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Is there any rational basis for this that makes any sense? I honestly want to understand the anti-nuclear position but I can't seem to find anything that really

Is there any rational basis for this that makes any sense? I honestly want to understand the anti-nuclear position but I can't seem to find anything that really is convincing.

josteink 4y ago
There isn't. But existing nuclear-power (where the environmental cost is already paid) isn't perceived "green", even though we can get stable "free" power for years and years and years. The "Green shift" is fundamentally not scientific, but driven by emotions and buzzwords, and hand-wavey things which can appear to be environmentally friendly or in some cases, just pure environmental accounting cheating/fraud (like moving your emissions to another country instead). What all professional politicians really care most about though is their own personal reelection, and you can't get reelected without appealing to a wide enough audience. Doing "green" things is their current strategy to appeal to (non-rational perceptions held by) younger demographics.
JanSt 4y ago
It‘s basically fear. The Green Party was founded with the mission to stop nuclear power in Germany. The media repeated their talking points for years and years. It sounds so good and we have dozens of „experts“ who tell us how expensive and dangerous nuclear power is.
- civilized 4y ago
  As an American, it's so interesting to look at the intra-European differences we normally ignore. France managed to scale nuclear power with the consent of the population, and it's gone fine, but for some reason countries right next door don't see anything worth learning. I guess you could say the same about America and Canada, but some of us are accustomed to seeing Europeans as more enlightened than us politically. I suppose people around the world are not that different in the end.
  - Mashimo 4y ago
    France has a long term storage for nuclear waste. Germany has to dig their waste up again because groundwater is leaking in.
    - civilized 4y ago
      Interesting point, but seems unlikely to be a root cause of the difference? If anything I would guess the causation goes in the other direction - France was more committed and so did a more thoughtful job setting up nuclear sustainably.
      - bayesian_horse 4y ago
        Nope, Nope, Nope. France wanted to have nuclear weapons. Germany wasn't allowed to have them and we mostly didn't want to have them in any case (after WWII at least). Germany's nuclear infrastructure was just as "sustainable" (and that is a strange word for nuclear industry considering the investments, the mining, etc) as the French one, but smaller and entirely civilian.
        LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
        > entirely civilian ...Hrrm... There has been a strange clustering of Leukemia in children near Geesthacht, with much fuss about why that could be, and that it can't be at all related to the NPP Krümmel and adjoining research center there. There has been a tv-documentary by the ZDF in 2006, titled "Und keiner weiss warum... Leukämietod in der Elbmarsch" a few articles in the mainstream media, and some blogposts then. From my memory it was all very strange, much hush-hush by the local government, defamation of concerned citizens, and even stranger the burning up of evidence in of all possible places, a fire station involved several times with emergencies there. By random chance...imagine.... ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch#M%C3%B6glicher_Brandvorfall_am_GKSS_1986 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch... / https://www.atommuellreport.de/daten/detail/forschungszentrum-geesthacht.html https://www.atommuellreport.de/daten/detail/forschungszentru... / https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/geesthacht-labor-bestreitet-verbotene-atom-experimente-1.885955 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/geesthacht-labor-bestrei... / https://netzwerk-regenbogen.de/atomgk070413.html https://netzwerk-regenbogen.de/atomgk070413.html ) Also harassment and hampering of scientists which collected ground samples all over the area, and found no lab willing to examine them in all Germany. So they got it done in Minsk, Belorussia. Funny, isn't it? What was found there where so called 'spherules', not bigger than one millimeter, hollow ceramic spheres, with (meanwhile?) weakly radioactive matter in them. Obviously artificial. And unknown. Speculation ensues. Micronukes... Conspiracy!1!! Interestingly very similar stuff was also found in Hanau. ( www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/hanau-ermittlungen-wegen-radioaktiver-stoffe-im-wald-a-195069.html ) Whatever, call me sceptic regarding 'civilian'. Especially when the names of Kurt Diebner and Erich Bagge are involved :-)
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "how expensive and dangerous nuclear power is" Well, it is dangerous and therefore expensive. Mining Uranium is dirty. Handling the waste is expensive. And handling a big accident is very expensive. The alternatives are just expensive as well and not without risk either. So sure, big parts of those fears are definitely irrational. The risks of the invisible dangers of things people do not understand. This is always hard, especially coupled with the fear of a nuclear war. It should probably have been propagated more, that radiation is a very natural thing and without nuclear energy, there likely would be no life on earth, as the earth would be way colder, without fission inside the crust (and core?) warming the earth.
hutzlibu 4y ago
It is a cultural thing, the green party defined and bound their identity with the anti nuclear movement in the 80s/90s and now they rose to power. And that movement was strong back then, because chernobyl happened, the clouds came over here and to this day, it is recommended against eating mushrooms from the forest regulary. Then Fukoshima revitalisied that traumata and in the heat of the moment, the decision was made.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  Bullshit. The "Green" party is hovering around 20%, at best. Stop using them as scapegoats for bashing of opinions you don't like. Nuclear power is very unpopular in Germany. People don't like nuclear infrastructure in their back yards. And it's far from an irrational fear. And yes, there is a part about "We don't want nuclear weapons", so there is one less incentive to stomach the cost and issues and bulldoze over concerns. At the moment we can have political arguments about keeping one or two online. Don't mistake that for a desire or ability to build new ones...
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    They are part of the government and they are firmly anti nuclear and use their power. But sure, the base support for nuclear is low people who vote for them. Which is why even the CDU adopted it. Also I don't see, where I was bashing anything.
    - mqus 4y ago
