20 ms·

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

166 points by Bostonian 7y ago

BitwiseFool 7y ago
Sadly, the anti-nuclear movement in Germany is very strong. Germany also has a declining Coal industry. So after Fukushima shrewd politicians moved to shutter nuclear plants and return to coal. The worst part? German coal is some of the worst in terms of sulfur and pollutants.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  I've heard lignite described as "slightly more flammable dirt". It's an absolutely atrocious energy source.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - growlist 7y ago
    The destruction to the countryside from open-cast mining is staggering as well - enormous areas stripped back to bare earth. Terrifying.
- this_user 7y ago
  > So after Fukushima shrewd politicians moved to shutter nuclear plants and return to coal. That's not true. The phasing out of nuclear energy was decided in the late 90s after the Social Democrats and Greens had taken over the government. This was part of a larger green energy package. This had been a major issue for the Greens since at least the 80s when the party was founded. The Merkel government attempted to roll some of that back in 2010, but was blindsided by the Fukushima accident that caused public opinion to become much more polarised again w.r.t. nuclear energy. Please stop spreading this misinformation that the end of nuclear energy in Germany was caused by Fukushima.
  - alexott 7y ago
    it was intensified after Fukushima... P.S. I misread the comment...
    - metalliqaz 7y ago
      that's what parent comment said
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    The entire nuclear saga showed how even an educated country can become very irrational over technology. In the future, especially in democratic countries, these things are going to become worse.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    > The Merkel government attempted to roll some of that back in 2010, but was blindsided by the Fukushima accident that caused public opinion to become much more polarised again w.r.t. nuclear energy. In a democratic society, the will of the people is relevant. Fukushima caused the end of nuclear energy in Germany.
    - lispm 7y ago
      > Fukushima caused the end of nuclear energy in Germany The end of nuclear was decided by the red/green government a few years earlier. The conservative successor government (Merkel) tried to reverse that decision and after Fukushima they joined the German mainstream position to end nuclear and to invest further money into a new type of distributed electricity production with the focus on renewable energy.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        > The end of nuclear was decided by the red/green government a few years earlier. The conservative successor government (Merkel) tried to reverse that decision and after Fukushima they joined the German mainstream position to end nuclear and to invest further money into a new type of distributed electricity production with the focus on renewable energy. ... thus ending it.
- svara 7y ago
  That's not true, coal did not replace nuclear, renewables did [0]. What's true is that coal plants could have been shut down instead of nuclear ones, which sucks. But note that anthracite coal is decreasing since ~5 years ago (dark grey bar in [0]). [0] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/384/bilder/3_abb_bruttostromerzeugung-et_2019-02-26.png https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38... "Kohle" is coal; "Kernenergie" is nuclear; "Erneuerbare" is renewables.
  - looping__lui 7y ago
    Yes. And not to mention that the coal plants emit 2x as much radioactivity into the environment at comparable power generation [0]. [0] https://www.bund-nrw.de/fileadmin/nrw/dokumente/braunkohle/2008_11_BUNDhintergrund_Radioaktivitaet_aus_Kohlekraftwerken.pdf https://www.bund-nrw.de/fileadmin/nrw/dokumente/braunkohle/2...
    - C14L 7y ago
      And are the deadliest form of energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
- duxup 7y ago
  The sad part is that the results of Fukushima ... might generally be a example of how safe / what the risks of modern nuclear might be as I understand it. Fukushima was not updated like modern plants, and it did not experience a 'China Syndrome' type meltdown where the core melted and then kept breaking through all the containment material, rather it fused to the material (sand I belive) of its container and stopped indicating that even an old model nuclear plant might not ever experience a 'China Syndrome' type event. Granted probabbly a really hard sell that a disaster might indicate safety.
  - lispm 7y ago
    Probably a really hard sell that a single event took out mostly all nuclear power plants in Japan for a decade...
vmchale 7y ago
I'm not surprised this happened, but it is bitter. Glad to see the failure is being pointed out to the public.
m4rtink 7y ago
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 only incremental updates in later generations. In this light their decision to shutdown seems a little less insane, still could be bad to loose all the related knowledge and industry as a result, which might make deployment of new reactors in the future hard.
- dv_dt 7y ago
  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.
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    Still, it at least so far it worked well, they avoided releasing a lot of emissions and are now in a much better position to decide what to do next.
    - dv_dt 7y ago
      https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-power-costs-will-rise-if-renewables-are-sidestepped https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-po... "France will save 39 billion euros ($44.5 billion) if it refrains from building 15 new nuclear plants by 2060, and bets instead on renewable energy sources to replace its all its aging atomic facilities, a government agency said." If France with it's experience with last gen, and one of the most built next gen designs is thinking this, then it doesn't really bode well for fission plants. I think the world should go hard for renewable and storage as imperfect as they are, while increasing research for fusion plants. The basic tech/economic balance point is that fission plant tech is highly matured to a high-cost point that is unlikely to shift downwards anytime soon, while renewables and even more so storage tech is on a rapid cost decrease in the manufacturing s-curve - with quite a bit more to run, and they're at pretty close to parity with nuclear in price/watt. Renewables + storage are faster to put up at watt/time - which factors into even more reduced project costs - and more importantly a much wider range of financing options and players who have or can rapidly develop capability to put up renewable plants, leading to even more cost reductions.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
German subsidies in the 2000-2010 decade almost single-handedly financed the improvements in solar cells that sees them competitive with even coal today. And because the environmental goals had higher rank than economic and selfish ones, they did not enact trade barriers, or lobby for them on an EU Level, even when it became clear it would be Chinese manufacturers reaping the profits of mass production.
- yorwba 7y ago
  A Brussels committee [in 2017] agreed to set minimum import duties for Chinese solar modules and cells that could price them up to 30% above market levels with “huge negative effects” for the industry, according to trade groups. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/08/solar-industry-says-eu-tariffs-chinese-imports-will-raise-panel-prices https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/08/solar-in... EDIT: they scrapped the tariffs in 2018: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=1904 http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=1904
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
llampx 7y ago
Try pointing this out in Germany. Most people have no idea what kind of electricity they are actually buying, apart from choosing a greenwashed energy provider and paying through the nose.
- sesuximo 7y ago
  Im sure there's large variance in different pockets of people, but I dont think this holds true based on my convenience sample
goatinaboat 7y ago
Nuclear energy, to start with, is ultimately not safe Solar kills more people than nuclear per watt, so that’s the reporter’s personal agenda talking https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
