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If the green movement had any sense they would be promoting nuclear and lobbying to get plants built asap. Instead most of the green movement is against nuclear

by rapsey 5mo ago

If the green movement had any sense they would be promoting nuclear and lobbying to get plants built asap. Instead most of the green movement is against nuclear and only make things worse, i.e. germany now using huge amounts of coal.

psb5 5mo ago
Well the article is saying transformers are overheating. That means the entire distribution network is probably not rated for such high tempratures and god knows how that is going to be solved even if you change the power plant.
- rapsey 5mo ago
  The thread is about the world moving off fossil fuels.
sevenzero 5mo ago
Because nuclear energy is only popular in certain circles. No, nuclear waste is not a solved issue. Given Russia was very happily attacking Zaporizhzhia they aren't as safe as you might want to believe. Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Fuck nuclear power.
- gambiting 5mo ago
  >>Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Isn't highly radioactive waste vitrified(turned into glass)? How is it leaking, exactly? And isn't the entire point of storing it inside salt that it's self sealing - even if there is a leak it won't go anywhere.
  - sevenzero 5mo ago
    Leakage due to water infiltration. Its about 120.000 barrels stored in "Asse II" that were produced between 1967 and 1978. The contaminated water is reaching ground water which already got positively tested for caesium-137 and plutonium.
    - Gud 5mo ago
      Nobody is arguing we should store nuclear waste haphazardly in barrels.
      - cess11 5mo ago
        Right, nobody is arguing for the negative consequences we've had from nuclear reactors, except perhaps atom bombs, but they happened anyway. I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste. Can you name some that you find trustworthy enough?
        gambiting 5mo ago
        >>I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste I know zero politicians I'd trust with deciding where to build wind farms either, it says more about politicians than the type of energy generation. These kinds of things should be decided following comprehensive research on several locations, which you know - is generally how it's done, example given by OP notwithstanding.
    - cess11 5mo ago
      2008: https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long-german-nuclear-leak-scandal-engulfs-country-and-disturbs-europe https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long... 2024: https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management/water-leaks-reported-at-germanys-asse-ii-radwaste-facility/ https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management... 2026: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-nuclear-waste-salt-mine-germany https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-... Here's a timeline as PDF: https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf Pricing in these things into nuclear energy production makes it quite unpalatable compared to simpler engineering, in my opinion. Who knows what will come of chinese fusion research, perhaps they'll figure it out and change my mind. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.h...
  - Mashimo 5mo ago
    German scientist had a list with possible locations for the "endlager" final location. But politicians did not listen and on purpose chose a location not on the list, but one that was close too east Germany to mess with them. They overruled the scientist. Until we clean it up and find a new endlager I think Germany should not build new nuclear reactor. Just not a good track record. Oh and before that we just dumped it into the north see.
- Manuel_D 5mo ago
  Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater. The fact that Zaporizhia was on the front lines of one of the biggest armed conflicts in recent memory and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
  - sevenzero 5mo ago
    Its not a solved issue. The plant still is in a state of emergency. It just shows that these plants are easy targets.
  - Mashimo 5mo ago
    > Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater. But Germany did not do it. They on purpose put it in a salt mine close to the east Germany border and now we have to dig it up again, because ground water is seeping in. A few weeks ago there were rumors that it's not possible to dig it up and we might have to flood it. It's such a cluster fuck. Finland did it well though.
  - simoncion 5mo ago
    > ...and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not? It is, yes. As was the performance of the Fukushima [0] reactors after getting hit with seismic forces notably outside their design tolerances... and -well- pretty much every commercially-operated fission power plant ever, other than the known-to-be-very-dangerous-to-everyone-even-at-the-time one the Soviets were running at Chernobyl. [0] Consider that the destruction of the power plant caused maybe one death years later and definitely caused a couple dozen injuries, whereas the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed that plant killed tens of thousands of people and injured many thousands more.
  - fileeditview 5mo ago
    > Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater. It's literally sweeping something under the carpet.. At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster. Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things. I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.
f_allwein 5mo ago
No. Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget/ where would you build?/ where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)?/ contributes little to global energy mix atm/ uranium is limited. Where do you get it from? Etc
- rapsey 5mo ago
  Nuclear waste is a hilariously small amount of mass. It takes decades to build because of permitting and excessive regulations, the current UK plant build being one public insanity after another. Mining uranium is not an issue, it is all over the place and so on. Every one of your points is a non issue, made into a big deal because of ideology.
  - expedition32 5mo ago
    Nuclear was built in the 60s and 70s when Europe was still somewhat poor. As countries become decadent standards go up. Folks suddenly have rights and they can afford lawyers. And that house that you want to bulldoze is a half million property.
- dotancohen 5mo ago
  > where would you store nuclear waste This is my favourite objection to nuclear energy. Why wouldn't we just burn the nuclear waste and vent it to the atmosphere? That's acceptable for the fossil fuel industry, so why not for nuclear? The fact that nuclear energy produces globs of concentrated, easily collected waste is a feature, not a problem. Air pollution from fossil fuels (including radioactive particles) is a leading cause of death worldwide.
  - rapsey 5mo ago
    Not only that, that nuclear waste is still incredibly energy dense and could be used in the future, if we actually invested more into developing nuclear technologies.
- lloeki 5mo ago
ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
Germany uses less coal now than at the peak of their nuclear output. They both trend down at a similar rate over the last two decades, coal slightly faster. https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=Germany&fuel=total&mode=line https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... You could make the argument that they could have phased coal out even faster if they'd kept nuclear and did the massive renewables rollout at the same time but generally people advocating strongly for nuclear while attacking environmental groups or left wing political groups are wildly divergent from reality and so don't bother.
- rapsey 5mo ago
  You are right I was mistaken. However Germany is still a basket case. If you want to move to a low carbon economy, you can not do it with renewables only and must be able to maintain equal power generation levels. Germany is producing less power than before and thus shooting their economy in the foot. Nuclear is the only practical solution.
  - fulafel 5mo ago
    > must be able to maintain equal power generation levels This is the baseload fallacy. It's not the case now and even less in the future as electricity use coevolves (eg more electricity users move to real time pricing, more storage, strengthened crossborder grid links, etc etc).
    - modo_mario 5mo ago
      And in the meantime you've been putting out insane amounts of co2 for decades.
      - fulafel 5mo ago
        If we so choose. If we want to move faster than we can mange to balance things, we can also reduce energy use. It's all just political decisions.
fulafel 5mo ago
The green movement's main job is to convince the rest of the policymakers to take the bull by the horns, the rest is just technical details. Though nuclear can't do much in the near term and it doesn't seem cost competitive at any timescale. We shouldn't need the green movement for this, the catastrophe is obvious now and has been for a long time, the needed policies have been talked about endlessly in intergovernmental climate summits etc.
Mashimo 5mo ago
> germany now using huge amounts of coal. I tried to look that up, but all I could find is that it trends downwards: https://emvg.energie-und-management.de/filestore/newsimgorg/Statista-Grafiken/Diverse_2025/statistic_id41511_kohleverbrauch-in-deutschland-bis-2023.orig.pdf https://emvg.energie-und-management.de/filestore/newsimgorg/... Not the best source, I think I have seen better where you can see all the different sources in one graph. Anyhow, you still can't eat mushrooms in certain places in Germany. And some wild boar meet has to be tested (they eat the muschrooms) All because of nuclear. And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem. I'm not against nuclear, I'm against nuclear in Germany until we prove we have our shit together.
- Someone 5mo ago
  > And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem For those who wonder: Asse II is a salt mine that has been used for storing radioactive waste. That started as “place barrels in rows, leave space for inspection” but later turned into “roll barrels onto the heap”, making inspection impossible. Current plans are to take the waste out and store it in a more responsible manner. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Recovery_and_closure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Recovery_and_clos...

