13 ms·

There are also many institutes (e.g IDW) constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable tox

by 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.
  - littlecranky67 4y ago
    Yes, taxes and subsidies distort the actual costs of energy production. But if you look at my example, 90% of the Stromsteuer (tax on your energy bill as a household) don't go into funding of energy production, but to stabilize the (very broken) german mandatory pension/retirment system. But yes, one could argue that it is just moving around taxes in the government spending household.
    - derrasterpunkt 4y ago
      This is because taxes in Germany can’t be tied to a specified purpose. This is intentional.
- JanSt 4y ago
  The Stromsteuer ist only 5% of the price. It depends on your definition of taxes. The EEG-Umlage alone reached 6.5ct/kwh and directly paid for renewables. It‘s now taken out of the price, so the real price of energy is higher than what is paid by the consumer. The EEG Umlage is now hidden in and paid for by a special fund („Energie- und Klimafonds“)
  - QuarterReptile 4y ago
    You're saying that there is a transfer from nuclear to renewables of 6.5 cents/kWh for every kWh nuclear generates, or a net market distortion of 13c/kWh between the two (using the tenuous assumption of roughly equivalent capacities between the two sectors)? That's more than I pay in the US in total per kWh for electricity, generated, distributed, and taxed.
    - JanSt 4y ago
      6.5ct is added to the cost of every used kwh (no matter where it comes from) and paid to the producers of renewable energy
      - Retric 4y ago
        Germany jumped into solar really early and it's very far north so it’s not that relevant when considering todays tradeoffs. 41.3 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2016 was frankly excessive though it helped PV get much cheaper. Unfortunately, Germany now stuck with these huge agreed upon subsides for another decade.
        rjzzleep 4y ago
        They also "pulled out" of solar early. I have idea how anyone can make sense of German policies. They seem to be working solely on the basis of emotion. The outcome is a disastrous policy that created one of the highest energy prices for consumers for no good reason. The Greens in Germany seem to be hell bent on de-industrializing Germany. They hate nuclear power and they hate all fossil fuels, but want to buy fracking LNG from the USA and fire up brown coal plants that were previously shut down to shove it to Putin. The outcome seems to be mass bankruptcies in what seems to be the social fabric of Germany, while getting a lot less energy for the same price.
baybal2 4y ago
petre 4y ago
> 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. Which is even more ridiculos because heat is the primary product of nuclear reactors. Their thermal rating of a nuclear reactor is about 3x the electrical rating.
- liftm 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, are there any nuclear reactor cogeneration plants in operation?
  - morning_gelato 4y ago
    Yes, for example Switzerland uses two of their nuclear power plants for district heating [1][2]. China has also started using it for district heating in Haiyang [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Refuna_nuclear_district_heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Ref... [2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-o-s/switzerland.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... [3] https://www.nucnet.org/news/city-of-haiyang-first-in-country-to-have-district-heating-system-powered-by-nuclear-11-5-2021 https://www.nucnet.org/news/city-of-haiyang-first-in-country...
  - Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
    Sure "Russia, Dec 1, 2019 — Unit 1 of the Leningrad 2 nuclear power station in western Russia has been integrated into the heat supply system of the city of Sosnovy Bor"
black_puppydog 4y ago
Sorry but you and GP complaining about how policy prevented nuclear from being the backbone of energy supply, then totally ignoring the impact of policy on the supply of renewables, that is a pretty weak way to argue. The politics in Germany have been pretty actively hostile to wind under the conservative governments. Check this graph I just compiled out of the stats from wikipedia: https://wtf.roflcopter.fr/pics/gcd4Rw5d/49s68U7X.png https://wtf.roflcopter.fr/pics/gcd4Rw5d/49s68U7X.png Yeah, if you introduce legislation that "these people" tell you will stall the construction, then _exactly_ that tends to happen. The 10H rules and other BS from the conservatives were expressly and successfully introduced to stifle wind energy construction.
- Brometheus 4y ago
  This is the correct take from my perspective. The same happend to: - biogas - solar - offshore wind
timwaagh 4y ago
Meanwhile in Russia they are doing heating with water from nuclear powerplants. While price gouging Germany for gas.
- Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
  "While price gouging Germany for gas" Huh?!? Price is settled somewhere in Netherlands, what Russia has to do with it?
