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De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party. It's understandable that France d

De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party. It's understandable that France doesn't want to go with that, as they don't want to be forced down the same ruinous path we're currently on here in Germany. And honestly, good for them. It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. I did my PhD at the French nuclear energy agency and my French colleagues would always be puzzled when I talked about German energy policies and our anti-nuclear sentiment. But here in Germany the Green party will probably never reverse it's stance on nuclear energy, as their rise to popularity was strongly fueled by the anti-nuclear movement from the 80s and it's the one thing they can't abandon without losing a large number of followers. I partially blame the highly ideological stance on the way people rise to power in politics and administration in Germany. In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...), whereas in Germany most people rise through social engineering and party politics and most top positions in the administration are filled by people with law degrees that don't have a clue about technology. In my opinion that's also a reason why we completely fail in everything regarding digitalization, lawyers are simply not good technical problem solvers.

osuairt 4y ago
The people that usually are puzzled about this approach, also avoid any of the arguments on why people don't want nuclear facilities as the basis of their energy infrastructure. Framing it as some closed minded ideological stance, and that Germany wouldn't be in a position to understand the pros and cons to nuclear technology, just looks to dismiss those that might have actual rationales for running their countries differently.
- Juliate 4y ago
  Also, framing it as if Germany policy had not been also ... "influenced" by Russia's long-term strategy would be quite naive.
  - blub 4y ago
    Why does everyone attribute to deception what could just as easily be attributed to this relationship being beneficial for Germany (and a lot of other EU countries which are conveniently omitted from this discussion)? Energy is at the core of economic development and Germany and a bunch of other countries were able to get gas for decades.
    - agapon 4y ago
      Do you the famous (and maybe fake) quote 'The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them' ? It's the same here, but with selling energy to "capitalists". What Europeans might have seen as purely economic affair for the USSR / Russia was just means of getting money to grow and support its army, to buy Western politicians and media influence, etc.
      - blub 4y ago
        Theoretically you’re right. Practically you’re not though, because as history attests, the USSR dissolved peacefully and thorough all the ups and downs the economic relationship survived. This is perhaps why the warnings from the US were ignored for so long: they were based on self-interest and they had a track record of being wrong for decades.
        lnsru 4y ago
        It was not peacefully. Rather without large scale war. Some people got killed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events_(Lithuania) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events_(Lithuania)
      - wsc981 4y ago
        Germany is just the b*tch of the USA though, that becomes very clear in this press conference. Germany has nothing to say over Nordstream: https://youtu.be/OS4O8rGRLf8?t=74 https://youtu.be/OS4O8rGRLf8?t=74
- Veen 4y ago
  I'm puzzled about why nuclear is deemed less satisfactory than dependence on Putin's Russia for the energy requirements of the world's 4th biggest economy.
  - blub 4y ago
    Dependence on the Soviet Union and later Russia worked for 50 years. This partnership, which was being undermined by the US from the beginning, is attributed to establishing a basis for cooperation between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Considering that the Soviets pulled out peacefully of Eastern Germany, that worked pretty great.
    - agapon 4y ago
      This is incredibly short-sighted. Soviets pulling out of Eastern Germany, the collapse of the GDR, the Warsaw Pact, the USSR has very little to do with the energy imports. One might even argue that the USSR would collapse economically even earlier if not for all the currency it got from oil and gas sales.
      - blub 4y ago
        Having a relationship based on mutually beneficial economic exchanges is an important reason why one would treat their economic partner nicely. It’s perhaps not the reason, but it is a reason. Given how peacefully it collapsed and the huge potential for mayhem, I’d stay away from altering the timeline.
        bluGill 4y ago
        We have no idea what the alternate histories would look like. We can guess - yours is a reasonable guess - but it is all guesses. I can come up with reasons thing would things went far worse, and if you think a little you should be able to as well - they may be somewhat unlikely, but that is all the more we can say. What we do know is where we are today: Russia is not playing nice with the world despite our attempts to have beneficial economic exchanges. Would the not play nice with USSR scenarios be worse - we have no real idea.
- jpgvm 4y ago
  In what ways has nuclear energy failed Germany that don't stem from small scale and lack of investment?
dsq 4y ago
Lawyer-run government is the norm in most Western countries. Software dev today is dominated by the US because of the brain drain great sucking noise.
JanSt 4y ago
There are also many institutes (e.g IDW) constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc. These people are constantly invited to present these „Zukunftsenergien“ as opposed to the old bad nuclear in talk shows. And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive AND highest CO2 energy in Europe. In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end. Now we are reliant on russian gas and the politicians still want to keep closing the remaining three nuclear power plants. The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power. We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants. It‘s ridicioulous.
- littlecranky67 4y ago
  > And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive Do you have any sources? Last time I checked, Germany and France weren't that far apart, if you remove taxes out of the costs. The thing is that Germany has a lot of Taxes that have nothing todo with how we generate the electricity. I.e. 90% of the electricity tax (Stromsteuer) goes into the government pension fund.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Technically, you're still not removing taxes from the equation, because the state owned nuclear plants in France are also funded by taxes, it's just not taxes that are added to the cost of units of electricity. Which actually makes sense, if you have a high upfront cost, constant output source iike nuclear, taxing each individual unit makes no sense since the marginal cost is effectively zero up till you need to build a new plant. Whereas if you burn coal or gas, you want to incentivise people to cut back for cost, carbon and pollution reasons. An even more sensible approach would be to tax the carbon directly and charge more for peak electricity since that contributes more to the infrastructure requirements, which I guess both countries will already be moving towards as is the current trend in most places.
bambax 4y ago
> In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...) That's a misconception. ENS has two branches, science and literature. ENS Sciences is technical, the other isn't. X (Polytechnique) is an engineering school in theory, but in practice very few of its students become actual engineers. ENA is essentially a law school; it's even less than that, it only teaches how the French administration works, not law. The one thing these schools have in common is that they are extremely competitive, and select for extreme dedication (and a bizarre capacity to study with high intensity at an age when other people are dating or partying). But at the top level of the French government you mostly find only énarques (= people who attended ENA); they are not technical in the least, "don't have a clue about technology", but think they know everything. It's a terrible, terrible system. Source: am French.
- ThePhysicist 4y ago
  I had colleagues that went through École Polytechnique and the Corps de Mines (usually reserved to the top 2 graduates of a given graduating class of several grandes ecoles) that then went on to work for the government. And I think it's still mandatory to work a certain number of years in the administration after going through some of the grandes écoles, not sure if that was changed (I graduated in 2012 so it was a while ago). Of course not everyone is graduating with a technical degree, but coming from Germany where top politicians often don't even have a finished university degree and high-ranked politicians are regularly found out to have been plagiarizing their PhD work it was pretty impressive to see a working elite system. It also has some negative aspects and nepotism is a thing as well (in the sense that people who went through the system know how to game it to get their children in with high probability) but it's much better than what we have here, in my opinion. Germany was and still is scared of anything that can be considered elitist as people always associate it with the elitism from the Third Reich.
  - bambax 4y ago
    I know almost nothing about the German political system so I won't discuss that. But the French system has plenty of flaws, two of the biggest being that 1/ énarques aren't technical at all, don't actually know anything except how bureaucracy works, and yet they're in charge of everything 2/ super-selective schools have the side effect of letting people think they're geniuses because they topped a competition while in their teens
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