      Sure, the greens have not prolonged the nuclear power plants, but right now this is mostly an economic decision. It's just too expensive for too little gain, to change plans again and again and again. The providers planned with destruction of those plants in mind (after being heavily compensated for shutting them down early). Planning to shut them down (without adequately speeding up replacements) was a mistake. But it's also a mistake to now decide to keep them (just 3! plants) running
      - 4y ago
hans_castorp 4y ago
Basically all major incidents involving nuclear power plants fueled that position. It started with Chernobyl but Fukujima was essentially the event that made the government speed up the whole plan. Plus: the still unclear situation on how and where all the nuclear waste will be stored for the next thousands of years. Note that nuclear plants only contributed to about 5% of all the electrical power in Germany.
- 0xDEF 4y ago
  >thousands of years After a few decades most of it will have decaded into low radioactivity industrial waste.
- doktrin 4y ago
  > Fukujima was essentially the event that made the government speed up the whole plan. It's wild to me that Fukushima was held up as a reasonable justification to accelerate nuclear decommissioning in Germany. Even ignoring the extent to which the disaster in question could have been mitigated, was anyone expecting a tsunami to suddenly manifest over Bavaria?
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "was anyone expecting a Tsunami to suddenly manifest over Bavaria?" No, the thinking or sentiment was, see, even high tech japan cannot securly operate nuclear plants(they know they have earthquakes and tsunamis), so there are surley things we overlooked as well. So nuclear is not totally safe. And there are a few things, as far as I know. For example the plants were not build taking into account, terrorists crashing a plane into them.
    - polotics 4y ago
      I have it from someone who actually ran finite elements calculations on this very thing, that you can crash a plane on a French plant all you want, it won't leak. You'd need a well placed JDAM, and even then the damage would be quite local, much less than the Chernobyl graphite fire.
adrianN 4y ago
Nuclear power is pretty expensive and doesn't do well in a grid with a high percentage of renewables.
- Cardinal7167 4y ago
  Citation needed
- ohyes 4y ago
  Expensive compared to what? It’s only expensive if you ignore the negative externalities of literally everything else.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Expensive compared to renewables of course.
    - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      Renewables + energy storage are more expensive than nuclear power plants.
      - adrianN 4y ago
        no, they are not
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    Talk to people involved in the Fukushima cleanup about "externalities" some time. Nuclear power is only cheap if you ignore that in essence, the whole society is carrying the risk of almost anything that goes wrong. A nuclear power company can't insure any of those risks and certainly can't pay the damages. Also hidden in those cost estimates is that you need a highly specialized labor force that is hard to ramp up and ramp down, and the field isn't exactly trendy. France is having a huge issue with that right now.
    - 4y ago
janmarsal 4y ago
Germany has a lot of brown coal and desire to use it. However, it's not politically trendy. By heavily investing in renewables while closing down nuclear power plants they know they'll have to be relying on coal for decades into the future out of "necessity" and thus they ensure the survival of their brown coal mining business. Kind of the same how oil companies shill for windmills and solar while telling everyone that nuclear power is very, very dangerous, because they know that windmills and solar aren't a solution and all countries that rely on such tech will be dependent on oil and gas. Renewables aren't really seen as a threat to fossil fuels, unlike nuclear power.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  Actually no, coal will be phased out much sooner than "decades".
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    So they say now. A different government after the next election might say something different. Lützerath was demolished for coal just this year.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/germany/coal-consumption https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/germany/coal-consumpti... Definitely going to shoot right back up any second now that it's financially unviable.
Mashimo 4y ago
Look into Asse II. West Germany was looking for a nuclear waste site. I think long to medium term? Not sure. Anyhow, they had like about a dozen potential sites. But then East Germany places a nuclear waste site very close to the border. Politicians do what they do best, step over the suggestion of the scientist and place all the nuclear waste into Asse II, which is close to the border. Just to fuck with East Germany. No, Asse II was not on the list of potential sites :))) Now we are combined again with a nuclear waste site smack in the middle of Germany. Groundwater leaks in and we have to dig up the old rusting barrels again. They have to dig a whole new tunnel just to get to them. It's insane. Oh, and before that we and a few other countries just throw the barrels into the ocean. This was a long time ago, so you might think we found a new site. No :) NIMBY is strong. France and Finnland have some decent long term storage. Combine the bad government track record with that Germany is the birth place of homeopathy and 50% of the population believes in angels. Sprinkle in a bit of Fukushima and Chernobyl. My mother sometimes talks about how she was scared and my sister could not play outside. Sure, a large part of it is not rational.
captainmuon 4y ago
Well the final storage problem for nuclear waste is not solved, and will likely never be solved. Second, nuclear power is not as competitive as everybody thinks without hefty subsidies. And what became important more recently, the Uranium is mostly imported from Russia and former USSR states. Switching off the nuclear power plants is a concious descision of the German society to go without from nuclear power. The descision is not between nuclear and fossil. The decision is between nuclear, and using less energy (when renewable cannot fill the gap). I find it surprising that the proponents of nuclear power, who are often free-market libertarians, have so little faith in the market. If we produce less power, prices will go up at first. But only marginally, because it will become more lucrative to build new (renewable) power plants. And energy-intensive industry will be scaled back in times where not much is generated. The economy works basically like a buffered solution. That's why I'm confident, when we turn off the last nuclear plant, nothing will happen.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  Actually, quite a bit of capacity was made up by not exporting so much capacity to France and other nations. Yes, before the nuclear transition, Germany exported quite a lot of energy to France, the supposed smart nuclear country.
