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Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online
- rob_c 5y agoWish it was invest and expand and not please don't decommission. It's a win, win, win when played right...
- legulere 5y agoThat would be unwise though, considering that building nuclear power plants is slower and more expensive than wind and solar in Europe.
- asdff 5y agoWind and solar in europe aren't going to get them off of fossil fuels anytime soon, while nuclear has had that capability since its inception.
- Nasrudith 5y agoSoon isn't a thing that happens with power grids in any normal sense. The big capex in creation means that you need big differences in cost to justify an early shutdown. You also have to the new working before turning off the old, contrary to political preferences to destroy the old and then try to make the new work. Plant modifications are smaller in cost usually - so swapping a coal plant to burn natural gas because fracking made it cheaper (not without its own costs) is a small step. If wind and solar remain cheapest per MW*hr they will grow to saturation.
- asdff 5y agoWhat happens when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? Where does the energy come from? Today, when that happens, the energy comes from natural gas and coal during these times when European renewables are unable to generate much power. All this expectation that we will be on renewables by X date hinges upon developments in battery storage capabilities by X date that have yet to materialize. On the other hand, we have nuclear energy which could have solved this problem 70 years ago.
- rob_c 5y agoNot too mention the problems with various batteries such as longevity, capacity, location and safety. Applies to gravity, ion and gas energy storage unfortunately, not as easy as lower and raise the control rods in a predictable manner unlike our eastern European friends.
- legulere 5y agoThat is factually incorrect. Even though politics blocked a faster increase of renewables Germany was able to greatly reduce fossil fuels usage for electricity production even while exiting nuclear: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.svg https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland... Nuclear currently is not able to that because of cost: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE,_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20201019_Levelized_C... Also new nuclear reactor projects are getting finished too slow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Plants_under_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Plants_u...
- rob_c 5y agoThat's a very poor argument against a very viable low carbon power source
- dr_dshiv 5y agoSafe nuclear power needs German engineering.
- duped 5y agoLike low emissions diesel engines did?
- freemint 5y agoThe motors were capable of hitting the spec as it did during testing, after flipping a few bits in the software the car just has a few PS fewer.
- topspin 5y agoSeems as though French engineering has been sufficient for nearly half a century now.
- joconde 5y agoOn the contrary, our major nuclear R&D company messed up an extension of the Flamanville nuclear plant multiple times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
- meshenna 5y agoAlso see Olkiluoto 3 in Finland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... "The main contractor, Areva, is building the unit for a fixed price of €3 billion, so in principle, any construction costs above that price fall on Areva. In July 2012, those overruns were estimated at more than €2 billion, and in December 2012, Areva estimated that the full cost of building the reactor would be about €8.5 billion, well over the previous estimate of €6.4 billion."
- chrisseaton 5y agoWhat’s not safe about the nuclear engineering in the UK or France?
- junon 5y agoI'm a US expat living in Germany, and boy is the anti-nuclear sentiment real here. There have even been fights - physical altercations - between Green Party members at rallies for having differing viewpoints about nuclear. Unfortunately, it seems those who are against are working with very outdated information and 'tropes' w.r.t. nuclear safety and whatnot. Quite unfortunate.
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- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> a US expat living in Germany, and boy is the anti-nuclear sentiment real here Is it the usual talking points on both sides? Or is there a Teutonic shade to the debate that doesn't surface in e.g. America?
- ethbr0 5y agoBeing the front line of the Cold War, while both the US and USSR developed battle plans for where nuclear weapons would be detonated in your country during a war, probably lends shades to the debate that aren't present in other countries. (Yes, nuclear power / nuclear weapons, but in the 70s that wasn't a clear distinction)
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> both the US and USSR developed battle plans for where nuclear weapons would be detonated in your country during a war Do we know if younger Germans are more open to nuclear power than Cold War era ones?
- junon 5y agoAnecdotally, no. Young Germans (at least, mid-late twenties into the thirties) tend to have the same sort of sentiments.
