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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."
France has stated that it will open several new nuclear reactors before 2022, and will increase the amount of power that it exports to Germany.
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"Well what the hell are we supposed to use? Harsh language?"
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.
Tsunamis and earthquakes has Germany had in lets say the last 1000 years :-)
They will actually be able to replace those 23% of the energy production in the meantime without increasing the energy costs too much... difficulty: the price for 2011 will already be about 50% higher than 2010 according to my energy supplier (announced a few weeks ago, before this decision).
The headline should read:
Germany To End Nuclear Power By 2022 yet again
Politicians are good at two things: making large strategic decisions that do not require anything now but much in not-so-near future and apologizing stuff that their predecessors have made. This decision will be repealed; nothing to see here, move along.
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.
Apparently, people make the right choice only after all other options were exhausted.
--
signed: rastos, citizen of EU.
Overreaction due to a disaster by a reactor that should have never been built in the first place. It should be common sense to never build a device that cannot be tuned off (or 3 months to turn off). There are other nuclear reactor designs that can be turn off quickly. Banning the entire industry without a proper review is stupid.
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".
Oil is likely to run out or become very expensive during the next few decades, if plug in hybrids and electric cars is the most likely replacement for gasoline ( and it seems to be the case at the moment ) then much more electricity will be needed.
Environmental concerns mandate a large reduction in the use of coal for electricity.
EU-member states have committed to such reductions through several treaties and
directives, and it is unlikely that they will simply be dropped.
Wind cannot contribute a majority of electricity generation out of load levelling concerns.
Solar is prohibitively expensive and only does well in Germany due to strong economic
incentives that would be very costly to scale. It also doesn't work during the night, and large
scale energy storage is prohibitively expensive.
Scaling bio-mass to supply a nation the size of Germany would have a dramatic environmental
impact associated with its cultivation, growth and combustion. It is presently very expensive for
applications other than heating, and the more advanced bio-fuels (cellulosic ethanol ) that actually
seem feasible are still experimental. Brazil kinda makes etanol from sugar cane work, but it is
dubious if the practice would be sustainable outside of tropical climates.
So basically unless they overturn this decision it seems likely that Germany will end up importing
electricity or making themselves reliant on Russian natural gas. This is what happens when you make
policy based on populism and wishful thinking rather than reality.
So their plan is to shutdown domestic nuclear power production without, from what I see, a corresponding increase in production from coal, gas, or "green" power sources. This means they'll be importing from places like France who are increasing their power production. While this is less of a concern now that they're all part of the warm and fuzzy EU brotherhood but Germany is handing the French (and any other country that will be doing the same, such as say the Netherlands) leverage in future negotiations.
The only way I see this really working in the long term is if the EU becomes more of a Federalist system with the EU taking on the role of the Federal Government and the Member Nations taking on the role of the component states. Ultimately I think that may be a decent idea, obviously with more independence for the Member Nations than the states enjoy in the USA but with potential benefits. Keep in mind at this point it is purely idol speculation with no real knowledge on the issues this would generate or hurdles that would have to be jumped.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
These idiots know that it's just politicians talking bullshit. It's not the first time a German government agreed on plans to end nuke power. One of the following governments simply ignored these plans and did whatever the nuke lobby wanted.
2022 is a long time away. By then the current concerns caused by Fukushima will be forgottten and corporations will have had enough time to bribe coming generations of politicians to delay/cancel the whole shebang once more.
It's just the usual "pandering to voters today, forgotten tomorrow" political fraud.
Natural gas and coal-fired power plants are not responsible alternatives to nuclear energy. Nuclear power does not belch out carbon monoxide and green house gases. By eschewing nuclear energy and blanketing as unsafe without looking into the technical problems and improving them, we may be headed down a entirely different wrong path. It seems like politicians the world around are excellent at making "large strategic decisions" without a clear, viable alternative. What about nuclear fusion? Where are we in that development?
