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What if Germany had invested in nuclear power?
- johnea 2y agoThen they could have giant piles of nuclear waste, that they have no idea how to dispose of, just like france...
- kman82 2y ago[flagged]
- rebolek 2y agoThose "giant piles" are abysmal compared to the damage done by coal plants which they keep running.
- H8crilA 2y agoCoal even releases nuclear isotopes into the air.
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoOr the long term ecological damage of solar panels. https://www.ecowatch.com/solar-environmental-impacts.html https://www.ecowatch.com/solar-environmental-impacts.html
- Solarisgood 2y ago"create solar panels is still nowhere near that of traditional energy facilities, and it is quite small when compared to oil drilling, fracking or coal mining" Did you post it to indicate that solar is bad or that it is also not 100% perfect?
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoThat solar is not perfect and not as effective as nuclear, which actually easily produces energy surpluses whenever needed and can provide the energy that is required to mine it. As opposed to solar, which still relies on fossil fuels due to the minimal adoption of nuclear, while also introducing its own environmental impacts.
- audunw 2y agoYou should take a look at how they dumped the earlier waste. It’s not something I’ve seen mentioned in these discussions: https://amp.dw.com/en/germanys-leaking-nuclear-waste-dump/video-69502364 https://amp.dw.com/en/germanys-leaking-nuclear-waste-dump/vi... After learning about Asse I totally understand why the Germans are so negative to nuclear energy. It’s not just Chernobyl that scarred them.
- Gud 2y agoGood thing no one is doing that anymore?
- fsflover 2y ago"If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 34 grams" https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch
- dotcoma 2y agoIs that a lot or very little? In any case, nuclear is a technology of the XX Century. The future is wind and solar.
- fsflover 2y ago> Is that a lot or very little? Read on my link. It's very little.
- Solarisgood 2y agoWould you be able to store a few kg (after decades) somewhere in your flat/house? I would say yes easily. "Hey we're is your nuclear waste?" "It's under my bed"
- lawn 2y agoThe future needs to first invent cheaper, more available, and more efficient energy storage before we can replace the old power plants. That fusion is the technology of the future does not mean we should dismantle what functions today.
- Dunedan 2y agoGermany also has giant piles of nuclear waste and doesn't even know yet where to store it permanently. Recently an assessment concluded that the process to select such a storage facility might take at least until 2074! [1] [1]: https://www.base.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/BASE/DE/fachinfo/fa/pasta_abschlussbericht.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=3 https://www.base.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/BASE/DE/fachin...
- stkdump 2y agoThere is exactly one country on earth that has found a permanent storage for its nuclear waste. For all we know Germany might still be amoung the first countries to find one.
- RGamma 2y agoAt this point we better find a way to slingshot it into space (SpinLaunch?)
- dgellow 2y agoPeople wouldnt like it because it sounds stupid, but sending radioactive waste deep at the bottom of oceans would work pretty well
- qwerty456127 2y agoIsn't it possible to engineer plants which use this waste for fuel?
- krasin 2y agoYes, breeder reactors can feed on waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor China has the plan to achieve closed nuclear fuel cycle, and there are new breeder reactors being put online to move the country closer to that goal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600
- qwerty456127 2y agoWhy is anybody troubled by the waste then? Why won't they just build some reactors of this kind?
- krasin 2y ago> Why is anybody troubled by the waste then? Greenpeace had a point back in 1970-ies, but the message got into a myth and subsequent advancements in technology have not been popularized enough to change the public perception.
- dgellow 2y agoGenerally a lots of misunderstandings regarding radioactive waste, but also breeder reactors are still fairly experimental.
- qwerty456127 2y agoI've read about breeder reactors in a German kids book in the nineties. How long do they have to be "experimental"? No surprise the nuclear industry is so weak when the progress is kept so slow (I used the word "kept" because the thing we are discussing can hardly be considered a bleeding edge advance).