- dv_dt 7y ago
  The killings that nuclear may make are difficult to pin down (did that cancer come from nuclear exposure, or a chemical, or just a chance cosmic ray?) and so may be unattributed.
  - funklute 7y ago
    A well-developed statistical model should be able to take that into account. My understanding is that the academic consensus is fairly strongly leaning towards nuclear being the safest energy option, based on robust statistical models. Would be interested in hearing the opinions on this from someone actually in this academic field though...
    - dv_dt 7y ago
      A model could provide an estimate there, but nuclear deaths are not estimated that way from the posted source. They are only directly attributable deaths. e.g. cherynobyl was attributed from the posted source as 7 deaths while statistical modeling puts it in at least the tens of thousands range. Even the 7 of the link is questionable as reports of firefighter deaths during the accident as 27. e.g. https://heavy.com/news/2019/05/how-many-people-died-at-chernobyl/ https://heavy.com/news/2019/05/how-many-people-died-at-chern...
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    Sure, but if we count that then let’s attribute all skin cancer to solar.
    - dv_dt 7y ago
DasIch 7y ago
Let's assume for a moment there would be no opposition to nuclear in Germany. How does nuclear energy help with climate change? Looking back to 2000, nuclear energy at peak was responsible for 32.1% of electricity production[1]. We'd need to at least double that. That would take a huge amount of money. More importantly it would take time. We can barely manage to build a single fucking airport in 1-2 decades. Building this many nuclear reactors would easily take this long, if not longer. It seems to me that nuclear energy as a solution to climate change might look good on paper. Sci-fi also looks good on paper though and it's just as realistic. [1]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage/anteil-der-atomenergie-an-der-stromerzeugung-in-deutschland/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage...
- pthreadses 7y ago
  There were great strides in increasing the overall percentage of renewable power. If the proportion of nuclear power had stayed constant, that would mean usage of coal could have been reduced even further than it already has been, which helps fight climate change.
  - lispm 7y ago
    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 energy or to open up their markets for competition. Politicians were given jobs in these companies after their political career. It took literally decades to break up this system and the Energiewende was the first movement towards open energy markets, competition and renewable energy production. It's a system which takes decades to reform and rebuild. Whether nuclear or coal is first to go out is a minor issue over that time scale. The money invested into renewable created a lot of effects which will drive down electricity prices in many other countries much faster than nuclear will do. Germany served as a first example how to build up technology, increase efficiency, etc. For example, the real benefit for solar will not be in Germany, but in many other countries which have lots of sunshine and lots of ways to deploy that kind of lower tech - compared to extremely complex nuclear technology. And this was kickstarted here.
AlphaGeekZulu 7y ago
Germans do not have to decide between Nuclear Energy or Climate Catastrophe. They have to decide between the potential risks of radioactive pollution or the impairment of landscape by wind turbines and power lines. There is not much tragedy in this decision.
- toohotatopic 7y ago
  In France and Belgium, which are West of Germany, there are plenty of nuclear reactors. This is in a region with prevailing west winds. If Germany would want to minimize the risk of radioactive pollution, it would have to build plenty nuclear reactors at its eastern border and sell that energy to France below market value. Then, as long as France doesn't cut Germany off, the French nuclear reactors would be shut down and the risk of nuclear pollution for Germany would be reduced.
  - looping__lui 7y ago
    And adding to that: the public DOES understand this. People in Western Germany (especially in NRW where they have to suffer from coal and are close to French and Belgium reactors) just shake heads in disbelief while having to swallow the highest electricity prices in Europe...
- C14L 7y ago
  Oh, we have decided. Germany has by far the dirtiest energy produciton in Western Europe. On average, every German citizen produces almost twice as much CO2 than the average French or Brit: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita And talking about risks: Brown coal ist BY FAR the most dangerous form of energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
  - anoncake 7y ago
    > And talking about risks: Brown coal ist BY FAR the most dangerous form of energy: A predictable number of deaths is not a danger but damage.
plupopit 7y ago
The article misses to mention that Germany is actually quite active in fusion reactor research (eg. Wendelstein 7x the world's largest stellerator was just opened a few years ago). Its yet to be seen if fusion power will ever reach production level. But stating that Germany cut itself off of nuclear energy research is not exactly right.
- magduf 7y ago
  That's pretty irrelevant. Fission and fusion are two totally separate processes. Fission is a process used in nuclear power plants to provide many gigawatts of power to electric grids. Fusion is something that's only used for science experiments and cannot generate useful power. Maybe it can in the future, and maybe in the future we'll also have holodecks and warp drive, but that isn't useful today.
- alexgmcm 7y ago
  Nuclear Fusion should be treated completely differently though. It shares nuclear in the name and the similarities pretty much end there (the 'waste' from neutron activation of plasma facing components is negligible). Fusion seems to be doing well these days with good progress on ITER, nice results from MAST and the approval of STEP. I remember Chen liked the idea of the Stellarator as it removed the need for the plasma current so perhaps we can expect good results from W7x as well. The last thing I want is for fusion to have political issues due to being linked with fission power just because of the name.
- melling 7y ago
  Yes, and we will solve that nuclear fusion problem sometime over the next 50 to 150 years! In the meantime, the decades long train wreck of climate change could easily have been slowed if we’d had simply moved off of coal earlier.
- mitchty 7y ago
  In common parlance nuclear tends to mean nuclear fission, not nuclear fusion. Though the "technically correct" aspect is that they're both nuclear reactions. I'd say its important to say that they're not cutting themselves off of nuclear fusion research.
PeterStuer 7y ago
The pro-nuclear lobby likes to pretend it offers a clean solution. I really want to believe, as it would make things easy. Sadly, not only is nuclear not clean, the worst part is humans can't handle the required responsibility for this technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU
- magduf 7y ago
  The French seem to have handled nuclear technology quite well for many decades now.
  - PeterStuer 7y ago
    If by "handling well" you mean examples like buying the Belgian energy sector and then buying the Belgian politicians with generous revolving doors to keep open extremely dated and deteriorating reactors in Wallonia (Thiange) and Flanders (Doel) and playing deaf to the objections of neighboring states scared shitless of having these things operating in a dilapidated state so close to their borders, then yes, I guess they are doing a-ok.
    - renaudg 7y ago
      Part of the German public and political class can be "scared shitless" until they're blue in the face, they have no leg to stand on. If I were Belgian, I sure would remain deaf to a lecture about energy and the environment, by one of the worst European contributors to CO2 emissions and emitter of deadly fine coal particles causing dozens of thousands of deaths now Germany, this is so out of character for you. You have the resources and smarts to be leading this effort instead of clinging to one terribly misguided populist decision 20 years ago. Until you do though, I would keep a low profile on these matters.