wokwokwok 4y ago
It’s maybe not as stupid as it seems. Nuclear power makes sense in stable peaceful societies where long term planning and maintenance mitigate the risks associated with it. Europe is perhaps, not currently a stable peaceful place where that makes sense. In other circumstances I’d be all for nuclear power… but, maybe some solar panels that won’t fuck anything up if the conflict in Ukraine gets out of hand or global warming / ai / banking crisis causes a society collapse isn’t such a bad call in the short term, eh?
- cryptonym 4y ago
  Solar panels are not a replacement for nuclear power. Controllable energy sources as Gas and Coal are.
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    Then you don't understand power generation. Especially as long as fossil fuel power generation is still online, any non-fossil fuel power generation, even supposedly unstable, is worth-while because it reduces greenhouse emissions. The turning point where this changes is quite far off for most countries. You need to replace a lot of fossil fuels with solar/wind to come to that point. And by the time that happens, other solutions will be used, some of which are ready, some of which are not: plant-based fuels, energy storage of various forms and better capacity planning. But if you were really interested in this topic you should have heard or read that argument a thousand times by now, so I assume you just don't want to listen.
    - cryptonym 4y ago
      - I don't understand - I'm not really interested - I don't want to listen Sir, your response is not very civilised! Short term, if you had 10GW of controllable nuclear, you will have to replace it with 10GW of another controllable source. As long as you don't have huge energy storage, replacing reliable and controllable energy source with something not controllable is pure fantasy. In our world this is typically replaced by Gas or Coal. Maybe in a future world we'll have plans to replace one controllable power plant with renewable and storage. BTW I'm mostly speaking about capacity and infrastructure, for sure you are free to not use an infrastructure at its maximum when there is wind or sun but you still need to build it, maintain it, buy and store gas coal or whatever... Solar/wind is far from ideal, requiring more cement, metal and other materials but also more space than other traditional concentred power sources and by multiple orders of magnitude. You also have to take into account new infrastructures for energy storage.
quonn 4y ago
No company wants to run the plants, they are very old, expensive and only ever provided 5% of the energy anyway. The population overwhelmingly rejects it (rightfully so) and nobody wants the fuel dumped in their backyard later. And the locations we had planned for that is broken.
- JanSt 4y ago
  1) they are some of the most modern plants on this planet, upgraded very regualary 2)The companies do want to run them, just bot under the imposed conditions and constant exit threat. Preussen Elektra lobbied to keep them running constantly 3)They provided vastly more in the past but got axed piece by piece 4) around 80% currently want to keep them running, especially younger people 5) in other news, no one wants climate change. And no garden was requested as waste storage yet.
  - quonn 4y ago
    1) Most were built in the 70s, the ones still running were all built in 1982. Since then the safety precautions have changed considerably and this cannot be retrofitted. This is also part of the reason why new plants are much more expensive. Has nothing to do with "upgrading". 2) The majority of German companies do not want to return to nuclear: “The phasing out of nuclear energy was decided in 2011 in a political and social consensus and is clearly regulated by law. The use of nuclear energy for electricity production has therefore ended in Germany.” This decision was made by the conservative Merkel government, not by the green party. "The dismantling of the power plants, the disposal of radioactive material, the search for a repository - all of this consumes enormous sums of money. German authorities and research institutes are therefore expecting up to 34 cents per kilowatt hour for nuclear power - by far the highest price of all forms of energy." https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/energie/energiewende-kernenergie-hat-sich-fuer-deutschland-erledigt-warum-die-energiekonzerne-keine-rueckkehr-der-atomkraft-wollen/27781670.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/energie/energiewend... 3) The have provided a greater part of the electricity, not of the energy needs. 4) The decision was made in 2011, data shows only 21% in favour of nuclear. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/196207/umfrage/meinung-zum-gebrauch-von-atomenergie-in-deutschland/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/196207/umfrag... 5) Backyard does not mean garden. It means near a village for example.
moek 4y ago
there are many reasons of course :) for example, germany does not have much space for radioactive waste and the people do not want to live near radioactive waste. so politicians can't decide where to put all the waste. also the performance of nuclear plants are not convincing: if you look to france where many nuclear plants have to shut down because there is not enough water to cool down the plants.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
It won't make sense to you. I don't believe you a tiny bit when you say you want to understand it. But yes, there are rational arguments. It is entirely rational not to believe "scientific" risk estimates after a couple too many impossible accidents happened. Estimation risk is real, fat tail risks are a problem, especially with the potential of radioactive fallout. The total projected cost of the Fukushima cleanup is going up year by year btw. Other rational arguments: The infrastructure is unwieldy and extremely unpopular at best. Germany has no path to solving the nuclear waste issue, partly for political reasons: Nobody wants that (or other parts of nuclear infrastructure, really) in their backyard, and backyards are spaced pretty closely in the old world, and when every citizen has the same voting weight, tough luck. It just doesn't work. Ukraine is teaching us another point: Nuclear power plants are weak points in the national security, and extremely so in wartime. Even when the enemy shows restraint (Russia strangely does, in that regard) there is an awkward element of hostage taking. Nuclear power is a bet on multiple decades of peace and everything going just right. And if you were really that interested, you could easily find lots more arguments.
elif 4y ago
