6 ms·

"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 Fukushim

by 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/...
  - mikeyouse 7y ago
    Do you think that this is somehow unique to Japan? How close do you think regulators and operators are in the US? Is there any industry that even remotely seems like it has a healthy relationship with its oversight bodies?
    - Melting_Harps 7y ago
      > Do you think that this is somehow unique to Japan? How close do you think regulators and operators are in the US? Is there any industry that even remotely seems like it has a healthy relationship with its oversight bodies? Yes, and no. TEPCO, and The Nuclear Village are strong powerful entities and lobbyists in Japanese Society. But it was the 'Japanese' way of not asking the global community for help that ultimately ensured that the Abe Government and its subsequent action would take the act of secrecy in the face of one of Man's biggest ecological disasters. Very, look at how much influence Edison and SONGS have over the Judicial system, and I will remind you San Onofre is home to some of the most expensive real estate in all of the US: https://www.ocregister.com/2019/12/11/edisons-nuclear-canisters-at-san-onofre-plant-letters/ https://www.ocregister.com/2019/12/11/edisons-nuclear-canist... Perhaps, but business interests are always messy things within centralized governance models and I can go on my tirade for the imperative need for Anarcho-Capitalism, but to be honest if someone like Trump hasn't already made it clear to you that these imbeciles (they're all the same) in power will march us off to extinction for yourself, then my arguments will fall on deaf ears.
  - hardoncollider 7y ago
    If the US inspections of offshore oil rigs are any indication of our lack of ability to fix things obviously broken, I can't imagine nuclear power plants would be any different, except the risk in a nuclear scenario would be amplified. Indeed, this does follow a global pattern.
- antris 7y ago
  > And this is why nuclear power is fundamentally unsafe: the operators have conclusively proven that they just cannot be trusted. Repeatedly. So let's just keep reliably killing people with coal around the year like we do now...? The fact is that nuclear power kills the least amount of people per unit of energy produced, with all accidents taken into account. If that's "unsafe" then you cannot consider any electricity production method safe.
  - number6 7y ago
    Or kill them in a single event that causes the surroundings uninhabitable. If only we had alternatives to generate power
    - dgellow 7y ago
      We only have worth alternative, that’s exactly the point here.
    - brutt 7y ago
      We have alternatives: solar, wind, water, bio, nuclear fusion, maybe LENR.
  - Melting_Harps 7y ago
    > The fact is that nuclear power kills the least amount of people per unit of energy produced, with all accidents taken into account. If that's "unsafe" then you cannot consider any electricity production method safe. This is such a horrible stat, especially when taken in this context; I'm not for coal, I think its filthy and and obsolete form of energy, but do you realize the affects of Chernobyl, 3 mile island, Fukushima et al will be felt for millions of years AFTER you are gone? With so many other forms of renewable energy, you'd think it were possible to create another model.
    - antris 7y ago
      > do you realize the affects of Chernobyl, 3 mile island, Fukushima et al will be felt for millions of years AFTER you are gone? No, because that's simply not true. At least not in terms of radiation. Perhaps politically, or in the general feeling of fear among people who do not understand nuclear energy, the effects might be long-lasting but the no-go area around Chernobyl is very small, Fukushima is basically liveable today and I don't think 3 mile island affected any area to such extent that radiation levels would be above the safety limits.
masterofpuppets 7y ago
True. I’d also add that the reactors at Chernobyl also suffered from an inherently unsafe design and they had no containment structure. In the the west there haven’t been any deaths from commercial nuclear power radiological accidents.
stkdump 7y ago
You make the common mistake of assuming one can scientifically prove a given nuclear plant is safe like one can prove that the square root of 2 is irrational or that carbon emissions cause warming. That is not the case and it boggles my mind how many people think it is. If you know so sure what causes these accidents, then you can predict what plant(s) will have them next. Can you? Can anyone? Saying after the fact: it can easily be explained why that happened... that isn't science.
fbender 7y ago
But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. This is mostly because human imagination is limited and humans are fallible, and what‘s not covered by the previous two is lack of knowledge & understanding. Said in other words, if you wait long enough, a catastrophe is inevitable. And history, both old and recent, has told us that the time you‘ll have to wait is much shorter that you‘d think. I work in aerospace operations and every freakin‘ day things go different than planned and anomalies happen. In „my“ „industry“, we try to prepare for off-nominal situations and that buffers the effects, but you can only do so much and you end up in contingencies very often. You can also easily see when a new player enters the stage as they very quickly (should) learn that you‘ll have to react and adapt your plans very often and tone down any promises … Long story short, whatever means you put up to prevent catastrophic events, they will never be enough. Then the question of cost arises, which is undoubtedly extremely high for nuclear events, especially in such a densely populated and small country like Germany, and you’ll quickly realise that you probably do not want to take that risk even if probability is very low. And finally, we have yet to find a working way to handle our nuclear waste for the next 10k-100k years. (I am aware of the options but obviously we are not there yet and it‘s unclear if we ever reach the state of „acceptable solution“ instead of pushing the issue to generations to come.)
- Melting_Harps 7y ago
  > But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. Agreed. The consequences of Nuclear energy last millions of years, not Human lifetimes, to this day we still have not felt the true impact of Fukushima's contaminated water run off into the Pacific, nor the contamination of the food and soil the epidemiology of Nuclear fallout was abysmal in 2011, and was done by Soviet's. Sudden heart failures as well as birth defects, and other maladies of children are stauncly being hidden from the Media as they were ramping up the efforts for the Olympics, not to mention the People have not been able to return Home to their and remian in a make-shift refugee camp, and seen as 'less than' in Japanese society: look up the Hibakusha from WWII, and the same stigma applies now. I think TEPCO/Nuclear Village and the Abe cabinet are just waiting from them to die to make it all go away so they can get back to how things were. > 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. First, if you are going to pull out her education in physics and then discount it, have a basis for doing so. And at least make the obvious correlation to the political decision that France is right next door and produces 379.1 TWh/71.6% of their entire energy production, so they will continue to just buy just buy it from them--I lived in S. Germany near the French Border and it that was common practice. With that said, I have a Biology background and just looking at how it devastated one of the most abundant Ag lands in Japan I'd say Humans are too fallible to have access to this tech to be able to use it on this planet. For Mars, sure, that makes total sense, but not here. We have way more, and better options. Sidenote: I lived near SONGS in S. OC, which had a leak happen around the same time as 3/11.
