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Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

nytimes.com

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Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#201

Post by fbender »

tremon wrote: post #121
fbender wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. This is mostly because human imagination is limited and humans are fallible, and what‘s not covered by the previous two is lack of kn…

Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening That premise requires more convincing evidence for me. Nuclear reactors have an incredible safety record, given that most current reactors have their design roots in the 60s, and have been operated for longer than initially anticipated, on MBA-style shoestring budgets. Given that scenario, yes, ac…

Take a look at history if you need more evidence. At some point, someone always said „now we know better and we can build XXXX to be perfect“, and now we are laughing about them (to give a bad but simple example: Titanic). You are naïve if you think today is any different than yesterday, even with all that superior technology and knowledge that we have – but that was also true for any other point in time.

And your „waste solution“ will not help one bit with the waste we already have. Hence my argument remains.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#202

Post by fbender »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #123
fbender wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. This is mostly because human imagination is limited and humans are fallible, and what‘s not covered by the previous two is lack of kn…

Coal has already killed far more beings than the highly rare nuclear power station disaster. If you care about wellbeing and human lives, swapping nuclear for coal is downright stupid.

Germany swapped nuclear (and coal) for renewables. While I wholeheartedly agree that it would have been better to extend nuclear in favor of decommissioning coal earlier, that‘ll still not make your argument valid.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#203

Post by fbender »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #134
fbender wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. This is mostly because human imagination is limited and humans are fallible, and what‘s not covered by the previous two is lack of kn…

>But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. This is mostly because human imagination is limited and humans are fallible, and what‘s not covered by the previous two is lack of k…

If you talk space, the difference is that all relevant people were and are aware of the risks and do their job despite them. And they do their job in such a way that the risk is always minimized (through extensive preparation, Monitoring, …), you can handle a situation immediately or even recover from it (e.g. redundancy; failure detection, isolation, & recovery mechanisms; etc) and learn from it (post-mortem processes). Everything and everyone breathes risk awareness.

If you are talking aeronautics, the situation is fundamentally similar but also the scales are very different (also in terms of operating personnel vs. throughput). But more importantly, society in the majority seemed to have accepted a level of risk even though we know for sure that the next catastrophic event could happen any moment.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#204

Post by eirini1 »

fbender wrote: post #201
tremon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening That premise requires more convincing evidence for me. Nuclear reactors have an incredible safety record, given that most current reactors have their design roots in the 60s, and have been operated for longer than initially anticipated, on MBA-style shoestring budgets. Given that scenario, yes, ac…

Take a look at history if you need more evidence. At some point, someone always said „now we know better and we can build XXXX to be perfect“, and now we are laughing about them (to give a bad but simple example: Titanic). You are naïve if you think today is any different than yesterday, even with all that superior technology and knowledge that we have – but that was also true for any other point in time. And your „w…

Did we stop building boats?

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#205

Post by kalleboo »

brutt wrote: post #160
roenxi wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't too costly to bear. There are already huge swathes of earth that are uninhabitable wastelands. The change in evacuating a region is painful, but the length of time it stays evacuated isn't important. In the long term it is like the existence of the Sahara - just a fact.

Why nuclear industry cannot bear this burden then instead of tax payers?

Because the fossil fuel industries aren't bearing the burden of the cost of climate change (or geopolitical warfare) and that's what they have to be competitive with

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#206

Post by PeterStuer »

renaudg wrote: post #166
trickstra wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is heavily investing in solar and wind. Why do you bring up coal? Also - even if the nuclear power plant is 100% safe, it still produces nuclear waste that nobody wants to keep anywhere near their city and will be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, that's longer than humanity has been around - it's just the same trap as burning fossil fuels. Why would we want to make the same mistake again?

> Germany is heavily investing in solar and wind. Why do you bring up coal? Because coal is what Germany really relies on in practice, making it one the worst industrialised nations when it comes to CO2 emissions per kWh. Check for yourself, right this minute : http://electricitymap.org/ > it's just the same trap as burning fossil fuels. Why would we want to make the same mistake again? Because it's not the same mist…

"Nuclear waste is stored in highly stable geological layers"

That is just factually wrong. "Despite advanced schemes in Finland, not a single country worldwide has an operational underground repository." [1]

That was 2014 and plans have stalled or have been abandoned altogether due to local opposition and technical problems. The reality is that in nearly all cases storage is onsite or in other above ground locations.