  - JanSt 4y ago
    They send very little gas (much less than agreed upon) through NS1 to send a message and try to force-open NS2, which leads to very high spot prices
    - anotheracctfo 4y ago
      Yeah the OPEC model. Except you can't end it by threatening to "nuke their ass and take their gas."
    - Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
      What is has to do with "price gouging"? How this "message" of yours reach Netherlands? Whatever is coming, price is defined in Netherlands, look for Dutch TTF futures. It is like price of oil - Brent futures minus some discount > which leads to very high spot prices Russian gas itself is not traded on spot place(s). It is long term contract, but price follow dutch futures. How this "price gouging" is done, could you describe mechanism?
      - JanSt 4y ago
        Less supply, higher supply volatility = higher prices, this is market 101.
        Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
        There is no supply of gas from Gazprom to the Dutch FFT. None whatsoever. Never was. Never will be.
mlindner 4y ago
> 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. Heating problem IS a power problem given the high efficiency of heat pumps nowadays. And yes they work perfectly fine in Germany's relatively moderate winters.
- Nitramp 4y ago
  Only in the most abstract sense, if you're willing to ignore actual installed capacity (and thus reality to some degree). There are around 350k heat pumps in Germany right now, of 40 million households (ignoring offices, ignoring multi family homes etc). There is no way Germany could install enough heatpumps to counteract the Russia induced gas crisis, not even over a timeframe of a decade or more. Optimistically you could fix this by 2050. So yes, there's a heating crisis, not an electricity crisis.
  - belorn 4y ago
    EU has an yearly report of the state of the energy grid, and a common finding is that different country spend subsidies on different things. Germany spend most of any country, and they spend a bit half of that on production of renewable energy and the remaining split between fossil fuel and shared infrastructure like power lines. Very little of the subsidies goes to the consumer side. There are however countries who focused on the infrastructure/consumer side of the equation. When communal or heath pump based heating is significant cheaper, suddenly people interest to invest into home improvements goes up. As the report describe, it not obvious which strategy is best in order to reduce pollution.
blablabla123 4y ago
> In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end. 65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 220 billion kWh from renewables actually https://www-destatis-de.translate.goog/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2022/03/PD22_116_43312.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-destatis-de.translate.goog/DE/Presse/Pressemitte...
- bobro 4y ago
  The table in that page says photovoltaics are 41B kWh.
  - blablabla123 4y ago
    I know, that's why I wrote "renewables". Comparing with one of several widely deployed options seems a bit arbitrary
- belorn 4y ago
  65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 45 billion kWh from solar, actually... 111 billion kWh from wind, 30 billion kWh from bio gas, 18 billion kWh from hydro, 156 billion kWh from coal, 65 billion kWh from gas. 25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany.
  - blablabla123 4y ago
    I'm aware of that and it's summed up together with hydro etc. Why would you want to compare Nuclear with solar? I mean solar alone doesn't make much sense because it depends on daylight - which surely is great since most energy is used during the day and battery storage is getting increasingly deployed. But it's better to diversify and therefore rather consider the sum. > 25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany. Well yeah but it's getting phased out on the long-term. Edit: also it's worth considering that gas and bio gas (the renewable version) power plants can be used during peak times because they can be started and shutdown quickly. That's not possible for nuclear which provides base load - in fact they need to be shut down during heat waves
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
> 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. Isn't your choice of telling them false based purely on political agenda? Same happens on other side of the camp, both believe their science is actual science.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  It kind of depends on what you consider a fact. I support nuclear scientifically. I don’t think it has a chance politically. Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem. Politically, expect to spend billions upon billions and then have things like Yucca Mountain canned after lots of construction. Both are true and which ones you consider lead to very different conclusions.
  - worik 4y ago
    > Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem. No it is not. There is no place on Earth that we know is geologically stable for the time periods required We have no way of knowing what society will be like ten thousand years from now, let alone 100,000 years. How do we communicate with those people bout the danger of what we left behind? Greed. Hubris.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Tectonic plates don't move nearly quick enough to be a concern in the span of 100k years. A spot square in the middle of a plate is going to be safe from earthquakes for millions of years. And not to mention, how does ground vibration bring sometimes buried under 500 meters of solid rock back onto the surface? Earthquakes shake the ground, they don't dig deep boreholes.
      - oezi 4y ago
        Yet, all the attempts to store nuclear fuel underground in Germany proved so catastrophic that they had to scrap all of them and restart the selection process.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
- LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a political and management issue. - maybe you keep the existing nuclear around for levelling, well, fine. But just be ready for it to get "nuked" once the battery/storage costs combined with wind/solar drop under everything. That day isn't today, and it isn't next year, but with cheap sodium ion and many other chemistries in active improvement... it will. - nuclear waste disposal is solved... if you have a LFTR or similar tech to "burn" it. Otherwise, the usual handwave on nuclear waste is a telltale sign of "old nuclear", as are the people that say it is safe. Solid fuel rod designs are not safe. I am not saying that LFTR should be the only path forward for nuclear, but the advantages of LFTR should be what a "real" nuclear solution has. LFTR is: - scalable in size - meltdown-proof (plug and pool where the liquid loses criticality) - burns/breeds virtually all of its fuel, and IIRC can "burn" spend rod waste - somewhat proliferation resistant Again, I don't know if the LFTR design challenges are truly problematic, but the CAPABILITIES of LFTR should be a standard next-gen nuclear must be held to. The Greens aren't correct generally in engineering or science, but what they are right about, indirectly, is the culture of nuclear power that grew up in the Cold War and attached to military needs for weapons isotopes. Those political priorities overrode safety, good design, economic performance, and other concerns, and left us with the terrible solid fuel rod design. LFTR got canned in the US in a backroom political power move, and the same nuclear establishment keeps it restricted from funds and research. Again, I'm not saying LFTR is the "one true path". But its core abilities address the Green concerns: meltdown proof and virtually waste free. Those two aspects are the base table stakes a "next gen nuclear" would need. Maybe you have a combined reactor approach where one design produces from solid or pebble fuel, and then that gets fed to LFTRs for final burn off. So I guess I would recommend Germany / France keep their nukes going for now, but view them as life support: these things are going away once battery/storage tech scales to meet the need, a virtually guaranteed proposition in the five year near future timeline. For nuclear to be relevant long term you'll need the safety tablestakes mentioned, but all nuclear projects are 10 years out: you'll need a stable price to target/combat 10 years out from wind/solar, and you don't know that right now.
- naasking 4y ago
  > - LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a political and management issue. LCOE isn't the only factor of relevance. That's partly how Germany got into its current situation, because LCOE doesn't account for intermittency. To solve that you need a large interconnected grid and huge overcapacity of renewables (and even then you'll have some brown outs), or you need long-term grid storage, which still has limited options at this time. The LCOE of renewables is not so rosy after you include all of these considerations to achieve the same stable service as a nuclear plant. We might get there in 20 years, but we're not there yet.
Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
What's happening in Germany is unfortunate, But I feel that while rebutting the statements of Anti-Nuclear Energy institutions with science people often forget that in the end humans run the reactors and the safety/efficacy of a Nuclear reactor also depends upon the people who run it i.e. even the stringent of safety protocols & design choices can be rendered useless by corrupt imbeciles(As we've seen in the past). So we should be careful in appropriating the overwhelming evidence of Nuclear Energy being safe and efficient to reactor in X vs Y.
Cryptonic 4y ago
Nice idea to shrink "Zukunftstechnologien" down to solar at the end of the argumentation... The problem with nuclear is that companies will not have to pay for final storage of the waste. Tax payers will have to pay forever. Same shit with our german coal mines. Take this into your equation. Google "Ewigkeitskosten"

