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The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted. I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with

by pm90 9y ago

The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted. I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with all the capital investment involved, just doesn't make any sense. Especially when there is little risk of natural disasters in Germany. If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal, the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment.

graeme 9y ago
I have never understood why people fear nuclear and don’t seem to fear carbon as giscerally or more. I can understand that nuclear has risks. But people seem to evaluate nuclear in a vacuum, rather than against the carbon sources which currently replace it. “What do we do with the waste” is a better question when applied to coal.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  "Fine particles from coal power plants kill an estimated 13,200 people each year in the US alone" https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053.600-fossil-fuels-are-far-deadlier-than-nuclear-power/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053.600-fossil-f... The death toll from coal is staggering compared to nuclear. It is not even close.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Coal is more dangerous than nuclear even if you count the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki under the "nuclear" column.
  - balamaci 9y ago
    How do you actually asses that the cause of death is coal vs cigarette smoke vs car exaust? Is only cancer of respiratory system taken into account? Is a percentage of stroke victims also? How is that percentage chosen?
    - aidenn0 9y ago
      I don't know how this study does it, but one can make estimates by seeing how death-rates change in places with different levels of coal particulates, particularly over time as coal plants were opened and shuttered. Alternatively there are studies that correlate various pollutants with respiratory issues, and then compare that with the pollution emitted by coal plants. Ideally one would make many such estimates, yielding a range that one could have high confidence is close to the truth, similar to how we use multiple methods of dating fossils, and then know something is wrong if there is a large disparity.
    - yk 9y ago
      These are not death as in murder, these are a statistical measure called excess death and it is usually very model dependent. I looked a bit into the models for nuclear accidents. There the problem is, that there is just no good data in the relevant range of radiation. We have data from very low doses due to background radiation and for high doses due to accidents, we don't have good data for large scale releases. Either you can do what is suggested for higher acute doses, then you end up with 40 000 dead due to Chernobyl, or you can fit a second order model, then you will end up with something in the order of 10. (Or you do what Greenpeace did and you look at correlations between irradiation and cancer rates in former Soviet oblasts, where you then have some influence of Soviet industry, etc...) And that is if you want to look at catastrophic risk at all. (After all an RMBK had several design flaws, that modern reactors don't have.) The number basically tells you that according to a specific model, that is hopefully a good approximation of our understanding of the risks, a certain percentage of the death rate should be due to that factor. However I think these numbers carry not much more information than 32 other bits of the same sentence and to really use them you have to look at the specific model and you need to develop an opinion if the model reflects the relevant arguments well.
- foepys 9y ago
  Germany is traditionally very anti-nuclear because when the Chernobyl disaster happened, a lot of people in the south were told to not let their children play outside. Even today some mushrooms and boars that eat those mushrooms are contaminated. On the French and Belgian side of its borders Germany got some very old reactors that had some serious security related incidents within the last few years. [1] In the city of Aachen the government even distributed iodine tablets if it gets worse. Additionally Germany doesn't have locations to store radioactive waste indefinitely. The current location for intermediate storage, called "Asse", is known to be leaking contaminated water into all kinds of directions and nobody is really sure how to stop it. [2] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station#Incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station#... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Water_inflow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Water_inflow
  - vog 9y ago
    And finally, don't forget Fukushima. The current politics here in Germany are a direct reaction to Fukushima. Chernobyl, Asse, Aachen, Gorleben all didn't change anything in our politics. But Fukushima did. Immediately.
    - lispm 9y ago
      The end of nuclear was decided long before Fukushima - in 2000. The Merkel government was on its way to change that, against protests (2010). Shortly after that Fukushima happened (2011), and Merkel had to return to the Atomausstieg (also 2011).
- adventured 9y ago
  The slow or grudual & unseen, versus the sudden and dramatic. Humans seem to almost universally do poorly at judging those two pools of risk against one another. People are terrified of being murdered or crashing in an airplane (both sudden death), yet they die by the droves at 10x, 100x or 1000x the rate from poor lifestyle habits (food, smoking, drinking, lack of exercise, etc). The fear of sharks is likewise similar (sudden violent death, and extremely rare). With some of these there is also the control aspect that comes into play (having control, not having control, or having an illusion of control). For example with sharks, you're in their environment, heavily lacking control, almost helpless by comparison to their ability. With passenger airplane crashes, it's kiss your ass goodbye, you have basically zero control over the situation (not even the ability to pretend you do). People die by the millions driving cars, yet they don't seem to fear that nearly so much as dying in a plane crash. I chalk that up to the partial illusion that drivers have a very large amount of control as to whether they die in a car crash or not. I believe coal generates the same fear response as the gradual lifestyle threats do, it's perceived as a gradual threat/risk. Nuclear is perceived as a sudden dramatic death threat (decades of miseducation, propaganda, and of course generalized fears over all things nuclear derived from the bomb).
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    People die in huge numbers in very violent automobile accidents. For young people in the US (15–35), the leading causes of death are car accidents and gunshots (homicide, suicide, accidents). Most physical violence (assault, murder, rape, ..) is between people who know each-other, but typically people are more afraid of different-looking strangers. I think it has more to do with fear of unusual situations than suddenness or drama.
    - adventured 9y ago
