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This is insane to me. Nuclear is the best long-term option for ecologically-friendly energy generation. This is absolutely a bad move, and the coal industry has

• midjji 5y ago
  Its less the coal industry and just a random quirk of culture.
• _Microft 5y ago
  We experienced fallout from Chernobyl (radiation levels of wild boar meat and some mushrooms are still under surveillance today) and we were designated nuclear ground zero in case that the Soviets tried to invade Europe. What attitude towards all things nuclear do you expect to arise from that?
  • RivieraKid 5y ago
    Depends on how rational you are. Unfortunately, people are not very rational on average.
    • hutzlibu 5y ago
      Well, one small accident 35 years ago and far away, that could have been much worse - is still the cause that large areas are contaminated here. It is rational, to be sceptic of such a technology. Most discussions about it are not, sure. Anti-nuclear is a strong dogma in green circles and not to be discussed about - but there are still real reasons, why it became a dogma in the first place. Because nuclear energy is not as save and easy as it was promised. It is heavily subsidized, but socialised the risk - and the current storage solutions to the waste are sub-optimal. So expensive and dangerous. I am open to have them run a bit longer, and rather close the coal plants, but they are not a magic bullet solution.
  • arghwhat 5y ago
    Being target for nuclear bombs isn't related to nuclear power in the slightest. The fallout sucked, but even that was a minor hiccup compared to the destruction pollution is bringing with it...
    • ben_w 5y ago
      Fear doesn’t work that way. I was forbidden from including a smoke detector in a school show-and-tell (UK, circa 1993) because of the radiation symbol, even though there was a detector just like it on the ceiling of the same classroom.
    • cesarb 5y ago
      > Being target for nuclear bombs isn't related to nuclear power in the slightest. There's a reason nuclear power plant technology is strictly controlled as "dual use": the same technology used for power production can also be used to produce the material for a nuclear bomb. So you can't say they're completely unrelated.
      • smotah 5y ago
        It's a bit more nuanced than that as there's just a subset of all possible nuclear power plant designs that needs the same enrichment facility than for military (bomb making) usage.
      • hcurtiss 5y ago
        Nuclear waste from commercial reactors in the US is not fissile. Reprocessing would change that (producing plutonium), but that's why we don't have fast breeders in the US (personally, I favor changing that). I'm aware of no enrichment facilities co-located with nuclear power plants, certainly not in the US.
  • danjac 5y ago
    Perhaps one that is relevant to the future of your children rather than the fears of your parents?
  • sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    Oh, come one! I spent most of my childhood in Minsk, 380km north-west to Chernobyl. Now in Europe my only worry is the blackout plan in case of power shortages, not the nuclear plant 60km on the east. I am always amazed how Germans are irrational about nuclear while nearby countries have a mostly pragmatic attitude. Even in Belgium the nuclear phase out is fake and every politician knows it can not be enforced until Netherlands build two new nuclear powerplants 20 years from now.
    • dougmwne 5y ago
      Nearly all the people I know in Poland who were children at the time of Chernobyl have thyroid issues, including my partner. It’s not accurate to say that it had zero health impact. Of course, coal has plenty of health impact, just not a good look to be so flippant about a major nuclear disaster.
      • rollcat 5y ago
        Chernobyl was also a political/PR issue, and in typical USSR fashion, the general public wasn't even informed until over a week after the incident. Consider the half-life of iodine-135, by the time people were being recommended and provided with the necessary medication most of the damage was already done.
        • dougmwne 5y ago
          Indeed. I know people who found out because they had friends in the university physics department. General population was not told immediately.
      • wwtrv 5y ago
        How do you know those issues thyroid issues were not caused by fossil fuel pollution? Many more people have serious health issues or die every year due pollutants emitted from burning coal (and other fossil fuels but coal is by far the worst) than the total death count related to Chernobyl was, its not even comparable. Poland is especially bad in this regard. It consistently has one the highest PM10 and PM2.5 levels in Europe (and I assume it should have been much worse in the 80's)
  • tacocataco 5y ago
    I'm not worried about new reactor designs failing. I'm more worried about storing and protecting waste that lasts 20,000 years. Just seems like another opportunity to externalize costs onto future humans to me.
    • asteroidbelt 5y ago
      > storing and protecting waste that lasts 20,000 years Earth core contains gazilions of spent nuclear fuel. Just burying spent nuclear fuel would not make anything worse. But it is suboptimal, because spent nuclear fuel can be used in the future reactors. I don't understand why people repeat this statement about spent fuel again and again why there's no problem.
• beders 5y ago
  if this accelerates transitioning to renewables, it is not insane.
  • bryan0 5y ago
    Well it’s definitely accelerating transitioning to Russian gas. Edit: gas not oil
    • fsh 5y ago
      Germany has never really used oil for producing electricity.
      • loeg 5y ago
        GP probably meant Russian gas. They are also going to become net buyers of coal electricity from neighboring countries as a result of this. It's not a good move for the environment.