      - PeterStuer 7y ago
        Have you ever considered that maybe it is because they have the smarts that they are getting out of both nuclear and coal? And you might want to read up on Thiange before you tell Belgians to ignore and carry on.
Barrin92 7y ago
I absolutely hate this narrative of the demise of nuclear energy largely being politically motivated because nuclear energy is not just falling in Germany, it's diminishing virtually across the entire world (with very few exceptions). It's true that Germany has a historical anti-nuclear and green sentiment but other countries are no different. Nuclear energy may be clean, but it is also exceedingly expensive and unable to compete in price in most countries including the US.[1] Even China, the large last country to buckle the trend as of late seems to have reduced the role of its nuclear energy policy and seems to be missing targets [2]. [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/industry-meltdown-is-era-of-nuclear-power-coming-to-an-end https://e360.yale.edu/features/industry-meltdown-is-era-of-n... [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...
- magduf 7y ago
  Expensive compared to what? Are you comparing the full costs of coal plants to nuclear, or are you just externalizing the costs as most comparisons do? The costs of coal need to include all the effects of coal emissions into the atmosphere, which may very well be incalculable. Solar and wind of course are great, but has anyone figured out how to make those supply 100% of a nation's power needs, 24/7? I don't believe so: we don't have the storage technology yet.
  - cma 7y ago
    Nuclear costs are heavily externalized ($12 billion liability cap, rest paid by governement and there are plausible >$1trillion accident scenarios). It is as if they only have to pay insurance on a deductible.
    - yohannparis 7y ago
      The lack of a carbon tax makes any fossil fuel technology heavily subsidies. When all externalities are taking into account, then we can talk about the cost of Nuclear.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Christmas-8 7y ago
Climate change is much in the news these days, but one important reason for it is never even mentioned: the “nuclear industry”. A radioactive gas, Krypton 85, is released into the atmosphere by the reprocessing of nuclear reactor fuel rods. It is considered harmless because it rises to the upper atmosphere and will not come into contact with any life. There is now several million times as much KR85 as in 1945, at the start of the Atomic Age. KR85 is a radioactive gas, and radioactive gases consist of charged particles. When charged particles enter a magnetic field, they migrate to the poles. The earth is a giant magnet, so the KR85 ends up equally at the North and South poles. There it interacts with the charged stream entering the earth's atmosphere from space, known to astronomers as the Wilson Current, a part of the Wilson Circuit, which keeps the earth charged up. The discharge portion of the Wilson Circuit is lightning, most of which is in the belt of constant thunderstorm activity that circles the earth at the Equator. As the inflow of charge at the poles weakens, so does the amount of lightning decrease everywhere on earth. And lightning is essential to plants. Plant life cannot use the nitrogen in the atmosphere unless it is "fixed" into compounds, which can be done by two processes: certain types of bacteria, and lightning strikes. There are some plants that have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots and do not need lightning, but many plants, especially in tropical forest areas where there is normally a lot of lightning, are lightning-dependent, and cannot get enough nitrogen to thrive without lightning. So the widespread use of nuclear power is decreasing the amount of lightning all over this planet, and causing deterioration of forests, especially in the tropics, from nitrogen starvation. And that is the worst form of climate breakdown currently happening. The mass extinction of countless species of plant life all over the world is much more significant than all other effects of climate destabilization combined. The increase in both frequency and severity of storms in the temperate and polar zones is also being augmented by the build-up of charge at the poles from KR85. The strong tropical storms that form along the Equator are highly-charged systems. How far they travel from their birthplace along the Equator toward the poles is determined by two factors: The strength of the charge of the storm itself, and that of the pole that is attracting it. As KR85 builds up at the poles, these strong tropical storms are drawn farther from their normal home in the tropics and sub-tropics toward the poles, bringing with them tropical heat, as well as more frequent and stronger storm activity to areas not formerly accustomed to such weather. The observations of decrease of ice in the polar zones and more frequent and severe storms in the polar and temperate regions is only one more symptom of the build-up of charge at the poles caused by radioactivity from the nuclear industry. Another side-effect of particular consequence in the Arctic is the damaging ultra-violet radiation that has been observed reaching the surface of the earth from above. It seems to be from beyond the atmosphere, and is conventionally thought to be from outer space, and reaching the surface because of a thinning of a filtering layer of ozone, but is actually being produced in the upper atmosphere by the interaction between the influx of charge of the Wilson Current, and the layer of KR85 that now exists there. The conventional explanations being thought up to explain what is happening in the atmosphere fall far short of the mark. So far, none of the mainstream scientific community has dared to mention the possible role of radioactivity in causing the breakdown of the climatic regime that has prevailed for the last 5,000 years or so. A large part of the reason for this glaring omission is the lack of any mechanism understood by orthodox meteorology that could account for the observations. There IS a well-worked out theory that explains all the manifold observations, and is supported by enough solid evidence to be convincing to anyone who examines it objectively. But the history of this theory, along with the personal reputation of it's originator, ensures that it will not be examined at all. That, however, is a defect in the education of the scientific community, not a defect in the theory.
donjoe 7y ago
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 power was produced. If disposal would be generally so expensive, we would have 700 billion €, but even with LWR=factor 5 cheaper (more realistic) we would end up with 6 times what is available (24 billion €) Addendum: In the USA the graphite of the spheres is to be gasified and the CO2 is to be released into the atmosphere together with the radioactive C14. It's a military facility, they're allowed to do that. In the EU this would be excluded in the civilian sector. But it makes disposal cheaper. Here detailed information on the Jülich spherical castors radientelex.com/Stx_18_748-749... There are a total of 453 Castors with balls. The castors are however smaller than LWR castors (25 t instead of 120 t) One more addendum: The acquisition costs of the 455 castors alone were almost as high as the value of the electricity generated with the balls. And one more thing: The transport is to be carried out by an armed special ship, some dozens of trips would be necessary " [1] (sorry, dirty twitter unroll & deepl translation) [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Moormann https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Moormann [1] https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/1201128328738037761?s=19 https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/120112832873803776... Edit: Typo
- kmmlng 7y ago
  Note that Jülich was not exactly a typical nuclear power plant: it was a prototype pebble bed reactor linked to a research facility.
Dagonfly 7y ago