And yet weirdly, those non-technical people seem to have accidentally stumbled on the solution that the whole world is moving towards, while the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear and even their most ambitious goals include using less nuclear and replacing it with the stuff the ideological German's came up with, because it's better. And it wasn't that long ago that they were threatening to scrap the whole idea of nuclear if the industry didn't produce one on time and budget, which still seems to be the main problem, they've just been given another chance to fail. Weird, it's almost like these ideological people were listening to experts, but you didn't like what the experts were saying, and so you labelled 'following expert advice' as 'ideological' to help you continue to ignore expert opinion.
- ThePhysicist 4y ago
  Solar and wind alone won't work without support by gas or other non-renewable sources. Try to find a single scientific study that gives a detailed overview of how the German energy mix is supposed to work and that explains how supply will be matched to demand 24/7 all year round. None exists. The whole "Energiewende" is built on the hope that either our neighbors will produce the necessary base capacity to stabilize our energy grid, or that a miracle storage technology will somehow be invented in the next 10 years. I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" [1] by a Cambridge professor, it goes into great detail about the problems of matching electricity demand to supply day- & year-round. 1: https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/
  - cm2187 4y ago
    And somehow the cost of the non renewable energies that are required to deal with the volatility of wind and solar are never factored in the cost.
    - Brometheus 4y ago
      In 2011 ENERTRAG had a constructed a system to use a windpark to produce hydrogen and burn this in a gas/fuelcell plant. But since a change in the EEG Umlage Gesetz made them pay for their own energy produced by wind, it became unprofitable to do so. If that sounds idiotic to you, that's because the change in the EEG was created to make exactly this impossible.
konschubert 4y ago
The grande école aristocracy in France isn't desirable either. It's a form of nepotism.
- ThePhysicist 4y ago
  Yeah there's definitely problems with that as well, not saying it's perfect. I mostly want to contrast it to the anti-intellectual approach here in Germany, where top-level politicians are proud of not having any higher education and see it as their mission to get more ideologically-formed people into top positions.
RandomLensman 4y ago
Nuclear does have a cost problem in the sense that costs have not really dropped since forever, which is not boding well for a technology (unlike, for example costs for solar). So I can accept people arguing that way - but could also still argue for nuclear as an expensive baseload technology. The whole taxonomic discussion is a distraction anyway. We are long past some simple carbon reduction path making a dent (and also coming at high costs), so in the end will be about mitigation and even attempts at geoengineering - as usual politics are way behind the curve.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  One could argue ten years ago for nuclear as an expensive (but still overall desirable) baseload technology, but I think the window on that argument has closed.
yrgulation 4y ago
"De-nuclearization of other European countries" - Germany should mind its own business.
tut-urut-utut 4y ago
The German Green party showed in multiple occasions that it's completely anti-science. They pick scientists that support their agenda, and then represent it as the one and only truth. They are basically a spiritual successor of the middle-age Catholic Church. All they talk is about sacrifice, suffering in our earthly life for better afterlife, bans, and restrictions. The only difference is that instead of God, they swear by "Klimawandel". And of course, it's not relatively rich Green party members and supporters that suffer from their policies. They keep their SUVs, flight regularly, and the poorer half of the population will need to save the planet. Atom energy is bad, but fracking is obviously fine for them. What a bunch of hypocrites. I hope the Green get off their moral high horse or get replaced before they do even more harm to the German economy, wealth and even environment. They are just the most destructive force leading Germany to collapse.
- dd36 4y ago
  Is it supported by the fossil fuel industry?
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  That might explain why Mojib Latif’s books are published by a publisher otherwise specializing in religious books
kitkat_new 4y ago
Check the data: https://www.stromdaten.info/ANALYSE/periods/index.php https://www.stromdaten.info/ANALYSE/periods/index.php - Timeframe: 01.06.2021 - 26.06.2022 - Import/Export country: Frankreich Data: - physical export balance 11,77 TWh - monetary export balance: 2,13 Mrd € - average import price/MWh: 133,71 € - average export price/MWh: 169,91 € It's good for Germany, not for France. Germany is selling electricity to France when prices are high, and buying when prices are low. And it is selling way more than buying. Additionally, France is reducing the nuclear power share. Not by decommissioning working plants, but simply by not building as many new plants as would be necessary to keep the share.
ren_engineer 4y ago
>De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party which was funded by Russia behind the scenes, along with anti-fracking and any other alternatives to Russian fossil fuel exports. >“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.” this was the former head of NATO in 2014, all of this has been known for a long time but nothing was done to prevent it https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-secretly-working-with-environmentalists-to-oppose-fracking https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...
moooo99 4y ago
I don’t really have a strong stance on the nuclear energy debate (although I highly doubt that it is as clear cut as the debates make it out to be). But I can’t really blame people for not being too excited about a technology that was first introduced to them by bombing two Japanese cities, had two worst case disasters, and was subject of the biggest arms race in history.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  You typed your message on a binary computer, often used to calculate missile trajectories and to run nuclear fuel centrifuges.
doe88 4y ago
While it's evident nuclear sentiment is not great in germany, from my point of view, I wouldn't characterize it as great in france either. Sadly, I think in this domain (as in many) france lives with the infrastructure and build of its past and currently fails to invest for its future, it's more managing decline than anything else. I think as current nuclear plants become older and mismatch between current needs and true green energies production become more apparent, people still live in a bubble and don't see the urgency nor courage to really invest in new reactors and plants and prepare the future, for france and europe. My dream would be that france, with help of germany and other willing eu countries would build new reactors with an overcapacity for france alone such that it would then provide this energy to other ue countries. Nuclear energy is a chance and is not mutually exclusive with other energies. (of course i'm french)
- kergonath 4y ago
  > While it's evident nuclear sentiment is not great in germany, from my point of view, I wouldn't characterize as great in france either I think it is changing. Both the IPCC and the ERDF reports were unambiguous and politicians and technocrats who were paying attention noticed. Now, skyrocketing gas prices are a warning shot. A blackout or a brownout could completely change public opinion (not that si would welcome it, but at this point it seems inevitable; we almost had 3 last winter). > Sadly, I think in this domain (as in many) france lives with the infrastructure and build of its past and currently fails to invest for its future, it's more managing decline than anything else. That is very true, unfortunately. That’s why building a series of EPR would be a good thing long-term, as it would provide some justifications to train new engineers and a refreshed skilled workforce. > My dream would be that france, with help of germany and other eu countries would build new reactors with an overcapacity for france alone and would then provide this energy to other ue countries. This would make sense from a technical point of view (one large fleet in a single country is easier to manage and more efficient than the same number of reactors distributed across several states). But that’s very difficult from a political point of view. > Nuclear energy is a chance and is not mutually exclusive with other energies. This is something a lot of people do not seem to grasp. We need all the low-carbon energy we can produce, and we need it 20 years ago. There is no point bickering about the share of renewable and the share of nuclear. We need renewables where we can and nuclear where we must. In the end, what matters is that even a carbon-free electricity supply is just half the journey, and the easy half at that. It’s not something we will solve with a one-size-fits-all approach.
kergonath 4y ago
> I did my PhD at the French nuclear energy agency Cheers from Saclay! :) To be fair, Germans always (in the recent past anyway) cared more about environment issues in general. Recycling, cycling instead of driving, things like that. It was not mainstream in France until fairly recently. But yeah, the lack of understanding of scientific and technical aspects of energy production from a supposed nation of engineers is disturbing.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  A shame german carmakers didnt care much.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    Indeed. Well, no country is perfect.
logifail 4y ago