jiub 7y ago
Removing the radioactive material from Fukushima is going to take forty years. Parts of the area around Chernobyl will be unsafe for the next 20,000. It doesn't matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
- roenxi 7y ago
  That isn't too costly to bear. There are already huge swathes of earth that are uninhabitable wastelands. The change in evacuating a region is painful, but the length of time it stays evacuated isn't important. In the long term it is like the existence of the Sahara - just a fact.
  - brutt 7y ago
    Why nuclear industry cannot bear this burden then instead of tax payers?
    - kalleboo 7y ago
      Because the fossil fuel industries aren't bearing the burden of the cost of climate change (or geopolitical warfare) and that's what they have to be competitive with
skywhopper 7y ago
The lesson of Fukushima and Chernobyl is that an unexpected failure with nuclear power can become a massively damaging, insanely expensive, generational cleanup effort. Sure, you can say newer designs are safer, but you can't say that the underlying technology behind nuclear power is inherently safe. Even a well-run, accident-free nuclear plant uses dangerously radioactive material and generates dangerously radioactive waste that must be dealt with. But if anything goes wrong with any of the processes surrounding all of that, the consequences can be dire. Why lean on dangerous, expensive, and risky tech when we have better solutions?
- sesuximo 7y ago
  do we really have better solution that can handle the magnitude of power more sustainably?
MidgetGourde 7y ago
I think nuclear power is a quick win, for the amount of CO2 discharged and the 'amount' of materials gained. The lasting legacy will always be the cost of maintenance, both in knowledge (in 100 years from now will people be able to operate the reactors and remember where all of the crud was left) and environmental impact. Certainly in the north sea area of europe, there is a drive for wind power, which I fully back. Nuclear power plants don't run themselves, which is why it's a highly skilled area, kill the skill, welcome to long periods of radiated land masses which are not obvious (unless you have a geiger counter)
RobLach 7y ago
To put things into perspective. The US Navy currently has 83 (known) active watercraft that are nuclear powered. Across all the reactors the Navy use and have used, they have amassed over 5300 “reactor years” without reactor incident. With adequate processes and training, Nuclear is incredibly safe and green.
- sesuximo 7y ago
  This is a good data point, but arguably it is a point for small nuclear reactors that may (or may not) generalize to large ones.
ksec 7y ago
>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. And that wasn't the only case, there were evidence it was the maintenance wasn't done properly. But no one was willing to admit it. Better to let the public think Nuclear is not safe rather than admitting to our own mistakes. I kept thinking, had that reactor withstand that tsunami, would the world have turn around and built newer, better Nuclear Reactor.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
> Newer designs are safer "Safer" is not "safe", and only "safe" would be a relevant thing to counter "not safe" with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m... For 100 people parading the merits of nuclear power around on HN, you will hardly find 1 able to take that article seriously. The people spending decades and millions on thinking of solutions for this as of yet unsolved problem would appreciate the help. But they need tested and proven solutions, not "maybe", or "I wouldn't be surprised if" and all that other stuff that masquerade as argument on HN. > older designs can be made safer Again, notice the difference between this and "older designs have been made safe". It seems HN doesn't even attempt to rise above "woulda coulda shoulda" whenever this topic comes up. > Is Germany paranoid about nuclear power? Yes. Does Germany need your approval or permission? NO. If nuclear power is so great, go knock yourself out, but why do you absolutely have to put all eggs into one basket? Why can't a few countries move away from nuclear? Are you afraid nuclear development will stop without German engineering or approval? It's not like Germany is putting pressure on anyone, why is HN time and time again obsessing about Germany not playing along? Oh no, they like cash and dislike nuclear... we're not even allowed to mention Trump, but we can repeat the same tripe about Germany not embracing nuclear all day.
finchisko 7y ago
>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." With this reasoning, any form of transportation should be "exited" (austeigt) too, because there were airplane, car... crashes in the past. And it is also highly unlikely that it wouldn't happen again.
emsign 7y ago
If a safety system requires that its operators are doing the right thing all the time it is an inherently unsafe system. It's as simple as that. Germany has understood this.
d10r 7y ago
I followed the Fukushima disaster very closely when it was happening. And I remember that during the crucial hours, when emissions of radioactive material was highest, the wind was luckily going to the east, out onto the pacific ocean, with thousands of miles of buffer. Given that, it seems to me that Fukushima could have gone much, much worse. I have a pragmatic proposal: lets use nuclear power if it's competitive including insurance and including the long term cost of handling its waste. If it's not or if nobody can insure it, we should probably not.
d10r 7y ago
one addition to the story: Exit from nuclear power in germany was already decreed by law several years before, by the then government of social democrats and greens. This decision was reverted by the first (I believe) Merkel government, only to be reverted again few years later due to Fukushima. Merkel is known for being quite pragmatic and following the path of least political resistance in most cases. While the exit of the exit was very popular at that moment, I do believe that in this case she was sincere when telling that seeing the Fukushima disaster changed her mind. I guess it was humbling even for world leaders to see how helpless everybody up to the PM were in Japan in the face of what was happening.