by JanSt 4y ago

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.
- littlecranky67 4y ago
  Yes, taxes and subsidies distort the actual costs of energy production. But if you look at my example, 90% of the Stromsteuer (tax on your energy bill as a household) don't go into funding of energy production, but to stabilize the (very broken) german mandatory pension/retirment system. But yes, one could argue that it is just moving around taxes in the government spending household.
  - derrasterpunkt 4y ago
    This is because taxes in Germany can’t be tied to a specified purpose. This is intentional.
JanSt 4y ago
The Stromsteuer ist only 5% of the price. It depends on your definition of taxes. The EEG-Umlage alone reached 6.5ct/kwh and directly paid for renewables. It‘s now taken out of the price, so the real price of energy is higher than what is paid by the consumer. The EEG Umlage is now hidden in and paid for by a special fund („Energie- und Klimafonds“)
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  You're saying that there is a transfer from nuclear to renewables of 6.5 cents/kWh for every kWh nuclear generates, or a net market distortion of 13c/kWh between the two (using the tenuous assumption of roughly equivalent capacities between the two sectors)? That's more than I pay in the US in total per kWh for electricity, generated, distributed, and taxed.
  - JanSt 4y ago
    6.5ct is added to the cost of every used kwh (no matter where it comes from) and paid to the producers of renewable energy
    - Retric 4y ago
      Germany jumped into solar really early and it's very far north so it’s not that relevant when considering todays tradeoffs. 41.3 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2016 was frankly excessive though it helped PV get much cheaper. Unfortunately, Germany now stuck with these huge agreed upon subsides for another decade.
      - rjzzleep 4y ago
        They also "pulled out" of solar early. I have idea how anyone can make sense of German policies. They seem to be working solely on the basis of emotion. The outcome is a disastrous policy that created one of the highest energy prices for consumers for no good reason. The Greens in Germany seem to be hell bent on de-industrializing Germany. They hate nuclear power and they hate all fossil fuels, but want to buy fracking LNG from the USA and fire up brown coal plants that were previously shut down to shove it to Putin. The outcome seems to be mass bankruptcies in what seems to be the social fabric of Germany, while getting a lot less energy for the same price.

baybal2 4y ago

petre 4y ago

> 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. Which is even more ridiculos because heat is the primary product of nuclear reactors. Their thermal rating of a nuclear reactor is about 3x the electrical rating.

liftm 4y ago
Out of curiosity, are there any nuclear reactor cogeneration plants in operation?
- morning_gelato 4y ago
  Yes, for example Switzerland uses two of their nuclear power plants for district heating [1][2]. China has also started using it for district heating in Haiyang [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Refuna_nuclear_district_heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Ref... [2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-o-s/switzerland.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... [3] https://www.nucnet.org/news/city-of-haiyang-first-in-country-to-have-district-heating-system-powered-by-nuclear-11-5-2021 https://www.nucnet.org/news/city-of-haiyang-first-in-country...
- Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
  Sure "Russia, Dec 1, 2019 — Unit 1 of the Leningrad 2 nuclear power station in western Russia has been integrated into the heat supply system of the city of Sosnovy Bor"

black_puppydog 4y ago

Sorry but you and GP complaining about how policy prevented nuclear from being the backbone of energy supply, then totally ignoring the impact of policy on the supply of renewables, that is a pretty weak way to argue. The politics in Germany have been pretty actively hostile to wind under the conservative governments. Check this graph I just compiled out of the stats from wikipedia: https://wtf.roflcopter.fr/pics/gcd4Rw5d/49s68U7X.png https://wtf.roflcopter.fr/pics/gcd4Rw5d/49s68U7X.png Yeah, if you introduce legislation that "these people" tell you will stall the construction, then _exactly_ that tends to happen. The 10H rules and other BS from the conservatives were expressly and successfully introduced to stifle wind energy construction.

Brometheus 4y ago
This is the correct take from my perspective. The same happend to: - biogas - solar - offshore wind

timwaagh 4y ago

Meanwhile in Russia they are doing heating with water from nuclear powerplants. While price gouging Germany for gas.

Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
"While price gouging Germany for gas" Huh?!? Price is settled somewhere in Netherlands, what Russia has to do with it?
- JanSt 4y ago
  They send very little gas (much less than agreed upon) through NS1 to send a message and try to force-open NS2, which leads to very high spot prices
  - anotheracctfo 4y ago
    Yeah the OPEC model. Except you can't end it by threatening to "nuke their ass and take their gas."
  - Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
    What is has to do with "price gouging"? How this "message" of yours reach Netherlands? Whatever is coming, price is defined in Netherlands, look for Dutch TTF futures. It is like price of oil - Brent futures minus some discount > which leads to very high spot prices Russian gas itself is not traded on spot place(s). It is long term contract, but price follow dutch futures. How this "price gouging" is done, could you describe mechanism?
    - JanSt 4y ago
      Less supply, higher supply volatility = higher prices, this is market 101.
      - Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
        There is no supply of gas from Gazprom to the Dutch FFT. None whatsoever. Never was. Never will be.

mlindner 4y ago

> 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. Heating problem IS a power problem given the high efficiency of heat pumps nowadays. And yes they work perfectly fine in Germany's relatively moderate winters.

Nitramp 4y ago
Only in the most abstract sense, if you're willing to ignore actual installed capacity (and thus reality to some degree). There are around 350k heat pumps in Germany right now, of 40 million households (ignoring offices, ignoring multi family homes etc). There is no way Germany could install enough heatpumps to counteract the Russia induced gas crisis, not even over a timeframe of a decade or more. Optimistically you could fix this by 2050. So yes, there's a heating crisis, not an electricity crisis.
- belorn 4y ago
  EU has an yearly report of the state of the energy grid, and a common finding is that different country spend subsidies on different things. Germany spend most of any country, and they spend a bit half of that on production of renewable energy and the remaining split between fossil fuel and shared infrastructure like power lines. Very little of the subsidies goes to the consumer side. There are however countries who focused on the infrastructure/consumer side of the equation. When communal or heath pump based heating is significant cheaper, suddenly people interest to invest into home improvements goes up. As the report describe, it not obvious which strategy is best in order to reduce pollution.

blablabla123 4y ago

> In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end. 65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 220 billion kWh from renewables actually https://www-destatis-de.translate.goog/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2022/03/PD22_116_43312.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-destatis-de.translate.goog/DE/Presse/Pressemitte...

bobro 4y ago
The table in that page says photovoltaics are 41B kWh.
- blablabla123 4y ago
  I know, that's why I wrote "renewables". Comparing with one of several widely deployed options seems a bit arbitrary
belorn 4y ago
65 billion kWh from Nuclear and 45 billion kWh from solar, actually... 111 billion kWh from wind, 30 billion kWh from bio gas, 18 billion kWh from hydro, 156 billion kWh from coal, 65 billion kWh from gas. 25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany.
- blablabla123 4y ago
  I'm aware of that and it's summed up together with hydro etc. Why would you want to compare Nuclear with solar? I mean solar alone doesn't make much sense because it depends on daylight - which surely is great since most energy is used during the day and battery storage is getting increasingly deployed. But it's better to diversify and therefore rather consider the sum. > 25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany. Well yeah but it's getting phased out on the long-term. Edit: also it's worth considering that gas and bio gas (the renewable version) power plants can be used during peak times because they can be started and shutdown quickly. That's not possible for nuclear which provides base load - in fact they need to be shut down during heat waves

YetAnotherNick 4y ago

> 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. Isn't your choice of telling them false based purely on political agenda? Same happens on other side of the camp, both believe their science is actual science.