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- qqtt 5y agoThe discussion and debate about nuclear energy needs to be a constant war of attrition against the long held and stubborn inertia of anti-nuclear sentiment. This letter signed by 25 "intellectuals" (oddly vague name for writers and journalists) is part of the puzzle insofar as it gets the discussion into the news. But unless there is a sustained conversation which carries the attention of the public and really drives and beats back the misinformation back to the shadows, nothing will change. The same tired anti-nuclear talking points need to be systemically deconstructed and refuted over and over again until it is pushed into being a fringe belief. Unfortunately humans are really not set up to have these conversations about "boring" things like global warming and nuclear energy. Unless there is a crisis front and center (like the pandemic) it is hard to reverberate change throughout society. I'm not sure what the answer is, but watching all this play out is like witnessing a devastating car crash happen in slow motion, and being helpless to do anything to prevent it.
- kazinator 5y agoThe Cold War takes a lot of the blame: everything from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, to the subsequent ugly arms race, to bomb testing and its environmental effects. Plus events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Generation X kids were born into an era which felt the threat of global nuclear war, and those people are decision makers today.
- Ericson2314 5y agoFrankly, non-nuclear is austerity in disguise. "Too cheap to meter" electricity is like full employment, objectively better but a huge target politically. It's not a coincidence that US gave up on both at the same time. https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf does justice to the full employment situation, and the same arguments apply. In the econ case it's kind of incredible we filled our minds with nonsense to convince ourselves the thing we had been doing is no longer possible. I suppose the nuclear hysteria served the same roll. To be clear, I am not trying to argue some sort of conspiracy here. I think it all happened organically, which is frankly even more fascinating. Shows that "truth is endogenous" and the post-modernists had a point long before people whined about Trump.
- CyanBird 5y agoBiggest issue with older nuclear plants is the material degradation as a consequence of radiation, after a some decades of constant irradiation steel can become as brittle as glass, which is not only not reversible, but it also means that the actual rebar and concrete surrounding the core becomes damaged and the only way to replace that is to rebuild the whole core I am rather against setting up new reactors, given that they are so centralized on the matter of costs, management, overruns and of course safety, the more safe you try to make them, the slower to build and more expensive they will end up being which is far from an ideal situation, but I am of course fully in favor of refactoring old ones, but it is important to understand that even when there might be political will to redactor them, that might just be technically unfeasible
- petre 5y agoI think you are making a cofusion between thermal fission reactors and fast reactors where neutron radiation is indeed a problem. Rebar and concrete in fission plants ages due to thermal stress plus the usual culprits (humidity, oxygen), not necessarily neutron radiation.
- CyanBird 5y agoThis is not entirely correct, alpha and beta radiation damage the crystaline and quasi-crystaline structures of metals and other materials Even when the reactors themselves, generally rest on light or heavy water, the steel, titanium and other metals and materials nearby the pellets or rods suffer greatly as a consequence of radiation, so it is not a matter of just neutron degradation, but a generalized problem of the physical interaction between radiation and the molecular structures of the materials Sadly for my case, my materials science course on University was very, very weak, but last year I found this MITOpenCourse which covers this topic on detail, I would highly recommend it to absolutely everyone interested on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZjVUWMEz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjZjVUWMEz0
- lamp987 5y agoSafety concerns are moot when the coal alternative will kill orders of magnitude more people.
- petre 5y agoGood luck with the Greens now as the #3 party. The authors of the letter are right, Germany will miss its 65% emissions target and politicians will try to fix this with carbon credits and other policy BS which of course doesn't quite work in practice, since clean electricity doesn't come out of thin air.
- throwawaysea 5y agoMichael Shellenberger's TED talk from 2017, "Why I changed my mind about nuclear power", is still relevant: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_changed_my_mind_about_nuclear_power https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_change... He also has a great Substack where he writes on a variety of topics, including nuclear power. He just wrote an article titled "Nations Go Nuclear As Prices Spike & Renewables Fail" that is timely: https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/nations-go-nuclear-as-prices-spike https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/nations-go-nucle...