> In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...), whereas in Germany most people rise through social engineering and party politics and most top positions in the administration are filled by people with law degrees that don't have a clue about technology [..] Would one really claim France is succeeding at a national level in the technology space due to all those excellent technically-trained administrators? > In my opinion that's also a reason why we completely fail in everything regarding digitalization, lawyers are simply not good technical problem solvers Why are administrators supposed to be the ones actually solving technical problems? Aren't government administrators more likely to be reading and writing plans and contracts (which trained [ex-]lawyers must have _some_ useful skills...)?
- google234123 4y ago
  The French manage to spend less on military than Germany and seem to get about twice the capability.
api 4y ago
I heard someone call Germany the "California of Europe" for this reason. It's simultaneously full of high-tech and engineers yet paradoxically also full of alternative-medicine quackery and anti-science viewpoints on things like nuclear power. AFAIK there's a weird through-line here where California new age and 70s "new left" ideology has some of its roots in the same early 20th century romanticism that was and I'm sure in various forms still is popular in Germany. Look up the Volkisch movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Völkisch_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Völkisch_movement
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  The Dead Kennedys arguably beat you to this realization.
catchclose8919 4y ago
There's no reason to require polyticians to be technicians, and no reason to expect less formally-educated people to be more anti nuclear (except in the presence of massive disinformation campaigns). Requirements for formal education just select for conservative and obedient people - and we put them on the leaders (we got it backwards!). The US seems to kind of got it a bit more right, but it's probably just circus. Technocratic politics doesn't work in practice (ask USSR), and there should be no requirements of formal education on politicians (not even non technical). But politicians and administrators do need to (re)learn fast on-the-lob so in practice an IQ test requirement would be great for them and probably for them only (yes, IQ measures well only how fast someone can learn something and not at all how good is someone at doing something after they've learned it, but, guess what... knowing and (re)learning fast about stuff they don't actually do is kind of the job requirement for politicians and administrators - an 145 IQ high-school-dropout with or without some alchol or substance issues is kind of the best person for a job like Prime Minister, Energy or Finance Minister etc.). Oh, and on the active (we know their effects, so they must exist) campaigns of disinformation against known to work tech, there's a solution for that: laws for spreading false-facts and disinformation + throwing in jail people breaking them. Glue your ass on the highway or spread misinformation on facebook fueling anti-nuclear protests: how about a 5 years prison sentence baby? As a society we're so f terrible at allocating human resources, that it's no wonder that other resources like those involved in energy production are massively missalocated too...
themitigating 4y ago
"In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...)" These are schools that train bueurocrats, "technically excellent" yes, at politics and public service but not engineers. For example the new energy transition minister has a business degree and went to ENA. I'm not one to call people elites but it's strange how you are using this to differentiate between France and German
croes 4y ago
Seems like France nuclear power has it's own problems https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-power-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...
- Kon5ole 4y ago
  Very interesting! So basically what this story says means that the nuclear operator in France has been selling the electricity at a loss, so much so that they are way behind on maintenance and almost bankrupt. Which in turn means that the actual cost of nuclear power in France is higher than has been reported so far. The cost has just been postponed for decades, until now. It's certainly bad timing to discover it now - what a nasty "perfect storm" of unfortunate events we are having for electricity in Europe this year. :(
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
> It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. What part of this entire discussion has anything do to with science? Is anyone actually contesting the science? Is it a discussion about the number of orbitals of uranium atoms? Or is it a discussion on which entities handle the long-term financials obligations, whether we favor or not decentralized grids, whether we favor short term or longer term solutions -- which in turn depends on whether the (possibly international) risks are long term or short term, etc. Not much of the later is "science". Politics is not a science and never can be. This entire story -- the word "green" itself -- is as unscientific as it gets. Not in the "science contradicts it" sense; I mean in the "this is neither provable nor falsifiable and science has nothing to do with it" sense.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  A lot of the anti-nuclear opinion is passionately opposed to scientific analysis. They're convinced Chernobyl can happen again, and that scientists are arrogantly playing god when they explain what can and can't happen
  - k__ 4y ago
    The last time I heard a physicist evaluate nuclear, it didn't look like any notable improvements happened in the last 20 years.
    - hedora 4y ago
      Well, maybe, but most nuclear reactor designs are at least 50 years out of date, and a lot of progress was made between 1970 and 2000.
    - neuronexmachina 4y ago
      Do you have the source where you heard that? Also worth noting that Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island were all built 50-60 years ago.
      - 4y ago
dimitar 4y ago
Anti-nuclear sentiment (both environmentalist and anti-nuclear weapons) was generously sponsored by the Soviet Union. What a surprise than nowadays the same groups are serving the interests of Russia. The most cynical thing is that the biggest nuclear accident in history was caused by Soviet negligence and incompetence and yet they managed to exploit it politically.
- dgb23 4y ago
  I would love to read more about this. Can you provide sources?
  - dimitar 4y ago
    Check the sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_influence_on_the_peace_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_influence_on_the_peace_... It has been claimed many times by Soviet defectors. Every defector from GRU or and high-profile officers from the KGB claimed so. It is very hard to prove, but it is so extremely serving to the USSR. Peace meant unilateral disarmament and abandonment of nuclear technology - how convenient. Today the claims by some politicians in Europe that "aiding Ukraine prolongs the war" are a similar trope of Russian origin. Back in the Cold War one of the policies the "Peace movement" advocated was "nuclear-free zones" in Western countries. The USSR encouraged organisations by providing funds and used its propaganda arms to aid the movement (conveniently keeping quit on its own arrangements).
- dv_dt 4y ago
  That doesn't make any sense because Russian companies are significant suppliers within the nuclear power production logistics footprint. edit: eg. https://www.wired.com/story/the-nuclear-reactors-of-the-future-have-a-russia-problem/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-nuclear-reactors-of-the-futu...
  - sp0ck 4y ago
    Money Russia gets from nuclear poewr production are miniscule comparing to money from gas/oil export. _any_ expansion of nuclear energy in Europe is against Russian agenda to be major gas/oil provider. Geramany suppose to be broker of that. For Germany cheap Nuclear energy on central/east Europe is dangerous because cheap energy = more competitive market. Add cheaper workforce and you have very dangerous mix. Read why Bulgaria was forced to shut down majority of their reactors before joining EU. Offically it was about "security". Bulgaria with cheap nuclear energy from already built power plants and cheap workforce was too "dangerous" for old EU countries. Politics is very important when discussing energy market.
hnthrowaway0328 4y ago
For politicians and administrations, I'm pretty sure any ideological stance is simply a facade to allow them to climb the ladders. The real propellent, throughout history, for politicians and administrations, are always more $$ and more power so I don't think Germany is an outlier.
Gravityloss 4y ago
This is a very good (and long) article looking at the history of nuclear energy in Germany in a broader context. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/20/germany-nuclear-power-energy-weapons-nato-russia-ukraine-war-energy-crisis-greens/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/20/germany-nuclear-power-e...
goodpoint 4y ago
Instead of accusing people of being ideological and irrational why don't you address all the issues around nuclear? Political stability VS centralization of power is one. Nuclear power is highly centralized and vulnerable to corruption. And also to war, terrorism and social unrest. If we are to expect extreme climate and social instability in the next 50 years, it's safer to democratize and localize energy production and storage. Renewables go in that direction. Nuclear goes in the opposite direction.
- lven 4y ago
  New nuclear is decentralizing with micro reactors.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    Except it's impossible to safely scale down nuclear to domestic/community/small-town level. Instead renewables and especially solar as well as batteries and geothermal heat storage scale down very well and can build resilient networks. After the horrific blackouts that happened in some countries people on HN should be able to grasp this...