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoIt does seem like renewables are taking over. But I do wish nuclear had had more fuel cycle ambitions. America's Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) used on-site pyro processing, and was able to process & burn a colossal amount of the waste (where-as breeders typically pull out & refine only plutonium, also a proliferation risk). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Onsite_reprocessing_using_pyroprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Onsite_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#Pyroprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#Pyroproce... We had so many interesting options for how to do nuclear in a responsible long term way. But so much of the world has seemingly been uninterested in funding the r&d.
- slow_typist 2y agoNo need to downvote. At least France is developing a disposal site in Bure. But they will need a second site for the highly active waste of the 50+ NNPs. EDIT: changed 80+ to 50+
- lousken 2y agoAs everybody was saying, their idea was silly at best. Good there's a study for that now
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- qwerty456127 2y agoCoincidentally (to the fact Germany is actively phasing out nuclear) Germany is the very country I would trust to run nuclear power plants without worry - every other nuclear-powered nation seems less good at quality and safety, the safety measures Germany applied seemed really good. Yet nowadays it appears Germany essentially outsources nuclear power generation to its neighbors who would still contaminate Germany in case of a nuclear incident at their land.
- usrusr 2y agoToyota - level reliability, train schedules that describe expectation, not ambition, speaking as a German I would have had a lot more trust in Japan running reactors.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jmkni 2y agoI guess the difference is the Earthquake threat
- krior 2y agoAs a german, I cannot speak for the situation in other countries, but Germany handled nuclear energy really poorly, especially the waste[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
- zeristor 2y agoImagine diselgate but with nuclear waste
- qwerty456127 2y agoAren't nuclear power plants generally ran by enterprises which are less concerned about sales and stocks than car manufacturers are?
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- cauch 2y agoWhile this study is very interesting, the way the Energiewende itself was applied was also not ideal. Some of the steps in the Energiewende were not applied properly, probably because the German government at the time was center-right and had conscious or unconscious biases in favor of coal and gas generations. It would have been interesting to compare the reasonable benefices of a properly-done nuclear path with the reasonable benefices of a properly-done renewable path (properly-done renewable path being constructed the same way: triangulating the situations in other countries), instead of comparing it with what really happened with the German renewable path.
- WalterBright 2y agoThere's nothing "right wing" about coal and gas power generation.
- wongarsu 2y agoCoal and gas is "what we always did", which sounds like the dictionary definition of the word "conservative" to me. Apart from that, at least in the context of German politics center-right ideology is "help the companies and everyone will prosper" and center-left ideology is "help the people and everyone will prosper". And with the amount of corruption evident in the center-right party that's morphed into "help the companies the high-ranking politicians are close to", which includes multiple companies heavily invested in coal and gas and few with serious commitments to green energy.
- WrongAssumption 2y agoHmm, seems to me historically the left has been at the forefront of protesting against nuclear anything, while conservatives have been promoting it even for energy supply. That is an instance of conservatives promoting something new, while the left has been wary of it.
- cauch 2y agoThings are obviously not as simplistic. The left was also promoting something new: the renewable and less consumerist society where people are less wasteful with energy and more conscious about not screwing up the environment. Nuclear is an appealing option for people who want to maintain the consumerist society and/or avoid calling into question the fact that the current ways of working may not be ideal. I think the right was both okay with nuclear, but still also sympathetic to coal and gas industries. Also, not sure that "conservative = against something new" is the correct understanding of the usual definition of the conservative. The conservative is usually to maintain the traditional balance of power where bosses get the big slice of cake. If their rich friends are coming with something new that profit to the communities currently in power, the conservative is usually totally up for it. And if we are currently in a situation where the cake is more equally distributed, they usually are totally for new things that re-give power to the previous elite (it looks "new", but the goal is to come back to what existed in the past).
- Solarisgood 2y agoWhat I don't understand is France: they have a controlled energy price but their nuclear provider has a lot of debt. And they need to start rebuilding new.ones. So was it smart in France? Besides the obvious advantage regarding CO2
- miohtama 2y agoGenerally, French is becoming Italy II with its debt, and this has a lot do with its labour market.