Germany has the 6th largest coal reserve in the world. It makes (economic) sense for them to protect their natural resource value by extending its relevancy as long as possible. Just like it makes (economic) sense for Germany to use its ECB role to put struggling economies into debt agreements that, for instance, transfer control of national infrastructure like airports to German corporations. Of course, in both cases, the superficial reasons given are bright fairytales of benevolence, and the German economic benefits are cast as convenient but coincidental externalities.
- quonn 4y ago
  What is this magical role that Germany supposedly has in the ECB? Name the struggling country that was supposedly put in a debt agreement. Is this Greece? Did Greece not _choose_ in a popular vote to remain in the Eurozone? Did they not enter the Eurozone by using fraudulent accounting in the first place? Let us know what Germany then supposedly did exactly during that crisis. Regarding coal your argument makes zero sense. Either nuclear is cheaper and could cover all needs, then it doesn't matter how much coal there is, it could be left alone. Or it isn't, then there is no need to shut down nuclear to expand coal. In reality German coal mining has not been economical for decades and has been heavily subsidised to safe some jobs. The German policy is to change everything to renewables and to phase out coal until 2030.
  - elif 4y ago
    The magical role is that they conveniently provided the ECB, an institution that exists on German soil, with such "independence" that when a real crisis was presented, they were stripped of any actual decision making power and instead the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troika_(European_group) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troika_(European_group) was formed to implement the largest scale changes. The troika, of course being also conveniently headed by the German chancellor, or "the de facto leader of the European Union (EU)" as her Wikipedia page explains in its introductory description.
    - quonn 4y ago
      > an institution that exists on German soil This is like saying the EU parliament conveniently is located in Belgium and therefore Belgium controls it. "The ECB is directly governed by European Union law. Its capital stock, worth €11 billion, is owned by all 27 central banks of the EU member states as shareholders." [0] [0] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/orga/capital/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/orga/capital/html/index.en.htm... The ECB was not strapped of any power, but as a central bank it cannot by itself bailout countries. The Troika was formed to perform this bailout. I'm not disputing that Germany wields considerable soft power in Europe due to the size of it's economy, but the EU is set up in a way that Germany is a member like the others. More information here: https://time.com/3980384/germany-europe-greece-crisis/ https://time.com/3980384/germany-europe-greece-crisis/ "German taxpayers invested for decades in the development of peripheral European Union members, spent trillions to develop Eastern Germany, and will now pay a good chunk of a third Greek bailout that will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion."
tfourb 4y ago
The origin of the German discourse about nuclear power is linked to a) nuclear proliferation and b) Chernobyl The generation born after WWII developed a deep desire to not repeat the slaughter of WWII and many felt that their parents essentially lied to them about their experiences during the Nazi era and their responsibility for it. This mistrust transferred to government policies that would rebuilt the German armed forces, join NATO and by extension come under the "nuclear umbrella" of the US. Nuclear power was seen by many of these people as a bridge technology into nuclear weapons. Regarding Chernobyl, it might be difficult for Americans to understand how scary and personal that crisis felt for many Germans. I personally can't remember the incident, but our parents shaved our heads and kept us indoors for days and weeks out of fear of potential nuclear fallout. It is comparable to the psychological impact of the COVID-epidemic for many of that generation. My wife is from Eastern Bavaria and forest mushrooms and wild boars over there still have elevated radiation levels and are not recommended to be eaten in many cases. The phaseout of the last nuclear power plants was essentially decided more than two decades ago under a green-left government. A bit more than ten years ago, a center-liberal government came to power and would have been able to reverse the decision (many politicians in the two parties would have liked to) but Fukushima happened and this became politically untenable. To remove the topic from the political discourse, Angela Merkel pushed through an acceleration of the phaseout schedule. Today, even the companies running the power plants have lost interest. Re-certification was not done in recent years and would take the remaining power stations offline for months or years, anyway. All of them are many decades old now, beyond their original life span. So is all of this "rational"? Maybe not in hindsight, but I would argue it was for many people at the time and given that nuclear power never contributed more than roughly 25% to Germanys power production (I think), renewables are growing rapidly and no nuclear power station has been built without massive government subsidies, I personally think that re-entering the nuclear arena does not make any sense for Germany at the moment.
wuming2 4y ago
https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-union https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-un... The number of nuclear reactors in operation in the EU peaked in 1989. More than thirty years of decline demonstrate low political, taxpayers and eventually industrial support. There are only so many years you can invest at training and financing without returns. Only nations with a nuclear deterrent still moderately invest in nuclear power. Industry and society in general moved on.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
The plants are old, they must shut down anyway. And it doesn't make much sense to invest in a harmful technology, when you can also invest in something better. Especially if you are already on the way, because you are forced to go down that road.
- polotics 4y ago
  All plants that are kept in operation have every single component in need of replacement replaced well in advance, so none of the European plants is old in any way a car could be considered old.
_hypx 4y ago
> British environmental campaigner George Monbiot last year compared Germany’s nuclear shutdown to Brexit, describing it “as a needless act of self-harm, driven by misinformation and the irrational allocation of blame”. That says it best. Germany will probably see a dramatic increase in fossil fuel consumption. They will also likely see higher energy prices.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  Will? WILL!? Have I got news for you...