        • bryan0 5y ago
          Yup sorry! I realized after I submitted I meant gas. I’ll see if I can edit
        • merb 5y ago
          > become net buyers of coal electricity even if, it's not because of that we have no coal. it's just not a good idea to use lignite (besides the co2 it also destroys tons of ecosystems which is probably beyond co2) and deep mining is basically dead in germany
  • akyoan 5y ago
    You can’t start up the equivalent of “half a country’s nuclear reactors” in 2 weeks. For this to happen you must already have an excess of renewables, which they obviously don’t have. What will happen is that more coal will be burned because coal always works and is instantly available; Sun and wind isn’t.
• zibzab 5y ago
  Germans have always been anti-nuclear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    Longer insanity is not less insanity!
    • monopoledance 5y ago
      It's democracy. We were much closer to Chernobyl, than all the Americans promoting yesterday's easy future here. Some parts in Germany are suffering the fallout still, when mushrooms and wild game make the Geiger counters beep in the news. Germany is extremely population dense and nobody wants to live next to radioactive waste. Especially in rich Bavaria were all the AKWs have been build (and where they had suitable rock to bury it). No one here wants nuclear power. Not even the energy producers. There is no lobby, no support, no future for Atomkraftwerke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer
      • smotah 5y ago
        > nobody wants to live next to radioactive waste. It seems irrational as sealed high profile waste doesn't leak any radiations beyond the natural ambiant radioactive noise. The problem may arise in a very long time due to water molecules progressively entering and exiting the enclosure during thousands of years. One could live and sleep every night in a nuclear waste storage building and nothing will happen to them. Similarly, one could swim in nuclear fuel cooling pools everyday and won't have any problem either. It's way more problematic for health to live next to a coal power plant.
        • monopoledance 5y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer
• pkdpic 5y ago
  > Germany intends to take all coal-fired generation offline by 2038 Good if they actually mean it maybe? > leading to a likely increase in renewable-power assets in the long term... Yet in the short term, coal is helping to bridge the supply gap. This just seems asinine. But what do I know... Is there something impassably / chronically dangerous about nuclear power or is it just public fear that pushes us away from it? It seems like a solvable engineering scenario from an outside perspective. I just dont get it.
  • dsl 5y ago
    > Is there something impassably / chronically dangerous about nuclear power or is it just public fear that pushes us away from it? Oil funding of anti-nuclear FUD. Thats it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement/?sh=65a64a5e7453 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
  • _ph_ 5y ago
    First of all, the new German government adjusted the phase-out of coal power to be as close as possible to 2030. 2038 was more a bad compromise by the previous government. And yes, nuclear power can be dangerous as Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown. Those dangers could probably be addressed by new reactors, but those are very expensive. The big problem are the existing old reactors. They are not as safe and require a lot of maintenance. A few years ago, Germany only had 4 nuclear power plants running through the whole winter as 4 others were down for longer maintenance. Then there is the problem where to plut all the nuclear waste, Germany doesn't have a long-term storage facility (though search started in the 80ies).
    • Delk 5y ago
      I don't really understand why the Chernobyl or Fukushima disasters should be considered evidence of nuclear power being dangerous. The Chernobyl plant had severe design deficiencies, and the operators were apparently not properly informed about the dangers of operating the plant the way they did at the moment. The Soviet Union was not exactly the epitome of environmental responsibility. Lots of things went wrong. The Fukushima disaster was precipitated by a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami that pretty much leveled the entire area and stopped the emergency generators. The backup generators also failed. Pretty much everything that could go wrong went wrong. People were displaced, and the radiation leakage should be considered significant environmental damage. The number of people displaced was tens of thousands. Although few deaths have been confirmed, if you're pessimistic, you might be able to come up with a larger figure. However, the Fukushima disaster was a once-per-several-decades event. Coal causes hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths every year through direct air pollution, not to mention the indirect effects from climate change. That's not a rare accident. That's business as usual. Yes, nuclear power has risks, and sometimes something goes wrong. Lots of work has been done to minimize the risks, as should be. But it's entirely emotion-driven and intellectually untenable to consider nuclear to be a major risk, comparatively. The damage caused by accidents that apparently should happen at most once per several decades in well-managed (or even less well managed) plants is still a fraction of the damage that coal-fired or other fossil-fueled plants cause every year as part of their normal operation. If anything, the lesson to be learned from the Fukushima disaster should be: "consider carefully whether to build nuclear plants in an area where major earthquakes and tsunamis are statistically to be expected; design and manage plants responsibly; other than that, it's probably fine". Nuclear waste is still be a problem but it's hard to imagine it being anywhere near the magnitude of the problems that burning fossil fuels causes.
• riazrizvi 5y ago
  Unless there is a higher risk of war. Can you imagine if WWII had been a bit more technologically advanced, with bombing raids on nuclear reactors? Here’s a report on their vulnerability in a modern war. https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/38/056/38056717.pdf https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
  • mullingitover 5y ago
    If WWII had nuclear technology in play, bombing raids on nuclear reactors would've been one of the smaller problems. Then again, if MAD had been around pre-WWII it may have never happened.
