About time. Nuclear is hardly an environmental risk even compared to the "cleaner" fossil fuels like gas. Hopefully this will allow the EU to return to competitive reactors designs instead of leaving China to pull humanities weight on that front. Though tbh I wouldn't be sad if we bought Chinese reactors until we are back up to speed, having Chinese nuclear > no nuclear. Everyone bitching about China stealing IP fina…
Competitive reactor design sounds like corruption, botched construction and profit over security.
Not sure it gets better when everyone gets paid regardless of performance, also things like corruption.
De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party. It's understandable that France doesn't want to go with that, as they don't want to be forced down the same ruinous path we're currently on here in Germany. And honestly, good for them. It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. I did my PhD at the French nuclear…
There are also many institutes (e.g IDW) constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc. These people are constantly invited to present these „Zukunftsenergien“ as opposed to the old bad nuclear in talk shows. And yet Germany, after two decades and c…
Meanwhile in Russia they are doing heating with water from nuclear powerplants. While price gouging Germany for gas.
> It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. What part of this entire discussion has anything do to with science? Is anyone actually contesting the science? Is it a discussion about the number of orbitals of uranium atoms? Or is it a discussion on which entities handle the long-term financials obligations, whether we favor or not decentralized grids, whether we favor short term or longer…
A lot of the anti-nuclear opinion is passionately opposed to scientific analysis. They're convinced Chernobyl can happen again, and that scientists are arrogantly playing god when they explain what can and can't happen
What "scientific" analysis has claimed "chernobyl can't happen again" ? It would be as ridiculous as someone claiming the new Airbus XXX model can't crash. Even analysis of the type "a chernobyl will happen once every XX years" are more political in nature than scientific, since you are assuming a stable society for decades to come (i.e. no degradation in the skill level of constructors or operators, etc. -- even foreign ones). Which, barring sudden miraculous discoveries in the area of Psychohistory, is basically entirely politics and outside the realm of science.
>No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. Trojan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
WP says the plant has been "largely decommissioned". To my reading, that means the same as "not decommissioned yet".
The reactor and fuel were removed, and the reactor building and cooling tower were demolished. Maybe we need to use another word? Seems like that plant is pining-for-the-fjords.
Why do we need to get deep storage unstuck? Putting the waste in dry casks is cheaper.
There are radionuclides in those casks with half-lives of 200,000 years - much longer than human civilisation, and much longer still than the lifetime of a human writing system. We don't even know how to make a label that will make sense in 200,000 years. This attitude only makes sense if one's view is that humanity isn't going to last more than 10,000 years. Unless we can find a way of rendering nuclear waste safe,…
I sort of mostly agree. Long term deep storage is nice because with a good design, we can pretty much set and forget. Most LLFPs aren't actually very dangerous as they don't emit gamma rays, but Tc-99 and I-129 are pretty nasty stuff. we could probably reprocess those into Ru and throw the rest of it into a deep geologically stable hole. Any society in 10k years that could find the stuff will be advanced enough to avoid or rebury it. As long as we don't store anything highly bioavailable near water, it should be fine. By 10k years from now the amount of radiation actually being released will be miniscule. But, I'm all for a big deep hole.
De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party. It's understandable that France doesn't want to go with that, as they don't want to be forced down the same ruinous path we're currently on here in Germany. And honestly, good for them. It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. I did my PhD at the French nuclear…
Anti-nuclear sentiment (both environmentalist and anti-nuclear weapons) was generously sponsored by the Soviet Union. What a surprise than nowadays the same groups are serving the interests of Russia.
The most cynical thing is that the biggest nuclear accident in history was caused by Soviet negligence and incompetence and yet they managed to exploit it politically.
De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party. It's understandable that France doesn't want to go with that, as they don't want to be forced down the same ruinous path we're currently on here in Germany. And honestly, good for them. It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. I did my PhD at the French nuclear…
For politicians and administrations, I'm pretty sure any ideological stance is simply a facade to allow them to climb the ladders. The real propellent, throughout history, for politicians and administrations, are always more $$ and more power so I don't think Germany is an outlier.
> Gas emits so little CO2 compared to coal At a molecular level this doesn't make sense to me. The fundamental carbon cycle value proposition is to harvest energy released when a carbon atom (re)joins two oxygens. For the same energy, how would methane and coal produce different amounts of CO2? That said, I can see how the oxygen reaction would be less efficient and create more byproducts (i.e. acid rain) using coal…
Coal: C + O2 -> CO2 Gas: CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O I don't know off hand exactly how many joules of energy (heat) are produced per mole in each case but it's not surprising that gas gives more joules per mole of CO2: it's a bit like you're burning hydrogen at the same time. EDIT: It's relevant that O-H bonds are stronger than C-H bonds, presumably.
You also need to consider that H2O itself is also a greenhouse gas, much worse than CO2, although much easier to remove from atmosphere.
De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party. It's understandable that France doesn't want to go with that, as they don't want to be forced down the same ruinous path we're currently on here in Germany. And honestly, good for them. It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. I did my PhD at the French nuclear…
There are also many institutes (e.g IDW) constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc. These people are constantly invited to present these „Zukunftsenergien“ as opposed to the old bad nuclear in talk shows. And yet Germany, after two decades and c…
> The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power. We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants.
Heating problem IS a power problem given the high efficiency of heat pumps nowadays. And yes they work perfectly fine in Germany's relatively moderate winters.