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Unless microreactors are stacked up at centralized sites to share labor their operating costs are likely to be prohibitive.
athinggoingon 4y ago
Germany's anti-nuclear environmental movement was, in part, funded by Russia. https://www.transparency.org/en/press/germany-state-government-conceals-gazprom-connection-controversial-environmental-foundation-beneficial-ownership https://www.transparency.org/en/press/germany-state-governme...
- Krasnol 4y ago
  This is a conspiracy which doesn't have anything to do with reality or what is written in the article you've linked to. The article describes a "Foundation" which was created 2021 to keep on building Gazprom 2. It neither has something to do with the decision to get out of nuclear energy (that was 2000) nor does it have anything to do with the Green party or any group which is against nuclear energy in Germany.
- godelski 4y ago
  In America Green Peace and Sierra Nevada had major donations by gas companies. https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-the-natural-gas-industry-and-why-they-stopped/ https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra...
rmbyrro 4y ago
> blame the highly ideological stance on the way people rise to power in politics and administration in Germany Don't be so harsh on your country. It's like that everywhere. But it gets better over time. It used to be a lot worse centuries ago...
blablabla123 4y ago
Environmental sciences are still a niche and the storage problem hasn't been solved yet. E.g. the infamous Asse II has empirically proven to be unsafe mostly because of water influx and the 126.000 containers (which are partially captured within slowly floating salt) now have to be retrieved which is going to cost billions No insurance company in the world is willing to insure a nuclear power plant and both risk and operation have been heavily subsidized since decades. In fact renewable sources are even cheaper: "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-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...
barbazoo 4y ago
It's such a pain how certain groups are so hung up on specific energy sources. German greens will never consider nuclear energy, Albertans will never consider anything that didn't come out of the ground either as oil or oil derived. It's like belonging to a sports team, it's silly. I used to be very much against nuclear energy because of the unsolved issue around dealing with it's waste. Two decades later after learning about climate change and understanding more about pros and cons of different fuels and ways to generate electricity, it's obvious that nuclear energy can play a useful role in the transition off fossil fuels.
- yetanother-1 4y ago
  When oil producing countries are racing to get nuclear energy, it remains no surprise that it is something that will only help in the transition, because burning the fule is not a enough!
- martin_a 4y ago
  So, what changed in regards to dealing with its waste in the two decades? Or do you simply not care enough anymore?
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    I put too much weight on the waste storage problem. Looking at it now, in my opinion it might be preferable to have nuclear waste underground somewhere than keep polluting the atmosphere. It seems silly to still get hung up on that. Sure it's not great and I'd rather we don't, but we're at the eleventh hour and we've got to take more drastic, albeit suboptimal, steps.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Waste was never the big problem with fission, nor is it the blocking issue now. The world has gravitated toward dry cask storage of spent fuel, which is both simple, sensible, and cheap. It only contributes $0.001/kWh toward the cost of power from fission reactors, and precludes no future options to dealing with the spent fuel. What has blocked fission is one thing: cost. For a while, fission advocates could stand pat, knowing that eventually fossil fuels would have to be moved away from, to fission, regardless of how expensive fission was. But now renewables have undercut fission, so that (somewhat lazy) expectation, that fission was almost entitled to be the post-fossil energy source, is no longer valid.
pojzon 4y ago
Its really funny that this description not only fits my country also but probably quite a few other. Issue that happens world wide is that politics is filled with “nice face” or “easy to buy” by corporations. There are no engineers with passion or corruptless ppl joining politics. Smile and wave guys, smile and wave. Ps. Here in Poland we talk about German politics as they were those competent ones, go figure.
worik 4y ago
What is your "science" for dealing with the long term waste? What "science" do you use to design mechanisms to keep highly toxic materials away from human contact for 200,000 years? It is not science. There is no science that can solve those problems. It is greed. (I live in the South Pacific. The French are hated here for what they have done for their nuclear programme)
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Let the waste sit in place for decades to decay away much of its radioactivity, dig a hole in a geologically boring mountain away from people, dump waste in the hole. Alternative first step: build breeder reactors to recycle most of the waste into nuclear fuel and dump the smaller amount of leftovers in the mountain.
  - worik 4y ago
    > dig a hole in a geologically boring mountain away from people Where? Where on Earth will you find a place that will still be like that in 200,000 years.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      Deep holes in mountains in deserts in tectonically boring locations in the middle of plates.
    - orangepurple 4y ago
      Ancient geologically stable rock formations exist
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      Nuclear waste doesn't need to be sequestered for anything like 200,000 years. After a few hundred years it's no more radioactive than the rocks from which it came. You seem to have the common misconception that "long half-life" = "more radioactive", when in fact "long half-life" = "less radioactive", by definition.
    - 4y ago
oezi 4y ago
Your comment gets it entirely backwards. France is currently in a terrible spot with their monoculture of nuclear because the hot temperatures have caused shutdowns of many reactors, many old plants are offline because of security concerns and the French operator of the nuclear plants is close to bankruptcy and needs to be pulled back into government ownership because renewables can be so much cheaper today. What Germany did get wrong is that they invested too much in renewables too early and that continues to haunts Germans by paying subsidies for renewables installed more than 10 years ago. Germany helped to jump-start the whole scaling of renewables (together with the US) but the price is high. I would argue this isn't actually so bad because we need to price energy higher anyway to reduce consumption and further accelerate the building of renewable capacity. No matter what anybody says: nuclear is dead. The number of projects in planning (outside China) is so small that it won't make the slightest dent for our emissions goals. The only topics worth focusing on is solar, transmission and energy storage. Wind only matters in the next 10 years. Afterwards solar will be another magnitude cheaper and wind won't be able to compete.
- MR4D 4y ago
  I wonder how much of your comments/predictions will be true after this coming winter.
  - oezi 4y ago
    I am not looking forward to my gas bill indeed. Still hard to forsee that nuclear could come to the rescue in any way. Even in France they have scaled back eletric heating and will face hard times when cold weather strikes.
    - MR4D 4y ago
      I’m less concerned about high prices than I am about rationing.
- Nimitz14 4y ago
  The problems of nuclear you mention seem fixable and french electricity prices are waaaaaaay cheaper than german ones. I fail to see how france is in a terrible spot when it's germany that's likely to freeze this winter (and has literally no solution for that, other than begging their enemy). Why do you think solar will get cheaper by another order of magnitude?
einpoklum 4y ago
The only "ruinous" aspect is that Germany did not prepare on the side of renewable installed capacity (and perhaps storage, although I'm not sure.) Nuclear is: * Something like 3x more costly (levelized cost etc.) relative to solar and wind. * Dangerous I: Yes, still dangerous for the foreseeable future. There are still significant risks, especially with nuclear waste storage, but to some extent with active plants. I'm not an expert on this, but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... with some examples from recent years. * Dangerous II: Considering the state of infrastructure generally in some world states (e.g. the US) and profit motives, I do not believe the private nuclear industry can be trusted to deliver sufficient levels of safety. * Dangerous III: Earthquakes, bombardment, and partisan/terrorist attacks are threats even to plants and storage facilities which are otherwise safe. And these occur with relative frequency; just think of the Zhaporizye (sp) plants a couple of months ago. * Has greenhouse gas emission costs via mining of Uranium and such. Caveat: Not sure how much this compares to wind/solar/geothermal on one hand and coal/carbon-rich gas on the other hand/ * Is promoted to a great extent as a counterpart to nuclear arms programs. For nuclear weapons, you need fissile material, and you produce that in a nuclear reactor. Which then also produces heat, which you convert to power. Not all nuclear plants need to be like that, but again, no trust that these will go away. Now, I am certainly no expert on the matter, so - convince me otherwise if you can.
Oberbaumbrucke 4y ago
Aparently the German Green Party was started with Russian influence. So there may be some conflict here.

