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Ask HN: Why is Germany so anti nuclear?

19 points by bilekas 5y ago

As an Irish we don't have nuclear but we had been given tablets (the name escapes me now but I think iodine) based on a plant that was in the UK. Apperantly we were downwind. As a family we had to learn and memorize where those tablets where. Chernobyl was around the same time. There might be a stigma built. But what are the facts? Full disclosure: incase I was not clear I'm pro nuclear.

forgotmypw17 5y ago
I think it's because there are several unsolved problems with nuclear, and they're nowhere near being solved. In an imperfect world, which is what we live in, you're guaranteed huge disasters like Chernobyl happening. In case you are not aware, areas in a radius of hundreds of kilometers all around Chernobyl are still affected by it, and will continue to be for hundreds of years.
- bilekas 5y ago
  I did think we learnt from that situation though, if not fair enough.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    Sure, we learned from it. But have we learned enough to prevent future accidents? Probably not. And do we have any solutions for storing existing processed waste? Nope.
- fy20 5y ago
  I was under the impression that modern reactors have much safer designs that would make a repeat of that much less likely, and then slightly different tech like molten salt reactors completely prevent meltdowns. That still doesn't prevent leaks like Fukashima though, but that has had a very small impact so far, that I'd be tempted to even call negligible - especially if you compare it to the problems pollution causes from lignite plants.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    Fukushima's impact is only beginning, as remediation is still ongoing, and the resources for remediation (room in the tanks for storing contaminated water) are running out this year. By the way, what's the point of comparing Fukushima to something else terrible? >A screening program a year later in 2012 found that more than a third (36%) of children in Fukushima Prefecture have abnormal growths in their thyroid glands. I think that's hardly comparable to coal.
  - max002 5y ago
    About molten salt. I love idea, but we will have soon just 1st one right? Or is it already operational? Btw. 660 bill on clean up thats nowhere to be done is big impact.
- ArtWomb 5y ago
  I wonder if there was anything in Europe comparable to the 1970s cultural backlash in the US with movies like Silkwood, China Syndrome, etc. It's not the Atom people feared, but Man. Hasty push to profits, led to rushed designs, accidents, black op coverups, etc. A real and true accounting of the Nuclear History of the World is perhaps too secret to ever be told ;)
lifeplusplus 5y ago
Fukushima - still leaking
- bilekas 5y ago
  True, there was never an expectation that a quake could hit to cause that kind of impact. That almost plays into the 'we never planned for that' scenario. Will it ever be safe ?
  - lifeplusplus 5y ago
    how you could an island that gets hit with quake/tsunami combo few times every hundred years couldn't have seen it coming
    - t-3 5y ago
      Well, some places catch fire every year, doesn't stop people trying to pretend that that's not normal.
      - max002 5y ago
        But you don't plant a new forest where there was fire last year... Or you do? xD
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      IIRC, they did see it coming. There was a risk assessment that pointed out that having backup generators protected by a flood wall of the height it was was a bad idea if there was a tsunami wave taller than the flood wall. Sadly, it was considered not particularly likely, and a new wall would have been expensive, so nothing happened. I think when you consider the risk of nuclear plants, it's worth taking into account the culture of the host nation. Japan, with its culture of institutional and individual corruption, is always a bit risky with dangerous industries, as demonstrated by its history of lethal industrial accidents. I think Germany would be a little bit better, but it's hard to say for sure.
  - 5y ago
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
There was a really public fight for years between the federal government and some states about the final repository of nuclear waste without any conclusion we officially still don't have one. Besides that we have a mine full of leaking radiation barrels because we were one of the few countries that did not drop their early nuclear waste into the ocean. There were also some pretty rough clashes between police and people demonstrating castor transports that were televised publicly. We also got a lot of fallout after Tschernobyl with mandates like don't eat forest mushrooms or lettuce from your own garden for years after the incident which helped our green party to establish themselves as a big part of our political system. They were part of the government for 8 years under Schröder and again now. They are the third biggest political party in our country for a long time now. All that combined made everyone pretty skeptic for nuclear power.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Tepix 5y ago
Perhaps it's because Germans are more responsible? Nuclear waste disposal is very much an unsolved problem that we are putting on the shoulders of the following generations. Just like - climate catastrophe - insane debt - rampant pollution - the ongoing mass extinction - pensions during changing demographics Other than that nuclear is slower and much more expensive to newly deploy than wind and solar. It also remains more dangerous because there is always the human factor (hubris and corruption!) as we have seen in Japan. Before Fukushima, people said it couldn't happen there, only in countries like Russia.
- Tepix 5y ago
  Also 40% of the Uranium delivered to Europe come from Kasachstan. That's not a reliable source.
- Adrig 5y ago
