13 ms·

Germany considers keeping nuclear power plants online

181 points by nixass 5y ago

synergyS 5y ago
Nuclear power is the future, modern nuclear power is very safe and emissions free.
- froh 5y ago
  No more nuclear waste?
  - isoprophlex 5y ago
    At least with nuclear you have some control over where the waste goes, as it is so highly concentrated.
    - iforgotpassword 5y ago
      Theoretically yes, in practice it has mostly been politics first when deciding where to put that stuff than anything else, at least in Germany.
      - DrBazza 5y ago
        Bury it deep. Either we survive as a species technologically, and will always know where it is, or we become cavemen again and lose the technology to dig down that deep. Win win.
- isoprophlex 5y ago
  Nuclear is the safest energy source. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
  - bluejekyll 5y ago
    Safer than solar, wind, and hydro?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - MerelyMortal 5y ago
      If a damn fails, I imagine the result would be pretty devestating to anything downstream.
      - DrBazza 5y ago
        Yup. More deaths in this one dam failure in China than all worldwide nuclear deaths combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
      - pvaldes 5y ago
        Big intensity, short duration. Nuclear accidents will be devastating for thousands of years so very different things. This is like saying that high voltage is harmless because high amperage can kill you also. Time to move on further in this discussion and stop talking about that damn. Is a popular stance but useless to compare both
    - winkeltripel 5y ago
      Yeah. In solar and wind lots of deaths from falling off roofs or windmills.
      - polygloty 5y ago
        This is as much true as it is trolling
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > Nuclear is the safest energy source. The cited link shows that deaths directly attributable to nuclear power thus far is the lowest based on the data used. This is not the only definition of safety, and should not be portrayed as such. The primary objections to fission nuclear power has been the many-thousand-year half-life of the waste products, not that it would kill people while being built or while running. We have no way to project what the tally will look like in 10k years time.
- alvarlagerlof 5y ago
  Not going to happen fast enough, or cost less than renewables.
- sto_hristo 5y ago
  Only the future is now and we already live in it. Nuclear power is already the most superior source of energy. Just keep the comrades away from it and we'll be safe and sound.
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  But its not cheap, given that nuclear waste disposal will take for so long and companies do not factor the true price of securing nuclear waste for thousands of years. We could see what happened in Germany after the nuclear exit was put into place: Energy companies tried to split up, moving their nuclear business into one company, and their renewables into another - a very apparent move to let the nuclear company (with all the burdens of waste disposal management) go bankrupt into a couple of decades, knowing that the government will take over the burden for free. The german government prevented this through a buy-out deal, where the companies would put a sum of roughly 50bn € into a fund, and the responsibility ownership would go over to the government once and for all. The issue is, no one can put a real price tag on nuclear waste management that will take thousands of year. It's all some made up number that is used to show that nuclear energy is cheap. But it is not, we are just boworring money from the future. Even if you think from an engineering standpoint that we can secure nuclear waste for generations to come, I don't believe we have the economic system to achive that. Companies don't exist long enough to be responsible for thousand-year long commitments - only society does.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    We don't need to store nuclear waste for thousands of years. We need to store it until we have fast reactors that can use it for fuel. After that, we'll need to store the fast reactor waste for 300 years. Since the decline is exponential, most of the radioactivity will be gone from that waste after the first few decades. Melt it into glass blocks and bury it, and it'll likely be fine. Several fast reactors are in commercial operation already, and various companies are working on new designs.
    - Gwypaas 5y ago
      We've had fast reactors since the 70s. It is simply that they are even less economical than regular nuclear power plants, and those are already completely uncompetitive compared to renewables. > Breeder reactors are costly to build and operate. About $100 billion (in 2007 dollars) has been spent worldwide on breeder reactor research and development and on demonstration breeder reactor projects. Yet none of these efforts has produced a reactor that is economically competitive with a conventional light water reactor. The capital costs per kilowatt of generating capacity of demonstration liquid sodium-cooled fast reactors have typically been more than twice those of water cooled reactors of comparable capacity. Although it could be expected that once in production this cost ratio would decline, today few, if any, experts argue that breeder reactor capital costs could be less than 25 percent higher than that of similarly sized water cooled reactors.4 > The breeder reactor dream is not dead, but it has receded far into the future. In the 1970s, breeder advocates were predicting that the world would have thousands of breeder reactors operating this decade. Today, they are predicting commercialization by approximately 2050. In the meantime, the world has to deal with the hundreds of tons of separated weapons-usable plutonium that are the legacy of the breeder dream and more being separated each year by Britain, France, India, Japan, and Russia. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2968/066003007 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2968/066003007