osuairt 4y ago

The people that usually are puzzled about this approach, also avoid any of the arguments on why people don't want nuclear facilities as the basis of their energy infrastructure. Framing it as some closed minded ideological stance, and that Germany wouldn't be in a position to understand the pros and cons to nuclear technology, just looks to dismiss those that might have actual rationales for running their countries differently.

Juliate 4y ago
Also, framing it as if Germany policy had not been also ... "influenced" by Russia's long-term strategy would be quite naive.
- blub 4y ago
  Why does everyone attribute to deception what could just as easily be attributed to this relationship being beneficial for Germany (and a lot of other EU countries which are conveniently omitted from this discussion)? Energy is at the core of economic development and Germany and a bunch of other countries were able to get gas for decades.
  - agapon 4y ago
    Do you the famous (and maybe fake) quote 'The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them' ? It's the same here, but with selling energy to "capitalists". What Europeans might have seen as purely economic affair for the USSR / Russia was just means of getting money to grow and support its army, to buy Western politicians and media influence, etc.
    - blub 4y ago
      Theoretically you’re right. Practically you’re not though, because as history attests, the USSR dissolved peacefully and thorough all the ups and downs the economic relationship survived. This is perhaps why the warnings from the US were ignored for so long: they were based on self-interest and they had a track record of being wrong for decades.
      - lnsru 4y ago
        It was not peacefully. Rather without large scale war. Some people got killed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events_(Lithuania) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events_(Lithuania)
    - wsc981 4y ago
      Germany is just the b*tch of the USA though, that becomes very clear in this press conference. Germany has nothing to say over Nordstream: https://youtu.be/OS4O8rGRLf8?t=74 https://youtu.be/OS4O8rGRLf8?t=74
Veen 4y ago
I'm puzzled about why nuclear is deemed less satisfactory than dependence on Putin's Russia for the energy requirements of the world's 4th biggest economy.
- blub 4y ago
  Dependence on the Soviet Union and later Russia worked for 50 years. This partnership, which was being undermined by the US from the beginning, is attributed to establishing a basis for cooperation between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Considering that the Soviets pulled out peacefully of Eastern Germany, that worked pretty great.
  - agapon 4y ago
    This is incredibly short-sighted. Soviets pulling out of Eastern Germany, the collapse of the GDR, the Warsaw Pact, the USSR has very little to do with the energy imports. One might even argue that the USSR would collapse economically even earlier if not for all the currency it got from oil and gas sales.
    - blub 4y ago
      Having a relationship based on mutually beneficial economic exchanges is an important reason why one would treat their economic partner nicely. It’s perhaps not the reason, but it is a reason. Given how peacefully it collapsed and the huge potential for mayhem, I’d stay away from altering the timeline.
      - bluGill 4y ago
        We have no idea what the alternate histories would look like. We can guess - yours is a reasonable guess - but it is all guesses. I can come up with reasons thing would things went far worse, and if you think a little you should be able to as well - they may be somewhat unlikely, but that is all the more we can say. What we do know is where we are today: Russia is not playing nice with the world despite our attempts to have beneficial economic exchanges. Would the not play nice with USSR scenarios be worse - we have no real idea.
jpgvm 4y ago
In what ways has nuclear energy failed Germany that don't stem from small scale and lack of investment?

dsq 4y ago

Lawyer-run government is the norm in most Western countries. Software dev today is dominated by the US because of the brain drain great sucking noise.

JanSt 4y ago

There are also many institutes (e.g IDW) constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc. These people are constantly invited to present these „Zukunftsenergien“ as opposed to the old bad nuclear in talk shows. And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive AND highest CO2 energy in Europe. In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end. Now we are reliant on russian gas and the politicians still want to keep closing the remaining three nuclear power plants. The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power. We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants. It‘s ridicioulous.

littlecranky67 4y ago
> And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive Do you have any sources? Last time I checked, Germany and France weren't that far apart, if you remove taxes out of the costs. The thing is that Germany has a lot of Taxes that have nothing todo with how we generate the electricity. I.e. 90% of the electricity tax (Stromsteuer) goes into the government pension fund.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Technically, you're still not removing taxes from the equation, because the state owned nuclear plants in France are also funded by taxes, it's just not taxes that are added to the cost of units of electricity. Which actually makes sense, if you have a high upfront cost, constant output source iike nuclear, taxing each individual unit makes no sense since the marginal cost is effectively zero up till you need to build a new plant. Whereas if you burn coal or gas, you want to incentivise people to cut back for cost, carbon and pollution reasons. An even more sensible approach would be to tax the carbon directly and charge more for peak electricity since that contributes more to the infrastructure requirements, which I guess both countries will already be moving towards as is the current trend in most places.

bambax 4y ago

> In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...) That's a misconception. ENS has two branches, science and literature. ENS Sciences is technical, the other isn't. X (Polytechnique) is an engineering school in theory, but in practice very few of its students become actual engineers. ENA is essentially a law school; it's even less than that, it only teaches how the French administration works, not law. The one thing these schools have in common is that they are extremely competitive, and select for extreme dedication (and a bizarre capacity to study with high intensity at an age when other people are dating or partying). But at the top level of the French government you mostly find only énarques (= people who attended ENA); they are not technical in the least, "don't have a clue about technology", but think they know everything. It's a terrible, terrible system. Source: am French.

ThePhysicist 4y ago
I had colleagues that went through École Polytechnique and the Corps de Mines (usually reserved to the top 2 graduates of a given graduating class of several grandes ecoles) that then went on to work for the government. And I think it's still mandatory to work a certain number of years in the administration after going through some of the grandes écoles, not sure if that was changed (I graduated in 2012 so it was a while ago). Of course not everyone is graduating with a technical degree, but coming from Germany where top politicians often don't even have a finished university degree and high-ranked politicians are regularly found out to have been plagiarizing their PhD work it was pretty impressive to see a working elite system. It also has some negative aspects and nepotism is a thing as well (in the sense that people who went through the system know how to game it to get their children in with high probability) but it's much better than what we have here, in my opinion. Germany was and still is scared of anything that can be considered elitist as people always associate it with the elitism from the Third Reich.
- bambax 4y ago
  I know almost nothing about the German political system so I won't discuss that. But the French system has plenty of flaws, two of the biggest being that 1/ énarques aren't technical at all, don't actually know anything except how bureaucracy works, and yet they're in charge of everything 2/ super-selective schools have the side effect of letting people think they're geniuses because they topped a competition while in their teens

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

And yet weirdly, those non-technical people seem to have accidentally stumbled on the solution that the whole world is moving towards, while the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear and even their most ambitious goals include using less nuclear and replacing it with the stuff the ideological German's came up with, because it's better. And it wasn't that long ago that they were threatening to scrap the whole idea of nuclear if the industry didn't produce one on time and budget, which still seems to be the main problem, they've just been given another chance to fail. Weird, it's almost like these ideological people were listening to experts, but you didn't like what the experts were saying, and so you labelled 'following expert advice' as 'ideological' to help you continue to ignore expert opinion.