  Sure, it's far more responsible to release byproducts in the atmosphere killing millions than contain it underground. Here's another unsolved problem for you : intermittence of renewals. Why having a base of reliable energy source from nuclear when you can burn coal? Or give up geopolitical independence by being reliant on Russia's gas?
  - max002 5y ago
    Is it better to product radioactive waste thats gonna leak and cost hundreds of generation insane amounts of money and we will happily live on one bug radioactive dump? Its better to use invest in renewables
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    Really the baseload myth needs to go, it's been debunked many times. In electricity demand is intermittent, therefore you need to have your supply to be able to follow those demand fluctuations, in other words you need a quickly adjustable supply. Traditionally electricity grids used gas turbines to give this quickly adjustable supply. However, generally power from gas turbines is relatively expensive, so what many grids did is use coal or nuclear (which was cheaper, but could also not be adjusted) to supply a fraction of supply and only use gas to even out the demand fluctuations. Renewables are now significantly cheaper than both coal and nuclear, however as you correctly point out they are intermittent, so you can't combine them with "base load" because you still need quick adjustable supply. Renewables therefore mainly replace the slow "baseload" plants. Moreover the economics are such that it makes it much cheaper to just overprovision with renewables (to essentially make it easier to even out fluctuations) instead of using some plants which have to run at a 100% full time to be economical (like nuclear). TLDR "baseload" only makes sense if the way of producing it is cheaper than all other methods. That is not the case with nuclear by a significant margin.
dzikimarian 5y ago
I was reading about it some time ago. In the 90s Green party of Germany built its identity around being anti-nuclear. Meanwhile Schroeder (who came from conservatives) had a problem with miners aggressively pushing to preserve coal mines. They formed otherwise unlikely alliance against nuclear power. This resulted in lots of propaganda and actual laws being implemented in order to dismantle nuclear plants, which impacts Germany to this day. Given ties that Schroeder has to Gazprom, he could have also other motives in not allowing Germany to be too energy independent.
- max002 5y ago
  Germany is proving that you can go without nuclear without going back to coal. Instead they went into renewables. Im not sure if any other country in Europe/on continent did it. Love them for that.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    Germany energy composition in 2021 literally went back to coal. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-electricity-source/a-59168105 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
    - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
      It was the primary source of energy in Germany since the beginning of the industrial age we had a few years which favored renewables so they went ahead. Nuclear was never over 25% of power generation.
    - max002 5y ago
      Yes, the production is one thing, but whaat i wantex to say is: 1. Germany is plan to shutdow all atomic 2. They dont plan to build any new coal
      - dzikimarian 5y ago
        Not true https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-online/ https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-...
LaunchAway1 5y ago
I think it's nearly impossible to learn the facts because the issue is so heavily politized. Too much money and too much votes. If we can go on with renewables then it's great although I hope the tech is maintained somehow like for example space exploration.
jka 5y ago
Lots of reasons no doubt, as with many other of life's questions - it's expensive though, for one. The best individual metric I'm aware of as a way to compare costs of different types of energy production is called "Levelized Cost of Energy" (LCOE) - here's a Feb 2021 report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration with a link to an estimated cost comparisons page: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf#page=8 https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
- max002 5y ago
  https://www.energyforgrowth.org/memo/lcoe-and-its-limitations/ https://www.energyforgrowth.org/memo/lcoe-and-its-limitation...
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
There's some hidden assumptions in this question. First, that Germany is extremely "anti nuclear". But, deciding over 20 years ago to close plants when their lifetime runs out and not replace them is hardly the drastic act of a maniac. Germany is just doing what everyone else is doing, building cheap renewables. Only real difference is that many countries never built any nuclear plants in the first place and so they don't have old plants to shut.
- thiht 5y ago
  > to close plants when their lifetime runs out That’s not as simple as it sounds. The initial lifetime given to nuclear plants is extremely conservative. And given proper maintenance it can easily be extended by decades. Closing plants because they « reached their lifetime » often means closing a perfectly good plant, and it’s a political act, not a rational act. I don’t know if it was the case for German plants but it was definitely the case in France with Fessenheim.
amai 5y ago
Interesting: Ireland is even more anti nuclear than Germany. There have never been any nuclear power plants in Ireland. They are even prohibited: „The production of electricity for the Irish national grid (Eirgrid), by nuclear fission, is prohibited in the Republic of Ireland by the Electricity Regulation Act, 1999 (Section 18)“. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Ireland But since you are pro nuclear just think for a moment where on your beautiful island you would like to store all the highly radioactive nuclear waste? You probably will have difficulty answering this. And the same is true for Germans, even although Germany is much bigger than Ireland and it searched for decades for a suitable place and failed.