I don't like nuclear power either.... but I base my opinion on some real science instead of your chiropractic quackery.
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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.
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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.
the catch is, that gift that keeps on giving has the possibility of giving way too much to make any such discussion pointless, if we have more serious problems.
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After a quick glance through history, it would appear that the French are more likely to have such thoughts, or even the Russians.. The Americans carried a fairly strong and friendly business relationship with the Germans throughout the war. Only the zombie public had any animosity..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
invention of radioactivity
You should have taken an entry level science course instead of enrolling in Chiropractic Clown College.
Hearing of countless stories isn't the same thing as countless of nuclear power plants actually having issues with poor operational and maintenance attention. I mean, here is a plant in Japan, and it has ran like a top, and the containment in case of disaster did it's job. What part of lacklustre maintenance and attention played a part in creating the disaster, worsening its effects on the plant, or promoting the release of radation?
We have had one plant truly mess up, one almost mess up, and one hit by a natural disaster so large it defies reason that the plant managed to contain. In response, it seems we reward these efforts with a nuclear scare story every fifteen minutes. I know I'm exaggerating, but it seems that the scales are tipped way too far in directions that don't foster actual improvement.
i visited a nuclear power plant in northern germany last year. and i am glad, that this is been shut down. that 70ies tech does not shine anymore. and i talked to the control room employee what extra education he has. well there is a one year course and here is the funny part, nobody fails in this course.
You should move to the Fukushima area or to Pripyat and enjoy the clean and healthy environment there.
Firstly, nobody "invented" radioactivity. The Big Bang was a nuclear explosion. We are (a very small) part of the fallout.
You could say that someone invented nuclear power. This is not the same thing as radioactivity. Some might say it uses radioactivity but for better explanations you should read a textbook or even Wikipedia.
Spinal subluxations have been around a lot longer than human generated radioactivity. The fact that they have increased does not mean that they are caused by radioactive leaks/fallout. Correlation is not causation. They may be related but there are a lot more people around that there was in the time of the Curies and a lot of the things that people died of back then are far less prevalent.
Cancer is a bigger problem and some most definitely is related to radioactivity. We definitely need to deal with that. Closing down all nuclear activity will not do this. It will help the uninformed feel good. It will not make the world a better place. It will make life harder - unless you think that we can make up the deficit from renewables? I suggest you read up on that myth too,
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
No debate with your points. But here are some other insights...
Did you know to this day 20% of Belarus's farmland is unusable?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus
The problem is that nuclear has serious longterm issues like this. Sure there are less immediate deaths, but the longer term deaths related to nuclear are much higher. This is the fault of humanity that can't look beyond the next Apple announcement.
So tell me how do you plan on making all of the land usable again? Oh wait I forgot you are not near any of these disasters and as such could not shive a ghit. Until it happens in your backyard!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
This is close to the worst way to make a government in the modern era.
Wow. I was going to respond to all Dr.Bob's detractors with a great big Whoosh! I interpreted his post as sarcasm. I'm glad I looked at his post history first.
I actually kind of like nuke power. it's pretty safe. its cheap. its easy to put just about anywhere.
However... The worst case failure mode for a nuclear power plant is much much MUCH worse than anything else save perhaps hydro. And even then if the hydro dam fails and wipes out everything downstream... well you can go back in and rebuild now. not in 10,100,1000,10000 years when the place isnt 'hot' anymore.
Arguments could be made for coal that it contaminates a much wider area over the entire time it's running.
But people don't work like that. They see that one day this land was fine. And the next day after a nuke disaster. It's now super fucked for a great many years.
Where coal is a gradual fuck of the entire area. Not quite as noticable. And you CAN put alot of work into cleaning coal stack output. We just never really have. Yet.
Anywhere the epic fuckups of humans and the epic fuckups of nature can wipe out an entire chunk of land for decades... Is most likely something we shouldnt allow to happen. And that means not using nuke power till we're much much more capable of preventing worst case failures. And we're a long time from that just due to plain human greed and shortsightedness.
