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Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

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Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#271

Post by rasz »

Isolus wrote: post #82
_dain_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The whole political position of this party rests on their fanatic opposition to Nuclear power. Btw if anyone thinks this is exaggeration, it's not. They are evil fanatics: https://twitter.com/giuliasaudelli/status/158097313099012505... >"Nuclear power and fossil fuels brought us here. They caused this crisis, they are not the solution." >Strong and at times emotional speech by Robert Habeck, after weeks under pressu…

> Reality: the Greens and their allies spent half a trillion USD on the "energy transition" and turned off perfectly good nuclear reactors. Result: energy shortages and diplomatic submission to Russia. Um no. Renewable energy is now actually cheaper than nuclear energy. You could build renewable energy + storage within the same range of cost. The problem is the former government shut down nuclear power plants and the…

>You could

Clearly Germany couldnt, otherwise they would decommission coal plants.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#272

Post by papito »

xg15 wrote: post #125
papito wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more sinister than that. Russia was financially extremely incentivized to let this happen and indeed, it seems the so-called "environmental groups" in Germany and elsewhere are really fronts for the Russian government: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127... Designed to cynically "care" about the environment, but in reality meant to destroy Europe's energy independence.

> It has recently come to light Are there any more specific references what exactly has come to light here? As it stands, this question just reads as a pretty cheap attempt to frame any and all environmental concerns or pro-renewable/anti-fossil fuel advocacy as russian propaganda. (which doesn't even make sense as gas itself is not renewable - greens usually see gas as the lesser evil compared to coal and nuclear bu…

Sure. How about Fox News? https://www.foxnews.com/world/russia-funding-environmental-g...

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#273

Post by panick21_ »

grecy wrote: post #264
JohnBooty wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should make people more comfortable that Germany will be able to safeguard against their known risks? The safety of nuclear power plants isn't exactly some great unknown. There are ~450 plants currently operating in the world, with an average age of multiple decades. Plus all the ones that have been retired. That's a lot of data. You don't really have to take anybody's word for it. They're safe. They are not zer…

The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad. We were extremely lucky with Chernobyl that young men sacrificed themselves, else a large chunk of Europe would be uninhabitable. We were extremely lucky with Fukushima all the radiated water just went into the ocean. When it was going down there was nothing we could do but stand back and watch how bad it got. Of course on a regular day nuclear is safe, but every n…

> The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad.

Not really. If you actually measure it, its not actually that bad.

> We were extremely lucky with Chernobyl that young men sacrificed themselves, else a large chunk of Europe would be uninhabitable.

Often claimed but, the scientific bases for this claim is beyond shake. Maybe at the very worse you could say that radiation that was slightly dangerous would have been measurable all over Europe, but even that is a stretch.

> The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad.

Fukushima killed people because of rush unnecessary evacuations. Nobody actually died of radiation, maybe a very small group of people will have a slightly higher likely-hood of getting cancer, but even that will most likely not even be measruable.

The actual earth quake and the water killed far more people. The nuclear event made the news because its a novelty, while we have seen many people killed by earthquake and water.

> sooner or later we’re not going to get so lucky.

Given that safety increases over time, even the chance of a minor incident is increasingly less likely.

And if we actually built modern plants not 1970 design we could make it almost impossible for any significant risk to exist at all. But of course research and progress has essentially been stopped.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#274

Post by panick21_ »

nosianu wrote: post #206
metadat wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the remaining 95 potential uncontrollable problems beyond earthquake, fire, flood, war, human incompetence? Given appropriate attention and care, these can be accounted for through planning processes and protocols.

See France and its maintenance issues with not just one but many of their power plants, accumulated over decades and now greatly contributing to the European energy problems. ( https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/10/13/frances-nuclear-... ) Some issues I see are accountants, management, laziness, "somebody else's problem", etc. Those are businesses and they will try all the well-known ways to save money. Which the…

And France having maintenance issues is in large part because of the anti-nuclear campaign that increasingly started to attempt to move away from nuclear. For a while even in France they basically just wanted to run the reactors out and switch to renewables.

So the politics goes like this, cause maintenance delay, condemn nuclear for maintenance delay. Seriously, these delays are being handled in a reasonable time-frames and most of the reactors will be back when they are really needed.

Consider that with the age of these reactors, wind-farms would have to be mostly rebuilt to a larger degree.

Also, if we actually made progress on technology then we could have had moved on to air-cooled designs but sadly we can't have nice things.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#275

Post by panick21_ »

karamanolev wrote: post #249
metadat wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good reactor design would account for the human factor, and perhaps this is the truly difficult problem with practical nuclear power.

Agreed. "A good reactor design" to that definition is enormously hard though - I'll be incredibly happy if that gets solved, hopefully with a modular "built in a factory" design that can be easily replicated and remain very safe.

No bad reactor designs get built or have been built in the West in many decades.

Better designs would have been here long ago if we actually had continued with this technology, but its not that current reactors are truly bad designs.

The problem with them is more that they don't fit into how energy markets and energy investments are made and have been made. That goes for both the US and Europe.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#276

Post by fomine3 »

cedilla wrote: post #216
nickpp wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody knows why they are completely cleaning up that plant instead of just cordoning it off and marking it as "deadly land, nobody allowed in". You know, an exclusion zone like Chernobyl. Is land that expensive in Japan? Or is it some sort of ambition to prove they can repair that fuckup? O maybe there is a lot of money to be made in a cleanup operation?