I'm pro-nuclear, but I find these articles about Germany's anti-nuclear stance extremely frustrating. Blaming the current situation on Fukushima is historically inaccurate. Imo, there are 2 major reasons for the current stance: 1. Chernobyl: After the disaster in 1986 the anti-nuclear movement gained massive traction. The radioactive cloud spread all the way to West Germany and warnings had to be issued (mushrooms, venison, crops, ...). It was a real turning point, since everyone was made aware of the concerns. [1] 2. "Endlager"-discussion: The search for a permanent nuclear waste deposit was/is a political shitshow. The trial run at Asse (in the 70s) failed: We are currently getting all canisters out of there, after they found contaminated sludge and flooded areas. [2] Further, the decision to select Gorleben as one possible locations was mostly political. The whole process is politically loaded, expensive and devoid of any scientific reasoning. [3] The anti-nuclear decision has been made years before Fukushima for imo valid concerns. The "latest" reactor in Germany went online in 1989, and the decision to phase-out was made in 2002. So the reactors being phased out now are all 30+ years old. Nowadays, I don't think any energy provider in Germany would be willing to invest in NEW fission plants. By the time they will be online, renewables might be way cheaper per kWh. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine [3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_(Kerntechnik) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_(Kerntechnik)
- ofrzeta 7y ago
  > 1. Chernobyl: After the disaster in 1986 the anti-nuclear movement gained massive traction. The radioactive cloud spread all the way to West Germany and warnings had to be issued (mushrooms, venison, crops, ...). It was a real turning point, since everyone was made aware of the concerns. That is true. And also, still today, when in our forests a boar gets killed by a hunter it has to be brought to the administration to meter the radioactivity (due to Cesium 137). A lot of boar gets discarded instead of being eaten because it exceeds the threshold (600 Bq/kg). I don't know what they are doing with it though.
  - moepstar 7y ago
beloch 7y ago
"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 that — as far as it is humanly possible to judge — it won’t come to pass.” After Fukushima, Ms. Merkel, a trained physicist, was no longer able to believe that a nuclear disaster would not occur. That there was a catastrophe even in a high-tech country like Japan made her change her mind." This article dismisses nuclear power as "not safe" with nothing more than the decision of Merkel to justify it. Yes, Merkel has a background in physics, but she made that decision as a politician. It's an unfortunate truth that science is rarely the first consideration in political decisions. Merkel's decision ignored the truly extraordinary circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, which was triggered by an earthquake and tsunami that, each individually, exceeded the design parameters of the reactor, which was 40 years old at the time of the disaster. Updated studies indicated the reactor was vulnerable to tsunami, but were ignored. Repeatedly. The reactors of 40-50 years ago can indeed be unsafe if operated poorly (e.g. Chernobyl) or if necessary threat mitigation is totally ignored. Newer designs are safer, and older designs can be made safer if people don't bury their heads in the sand about necessary updates. Ultimately, nuclear reactors are designed and operated by humans, and mistakes do happen. However, the fact is that the Fukushima disaster has killed fewer people in total than coal power kills every year under normal operating conditions. Is Germany paranoid about nuclear power? Yes.
- fhars 7y ago
  > Updated studies indicated the reactor was vulnerable to tsunami, but were ignored. Repeatedly. And this is why nuclear power is fundamentally unsafe: the operators have conclusively proven that they just cannot be trusted. Repeatedly.
  - masterofpuppets 7y ago
    The Fukushima accident had more to do with the culture in Japan than the industry globally[1]. The government and the regulator were basically in bed with TEPCO. 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/17/japanese-government-liable-negligence-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-disaster https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/...
anovikov 7y ago
Well, let's see: wind parks are a tough sell to the public, will new nuclear plants be an easier sell? I doubt it. So they seem to be on the right path. And yeah, proportion of renewables in total net energy consumption has been 46% in 2019 already.
gumby 7y ago
Bittner ignores that energy will be imported — from Danish windmills sure, but also French and Czech nukes
trhway 7y ago
to add some geopolitics - shutting down nuclear&coal and relying on renewables Germany would need more and more of natural gas plants - the cleanest option and most convenient one due to high speed of bringing up/down among the "dirty" ones - with more and more of the natural gas coming from Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Controversies_of_Nord_Stream_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Controversies_of_N...). While Germans seem to be ok with it (Stockholm syndrome?:), other countries, like US and various Germany neighbors, are naturally either don't like it or actively against it, and as result i think a lot of anti- German anti-nuclear PR and renewables scaremongering is coming from here.
LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
We never moved out of nuclear, we only outsourced the danger to neighbouring countrys. Some of the new energy providers beyond the border are so unsafe, the local government has to distribute iodine for the worst case. (Aachen) So all in all, irrational, yes. Non, nuclear, no.
fxj 7y ago
Here is a by the minute diagram of the german energy consumption. Germany would be fine with all the nuclear power plants switched off. They invest heavily in renewable energy which shows off. https://energy-charts.de/power_de.htm?source=all-sources&year=2019&week=51&fbclid=IwAR2JVsfqMXAFKj5b21u0Rzj_0-Rpz6iyxngF3vvmEzNfzv-GkBRzZaj4O58 https://energy-charts.de/power_de.htm?source=all-sources&yea...
- renaudg 7y ago
  Their "heavy investment" in renewables doesn't do much for Germany. It's really coal and gas "saving" them from nuclear, and that's problematic. https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=DE https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem... #1: coal, 34% #2: wind, 18% #3: gas, 13% #4: nuclear, 12% (Solar is zero of course, it's night right now : inconveniently, this tends to happen rather regularly) for a whopping average of 400gCO2/kW, compared to France 68, Sweden's 42, or Iceland's 28. "It shows" indeed, but nothing to be proud of.
renaudg 7y ago
Every time this topic comes up, I find it useful to share this fascinating real time map of electricity production and its carbon intensity around the world : https://www.electricitymap.org/ https://www.electricitymap.org/ I think it helps frame the debate and put things in perspective. Needless to say that Germany's mediocre figures here are not worthy of the country's reputation for pragmatism and engineering excellence.
- solstice 7y ago
  That reputation has suffered anyway quite significantly in the recent past: BER (Berlin's hilariously failed "new" airport) VW et al. cheating on emissions tests...
wazoox 7y ago
Germany invested 300 billions euros in windmills and solar, and achieved 0% emission reduction, thanks to its abandonment of nuclear power. Worse, they now realise that windmills last only about 20 years, while nuclear plants last at the very least 40 to 60 years. With similar amounts invested in nuclear they would be coal free by now.
bawana 7y ago
people are using the words 'nuclear power' like the word 'disease'. There multiple different kinds of nuc power. I disagree with our use of fast breeders and other reactions that also keep our supply of weapons grade fissile material 'fresh'. However there are other much safer reactions that are much safer and aimed more at energy generation like molten salt reactors - thorium, fluoride? Just like there are diseases with which we can cope(chickenpox) and others which are horrible(smallpox), we should not use the words 'nuclear power' in planning or discussion among educated people. 'Nuclear power' is only useful in third grade science class.
biolurker1 7y ago
Greenpeace won. They killed millions by denying access to GMO rice and they will make the planet more polluted too
thesaint 7y ago
Ms.Merkel. A communist...
kisstheblade 7y ago
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/ 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