SahAssar 5y ago

What are your thoughts on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... and similar nuclear waste disposal strategies?

cycomanic 5y ago
The issue with these facilities is that they need to be safe for thousand(s) of years and nobody really knows if they are. Moreover the experience in Germany is that the operators, politicians, construction companies... take shortcuts for various (primarily economic reasons), which makes safety even more questionable. This is one of the primary things that fueled nuclear scepticism in Germany, people become more aware of the news around nuclear power operators and the dogeiness that is happening. For example it happened multiple times that there were incidents that should have been reported by law and operators didn't report because it possibly would have meant to a shutdown period. Usually, nothing came out of these violations, even though there are provisions that require operators to be "trustworthy". Looking at other countries, e.g. France, information was very biased to keep bad news about nuclear away. For example my partner told me that when Tschernobyl happened when she was young they were essentially told that all radiation had stopped at the border and now restrictions regarding vegetables, mushrooms etc were necessary.
- morelisp 5y ago
  Thank god we're burning lignite and building pipelines to buy gas from Putin rather than dealing with potentially dodgy nuclear plant operators!
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    Well the consequences of a dodgy nuclear plant operator are potentially pretty disastrous (see Japan). That said, I completely agree that burning lignite is shameful, I would argue that it has nothing to do with nuclear or renewables, it's politics. Regarding gas, both nuclear and most renewables are not really in the same category as gas in terms of the supply they provide. Gas would be just as necessary if all current goal plants are nuclear (or wind for that matter). It might very well be that gas would allow to reduce CO2 emissions and transition to renewables more quickly than without. I agree with the geopolitical implications, but Germany is producing lots of things in China and are delivering weapons to Saudi Arabia and now we suddenly take a stance when it comes to gas from Russia? In terms of environmental impact it's still better than developing reserves from fracking.
    - morelisp 5y ago
      > now we suddenly take a stance when it comes to gas from Russia? So we can hype up renewables even though we know we can't really build enough fast enough, completely throw out nuclear because of the hypothetical risk of some future corrupt politician coming into control of our waste pile, then when it comes to gas we suddenly take a Realpolitik stance but only as it pertains to the despot next door?
  - max002 5y ago
    Thanks (multiple) gods that wr dont bae science on god.