Is there any rational basis for this that makes any sense? I honestly want to understand the anti-nuclear position but I can't seem to find anything that really is convincing.

josteink 4y ago

There isn't. But existing nuclear-power (where the environmental cost is already paid) isn't perceived "green", even though we can get stable "free" power for years and years and years. The "Green shift" is fundamentally not scientific, but driven by emotions and buzzwords, and hand-wavey things which can appear to be environmentally friendly or in some cases, just pure environmental accounting cheating/fraud (like moving your emissions to another country instead). What all professional politicians really care most about though is their own personal reelection, and you can't get reelected without appealing to a wide enough audience. Doing "green" things is their current strategy to appeal to (non-rational perceptions held by) younger demographics.

JanSt 4y ago

It‘s basically fear. The Green Party was founded with the mission to stop nuclear power in Germany. The media repeated their talking points for years and years. It sounds so good and we have dozens of „experts“ who tell us how expensive and dangerous nuclear power is.

civilized 4y ago
As an American, it's so interesting to look at the intra-European differences we normally ignore. France managed to scale nuclear power with the consent of the population, and it's gone fine, but for some reason countries right next door don't see anything worth learning. I guess you could say the same about America and Canada, but some of us are accustomed to seeing Europeans as more enlightened than us politically. I suppose people around the world are not that different in the end.
- Mashimo 4y ago
  France has a long term storage for nuclear waste. Germany has to dig their waste up again because groundwater is leaking in.
  - civilized 4y ago
    Interesting point, but seems unlikely to be a root cause of the difference? If anything I would guess the causation goes in the other direction - France was more committed and so did a more thoughtful job setting up nuclear sustainably.
    - bayesian_horse 4y ago
      Nope, Nope, Nope. France wanted to have nuclear weapons. Germany wasn't allowed to have them and we mostly didn't want to have them in any case (after WWII at least). Germany's nuclear infrastructure was just as "sustainable" (and that is a strange word for nuclear industry considering the investments, the mining, etc) as the French one, but smaller and entirely civilian.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
        > entirely civilian ...Hrrm... There has been a strange clustering of Leukemia in children near Geesthacht, with much fuss about why that could be, and that it can't be at all related to the NPP Krümmel and adjoining research center there. There has been a tv-documentary by the ZDF in 2006, titled "Und keiner weiss warum... Leukämietod in der Elbmarsch" a few articles in the mainstream media, and some blogposts then. From my memory it was all very strange, much hush-hush by the local government, defamation of concerned citizens, and even stranger the burning up of evidence in of all possible places, a fire station involved several times with emergencies there. By random chance...imagine.... ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch#M%C3%B6glicher_Brandvorfall_am_GKSS_1986 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuk%C3%A4miecluster_Elbmarsch... / https://www.atommuellreport.de/daten/detail/forschungszentrum-geesthacht.html https://www.atommuellreport.de/daten/detail/forschungszentru... / https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/geesthacht-labor-bestreitet-verbotene-atom-experimente-1.885955 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/geesthacht-labor-bestrei... / https://netzwerk-regenbogen.de/atomgk070413.html https://netzwerk-regenbogen.de/atomgk070413.html ) Also harassment and hampering of scientists which collected ground samples all over the area, and found no lab willing to examine them in all Germany. So they got it done in Minsk, Belorussia. Funny, isn't it? What was found there where so called 'spherules', not bigger than one millimeter, hollow ceramic spheres, with (meanwhile?) weakly radioactive matter in them. Obviously artificial. And unknown. Speculation ensues. Micronukes... Conspiracy!1!! Interestingly very similar stuff was also found in Hanau. ( www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/hanau-ermittlungen-wegen-radioaktiver-stoffe-im-wald-a-195069.html ) Whatever, call me sceptic regarding 'civilian'. Especially when the names of Kurt Diebner and Erich Bagge are involved :-)
hutzlibu 4y ago
"how expensive and dangerous nuclear power is" Well, it is dangerous and therefore expensive. Mining Uranium is dirty. Handling the waste is expensive. And handling a big accident is very expensive. The alternatives are just expensive as well and not without risk either. So sure, big parts of those fears are definitely irrational. The risks of the invisible dangers of things people do not understand. This is always hard, especially coupled with the fear of a nuclear war. It should probably have been propagated more, that radiation is a very natural thing and without nuclear energy, there likely would be no life on earth, as the earth would be way colder, without fission inside the crust (and core?) warming the earth.

hutzlibu 4y ago

It is a cultural thing, the green party defined and bound their identity with the anti nuclear movement in the 80s/90s and now they rose to power. And that movement was strong back then, because chernobyl happened, the clouds came over here and to this day, it is recommended against eating mushrooms from the forest regulary. Then Fukoshima revitalisied that traumata and in the heat of the moment, the decision was made.