ThePhysicist 4y ago
Solar and wind alone won't work without support by gas or other non-renewable sources. Try to find a single scientific study that gives a detailed overview of how the German energy mix is supposed to work and that explains how supply will be matched to demand 24/7 all year round. None exists. The whole "Energiewende" is built on the hope that either our neighbors will produce the necessary base capacity to stabilize our energy grid, or that a miracle storage technology will somehow be invented in the next 10 years. I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" [1] by a Cambridge professor, it goes into great detail about the problems of matching electricity demand to supply day- & year-round. 1: https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/
- cm2187 4y ago
  And somehow the cost of the non renewable energies that are required to deal with the volatility of wind and solar are never factored in the cost.
  - Brometheus 4y ago
    In 2011 ENERTRAG had a constructed a system to use a windpark to produce hydrogen and burn this in a gas/fuelcell plant. But since a change in the EEG Umlage Gesetz made them pay for their own energy produced by wind, it became unprofitable to do so. If that sounds idiotic to you, that's because the change in the EEG was created to make exactly this impossible.

konschubert 4y ago

The grande école aristocracy in France isn't desirable either. It's a form of nepotism.

ThePhysicist 4y ago
Yeah there's definitely problems with that as well, not saying it's perfect. I mostly want to contrast it to the anti-intellectual approach here in Germany, where top-level politicians are proud of not having any higher education and see it as their mission to get more ideologically-formed people into top positions.

RandomLensman 4y ago

Nuclear does have a cost problem in the sense that costs have not really dropped since forever, which is not boding well for a technology (unlike, for example costs for solar). So I can accept people arguing that way - but could also still argue for nuclear as an expensive baseload technology. The whole taxonomic discussion is a distraction anyway. We are long past some simple carbon reduction path making a dent (and also coming at high costs), so in the end will be about mitigation and even attempts at geoengineering - as usual politics are way behind the curve.

pfdietz 4y ago
One could argue ten years ago for nuclear as an expensive (but still overall desirable) baseload technology, but I think the window on that argument has closed.

yrgulation 4y ago

"De-nuclearization of other European countries" - Germany should mind its own business.

tut-urut-utut 4y ago

The German Green party showed in multiple occasions that it's completely anti-science. They pick scientists that support their agenda, and then represent it as the one and only truth. They are basically a spiritual successor of the middle-age Catholic Church. All they talk is about sacrifice, suffering in our earthly life for better afterlife, bans, and restrictions. The only difference is that instead of God, they swear by "Klimawandel". And of course, it's not relatively rich Green party members and supporters that suffer from their policies. They keep their SUVs, flight regularly, and the poorer half of the population will need to save the planet. Atom energy is bad, but fracking is obviously fine for them. What a bunch of hypocrites. I hope the Green get off their moral high horse or get replaced before they do even more harm to the German economy, wealth and even environment. They are just the most destructive force leading Germany to collapse.

dd36 4y ago
Is it supported by the fossil fuel industry?
selimthegrim 4y ago
That might explain why Mojib Latif’s books are published by a publisher otherwise specializing in religious books

kitkat_new 4y ago

Check the data: https://www.stromdaten.info/ANALYSE/periods/index.php https://www.stromdaten.info/ANALYSE/periods/index.php - Timeframe: 01.06.2021 - 26.06.2022 - Import/Export country: Frankreich Data: - physical export balance 11,77 TWh - monetary export balance: 2,13 Mrd € - average import price/MWh: 133,71 € - average export price/MWh: 169,91 € It's good for Germany, not for France. Germany is selling electricity to France when prices are high, and buying when prices are low. And it is selling way more than buying. Additionally, France is reducing the nuclear power share. Not by decommissioning working plants, but simply by not building as many new plants as would be necessary to keep the share.

ren_engineer 4y ago

>De-nuclearization of other European countries is a long-held goal of the German environmentalist movement and the Green party which was funded by Russia behind the scenes, along with anti-fracking and any other alternatives to Russian fossil fuel exports. >“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.” this was the former head of NATO in 2014, all of this has been known for a long time but nothing was done to prevent it https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-secretly-working-with-environmentalists-to-oppose-fracking https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...

moooo99 4y ago

I don’t really have a strong stance on the nuclear energy debate (although I highly doubt that it is as clear cut as the debates make it out to be). But I can’t really blame people for not being too excited about a technology that was first introduced to them by bombing two Japanese cities, had two worst case disasters, and was subject of the biggest arms race in history.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
You typed your message on a binary computer, often used to calculate missile trajectories and to run nuclear fuel centrifuges.

doe88 4y ago

While it's evident nuclear sentiment is not great in germany, from my point of view, I wouldn't characterize it as great in france either. Sadly, I think in this domain (as in many) france lives with the infrastructure and build of its past and currently fails to invest for its future, it's more managing decline than anything else. I think as current nuclear plants become older and mismatch between current needs and true green energies production become more apparent, people still live in a bubble and don't see the urgency nor courage to really invest in new reactors and plants and prepare the future, for france and europe. My dream would be that france, with help of germany and other willing eu countries would build new reactors with an overcapacity for france alone such that it would then provide this energy to other ue countries. Nuclear energy is a chance and is not mutually exclusive with other energies. (of course i'm french)

kergonath 4y ago
> While it's evident nuclear sentiment is not great in germany, from my point of view, I wouldn't characterize as great in france either I think it is changing. Both the IPCC and the ERDF reports were unambiguous and politicians and technocrats who were paying attention noticed. Now, skyrocketing gas prices are a warning shot. A blackout or a brownout could completely change public opinion (not that si would welcome it, but at this point it seems inevitable; we almost had 3 last winter). > Sadly, I think in this domain (as in many) france lives with the infrastructure and build of its past and currently fails to invest for its future, it's more managing decline than anything else. That is very true, unfortunately. That’s why building a series of EPR would be a good thing long-term, as it would provide some justifications to train new engineers and a refreshed skilled workforce. > My dream would be that france, with help of germany and other eu countries would build new reactors with an overcapacity for france alone and would then provide this energy to other ue countries. This would make sense from a technical point of view (one large fleet in a single country is easier to manage and more efficient than the same number of reactors distributed across several states). But that’s very difficult from a political point of view. > Nuclear energy is a chance and is not mutually exclusive with other energies. This is something a lot of people do not seem to grasp. We need all the low-carbon energy we can produce, and we need it 20 years ago. There is no point bickering about the share of renewable and the share of nuclear. We need renewables where we can and nuclear where we must. In the end, what matters is that even a carbon-free electricity supply is just half the journey, and the easy half at that. It’s not something we will solve with a one-size-fits-all approach.

kergonath 4y ago

> I did my PhD at the French nuclear energy agency Cheers from Saclay! :) To be fair, Germans always (in the recent past anyway) cared more about environment issues in general. Recycling, cycling instead of driving, things like that. It was not mainstream in France until fairly recently. But yeah, the lack of understanding of scientific and technical aspects of energy production from a supposed nation of engineers is disturbing.

yrgulation 4y ago
A shame german carmakers didnt care much.
- kergonath 4y ago
  Indeed. Well, no country is perfect.

logifail 4y ago

> In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...), whereas in Germany most people rise through social engineering and party politics and most top positions in the administration are filled by people with law degrees that don't have a clue about technology [..] Would one really claim France is succeeding at a national level in the technology space due to all those excellent technically-trained administrators? > In my opinion that's also a reason why we completely fail in everything regarding digitalization, lawyers are simply not good technical problem solvers Why are administrators supposed to be the ones actually solving technical problems? Aren't government administrators more likely to be reading and writing plans and contracts (which trained [ex-]lawyers must have _some_ useful skills...)?

google234123 4y ago
The French manage to spend less on military than Germany and seem to get about twice the capability.