- trimbo 5y ago
  You're right about it being very safe and emissions free. It would be a great choice if we wanted to solve CO2 emissions. But the reporting around last week's attack on Zaporizhzhia illustrates why it's not the future. The "paper of record" reporting vague experts' fears about a "cloud of radioactive isotopes over Europe"[1]. The Ukrainian President saying: "If there's an explosion, it's the end of Europe"[2] How can nuclear overcome that level of FUD? No idea what it would take, honestly. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/science/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/science/ukraine-nuclear-p... [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant-fire-zaporizhzhia-russian-shelling https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/ukraine-nuclea...
- pvaldes 5y ago
  > modern nuclear power is very safe and emissions free. And then you have a war and the house of cards collapses in a week At this moment nuclear is as reliable as Putin mind will be, (and many people would say that the man is acting in a totally insane way). Nuclear will never will be more reliable than the less reliable of the people at charge of it, that are the weakest links in this chain. No matter how much technology, laws and wax seals you put on it. Still can be destroyed by the next idiot narcissist in power.
TheChaplain 5y ago
Renewable energy sources are not without hitches. 20% of wind mills in Sweden are owned by one foreign company. Hint: That state-owned company was banned in the US for stealing nuclear technology for military use.
bell-cot 5y ago
So... Germany decided, back in 2011, to completely shut down their nuclear power plants in 2021 & 2022. Now - after 10 years of the plant operators carefully planning for that (longer-term maintenance not done, suppliers for parts have discontinued production, key personnel retiring with no trained replacements, etc., etc.) - Germany suddenly wants to say "no, wait, keep 'em running!" I thought Germany was the land of competent engineers and managers? EDIT: Critics - yes, you're 90+% correct on facts, current German leaders are stuck playing the cards currently on the table, and I understand that Morton Thiokol engineers did not blow up the Challenger. But "suddenly wants to" != "decided". And my point was to mock Germany's political leadership for proving disastrously bad at what is a very traditional & stereotypical German strength. Perhaps if German politicians were not allowed to take office without earning at least X% of the votes of practicing engineers. And demonstrating that they can pour beers without injuring themselves...
- sdfjkl 5y ago
  Engineers? Some, certainly. Managers? Maybe. Probably not. But politicians? Hardly.
- noja 5y ago
  Erm, have you noticed that the situation has changed?
- _ph_ 5y ago
  No, Germany hasn't decided to keep them running. They are evaluating the implications if they wanted to keep them running. And as you said, it is unlikely, that this is a good idea because their lifetime was planned to end. As the article says, the most likely outcome is: we shut them down and rather concentrate all efforts to hasten the transition to renewables.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  Germany decided this in the late 90s when Gerhard Schröder was in office, when Merkel came to power she tried to delay the closure but she was forced to revise that when Fukushima happened.
brohoolio 5y ago
If it’s safe it should be done. Anything that can create pressure to end the war should be done. One other thing is that while natural gas is “cleaner”, it’s clear that leaks in the natural gas infrastructure are putting way more methane into the air than previously realized. I’m not sure you can trust countries such as Russia to have strong policies in place to make sure wells are properly sealed.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  Keeping the last 3 power plants online will not create any pressure, it just won't further increase Russia's already strong negotiation position.
- eloff 5y ago
  I think you mean to say natural gas is cleaner than coal. It's obviously not cleaner than nuclear.
  - The_rationalist 5y ago
- mrtksn 5y ago
  I would like to see Nuclear Power plants working up until we convert everything into renewables. Use the much needed energy to build renewable systems from the already existing Nuclear Power generation capacity. Very unpopular opinion around here but I think the future is not Nuclear. Besides the unsolved problems of nuclear waste, It employs huge risks and it is safe the exactly the same way the airlines are safe: high quality operations. I simply don't trust that the excellence displayed by most of the current operators will be scaled to %100 of the operators and even a few disasters is way too many(again, very similar to airlines). We also witnessed that NPPs can be targeted by military forces, just yesterday. This time nothing happened but it could have happened. You might have missle proof reactors but you still need the support personel to be alive and operational to keep the thing safe. Also, a warlord might decide that it is a good idea to sabotage a captured facility to achieve some strategic goal(after all, these are people who use destruction and murders as tools and they do threaten with nuclear warfare).