bayesian_horse 4y ago
Bullshit. The "Green" party is hovering around 20%, at best. Stop using them as scapegoats for bashing of opinions you don't like. Nuclear power is very unpopular in Germany. People don't like nuclear infrastructure in their back yards. And it's far from an irrational fear. And yes, there is a part about "We don't want nuclear weapons", so there is one less incentive to stomach the cost and issues and bulldoze over concerns. At the moment we can have political arguments about keeping one or two online. Don't mistake that for a desire or ability to build new ones...
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  They are part of the government and they are firmly anti nuclear and use their power. But sure, the base support for nuclear is low people who vote for them. Which is why even the CDU adopted it. Also I don't see, where I was bashing anything.
  - mqus 4y ago
    Sure, the greens have not prolonged the nuclear power plants, but right now this is mostly an economic decision. It's just too expensive for too little gain, to change plans again and again and again. The providers planned with destruction of those plants in mind (after being heavily compensated for shutting them down early). Planning to shut them down (without adequately speeding up replacements) was a mistake. But it's also a mistake to now decide to keep them (just 3! plants) running
    - 4y ago

hans_castorp 4y ago

Basically all major incidents involving nuclear power plants fueled that position. It started with Chernobyl but Fukujima was essentially the event that made the government speed up the whole plan. Plus: the still unclear situation on how and where all the nuclear waste will be stored for the next thousands of years. Note that nuclear plants only contributed to about 5% of all the electrical power in Germany.

0xDEF 4y ago
>thousands of years After a few decades most of it will have decaded into low radioactivity industrial waste.
doktrin 4y ago
> Fukujima was essentially the event that made the government speed up the whole plan. It's wild to me that Fukushima was held up as a reasonable justification to accelerate nuclear decommissioning in Germany. Even ignoring the extent to which the disaster in question could have been mitigated, was anyone expecting a tsunami to suddenly manifest over Bavaria?
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "was anyone expecting a Tsunami to suddenly manifest over Bavaria?" No, the thinking or sentiment was, see, even high tech japan cannot securly operate nuclear plants(they know they have earthquakes and tsunamis), so there are surley things we overlooked as well. So nuclear is not totally safe. And there are a few things, as far as I know. For example the plants were not build taking into account, terrorists crashing a plane into them.
  - polotics 4y ago
    I have it from someone who actually ran finite elements calculations on this very thing, that you can crash a plane on a French plant all you want, it won't leak. You'd need a well placed JDAM, and even then the damage would be quite local, much less than the Chernobyl graphite fire.

adrianN 4y ago

Nuclear power is pretty expensive and doesn't do well in a grid with a high percentage of renewables.

Cardinal7167 4y ago
Citation needed
ohyes 4y ago
Expensive compared to what? It’s only expensive if you ignore the negative externalities of literally everything else.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Expensive compared to renewables of course.
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    Renewables + energy storage are more expensive than nuclear power plants.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      no, they are not
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  Talk to people involved in the Fukushima cleanup about "externalities" some time. Nuclear power is only cheap if you ignore that in essence, the whole society is carrying the risk of almost anything that goes wrong. A nuclear power company can't insure any of those risks and certainly can't pay the damages. Also hidden in those cost estimates is that you need a highly specialized labor force that is hard to ramp up and ramp down, and the field isn't exactly trendy. France is having a huge issue with that right now.
  - 4y ago

janmarsal 4y ago

Germany has a lot of brown coal and desire to use it. However, it's not politically trendy. By heavily investing in renewables while closing down nuclear power plants they know they'll have to be relying on coal for decades into the future out of "necessity" and thus they ensure the survival of their brown coal mining business. Kind of the same how oil companies shill for windmills and solar while telling everyone that nuclear power is very, very dangerous, because they know that windmills and solar aren't a solution and all countries that rely on such tech will be dependent on oil and gas. Renewables aren't really seen as a threat to fossil fuels, unlike nuclear power.

bayesian_horse 4y ago
Actually no, coal will be phased out much sooner than "decades".
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  So they say now. A different government after the next election might say something different. Lützerath was demolished for coal just this year.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/germany/coal-consumption https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/germany/coal-consumpti... Definitely going to shoot right back up any second now that it's financially unviable.

Mashimo 4y ago

Look into Asse II. West Germany was looking for a nuclear waste site. I think long to medium term? Not sure. Anyhow, they had like about a dozen potential sites. But then East Germany places a nuclear waste site very close to the border. Politicians do what they do best, step over the suggestion of the scientist and place all the nuclear waste into Asse II, which is close to the border. Just to fuck with East Germany. No, Asse II was not on the list of potential sites :))) Now we are combined again with a nuclear waste site smack in the middle of Germany. Groundwater leaks in and we have to dig up the old rusting barrels again. They have to dig a whole new tunnel just to get to them. It's insane. Oh, and before that we and a few other countries just throw the barrels into the ocean. This was a long time ago, so you might think we found a new site. No :) NIMBY is strong. France and Finnland have some decent long term storage. Combine the bad government track record with that Germany is the birth place of homeopathy and 50% of the population believes in angels. Sprinkle in a bit of Fukushima and Chernobyl. My mother sometimes talks about how she was scared and my sister could not play outside. Sure, a large part of it is not rational.

captainmuon 4y ago

Well the final storage problem for nuclear waste is not solved, and will likely never be solved. Second, nuclear power is not as competitive as everybody thinks without hefty subsidies. And what became important more recently, the Uranium is mostly imported from Russia and former USSR states. Switching off the nuclear power plants is a concious descision of the German society to go without from nuclear power. The descision is not between nuclear and fossil. The decision is between nuclear, and using less energy (when renewable cannot fill the gap). I find it surprising that the proponents of nuclear power, who are often free-market libertarians, have so little faith in the market. If we produce less power, prices will go up at first. But only marginally, because it will become more lucrative to build new (renewable) power plants. And energy-intensive industry will be scaled back in times where not much is generated. The economy works basically like a buffered solution. That's why I'm confident, when we turn off the last nuclear plant, nothing will happen.

