Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 239 posts

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

#211

Post by lispm »

pthreadses wrote: post #197
lispm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works. Energy production is a huge market with lots of political corruption and huge amounts of money involved. Nuclear AND coal is both owned by a few monopolistic companies. In Germany there were four regions for electricity production and these four companies each owned one: basically all production and distribution of electricity. None of these companies had any interest to invest in renewable e…

It’s not at all a minor issue. These are real emissions that will continue to exist which didn’t need to. You’ve made zero argument to refute that fact.

> These are real emissions that will continue to exist which didn’t need to

They won't continue. Renewable will replace them much faster than nuclear could. Nuclear simply does scale much slower and much more expensive than nuclear.

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

#212

Post by lispm »

close04 wrote: post #129
lispm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market tells you that it's not true. If a horse is dead, you might as well climb down.

I feel like you are being intentionally obtuse by avoiding all direct answers and just replying with platitudes. Some of them plain wrong since the "horse" argument was based on a well known quote by Henry Ford [0] also implying that just because you have a working solution doesn't mean you have to stop searching for a better one, and that "the market" is not an oracle. The market was wrong so many times that using i…

So far I have't heard any convincing arguments from you. Just appeals, platitude and stuff from Henry Ford.

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

#213

Post by brutt »

MiroF wrote: post #180
brutt wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This millennia is not ended yet, so it is too early to count total number of victims of nuclear accidents.

This argument makes no sense

Radioactive contamination of soil has very long tail, so we should wait until radioactivity will be lower than background level to count total number of victims. I.e. 1 victim per year x 100 years = 100 victims, while 1 victim per year x 1000 years = 1000 victims, order of magnitude more victims.

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

#214

Post by renaudg »

xxgreg wrote: post #190
renaudg wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Phasing out coal in Germany is a political battle against a large entrenched century old industry. The phase-out looks to be gaining traction in recent years. Deals are being made to retrain coal miners and fund economic redevelopment of heavily coal dependent regions. All players including the power companies, network operators, miners unions, green NGOs, central and regional governments have been in discussion abou…

The incontrovertible problem remains : wind/solar are intermittent, peak load sources (Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro)

No matter how you spin this, you NEED to pick one of either nuclear, gas or coal in your mix to complement renewables.

Of these 3, only one of them is low carbon. Of the other two, one makes your energy grid depend on Putin's whims, while the other causes tremendous fine particles pollution causing thousands of premature deaths today, in addition to carbon emissions.

> Coal powered electricity generation is dropping and renewable generation is increasing.

But won't ever replace a base load source of electricity. Even after a 300 billion investment and spectacular share increase of renewables from 6 to 46%, Germany's emissions per kWh are 5-10 times worst than the best.

> The next election will likely be a CDU-Green coalition which will likely increase ambitions on emissions reductions.

Increased ambition is great but the facts above are unescapable. Are Die Grüne willing to drop ideology and face them ? That seems highly improbable.

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

#215

Post by d10r »

beloch wrote: post #71

"Nuclear energy, to start with, is ultimately not safe, and the Germans have always been particularly uneasy with it. After the nuclear accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan in 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the “Atomausstieg,” the exit from nuclear energy once and for all. Why? Because, as Ms. Merkel put it back then: “The residual risk of nuclear energy can be accepted only if one is convinced th…

I followed the Fukushima disaster very closely when it was happening. And I remember that during the crucial hours, when emissions of radioactive material was highest, the wind was luckily going to the east, out onto the pacific ocean, with thousands of miles of buffer. Given that, it seems to me that Fukushima could have gone much, much worse.

I have a pragmatic proposal: lets use nuclear power if it's competitive including insurance and including the long term cost of handling its waste. If it's not or if nobody can insure it, we should probably not.

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

#216

Post by renaudg »

PeterStuer wrote: post #206
renaudg wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

So on the one hand with nuclear, we're talking about one swimming pool's worth of waste since the beginning of the French nuclear programme. Currently stored safely enough, long term solution identified and implementation in progress.