166 points by Bostonian 7y ago

Sadly, the anti-nuclear movement in Germany is very strong. Germany also has a declining Coal industry. So after Fukushima shrewd politicians moved to shutter nuclear plants and return to coal. The worst part? German coal is some of the worst in terms of sulfur and pollutants.

KozmoNau7 7y ago
I've heard lignite described as "slightly more flammable dirt". It's an absolutely atrocious energy source.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- growlist 7y ago
  The destruction to the countryside from open-cast mining is staggering as well - enormous areas stripped back to bare earth. Terrifying.
this_user 7y ago
> So after Fukushima shrewd politicians moved to shutter nuclear plants and return to coal. That's not true. The phasing out of nuclear energy was decided in the late 90s after the Social Democrats and Greens had taken over the government. This was part of a larger green energy package. This had been a major issue for the Greens since at least the 80s when the party was founded. The Merkel government attempted to roll some of that back in 2010, but was blindsided by the Fukushima accident that caused public opinion to become much more polarised again w.r.t. nuclear energy. Please stop spreading this misinformation that the end of nuclear energy in Germany was caused by Fukushima.
- alexott 7y ago
  it was intensified after Fukushima... P.S. I misread the comment...
  - metalliqaz 7y ago
    that's what parent comment said
- Aperocky 7y ago
  The entire nuclear saga showed how even an educated country can become very irrational over technology. In the future, especially in democratic countries, these things are going to become worse.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  > The Merkel government attempted to roll some of that back in 2010, but was blindsided by the Fukushima accident that caused public opinion to become much more polarised again w.r.t. nuclear energy. In a democratic society, the will of the people is relevant. Fukushima caused the end of nuclear energy in Germany.
  - lispm 7y ago
    > Fukushima caused the end of nuclear energy in Germany The end of nuclear was decided by the red/green government a few years earlier. The conservative successor government (Merkel) tried to reverse that decision and after Fukushima they joined the German mainstream position to end nuclear and to invest further money into a new type of distributed electricity production with the focus on renewable energy.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      > The end of nuclear was decided by the red/green government a few years earlier. The conservative successor government (Merkel) tried to reverse that decision and after Fukushima they joined the German mainstream position to end nuclear and to invest further money into a new type of distributed electricity production with the focus on renewable energy. ... thus ending it.
svara 7y ago
That's not true, coal did not replace nuclear, renewables did [0]. What's true is that coal plants could have been shut down instead of nuclear ones, which sucks. But note that anthracite coal is decreasing since ~5 years ago (dark grey bar in [0]). [0] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/384/bilder/3_abb_bruttostromerzeugung-et_2019-02-26.png https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38... "Kohle" is coal; "Kernenergie" is nuclear; "Erneuerbare" is renewables.
- looping__lui 7y ago
  Yes. And not to mention that the coal plants emit 2x as much radioactivity into the environment at comparable power generation [0]. [0] https://www.bund-nrw.de/fileadmin/nrw/dokumente/braunkohle/2008_11_BUNDhintergrund_Radioaktivitaet_aus_Kohlekraftwerken.pdf https://www.bund-nrw.de/fileadmin/nrw/dokumente/braunkohle/2...
  - C14L 7y ago
    And are the deadliest form of energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
duxup 7y ago
The sad part is that the results of Fukushima ... might generally be a example of how safe / what the risks of modern nuclear might be as I understand it. Fukushima was not updated like modern plants, and it did not experience a 'China Syndrome' type meltdown where the core melted and then kept breaking through all the containment material, rather it fused to the material (sand I belive) of its container and stopped indicating that even an old model nuclear plant might not ever experience a 'China Syndrome' type event. Granted probabbly a really hard sell that a disaster might indicate safety.
- lispm 7y ago
  Probably a really hard sell that a single event took out mostly all nuclear power plants in Japan for a decade...

vmchale 7y ago

I'm not surprised this happened, but it is bitter. Glad to see the failure is being pointed out to the public.

m4rtink 7y ago

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 only incremental updates in later generations. In this light their decision to shutdown seems a little less insane, still could be bad to loose all the related knowledge and industry as a result, which might make deployment of new reactors in the future hard.

dv_dt 7y ago
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.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Still, it at least so far it worked well, they avoided releasing a lot of emissions and are now in a much better position to decide what to do next.
  - dv_dt 7y ago
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-power-costs-will-rise-if-renewables-are-sidestepped https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-po... "France will save 39 billion euros ($44.5 billion) if it refrains from building 15 new nuclear plants by 2060, and bets instead on renewable energy sources to replace its all its aging atomic facilities, a government agency said." If France with it's experience with last gen, and one of the most built next gen designs is thinking this, then it doesn't really bode well for fission plants. I think the world should go hard for renewable and storage as imperfect as they are, while increasing research for fusion plants. The basic tech/economic balance point is that fission plant tech is highly matured to a high-cost point that is unlikely to shift downwards anytime soon, while renewables and even more so storage tech is on a rapid cost decrease in the manufacturing s-curve - with quite a bit more to run, and they're at pretty close to parity with nuclear in price/watt. Renewables + storage are faster to put up at watt/time - which factors into even more reduced project costs - and more importantly a much wider range of financing options and players who have or can rapidly develop capability to put up renewable plants, leading to even more cost reductions.

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago

German subsidies in the 2000-2010 decade almost single-handedly financed the improvements in solar cells that sees them competitive with even coal today. And because the environmental goals had higher rank than economic and selfish ones, they did not enact trade barriers, or lobby for them on an EU Level, even when it became clear it would be Chinese manufacturers reaping the profits of mass production.

yorwba 7y ago
A Brussels committee [in 2017] agreed to set minimum import duties for Chinese solar modules and cells that could price them up to 30% above market levels with “huge negative effects” for the industry, according to trade groups. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/08/solar-industry-says-eu-tariffs-chinese-imports-will-raise-panel-prices https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/08/solar-in... EDIT: they scrapped the tariffs in 2018: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=1904 http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=1904
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

llampx 7y ago

Try pointing this out in Germany. Most people have no idea what kind of electricity they are actually buying, apart from choosing a greenwashed energy provider and paying through the nose.