Good for germany.
Out of curiosity, what makes you opposed to the modern iteration of nuclear reactors? The major accidents have all been Mark I reactors, which have been known to be unsafe since 1972 (warnings ignored, thank GE in the U.S.). For modern reactors, "real science" reveals mostly positives, with almost no chance of a critical meltdown.
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.
This is a groundbreaking turn from the country already leading the world in renewable energy.
The question is now, what combination of sources will replace the nuclear piece of the energy pie.
Currently nuclear stands at 22% and renewables at 17% in Germany. I reccomend the literature here for anyone who doubts renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, small hydro, biomass) are up to the task of displacing fossil and nuclear. Especially check out Hermann Scheer's "Energy Autonomy".
As a bonus, this will be a chance to dispel illusions regarding the technical viability of thorium, fast breeder reactors, fusion and other nuclear chymeras.
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I'm starting to loose my faith in humanity...
You've already lost your voting rights.
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Much higher than what? Deaths from burning dirty brown coal? I doubt it.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Maybe so, but when they close down their nuclear plants, Germany will have trouble meeting its CO2 emissions targets. The problem is not so much about generation capacity (anyone can build coal-fired stations), but doing so within agreed targets
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Given that effectively all of our energy (aside from a comparatively small amount of geothermal) is produced in a very, very large nuclear reactor, to which we have been exposed on a daily basis since life began, I guess you've just explained all disease! Good thing too-we had it long before we were "out of the trees", or "in the trees"-even single-celled organisms die.
What they don't die of is "subluxations", because there's no such thing. Honestly, I hope you're a troll. The alternative is far worse-that you're really one of the people who's out there selling this shit to people, and keeping them from getting real treatment in some cases. But whether you're personally a troll or not, there really are people who do that. It's not funny-they kill people and in the meantime make a fortune selling snake oil to the gullible and the desperate.
Of course, if you had any real interest in science, you'd know that coal power causes thousands upon thousands of deaths a year-not from "subluxations", but from the harmful chemicals it releases into the atmosphere. And we may see its death toll rise precipitously once the full effects of climate change begin to be felt, though I certainly hope that will not be the case. And right now, if you're not doing nuclear as your baseline, you're doing coal or natural gas. There isn't enough stable energy potential in solar or wind yet, and they're not cost-effective on a massive scale.
Right now, nuclear is our best option. It should be carefully regulated, and perhaps some older plants do need to be given the choice between mandatory upgrade and shutdown. What we shouldn't do is throw a technology out that can work properly because someone misused and failed to maintain it.
But, of course, you're a quack (or you're a troll playing one). So what do you care about reality, anyway, in either case?
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
The funny thing is, that they will need a replacement for the loss of nuclear power. Since there are also laws that energy must be "green" for a certain percentage, coal plants will be off limits. Which will lead to .. Germany importing energy from France. Which is generated by ... dumtiedum .. nuclear reactors!
Hypocrisy at its finest.
So i wonder, how are they going to light their bulbs, or maybe they will move to candles???
Um, no. In fact, there is not enough data to make that correlation.
It is kind of like claiming that truck drivers are worse driver because truck drivers are involved in more wrecks per capita and the wrecks are worse. But, the truth is that truck drivers are some of the safest drivers. They are in more wrecks per capita because they travel many times more miles per year than the average driver. It is not that the reactors are older. It is that the data covers a long period of time. Compare nuclear power incidents and the rate of incidents per year to other industrial complexes and/or power generation facilities and you will find that nuclear power has a much better safety record.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Yes, because that has worked ever so well with 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl.... As it fades from the news, it will become more of a distant memory, and will no longer have the weight it has now when arguing the dangers of nuclear energy. Ultimately, it'll come down to one thing: cost. As long as nuclear energy is the cheapest out there, it will continue to be widely used. As soon as safer and cheaper technologies are easily available, a gradual transition will begin. It is not going to be an overnight change, no matter how much you want it to be: just look at how much coal energy is still being used in the states.
