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Germany To End Nuclear Power By 2022
dcollins writes "Germany on Monday announced plans to become the first major industrialized power to shut down all its nuclear plants in the wake of the disaster in Japan, with a phase-out due to be wrapped up by 2022... Germany has 17 nuclear reactors on its territory, eight of which are currently off the electricity grid... Already Friday, the environment ministers from all 16 German regional states had called for the temporary order on the seven plants to be made permanent... Monday's decision is effectively a return to the timetable set by the previous Social Democrat-Green coalition government a decade ago. And it is a humbling U-turn for Merkel, who at the end of 2010 decided to extend the lifetime of Germany's 17 reactors by an average of 12 years, which would have kept them open until the mid-2030s."
Where does the power come from then!?
The government must now determine how it can make up the difference with renewable energy sources, natural gas and coal-fired plants.
I mean, really? That'll end up being 90% coal at the very least. I love sentiment driven politics, It's crappy, but waaay more interesting.
The circumstances that contributed to the failings at Fukushima are not similar to the situation surrounding nuclear plants in Switzerland or Germany. This is nonsense.
They want to improve their use of renewables, awesome. They should keep the nuke plants while boosting efforts on wind, solar, and hydro. Ramping up reliance on fossil-fueled energy while waiting for those other technologies to get to where we need them to be is foolish.
As a rational personal driven by science rather than sentiment and sensationalism, I am of two minds.
On one, there's no reason to necessarily fear well operated nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, we hear countless stories of power plants that are not being maintained and funded properly and with poor operational and maintenance attention. Hardly the place where you want to skimp.
On the other hand, with your plane analogy . . . when a plane goes seriously bad, it kills some people on board. Maybe kills a couple people on the ground. Maybe spills some fuel all over the ground in a biggish area. I'm not sure when the last plane crashed (that wasn't carrying nuclear material) which resulted in tens of miles around it's crash site being unlivable for multiple lifetimes, possibly contaminating vast food and water supplies, and reaching potentially dangerous levels hundreds or thousands of miles away, with the air currents.
It's very hard, even with statistics, to mentally overcome the sheer potential damage of a nuclear plant gone really wrong. It's like saying "hey, the mutually assured destruction policy between America and Russia actually kept us safe for so many decades, because we both had tens of thousands of warheads pointed at each other that could wipe away all life on earth in an hour, but that sheer fact meant nobody would ever do it". Only . . . the reality is that on more than one occasion, we came seriously fucking close to letting nukes loose on the other guy due to human error. Flocks of geese being mistaken for a flight of warheads over the ocean. Test missiles being mistaken for a strike (because of human error; not notifying people higher up that it was occurring and that it should not be taken as an attack).
All it takes is one fuck up and we're a species that is as capable of mind-shattering fuck-ups as we are raw ingenuity.
So, while I tend to want to say "hurrah! clean, safe, cheap, awesome nuclear power!", there's another part of me that says "let's not".
Oh yes. Excellent news. Because nuclear power is the cleanest, most dependable, most regulated, and lowest impacting power source on the planet right now, lets shut it down for no realistic reason. "Spinal sublexations which cause ill health?" Ah, you're a chiropractor. Sooooo, your position is that mythical twisting of the vertebrae (Oh yes, sorry, chiropractors have co-opted the term 'subluxation' to mean whatever they think might be wrong, rather than an actual anatomical definition. Convenient) ... which you say causes ill health, is due to radioactivity, that no one has ever sensed? That's quite a reach my friend.
The short version is nuclear power is the safest power we have. (Xref: http://climatesight.org/2011/03/15/nuclear-power-in-context/ ) That chart shows direct-impact deaths, and does not show the number of mine workers who die yearly mining coal, or the oil rig operators who die, or the VAST environmental impact directly from burning fossil fuels. In 40 years of nuclear power, there have been THREE nuclear plant failures. TMI, Chernobyl, and fukujima. TMI resulted in negligible radiation release. Chernobyl resulted in 64 confirmed deaths (though there is ENORMOUS variation in forecasts for 'potential deaths'), and Fukujima has, we've noted so far, had ONE death. One.
I can already hear the raising of the "But, it's Radiation! Radiation is BAD!" - yes, of course it is, but it must be taken in context. The levels talked about around these plants varies wildly, and your random "because we have nuke plants, people are getting more colds because of mythical undefineable spinal shift" is a textbook "Correlation proves Causation - a logical fallacy.
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
If I had to choose between burning coal and fission reactors, I'd keep the nuclear.