vletal 5y ago
Could they maybe like reopen some?!
- rapsey 5y ago
  Not something you can just turn back on.
  - vletal 5y ago
    Well, I definitely did not expect it can be done over night. More like over a year or something.
ianpurton 5y ago
A large percentage of homes in Germany use gas for heating and Germany imports a lot of that gas. Coupled with Germany being the biggest emitter of CO2 in Europe, nuclear looks like a way to kill two birds with one stone.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  They should immediately bend some of their manufacturing assets toward the goal of electrification. We need all heating to be electrified in the next 20-50 years anyway. No time like the present to start working on this effort.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Does Germany mostly use forced air or boilers for heat? Forced air is easier to switch to electric heat pumps, AFAICT.
    - garionion 5y ago
      Nearly every Building uses Boilers for heating
  - ausudhz 5y ago
    Yes then we produce electricity with Russian gas :)
  - barney54 5y ago
    Where is the electricity going to come from? Especially if they are closing nuclear and coal-fired power plants. They are building some renewables, but prices for electricity were high this year because wind speeds were low.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      Renewables and nuclear. That new sources of energy should be carbon free goes without saying. New coal is obviously a non-starter. That being said, they are already well on their way with this process. Check out the decline in fossil fuel electric generation over the past half decade! https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/DEU/electricity/electricity-generation?pd=2&p=00000000000000000000000000000fvu&u=0&f=A&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=none&l=249--55&s=315532800000&e=1577836800000 https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/DEU/electrici...
323 5y ago
In other articles German experts say that if Russia cuts of the gas, there will be economic Armageddon in Germany. Yet Germany still strongly resists pausing the closure of currently running nuclear power plants. What is going on here? This doesn't make any sense. Why such resistance to even pausing the process?
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  TFA gives this hint, but doesn't go into detail: > Yet, the long-winded process of shutting down the country’s nuclear plants may have already progressed too far to be able to stop it, the operators of the plants have warned. I'd also like to know.
  - lumost 5y ago
    I’d expect it’s mostly a financial and personnel issue. People have been laid off, refueling operations haven’t been planned, multi billion dollar contracts for cleanup are set to start with the associated workers/staffing already underway. In short, nothing that can’t be changed with an injection of capital and assistance from the French/international nuclear industry.
- patall 5y ago
  It is very simple. The shut down of those nuclear power plants has been planned to the day for about 10 years. That includes maintanance, how much fuel is needed, which people are going to keep their job, how many new people are hired and trained, who retires early. There is almost no chance to change that trajectory with only 10 months to go. And were not even talking about the regulatory planning that would be needed. The german nuclear power plants will be shut down on december 31 this year. Nothing, short of a nuclear war, is going to change that.
  - 323 5y ago
    So Germany would rather inflict itself tens of billions of euros of economical damage, instead of figuring out how to stop a planned process? Has it got that inflexible? That's a scary thought.
littlecranky67 5y ago
Article quotes rather old statements (from 27th of February). The minister had said they were considering/checking it, but AFAIK its overall consensus that it would not be possible. It is simply too late for that, the process has been going for too long. Jobs were laid of/relocated and new qualified jobs in that sector were not created due to the upcoming nuclear exit. And you will not find anybody wanting to go back to that field, given that it is perfectly clear that this is not future proof.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Large nuclear power plants Brokdorf and Grohnde have been closed down end of last year. Could an engineer tell me the concrete measures to restart them, or why they can't be restarted to meet demand, or other implications of restarting them?
1970-01-01 5y ago
Buy from Russia, keep using nuclear, or suffer an energy crisis. There are no other real options for them to consider.
k__ 5y ago
Ironically, the plan to finally shutting them down was made by the pro-nuclear conservative party. Now, when the green party is in power, it's considered to stop the shut down again. One of the founding premisses of the green party was to get rid of those power plants. They worked for decades to that goal.
- Aldipower 5y ago
  This is not entirely true. The plan was made by the left and green in the beginning of the millennium, then canceled by the conservatives and after some years reapply by the conservatives, sold as their idea. Nice trick, though. :D