- coyotespike 5y agoI like Shellenberger's nuclear advocacy, some of his writing is pungent and balanced. Regrettably he is unreliable in much of his other climate advocacy. He seems to have been radicalized by climate alarmism and has swung too far the other way, espousing poorly supported lukewarmist positions.
- leifg 5y agoThe original letter is in German and behind a paywall. Here is an English translation: https://cleanenergyrevolution.org/publications https://cleanenergyrevolution.org/publications
- schleck8 5y agoIt's worth noting that nuclear is really expensive when factoring in insurance and disposable, a lot more so than wind and solar. >The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
- Factorium 5y agoCurrent wholesale electricity prices in Germany are $194/MWh: https://www.energylive.cloud/ https://www.energylive.cloud/ How much does Germany spend on the military? Cancel it, and spend the money on nuclear power. Otherwise Germany has a significant strategic weakness (gas imports) to Russia, its only realistic enemy.
- Gwypaas 5y agoWholesale energy is priced by the marginal cost, gas peaker plants come in at $150 - $200/MWh so not a surprising price to level out on. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
- schleck8 5y agoI don't think canceling an already tight military budget in favor of a power source that could be devastating when hit by an airstrike is a good strategy
- Ericson2314 5y agoit wouldn't be devastating
- schleck8 5y ago>A meltdown or explosion at a nuclear facility could cause a large amount of radioactive material to be released into the environment. https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/HEALTHYENVIRONMENTS/RADIATIONPROTECTION/EMERGENCYRESPONSE/Documents/radiologicalterrorism.pdf https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/HEALTHYENVIRONMENTS/RADIATIONP...
- tannhaeuser 5y agoNo way with the Green Party part of gov. They've literately started out with "Atomkraft - Nein danke" stickers in late 1970s. Mostly seen on cars, then and today.
- _Microft 5y agoYou have to understand the context that the anti-nuclear movement came from. First, nuclear weapons had been demonstrated as devastating by killing tens of thousands in Japan. Then the superpowers engaged in a nuclear arms race. A small town in Germany's Hesse was even assigned coordinates 0/0 in NATO maps because it was expected to be nuclear ground zero in case of a push of the Soviets through the Fulda Gap. Add Chernobyl to the mix that showed that even civil use of nuclear power can be dangerous and you get a universal, blanket rejection of all things nuclear. It's really not surprising. Rejection of nuclear power plants might not make a lot of sense nowadays in a stable and developed country like Germany but it is understandable once you look at the history.
- rsj_hn 5y agoAnd this is why Germany has increased its coal use - Germany hates nuclear more than coal. When that changes, and someone is adult enough to realize that tough trade offs have to be made rather than relying on finger-wagging austerity, then Germany will migrate out of coal. My bet is that we'll get more scolding, hand-wringing, and continued coal use well into the 2040s if not beyond.
- aagd 5y agoThe view I share with a majority of Germans: Costs of nuclear energy are very much a burden that future generations will have to carry. A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price. It is also clear now that the the companies running the plants will not pay for the deconstruction of the plants after they reached their end of life. Tax payers have to pay for this, and a large part of the remains will need to be stored safely for millenia as well. This is the opposite of sustainability and fairness towards future generations. Worldwide there still exists only a single final storage solution for nuclear waste - in Finland for the finish waste. In densly populated Germany the search for a storage site has been going on since the late 1950s, so far without success. All this on top of the risk of a system failure that would devastate huge territories. In a country where, as we've recently seen, simple emergency warning systems are basically non-existent and fax is still the main communication tool for the authorities...
- 627467 5y agoSo, 100 thousand years is not long enough to find a use of disposing nuclear waste but it is enough to try to terraform earth to undo the changes enacted from NOT using nuclear?