api 4y ago

I heard someone call Germany the "California of Europe" for this reason. It's simultaneously full of high-tech and engineers yet paradoxically also full of alternative-medicine quackery and anti-science viewpoints on things like nuclear power. AFAIK there's a weird through-line here where California new age and 70s "new left" ideology has some of its roots in the same early 20th century romanticism that was and I'm sure in various forms still is popular in Germany. Look up the Volkisch movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Völkisch_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Völkisch_movement

selimthegrim 4y ago
The Dead Kennedys arguably beat you to this realization.

catchclose8919 4y ago

There's no reason to require polyticians to be technicians, and no reason to expect less formally-educated people to be more anti nuclear (except in the presence of massive disinformation campaigns). Requirements for formal education just select for conservative and obedient people - and we put them on the leaders (we got it backwards!). The US seems to kind of got it a bit more right, but it's probably just circus. Technocratic politics doesn't work in practice (ask USSR), and there should be no requirements of formal education on politicians (not even non technical). But politicians and administrators do need to (re)learn fast on-the-lob so in practice an IQ test requirement would be great for them and probably for them only (yes, IQ measures well only how fast someone can learn something and not at all how good is someone at doing something after they've learned it, but, guess what... knowing and (re)learning fast about stuff they don't actually do is kind of the job requirement for politicians and administrators - an 145 IQ high-school-dropout with or without some alchol or substance issues is kind of the best person for a job like Prime Minister, Energy or Finance Minister etc.). Oh, and on the active (we know their effects, so they must exist) campaigns of disinformation against known to work tech, there's a solution for that: laws for spreading false-facts and disinformation + throwing in jail people breaking them. Glue your ass on the highway or spread misinformation on facebook fueling anti-nuclear protests: how about a 5 years prison sentence baby? As a society we're so f terrible at allocating human resources, that it's no wonder that other resources like those involved in energy production are massively missalocated too...

themitigating 4y ago

"In France, top positions in the administration are usually filled by people that are technically excellent and have gone through the system of grandes écoles (ENS, ENA, X, ...)" These are schools that train bueurocrats, "technically excellent" yes, at politics and public service but not engineers. For example the new energy transition minister has a business degree and went to ENA. I'm not one to call people elites but it's strange how you are using this to differentiate between France and German

croes 4y ago

Seems like France nuclear power has it's own problems https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-power-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

Kon5ole 4y ago
Very interesting! So basically what this story says means that the nuclear operator in France has been selling the electricity at a loss, so much so that they are way behind on maintenance and almost bankrupt. Which in turn means that the actual cost of nuclear power in France is higher than has been reported so far. The cost has just been postponed for decades, until now. It's certainly bad timing to discover it now - what a nasty "perfect storm" of unfortunate events we are having for electricity in Europe this year. :(

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

> It's just sad to see how little actual science is respected in Germany. What part of this entire discussion has anything do to with science? Is anyone actually contesting the science? Is it a discussion about the number of orbitals of uranium atoms? Or is it a discussion on which entities handle the long-term financials obligations, whether we favor or not decentralized grids, whether we favor short term or longer term solutions -- which in turn depends on whether the (possibly international) risks are long term or short term, etc. Not much of the later is "science". Politics is not a science and never can be. This entire story -- the word "green" itself -- is as unscientific as it gets. Not in the "science contradicts it" sense; I mean in the "this is neither provable nor falsifiable and science has nothing to do with it" sense.

BurningFrog 4y ago
A lot of the anti-nuclear opinion is passionately opposed to scientific analysis. They're convinced Chernobyl can happen again, and that scientists are arrogantly playing god when they explain what can and can't happen
- k__ 4y ago
  The last time I heard a physicist evaluate nuclear, it didn't look like any notable improvements happened in the last 20 years.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Well, maybe, but most nuclear reactor designs are at least 50 years out of date, and a lot of progress was made between 1970 and 2000.
  - neuronexmachina 4y ago
    Do you have the source where you heard that? Also worth noting that Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island were all built 50-60 years ago.
    - 4y ago

dimitar 4y ago

Anti-nuclear sentiment (both environmentalist and anti-nuclear weapons) was generously sponsored by the Soviet Union. What a surprise than nowadays the same groups are serving the interests of Russia. The most cynical thing is that the biggest nuclear accident in history was caused by Soviet negligence and incompetence and yet they managed to exploit it politically.

dgb23 4y ago
I would love to read more about this. Can you provide sources?
- dimitar 4y ago
  Check the sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_influence_on_the_peace_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_influence_on_the_peace_... It has been claimed many times by Soviet defectors. Every defector from GRU or and high-profile officers from the KGB claimed so. It is very hard to prove, but it is so extremely serving to the USSR. Peace meant unilateral disarmament and abandonment of nuclear technology - how convenient. Today the claims by some politicians in Europe that "aiding Ukraine prolongs the war" are a similar trope of Russian origin. Back in the Cold War one of the policies the "Peace movement" advocated was "nuclear-free zones" in Western countries. The USSR encouraged organisations by providing funds and used its propaganda arms to aid the movement (conveniently keeping quit on its own arrangements).
dv_dt 4y ago
That doesn't make any sense because Russian companies are significant suppliers within the nuclear power production logistics footprint. edit: eg. https://www.wired.com/story/the-nuclear-reactors-of-the-future-have-a-russia-problem/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-nuclear-reactors-of-the-futu...
- sp0ck 4y ago
  Money Russia gets from nuclear poewr production are miniscule comparing to money from gas/oil export. _any_ expansion of nuclear energy in Europe is against Russian agenda to be major gas/oil provider. Geramany suppose to be broker of that. For Germany cheap Nuclear energy on central/east Europe is dangerous because cheap energy = more competitive market. Add cheaper workforce and you have very dangerous mix. Read why Bulgaria was forced to shut down majority of their reactors before joining EU. Offically it was about "security". Bulgaria with cheap nuclear energy from already built power plants and cheap workforce was too "dangerous" for old EU countries. Politics is very important when discussing energy market.

hnthrowaway0328 4y ago

For politicians and administrations, I'm pretty sure any ideological stance is simply a facade to allow them to climb the ladders. The real propellent, throughout history, for politicians and administrations, are always more $$ and more power so I don't think Germany is an outlier.

Gravityloss 4y ago

This is a very good (and long) article looking at the history of nuclear energy in Germany in a broader context. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/20/germany-nuclear-power-energy-weapons-nato-russia-ukraine-war-energy-crisis-greens/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/20/germany-nuclear-power-e...

goodpoint 4y ago

Instead of accusing people of being ideological and irrational why don't you address all the issues around nuclear? Political stability VS centralization of power is one. Nuclear power is highly centralized and vulnerable to corruption. And also to war, terrorism and social unrest. If we are to expect extreme climate and social instability in the next 50 years, it's safer to democratize and localize energy production and storage. Renewables go in that direction. Nuclear goes in the opposite direction.

lven 4y ago
New nuclear is decentralizing with micro reactors.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Except it's impossible to safely scale down nuclear to domestic/community/small-town level. Instead renewables and especially solar as well as batteries and geothermal heat storage scale down very well and can build resilient networks. After the horrific blackouts that happened in some countries people on HN should be able to grasp this...
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Unless microreactors are stacked up at centralized sites to share labor their operating costs are likely to be prohibitive.

athinggoingon 4y ago

Germany's anti-nuclear environmental movement was, in part, funded by Russia. https://www.transparency.org/en/press/germany-state-government-conceals-gazprom-connection-controversial-environmental-foundation-beneficial-ownership https://www.transparency.org/en/press/germany-state-governme...