Technology is promising. There are new types of solar cells available in the last couple of years that weren't possible 5 years ago, and that are significantly cheaper to manufacture while also being significantly more efficient. There's other uses of solar energy that are coming into use (like the plant outside Seville, Spain). There's large scale wind operations coming into use, and even some very interesting buildings being built that produce their own wind (there's a twin tower in Dubai with 3 wind turbines between the pillars, using the Bernoulli effect on the breeze passing between the buildings to increase the flow through the turbines, for example). There's buildings being built that are much more efficient with how they use energy. All of it will add up to an eventual shift to completely renewable energy in time, but right now, we're still developing technologies that we'll need to do it properly, and we still need to use transition technologies like ethanol fuel and biodiesel. (and yes, I do believe that a traditional diesel generator plant fuelled by biodiesel will be a step between nuclear power and large scale solar/wind power, because the infrastructure is already there and old plants can be converted really easily).
Uh, no. Mark 1 reactors are fundamentally flawed, in that they can easily build up hydrogen and explode if the cooling system is compromised (leaving out the detail here). Even Mark 2 designs are built strong enough to withstand a failed cooling system.
Even if you were correct, that age is the most important factor, then why is that the fault of nuclear power in general, and not the governments for a fire-and-forget attitude?
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.
In the long term, most energy generation techniques have long term issues, especially the most popular. The long term deaths from normal operation of coal plants is much higher than those from nuclear power accidents. You are focusing so much on that tree in front of you that you are not seeing the forest.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
> Because nuclear power is the cleanest, most dependable, most regulated,
> and lowest impacting power source on the planet right now
That would be hydro, not nuclear. Much cheaper too. People who believe nuclear is the way to go generally live in areas that are tapped out on the hydro side and the local power companies stop talking about it.
A good example is right here in Toronto. They're still trying to build another set of four reactors east of the city, but there's 9 reactors worth in norther Quebec already installed and underused, another 11 unbuilt, another 10 in Newfoundland and Manitoba, and at least 25 in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. There's more untapped hydro in Canada than tapped, and more hydro in total than all the other forms of power put together. If we did a full build-out, we would supply all of our electricity, power all our cars, and still export more power to the US than we do now.
So no, I don't support building new reactors.
If a nuclear reactor is underground (let's say, 100 m below surface), then in case of radiation leak, a simple covering of the reactor with dirt will solve the problem.
Is this realistic?
I find this all very upsetting.. I thought radiation was supposed to give us super powers... What's up with that?
Not really true, they (the industry) say there is a chance of 1 in 2000 years that one will meltdown. With the current number + the soon to be build new plants, you come to 1 meltdown/serious accident in 14 years. This seems to be spot on with history. You can get a free report btw from the atom agency that has all the accidents that are known with radiation in them. Many thousand cases already and a scary read.
The greenies now go laughing to the next polls, and 5 years later someone else will go laughing to the polls when personal electricity bills get too expensive and nuclear is sold as "cheaper".
Modern democratic politics is pathetic. Politicians are not interested in change, improvements or ideals - they do whatever wins them polls and votes and gives them airtime - so they can retire out of politics, famous and into a lucrative private sector career.
I guess the accident that killed people at the fuel processing facility and exposed residents nearby to radiation in 1999 doesn't count.
And although no one died, the accident, and the cover-up of the severity of it, at the Japanese sodium breeder reactor apparently isn't worth mentioning.
That was no Mark I design.
The fuel pond issues certainly aren't unique to Mark I designs. Unit 4 in Japan, which had fuel only in the fuel pond, exploded, apparently from hydrogen that came from unit 3. Neither unit 3 nor unit 4 were Mark I designs. There aren't supposed to be any common-cause failures, yet clearly that explosion pathway and the backup power had causes in common.