bayesian_horse 4y ago
Actually, quite a bit of capacity was made up by not exporting so much capacity to France and other nations. Yes, before the nuclear transition, Germany exported quite a lot of energy to France, the supposed smart nuclear country.

wokwokwok 4y ago

It’s maybe not as stupid as it seems. Nuclear power makes sense in stable peaceful societies where long term planning and maintenance mitigate the risks associated with it. Europe is perhaps, not currently a stable peaceful place where that makes sense. In other circumstances I’d be all for nuclear power… but, maybe some solar panels that won’t fuck anything up if the conflict in Ukraine gets out of hand or global warming / ai / banking crisis causes a society collapse isn’t such a bad call in the short term, eh?

cryptonym 4y ago
Solar panels are not a replacement for nuclear power. Controllable energy sources as Gas and Coal are.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  Then you don't understand power generation. Especially as long as fossil fuel power generation is still online, any non-fossil fuel power generation, even supposedly unstable, is worth-while because it reduces greenhouse emissions. The turning point where this changes is quite far off for most countries. You need to replace a lot of fossil fuels with solar/wind to come to that point. And by the time that happens, other solutions will be used, some of which are ready, some of which are not: plant-based fuels, energy storage of various forms and better capacity planning. But if you were really interested in this topic you should have heard or read that argument a thousand times by now, so I assume you just don't want to listen.
  - cryptonym 4y ago
    - I don't understand - I'm not really interested - I don't want to listen Sir, your response is not very civilised! Short term, if you had 10GW of controllable nuclear, you will have to replace it with 10GW of another controllable source. As long as you don't have huge energy storage, replacing reliable and controllable energy source with something not controllable is pure fantasy. In our world this is typically replaced by Gas or Coal. Maybe in a future world we'll have plans to replace one controllable power plant with renewable and storage. BTW I'm mostly speaking about capacity and infrastructure, for sure you are free to not use an infrastructure at its maximum when there is wind or sun but you still need to build it, maintain it, buy and store gas coal or whatever... Solar/wind is far from ideal, requiring more cement, metal and other materials but also more space than other traditional concentred power sources and by multiple orders of magnitude. You also have to take into account new infrastructures for energy storage.

quonn 4y ago

No company wants to run the plants, they are very old, expensive and only ever provided 5% of the energy anyway. The population overwhelmingly rejects it (rightfully so) and nobody wants the fuel dumped in their backyard later. And the locations we had planned for that is broken.

JanSt 4y ago
1) they are some of the most modern plants on this planet, upgraded very regualary 2)The companies do want to run them, just bot under the imposed conditions and constant exit threat. Preussen Elektra lobbied to keep them running constantly 3)They provided vastly more in the past but got axed piece by piece 4) around 80% currently want to keep them running, especially younger people 5) in other news, no one wants climate change. And no garden was requested as waste storage yet.
- quonn 4y ago
  1) Most were built in the 70s, the ones still running were all built in 1982. Since then the safety precautions have changed considerably and this cannot be retrofitted. This is also part of the reason why new plants are much more expensive. Has nothing to do with "upgrading". 2) The majority of German companies do not want to return to nuclear: “The phasing out of nuclear energy was decided in 2011 in a political and social consensus and is clearly regulated by law. The use of nuclear energy for electricity production has therefore ended in Germany.” This decision was made by the conservative Merkel government, not by the green party. "The dismantling of the power plants, the disposal of radioactive material, the search for a repository - all of this consumes enormous sums of money. German authorities and research institutes are therefore expecting up to 34 cents per kilowatt hour for nuclear power - by far the highest price of all forms of energy." https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/energie/energiewende-kernenergie-hat-sich-fuer-deutschland-erledigt-warum-die-energiekonzerne-keine-rueckkehr-der-atomkraft-wollen/27781670.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/energie/energiewend... 3) The have provided a greater part of the electricity, not of the energy needs. 4) The decision was made in 2011, data shows only 21% in favour of nuclear. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/196207/umfrage/meinung-zum-gebrauch-von-atomenergie-in-deutschland/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/196207/umfrag... 5) Backyard does not mean garden. It means near a village for example.

moek 4y ago

there are many reasons of course :) for example, germany does not have much space for radioactive waste and the people do not want to live near radioactive waste. so politicians can't decide where to put all the waste. also the performance of nuclear plants are not convincing: if you look to france where many nuclear plants have to shut down because there is not enough water to cool down the plants.

bayesian_horse 4y ago

It won't make sense to you. I don't believe you a tiny bit when you say you want to understand it. But yes, there are rational arguments. It is entirely rational not to believe "scientific" risk estimates after a couple too many impossible accidents happened. Estimation risk is real, fat tail risks are a problem, especially with the potential of radioactive fallout. The total projected cost of the Fukushima cleanup is going up year by year btw. Other rational arguments: The infrastructure is unwieldy and extremely unpopular at best. Germany has no path to solving the nuclear waste issue, partly for political reasons: Nobody wants that (or other parts of nuclear infrastructure, really) in their backyard, and backyards are spaced pretty closely in the old world, and when every citizen has the same voting weight, tough luck. It just doesn't work. Ukraine is teaching us another point: Nuclear power plants are weak points in the national security, and extremely so in wartime. Even when the enemy shows restraint (Russia strangely does, in that regard) there is an awkward element of hostage taking. Nuclear power is a bet on multiple decades of peace and everything going just right. And if you were really that interested, you could easily find lots more arguments.