sesuximo 7y ago
Im sure there's large variance in different pockets of people, but I dont think this holds true based on my convenience sample

goatinaboat 7y ago

Nuclear energy, to start with, is ultimately not safe Solar kills more people than nuclear per watt, so that’s the reporter’s personal agenda talking https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

dv_dt 7y ago
The killings that nuclear may make are difficult to pin down (did that cancer come from nuclear exposure, or a chemical, or just a chance cosmic ray?) and so may be unattributed.
- funklute 7y ago
  A well-developed statistical model should be able to take that into account. My understanding is that the academic consensus is fairly strongly leaning towards nuclear being the safest energy option, based on robust statistical models. Would be interested in hearing the opinions on this from someone actually in this academic field though...
  - dv_dt 7y ago
    A model could provide an estimate there, but nuclear deaths are not estimated that way from the posted source. They are only directly attributable deaths. e.g. cherynobyl was attributed from the posted source as 7 deaths while statistical modeling puts it in at least the tens of thousands range. Even the 7 of the link is questionable as reports of firefighter deaths during the accident as 27. e.g. https://heavy.com/news/2019/05/how-many-people-died-at-chernobyl/ https://heavy.com/news/2019/05/how-many-people-died-at-chern...
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Sure, but if we count that then let’s attribute all skin cancer to solar.
  - dv_dt 7y ago

DasIch 7y ago

Let's assume for a moment there would be no opposition to nuclear in Germany. How does nuclear energy help with climate change? Looking back to 2000, nuclear energy at peak was responsible for 32.1% of electricity production[1]. We'd need to at least double that. That would take a huge amount of money. More importantly it would take time. We can barely manage to build a single fucking airport in 1-2 decades. Building this many nuclear reactors would easily take this long, if not longer. It seems to me that nuclear energy as a solution to climate change might look good on paper. Sci-fi also looks good on paper though and it's just as realistic. [1]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage/anteil-der-atomenergie-an-der-stromerzeugung-in-deutschland/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage...

pthreadses 7y ago
There were great strides in increasing the overall percentage of renewable power. If the proportion of nuclear power had stayed constant, that would mean usage of coal could have been reduced even further than it already has been, which helps fight climate change.
- lispm 7y ago
  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 energy or to open up their markets for competition. Politicians were given jobs in these companies after their political career. It took literally decades to break up this system and the Energiewende was the first movement towards open energy markets, competition and renewable energy production. It's a system which takes decades to reform and rebuild. Whether nuclear or coal is first to go out is a minor issue over that time scale. The money invested into renewable created a lot of effects which will drive down electricity prices in many other countries much faster than nuclear will do. Germany served as a first example how to build up technology, increase efficiency, etc. For example, the real benefit for solar will not be in Germany, but in many other countries which have lots of sunshine and lots of ways to deploy that kind of lower tech - compared to extremely complex nuclear technology. And this was kickstarted here.

AlphaGeekZulu 7y ago

Germans do not have to decide between Nuclear Energy or Climate Catastrophe. They have to decide between the potential risks of radioactive pollution or the impairment of landscape by wind turbines and power lines. There is not much tragedy in this decision.

toohotatopic 7y ago
In France and Belgium, which are West of Germany, there are plenty of nuclear reactors. This is in a region with prevailing west winds. If Germany would want to minimize the risk of radioactive pollution, it would have to build plenty nuclear reactors at its eastern border and sell that energy to France below market value. Then, as long as France doesn't cut Germany off, the French nuclear reactors would be shut down and the risk of nuclear pollution for Germany would be reduced.
- looping__lui 7y ago
  And adding to that: the public DOES understand this. People in Western Germany (especially in NRW where they have to suffer from coal and are close to French and Belgium reactors) just shake heads in disbelief while having to swallow the highest electricity prices in Europe...
C14L 7y ago
Oh, we have decided. Germany has by far the dirtiest energy produciton in Western Europe. On average, every German citizen produces almost twice as much CO2 than the average French or Brit: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita And talking about risks: Brown coal ist BY FAR the most dangerous form of energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
- anoncake 7y ago
  > And talking about risks: Brown coal ist BY FAR the most dangerous form of energy: A predictable number of deaths is not a danger but damage.

plupopit 7y ago

The article misses to mention that Germany is actually quite active in fusion reactor research (eg. Wendelstein 7x the world's largest stellerator was just opened a few years ago). Its yet to be seen if fusion power will ever reach production level. But stating that Germany cut itself off of nuclear energy research is not exactly right.

magduf 7y ago
That's pretty irrelevant. Fission and fusion are two totally separate processes. Fission is a process used in nuclear power plants to provide many gigawatts of power to electric grids. Fusion is something that's only used for science experiments and cannot generate useful power. Maybe it can in the future, and maybe in the future we'll also have holodecks and warp drive, but that isn't useful today.
alexgmcm 7y ago
Nuclear Fusion should be treated completely differently though. It shares nuclear in the name and the similarities pretty much end there (the 'waste' from neutron activation of plasma facing components is negligible). Fusion seems to be doing well these days with good progress on ITER, nice results from MAST and the approval of STEP. I remember Chen liked the idea of the Stellarator as it removed the need for the plasma current so perhaps we can expect good results from W7x as well. The last thing I want is for fusion to have political issues due to being linked with fission power just because of the name.
melling 7y ago
Yes, and we will solve that nuclear fusion problem sometime over the next 50 to 150 years! In the meantime, the decades long train wreck of climate change could easily have been slowed if we’d had simply moved off of coal earlier.
mitchty 7y ago
In common parlance nuclear tends to mean nuclear fission, not nuclear fusion. Though the "technically correct" aspect is that they're both nuclear reactions. I'd say its important to say that they're not cutting themselves off of nuclear fusion research.

PeterStuer 7y ago

The pro-nuclear lobby likes to pretend it offers a clean solution. I really want to believe, as it would make things easy. Sadly, not only is nuclear not clean, the worst part is humans can't handle the required responsibility for this technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU

magduf 7y ago
The French seem to have handled nuclear technology quite well for many decades now.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  If by "handling well" you mean examples like buying the Belgian energy sector and then buying the Belgian politicians with generous revolving doors to keep open extremely dated and deteriorating reactors in Wallonia (Thiange) and Flanders (Doel) and playing deaf to the objections of neighboring states scared shitless of having these things operating in a dilapidated state so close to their borders, then yes, I guess they are doing a-ok.
  - renaudg 7y ago
    Part of the German public and political class can be "scared shitless" until they're blue in the face, they have no leg to stand on. If I were Belgian, I sure would remain deaf to a lecture about energy and the environment, by one of the worst European contributors to CO2 emissions and emitter of deadly fine coal particles causing dozens of thousands of deaths now Germany, this is so out of character for you. You have the resources and smarts to be leading this effort instead of clinging to one terribly misguided populist decision 20 years ago. Until you do though, I would keep a low profile on these matters.
    - PeterStuer 7y ago
      Have you ever considered that maybe it is because they have the smarts that they are getting out of both nuclear and coal? And you might want to read up on Thiange before you tell Belgians to ignore and carry on.