• BenoitP 5y ago
  Well, Germany's wind was done without a thought about how to implement storage; it did not have to; it was a perfect egotistic game-theoretic play: The EU energy market mandates that wind and solar production must be bought before everything else. What happens at the moment is France's nuclear reduces production when Germany's wind is over-producing; there is no energy storage at all. So right now, on top of wind uselessly adding to max production capacity, it thrashes zero-CO2 nuclear-allocated capital's effectiveness. That's a form of capital theft. And on top of that, Germany's huge coal baseline continues producing just as before: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE Really, the EU rules should be changed so as to account for driveability in energy production.
  • nradov 5y ago
    Some of France's nuclear plants are currently offline for maintenance which is contributing to the spike in natural gas prices. https://seekingalpha.com/news/3780688-france-shuts-down-nuclear-plants-gas-and-power-prices-shatter-records https://seekingalpha.com/news/3780688-france-shuts-down-nucl...
  • IsThisYou 5y ago
    The EU is our battery.
    • AstralStorm 5y ago
      It isn't. You cannot rely on everyone else staying carbon positive, as you will feel the heat too.
    • BenoitP 5y ago
      Well, good on you I guess. What's so sad is wind and solar being so concentrated in Germany. If it were more spread out over Europe, it would have lower correlation; and help with production peaks. There's egotistic, and there's egotistic + harmful.
  • hilios 5y ago
    While yes, Germany profits from the European grid to offset some of its over or under production, it doesn't really affect Germany's or France's nuclear energy production. As you can see even at time when wind provides more than half of Germany's total energy production, the red nuclear bar remains nearly unchanged. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&stacking=stacked_absolute_area&year=2021&source=all&week=48 https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c... If you check France's energy production at the same time nuclear energy production isn't affected. https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energy-source# https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ... It does affect oil, gas and coal, but hardly affects nuclear.
• lb0 5y ago
  And that thinking is insane to me, long-term best is to have renewables and not pollute - nuclear is no alternative but just another bad with too many problems, bad economics, and waste produced.
  • midjji 5y ago
    Nuclear is fantastic economics, its just regulated to death. The real effect of suppressing nuclear has been a slower transition to a sustainable carbon economy, and increased power prices limiting innovation and productivity. Solar and wind have benefitted, but its still a minor player, and without a revolutionary new battery tech, and gargantuan infrastructure investment, it simply cant replace a majority of current power production, much less satisfy the massive suppressed demand.
    • lb0 5y ago
      We must be looking at very different numbers - or what do you mean with regulation, requiring some safety standards? Nowhere nuclear got economic, required massive subsidies - and in the end has been driven by the need for the precious byproducts?
      • midjji 5y ago
        You can tell because for profit(if staterun) companies are building them across the world. France is drawing significant profits from existing nuclear, and constructing new. Nuclear has been ridiculously profitable for most countries which built them, with the sole exception of countries which started building them, then forbid nuclear. Many countries in Asia are building them because its cheaper than coal power. Most countries impose nuclear specific taxes, in addition to long term disposal fees, which exceed the price of production by several times. Sheer state profit. Despite this, the main reason nuclear does not get built in Europe is regulation, the the risk of losing the investment due to changing laws on nuclear. Which has happened several times. Byproducts, aside from nuclear weapons, which most countries do not have, are a negligible part. Sweden for instance built ample nuclear early, but never built the kind of reactor which is used in nuclear weapon production. Sweden also didnt subsidize it, but rather has been taxing it at an additional 300-500% in addition to long term disposal fees(so little of which actually went to long term disposal they introduced a second free named exactly the same 40 years latter). Despite also discarding the cooling water heat into the ocean completely needlessly, all it took for these plants to be profitable was not forcing them to shut down when public opinion turned. It took a while sure, but plants have been profitable for 30 years now, and could have continued to be so if they hadn't by law been prohibited from upgrading and researching. Nuclear regulation in most places goes as follows: is nuclear profitable? if yes, increase safety until it stops being so. If technology improves so that the same safety can be achieved using less cost, further improve safety. If this happens while building a new plant, force them to start over. For what that looks like, look to the 3 complete restarts due to previously approved safety measures suddenly being retracted and increased during the construction of the Finnish plant. Its this idiotic idea that they must guarantee zero percent risk which is the main culprit. Flying kills more people, and more people need power than flight, yet we require far more of nuclear. Many countries built dozens of perfectly safe plants during the 60ties for pennies on the dollar. If we could build those again, you know the ones where less than 0.25% had an serious accident over a 60 year history, and removed the massive taxes, we could have power prices at a fifth of what they are today.
• charlieyu1 5y ago
  Nuclear fusion is. Nuclear fission is definitely not environmentally friendly, and will probably be obsolete in 30-40 years. Then the future generations have to deal with the problem that comes with nuclear fission power plants.