elif 4y ago

Germany has the 6th largest coal reserve in the world. It makes (economic) sense for them to protect their natural resource value by extending its relevancy as long as possible. Just like it makes (economic) sense for Germany to use its ECB role to put struggling economies into debt agreements that, for instance, transfer control of national infrastructure like airports to German corporations. Of course, in both cases, the superficial reasons given are bright fairytales of benevolence, and the German economic benefits are cast as convenient but coincidental externalities.

quonn 4y ago
What is this magical role that Germany supposedly has in the ECB? Name the struggling country that was supposedly put in a debt agreement. Is this Greece? Did Greece not _choose_ in a popular vote to remain in the Eurozone? Did they not enter the Eurozone by using fraudulent accounting in the first place? Let us know what Germany then supposedly did exactly during that crisis. Regarding coal your argument makes zero sense. Either nuclear is cheaper and could cover all needs, then it doesn't matter how much coal there is, it could be left alone. Or it isn't, then there is no need to shut down nuclear to expand coal. In reality German coal mining has not been economical for decades and has been heavily subsidised to safe some jobs. The German policy is to change everything to renewables and to phase out coal until 2030.
- elif 4y ago
  The magical role is that they conveniently provided the ECB, an institution that exists on German soil, with such "independence" that when a real crisis was presented, they were stripped of any actual decision making power and instead the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troika_(European_group) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troika_(European_group) was formed to implement the largest scale changes. The troika, of course being also conveniently headed by the German chancellor, or "the de facto leader of the European Union (EU)" as her Wikipedia page explains in its introductory description.
  - quonn 4y ago
    > an institution that exists on German soil This is like saying the EU parliament conveniently is located in Belgium and therefore Belgium controls it. "The ECB is directly governed by European Union law. Its capital stock, worth €11 billion, is owned by all 27 central banks of the EU member states as shareholders." [0] [0] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/orga/capital/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/orga/capital/html/index.en.htm... The ECB was not strapped of any power, but as a central bank it cannot by itself bailout countries. The Troika was formed to perform this bailout. I'm not disputing that Germany wields considerable soft power in Europe due to the size of it's economy, but the EU is set up in a way that Germany is a member like the others. More information here: https://time.com/3980384/germany-europe-greece-crisis/ https://time.com/3980384/germany-europe-greece-crisis/ "German taxpayers invested for decades in the development of peripheral European Union members, spent trillions to develop Eastern Germany, and will now pay a good chunk of a third Greek bailout that will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion."

tfourb 4y ago

The origin of the German discourse about nuclear power is linked to a) nuclear proliferation and b) Chernobyl The generation born after WWII developed a deep desire to not repeat the slaughter of WWII and many felt that their parents essentially lied to them about their experiences during the Nazi era and their responsibility for it. This mistrust transferred to government policies that would rebuilt the German armed forces, join NATO and by extension come under the "nuclear umbrella" of the US. Nuclear power was seen by many of these people as a bridge technology into nuclear weapons. Regarding Chernobyl, it might be difficult for Americans to understand how scary and personal that crisis felt for many Germans. I personally can't remember the incident, but our parents shaved our heads and kept us indoors for days and weeks out of fear of potential nuclear fallout. It is comparable to the psychological impact of the COVID-epidemic for many of that generation. My wife is from Eastern Bavaria and forest mushrooms and wild boars over there still have elevated radiation levels and are not recommended to be eaten in many cases. The phaseout of the last nuclear power plants was essentially decided more than two decades ago under a green-left government. A bit more than ten years ago, a center-liberal government came to power and would have been able to reverse the decision (many politicians in the two parties would have liked to) but Fukushima happened and this became politically untenable. To remove the topic from the political discourse, Angela Merkel pushed through an acceleration of the phaseout schedule. Today, even the companies running the power plants have lost interest. Re-certification was not done in recent years and would take the remaining power stations offline for months or years, anyway. All of them are many decades old now, beyond their original life span. So is all of this "rational"? Maybe not in hindsight, but I would argue it was for many people at the time and given that nuclear power never contributed more than roughly 25% to Germanys power production (I think), renewables are growing rapidly and no nuclear power station has been built without massive government subsidies, I personally think that re-entering the nuclear arena does not make any sense for Germany at the moment.

wuming2 4y ago

https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-union https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-un... The number of nuclear reactors in operation in the EU peaked in 1989. More than thirty years of decline demonstrate low political, taxpayers and eventually industrial support. There are only so many years you can invest at training and financing without returns. Only nations with a nuclear deterrent still moderately invest in nuclear power. Industry and society in general moved on.

PurpleRamen 4y ago

The plants are old, they must shut down anyway. And it doesn't make much sense to invest in a harmful technology, when you can also invest in something better. Especially if you are already on the way, because you are forced to go down that road.

polotics 4y ago
All plants that are kept in operation have every single component in need of replacement replaced well in advance, so none of the European plants is old in any way a car could be considered old.

_hypx 4y ago

> British environmental campaigner George Monbiot last year compared Germany’s nuclear shutdown to Brexit, describing it “as a needless act of self-harm, driven by misinformation and the irrational allocation of blame”. That says it best. Germany will probably see a dramatic increase in fossil fuel consumption. They will also likely see higher energy prices.

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
Will? WILL!? Have I got news for you...