Swiss To End Use of Nuclear Power

mdsolar writes "Energy minister Doris Leuthard is set to propose Switzerland gradually exits nuclear power, two Swiss newspapers reported on Sunday, citing sources close to the government. The multi-party Swiss government was expected to make an announcement on nuclear policy on Wednesday and may recommend an exit. Switzerland's five nuclear reactors generate about 40 percent of the country's electricity."

Comments

Re:What will they replace it with?

[xMrFishx]

Pacifism, obviously.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[siddesu]

You could have read the TFA, it wasn't that long:

The two papers reported Leuthard backed continuing to use current nuclear plants until the end of their lifespans, not building any new ones, and expanding alternative energy sources such as water power.

Headline Misleading

[Frosty Piss]

The Slashdot headline is (predictably?) not accurate. The Swiss *ARE NOT* ending nuclear power. Rather, there is a proposal to gradually exit nuclear power by not building any new plants. Realistically, even if such a proposal was approved by the current government, given the growing energy needs of society and the shrinking supply / rising cost / environmental issues associated with fossil fuels, I don't see this happening. The current technologies of renewable energy simply cannot support the world's energy needs.

So what's it going to be? Continue with fossil fuels, or continue developing safer cleaner nuclear? Switzerland's five nuclear reactors generate about 40 percent of the country's electricity, and the needs will only grow. What can realistically replace that?

Re:Headline Misleading

[yodleboy]

sadly, the same environmental crowd that demands an end to nuclear will stonewall that as well. Just saw a lovely article in Wired about the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generator in the Mojave. 5 1/2 square miles of mirrors. 5 1/2. guess what? the environmental crowd is suing to stop it on the grounds that those 5 1/2 square miles of sand are more important as habitat than a 60% increase in US solar generation. Yet they will no doubt be at the next anti-nuclear, anti-fossil fuel rally. What exactly are we supposed to use for power? Happy thoughts maybe?

Re:Headline Misleading

[peragrin]

For Japan to replace the 6 fukishima reactors, japan will need to build something like 12,000 2 MW wind turbines. If you put it on the coast your going to use something along the lines of 1,000 miles of shoreline.

To replace with PV solar you need a similar land area devoted to cells.

With Solar salt you get a higher density, so maybe only 20 solar salt plants.

To replace with tidal means you have to destroy your fishing grounds.

Geo thermal might be possible but with the number of earthquakes you will run into problems.

Take a good look at actual power output of the worlds largest turbine, and solar fields and then compare it to a single nuclear reactor. What you will find is that Nuclear aircraft carriers have larger power plants.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[StripedCow]

They'll put a paddle-wheel in the cash-flow going to the nation's banks.

Posted by 'mdsolar'

[Rurik]

So an anti-nuclear story posted by a user named 'mdsolar' with a blog running very anti-nuclear posts. He also is involved in a business that rents solar systems to homes (http://www.blogger.com/profile/14124764472206647347).

Christ, Slashdot. Can you be a bit more opaque in posting biased stories?

Re:Posted by 'mdsolar'

[Halo1]

The link goes to Reuters. Who cares about the bias of the submitter? Doesn't pretty much every submitter only submit stories they feel should see wider exposure, and hence are biased about? It does work for me like that at least.

Re:Posted by 'mdsolar'

[vadim_t]

You know, I'd be willing to bet that stories about Apple are mostly submitted by fans or people who hate the company, stories about games are mostly submitted by gamers, and stories about new versions of the Linux kernel mostly come from Linux users.

In other words, people submit stores about subjects they care about, and are almost certainly biased in one way or another.

So what's the big deal here?

Re:Posted by 'mdsolar'

[Anonymous Coward]

He also is involved in a business that rents solar systems

I recently heard about an entire country you can rent for $70,000/day, but now you can rent an entire solar system? How much does that cost?!

Re:What will they replace it with?

[ChienAndalu]

French nuclear power.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[Chelloveck]

The two papers reported Leuthard backed continuing to use current nuclear plants until the end of their lifespans, not building any new ones, and expanding alternative energy sources such as water power.

Ah. So in other words they don't have a plan yet. Unless you count "hoping really hard that something revolutionary will happen before our existing nuke plants wear out" to be a plan.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[Anonymous Coward]

So they are basically trying to create another Japan like incident, on purpose this time.