by rapsey 5mo ago

psb5 5mo ago

Well the article is saying transformers are overheating. That means the entire distribution network is probably not rated for such high tempratures and god knows how that is going to be solved even if you change the power plant.

rapsey 5mo ago
The thread is about the world moving off fossil fuels.

sevenzero 5mo ago

Because nuclear energy is only popular in certain circles. No, nuclear waste is not a solved issue. Given Russia was very happily attacking Zaporizhzhia they aren't as safe as you might want to believe. Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Fuck nuclear power.

gambiting 5mo ago
>>Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Isn't highly radioactive waste vitrified(turned into glass)? How is it leaking, exactly? And isn't the entire point of storing it inside salt that it's self sealing - even if there is a leak it won't go anywhere.
- sevenzero 5mo ago
  Leakage due to water infiltration. Its about 120.000 barrels stored in "Asse II" that were produced between 1967 and 1978. The contaminated water is reaching ground water which already got positively tested for caesium-137 and plutonium.
  - Gud 5mo ago
    Nobody is arguing we should store nuclear waste haphazardly in barrels.
    - cess11 5mo ago
      Right, nobody is arguing for the negative consequences we've had from nuclear reactors, except perhaps atom bombs, but they happened anyway. I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste. Can you name some that you find trustworthy enough?
      - gambiting 5mo ago
        >>I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste I know zero politicians I'd trust with deciding where to build wind farms either, it says more about politicians than the type of energy generation. These kinds of things should be decided following comprehensive research on several locations, which you know - is generally how it's done, example given by OP notwithstanding.
  - cess11 5mo ago
    2008: https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long-german-nuclear-leak-scandal-engulfs-country-and-disturbs-europe https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long... 2024: https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management/water-leaks-reported-at-germanys-asse-ii-radwaste-facility/ https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management... 2026: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-nuclear-waste-salt-mine-germany https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-... Here's a timeline as PDF: https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf Pricing in these things into nuclear energy production makes it quite unpalatable compared to simpler engineering, in my opinion. Who knows what will come of chinese fusion research, perhaps they'll figure it out and change my mind. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.h...
- Mashimo 5mo ago
  German scientist had a list with possible locations for the "endlager" final location. But politicians did not listen and on purpose chose a location not on the list, but one that was close too east Germany to mess with them. They overruled the scientist. Until we clean it up and find a new endlager I think Germany should not build new nuclear reactor. Just not a good track record. Oh and before that we just dumped it into the north see.
Manuel_D 5mo ago
Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater. The fact that Zaporizhia was on the front lines of one of the biggest armed conflicts in recent memory and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
- sevenzero 5mo ago
  Its not a solved issue. The plant still is in a state of emergency. It just shows that these plants are easy targets.
- Mashimo 5mo ago
  > Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater. But Germany did not do it. They on purpose put it in a salt mine close to the east Germany border and now we have to dig it up again, because ground water is seeping in. A few weeks ago there were rumors that it's not possible to dig it up and we might have to flood it. It's such a cluster fuck. Finland did it well though.
- simoncion 5mo ago
  > ...and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not? It is, yes. As was the performance of the Fukushima [0] reactors after getting hit with seismic forces notably outside their design tolerances... and -well- pretty much every commercially-operated fission power plant ever, other than the known-to-be-very-dangerous-to-everyone-even-at-the-time one the Soviets were running at Chernobyl. [0] Consider that the destruction of the power plant caused maybe one death years later and definitely caused a couple dozen injuries, whereas the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed that plant killed tens of thousands of people and injured many thousands more.
- fileeditview 5mo ago
  > Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater. It's literally sweeping something under the carpet.. At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster. Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things. I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.