Barrin92 7y ago

I absolutely hate this narrative of the demise of nuclear energy largely being politically motivated because nuclear energy is not just falling in Germany, it's diminishing virtually across the entire world (with very few exceptions). It's true that Germany has a historical anti-nuclear and green sentiment but other countries are no different. Nuclear energy may be clean, but it is also exceedingly expensive and unable to compete in price in most countries including the US.[1] Even China, the large last country to buckle the trend as of late seems to have reduced the role of its nuclear energy policy and seems to be missing targets [2]. [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/industry-meltdown-is-era-of-nuclear-power-coming-to-an-end https://e360.yale.edu/features/industry-meltdown-is-era-of-n... [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...

magduf 7y ago
Expensive compared to what? Are you comparing the full costs of coal plants to nuclear, or are you just externalizing the costs as most comparisons do? The costs of coal need to include all the effects of coal emissions into the atmosphere, which may very well be incalculable. Solar and wind of course are great, but has anyone figured out how to make those supply 100% of a nation's power needs, 24/7? I don't believe so: we don't have the storage technology yet.
- cma 7y ago
  Nuclear costs are heavily externalized ($12 billion liability cap, rest paid by governement and there are plausible >$1trillion accident scenarios). It is as if they only have to pay insurance on a deductible.
  - yohannparis 7y ago
    The lack of a carbon tax makes any fossil fuel technology heavily subsidies. When all externalities are taking into account, then we can talk about the cost of Nuclear.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Christmas-8 7y ago

Climate change is much in the news these days, but one important reason for it is never even mentioned: the “nuclear industry”. A radioactive gas, Krypton 85, is released into the atmosphere by the reprocessing of nuclear reactor fuel rods. It is considered harmless because it rises to the upper atmosphere and will not come into contact with any life. There is now several million times as much KR85 as in 1945, at the start of the Atomic Age. KR85 is a radioactive gas, and radioactive gases consist of charged particles. When charged particles enter a magnetic field, they migrate to the poles. The earth is a giant magnet, so the KR85 ends up equally at the North and South poles. There it interacts with the charged stream entering the earth's atmosphere from space, known to astronomers as the Wilson Current, a part of the Wilson Circuit, which keeps the earth charged up. The discharge portion of the Wilson Circuit is lightning, most of which is in the belt of constant thunderstorm activity that circles the earth at the Equator. As the inflow of charge at the poles weakens, so does the amount of lightning decrease everywhere on earth. And lightning is essential to plants. Plant life cannot use the nitrogen in the atmosphere unless it is "fixed" into compounds, which can be done by two processes: certain types of bacteria, and lightning strikes. There are some plants that have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots and do not need lightning, but many plants, especially in tropical forest areas where there is normally a lot of lightning, are lightning-dependent, and cannot get enough nitrogen to thrive without lightning. So the widespread use of nuclear power is decreasing the amount of lightning all over this planet, and causing deterioration of forests, especially in the tropics, from nitrogen starvation. And that is the worst form of climate breakdown currently happening. The mass extinction of countless species of plant life all over the world is much more significant than all other effects of climate destabilization combined. The increase in both frequency and severity of storms in the temperate and polar zones is also being augmented by the build-up of charge at the poles from KR85. The strong tropical storms that form along the Equator are highly-charged systems. How far they travel from their birthplace along the Equator toward the poles is determined by two factors: The strength of the charge of the storm itself, and that of the pole that is attracting it. As KR85 builds up at the poles, these strong tropical storms are drawn farther from their normal home in the tropics and sub-tropics toward the poles, bringing with them tropical heat, as well as more frequent and stronger storm activity to areas not formerly accustomed to such weather. The observations of decrease of ice in the polar zones and more frequent and severe storms in the polar and temperate regions is only one more symptom of the build-up of charge at the poles caused by radioactivity from the nuclear industry. Another side-effect of particular consequence in the Arctic is the damaging ultra-violet radiation that has been observed reaching the surface of the earth from above. It seems to be from beyond the atmosphere, and is conventionally thought to be from outer space, and reaching the surface because of a thinning of a filtering layer of ozone, but is actually being produced in the upper atmosphere by the interaction between the influx of charge of the Wilson Current, and the layer of KR85 that now exists there. The conventional explanations being thought up to explain what is happening in the atmosphere fall far short of the mark. So far, none of the mainstream scientific community has dared to mention the possible role of radioactivity in causing the breakdown of the climatic regime that has prevailed for the last 5,000 years or so. A large part of the reason for this glaring omission is the lack of any mechanism understood by orthodox meteorology that could account for the observations. There IS a well-worked out theory that explains all the manifold observations, and is supported by enough solid evidence to be convincing to anyone who examines it objectively. But the history of this theory, along with the personal reputation of it's originator, ensures that it will not be examined at all. That, however, is a defect in the education of the scientific community, not a defect in the theory.

donjoe 7y ago

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 power was produced. If disposal would be generally so expensive, we would have 700 billion €, but even with LWR=factor 5 cheaper (more realistic) we would end up with 6 times what is available (24 billion €) Addendum: In the USA the graphite of the spheres is to be gasified and the CO2 is to be released into the atmosphere together with the radioactive C14. It's a military facility, they're allowed to do that. In the EU this would be excluded in the civilian sector. But it makes disposal cheaper. Here detailed information on the Jülich spherical castors radientelex.com/Stx_18_748-749... There are a total of 453 Castors with balls. The castors are however smaller than LWR castors (25 t instead of 120 t) One more addendum: The acquisition costs of the 455 castors alone were almost as high as the value of the electricity generated with the balls. And one more thing: The transport is to be carried out by an armed special ship, some dozens of trips would be necessary " [1] (sorry, dirty twitter unroll & deepl translation) [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Moormann https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Moormann [1] https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/1201128328738037761?s=19 https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/120112832873803776... Edit: Typo

kmmlng 7y ago
Note that Jülich was not exactly a typical nuclear power plant: it was a prototype pebble bed reactor linked to a research facility.