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Ironically, the plan to finally shutting them down was made by the pro-nuclear conservative party. That is... not really true? The plan to shut them down was initiated by the SPD following the SPD/Green election of '98. They also voted to ban the building of new plants. When the CDU was elected in 2009, they decided to extend the existing plants' lifetimes by 8 to 14 years. This was quite unpopular, and if they went back on that idea following fukushima it was mostly because they were being hammered by the Greens (Baden-Wuttemberg went Green after 50 years of CDU rule). When put to a vote, the only people who objected were Die Linke because they thought a 10 years deadline to shut down the plants was too long.
- PKop 5y ago
  reality > utopia realpolitik > ideology You have to do what you have to do. The massive energy deficit Europe has always meant these policies of "renewables" were vaporware, and were going to run into a brick wall of reality. And the same will be true of needing to continue buying gas from Russia, just watch. Europeans are funny because they naively get led around by the humanitarian and morality propaganda of US, while US continues to buy Russian and Saudi Oil, and just yesterday was meeting with Maduro in Venezuela (world's largest oil reserves) probably to make arrangements to bring his oil back online for US, and be their next Saudi Arabia. Rhetoric around his treatment of his people or Guaido being their guy was always nonsense, now they secure their resources while Europe economy withers. You "go green" while rest of world, China, Russia, US continue to consume cheaper and more productive oil, gas and nuclear, and increase relative economic and geopolitical power at your expense. People should read up on Mackinder's heartland theory, and the geographic pivot [0]. US policy has always been to keep Europe down and Germany and Russia apart; if they were allies, US would lose a huge vassal they can lead around for their own geopolitical aims. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_Hist...
infogulch 5y ago
We should probably aim to have 50% over provisioned capacity for energy production at the national level, and chaos monkey it to ensure that it's resilient.
Archelaos 5y ago
In the current context, it should be noted that the EU's dependence on Russia and its sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) for uranium is more or less compatible with that of coal, gas, and oil; for the US, it is even worse. In 2020 only 0.5% of the uranium supply in the EU was domestic (+ 1.6% re-enriched), but the percentage from the Russian sphere of influence was as follows:[1] 20.2 % Russia 19.2 % Kazakhstan 2.6 % Uzbekistan Total: 42.0 % The figures for the US in 2020 were as follows:[2] 16 % Russia 22 % Kazakhstan 8 % Uzbekistan Total: 46 % [1] Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Nuclear_energy_statistics#Uranium_supply_security https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [2] Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uranium-comes-from.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uraniu...
- dmurray 5y ago
  Fuel is a much smaller fraction of the total cost of energy generation for nuclear power, though. If natural gas prices doubles, the price of electricity from gas turbine plants doubles. If uranium prices double because no one will buy it from Russia any more, the price of nuclear electricity goes up what, 5 or 10 percent?
  - gpm 5y ago
    Can anyone else increase production? Do we have stockpiles? If not the price of that electricity goes up to whatever Russia wants it to until we just stop using the reactors for lack of fuel. (Note: I don't know the answer to those questions, they aren't rhetorical)
    - loeg 5y ago
      Australia has large amounts of uranium (in the ground), for example. Russia and former Soviet states are not the only suppliers.
      - tomatotomato37 5y ago
throw0101a 5y ago
Note: this does not necessarily mean new nuclear. Keep the current nuclear going, build renewable sources of electricity, and retire fossil fuel plants first. Once those are gone continue with renewables building and then (perhaps) shutdown nuclear. Building new nuclear would be a separate discussion from the above.
- hoechst 5y ago
  it does _not at all_ mean "new nuclear".. that was never up for discussion and would certainly not help with the problem that the whole discussion is about: a potential short term energy shortage related to russias invasion of ukraine.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Krasnol 5y ago
No they don't. This "News" is from 28th of February where a partial sentence of Habeck has been taken out of context by some media. It has been declined since than several times over and there was never substance to this "news". https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article237209973/Atomenergie-Habeck-offen-fuer-Kernkraft-Ein-Missverstaendnis.html https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article237209973/Ato...
- hoechst 5y ago
  yea, the OP article is a few weeks old and very much out of context. HN doesn't care though.. bunch of tech bros discussing headlines.
szundi 5y ago
At last
boomka 5y ago
Ukraine has been sounding an alarm about battles happening next to its nuclear reactors. I would think it's very hard to make any nuclear safety guarantees if the power station gets hit with missiles. War also makes people do crazy things, and it's very easy to imagine a reactor being sabotaged on purpose, even by defenders themselves (scorched earth tactics). So on the whole it seems like we have another reminder that nuclear just cannot be made 100% safe.