      > People die in huge numbers in very violent automobile accidents. That's offset by the illusion that people believe they're in a very high degree of control over the situation. It enables the brain to create an illusion and say to itself: I won't make that mistake, my actions dictate the outcome, I'm a good driver (as the comical studies always demonstrate, people tend to dramatically over-estimate their driving skill). > Most physical violence ... is between people who know each-other You don't actually think that's going to happen, that's the issue. If you told someone their pal is about to rape or murder them, they would not believe it, they'd be far more afraid of the menacing looking stranger. That's where ignorance of risk - as with sharks - comes into action. I would guarantee a low percentage would believe they're more likely to be murdered by someone they're close to than a stranger. If a person doesn't have a meaningful comprehension of the risk (as with nuclear), the risk context inherently can't be judged properly. I suspect there's a big illusion of control that is involved between two known relations as well, you think you have some influence over whether a friend will murder you (surely they like you, surely you could talk them down from a violent confrontation, etc.); versus that almost entirely missing from the menacing stranger scenario.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  That's an interesting thought and I think you have hit the nail on the head. If you ask someone where nuclear power can damage the environment, they say yes it can. They understand the damage from fallout because it is local. But the same person may not believe that coal can damage the environment globally. There is a huge cognitive bias against effects we can't physically see, and understanding the scale of the planet. This is the same reason we have some people who still believe in the flat earth conspiracy. The only answer real is education. If educators had a way to help children better create visual models of these things inside their heads, maybe we could all agree on these issues we can't see with our eyes. Maybe VR will help? I don't know. But I would definitely donate to any think tank that was A/B testing educators lessons on global warming.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    Who believes the Earth is flat? As far as I'm aware, nobody does and nobody ever did. The belief in flat earthers is ironically stronger and more like a conspiracy theory than the belief in a flat Earth.
    - airza 9y ago
      you could probably find out this is very demonstrably false by searching facebook or google news for about 15 minutes
      - kaybe 9y ago
        Can you really though? I find it hard to distinguish from a really elaborate troll.
    - jensv 9y ago
      [This Is What the Q&A Session at a Flat Earth Conference Looks Like](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/11/13/this-is-what-the-qa-session-at-a-flat-earth-conference-looks-like/#uPme4LVH8rxO3k4A.99 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/11/13/this...)
- pizzapill 9y ago
  The fear of nuclear power in Germany comes from the Tschernobyl disaster 1986. A life changing event for many Germans. Not beeing able to leave the house. Cutting a lot of foods from your diet because they are contaminated for decades (mushrooms, game meat, berries etc.). East block countries trying to sell their contaminated food for consumption and it ending up in GDR school kitchens. Additionally having two superpowers stationing a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs in your country. While at the same time beeing sure that you'd die first in a new world war that would almost surely start in your country and would probably devastate your whole continent beyond beeing suited for human surival. Then the whole argument that its cleaner and cheaper energy. While you pay for transport, storage and security with your tax money and the company keeps the profits. By storage i mean temporar storage, because no one worldwide has figured out how to safely store the waste for hundreds of thousands of years (Pyramids are 4500 years old and we don't even know how they are build). Thats why most of this waste from the 80s and 90s lies a few km off our coasts in the sea where the UK, Russia and Italian mafia dumped it.
  - vog 9y ago
    > The fear of nuclear power in Germany comes from the Tschernobyl disaster 1986. Tschernobyl was almost forgotten, at least by the politicians in power, but then Fukushima happend.
    - pizzapill 9y ago
      Not by the populace tough. I mean our politicians were happy to kill off the planet 30 years ago until many citizens started to protest for environmentaly concious politics. Now its mainstream in German politics and almost all other countries start similar programs currently. I mean even the US starts to hear the bells ringing in the last couple of years and is implementing policies that they shoul've implemented 30 years ago. In addition I might add that we are sourrounded by countries that we don't trust to be able to feed their citizes reliably. Less so when it comes to reactor security.
      - wott 9y ago
- ben_w 9y ago
  It’s not a rational distinction, it’s a tribal one. It’s the same cognitive bias that meant during Cold War both the USA and the USSR thought gay men were spies for the other team. Black amd white morality — if you’re any less than an angel you must be a demon.
- walshemj 9y ago
  And as an example the Aberfan disaster where coal mine waste had a landslide and killed 116 children and 28 adults.
- megy 9y ago
  Are you serious? It is the same reason people fear terrorist attacks when a million people are killed by cars every single year but everyone still drives.
27182818284 9y ago
>the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment. It is hard to get away from that energy density, yeah. I remember seeing an old black and white photo in a book as a child where each pellet of uranium was equal to like a ton of coal in terms of electrical production.
- simonh 9y ago
  Uranium has two to three million times the energy density of coal, so one kg of uranium equals several thousand metric tons of coal.
  - Ygg2 9y ago
    I imagine a pellet is no larger than a marble, so it seems same proportion.
- rakoo 9y ago
  Relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/1162/ https://www.xkcd.com/1162/
  - dest 9y ago
    There are so many xkcds, I still discover some of them! Thanks for sharing.
Avamander 9y ago
It's because they have bad experiences with nuclear and general public doesn't like it either. I suck at German so I can't find the article, but there have been a few cases where the construction of a few reactors has been sub-optimal and thus somewhat dangerous (and too hard to fix). Also some cases of statistically significantly higher chances of leukemia in children near one nuclear plant. But don't quote me on this, GTranslate might have left some critical details about those articles untranslated.
- mikeash 9y ago
  They have a pretty bad experience with coal, too. Several thousand Germans die each year due to pollution from coal-fired power plants. Yet there's no urgent push to immediately shut down every.
  - Tomte 9y ago
    Because that's invisible. Still, n * 1000 deaths (in n years) may rationally be preferable to m deaths once, even if n * 1000 >> m Risk assessment is a funny thing. Economists and psychologists have done great experiments along these lines.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      I can see it if m is, say, 90% of the entire population. But when m is measured in thousands, how is the vastly larger death toll ever rationally preferable just because it's spread out a bit? It's not even spread out that much. Worldwide, coal kills more people in two months than nuclear ever has, and that's including nuclear bombs.
  - whyever 9y ago
    > Several thousand Germans die each year due to pollution from coal-fired power plants. Do you have a source for this?
    - mikeash 9y ago
mikeash 9y ago
Very little about nuclear policy has any relation to sense. Emotion dominates the discussion, even more than usual. The good news is that it looks hopeful that renewables will be in a position to take over before too much longer, giving us emission-free energy without the emotional baggage of nukes.
saosebastiao 9y ago
Not too long ago microwave radiation was a huge boogeyman. Everybody was afraid of it turning them into mutants or used as super weapons. The only thing that changed was some people started putting it into their homes. They were cooking their food with it, and nobody died. Then they went through the whole technology adoption curve, jumped the chasm, and the rest is history. I honestly believe that if we had focused more on building smaller and smaller nuclear power plants, and putting them in more and more cities, that we wouldn't have had this problem. If you look around at the areas that have high support for nuclear power, they're all areas that have had nuclear power plants for decades without a problem. Make them small enough that people don't notice them, and when they find out one has been in their backyard for 20 years, they shrug it off like if they found out their neighbor was a lesbian (maybe that's a bad example but whatever).