f_allwein 5mo ago

No. Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget/ where would you build?/ where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)?/ contributes little to global energy mix atm/ uranium is limited. Where do you get it from? Etc

rapsey 5mo ago
Nuclear waste is a hilariously small amount of mass. It takes decades to build because of permitting and excessive regulations, the current UK plant build being one public insanity after another. Mining uranium is not an issue, it is all over the place and so on. Every one of your points is a non issue, made into a big deal because of ideology.
- expedition32 5mo ago
  Nuclear was built in the 60s and 70s when Europe was still somewhat poor. As countries become decadent standards go up. Folks suddenly have rights and they can afford lawyers. And that house that you want to bulldoze is a half million property.
dotancohen 5mo ago
> where would you store nuclear waste This is my favourite objection to nuclear energy. Why wouldn't we just burn the nuclear waste and vent it to the atmosphere? That's acceptable for the fossil fuel industry, so why not for nuclear? The fact that nuclear energy produces globs of concentrated, easily collected waste is a feature, not a problem. Air pollution from fossil fuels (including radioactive particles) is a leading cause of death worldwide.
- rapsey 5mo ago
  Not only that, that nuclear waste is still incredibly energy dense and could be used in the future, if we actually invested more into developing nuclear technologies.
lloeki 5mo ago

ZeroGravitas 5mo ago

Germany uses less coal now than at the peak of their nuclear output. They both trend down at a similar rate over the last two decades, coal slightly faster. https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=Germany&fuel=total&mode=line https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... You could make the argument that they could have phased coal out even faster if they'd kept nuclear and did the massive renewables rollout at the same time but generally people advocating strongly for nuclear while attacking environmental groups or left wing political groups are wildly divergent from reality and so don't bother.

rapsey 5mo ago
You are right I was mistaken. However Germany is still a basket case. If you want to move to a low carbon economy, you can not do it with renewables only and must be able to maintain equal power generation levels. Germany is producing less power than before and thus shooting their economy in the foot. Nuclear is the only practical solution.
- fulafel 5mo ago
  > must be able to maintain equal power generation levels This is the baseload fallacy. It's not the case now and even less in the future as electricity use coevolves (eg more electricity users move to real time pricing, more storage, strengthened crossborder grid links, etc etc).
  - modo_mario 5mo ago
    And in the meantime you've been putting out insane amounts of co2 for decades.
    - fulafel 5mo ago
      If we so choose. If we want to move faster than we can mange to balance things, we can also reduce energy use. It's all just political decisions.

fulafel 5mo ago

The green movement's main job is to convince the rest of the policymakers to take the bull by the horns, the rest is just technical details. Though nuclear can't do much in the near term and it doesn't seem cost competitive at any timescale. We shouldn't need the green movement for this, the catastrophe is obvious now and has been for a long time, the needed policies have been talked about endlessly in intergovernmental climate summits etc.

Mashimo 5mo ago

> germany now using huge amounts of coal. I tried to look that up, but all I could find is that it trends downwards: https://emvg.energie-und-management.de/filestore/newsimgorg/Statista-Grafiken/Diverse_2025/statistic_id41511_kohleverbrauch-in-deutschland-bis-2023.orig.pdf https://emvg.energie-und-management.de/filestore/newsimgorg/... Not the best source, I think I have seen better where you can see all the different sources in one graph. Anyhow, you still can't eat mushrooms in certain places in Germany. And some wild boar meet has to be tested (they eat the muschrooms) All because of nuclear. And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem. I'm not against nuclear, I'm against nuclear in Germany until we prove we have our shit together.

Someone 5mo ago
> And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem For those who wonder: Asse II is a salt mine that has been used for storing radioactive waste. That started as “place barrels in rows, leave space for inspection” but later turned into “roll barrels onto the heap”, making inspection impossible. Current plans are to take the waste out and store it in a more responsible manner. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Recovery_and_closure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Recovery_and_clos...