You find this unacceptable.

On the other hand, we have renewables with no solution in sight (let alone implemented) for the intermittence problem (awaiting an hypothetical scientific breakthrough in batteries). In practice, you rely on coal for the day-to-day base load. Coal, for only a year's worth of running a country's trains generates "700.000 tons of solid ash (usually stored in the open air), plus 1.000 tons of soot and fine particles, including tons / dozens of tons of arsenic, lead, thallium, mercury, even uranium and thorium".

You call this the reasonable option.

And in another comment, you even feel entitled to lecture the Belgians and French about their nuclear plants near the border that might hypothetically fail one day, when 7 of the 10 worst polluters in Europe are Germany's lignite plants (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-lignite-plants-e...), with coal killing 23.300 people in Europe every year (https://endcoal.org/health/) right now, with certainty

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

#217

Post by lispm »

renaudg wrote: post #172
lispm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply wrong. Renewable energy for electricity is at 46% last year. Up from 6% in 2000. Coal has been declining a lot from 2000 (when the Energiewende startet) to today. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiem...

You're just focusing on the wrong metric. Because coal is so bad in terms of carbon intensity (800 gCO2/kwH), Germany's greenhouse gas emissions figures are still terrible on average. "Why Aren't Renewables Decreasing Germany's Carbon Emissions?" https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/10/10/why-arent... "Why solar and wind won’t make much difference to carbon dioxide emissions" https://blog.oup.com/2017/10/sola…

> You're just focusing on the wrong metric.

I don't and you are posting links to outdated articles.

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

#218

Post by d10r »

beloch wrote: post #71

"Nuclear energy, to start with, is ultimately not safe, and the Germans have always been particularly uneasy with it. After the nuclear accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan in 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the “Atomausstieg,” the exit from nuclear energy once and for all. Why? Because, as Ms. Merkel put it back then: “The residual risk of nuclear energy can be accepted only if one is convinced th…

one addition to the story: Exit from nuclear power in germany was already decreed by law several years before, by the then government of social democrats and greens. This decision was reverted by the first (I believe) Merkel government, only to be reverted again few years later due to Fukushima.

Merkel is known for being quite pragmatic and following the path of least political resistance in most cases. While the exit of the exit was very popular at that moment, I do believe that in this case she was sincere when telling that seeing the Fukushima disaster changed her mind. I guess it was humbling even for world leaders to see how helpless everybody up to the PM were in Japan in the face of what was happening.

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

#219

Post by jplayer01 »

dv_dt wrote: post #13
m4rtink wrote: post #7

Looking at the list of nuclear reactors in Germany Wikipedia has, while there are quite a few they don't seem to be very "good". There are disparate classes with little commonality and nothing in operation that has been built after ~1990. A far cry for the massive french nuclear power program, which managed to achieve large cost benefits by deciding on a single reactor type and then deploying at a large scale, with o…

I think France made one of the few smart moves with nuclear in the day, but today even France is closely studying tradeoffs between reinvesting in the next gen of nuclear fission plans vs renewable. In publicised studies renewable is looking like the better option.

That's a consideration that makes sense though, since France's reliance on fossil fuels is very low and they can rely on nuclear for base load. Germany, instead, has decided to replace nuclear with renewables where something like 40-50% of our energy comes from coal. If that's not insanity, I don't know what is.

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

#220

Post by kisstheblade »

Why do we still talk about "safety" when discussing nuclear even though this has been handled over 30 years ago. Or in other words I haven't seen any arguments presented in this paper "debunked". http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/

In short a few points:

- nuclear power is the safest form of energy production by far

- storing the waste is an easy problem (store on site and reuse later with better technologies), or just make glass cubes of it and dump in the ocean (yes really)!

- the high price of building nuclear power plants is in many ways the result of "nucular paranoia"

- non-military reactors (ie. all "western reactors") can't have the same failure modes as chernobyl had

Post reply on HN