181 points by nixass 5y ago

synergyS 5y ago

Nuclear power is the future, modern nuclear power is very safe and emissions free.

froh 5y ago
No more nuclear waste?
- isoprophlex 5y ago
  At least with nuclear you have some control over where the waste goes, as it is so highly concentrated.
  - iforgotpassword 5y ago
    Theoretically yes, in practice it has mostly been politics first when deciding where to put that stuff than anything else, at least in Germany.
    - DrBazza 5y ago
      Bury it deep. Either we survive as a species technologically, and will always know where it is, or we become cavemen again and lose the technology to dig down that deep. Win win.
isoprophlex 5y ago
Nuclear is the safest energy source. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
- bluejekyll 5y ago
  Safer than solar, wind, and hydro?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - MerelyMortal 5y ago
    If a damn fails, I imagine the result would be pretty devestating to anything downstream.
    - DrBazza 5y ago
      Yup. More deaths in this one dam failure in China than all worldwide nuclear deaths combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      Big intensity, short duration. Nuclear accidents will be devastating for thousands of years so very different things. This is like saying that high voltage is harmless because high amperage can kill you also. Time to move on further in this discussion and stop talking about that damn. Is a popular stance but useless to compare both
  - winkeltripel 5y ago
    Yeah. In solar and wind lots of deaths from falling off roofs or windmills.
    - polygloty 5y ago
      This is as much true as it is trolling
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > Nuclear is the safest energy source. The cited link shows that deaths directly attributable to nuclear power thus far is the lowest based on the data used. This is not the only definition of safety, and should not be portrayed as such. The primary objections to fission nuclear power has been the many-thousand-year half-life of the waste products, not that it would kill people while being built or while running. We have no way to project what the tally will look like in 10k years time.
alvarlagerlof 5y ago
Not going to happen fast enough, or cost less than renewables.
sto_hristo 5y ago
Only the future is now and we already live in it. Nuclear power is already the most superior source of energy. Just keep the comrades away from it and we'll be safe and sound.
littlecranky67 5y ago
But its not cheap, given that nuclear waste disposal will take for so long and companies do not factor the true price of securing nuclear waste for thousands of years. We could see what happened in Germany after the nuclear exit was put into place: Energy companies tried to split up, moving their nuclear business into one company, and their renewables into another - a very apparent move to let the nuclear company (with all the burdens of waste disposal management) go bankrupt into a couple of decades, knowing that the government will take over the burden for free. The german government prevented this through a buy-out deal, where the companies would put a sum of roughly 50bn € into a fund, and the responsibility ownership would go over to the government once and for all. The issue is, no one can put a real price tag on nuclear waste management that will take thousands of year. It's all some made up number that is used to show that nuclear energy is cheap. But it is not, we are just boworring money from the future. Even if you think from an engineering standpoint that we can secure nuclear waste for generations to come, I don't believe we have the economic system to achive that. Companies don't exist long enough to be responsible for thousand-year long commitments - only society does.
- DennisP 5y ago
  We don't need to store nuclear waste for thousands of years. We need to store it until we have fast reactors that can use it for fuel. After that, we'll need to store the fast reactor waste for 300 years. Since the decline is exponential, most of the radioactivity will be gone from that waste after the first few decades. Melt it into glass blocks and bury it, and it'll likely be fine. Several fast reactors are in commercial operation already, and various companies are working on new designs.
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    We've had fast reactors since the 70s. It is simply that they are even less economical than regular nuclear power plants, and those are already completely uncompetitive compared to renewables. > Breeder reactors are costly to build and operate. About $100 billion (in 2007 dollars) has been spent worldwide on breeder reactor research and development and on demonstration breeder reactor projects. Yet none of these efforts has produced a reactor that is economically competitive with a conventional light water reactor. The capital costs per kilowatt of generating capacity of demonstration liquid sodium-cooled fast reactors have typically been more than twice those of water cooled reactors of comparable capacity. Although it could be expected that once in production this cost ratio would decline, today few, if any, experts argue that breeder reactor capital costs could be less than 25 percent higher than that of similarly sized water cooled reactors.4 > The breeder reactor dream is not dead, but it has receded far into the future. In the 1970s, breeder advocates were predicting that the world would have thousands of breeder reactors operating this decade. Today, they are predicting commercialization by approximately 2050. In the meantime, the world has to deal with the hundreds of tons of separated weapons-usable plutonium that are the legacy of the breeder dream and more being separated each year by Britain, France, India, Japan, and Russia. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2968/066003007 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2968/066003007
trimbo 5y ago
You're right about it being very safe and emissions free. It would be a great choice if we wanted to solve CO2 emissions. But the reporting around last week's attack on Zaporizhzhia illustrates why it's not the future. The "paper of record" reporting vague experts' fears about a "cloud of radioactive isotopes over Europe"[1]. The Ukrainian President saying: "If there's an explosion, it's the end of Europe"[2] How can nuclear overcome that level of FUD? No idea what it would take, honestly. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/science/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/science/ukraine-nuclear-p... [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant-fire-zaporizhzhia-russian-shelling https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/ukraine-nuclea...
pvaldes 5y ago
> modern nuclear power is very safe and emissions free. And then you have a war and the house of cards collapses in a week At this moment nuclear is as reliable as Putin mind will be, (and many people would say that the man is acting in a totally insane way). Nuclear will never will be more reliable than the less reliable of the people at charge of it, that are the weakest links in this chain. No matter how much technology, laws and wax seals you put on it. Still can be destroyed by the next idiot narcissist in power.