One of the reactors shut down in central Japan over earthquake fears was found to have salt water in the closed-loop part of the cooling system. That wasn't even known before the plant was shut down for another reason. Coupling between the ocean water and internal cooling water loops was supposed to be impossible.
In one sense the older systems may have an advantage. They didn't originally use frail and vulnerable computer systems. What modern computer systems can be trusted to work for 40 years plus?
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.
What "countless stories?" It's worth noting here that there aren't really countless stories of valid nuclear plant problems, but an endless stream of anti-nuke propaganda, the majority of which is written in a style which hasn't changed since the 70s.
Fact is civilian nuclear power has been remarkably safe since its creation with the first major accident in 25 years.
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".
I guess you'll have to decide whether you want to continue to be a rational person or not.
"A Russian publication, Chernobyl, concludes that 985,000 excess deaths occurred between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination."
The number of excess deaths from Chernobyl is controversial, and the nearly-a-million number you cite is the absolute top of the range, based on a theoretical model that is known to be false--cancer demographics simply do not support a no-threshold dose-response model, nor does the fact that we use the quality factor to correct for multi-hit damage from heavy particles.
The linear dose-response model is used to set safety guideline precisely because it is enormously conservative, and the belief has been that the cost of such conservative limits is small. To use linear dose-response to estimate actual deaths, however, is irresponsible to the point of being anti-scientific. It requires that things we know to be false--the implied variation of cancer rates with altitude and other natural background changes--to be true.
The safety issue from nuclear power is non-trivial, and the cost issue is enormous, but this is a case where people who are probably on the right side of the issue in the long term are damaging their own cause by over-estimating the consequences and hurting their own cause, except amongst their anti-scientific fellow-travelers. The problem is they are saying "Chernobyl killed a million people so we must have no nukes!" which is setting themselves up for the (insane) reply, "No, it only killed 5000 people so nukes are OK."
They would be far better off saying, "Chernobyl killed 5000 people, and that is 5000 too many."
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Germany is pushing hard on the green front, entire towns are off the grid now. A full 17% of their energy is provided by renewable sources, well on track to meeting their 18% goal by 2020.
Nuclear comprises only 11% of Germany's energy generation as of 2009.
One of the challenges with modern democracy is that government mandates usually last only 4 or 5 years at most. Any commitments made beyond the current term are essentially meaningless. If peak oil predictions turn out to be true, it might be very difficult for Germany to avoid nuclear power in the 2020s, unless the entire population dramatically reduces power consumption.
Hydro-electric dam failures have killed hundreds of thousands of people over the years. Indeed, a small (non-power-generating) dam in Fukushima prefecture broke during the recent big earthquake in Japan, killing at least four people at the dam itself and washing away a couple of villages downstream with some inhabitants reported as missing presumed drowned. That's a lot more people than were killed by the tsunami and earthquake at the two Fukushima plants and (obviously) a lot more than have died from radioactivity releases caused by the reactor failures.
Hydro power is a proven killer with a long history of mass deaths due to structural failures and operating problems. It's not in the same class as coal and oil due to the amount of pollution and CO2 it produces for the amount of energy it outputs but in terms of ill-effects it's way ahead of nuclear in any scale you care to compare it with.
Magic fairy dust? Oil will be out of the question by then. Too expensive. Natural gas will work - for a while, until everyone starts doing it and the remaining gas fields, which deplete *much* more quickly than oil fields start running out. Coal? That too, will work, for a while, but the situation there is analogous to peak oil. It's not that there isn't a lot of it; it's that what's left is expensive to get, with a much lower energy return than the cheap, close-to-the-surface, low sulfur coal we used to be able to get.
2022 seems like a goodish date. IBGYBG as the saying goes and the public, shivering in their homes during the first cold winter, will start voting sensibly again.
Oh, and before you start in with an innumerate response about how we'll replace it all with wind, solar and faith, I suggest you review some numbers at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil so you sound like less of an idiot.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Actually, it appears that only the EU, Australia and New Zealand are determined to destroy themselves; Canada, America and some other countries recently announced that they're having nothing to do with any more Kyoto-style suicide pacts.
