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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

#461

Post by akimball »

DasIch wrote: post #415
akimball wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems a de minimis cost compared to megadeath and a vast refugee crisis

That's only a reasonable comparison to make, if there are no other options. If there are other options, which is clearly the case, you have to compare to those. A refugee crisis isn't all that bad by the way. Politically it's a problem but economically a 2016 scale refugee crisis every year would be quite good for Germany. Germany needs huge amounts of people, especially people working in trades, to do the work neces…

Good for the host, but not good for the refugees.

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

#462

Post by pvaldes »

barry-cotter wrote: post #107
ivan_gammel wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. First of all, that estimate was not made by an expert, as other commenters pointed out. Second, the additional risk is created not because of new safety standards, but also from all other factors where deviation from standard procedures could accelerate…

> 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?

Not matter how much will be repeated, both claims are still false. Had been debunked here extensively before.

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

#463

Post by bayesian_horse »

dzikimarian wrote: post #330
bayesian_horse wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 G…

Your labeling of "political plays" and "propaganda" is entirely arbitrary. You neglect that those who did what you say is "propaganda" were just as worried about the technology.

The fact is there are lots of legitimate concerns about the risks around nuclear technology, with and without nuclear weapons in the mix. Opposition to nuclear power is driven by a different tolerance of such risk and especially a lower trust in what some scientists say about the risks, after they had been wrong a few times. Not all scientists, because quite a few don't see nuclear power as a risk worth taking. To me, what you are doing is itself dishonest and ignorant, by broadly calling all of this "propaganda".

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

#464

Post by bayesian_horse »

hedora wrote: post #446
someguydave wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Accident” implies a lack of responsibility, which is not the case.

I meant he accidentally started WWIII at the same time he made it clear Russia's military is collapsing from the inside out. It probably won't escalate to a shooting war outside of Ukraine, but that's mostly because the rest of the world will probably be able to stop him via a proxy war. He showed spectacular lack of judgment. I'm sorry if anyone thought I meant he lacks responsibility for his actions. I hope Putin i…

By your definition the Korean and Vietnam Wars would have counted as World War Three as well.

There is a kind of an economic world war brewing right now, but I expected China to be on the receiving end from the start...

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

#465

Post by bayesian_horse »

spupe wrote: post #361
bayesian_horse wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a responsibility to future generations. Which is a really long time, considering the half-life involved. "Secure and easily monitored" doesn't account for: Natural disasters, human error or human depravity (sabotage, shooting, terrorism etc). And what if the government breaks down for some reason? If for any reason the "securely and safely monitoring" gets neglected...

The way it is going, future generations will be left with much worse problems that a few tons of nuclear waste.

To stop climate change with nuclear power, you wouldn't risk "a few tons of nuclear waste" (which we already can't store safely), but it would have to be scaled up by a factor of ten at least. The plants and waste storage sites would have to be everywhere. Including where there is no trustworthy government. Including where people can shoot at the sites, steal material for dirty bombs, start their own nuclear weapons program and whatever.

So no, "a few tons of nuclear waste" really doesn't capture the problem...

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

#466

Post by bayesian_horse »

kaba0 wrote: post #458
bayesian_horse wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 environ…

Can you name such accidents specifically? I just stated a figure from the Japanese Ministry of trade, and that seems to be the radioactive cleanup and paying of benefits etc.. while there is another figure that decommissioning the plant will cost about 750 billion US Dollars.

A particular problem are millions of square meters of radio-active top-soil and where to store it. Yes, those problems have not been solved yet, and most evacuees have not yet returned and will probably never return. No amount of propaganda will convince them that the site is safe after the "safe" reactor blew up and contaminated everything. Meanwhile nuclear power has become really unpopular in Japan. People like you will dismiss this as irrational fear. Or is it irrational that you think that the future risk is a) actually quantifiable and b) tolerable? Because neither of these is scientific consensus.

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

#467

Post by lispm »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #442
lispm wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality looks like this: https://www.bge.de/en/asse/short-information/ Nuclear waste buried underground. Didn't work like planned. Now it needs another several billion Euros to deal with that failure. It took less than 200 years to waste several billion Euros on a failed storage site. It wasn't even for highly radioactive waste.

That's a really of half a century ago, when being gay was a crime in Britain, Asbestos was still used in construction, lead in petrol and paint on kids toys was still legal, you could rape your wife and it wouldn't be a crime, and, most shockingly, the top marginal tax rate in US was 70%, and today anyone suggesting that is cla communist.

Exactly, and that's the problem. This stuff has to last much longer. It didn't.

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

#468

Post by lispm »

99_00 wrote: post #441
lispm wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say makes no sense. Russia has been and is a threat to the US.

The theory that Russia is a threat to the US isn't supported by data. The data is Russia's humiliating defeat in Ukraine.

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

"The nation possesses approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads as of 2022—the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world."

Guess where they are directed at.

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

#470

Post by trizuz »

KarlKemp wrote: post #137
outside1234 wrote: post #5

Let's be real - they just don't care about anyone but themselves.

They've taken in 200,000 refugees in the last six weeks or so, or as much as the US has, in total, since 2016. They are also paying about 10 x as much as the US in GDP terms for the existing sanctions against Russia, because they do far more trade with the country than the US. They also have a 40-year history of being unwilling to allow arms exports to anyone but NATO countries and the likes of Switzerland, far more…

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