- nickik 9y ago
  Nuclear could be so awesome but its its so hard to do because of regulation. We would already have energy cheaper then coal if you could more easily develop and deploy these.
  - Tomte 9y ago
    We would also have quite a few uninhabitable areas if we let Silicon Valley startup types dabble with nuclear reactors. "Move fast and break things"…
    - nickik 9y ago
      That's the same argument people make against SpaceX and they are generally far faster cheaper and have high standards. Yes, nuclear should not be a total free for all, but there is absolutely no reason why people should not be allowed to make small research reactors and small reactors to iterate on the technology. We essentially still use age old concepts for our reactors and one of the reasons is that its almost impossible to bring something different to market. Its literally stifling innovation.
bennofs 9y ago
Risk is not the only reason to move away from nuclear energy. There's also the problem of radioactive waste, which will need to be dealt with for many, many years (German laws require secure storage for one million years). I won't claim that radioactive waste is more problematic than burning coal here, because I don't know enough about the topic. But it needs to be taken into account in the discussion. Calling nuclear energy "emissions free" is just wrong in my opinion: it just generates a different kind of emissions, nuclear waste.
- nickik 9y ago
  Nuclear waste is not actually a huge problem if you look at resources spent. Its only a 'problem' because anti-nuclear people demand totally unreasonable requirements and managed to put them into law. Plus the waste majority of the problem would go away, newer reactor types could consume lots of the old 'waste'. The US alone has enough 'waste' to power the whole US for years and years. It is of course not allowed to even research these reactors in many places. While it might not be 'emission free' it is free of uncontrolled emission. You know exactly where and how much radiation is produced and you can easily set it up so that not a single human or animal is hurt by it.
  - lispm 9y ago
    > newer reactor types could consume lots of the old 'waste'. These reactors don't exist in Germany, and they won't exist in the next two decades and they need a whole new industry around it. These types of industries (reprocessing plants, fuel production, etc.) nobody wants to have in a dense European country and which are extremely expensive. Setting up these new reactors and the corresponding new fuel industries far away. If somebody wants to invest the many billions, good luck - but hopefully not anywhere near Germany.
    - nickik 9y ago
      You don't have to build a storage room for millions of years if you know that technologically its is quite feasible to use these resources in the next 1-2 generations. If nuclear energy development would not be stopped and opposed on every step both in development and deployment these things would have been solved long ago. The needed technology essentially exists for 40 years. Basically the problem only exist as long as people are determined to not develop nuclear technology any further. As for your 'dense population argument' that is essentially another 'nuclear is very dangerous and needs to be far away from people' argument. Every reasonable large country in Europe has enough space for these things, if you use real rather then fantasy risk assessment. Also, in a global market there is no reason why any of that stuff has to be in your country.
jrs95 9y ago
At the very least they should have had a plan to move to another green energy source. Or at least something that isn't essentially guaranteed to kill people.
topspin 9y ago
This reminds me of a comment by quotemstr a few days ago about the housing supply 'debate,' where the absurdity of pretending that supply and demand somehow doesn't apply to the west coast reality distortion field is called out. The math behind energy is very simple and any honest person that chose to deal in realities understood that by EOLing their nuclear supply Germany had only more fossil fuel or severe economic decline as possible futures; renewables can not make up the difference then, now or in the foreseeable future, no matter how hard we wish it could. Yes, I know: Chernobyl. That's a cop out. Germany need not be governed by hysteria. The difference between Russian/Soviet incompetence and the results we see from France, Ontario and other well governed and highly successful nuclear systems is vast and decisive and could have provided Germany's 'leaders' with the ammo they needed to do something other than indulge anti-nook hysteria. But that's not what happened... so burn coal instead.
- Tomte 9y ago
  We've seen severe problems and gross negligence in American, French and Dutch reactors, as well. Oh, and in German ones, of course. And let's not forget about Japan who must certainly be counted among the "well governed and highly successful" ones. The examples are legion. I do understand that less nuclear means more coal and that this is a difficult decision. But nuclear fans claiming that the problem with nuclear reactors is just "stupid Russians" disqualify themselves immediately.
  - adventured 9y ago
    > I do understand that less nuclear means more coal and that this is a difficult decision. Germany has vast financial resources at its disposal. They could go on a natural gas plant building binge and link deals to the US on imports for long durations that the US would be thrilled to do. That would help narrow the trade deficit Germany has with the US ($65 billion annually; natural gas trade could solidly knock out half of that), so killing two birds with one stone. With help from the US abundance of natural gas supply, Germany could replace half its coal power in the next ~15 years using natural gas and significantly reduce its CO2 output just from that (and a big chunk of the other half could probably be knocked out by gradual renewable growth from where they're already at).
GuB-42 9y ago
I suspect it is partly a political move, partly economical. For me, the biggest drawback for nuclear power is that it is expensive. Nuclear fuel is cheap but building, maintaining and decommissioning power plants is not. It is especially apparent as power plants approach their end of life. The choice is to either decommission it, an expensive and unproductive process, or to extend its life. Unlike what many people think, there is nothing wrong with the second option, however, maintenance costs increase exponentially, so passed a certain point, it is no longer viable. I suspect Germany moved away from nuclear because of a combination of several factors : public perception of nuclear power following Fukushima accidents, power plants approaching end of life and sufficient coal reserves. Their policy seem to be a mix of highly variable solar+wind backed up by on-demand coal plants, and nuclear, while ideal for baseline, doesn't seem to fit this policy.
- detaro 9y ago
  Germany had been moving away from nuclear power for a long time before Fukushima: The plans for shutdowns were made in 2000, with the last reactors closing in 2015-2020 (there were no fixed dates, but rather remaining production capacities assigned, so e.g. stopping a reactor for a few months of maintenance wouldn't have meant a loss for the operator). A anti-nuclear movement had existed for decades before that, growing more and more in popularity the more people lost trust in the plant operators and the agencies supposed to oversee them: operators failing to report incidents, regular failures in temporary storage facilities (e.g. the "Asse", an old salt mine in which nuclear waste is stored and which started to flood), a never-completed search for an actual long-term storage facility, questions about why the government was paying for so much of that work, ... Late 2010 the then-current government decided to weaken this and added run-time extensions, against popular opinion which wanted to stay with the 2000 plans. Fukushima pushed this back up to public attention, which caused the government to turn 180 degrees, force the worst reactors offline temporarily and re-implement the 2000 plans.