- izacus 5y agoThe Germans have switched from nuclear to coal. Can you cut this "future generations are going to have to carry the cost" when the alternative is literally helping destroy the whole planet's ecosystems? Not to mention they spew up significantly more radioactivity in the air than nuclear powerplants. A 30x30m pool of radioactive fuel is nothing compared to what their powerplants are doing to the future of young generations. Is cancer caused by coal particulates really something you wish on people around you?
- jhgb 5y ago> The Germans have switched from nuclear to coal. No, they did not. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/paragraph_text_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig2-gross-power-production-germany-1990-2020.png https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
- blablabla123 5y ago> Germany is in danger of missing its 2030 climate target, despite all its efforts Which efforts? Germany might look quite progressive when it comes to renewables but lacks a holistic strategy. Energy storage is not discussed at all. It's good that the Greens are part of the government again to put in larger restrictions but they'll be limited by the other 2 parties. Real change is probably going to be provided by companies like Tesla which actually provide a solution to the storage problem. Also the article is behind a paywall and from Welt which is from the same publisher as the notorious yellow press publication Bild. Die Zeit (Former editor-in-chief of it is mentioned) hasn't put it on its start page.
- retrac 5y agoOne generally underappreciated aspect to nuclear energy opposition is the intrinsic link to nuclear weapons. Some of it is scientifically illiterate nonsense (a lot of people seem to think power reactors can have a nuclear explosion). And some of it is just historical association. But some of it is a lot harder to dismiss. A world without nuclear reactors or enrichment facilities is a world without nuclear weapons. Any medium or large industrialized country with power reactors could build nukes very quickly. It's bad enough half a dozen already have. This notion keeps some people up at night, I think. If you consider nuclear weapons to be an existential threat to the species -- perhaps worse than climate change -- then building infrastructure that would allow their more easy construction might seem like madness.
- Slade1 5y agoWould a world where we took initiative to reduce civilian air travel in preference of trains and boats also lead to the military no longer producing fighter jets?
- burnished 5y agoIt would do a lot, yeah. Boeing services military and commercial contracts. If instead of commercial airlines taking off (lol) they just.. didn't, then even with an interested military you would have fewer engineers, smaller & poorer companies, just generally less advancement and less production. Your question is good but it doesn't have the answer you seem to think it does! These things feed into each other, so while it might be unreasonable to say "no commercial airlines means no military air vehicles" (I hesitate to say fighter jet because I do think that would be a casualty), it would also be unreasonable to say that "no commercial airlines means no impact on military air technology". You might think, hey, the military has got some strong advancements the rest of us don't even know about, whos to say that wouldn't be the case? Well, the people working on that tech went to college and got educations in a field that had employment opportunities, and likely would not have if those opportunities didn't exist. Just think about all the supporting industries that are very specific. The aluminum alloys, the manufacturing methods for these high tolerance parts, the electrical systems, the fuel systems etc. You just aren't going to get very far without a civilian populace implicitly backing the effort.
- Ericson2314 5y agoNeverminding the politics and legalities, is it technically possible to "un-decommision" the plants already closed? Or our too many blueprints lost, people retired, etc.? Forgive the optimism, just trying to think ahead.
- mrich 5y agoToo late, they blew up the Philippsburg power plant 30km from my home last year: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zsSswlxThqo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zsSswlxThqo One of the blocks was really old so I'm glad to see it go. I'm in favor of building new, safer reactors. Bill Gates is an investor in a startup that developed such a design, but it will probably be hard to get it tested. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower China apparently also has made advances.
- k__ 5y agoIf I look how close to the German border France built their nuclear plants, we could just have kept ours...
- newman555 5y agonot again. I can’t go through 641st “nuclear vs solar/wind” thread on HN about :) Isn’t this an objective data driven problem and we can decide what’s better for short / medium / long term?