Germans have long been known for their general intellect and logical reasoning. Here they are, reacting out of fear instead of surveying the situation and determining where safety can be improved. I'm dumbfounded.
Nuclear power is just about the best there is. Zero emissions and fairly low maintenance. The only problems that seem to exist are those that could have been prevented with monitoring and maintenance.
As energy-related disasters go, we have seen far more tragic things come from oil spills and coal mines than we have seen from nuclear plants and yet people aren't falling all over themselves demanding the shutdown of every coal and oil burning power plant. And the crap that comes from burning those do far more harm to humanity and wildlife -- noticed the problems with mercury in the fish? Fish used to be a healthy food and now it can give you cancer.
Nuclear power is "scary." I get that. Guns are scary. Fear and reaction, fear and reaction. Stop running around like herds of animals and pause to think for a moment. Even Chernobyl hasn't caused a huge global impact on the planet and that one was pretty bad. People didn't start shutting down power plants then... why? Oh that's right, because it was the Russians who built that and we all know Russians don't built for safety or reliability so we can dismiss this case. But Japan? The Japanese are perfect and never put profits before safety so the problem must be the technology! Ban it!
There is a big picture. People would do themselves a world of good to look at it once in a while.
Dr. Bob. Dude, you're a nutbag. Take some time out and look at your world from an objective cause-and-effect perspective. My father's a freak like you -- thought he could cure muscular dystrophy with prayer and the anointing of oils. Now I have two dead half-brothers who suffered 'til the very last... oh if only we knew what chiropractic care could have done to heal their misery. Get with real life.
Did you know to this day 20% of Belarus's farmland is unusable?
No, and you didn't know either because it isn't true. The original BBC story states that 20% of Belarus was contaminated by Chernobyl fallout. Much of that land (probably everything aside from a bit that lies within the Chernobyl exclusion zone) is being used.
So tell me how do you plan on making all of the land usable again?
You can always reuse such land for industrial purposes. Or plant a crop that aggressively absorbs cesium or other problem isotopes.
Even more dangerous is that they import natural gas from Russia.
Then the Germans wonder how they have to please their new masters when Russia decides it isn't pleased with things and shuts off the gas. Especially in winter.
Fleeing nuclear blindly has been a VERY large coup for the Russians. Now, Germany is their bitch because German citizens will die because they can't get heat in the winter if Russia decides it doesn't want to continue providing gas.
Real stupid -- Germany has completely compromised its national security for to please the Greens, and the long term result, has not pleased them (you cannot appease a dictator... Europe should have learned this because appeasement cost millions of lives.)
Your first impression, before you read his history, was the correct one...The very last thing you should do is take him seriously.. And to him, we should only say, jolly good show..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
so STILL going on about the same bullshit attitude ? 'nuclear power will never end' ? what's with this nuclear power morondom ?
Nuclear power will never end. It will be used by the countries that succeed, versus the ones that'll be ever more irrelevant. Interesting that France will start selling nuclear generated power to Germany, eh?
Then there's China, which has the foresight and will to invest heavily in thorium reactor technology. Good move, I hope the US wises up under the next (sane this time) administration!
Watch and see what happens. ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
he is a meta-troll.
As I said earlier in the discussion, if TEPCO had merely done a reasonable job of protecting the backup generators (not at all that expensive of a thing to do) the entire Fukushima radiation release would have been averted.
While it does show the effect of human fallibility, it also shows that with a little more planning even a Richter 9 earthquake and tsunami wouldn't have caused a major problem.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Chernobyl was the result of a very poor reactor design (no containment) coupled with criminal stupidity.