by beloch 7y ago

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/...
- mikeyouse 7y ago
  Do you think that this is somehow unique to Japan? How close do you think regulators and operators are in the US? Is there any industry that even remotely seems like it has a healthy relationship with its oversight bodies?
  - Melting_Harps 7y ago
    > Do you think that this is somehow unique to Japan? How close do you think regulators and operators are in the US? Is there any industry that even remotely seems like it has a healthy relationship with its oversight bodies? Yes, and no. TEPCO, and The Nuclear Village are strong powerful entities and lobbyists in Japanese Society. But it was the 'Japanese' way of not asking the global community for help that ultimately ensured that the Abe Government and its subsequent action would take the act of secrecy in the face of one of Man's biggest ecological disasters. Very, look at how much influence Edison and SONGS have over the Judicial system, and I will remind you San Onofre is home to some of the most expensive real estate in all of the US: https://www.ocregister.com/2019/12/11/edisons-nuclear-canisters-at-san-onofre-plant-letters/ https://www.ocregister.com/2019/12/11/edisons-nuclear-canist... Perhaps, but business interests are always messy things within centralized governance models and I can go on my tirade for the imperative need for Anarcho-Capitalism, but to be honest if someone like Trump hasn't already made it clear to you that these imbeciles (they're all the same) in power will march us off to extinction for yourself, then my arguments will fall on deaf ears.
- hardoncollider 7y ago
  If the US inspections of offshore oil rigs are any indication of our lack of ability to fix things obviously broken, I can't imagine nuclear power plants would be any different, except the risk in a nuclear scenario would be amplified. Indeed, this does follow a global pattern.
antris 7y ago
> And this is why nuclear power is fundamentally unsafe: the operators have conclusively proven that they just cannot be trusted. Repeatedly. So let's just keep reliably killing people with coal around the year like we do now...? The fact is that nuclear power kills the least amount of people per unit of energy produced, with all accidents taken into account. If that's "unsafe" then you cannot consider any electricity production method safe.
- number6 7y ago
  Or kill them in a single event that causes the surroundings uninhabitable. If only we had alternatives to generate power
  - dgellow 7y ago
    We only have worth alternative, that’s exactly the point here.
  - brutt 7y ago
    We have alternatives: solar, wind, water, bio, nuclear fusion, maybe LENR.
- Melting_Harps 7y ago
  > The fact is that nuclear power kills the least amount of people per unit of energy produced, with all accidents taken into account. If that's "unsafe" then you cannot consider any electricity production method safe. This is such a horrible stat, especially when taken in this context; I'm not for coal, I think its filthy and and obsolete form of energy, but do you realize the affects of Chernobyl, 3 mile island, Fukushima et al will be felt for millions of years AFTER you are gone? With so many other forms of renewable energy, you'd think it were possible to create another model.
  - antris 7y ago
    > do you realize the affects of Chernobyl, 3 mile island, Fukushima et al will be felt for millions of years AFTER you are gone? No, because that's simply not true. At least not in terms of radiation. Perhaps politically, or in the general feeling of fear among people who do not understand nuclear energy, the effects might be long-lasting but the no-go area around Chernobyl is very small, Fukushima is basically liveable today and I don't think 3 mile island affected any area to such extent that radiation levels would be above the safety limits.