- dgellow 2y agoThey needed to build new ones decades ago but didn’t. It’s way too late now. Young people were pushed away from the industry, and now the country doesn’t have a skilled workforce anymore and mostly only has old reactors that cost more and more money every decade to maintain. The whole history of nuclear in Europe is incredibly sad, we stopped developing and investing after some early success, and with almost no serious consideration of future problems. And all of this has been known and discussed openly for decades.
- cauch 2y agoI think it is acknowledged in the energy sector that France drove itself in a dead-end (and I'm not sure how they are going to get out of it). There was a lot of reasons, including their botched electricity nationalization and the fact that electricity companies banked on short-term profit rather than longer-term stability (hoping that the state will save them and pay all their debt when it is needed). It does not mean that a nuclear path would have always led where France is, the same way a renewable path is not always leading to where Germany is.
- frafra 2y agoThe amount of debt is not directly correlated to the health of a company: most companies have debts, and building nuclear reactors is very capital intensive. EDF net income for 2023 is 10B €, while for H1 2024 is 7B €. From 2007 to 2024 always had a positive net worth except for 2022. France is a net-exporter, with cheap, reliable and low emission electricity. Germany is almost the opposite of that.
- Yeul 2y agoEven a lot of Dutch people don't know this but for decades the Netherlands was selling huge quantities of natural gas for bargain prices to anyone willing to pay. Why? Because some very smart Dutch experts calculated that Europe would switch to nuclear so there was a limited window of opportunity to sell this soon to be useless commodity. And to add insult to injury just as the Ukraine crisis started all the gas fields were starting to run dry.
- sebastiennight 2y agoTo give those experts some credit, they probably had overly optimistic assumptions that European countries would take the rational smart choice of nuclear, instead of being all over the place.
- illiac786 2y agoI’d agree, being wrong doesn’t mean the reasoning was wrong. They bet on the most likely and I would think it was at the time the most likely. Something less likely happened instead. Doesn’t make them stupid at all, it just illustrates that predicting the future is hard if not impossible.
- dehrmann 2y agoI think part of Russia and Iran making moves right now is that, like the Dutch, they're seeing the window of opportunity for selling fossil fuel closing, and they're settling long-term grievances while the rest of the world still needs their resources and can't isolate them like North Korea.
- kkfx 2y agoI suggest another study, albeit very hard to do: what if Germany have chosen de-urbanisation, observing that in the denser Nederland 81.3% of citizens live in homes not apartments, like in Belgium (77.6%) or France (62%) pushing a nation-wide program to build new homes (meaning "A class", well insulated, air-tight, with good windows, heat-pumps for heating, cooling and hot water) etc modeled as a State run real estate exchange a classic home against a new one, with some constraint like: - similar size, more allowed but at citizen expense - build in a locally hydro-geologically stable place (meaning a flood/landslide can arrive nearby but not in the home) - only offered for PERSONAL properties, or SME enterprise direct property, not allowed to be rent for 5 years at least after that bonus Obtaining as a result a sharp decrease in winter consumption for heating, summer consumption for cooling, and a bit of renewable to shift a bit of load AND a bit of semi-smart grid meaning a classic "low tariff" with pilot wires for appliances like hot water heater etc that in a new home could run a bit independently from the heated water usage? IME, having built a new home, I can state a mean of 1/7 to 1/10 overall consumption compared to an old one, meaning at large an enormous reduction in energy consumption and a bit of semi-autonomy allow for less urgent intervention in case of service issues witch in general means much lower costs and easier evolution for the service side. Aside building resilience and what we damn need for future evolution. A small notes for those from USA: in UE there are no USA-style suburbs, meaning even in spread living homes and commerce are normally mixed, so you normally do not need to travel much for anything, and you don't need to go to the nearest city for anything because anything is actually spread like homes. Cities on contrary are MUCH more dense than USA, to the point is practically impossible re-building simply because the construction site would disrupt the surrounding circulation in such impacting ways to be doable only in case of collapse risks. A last note for all: so far many state cities cost less than living spread but there is NO REAL STUDY on that topic, especially for MODERN cities (buildings built with elevators, HVAC, ventilation, fire and seismic safety, energy performances etc etc etc not classic "just a set of stacked boxes and some stairs"). IME and IMO having done some very basic computing a MODERN set of small homes consume less alone than an equivalent building of apartments and urban infra around (sewers, drinking water, electricity, roads) cost LESS as well for spread areas where infra a smaller instead of having to sustain density.