TheChaplain 5y ago

Renewable energy sources are not without hitches. 20% of wind mills in Sweden are owned by one foreign company. Hint: That state-owned company was banned in the US for stealing nuclear technology for military use.

bell-cot 5y ago

So... Germany decided, back in 2011, to completely shut down their nuclear power plants in 2021 & 2022. Now - after 10 years of the plant operators carefully planning for that (longer-term maintenance not done, suppliers for parts have discontinued production, key personnel retiring with no trained replacements, etc., etc.) - Germany suddenly wants to say "no, wait, keep 'em running!" I thought Germany was the land of competent engineers and managers? EDIT: Critics - yes, you're 90+% correct on facts, current German leaders are stuck playing the cards currently on the table, and I understand that Morton Thiokol engineers did not blow up the Challenger. But "suddenly wants to" != "decided". And my point was to mock Germany's political leadership for proving disastrously bad at what is a very traditional & stereotypical German strength. Perhaps if German politicians were not allowed to take office without earning at least X% of the votes of practicing engineers. And demonstrating that they can pour beers without injuring themselves...

sdfjkl 5y ago
Engineers? Some, certainly. Managers? Maybe. Probably not. But politicians? Hardly.
noja 5y ago
Erm, have you noticed that the situation has changed?
_ph_ 5y ago
No, Germany hasn't decided to keep them running. They are evaluating the implications if they wanted to keep them running. And as you said, it is unlikely, that this is a good idea because their lifetime was planned to end. As the article says, the most likely outcome is: we shut them down and rather concentrate all efforts to hasten the transition to renewables.
cinntaile 5y ago
Germany decided this in the late 90s when Gerhard Schröder was in office, when Merkel came to power she tried to delay the closure but she was forced to revise that when Fukushima happened.

brohoolio 5y ago

If it’s safe it should be done. Anything that can create pressure to end the war should be done. One other thing is that while natural gas is “cleaner”, it’s clear that leaks in the natural gas infrastructure are putting way more methane into the air than previously realized. I’m not sure you can trust countries such as Russia to have strong policies in place to make sure wells are properly sealed.

cinntaile 5y ago
Keeping the last 3 power plants online will not create any pressure, it just won't further increase Russia's already strong negotiation position.
eloff 5y ago
I think you mean to say natural gas is cleaner than coal. It's obviously not cleaner than nuclear.
- The_rationalist 5y ago
mrtksn 5y ago
I would like to see Nuclear Power plants working up until we convert everything into renewables. Use the much needed energy to build renewable systems from the already existing Nuclear Power generation capacity. Very unpopular opinion around here but I think the future is not Nuclear. Besides the unsolved problems of nuclear waste, It employs huge risks and it is safe the exactly the same way the airlines are safe: high quality operations. I simply don't trust that the excellence displayed by most of the current operators will be scaled to %100 of the operators and even a few disasters is way too many(again, very similar to airlines). We also witnessed that NPPs can be targeted by military forces, just yesterday. This time nothing happened but it could have happened. You might have missle proof reactors but you still need the support personel to be alive and operational to keep the thing safe. Also, a warlord might decide that it is a good idea to sabotage a captured facility to achieve some strategic goal(after all, these are people who use destruction and murders as tools and they do threaten with nuclear warfare).