Come 40 years from now when these plants are past their life expectancy, and desperately need updates to newer technology, instead they will remain falling apart and not replaced, since they clearly have no plan to move away to another form of power generation that can match their usage needs. (No water will not cut it)

Then the unmaintained and failing hardware will do as all unmaintained hardware does and fail catastrophically, giving the moron anti-nuclear people one more bullet in the 'zomg nuclear is bad!' gun just like they are doing in Japan right now :/

Re:What will they replace it with?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pacifism, obviously.

Switzerland's policy is neutrality not pacifism. They have compulsory military service. They're committed to fighting back if you attack them, they just don't take sides in other people's disputes.

Power

[fermion]

The Japan situation shows that nuclear power is safe, but not every contingency can be planned for, therefore there is always a small risk. The problem is one of managing risk and expectation. The nuclear industry, like all industries, wish to have minimum external burdens, wish to externalize as much costs as possible to the general public, so they like anyone else will lie to gain support. This will in the long run is always disastrous, but enough profits are made in the short run to make no difference to the private interests.

The big thing with energy is the externalization of costs to the general public, both real and opportunity. It is not really a conservative of liberal thing. When the BP oil well exploded in the Gulf or Mexico, conservatives all along the conservative Gulf Coast raised hell about the externalization of costs. Conservative Florida threw a fit even though conservative support approving drilling in the Gulf with minimal regulations. The coal industry is allowed to destroy public owned resources the could be better monetized by future generation with no recompense to future generations. And the nuclear industry is allowed to irradiate resources and create waste without a management plan. The Swiss reprocesses and stores the larger quantity, but less radioactive waste. Whether this faustian bargain will be acceptable in the long term is yet to be seen. What is true is that unlike out previous energy experiments in the industrial revolution will not be so easy to reverse. The benefit of nuclear energy is that most of the externalization is limited to the nation-state that benefits from the energy, unlike other sources in which the externalization is wolrd wide.

On a total cost basis other energy sources are viable. Switzerland has good solar irradiation potential. It also has mountains. During the day excess solar energy can be used to pump water up the mountain into a reservoir, and then run through a hydroelectric generator when needed. The same is true for wind. All without externalazing costs to future generations.

Nuclear power requires honest governments

[cryfreedomlove]

Those are few and far between, even today. The Soviet Union lied to their own people about Cherynobyl. The Japanese government withheld messy truth until they were outed by foreign press.

I believe nukes can be safe, but most governments are not trustworthy enough to make that happen.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[Zemran]

It is a mountain kingdom, lots of hydro potential and very few people. Why would they want the infinite expense and risks involved with current nuclear? They can have free power without difficulty and hydro does not stop at night. It is easy for those here to say that anyone that does not want nuclear must be a crank or green but that is just stupid. I worked for BNFL and am not green (maybe a crank). I just happen to look at the whole picture without rose coloured glasses.

In Wales there are dams that were built by the Victorians and they are still good. The reactors I have worked with are not good but there is nothing you can do to stop a Magnox reactor. The British Magnox reactors are still running after their expected lifespan because no-one knows what to do with them. Trawsfynydd still consumes considerable amounts of electricity to keep it stable. The costs do not stop after the fifty years of lifespan. The costs go on and on for tens of thousands of years making them unbelievably expensive when compared to any other power source. Burning money in a generator would be cheaper.

There are better options and this decision is not the best way forward. I hope that advances will soon make Thorium into a good commercial choice. Anything but Uranium/Plutonium...

Re:What will they replace it with?

[boaworm]

It is a mountain kingdom, ...Why would they want the infinite expense and risks involved with current nuclear? They can have free power without difficulty and hydro does not stop at night.

The chance of Swizerland being hit by a 9.0 quake followed by a large tzunami is ... shall we say slim? :-)

And before anyone claims that hydroelectric plants are green, go have a look at one. Sure, the carbon footprint is small, but it completely destroys the local landscape and ecosystems.

So if they are really going away from working nuke plans, hope they don't plan to buy their electricity from germany or eastern europe instead.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[Pinky's Brain]

They could always just ask France to build extra plants and import the electricity, I doubt a national nuclear program with all the regulatory mess which comes with it is cheaper. With France's economy of scale and a waste management infrastructure within it's own borders it has comparative advantage for nuclear power generation.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[Moryath]

Not just that - the Swiss defense system also consists of the ability to use the mountains against an attacker. Set off rockslides, destroy passes and roadways, bury any armed force unfortunate enough to be downhill.