We're talking about highly toxic soil here. Soil doesn't stay where it is, it moves with water and wind. You have to fix it, somehow. Just putting a bit of warning tape around it doesn't cut it. This isn't a theoretical point, either, wild mushrooms are still unsafe to eat in some parts of central Europe, almost four decades after Tchernobyl. The whole Fukushima disaster is another lesson in the prevention paradox. W…

> Soil doesn't stay where it is, it moves with water and wind. You have to fix it, somehow.

If (enough) so, it is spread across the globe so it become negligible. Those lands are highly polluted so it can't be live.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#277

Post by ta123456789 »

this_user wrote: post #175
worldvoyageur wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Chernobyl happened I was a physics undergrad in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and was spending the summer term on campus. We (the grad students really) went up to the roof of the physics building and started measuring for the radiation. There was much rejoicing when it turned up, which as I imperfectly remember was about two weeks after the incident. Which is to say, that the radiation could be measured is different…

Not all of us have the luxury of having more than 7000 km between us and the next nuclear accident, though. But I can send you some mushrooms from the forests of southern Germany if you would like to explore the health risks further.

Seems like it would be completely fine to eat, even regularly. With mushrooms having 1000 Bq/kg at worst, according to samples by BfS.

> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 2,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.005 millisievert. This is considerably less than the radiation exposure during a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. However, if adults eat such a mushroom meal each week, they will receive an additional annual radiation exposure corresponding to about twenty flights from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. Expressed in numbers it is 0.27 millisievert.

https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#278

Post by panick21_ »

cedilla wrote: post #216
nickpp wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody knows why they are completely cleaning up that plant instead of just cordoning it off and marking it as "deadly land, nobody allowed in". You know, an exclusion zone like Chernobyl. Is land that expensive in Japan? Or is it some sort of ambition to prove they can repair that fuckup? O maybe there is a lot of money to be made in a cleanup operation?

We're talking about highly toxic soil here. Soil doesn't stay where it is, it moves with water and wind. You have to fix it, somehow. Just putting a bit of warning tape around it doesn't cut it. This isn't a theoretical point, either, wild mushrooms are still unsafe to eat in some parts of central Europe, almost four decades after Tchernobyl. The whole Fukushima disaster is another lesson in the prevention paradox. W…

No its not actually highly toxic and not actually very dangerous at all. A false level of danger has been assigned to radiation and its risk, mostly because of bad science in the 1970s.

This mushrooms are still unsafe stuff is mostly a myth. What's correct is that these mushrooms still measure over the arbitrary level set government regulation during the height of panic about nuclear.

> We see low death and disease numbers, and somehow many people think that's because the disaster wasn't that bad after all, completely ignoring the literal tens of billions of dollars that the Japanese government

Actually much of those efforts have actually killed and hurt more people then it saved. Creating a panic and evacuating a major city because of some unfounded unscientific assessment of the danger.

I'm sure all the money spent on cleaning the grass has saved millions of people. The reality is that many of those efforts are political show making, security theater, like the TSA.

I'm sure there are some reasonable measures as well, but much of it is vastly overblown in terms of actual effects it would have.

See in Tschernobyl where very little was done, and people in the exclusion zone (where there is more radiation then in Japan) are totally fine.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#279

Post by ncmncm »

cedilla wrote: post #233
asdff wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't it scary that political decisions about energy are made on reactionary terms rather than engineering terms? An engineer would not have said "we have to stop nuclear power," because of accidents, they would have studied those accidents and developed methods to mitigate them. This is why airlines are safe, because of past accidents that were deeply tragic and catastrophic but often went on to stymie some shor…

It is scary, but it's not quite what happened. The original nuclear exit was a plan over some decades and included a clear exit from coal power as well. It also included a multi billion dollar plan to accelerate renewable energy as well, one that still reaps dividends today. Unfortunately, the Merkel government stopped these subsidies and dragged its feet regarding renewables for sixteen years. The flip-flopping stan…

No post body was provided.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#280

Post by panick21_ »

legulere wrote: post #91
mabbo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have instead replaced the fossil fuel electrical generation with those renewables, and kept the nuclear plants. That would have been a massive reduction in carbon emissions by Germany. Odd choice.

I would agree, especially from the standpoint of today, but I guess you have to see things historically. Issues with nuclear like fallout from Chernobyl still leading to contamination today in German or bad handling of nuclear waste at the Asse II mine have been a topic in German society for a very long time. The climate crisis picked up as a topic only really in the late 90s. That explains the first nuclear exit pla…

> Issues with nuclear like fallout from Chernobyl still leading to contamination today in German

What you mean is that fraudulent anti-science organization use it to fear monger to get people to do what they tell them to.

The actual contamination is a literal non issue. If nobody ever talked about it and nobody ever did anything about it exactly 0 people would get hurt.

> Asse II mine have been a topic in German society for a very long time.

More fear mongering for the most part.

Had all the money they wasted on Asse II been spent on new nuclear plants, they would literally have saved 1000s of people instead.

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