Dagonfly 7y ago

I'm pro-nuclear, but I find these articles about Germany's anti-nuclear stance extremely frustrating. Blaming the current situation on Fukushima is historically inaccurate. Imo, there are 2 major reasons for the current stance: 1. Chernobyl: After the disaster in 1986 the anti-nuclear movement gained massive traction. The radioactive cloud spread all the way to West Germany and warnings had to be issued (mushrooms, venison, crops, ...). It was a real turning point, since everyone was made aware of the concerns. [1] 2. "Endlager"-discussion: The search for a permanent nuclear waste deposit was/is a political shitshow. The trial run at Asse (in the 70s) failed: We are currently getting all canisters out of there, after they found contaminated sludge and flooded areas. [2] Further, the decision to select Gorleben as one possible locations was mostly political. The whole process is politically loaded, expensive and devoid of any scientific reasoning. [3] The anti-nuclear decision has been made years before Fukushima for imo valid concerns. The "latest" reactor in Germany went online in 1989, and the decision to phase-out was made in 2002. So the reactors being phased out now are all 30+ years old. Nowadays, I don't think any energy provider in Germany would be willing to invest in NEW fission plants. By the time they will be online, renewables might be way cheaper per kWh. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine [3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_(Kerntechnik) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_(Kerntechnik)

ofrzeta 7y ago
> 1. Chernobyl: After the disaster in 1986 the anti-nuclear movement gained massive traction. The radioactive cloud spread all the way to West Germany and warnings had to be issued (mushrooms, venison, crops, ...). It was a real turning point, since everyone was made aware of the concerns. That is true. And also, still today, when in our forests a boar gets killed by a hunter it has to be brought to the administration to meter the radioactivity (due to Cesium 137). A lot of boar gets discarded instead of being eaten because it exceeds the threshold (600 Bq/kg). I don't know what they are doing with it though.
- moepstar 7y ago

beloch 7y ago

"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 that — as far as it is humanly possible to judge — it won’t come to pass.” After Fukushima, Ms. Merkel, a trained physicist, was no longer able to believe that a nuclear disaster would not occur. That there was a catastrophe even in a high-tech country like Japan made her change her mind." This article dismisses nuclear power as "not safe" with nothing more than the decision of Merkel to justify it. Yes, Merkel has a background in physics, but she made that decision as a politician. It's an unfortunate truth that science is rarely the first consideration in political decisions. Merkel's decision ignored the truly extraordinary circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, which was triggered by an earthquake and tsunami that, each individually, exceeded the design parameters of the reactor, which was 40 years old at the time of the disaster. Updated studies indicated the reactor was vulnerable to tsunami, but were ignored. Repeatedly. The reactors of 40-50 years ago can indeed be unsafe if operated poorly (e.g. Chernobyl) or if necessary threat mitigation is totally ignored. Newer designs are safer, and older designs can be made safer if people don't bury their heads in the sand about necessary updates. Ultimately, nuclear reactors are designed and operated by humans, and mistakes do happen. However, the fact is that the Fukushima disaster has killed fewer people in total than coal power kills every year under normal operating conditions. Is Germany paranoid about nuclear power? Yes.

fhars 7y ago
> Updated studies indicated the reactor was vulnerable to tsunami, but were ignored. Repeatedly. And this is why nuclear power is fundamentally unsafe: the operators have conclusively proven that they just cannot be trusted. Repeatedly.
- masterofpuppets 7y ago
  The Fukushima accident had more to do with the culture in Japan than the industry globally[1]. The government and the regulator were basically in bed with TEPCO. 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/17/japanese-government-liable-negligence-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-disaster https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/...

anovikov 7y ago

Well, let's see: wind parks are a tough sell to the public, will new nuclear plants be an easier sell? I doubt it. So they seem to be on the right path. And yeah, proportion of renewables in total net energy consumption has been 46% in 2019 already.

gumby 7y ago

Bittner ignores that energy will be imported — from Danish windmills sure, but also French and Czech nukes

trhway 7y ago

to add some geopolitics - shutting down nuclear&coal and relying on renewables Germany would need more and more of natural gas plants - the cleanest option and most convenient one due to high speed of bringing up/down among the "dirty" ones - with more and more of the natural gas coming from Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Controversies_of_Nord_Stream_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Controversies_of_N...). While Germans seem to be ok with it (Stockholm syndrome?:), other countries, like US and various Germany neighbors, are naturally either don't like it or actively against it, and as result i think a lot of anti- German anti-nuclear PR and renewables scaremongering is coming from here.

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago

We never moved out of nuclear, we only outsourced the danger to neighbouring countrys. Some of the new energy providers beyond the border are so unsafe, the local government has to distribute iodine for the worst case. (Aachen) So all in all, irrational, yes. Non, nuclear, no.

fxj 7y ago

Here is a by the minute diagram of the german energy consumption. Germany would be fine with all the nuclear power plants switched off. They invest heavily in renewable energy which shows off. https://energy-charts.de/power_de.htm?source=all-sources&year=2019&week=51&fbclid=IwAR2JVsfqMXAFKj5b21u0Rzj_0-Rpz6iyxngF3vvmEzNfzv-GkBRzZaj4O58 https://energy-charts.de/power_de.htm?source=all-sources&yea...

renaudg 7y ago
Their "heavy investment" in renewables doesn't do much for Germany. It's really coal and gas "saving" them from nuclear, and that's problematic. https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=DE https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem... #1: coal, 34% #2: wind, 18% #3: gas, 13% #4: nuclear, 12% (Solar is zero of course, it's night right now : inconveniently, this tends to happen rather regularly) for a whopping average of 400gCO2/kW, compared to France 68, Sweden's 42, or Iceland's 28. "It shows" indeed, but nothing to be proud of.

renaudg 7y ago

Every time this topic comes up, I find it useful to share this fascinating real time map of electricity production and its carbon intensity around the world : https://www.electricitymap.org/ https://www.electricitymap.org/ I think it helps frame the debate and put things in perspective. Needless to say that Germany's mediocre figures here are not worthy of the country's reputation for pragmatism and engineering excellence.

solstice 7y ago
That reputation has suffered anyway quite significantly in the recent past: BER (Berlin's hilariously failed "new" airport) VW et al. cheating on emissions tests...

wazoox 7y ago

Germany invested 300 billions euros in windmills and solar, and achieved 0% emission reduction, thanks to its abandonment of nuclear power. Worse, they now realise that windmills last only about 20 years, while nuclear plants last at the very least 40 to 60 years. With similar amounts invested in nuclear they would be coal free by now.

bawana 7y ago

people are using the words 'nuclear power' like the word 'disease'. There multiple different kinds of nuc power. I disagree with our use of fast breeders and other reactions that also keep our supply of weapons grade fissile material 'fresh'. However there are other much safer reactions that are much safer and aimed more at energy generation like molten salt reactors - thorium, fluoride? Just like there are diseases with which we can cope(chickenpox) and others which are horrible(smallpox), we should not use the words 'nuclear power' in planning or discussion among educated people. 'Nuclear power' is only useful in third grade science class.

biolurker1 7y ago

Greenpeace won. They killed millions by denying access to GMO rice and they will make the planet more polluted too

thesaint 7y ago

Ms.Merkel. A communist...

kisstheblade 7y ago

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/ 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