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."

Comments

Serious question;

[cablepokerface]

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.

Re:Serious question;

[Minwee]

While that fact is interesting and unexpected, it only applies until something goes wrong.

While everything is going right, nuclear power is quite safe.

While everything is going right, coal power still kills 24,000 people in the USA alone every year. And that's not even mentioning things like the 48 tons of mercury released into the air and water every year by perfectly functioning coal plants in which nothing has gone wrong.

Even Greenpeace only puts the death toll from Chernobyl at 200,000 from 1990 to 2004, less than two thirds of what American Coal accomplished over the same time, and they didn't even have an accident to blame. That's just business as usual.

So, yeah, go Coal. Let's put an end to those dangerous nuclear plants and return to safe, clean power.

Re:Serious question;

[Glock27]

Regardless of the radiation emitted by coal fired plants, the pollutants are (at a minimum) responsible for killing thousands of people a year.

Nuclear power is clearly desirable from many standpoints, and there are absolutely no insurmountable problems (most definitely including nuclear waste disposal/reuse).

Fukushima was a worst-case scenario involving both forty year old technology and very poor planning. If only the backup generators had been in a tsunami-proof vessel, like at other plants, there would have been no meltdown. Modern reactor designs would also avoid any meltdown scenario.

Re:Serious question;

[PhreakOfTime]

Not all plants collect fly ash in the manner provided in your link.

Of course they don't. I never claimed they did. But then again, not all nuclear power plants are located next to oceans and hit by tsunamis.

That didn't stop the crazy people from linking that ONE incident, to every single plant. Demanding their closure, or in this case, the exit of an entire country from this means of producing electricity.

There is no 100% safe way to do anything, much less generate electricity on a massive scale. Natural disasters will happen, but is no reason to go back to the dark ages of technology.

I wish people who were so adamant of these things could all live on an island with no electricity. As is seems they are unable to comprehend that there are benefits and trade-offs for the risk. Do I want clean drinking water(powered by electricity)? Do I want to keep my food safe from spoiling?

In all honesty, it's a symptom of a larger problem that seems to be a rather widespread thought process. I like to call it the 'Broken Utopia' model, where everything would be just perfect(literally perfect) if we didn't get involved with our 'sciency' ideas. In this line of thinking, the goal is an unattainable state of perfection, and anything less is cause to throw out the entire field. Be it nuclear energy in this case, or the motives of the 'anti-vaccine' crowd.

The fact that this parallels so closely with the creation stories of many major religions, is no accident. And is just further proof to me that religion does far, FAR more harm than it does good.

Complete and Total Over-reaction

[Huntr]

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.

Re:Retards

[Seumas]

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".

Re:First in a long line I hope!

[Shayde]

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.

If it's down to coal or nuclear...

[Khenke]

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.

Re:First in a long line I hope!

[DaveV1.0]

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."