- pouetpouet 9y ago
  I agree that building and decomissioning are expensive. But the rational response to that is: don't build more. How is early decomissioning going to help both of these issues?
StreamBright 9y ago
Adding the the coal is safer than nuclear argument: http://assets2.motherboard.tv/content-images/contentimage/no-slug/d75936b917b5dbe2376ac949a9a0acf9.jpg http://assets2.motherboard.tv/content-images/contentimage/no...
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  What are Terrawatts?
  - stickydink 9y ago
    Terra is the SI unit for 10^12. One Terrawatt-hour is the electrical energy equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000 watts, generated in one hour.
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    > What are Terrawatts? 1 terawatt (TW) = 10e12 watts. Then 1 watt-hour (Wh) is 3600 joules. Or maybe you meant to say they misspelled the word? But then you would have just said it was a misspelling, so I assumed you asked about the unit itself.
  - whyever 9y ago
    "Tera" is an SI prefix and "Watt" is the SI unit of power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefixes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt
- timthelion 9y ago
  Nuclear has the risk of radiation release, coal has the guarantee of radiation release. But rooftop solar is still the best option. Solar along fences, solar above electrified train tracks.
  - AdamJacobMuller 9y ago
    Energy storage is not a solved problem at scale yet. Are we making useful progress? Sure. But, not solved yet.
baxtr 9y ago
Maybe you are right. But, let’s not panic about this though. I believe this will be just a temporary hike and pushes Germany towards renewable energy sources even stronger.
pizzapill 9y ago
> The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted. Movement for it started in 1986. Complete exit was made into law in 2000. Softened up and reinstated after Fukushima. > I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with all the capital investment involved, just doesn't make any sense. Many reactors are old and wouldn't have been running for any longer anyways. Other than that I agree that it does not make sense on a economical level. > Especially when there is little risk of natural disasters in Germany. Like in every other country that has nuclear power plants, severe hazards are a weekly occurence. Aditionally Germany is close to many countries which nobody trusts when it comes to nuclear security. Ukraine already had a nuclear catastrophe that cost ~1 million lifes until to date. Belgium has one of the most dangerous reactors running, Tihange 2. Etc. If you google for it you can find pictures of nuclear plants that fix their pipes with duct tape and catch radioactive water with kiddie pools. Aditionally there is the very real and exisiting risk that all our sourrounding seas and oceans have the nuclear waste of a couple decades dumped into them with happy involvement of governments, militaries and organized crime. Then there is the waste which is temporarily stored. Worldwide. Since nobody can figure out how to store and keep it save for the next couple hundred thousand years. I mean we're not even on the level of knowing what really happened 2000 years ago. > If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal, The people in Germany have will and currently do accept sacrifices in this regard when it comes to saving the environment. We pay high taxes on energy and transportation. Our industry is on the forefront of environment friendly production. This was a push that started as a grass roots movement in the 80s. Now its German mainstream politics. Germans actually invest a lot of money in the environment. So do other countries. > the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes. But its not the optimal solution and it can be phased out. If my country is on the forefront of phasing it out I'm all for it. I'm also for phasing out coal. Especially since for example in our domestic coal production, every employee is subsidized by the state with ~ 500 000 € p. year. > Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment. Both destroy our environment. All that nuclear waste in our seas will start to leak out and will probably kill off many species and large parts of the oceans. Its already killing millions of people and we don't know what is going to happen. Nuclear could be a clean solution to our current energy needs if its managed correctly. On the other hand it could well be a suicide technology where we wake up one day and realize that its too late for our species or planet.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
Germany, despite all it's posturing, does not really believe that global warming is as scary as they say it is. If they really believed that global warming was catastrophic, then even having a Chernobyl occur once every decade is preferable to shutting down nuclear and burning coal.
MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
We had a reasonable long-term plan. Then Fukushima happened. Merkel always goes with the popular sentiment, the only exception was the refugee crisis and her party suffered dearly for that.
nikdaheratik 9y ago
It's very tiresome how these threads seem to pop up on this site that basically boil down to how "Nuclear is the savior of all" and people are too scared/stupid to see it. The problem is that "people" aren't making these decisions, utility companies are. And they have good economic reasons on top of the complicated politics. For safety reasons, nuclear plants are very complex, take a long time to build and require a ton of capital. The physics make these work out long term, but only if you're willing to build a large enough facility that you can take the place of 2-3 comparable coal facilities. Part of this is because they produce power more efficiently, but also because the largest startup costs for these are from finding a site and going through all the safety and other regulatory requirements. Once you have approval for single reactor, you're better off adding a few more at the same site than trying to find another site for a new reactor. The bottom line is the utility company is on the hook for a huge investment for 30 years or more before it breaks even. That's what stalled the development in the 70s and 80s and it's even more unlikely to get started today, what with the extreme uncertainty surrounding fossil fuel sources, the rapidly decreasing cost of renewables, etc. The most common response to this fact is that we can replace huge facilities these with lots of much smaller/safer Thorium or other alternative fuels. From a physics standpoint, this may be true, but utility companies don't want to have to manage the fuel chain for (potentially) dozens of facilities, governments don't like having to guard that many small sites, and there are a limited number of communities that are comfortable living near a reactor of any kind, even a "tiny" one. I don't know if this is smart or not, but it's not going to change anytime soon. The bottom line is that unless we have a huge leap in the amount of technology required to manage a nuclear reactor, or in the potential safety factor around the fuel and other risks, nuclear is not going to ever become a majority power source in most countries.
cvwright 9y ago
They should have seen this coming a long time ago. I did a study abroad in Germany in 2000, and one of my classes was on the energy crisis. We visited a strip mine that was going to become the largest lake in Germany after they were done extracting the coal, because they were planning to fill the huge hole with water. It's hard to describe the scale of the thing in words. "Enormous" doesn't even start. As part of that same course, the Germans were also nice enough to tour a bunch of foreign engineering students around inside one of their nuclear reactors. That was quite a trip. After 9/11 I doubt they did those tours anymore, and now the reactors will be gone anyway..