vletal 5y ago

Could they maybe like reopen some?!

rapsey 5y ago
Not something you can just turn back on.
- vletal 5y ago
  Well, I definitely did not expect it can be done over night. More like over a year or something.

ianpurton 5y ago

A large percentage of homes in Germany use gas for heating and Germany imports a lot of that gas. Coupled with Germany being the biggest emitter of CO2 in Europe, nuclear looks like a way to kill two birds with one stone.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
They should immediately bend some of their manufacturing assets toward the goal of electrification. We need all heating to be electrified in the next 20-50 years anyway. No time like the present to start working on this effort.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Does Germany mostly use forced air or boilers for heat? Forced air is easier to switch to electric heat pumps, AFAICT.
  - garionion 5y ago
    Nearly every Building uses Boilers for heating
- ausudhz 5y ago
  Yes then we produce electricity with Russian gas :)
- barney54 5y ago
  Where is the electricity going to come from? Especially if they are closing nuclear and coal-fired power plants. They are building some renewables, but prices for electricity were high this year because wind speeds were low.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    Renewables and nuclear. That new sources of energy should be carbon free goes without saying. New coal is obviously a non-starter. That being said, they are already well on their way with this process. Check out the decline in fossil fuel electric generation over the past half decade! https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/DEU/electricity/electricity-generation?pd=2&p=00000000000000000000000000000fvu&u=0&f=A&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=none&l=249--55&s=315532800000&e=1577836800000 https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/DEU/electrici...

323 5y ago

In other articles German experts say that if Russia cuts of the gas, there will be economic Armageddon in Germany. Yet Germany still strongly resists pausing the closure of currently running nuclear power plants. What is going on here? This doesn't make any sense. Why such resistance to even pausing the process?

DangitBobby 5y ago
TFA gives this hint, but doesn't go into detail: > Yet, the long-winded process of shutting down the country’s nuclear plants may have already progressed too far to be able to stop it, the operators of the plants have warned. I'd also like to know.
- lumost 5y ago
  I’d expect it’s mostly a financial and personnel issue. People have been laid off, refueling operations haven’t been planned, multi billion dollar contracts for cleanup are set to start with the associated workers/staffing already underway. In short, nothing that can’t be changed with an injection of capital and assistance from the French/international nuclear industry.
patall 5y ago
It is very simple. The shut down of those nuclear power plants has been planned to the day for about 10 years. That includes maintanance, how much fuel is needed, which people are going to keep their job, how many new people are hired and trained, who retires early. There is almost no chance to change that trajectory with only 10 months to go. And were not even talking about the regulatory planning that would be needed. The german nuclear power plants will be shut down on december 31 this year. Nothing, short of a nuclear war, is going to change that.
- 323 5y ago
  So Germany would rather inflict itself tens of billions of euros of economical damage, instead of figuring out how to stop a planned process? Has it got that inflexible? That's a scary thought.

littlecranky67 5y ago

Article quotes rather old statements (from 27th of February). The minister had said they were considering/checking it, but AFAIK its overall consensus that it would not be possible. It is simply too late for that, the process has been going for too long. Jobs were laid of/relocated and new qualified jobs in that sector were not created due to the upcoming nuclear exit. And you will not find anybody wanting to go back to that field, given that it is perfectly clear that this is not future proof.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

Large nuclear power plants Brokdorf and Grohnde have been closed down end of last year. Could an engineer tell me the concrete measures to restart them, or why they can't be restarted to meet demand, or other implications of restarting them?

1970-01-01 5y ago

Buy from Russia, keep using nuclear, or suffer an energy crisis. There are no other real options for them to consider.

k__ 5y ago

Ironically, the plan to finally shutting them down was made by the pro-nuclear conservative party. Now, when the green party is in power, it's considered to stop the shut down again. One of the founding premisses of the green party was to get rid of those power plants. They worked for decades to that goal.