MattGaiser 4y ago
It kind of depends on what you consider a fact. I support nuclear scientifically. I don’t think it has a chance politically. Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem. Politically, expect to spend billions upon billions and then have things like Yucca Mountain canned after lots of construction. Both are true and which ones you consider lead to very different conclusions.
- worik 4y ago
  > Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem. No it is not. There is no place on Earth that we know is geologically stable for the time periods required We have no way of knowing what society will be like ten thousand years from now, let alone 100,000 years. How do we communicate with those people bout the danger of what we left behind? Greed. Hubris.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Tectonic plates don't move nearly quick enough to be a concern in the span of 100k years. A spot square in the middle of a plate is going to be safe from earthquakes for millions of years. And not to mention, how does ground vibration bring sometimes buried under 500 meters of solid rock back onto the surface? Earthquakes shake the ground, they don't dig deep boreholes.
    - oezi 4y ago
      Yet, all the attempts to store nuclear fuel underground in Germany proved so catastrophic that they had to scrap all of them and restart the selection process.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

- LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a political and management issue. - maybe you keep the existing nuclear around for levelling, well, fine. But just be ready for it to get "nuked" once the battery/storage costs combined with wind/solar drop under everything. That day isn't today, and it isn't next year, but with cheap sodium ion and many other chemistries in active improvement... it will. - nuclear waste disposal is solved... if you have a LFTR or similar tech to "burn" it. Otherwise, the usual handwave on nuclear waste is a telltale sign of "old nuclear", as are the people that say it is safe. Solid fuel rod designs are not safe. I am not saying that LFTR should be the only path forward for nuclear, but the advantages of LFTR should be what a "real" nuclear solution has. LFTR is: - scalable in size - meltdown-proof (plug and pool where the liquid loses criticality) - burns/breeds virtually all of its fuel, and IIRC can "burn" spend rod waste - somewhat proliferation resistant Again, I don't know if the LFTR design challenges are truly problematic, but the CAPABILITIES of LFTR should be a standard next-gen nuclear must be held to. The Greens aren't correct generally in engineering or science, but what they are right about, indirectly, is the culture of nuclear power that grew up in the Cold War and attached to military needs for weapons isotopes. Those political priorities overrode safety, good design, economic performance, and other concerns, and left us with the terrible solid fuel rod design. LFTR got canned in the US in a backroom political power move, and the same nuclear establishment keeps it restricted from funds and research. Again, I'm not saying LFTR is the "one true path". But its core abilities address the Green concerns: meltdown proof and virtually waste free. Those two aspects are the base table stakes a "next gen nuclear" would need. Maybe you have a combined reactor approach where one design produces from solid or pebble fuel, and then that gets fed to LFTRs for final burn off. So I guess I would recommend Germany / France keep their nukes going for now, but view them as life support: these things are going away once battery/storage tech scales to meet the need, a virtually guaranteed proposition in the five year near future timeline. For nuclear to be relevant long term you'll need the safety tablestakes mentioned, but all nuclear projects are 10 years out: you'll need a stable price to target/combat 10 years out from wind/solar, and you don't know that right now.

naasking 4y ago
> - LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a political and management issue. LCOE isn't the only factor of relevance. That's partly how Germany got into its current situation, because LCOE doesn't account for intermittency. To solve that you need a large interconnected grid and huge overcapacity of renewables (and even then you'll have some brown outs), or you need long-term grid storage, which still has limited options at this time. The LCOE of renewables is not so rosy after you include all of these considerations to achieve the same stable service as a nuclear plant. We might get there in 20 years, but we're not there yet.

Abishek_Muthian 4y ago

What's happening in Germany is unfortunate, But I feel that while rebutting the statements of Anti-Nuclear Energy institutions with science people often forget that in the end humans run the reactors and the safety/efficacy of a Nuclear reactor also depends upon the people who run it i.e. even the stringent of safety protocols & design choices can be rendered useless by corrupt imbeciles(As we've seen in the past). So we should be careful in appropriating the overwhelming evidence of Nuclear Energy being safe and efficient to reactor in X vs Y.

Cryptonic 4y ago

Nice idea to shrink "Zukunftstechnologien" down to solar at the end of the argumentation... The problem with nuclear is that companies will not have to pay for final storage of the waste. Tax payers will have to pay forever. Same shit with our german coal mines. Take this into your equation. Google "Ewigkeitskosten"