by pm90 9y ago

graeme 9y ago

I have never understood why people fear nuclear and don’t seem to fear carbon as giscerally or more. I can understand that nuclear has risks. But people seem to evaluate nuclear in a vacuum, rather than against the carbon sources which currently replace it. “What do we do with the waste” is a better question when applied to coal.

saas_co_de 9y ago
"Fine particles from coal power plants kill an estimated 13,200 people each year in the US alone" https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053.600-fossil-fuels-are-far-deadlier-than-nuclear-power/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053.600-fossil-f... The death toll from coal is staggering compared to nuclear. It is not even close.
- mikeash 9y ago
  Coal is more dangerous than nuclear even if you count the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki under the "nuclear" column.
- balamaci 9y ago
  How do you actually asses that the cause of death is coal vs cigarette smoke vs car exaust? Is only cancer of respiratory system taken into account? Is a percentage of stroke victims also? How is that percentage chosen?
  - aidenn0 9y ago
    I don't know how this study does it, but one can make estimates by seeing how death-rates change in places with different levels of coal particulates, particularly over time as coal plants were opened and shuttered. Alternatively there are studies that correlate various pollutants with respiratory issues, and then compare that with the pollution emitted by coal plants. Ideally one would make many such estimates, yielding a range that one could have high confidence is close to the truth, similar to how we use multiple methods of dating fossils, and then know something is wrong if there is a large disparity.
  - yk 9y ago
    These are not death as in murder, these are a statistical measure called excess death and it is usually very model dependent. I looked a bit into the models for nuclear accidents. There the problem is, that there is just no good data in the relevant range of radiation. We have data from very low doses due to background radiation and for high doses due to accidents, we don't have good data for large scale releases. Either you can do what is suggested for higher acute doses, then you end up with 40 000 dead due to Chernobyl, or you can fit a second order model, then you will end up with something in the order of 10. (Or you do what Greenpeace did and you look at correlations between irradiation and cancer rates in former Soviet oblasts, where you then have some influence of Soviet industry, etc...) And that is if you want to look at catastrophic risk at all. (After all an RMBK had several design flaws, that modern reactors don't have.) The number basically tells you that according to a specific model, that is hopefully a good approximation of our understanding of the risks, a certain percentage of the death rate should be due to that factor. However I think these numbers carry not much more information than 32 other bits of the same sentence and to really use them you have to look at the specific model and you need to develop an opinion if the model reflects the relevant arguments well.
foepys 9y ago
Germany is traditionally very anti-nuclear because when the Chernobyl disaster happened, a lot of people in the south were told to not let their children play outside. Even today some mushrooms and boars that eat those mushrooms are contaminated. On the French and Belgian side of its borders Germany got some very old reactors that had some serious security related incidents within the last few years. [1] In the city of Aachen the government even distributed iodine tablets if it gets worse. Additionally Germany doesn't have locations to store radioactive waste indefinitely. The current location for intermediate storage, called "Asse", is known to be leaking contaminated water into all kinds of directions and nobody is really sure how to stop it. [2] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station#Incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station#... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Water_inflow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Water_inflow
- vog 9y ago
  And finally, don't forget Fukushima. The current politics here in Germany are a direct reaction to Fukushima. Chernobyl, Asse, Aachen, Gorleben all didn't change anything in our politics. But Fukushima did. Immediately.
  - lispm 9y ago
    The end of nuclear was decided long before Fukushima - in 2000. The Merkel government was on its way to change that, against protests (2010). Shortly after that Fukushima happened (2011), and Merkel had to return to the Atomausstieg (also 2011).
adventured 9y ago
The slow or grudual & unseen, versus the sudden and dramatic. Humans seem to almost universally do poorly at judging those two pools of risk against one another. People are terrified of being murdered or crashing in an airplane (both sudden death), yet they die by the droves at 10x, 100x or 1000x the rate from poor lifestyle habits (food, smoking, drinking, lack of exercise, etc). The fear of sharks is likewise similar (sudden violent death, and extremely rare). With some of these there is also the control aspect that comes into play (having control, not having control, or having an illusion of control). For example with sharks, you're in their environment, heavily lacking control, almost helpless by comparison to their ability. With passenger airplane crashes, it's kiss your ass goodbye, you have basically zero control over the situation (not even the ability to pretend you do). People die by the millions driving cars, yet they don't seem to fear that nearly so much as dying in a plane crash. I chalk that up to the partial illusion that drivers have a very large amount of control as to whether they die in a car crash or not. I believe coal generates the same fear response as the gradual lifestyle threats do, it's perceived as a gradual threat/risk. Nuclear is perceived as a sudden dramatic death threat (decades of miseducation, propaganda, and of course generalized fears over all things nuclear derived from the bomb).
- jacobolus 9y ago
  People die in huge numbers in very violent automobile accidents. For young people in the US (15–35), the leading causes of death are car accidents and gunshots (homicide, suicide, accidents). Most physical violence (assault, murder, rape, ..) is between people who know each-other, but typically people are more afraid of different-looking strangers. I think it has more to do with fear of unusual situations than suddenness or drama.
  - adventured 9y ago
    > People die in huge numbers in very violent automobile accidents. That's offset by the illusion that people believe they're in a very high degree of control over the situation. It enables the brain to create an illusion and say to itself: I won't make that mistake, my actions dictate the outcome, I'm a good driver (as the comical studies always demonstrate, people tend to dramatically over-estimate their driving skill). > Most physical violence ... is between people who know each-other You don't actually think that's going to happen, that's the issue. If you told someone their pal is about to rape or murder them, they would not believe it, they'd be far more afraid of the menacing looking stranger. That's where ignorance of risk - as with sharks - comes into action. I would guarantee a low percentage would believe they're more likely to be murdered by someone they're close to than a stranger. If a person doesn't have a meaningful comprehension of the risk (as with nuclear), the risk context inherently can't be judged properly. I suspect there's a big illusion of control that is involved between two known relations as well, you think you have some influence over whether a friend will murder you (surely they like you, surely you could talk them down from a violent confrontation, etc.); versus that almost entirely missing from the menacing stranger scenario.
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
That's an interesting thought and I think you have hit the nail on the head. If you ask someone where nuclear power can damage the environment, they say yes it can. They understand the damage from fallout because it is local. But the same person may not believe that coal can damage the environment globally. There is a huge cognitive bias against effects we can't physically see, and understanding the scale of the planet. This is the same reason we have some people who still believe in the flat earth conspiracy. The only answer real is education. If educators had a way to help children better create visual models of these things inside their heads, maybe we could all agree on these issues we can't see with our eyes. Maybe VR will help? I don't know. But I would definitely donate to any think tank that was A/B testing educators lessons on global warming.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  Who believes the Earth is flat? As far as I'm aware, nobody does and nobody ever did. The belief in flat earthers is ironically stronger and more like a conspiracy theory than the belief in a flat Earth.
  - airza 9y ago
    you could probably find out this is very demonstrably false by searching facebook or google news for about 15 minutes
    - kaybe 9y ago
      Can you really though? I find it hard to distinguish from a really elaborate troll.
  - jensv 9y ago
    [This Is What the Q&A Session at a Flat Earth Conference Looks Like](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/11/13/this-is-what-the-qa-session-at-a-flat-earth-conference-looks-like/#uPme4LVH8rxO3k4A.99 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/11/13/this...)
pizzapill 9y ago
The fear of nuclear power in Germany comes from the Tschernobyl disaster 1986. A life changing event for many Germans. Not beeing able to leave the house. Cutting a lot of foods from your diet because they are contaminated for decades (mushrooms, game meat, berries etc.). East block countries trying to sell their contaminated food for consumption and it ending up in GDR school kitchens. Additionally having two superpowers stationing a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs in your country. While at the same time beeing sure that you'd die first in a new world war that would almost surely start in your country and would probably devastate your whole continent beyond beeing suited for human surival. Then the whole argument that its cleaner and cheaper energy. While you pay for transport, storage and security with your tax money and the company keeps the profits. By storage i mean temporar storage, because no one worldwide has figured out how to safely store the waste for hundreds of thousands of years (Pyramids are 4500 years old and we don't even know how they are build). Thats why most of this waste from the 80s and 90s lies a few km off our coasts in the sea where the UK, Russia and Italian mafia dumped it.
- vog 9y ago
  > The fear of nuclear power in Germany comes from the Tschernobyl disaster 1986. Tschernobyl was almost forgotten, at least by the politicians in power, but then Fukushima happend.
  - pizzapill 9y ago
    Not by the populace tough. I mean our politicians were happy to kill off the planet 30 years ago until many citizens started to protest for environmentaly concious politics. Now its mainstream in German politics and almost all other countries start similar programs currently. I mean even the US starts to hear the bells ringing in the last couple of years and is implementing policies that they shoul've implemented 30 years ago. In addition I might add that we are sourrounded by countries that we don't trust to be able to feed their citizes reliably. Less so when it comes to reactor security.
    - wott 9y ago
ben_w 9y ago
It’s not a rational distinction, it’s a tribal one. It’s the same cognitive bias that meant during Cold War both the USA and the USSR thought gay men were spies for the other team. Black amd white morality — if you’re any less than an angel you must be a demon.
walshemj 9y ago
And as an example the Aberfan disaster where coal mine waste had a landslide and killed 116 children and 28 adults.
megy 9y ago
Are you serious? It is the same reason people fear terrorist attacks when a million people are killed by cars every single year but everyone still drives.