masterofpuppets 7y ago

True. I’d also add that the reactors at Chernobyl also suffered from an inherently unsafe design and they had no containment structure. In the the west there haven’t been any deaths from commercial nuclear power radiological accidents.

stkdump 7y ago

You make the common mistake of assuming one can scientifically prove a given nuclear plant is safe like one can prove that the square root of 2 is irrational or that carbon emissions cause warming. That is not the case and it boggles my mind how many people think it is. If you know so sure what causes these accidents, then you can predict what plant(s) will have them next. Can you? Can anyone? Saying after the fact: it can easily be explained why that happened... that isn't science.

fbender 7y ago

But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. This is mostly because human imagination is limited and humans are fallible, and what‘s not covered by the previous two is lack of knowledge & understanding. Said in other words, if you wait long enough, a catastrophe is inevitable. And history, both old and recent, has told us that the time you‘ll have to wait is much shorter that you‘d think. I work in aerospace operations and every freakin‘ day things go different than planned and anomalies happen. In „my“ „industry“, we try to prepare for off-nominal situations and that buffers the effects, but you can only do so much and you end up in contingencies very often. You can also easily see when a new player enters the stage as they very quickly (should) learn that you‘ll have to react and adapt your plans very often and tone down any promises … Long story short, whatever means you put up to prevent catastrophic events, they will never be enough. Then the question of cost arises, which is undoubtedly extremely high for nuclear events, especially in such a densely populated and small country like Germany, and you’ll quickly realise that you probably do not want to take that risk even if probability is very low. And finally, we have yet to find a working way to handle our nuclear waste for the next 10k-100k years. (I am aware of the options but obviously we are not there yet and it‘s unclear if we ever reach the state of „acceptable solution“ instead of pushing the issue to generations to come.)

Melting_Harps 7y ago
> But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. Agreed. The consequences of Nuclear energy last millions of years, not Human lifetimes, to this day we still have not felt the true impact of Fukushima's contaminated water run off into the Pacific, nor the contamination of the food and soil the epidemiology of Nuclear fallout was abysmal in 2011, and was done by Soviet's. Sudden heart failures as well as birth defects, and other maladies of children are stauncly being hidden from the Media as they were ramping up the efforts for the Olympics, not to mention the People have not been able to return Home to their and remian in a make-shift refugee camp, and seen as 'less than' in Japanese society: look up the Hibakusha from WWII, and the same stigma applies now. I think TEPCO/Nuclear Village and the Abe cabinet are just waiting from them to die to make it all go away so they can get back to how things were. > 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. First, if you are going to pull out her education in physics and then discount it, have a basis for doing so. And at least make the obvious correlation to the political decision that France is right next door and produces 379.1 TWh/71.6% of their entire energy production, so they will continue to just buy just buy it from them--I lived in S. Germany near the French Border and it that was common practice. With that said, I have a Biology background and just looking at how it devastated one of the most abundant Ag lands in Japan I'd say Humans are too fallible to have access to this tech to be able to use it on this planet. For Mars, sure, that makes total sense, but not here. We have way more, and better options. Sidenote: I lived near SONGS in S. OC, which had a leak happen around the same time as 3/11.