- veddox 5y ago> Isn’t this an objective data driven problem and we can decide what’s better for short / medium / long term? No, such questions never are. Even if you could remove the prevailing strong emotional responses from the debate (humans aren‘t always rational), you would still find that at heart, the debate is not about technology but about values. What targets are we actually aiming for, and why? If you can‘t agree on what the problem is, you aren‘t going to find a common solution. And worse: often such issues pose multiple problems, the solutions for some of which may actually make the others worse. So how do you deal with these trade-offs? What do you prioritize? Nuclear power is a hard problem not because we don‘t know the solutions, but because we can‘t agree on which problems are the most urgent. And again, that’s not a question about technology, but about values.
- cure 5y agoIt may be pragmatic - but politically tough - to keep the nuclear plants open longer, if that can be done safely, and invest heavily in renewables + storage to take all that awful lignite/coal power generation offline. And phase out the nuclear plants once enough (storage) capacity has been built. I wonder if people have modeled for how fast that could be done, and how expensive it would be. We have the technology (cf. grid scale storage, there is a fascination array of options, several of which are tried and tested), it's "just" a matter of scaling it up. The current plan only phases out coal by 2038 which seems... way way way too late. Cf. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/spelling-out-coal-phase-out-germanys-exit-law-draft https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/spelling-out-coal...
- rektide 5y agoemblematic imo of an extremely & admittedly fairly deserved high level of distrust of our general ability to take care of/maintain things.
- poetaster 5y agoIn Germany, Fusion and not Fission is the future (ducks and runs).
- andbberger 5y agoAll the nuclear threads here are the same, and they're all deeply frustrating. HN isn't exactly a bastion of liberal speech (here fucked up conservative hot takes reign supreme) - but ostensibly the populace is more technically literate than average. Yet it's the same stupid bullshit every time. It's dangerous!!11!! fukushima! chernobyl!1!! > nope look at some statistics it's very safe ok, the waste!11! scary spicy rocks!! glowing cats! landscape of thorns!!11 > nope just bury it like finland, or leave it in the pool ok ok only finland is special enough to dig holes for spicy rocks > ... it's expensive!!!11! it's too expensive!! the future is wind turbines and solar panels and turning bolivia into a giant battery The water is lapping at our feet. We are doomed.
- arcticbull 5y agoThis has been my experience too, speaking as someone who's usually the ">" line.
- f7ebc20c97 5y agoDoes a hypereducated liberal democracy even work in the long run, or will a morally relativist people aloof from reality argue over lifeboats and bilge pumps forever until the ship sinks and they all drown?
- tim333 5y agoWe've had nuclear power for 70 years and it hasn't exactly stopped CO2 emissions or made electricity too cheap to meter, and is much the same deal as it was 20 years ago. Solar etc. on the other hand is growing rapidly and exponentially.
- andbberger 5y agowhat are you talking about the nuclear power plants of the world have prevented gigatons of CO2 emissions and could have gone a lot further if the decision makers weren't a bunch of nincompoops who share a bed with the oil lobby.
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- poetaster 5y agoChina consumes over 4 billion tonnes of coal a year. Germany less than 300,000 million. Now, the best course of action is to get VW out of the chinese market to reduce emissions there! Win, win!!!
- m0zg 5y agoFrance, too: https://www.ft.com/content/d06500e2-7fd2-4753-a54b-bc16f1faadd8 https://www.ft.com/content/d06500e2-7fd2-4753-a54b-bc16f1faa.... Looks like cooler heads might actually prevail there.
- reacharavindh 5y agoI know that Germany already invested quite a bit in wind and solar energy. I wonder if Germany, being a rich, progressive, social country, simply side-step all the criticism like what is on this thread by issuing a moratorium on all the existing nuclear reactors - say 6 months, and invest completely in solar and wind over the 6 months to add capacity? Germany’s geo location makes it possible to be part of the EU power grid sharing the renewable power across neighbours to make it all work. The political cost of such a drastic measure would actually be a nett positive in a country like Germany I hope. If only politicians stop thinking short term and be the leaders they are expected to be …