4 ms·

The "treated with care" part is also more like a shortsighted wish. See Asse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_m

The "treated with care" part is also more like a shortsighted wish. See Asse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine Waste from decommission is not even included there.

barry-cotter 7y ago
No containment breaches ever sounds pretty great to me. There’s obviously room for improvement but if all you’ve got is that it’s not actually perfect I’ll happily concede that. Meanwhile Germany’s withdrawal from nuclear power has resulted in 1,000 additional deaths per year. http://papers.nber.org/tmp/26395-w26598.pdf http://papers.nber.org/tmp/26395-w26598.pdf This paper examines the impact of the shutdown of roughly half of the nuclear production capacity in Germany after the Fukushima accident in 2011. We use hourly data on power plant operations and a novel machine learning framework to estimate how plants would have operated differently if the phase-out had not occurred. We find that the lost nuclear electricity production due to the phase-out was replaced primarily by coal- fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately 12 billion dollars per year. Over 70% of this cost comes from the increased mortality risk associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels. Even the largest estimates of the reduction in the costs associated with nuclear accident risk and waste disposal due to the phase-out are far smaller than 12 billion dollars.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  There was no shift from nuclear to coal in Germany. Throwing numbers around while ignoring the political reality around coal in Germany is bad science. The is a huge coal lobby and coal in underdeveloped regions being the only employer are right now the main reasons why coal is being kept alive while support for renewables is being kept low. Not a single coal reactor or mine would have been shut down if nuclear would have still be there.

barry-cotter 7y ago

No containment breaches ever sounds pretty great to me. There’s obviously room for improvement but if all you’ve got is that it’s not actually perfect I’ll happily concede that. Meanwhile Germany’s withdrawal from nuclear power has resulted in 1,000 additional deaths per year. http://papers.nber.org/tmp/26395-w26598.pdf http://papers.nber.org/tmp/26395-w26598.pdf This paper examines the impact of the shutdown of roughly half of the nuclear production capacity in Germany after the Fukushima accident in 2011. We use hourly data on power plant operations and a novel machine learning framework to estimate how plants would have operated differently if the phase-out had not occurred. We find that the lost nuclear electricity production due to the phase-out was replaced primarily by coal- fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately 12 billion dollars per year. Over 70% of this cost comes from the increased mortality risk associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels. Even the largest estimates of the reduction in the costs associated with nuclear accident risk and waste disposal due to the phase-out are far smaller than 12 billion dollars.

Krasnol 7y ago
There was no shift from nuclear to coal in Germany. Throwing numbers around while ignoring the political reality around coal in Germany is bad science. The is a huge coal lobby and coal in underdeveloped regions being the only employer are right now the main reasons why coal is being kept alive while support for renewables is being kept low. Not a single coal reactor or mine would have been shut down if nuclear would have still be there.