Krasnol 4y ago
This is a conspiracy which doesn't have anything to do with reality or what is written in the article you've linked to. The article describes a "Foundation" which was created 2021 to keep on building Gazprom 2. It neither has something to do with the decision to get out of nuclear energy (that was 2000) nor does it have anything to do with the Green party or any group which is against nuclear energy in Germany.
godelski 4y ago
In America Green Peace and Sierra Nevada had major donations by gas companies. https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-the-natural-gas-industry-and-why-they-stopped/ https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra...

rmbyrro 4y ago

> blame the highly ideological stance on the way people rise to power in politics and administration in Germany Don't be so harsh on your country. It's like that everywhere. But it gets better over time. It used to be a lot worse centuries ago...

blablabla123 4y ago

Environmental sciences are still a niche and the storage problem hasn't been solved yet. E.g. the infamous Asse II has empirically proven to be unsafe mostly because of water influx and the 126.000 containers (which are partially captured within slowly floating salt) now have to be retrieved which is going to cost billions No insurance company in the world is willing to insure a nuclear power plant and both risk and operation have been heavily subsidized since decades. In fact renewable sources are even cheaper: "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-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...

barbazoo 4y ago

It's such a pain how certain groups are so hung up on specific energy sources. German greens will never consider nuclear energy, Albertans will never consider anything that didn't come out of the ground either as oil or oil derived. It's like belonging to a sports team, it's silly. I used to be very much against nuclear energy because of the unsolved issue around dealing with it's waste. Two decades later after learning about climate change and understanding more about pros and cons of different fuels and ways to generate electricity, it's obvious that nuclear energy can play a useful role in the transition off fossil fuels.

yetanother-1 4y ago
When oil producing countries are racing to get nuclear energy, it remains no surprise that it is something that will only help in the transition, because burning the fule is not a enough!
martin_a 4y ago
So, what changed in regards to dealing with its waste in the two decades? Or do you simply not care enough anymore?
- barbazoo 4y ago
  I put too much weight on the waste storage problem. Looking at it now, in my opinion it might be preferable to have nuclear waste underground somewhere than keep polluting the atmosphere. It seems silly to still get hung up on that. Sure it's not great and I'd rather we don't, but we're at the eleventh hour and we've got to take more drastic, albeit suboptimal, steps.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Waste was never the big problem with fission, nor is it the blocking issue now. The world has gravitated toward dry cask storage of spent fuel, which is both simple, sensible, and cheap. It only contributes $0.001/kWh toward the cost of power from fission reactors, and precludes no future options to dealing with the spent fuel. What has blocked fission is one thing: cost. For a while, fission advocates could stand pat, knowing that eventually fossil fuels would have to be moved away from, to fission, regardless of how expensive fission was. But now renewables have undercut fission, so that (somewhat lazy) expectation, that fission was almost entitled to be the post-fossil energy source, is no longer valid.

pojzon 4y ago

Its really funny that this description not only fits my country also but probably quite a few other. Issue that happens world wide is that politics is filled with “nice face” or “easy to buy” by corporations. There are no engineers with passion or corruptless ppl joining politics. Smile and wave guys, smile and wave. Ps. Here in Poland we talk about German politics as they were those competent ones, go figure.

worik 4y ago

What is your "science" for dealing with the long term waste? What "science" do you use to design mechanisms to keep highly toxic materials away from human contact for 200,000 years? It is not science. There is no science that can solve those problems. It is greed. (I live in the South Pacific. The French are hated here for what they have done for their nuclear programme)

colechristensen 4y ago
Let the waste sit in place for decades to decay away much of its radioactivity, dig a hole in a geologically boring mountain away from people, dump waste in the hole. Alternative first step: build breeder reactors to recycle most of the waste into nuclear fuel and dump the smaller amount of leftovers in the mountain.
- worik 4y ago
  > dig a hole in a geologically boring mountain away from people Where? Where on Earth will you find a place that will still be like that in 200,000 years.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Deep holes in mountains in deserts in tectonically boring locations in the middle of plates.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Ancient geologically stable rock formations exist
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    Nuclear waste doesn't need to be sequestered for anything like 200,000 years. After a few hundred years it's no more radioactive than the rocks from which it came. You seem to have the common misconception that "long half-life" = "more radioactive", when in fact "long half-life" = "less radioactive", by definition.
  - 4y ago

oezi 4y ago

Your comment gets it entirely backwards. France is currently in a terrible spot with their monoculture of nuclear because the hot temperatures have caused shutdowns of many reactors, many old plants are offline because of security concerns and the French operator of the nuclear plants is close to bankruptcy and needs to be pulled back into government ownership because renewables can be so much cheaper today. What Germany did get wrong is that they invested too much in renewables too early and that continues to haunts Germans by paying subsidies for renewables installed more than 10 years ago. Germany helped to jump-start the whole scaling of renewables (together with the US) but the price is high. I would argue this isn't actually so bad because we need to price energy higher anyway to reduce consumption and further accelerate the building of renewable capacity. No matter what anybody says: nuclear is dead. The number of projects in planning (outside China) is so small that it won't make the slightest dent for our emissions goals. The only topics worth focusing on is solar, transmission and energy storage. Wind only matters in the next 10 years. Afterwards solar will be another magnitude cheaper and wind won't be able to compete.

MR4D 4y ago
I wonder how much of your comments/predictions will be true after this coming winter.
- oezi 4y ago
  I am not looking forward to my gas bill indeed. Still hard to forsee that nuclear could come to the rescue in any way. Even in France they have scaled back eletric heating and will face hard times when cold weather strikes.
  - MR4D 4y ago
    I’m less concerned about high prices than I am about rationing.
Nimitz14 4y ago
The problems of nuclear you mention seem fixable and french electricity prices are waaaaaaay cheaper than german ones. I fail to see how france is in a terrible spot when it's germany that's likely to freeze this winter (and has literally no solution for that, other than begging their enemy). Why do you think solar will get cheaper by another order of magnitude?

einpoklum 4y ago

The only "ruinous" aspect is that Germany did not prepare on the side of renewable installed capacity (and perhaps storage, although I'm not sure.) Nuclear is: * Something like 3x more costly (levelized cost etc.) relative to solar and wind. * Dangerous I: Yes, still dangerous for the foreseeable future. There are still significant risks, especially with nuclear waste storage, but to some extent with active plants. I'm not an expert on this, but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... with some examples from recent years. * Dangerous II: Considering the state of infrastructure generally in some world states (e.g. the US) and profit motives, I do not believe the private nuclear industry can be trusted to deliver sufficient levels of safety. * Dangerous III: Earthquakes, bombardment, and partisan/terrorist attacks are threats even to plants and storage facilities which are otherwise safe. And these occur with relative frequency; just think of the Zhaporizye (sp) plants a couple of months ago. * Has greenhouse gas emission costs via mining of Uranium and such. Caveat: Not sure how much this compares to wind/solar/geothermal on one hand and coal/carbon-rich gas on the other hand/ * Is promoted to a great extent as a counterpart to nuclear arms programs. For nuclear weapons, you need fissile material, and you produce that in a nuclear reactor. Which then also produces heat, which you convert to power. Not all nuclear plants need to be like that, but again, no trust that these will go away. Now, I am certainly no expert on the matter, so - convince me otherwise if you can.

Oberbaumbrucke 4y ago

Aparently the German Green Party was started with Russian influence. So there may be some conflict here.