detaro 5y ago
What is that article supposed to show is not true?
- dzikimarian 5y ago
  Ok, maybe "not true" is an overstatement. However this power plant was planned and built after Germany declared to go away from coal, contrary to the earlier statements.
- morelisp 5y ago
  The government's commitment to not open any new coal plants predates the opening of Datteln 4. They are still claiming a victory because they are opening one and shutting down multiple. Of course those four were going to shut down anyway, but by any normal meaning of words this is "going back to coal". The plan to eliminate nuclear by 2022 and coal by 2038 should have been swapped. And lignite should've been banned a decade ago.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    > The government's commitment to not open any new coal plants predates the opening of Datteln 4. That's correct, but more relevant is when the build started. There are likely all sort of legal reasons why they could not stop the plant going into operation at this stage. Saying that Germany is going back to coal based on this is a bit factitious though. Germany was in fact planning more new coal plans previously, most of them did not get built. https://www.greenpeace.de/klimaschutz/energiewende/kohleausstieg/geplante-kohlekraftwerke-deutschland https://www.greenpeace.de/klimaschutz/energiewende/kohleauss... > They are still claiming a victory because they are opening one and shutting down multiple. Of course those four were going to shut down anyway, but by any normal meaning of words this is "going back to coal". No it is not. They put into operation a plant that was planned 15 years ago (im not arguing that they should have done this, but they did) . Should they instead have kept operating one of the older plants just to say "we haven't build a new one"? > The plan to eliminate nuclear by 2022 and coal by 2038 should have been swapped. And lignite should've been banned a decade ago. Completely agree on lignite, and they should (and likely could) have phased out both coal and nuclear by now.
    - morelisp 5y ago
      I mean yeah, I want everything on wind/solar, and a pony too. but that was never going to happen. When the nuclear shutdown was announced in 2011 it was incredibly obvious we would not be able to compensate with renewable sources. We have wasted an entire decade offsetting our drop in nuclear power and a minute amount of nuclear waste with renewables, when we could have kept nuclear on to offset coal and gas instead. Germany "proving that you can go without nuclear without going back to coal" is not a reality-based opinion. Nuclear waste is a problem, but we have chosen one of the few paths even worse than that.
      - max002 5y ago
        They told edison and tesla theyre crazy too, dont stress and dont undermine power of human minds when it comes to working together on global solution (see vaccine).
        morelisp 5y ago
        Well, today we also have the benefit of hindsight proving me right. Germany did in fact spend ten years offsetting the loss of nuclear with renewables while also increasing the amount of gas and biomass (which is renewable, but not at all clean) used. What have you got, ten year old hope?
  - max002 5y ago
    As you said, by next year they will close all nuclear plants.

cycomanic 5y ago

> I was reading about it some time ago. > In the 90s Green party of Germany built its identity around being anti-nuclear. Meanwhile Schroeder (who came from conservatives) had a problem with miners aggressively pushing to preserve coal mines. Schröder was a social democrat not a Conservative, however it is true that miners still hold a disproportionate influence with the SPD, one of the reasons why Germany has not moved off coal as quickly as they could have. > They formed otherwise unlikely alliance against nuclear power. This resulted in lots of propaganda and actual laws being implemented in order to dismantle nuclear plants, which impacts Germany to this day. It was not an unlikely alliance, since the greens became a signicant power and the liberals (FDP) moved into the direction of a free market Liberal instead of social Liberal it was always the second coalition option. It was largely considered only a question of time until the greens became part of a federal coalition government. It also needs to be pointed out that quite a few older plants got extensions on their operation certificate in exchange for operators not trying to extend other plants. Finally it was actually the Conservative Merkel government which really nailed down the move away from nuclear. Knowing anything about how she did politics you can be sure that there was widespread support for this. > Given ties that Schroeder has to Gazprom, he could have also other motives in not allowing Germany to be too energy independent.

dzikimarian 5y ago
Unlikely due to lack of goal alignment. One were in support of traditional industry and second one - well green. However of course it made sense purely from voting power perspective. > Finally it was actually the Conservative Merkel government which really nailed down the move away from nuclear. Knowing anything about how she did politics you can be sure that there was widespread support for this. Indeed there was. I don't find it surprising, since nuclear power was stigmatized for a long time everywhere. Arguably in Germany more than in other places.