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Basically all major incidents involving nuclear power plants fueled that position. It started with Chernobyl but Fukujima was essentially the event that made t
by 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 agoI 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.
- soliton4 4y agoone argument that was repeated over and over by pro fission folks was that an accident like chernobyl could not happen in a "good" country like france, german or japan. seening how one of the most technologicaly advanced countries suffered a contaminating incident that is comparable on scale with chernobyl was a shock to most germans and blew the mentioned agument away. if you were old enough to remember not being allowed to go outside as a child, to see your playgrounds demolished and the sand exchanged, you may be thinking differently about it. for decades it wasnt safe to collect mushrooms in the woods, something germans are or better were quite fond of. i am honestly not sure if its even safe today. nuclear may be safe for the most part but when it goes wrong it goes wrong in such a dramatic way that it is traumatizing.
- polotics 4y agoFukushima was not Chernobyl: it killed nobody, polluted very little. Much less than a coal plant does in any case, even in terms of radioactive particles put up in the air ..
- bayesian_horse 4y agoFukushima was another reminder that you don't know what you don't know. And with nuclear power, if you don't know something, a whole chunk of your country needs to get evacuated and cleaned up at a stupendous cost.
- polotics 4y agoYou are writing something that is not true: in no way can a modern plant cause a large evacuation. Can you explain with an example what you mean? The UNSCEAR has the documentation you need to read in order to graduate from being a green-identity-affirming anti-nuclear commenter into an actual ecologist.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoSo you count the Fukushima plant as not modern enough, because it caused a large evacuation right? And what counts as modern? Certainly nothing that has ever been built in Germany. And how fast can we build them? They need to start to come online in the next few years to do anything to stop global warming.
- polotics 4y agoThe evacuation was precautionary, killed one person in an accident, only direct loss of life from the Fukushima accident. Not building adequate flood protection and building so close to sea was inane and not something you will find in other sea-shore plants, for example Diablo Canyon in California.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoFukushima incident was down to intentional missmanagement by those in charge of running it, not to not knowing something.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoAh yes. And you trust your government to do a perfect job stopping power companies from any such intentional miss-management, especially given such dire consequences? I don't, even though I trust my government quite far. Because the Japanese government's failure to stop TEPCO from this miss-management is just as bad as any engineering oversight. And Japan isn't a third-world country. Japan runs a tight ship in most regards, tighter than the US and many EU nations. Other countries with a nuclear industry are far more troublesome: Iran, Pakistan, India, Ukraine, Russia, China... But if Japan can fail so spectacularly, all risk estimates around nuclear power are futile.
- JanSt 4y agoIn 2021 the remaining (!) 6 power plants produced more electricity than all installed solar capacity. The nuclear waste storage is not solved because it is a policy not to solve it. On all metrics coal is more damaging and dangerous than nuclear.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoPoliticians are accountable by voters and voters object to have nuclear waste stored near their homes. Even those who don't think it's a problem and believe the scientists who say "this will never be a problem" (and they don't exactly say that, do they?) know that their property values will suffer. Putting coal as the alternative to nuclear power is not just a mistake, it's an entirely dishonest argument trying to fool people.
- soco 4y agoBut coal is the current alternative to nuclear power. A day may come when solar and wind will be, but it is not this day.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoThat's just a big fat lie. Even in Germany, the country you malign so much, coal power generation did not increase in the last few years. Not even when transitioning from Russian natural gas.
- soco 4y agoYou may need to delete your comment, will you? https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fuels-coal-comeback-germany-2022-12-16/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fu... (note: in 2020 coal energy in Germany was 20.4% which the above article doesn't mention)
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
- josteink 4y ago> Note that nuclear plants only contributed to about 5% of all the electrical power in Germany. And how much of that is coal? Nuclear power plants provides stable power regardless of weather, wind and climate, and serves as a necessary baseline which can be complimented by renewables. Eliminating this without having any replacement, any stable baseline power is knowingly making the power-grid and power-supply of your nation unstable. In lack of better words, I would call it malicious.
- Mashimo 4y ago> Nuclear power plants provides stable power regardless of weather, wind and climate I know some German powerplants have to lower power output when the cooling water gets low during heat waves: https://qz.com/1348969/europes-heatwave-is-forcing-nuclear-power-plants-to-shut-down https://qz.com/1348969/europes-heatwave-is-forcing-nuclear-p... But is that still the case with newly build plants?
- JanSt 4y agoNot a single german nuclear plant was powered down to heat or low water.
- Mashimo 4y agoThanks. Corrected. Do you know if it still the case with modern reactors that they are affected by heatwaves?
- JanSt 4y agoIt‘s rather easy to build cooling towers, so only a small problem.
- PurpleRamen 4y agoWhich is not really true. German plants were also throttling down significantly in summer. They were just not completely shutting down.