27182818284 9y ago

>the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment. It is hard to get away from that energy density, yeah. I remember seeing an old black and white photo in a book as a child where each pellet of uranium was equal to like a ton of coal in terms of electrical production.

simonh 9y ago
Uranium has two to three million times the energy density of coal, so one kg of uranium equals several thousand metric tons of coal.
- Ygg2 9y ago
  I imagine a pellet is no larger than a marble, so it seems same proportion.
rakoo 9y ago
Relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/1162/ https://www.xkcd.com/1162/
- dest 9y ago
  There are so many xkcds, I still discover some of them! Thanks for sharing.

Avamander 9y ago

It's because they have bad experiences with nuclear and general public doesn't like it either. I suck at German so I can't find the article, but there have been a few cases where the construction of a few reactors has been sub-optimal and thus somewhat dangerous (and too hard to fix). Also some cases of statistically significantly higher chances of leukemia in children near one nuclear plant. But don't quote me on this, GTranslate might have left some critical details about those articles untranslated.

mikeash 9y ago
They have a pretty bad experience with coal, too. Several thousand Germans die each year due to pollution from coal-fired power plants. Yet there's no urgent push to immediately shut down every.
- Tomte 9y ago
  Because that's invisible. Still, n * 1000 deaths (in n years) may rationally be preferable to m deaths once, even if n * 1000 >> m Risk assessment is a funny thing. Economists and psychologists have done great experiments along these lines.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    I can see it if m is, say, 90% of the entire population. But when m is measured in thousands, how is the vastly larger death toll ever rationally preferable just because it's spread out a bit? It's not even spread out that much. Worldwide, coal kills more people in two months than nuclear ever has, and that's including nuclear bombs.
- whyever 9y ago
  > Several thousand Germans die each year due to pollution from coal-fired power plants. Do you have a source for this?
  - mikeash 9y ago

mikeash 9y ago

Very little about nuclear policy has any relation to sense. Emotion dominates the discussion, even more than usual. The good news is that it looks hopeful that renewables will be in a position to take over before too much longer, giving us emission-free energy without the emotional baggage of nukes.

saosebastiao 9y ago

Not too long ago microwave radiation was a huge boogeyman. Everybody was afraid of it turning them into mutants or used as super weapons. The only thing that changed was some people started putting it into their homes. They were cooking their food with it, and nobody died. Then they went through the whole technology adoption curve, jumped the chasm, and the rest is history. I honestly believe that if we had focused more on building smaller and smaller nuclear power plants, and putting them in more and more cities, that we wouldn't have had this problem. If you look around at the areas that have high support for nuclear power, they're all areas that have had nuclear power plants for decades without a problem. Make them small enough that people don't notice them, and when they find out one has been in their backyard for 20 years, they shrug it off like if they found out their neighbor was a lesbian (maybe that's a bad example but whatever).

