations of nuclear power will cause a nuclear accident.

Europe will stop buying gas from Russia relatively soon to ensure it has less resources to wage new wars. It is absolutely baseless claim to say that immediate stop will have a significant positive impact.

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

#460

Post by freemint »

kdbeall_ wrote: post #437
freemint wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Lithium Sulfur?

Energy density and availability of materials. Li-S ballpark is 550 Wh/kg while conventional lithium-ion is around 200 Wh/kg. Using nickel, cobalt, and other expensive metals is not scalable.

Newer Battery Electric vehicle of similar size are not really much heavier then combustion cars of the same size. That boost in weight savings (and poorer duty cycles) would make such more sense for airplanes than cars.

The Nickel and Cobalt parts have been declining for decades and are low percentages of *-ode material, especially in cars which are no volume constrained. Only smartphone batteries or similar appliances have high amounts of those. In fact there some EVs which have less cobalt then normal cars because cobalt steel is used in many parts of the motor and transmission.

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