Yeah, I know people are scared because of what have happened in Japan, but I STILL rather have 100 nuclear plant in my backyard with a 0.0001% chance of killing or making me sick than one coal plant that are 100% sure to be bad (1) for my health.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station: The combustion of coal contributes the most to acid rain and air pollution, and has been connected with global warming.
While the reasoning of Merkel's government seems to be based on fear and emotions of the general public the background behind this is the nuclear waste.
Fukushima is just an example that a complex technology like nuclear power can fail, even with a lot of safeguards in place and in a high-tech country like Japan. It is now obvious that Tepco did not do their homework correctly and that it is just a bad idea in general to build a power plant where a tsunami can hit the shore but this is only the catalyst for the debate in Germany. The main problem is and will be in the future the massive amounts of nuclear waste, with high and medium radiation levels. The situation in Germany for waste disposal is abysmal. In the 1960s due to political issues only two underground mines were seriously examined if they can keep the waste safe for eternity until the radiation levels are low enough to be harmless. These two mines are Asse and Gorleben.
It is now very clear that during the last decades a lot of negative security reports for both mines were downplayed or never published. Asse is currently more or less flooded from groundwater penetrating the salt and while Gorleben seems safe today serious cracks have been discovered. So there is no place in Germany were we could safely store nuclear waste at all. The consensus was for a while to search for better places and it was obvious that any politician will fight tooth and nail against a mine in his district.
At the same time Germany tries to increase the amount of renewable energy and is quite successful. Merkel's current move is certainly not completely ruled by reason but it fits into the bigger picture and the last thing she wants is large demonstrations and her being seen as a cold technocrat which almost brought her a defeat in the last election.
While I personally like nuclear power much more than polluting the air with coal power plants, were the emissions also contain a lot of radioactivity and of course CO2 it feels irresponsible to use a technology as long as the waste problem is completely unsolved, at least in Germany.
Much higher than what? Deaths from burning dirty brown coal? I doubt it.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Or, he can stay where he is and experience the effects of burning coal and gas directly.
As someone recently said "Nuclear power damages the environment and causes health issues when there is an accident. Coal and gas damages the environment and causes health issues as a consequence of normal operation."
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
As a German I think it's the perfect time to ditch the nuclear power and finally invest some of the billions of moneys that the electric cooperations taking and come up with a sustainable and green energy source. Without any pressure from the government we will use oil, gas, coal and nuclear until all of this resources will get so expensive and until we get a some major catastrophes, because the cooperations don't care one bit about the future.
Everyone has known that the nuclear power plants have a limited lifetime. But what was the solution: just extend the lifetime. The electric companies took subsidies, tax cuts, new laws, and they knew that eventually the nuclear power plants are going to be shut down and they done nothing.
I'm really glad our politicians have the balls to say that from now on there will be a major technology shift. Yes, now the alternative energy sources sucks ass, but wait until we transfer some billions for R&D. Of course we can't shut down the nuclear plants over night, but we have to start someday. And it is always the government who is in the position and should have the balls to tell the market to create new technologies. Hell, without the governments pushing for nuclear, there would be no nuclear electric cooperations.
Now it's the prefect time to put pressure on the market to push for R&D for better energy sources. Without such pressure the banks will just continue to sit on their tax-bailout money and not lend to risky enterprises and the big energy cooperations will just waste the money on shareholders. Better now then in 30 years, where we actually don't have any other choice but to put the reactors down and because there was no pressure to invest in R&D we will get stuck down in the middle ages.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Nothing sacred about it... Just another technology that is useful. I take a much more pragmatic approach than the 'green' religion. Nuclear (fission) *will* one day be replaced, either by better nuclear (fusion) or better anything. But stating that we will do fine with solar and wind is ridiculous, we need baseline power and for now nuclear is far superior to coal (and saves lifes, do not underestimate that!)...
Also to imply that nuclear power plants will eventually need to blow up suggests you've bought into the whole propaganda of fear and have no idea of the current state of technology. It's like claiming you will never fly a plane because you've seen a documentary about the crash of the Gavilland Comet... Or you won't drive a car because you heard the decades old story of cars that explode after a minor accident. These kind of sentiments are not constructive, when all people act like that no new planes or cars would even have been developed and the technology would have gone down in history as a dangerous failure... Currently people are doing the same with nuclear, condemning the technology because of flaws in 60 year old designs and decades old power plants. People are capable of learning from failure, and we have... but fear is holding back newer safer alternatives.
Had the green movement not opposed nuclear so virulently there would have been new power plants that replaced the older ones a long time ago (and especially no new coal plants being built all the time). The way I see it the green movement is damaging nature with the best intentions.