nickik 9y ago
Nuclear could be so awesome but its its so hard to do because of regulation. We would already have energy cheaper then coal if you could more easily develop and deploy these.
- Tomte 9y ago
  We would also have quite a few uninhabitable areas if we let Silicon Valley startup types dabble with nuclear reactors. "Move fast and break things"…
  - nickik 9y ago
    That's the same argument people make against SpaceX and they are generally far faster cheaper and have high standards. Yes, nuclear should not be a total free for all, but there is absolutely no reason why people should not be allowed to make small research reactors and small reactors to iterate on the technology. We essentially still use age old concepts for our reactors and one of the reasons is that its almost impossible to bring something different to market. Its literally stifling innovation.

bennofs 9y ago

Risk is not the only reason to move away from nuclear energy. There's also the problem of radioactive waste, which will need to be dealt with for many, many years (German laws require secure storage for one million years). I won't claim that radioactive waste is more problematic than burning coal here, because I don't know enough about the topic. But it needs to be taken into account in the discussion. Calling nuclear energy "emissions free" is just wrong in my opinion: it just generates a different kind of emissions, nuclear waste.

nickik 9y ago
Nuclear waste is not actually a huge problem if you look at resources spent. Its only a 'problem' because anti-nuclear people demand totally unreasonable requirements and managed to put them into law. Plus the waste majority of the problem would go away, newer reactor types could consume lots of the old 'waste'. The US alone has enough 'waste' to power the whole US for years and years. It is of course not allowed to even research these reactors in many places. While it might not be 'emission free' it is free of uncontrolled emission. You know exactly where and how much radiation is produced and you can easily set it up so that not a single human or animal is hurt by it.
- lispm 9y ago
  > newer reactor types could consume lots of the old 'waste'. These reactors don't exist in Germany, and they won't exist in the next two decades and they need a whole new industry around it. These types of industries (reprocessing plants, fuel production, etc.) nobody wants to have in a dense European country and which are extremely expensive. Setting up these new reactors and the corresponding new fuel industries far away. If somebody wants to invest the many billions, good luck - but hopefully not anywhere near Germany.
  - nickik 9y ago
    You don't have to build a storage room for millions of years if you know that technologically its is quite feasible to use these resources in the next 1-2 generations. If nuclear energy development would not be stopped and opposed on every step both in development and deployment these things would have been solved long ago. The needed technology essentially exists for 40 years. Basically the problem only exist as long as people are determined to not develop nuclear technology any further. As for your 'dense population argument' that is essentially another 'nuclear is very dangerous and needs to be far away from people' argument. Every reasonable large country in Europe has enough space for these things, if you use real rather then fantasy risk assessment. Also, in a global market there is no reason why any of that stuff has to be in your country.

jrs95 9y ago

At the very least they should have had a plan to move to another green energy source. Or at least something that isn't essentially guaranteed to kill people.

topspin 9y ago

This reminds me of a comment by quotemstr a few days ago about the housing supply 'debate,' where the absurdity of pretending that supply and demand somehow doesn't apply to the west coast reality distortion field is called out. The math behind energy is very simple and any honest person that chose to deal in realities understood that by EOLing their nuclear supply Germany had only more fossil fuel or severe economic decline as possible futures; renewables can not make up the difference then, now or in the foreseeable future, no matter how hard we wish it could. Yes, I know: Chernobyl. That's a cop out. Germany need not be governed by hysteria. The difference between Russian/Soviet incompetence and the results we see from France, Ontario and other well governed and highly successful nuclear systems is vast and decisive and could have provided Germany's 'leaders' with the ammo they needed to do something other than indulge anti-nook hysteria. But that's not what happened... so burn coal instead.

Tomte 9y ago
We've seen severe problems and gross negligence in American, French and Dutch reactors, as well. Oh, and in German ones, of course. And let's not forget about Japan who must certainly be counted among the "well governed and highly successful" ones. The examples are legion. I do understand that less nuclear means more coal and that this is a difficult decision. But nuclear fans claiming that the problem with nuclear reactors is just "stupid Russians" disqualify themselves immediately.
- adventured 9y ago
  > I do understand that less nuclear means more coal and that this is a difficult decision. Germany has vast financial resources at its disposal. They could go on a natural gas plant building binge and link deals to the US on imports for long durations that the US would be thrilled to do. That would help narrow the trade deficit Germany has with the US ($65 billion annually; natural gas trade could solidly knock out half of that), so killing two birds with one stone. With help from the US abundance of natural gas supply, Germany could replace half its coal power in the next ~15 years using natural gas and significantly reduce its CO2 output just from that (and a big chunk of the other half could probably be knocked out by gradual renewable growth from where they're already at).

GuB-42 9y ago

I suspect it is partly a political move, partly economical. For me, the biggest drawback for nuclear power is that it is expensive. Nuclear fuel is cheap but building, maintaining and decommissioning power plants is not. It is especially apparent as power plants approach their end of life. The choice is to either decommission it, an expensive and unproductive process, or to extend its life. Unlike what many people think, there is nothing wrong with the second option, however, maintenance costs increase exponentially, so passed a certain point, it is no longer viable. I suspect Germany moved away from nuclear because of a combination of several factors : public perception of nuclear power following Fukushima accidents, power plants approaching end of life and sufficient coal reserves. Their policy seem to be a mix of highly variable solar+wind backed up by on-demand coal plants, and nuclear, while ideal for baseline, doesn't seem to fit this policy.

detaro 9y ago
Germany had been moving away from nuclear power for a long time before Fukushima: The plans for shutdowns were made in 2000, with the last reactors closing in 2015-2020 (there were no fixed dates, but rather remaining production capacities assigned, so e.g. stopping a reactor for a few months of maintenance wouldn't have meant a loss for the operator). A anti-nuclear movement had existed for decades before that, growing more and more in popularity the more people lost trust in the plant operators and the agencies supposed to oversee them: operators failing to report incidents, regular failures in temporary storage facilities (e.g. the "Asse", an old salt mine in which nuclear waste is stored and which started to flood), a never-completed search for an actual long-term storage facility, questions about why the government was paying for so much of that work, ... Late 2010 the then-current government decided to weaken this and added run-time extensions, against popular opinion which wanted to stay with the 2000 plans. Fukushima pushed this back up to public attention, which caused the government to turn 180 degrees, force the worst reactors offline temporarily and re-implement the 2000 plans.
pouetpouet 9y ago
I agree that building and decomissioning are expensive. But the rational response to that is: don't build more. How is early decomissioning going to help both of these issues?