France still has a plan to build and operate an underground storage facility in Bure [2], but costs have exploded due to not just very rose colored estimates at the start, but also due to running into problems such as water seepage and not being able to handle certain failure scenarios such as a transport catching fire.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26425674

[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cig%C3%A9o

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#207

Post by kmmlng »

donjoe wrote: post #59

Rainer Moormann's [0] recent statement concerning current nuclear costs Germany is facing in a single case: " Here an info about #NuclearWaste. A particularly bad kind are the 900,000 HTR-balls from Hamm and Jülich. It is being considered to export them to the USA against the resistance of the ecosystem. Would cost about 1 billion €, including transportation. From the globes, 4.4 TWh, i.e. 0.15% of the German nuclear…

Note that Jülich was not exactly a typical nuclear power plant: it was a prototype pebble bed reactor linked to a research facility.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#208

Post by merb »

renaudg wrote: post #178
merb wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btw. this map is bullshit. french basically netted zero co2 emissions for their nuclear power plant. I mean 90% of their uranium ore comes from nigeria. it's not like that stuff gets teleported to the reactors. the uraniums needs to be mined, refined, transported. see: - https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg23531450-700-7-generat... - https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... etc... of course i…

Nope sorry, it takes all of this into account. From their FAQ : "We use a life cycle analysis (LCA) approach, meaning that we take into account emissions arising from the whole life cycle of power plants (construction, fuel production, operational emissions, and decommissioning)."

yeah, but their approach was to basically cut the emission of construction, fuel production and opertional emissions and decomissioning basically to zero or at least extremly misleading numbers: https://euranetplus-inside.eu/deep/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#209

Post by tremon »

fbender wrote: post #201
tremon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening That premise requires more convincing evidence for me. Nuclear reactors have an incredible safety record, given that most current reactors have their design roots in the 60s, and have been operated for longer than initially anticipated, on MBA-style shoestring budgets. Given that scenario, yes, ac…

Take a look at history if you need more evidence. At some point, someone always said „now we know better and we can build XXXX to be perfect“, and now we are laughing about them (to give a bad but simple example: Titanic). You are naïve if you think today is any different than yesterday, even with all that superior technology and knowledge that we have – but that was also true for any other point in time. And your „w…

And your „waste solution“ will not help one bit with the waste we already have.

Why not? Breeder reactors can use spent fuel as (part of) their power source, and that spent fuel is the cause of our 10-100k year problem. From wikipedia [1]:

Since breeder reactors on a closed fuel cycle would use nearly all of the actinides fed into them as fuel, their fuel requirements would be reduced by a factor of about 100. The volume of waste they generate would be reduced by a factor of about 100 as well [..] In principle, breeder fuel cycles can recycle and consume all actinides, leaving only fission products [having] a peculiar 'gap' in their aggregate half-lives, such that no fission products have a half-life between 91 years and two hundred thousand years. As a result of this physical oddity, after several hundred years in storage, the activity of the radioactive waste from a Fast Breeder Reactor would quickly drop to the low level of the long-lived fission products

So, not only would fast breeder reactors reduce our waste volume by 99%, they would also reduce our waste storage lifetime from 10k-100k years to a few hundred years (a more than 99% reduction).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#210

Post by lispm »

renaudg wrote: post #175
lispm wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all irrelevant. The world production of nuclear power is basically flat for the last 30 years. Renewable energy is expanding rapidly. That's currently the only viable option. The best is to phase out all costly nuclear reactors and invest the money into renewable energy expansion. Storage of electricity can be done in multiple ways and we will see larger new installations in ten years from now. Models for runn…

> The world production of nuclear power is basically flat for the last 30 years. I'm glad that China proves you wrong. If they had gone all in with coal+renewables like Germany, climate change would be an even bigger issue than it already is. > Renewable energy is expanding rapidly. That's currently the only viable option. The best is to phase out all costly nuclear reactors and invest the money into renewable energy…

> I'm glad that China proves you wrong.

It doesn't. And China is not the world.

Nuclear is 4% in China for electricity production. Tiny. Renewable production & investments in China are much higher that the ones for nuclear. Wind power already is larger in China and fast growing.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Electric...

> No, again Germany has tried that.

of course it works. Renewable will grow year over year. In a decade it will be more than 60% in Germany.

> Besides, there's an upper limit to the expansion.

That limit hasn't been reached. By far.

In the EU basically most new deployment of electricity production is renewable. Basically none for nuclear.

Check the trends: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/-World-Nuclear-Industry-S...

It's clear where this is going. Nuclear's contribution to reduce CO2 emissions will be minor - the large share of reduction will come from large scale deployment of renewable energy. The numbers are clear, just read the World Nuclear Report from above...

> This is hot air, nothing more than wishful thinking

It's not. For example I live in North Germany. There is a large power line under construction to Norway and more can be build (some are already under planning). These will combine electricity from on/offshore windfarms with Hydro-Electric storage.

We also have very large storage facilities for gas, which can be generated from surplus electricity. The areas here will have huge amount of surplus electricity.

This will all get more important in a decade or so.

There are various other technologies for storing electricity either existing or under development.

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