jiub 7y ago

Removing the radioactive material from Fukushima is going to take forty years. Parts of the area around Chernobyl will be unsafe for the next 20,000. It doesn't matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

roenxi 7y ago
That isn't too costly to bear. There are already huge swathes of earth that are uninhabitable wastelands. The change in evacuating a region is painful, but the length of time it stays evacuated isn't important. In the long term it is like the existence of the Sahara - just a fact.
- brutt 7y ago
  Why nuclear industry cannot bear this burden then instead of tax payers?
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    Because the fossil fuel industries aren't bearing the burden of the cost of climate change (or geopolitical warfare) and that's what they have to be competitive with

skywhopper 7y ago

The lesson of Fukushima and Chernobyl is that an unexpected failure with nuclear power can become a massively damaging, insanely expensive, generational cleanup effort. Sure, you can say newer designs are safer, but you can't say that the underlying technology behind nuclear power is inherently safe. Even a well-run, accident-free nuclear plant uses dangerously radioactive material and generates dangerously radioactive waste that must be dealt with. But if anything goes wrong with any of the processes surrounding all of that, the consequences can be dire. Why lean on dangerous, expensive, and risky tech when we have better solutions?

sesuximo 7y ago
do we really have better solution that can handle the magnitude of power more sustainably?

MidgetGourde 7y ago

I think nuclear power is a quick win, for the amount of CO2 discharged and the 'amount' of materials gained. The lasting legacy will always be the cost of maintenance, both in knowledge (in 100 years from now will people be able to operate the reactors and remember where all of the crud was left) and environmental impact. Certainly in the north sea area of europe, there is a drive for wind power, which I fully back. Nuclear power plants don't run themselves, which is why it's a highly skilled area, kill the skill, welcome to long periods of radiated land masses which are not obvious (unless you have a geiger counter)

RobLach 7y ago

To put things into perspective. The US Navy currently has 83 (known) active watercraft that are nuclear powered. Across all the reactors the Navy use and have used, they have amassed over 5300 “reactor years” without reactor incident. With adequate processes and training, Nuclear is incredibly safe and green.

sesuximo 7y ago
This is a good data point, but arguably it is a point for small nuclear reactors that may (or may not) generalize to large ones.

ksec 7y ago

>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. And that wasn't the only case, there were evidence it was the maintenance wasn't done properly. But no one was willing to admit it. Better to let the public think Nuclear is not safe rather than admitting to our own mistakes. I kept thinking, had that reactor withstand that tsunami, would the world have turn around and built newer, better Nuclear Reactor.

PavlovsCat 7y ago

> Newer designs are safer "Safer" is not "safe", and only "safe" would be a relevant thing to counter "not safe" with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m... For 100 people parading the merits of nuclear power around on HN, you will hardly find 1 able to take that article seriously. The people spending decades and millions on thinking of solutions for this as of yet unsolved problem would appreciate the help. But they need tested and proven solutions, not "maybe", or "I wouldn't be surprised if" and all that other stuff that masquerade as argument on HN. > older designs can be made safer Again, notice the difference between this and "older designs have been made safe". It seems HN doesn't even attempt to rise above "woulda coulda shoulda" whenever this topic comes up. > Is Germany paranoid about nuclear power? Yes. Does Germany need your approval or permission? NO. If nuclear power is so great, go knock yourself out, but why do you absolutely have to put all eggs into one basket? Why can't a few countries move away from nuclear? Are you afraid nuclear development will stop without German engineering or approval? It's not like Germany is putting pressure on anyone, why is HN time and time again obsessing about Germany not playing along? Oh no, they like cash and dislike nuclear... we're not even allowed to mention Trump, but we can repeat the same tripe about Germany not embracing nuclear all day.

finchisko 7y ago

>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." With this reasoning, any form of transportation should be "exited" (austeigt) too, because there were airplane, car... crashes in the past. And it is also highly unlikely that it wouldn't happen again.

emsign 7y ago

If a safety system requires that its operators are doing the right thing all the time it is an inherently unsafe system. It's as simple as that. Germany has understood this.

d10r 7y ago

I followed the Fukushima disaster very closely when it was happening. And I remember that during the crucial hours, when emissions of radioactive material was highest, the wind was luckily going to the east, out onto the pacific ocean, with thousands of miles of buffer. Given that, it seems to me that Fukushima could have gone much, much worse. I have a pragmatic proposal: lets use nuclear power if it's competitive including insurance and including the long term cost of handling its waste. If it's not or if nobody can insure it, we should probably not.

d10r 7y ago

one addition to the story: Exit from nuclear power in germany was already decreed by law several years before, by the then government of social democrats and greens. This decision was reverted by the first (I believe) Merkel government, only to be reverted again few years later due to Fukushima. Merkel is known for being quite pragmatic and following the path of least political resistance in most cases. While the exit of the exit was very popular at that moment, I do believe that in this case she was sincere when telling that seeing the Fukushima disaster changed her mind. I guess it was humbling even for world leaders to see how helpless everybody up to the PM were in Japan in the face of what was happening.