StreamBright 9y ago

Adding the the coal is safer than nuclear argument: http://assets2.motherboard.tv/content-images/contentimage/no-slug/d75936b917b5dbe2376ac949a9a0acf9.jpg http://assets2.motherboard.tv/content-images/contentimage/no...

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
What are Terrawatts?
- stickydink 9y ago
  Terra is the SI unit for 10^12. One Terrawatt-hour is the electrical energy equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000 watts, generated in one hour.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  > What are Terrawatts? 1 terawatt (TW) = 10e12 watts. Then 1 watt-hour (Wh) is 3600 joules. Or maybe you meant to say they misspelled the word? But then you would have just said it was a misspelling, so I assumed you asked about the unit itself.
- whyever 9y ago
  "Tera" is an SI prefix and "Watt" is the SI unit of power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefixes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt
timthelion 9y ago
Nuclear has the risk of radiation release, coal has the guarantee of radiation release. But rooftop solar is still the best option. Solar along fences, solar above electrified train tracks.
- AdamJacobMuller 9y ago
  Energy storage is not a solved problem at scale yet. Are we making useful progress? Sure. But, not solved yet.

baxtr 9y ago

Maybe you are right. But, let’s not panic about this though. I believe this will be just a temporary hike and pushes Germany towards renewable energy sources even stronger.

pizzapill 9y ago

> The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted. Movement for it started in 1986. Complete exit was made into law in 2000. Softened up and reinstated after Fukushima. > I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with all the capital investment involved, just doesn't make any sense. Many reactors are old and wouldn't have been running for any longer anyways. Other than that I agree that it does not make sense on a economical level. > Especially when there is little risk of natural disasters in Germany. Like in every other country that has nuclear power plants, severe hazards are a weekly occurence. Aditionally Germany is close to many countries which nobody trusts when it comes to nuclear security. Ukraine already had a nuclear catastrophe that cost ~1 million lifes until to date. Belgium has one of the most dangerous reactors running, Tihange 2. Etc. If you google for it you can find pictures of nuclear plants that fix their pipes with duct tape and catch radioactive water with kiddie pools. Aditionally there is the very real and exisiting risk that all our sourrounding seas and oceans have the nuclear waste of a couple decades dumped into them with happy involvement of governments, militaries and organized crime. Then there is the waste which is temporarily stored. Worldwide. Since nobody can figure out how to store and keep it save for the next couple hundred thousand years. I mean we're not even on the level of knowing what really happened 2000 years ago. > If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal, The people in Germany have will and currently do accept sacrifices in this regard when it comes to saving the environment. We pay high taxes on energy and transportation. Our industry is on the forefront of environment friendly production. This was a push that started as a grass roots movement in the 80s. Now its German mainstream politics. Germans actually invest a lot of money in the environment. So do other countries. > the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes. But its not the optimal solution and it can be phased out. If my country is on the forefront of phasing it out I'm all for it. I'm also for phasing out coal. Especially since for example in our domestic coal production, every employee is subsidized by the state with ~ 500 000 € p. year. > Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment. Both destroy our environment. All that nuclear waste in our seas will start to leak out and will probably kill off many species and large parts of the oceans. Its already killing millions of people and we don't know what is going to happen. Nuclear could be a clean solution to our current energy needs if its managed correctly. On the other hand it could well be a suicide technology where we wake up one day and realize that its too late for our species or planet.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

Germany, despite all it's posturing, does not really believe that global warming is as scary as they say it is. If they really believed that global warming was catastrophic, then even having a Chernobyl occur once every decade is preferable to shutting down nuclear and burning coal.

MrBuddyCasino 9y ago

We had a reasonable long-term plan. Then Fukushima happened. Merkel always goes with the popular sentiment, the only exception was the refugee crisis and her party suffered dearly for that.

nikdaheratik 9y ago

It's very tiresome how these threads seem to pop up on this site that basically boil down to how "Nuclear is the savior of all" and people are too scared/stupid to see it. The problem is that "people" aren't making these decisions, utility companies are. And they have good economic reasons on top of the complicated politics. For safety reasons, nuclear plants are very complex, take a long time to build and require a ton of capital. The physics make these work out long term, but only if you're willing to build a large enough facility that you can take the place of 2-3 comparable coal facilities. Part of this is because they produce power more efficiently, but also because the largest startup costs for these are from finding a site and going through all the safety and other regulatory requirements. Once you have approval for single reactor, you're better off adding a few more at the same site than trying to find another site for a new reactor. The bottom line is the utility company is on the hook for a huge investment for 30 years or more before it breaks even. That's what stalled the development in the 70s and 80s and it's even more unlikely to get started today, what with the extreme uncertainty surrounding fossil fuel sources, the rapidly decreasing cost of renewables, etc. The most common response to this fact is that we can replace huge facilities these with lots of much smaller/safer Thorium or other alternative fuels. From a physics standpoint, this may be true, but utility companies don't want to have to manage the fuel chain for (potentially) dozens of facilities, governments don't like having to guard that many small sites, and there are a limited number of communities that are comfortable living near a reactor of any kind, even a "tiny" one. I don't know if this is smart or not, but it's not going to change anytime soon. The bottom line is that unless we have a huge leap in the amount of technology required to manage a nuclear reactor, or in the potential safety factor around the fuel and other risks, nuclear is not going to ever become a majority power source in most countries.

cvwright 9y ago

They should have seen this coming a long time ago. I did a study abroad in Germany in 2000, and one of my classes was on the energy crisis. We visited a strip mine that was going to become the largest lake in Germany after they were done extracting the coal, because they were planning to fill the huge hole with water. It's hard to describe the scale of the thing in words. "Enormous" doesn't even start. As part of that same course, the Germans were also nice enough to tour a bunch of foreign engineering students around inside one of their nuclear reactors. That was quite a trip. After 9/11 I doubt they did those tours anymore, and now the reactors will be gone anyway..