Aldipower 5y ago
This is not entirely true. The plan was made by the left and green in the beginning of the millennium, then canceled by the conservatives and after some years reapply by the conservatives, sold as their idea. Nice trick, though. :D
masklinn 5y ago
> Ironically, the plan to finally shutting them down was made by the pro-nuclear conservative party. That is... not really true? The plan to shut them down was initiated by the SPD following the SPD/Green election of '98. They also voted to ban the building of new plants. When the CDU was elected in 2009, they decided to extend the existing plants' lifetimes by 8 to 14 years. This was quite unpopular, and if they went back on that idea following fukushima it was mostly because they were being hammered by the Greens (Baden-Wuttemberg went Green after 50 years of CDU rule). When put to a vote, the only people who objected were Die Linke because they thought a 10 years deadline to shut down the plants was too long.
PKop 5y ago
reality > utopia realpolitik > ideology You have to do what you have to do. The massive energy deficit Europe has always meant these policies of "renewables" were vaporware, and were going to run into a brick wall of reality. And the same will be true of needing to continue buying gas from Russia, just watch. Europeans are funny because they naively get led around by the humanitarian and morality propaganda of US, while US continues to buy Russian and Saudi Oil, and just yesterday was meeting with Maduro in Venezuela (world's largest oil reserves) probably to make arrangements to bring his oil back online for US, and be their next Saudi Arabia. Rhetoric around his treatment of his people or Guaido being their guy was always nonsense, now they secure their resources while Europe economy withers. You "go green" while rest of world, China, Russia, US continue to consume cheaper and more productive oil, gas and nuclear, and increase relative economic and geopolitical power at your expense. People should read up on Mackinder's heartland theory, and the geographic pivot [0]. US policy has always been to keep Europe down and Germany and Russia apart; if they were allies, US would lose a huge vassal they can lead around for their own geopolitical aims. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_Hist...

infogulch 5y ago

We should probably aim to have 50% over provisioned capacity for energy production at the national level, and chaos monkey it to ensure that it's resilient.

Archelaos 5y ago

In the current context, it should be noted that the EU's dependence on Russia and its sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) for uranium is more or less compatible with that of coal, gas, and oil; for the US, it is even worse. In 2020 only 0.5% of the uranium supply in the EU was domestic (+ 1.6% re-enriched), but the percentage from the Russian sphere of influence was as follows:[1] 20.2 % Russia 19.2 % Kazakhstan 2.6 % Uzbekistan Total: 42.0 % The figures for the US in 2020 were as follows:[2] 16 % Russia 22 % Kazakhstan 8 % Uzbekistan Total: 46 % [1] Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Nuclear_energy_statistics#Uranium_supply_security https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [2] Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uranium-comes-from.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uraniu...

dmurray 5y ago
Fuel is a much smaller fraction of the total cost of energy generation for nuclear power, though. If natural gas prices doubles, the price of electricity from gas turbine plants doubles. If uranium prices double because no one will buy it from Russia any more, the price of nuclear electricity goes up what, 5 or 10 percent?
- gpm 5y ago
  Can anyone else increase production? Do we have stockpiles? If not the price of that electricity goes up to whatever Russia wants it to until we just stop using the reactors for lack of fuel. (Note: I don't know the answer to those questions, they aren't rhetorical)
  - loeg 5y ago
    Australia has large amounts of uranium (in the ground), for example. Russia and former Soviet states are not the only suppliers.
    - tomatotomato37 5y ago

throw0101a 5y ago

Note: this does not necessarily mean new nuclear. Keep the current nuclear going, build renewable sources of electricity, and retire fossil fuel plants first. Once those are gone continue with renewables building and then (perhaps) shutdown nuclear. Building new nuclear would be a separate discussion from the above.

hoechst 5y ago
it does _not at all_ mean "new nuclear".. that was never up for discussion and would certainly not help with the problem that the whole discussion is about: a potential short term energy shortage related to russias invasion of ukraine.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Krasnol 5y ago

No they don't. This "News" is from 28th of February where a partial sentence of Habeck has been taken out of context by some media. It has been declined since than several times over and there was never substance to this "news". https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article237209973/Atomenergie-Habeck-offen-fuer-Kernkraft-Ein-Missverstaendnis.html https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article237209973/Ato...

hoechst 5y ago
yea, the OP article is a few weeks old and very much out of context. HN doesn't care though.. bunch of tech bros discussing headlines.

szundi 5y ago

At last

boomka 5y ago

Ukraine has been sounding an alarm about battles happening next to its nuclear reactors. I would think it's very hard to make any nuclear safety guarantees if the power station gets hit with missiles. War also makes people do crazy things, and it's very easy to imagine a reactor being sabotaged on purpose, even by defenders themselves (scorched earth tactics). So on the whole it seems like we have another reminder that nuclear just cannot be made 100% safe.