- dgellow 2y ago
- uecker 2y agoThe study misses the point I think (I only glimpsed over it). But Germany invested early into renewables at a time where they were still very expensive. The goal was to create an economy of scale and bring down the price. This was expensive for Germany but ultimately very successful: renewables are now very cheap. The same thing never worked with nuclear in the past.
- ethbr1 2y agoWell, every time it was tried there was an inconvenient nuclear incident that soured political will. The Offshore Power Systems plan for a Blount Island (Jacksonville, FL) reactor mass-production facility [0] is a fascinating what-if in nuclear history. If the oil crisis hadn't severely curtailed electrical demand and hit the economy (1973) and Three Mile Island hadn't partially melted down (1979), we might finally have gotten to see what standardized reactor production at scale looked like. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems
- uecker 2y agoWith technology so old and with so many plants which were built in the past, it should not need a huge political will anymore to be successful. But it is still so expensive that it has simply no chance on the market. In contrast, renewables are now cheap. And this is what Germany achieved with its - certainly substantial - investment.
- ethbr1 2y agoThe only countries that have achieved economies of scale in nuclear reactor design/build after the 1980s have been France and China. [0] Other countries built one reactor here or there, while continually shifting regulations and/or political support, and then were surprised it was shockingly expensive. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations#In_service https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_statio... (sort by Began Operation date)
- oezi 2y agoPart of why the Energiewende was expensive was that it provided long term financial incentives for those who invested in renewables when they weren't yet economically competitive. If you bought solar panels 20 years ago you received subsidies for every year since then at the prices of the past. In a way Germany bankrolled a lot of the renewable development with this. Of course it wasn't viable to continue this so German government scaled back the scheme aggressively, which unfortunately killed the solar industry in Germany almost entirely (roughly 10 years ago). Today everything has changed. Renewables are now cheaper than fossils and thus expanding at incredible rates. There is no point in turning back to nuclear power which just got worse and worse from their economics.
- _Microft 2y agoThis is sad but we can find some solace in that providing demand/an initial market by this, it basically jumpstarted the mass-production of photovoltaics, leading to price decline and thereby mass-adoption of solar power in my opinion.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago> Renewables are now cheaper than fossils They're cheap because they're produced in China (>80% of worldwide supply) that runs on fossils (>80% of their energy). Try producing a solar panel using electricity from a solar panel and it becomes much more expensive. Use that new panel to produce yet another panel and it becomes prohibitively expensive. The whole thing is a mirage.
- chrisMyzel 2y agoGermany, to this day, has been unable to fix their nuclear waste treatment. There is no single approved upon solution for radioactive waste and recently it became clear that even some facilities need to resurface and relocate waste which, again, has no clear path after decades. I'm sceptical that any of the recent "influencer campaigns" (it feels like that for me watching x/ twitter) have ever addressed this.
- bob_theslob646 2y agoDo you have a source for this?
- chrisMyzel 2y agoyou'll need to translate this and it's just an intro https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Marodes-Atommuell-Endlager-Asse-Der-lange-Weg-zur-Raeumung,asse1410.html https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Marodes-Atommuell... "Search for final repository could drag into 2070s" https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-do-nuclear-waste-storage-question https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-do-nuclear-w... (contains many official sources) https://www.endlagersuche-infoplattform.de/webs/Endlagersuche/EN/home/home_node.html https://www.endlagersuche-infoplattform.de/webs/Endlagersuch... (Infopage of the German Gov.)
- bob_theslob646 2y agoThank you for your reply.