Mountaintop positions that make for incredible sniping posts and "we can hit you but good luck hitting us" mortar and cannon positions. Mountains themselves that make for treacherous flying for aircraft even for bombing runs, let alone foolhardy for any invading force to try to land forces.

And then there's the political situation. The Swiss were nominally germanic to start with, but they didn't have the direct ties that Austria did (remember, Hitler himself was Austrian-born) to the Nazi regime. The Nazis were, thereby, relatively content to let them sit and exist and be "neutral." They were essentially surrounded on all sides anyways, and the Nazi regime assumed that eventually, following the conquest of the rest of Europe, the Swiss would either decide to fold in or else become enough of an economic arm that it'd make little difference.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[nospam007]

"With France's economy of scale and a waste management infrastructure within it's own borders it has comparative advantage for nuclear power generation."

France builds reactors 1 mile from the border (Chooz, Cattenom, Fessenheim...), so in case of an accident, half of the damage goes to a foreign country. Sneaky.

Re:Have you noticed the Swiss have mountains?

[Splab]

Mankind didn't have to support billions of lives at that point.

We absolutely need power to drive the world as we know it - if we decide to abolish nuclear power we also need to go back to old way of life which means a couple of billion of lives will need to be sacrificed.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[makomk]

All fuel has been removed from the reactors and decommissioning is well underway.

The fuel may have been removed, but apparently the waste won't be safe to remove until 2065, and the buildings themselves aren't scheduled to be demolished and the site finally closed down until 2098. (Partly because it'll take that long for the widespread low-level contamination of the ground to reach safe levels, by the looks of it.)

Oh, and I'm not sure if we've managed to come up with a better way to dispose of nuclear waste than leaving them to rot in badly-maintained storage ponds at places like Sellafield yet...

Only if you choose to treat the residue as waste as opposed to a valuable fuel source.

The UK actually had one of the few nuclear reprocessing plants. They have a history of doing things like contaminating the sea and beaches nearby with large quantities of radioactive waste (in some cases deliberately and in others due to incompetence), not to mention stuff like falsifying testing data on the fuel they were selling to other governments. Fortunately they've since managed to get the UK government to offer them unlimited indemnity for any future accidents they might have, even ones caused by negligence.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[Samantha Wright]

"Perpetual finance" is usually called "sustainable growth." (ba-dum, tish!)

If only there had been a very large man with very big hands to stop capitalists from fucking up sustainability.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[SerpentMage]

eh.... NO....

I live here and we have some serious problems.

1) Global warming. We have less snow in the mountains with smaller runoffs.
2) Global warming. Did I say that? This year we don't have enough rain, nor water. It is resulting in the problem that the Rhein traffic has to be restrained.

Switzerland having infinite water is a myth and the last few years have been very hard. This is why they want to focus more on Wind, or Solar.

Re:Obviously...

[HungryHobo]

It's a very very valid point about solar 45 degrees+ from the equator.

Trying to run anything serious off batteries, flywheels or even pumped storage is barely sane overnight in places on the equator.

Trying to do the same during winter far from the equator is even less sane.

-Hydro is lovely but very limited unless you're in Brazil, the best sources are already being tapped already and it screws with the river ecosystem and makes vast tracts of land unusable.
-Wind is nice but is very unreliable, 20% of your grid is somewhat of an upper limit if you want to keep the grid any way stable.
-Solar is still a toy unless you talk to a solar panel salesman.
-Geothermal is glorious if you happen to be in iceland.
-Tidal is sorta ok until you get serious and then the greens hate it because it totally destroys coastal ecosystems.

And then there's fossil fuels which are terrible on almost every front.

finally there's nuclear which simply kills less people than getting your electricity from fossil fuels but the way it kills people- cancer happens to be how 25% of everyone dies anyway so if an accident happens which raises that to 25.001% then you get the blame for the other 25.000% and everyone will always have lots of people they knew who died of cancer and in their minds every single one of those deaths will be the fault of nuclear.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Exactly. This is the worst case scenario, whether you are in favour of nuclear power or against it: stopping all design and development of modern and much safer and cleaner nuclear plants (sure, not 100% safe nor 100% clean), whilst keeping the existing nukes running well past their designed lifetime... because the clean power source that was to replace them hasn't magically appeared, surprise, surprise.

Re:What will they replace it with?

[Shoe Puppet]

Nuclear reactors have to be built near rivers so they can use the water for the cooling. Sometimes these rivers just happen to constitute a border. In fact, most French reactors are fairly far away from any border.