That type of disaster will never happen in a first-world nation.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
"Nuclear power is just about the best" Until it goes wrong. Which it always will because people cut corners, get complacent, don't plan for statistically inevitable events or are just plain stupid. And when it does the costs are astronomical - have you any idea of how much land in an area with a radius of twenty kilometres is worth in Germany?. If nuclear power plants had to ensure themselves fully, none would ever be built. Renewables are our future. They are clever enough to want to get a jump start on the rest of the world. Good luck to them. It is just a shame that my native Australia, with all it's natural advantages in that regard, is still wedded to coal.
Great news! The human species has suffered with health problems since we left the trees. However since the invention of radioactivity, there has been a direct link between the amount of radiation used in the world and spinal subluxations which cause ill health. Hopefully Germany is just the first in a long long of countries dumping radioactivity!
Less nuclear power means more power from burning coal.
You should read about the health effects associated with the uptake of the heavy metals released from burning coal. Spinal sublaxations will be the least of your problems if the world continues to increase their coal consumption.
Nuclear power is already relatively insignificant in Germany:
just 20 out of 160 thousand megawatts
Yes, but I think the "1 in 2000 years" statistic includes Mark 1 reactors, which should have been phased out years ago.
And I don't mean to sound pedantic, but "1 in 2000 years" does not mean "1 every 14 years" (and actually, "1 in 2000 years" was an improper way for the industry to state this to begin with). In this case, the industry was trying to refer to the core integrity, which is designed to last a very long time; its expected lifetime is several hundred years. Additionally, "end of life" does not refer to "catastrophic failure", and modern reactors have an absurdly low chance that even an accident would produce a meltdown, or even a large radiation leak.
The only reason the "1 in 14 years" condition works, historically, is because the chance of failure for the Mark 1 containment reactors is much higher than the designed failure chance.
The markets react.
Shares of E.ON and RWE are getting hammered, Renewable Energy Corp, Vestas Wind, etc are up sharply today.
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
perhaps with our powerful german language (see link)
http://www.umweltrat.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/04_Stellungnahmen/2010_05_Stellung_15_erneuerbareStromversorgung.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
What modern computer systems can be trusted to work for 40 years plus?
Any ones that are left powered on. Transistors last apparently indefinitely if you leave them powered on, it's only when cycling the power that you have a chance for them to blow (after the "infant mortality" period of a few weeks/months anyway). If you used network storage then you wouldn't need the main system to have any moving parts at all, and it would last ages.
Why are you calling modern industrial computer setups "frail and vulnerable" anyway? It's not like anyone is going to be designing their nuclear power plant with a Windows box running all the essential control logic. Windows boxes might be used to monitor outputs and even to control some things, but they will be used in a situation where a BSOD/reboot is not going to cause everything to ASPLODE.
which is totally what she said
Compared to conventional burnt (chemical) fuel, like fossil fuel, wood fired stoves, etc.?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070709-china-pollution.html
You're kidding yourself if you think chemical fuels are risk-free. Nuclear isn't without risks, and in an ideal world we'd have something better (like unlimited, ultra-efficient, cheap solar power). But for the time being, it's one of the best options we have (and far better than the only other serious competitors- coal and gas), and certainly not deserving of the ridiculous stigmatising heaped on it over the last few decades.
why small? safe thorium reactors can be big and centralized and guarded. Many little ones are still an attractive nuisance for terrorists to make impromptu dirty bombs. With the right construction equipment can quickly dig next to one in minutes and apply high explosives)
That hydro which needs huge dams that deeply affect the local ecosystem and which can (and DID) kill hundreds of thousands of people if they happen to fail?
You gotta be kidding me.
Real life is overrated.
There are 17 available nuclear power plants in Germany. While some were down for maintenance in 2010, the remaining ones produced 22.6% of Germany's electricity.
Also in 2010, "green power" (electricity from regenerative sources) was at 16.5% in Germany.
8 nuclear power plants have been shut down in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and will remain so. With 5 down for maintenance, this leaves Germany with currently only 4 running nuclear power plants. I didn't notice any recent shortage of electricity. And obviously green power has outpaced nuclear power already.
And regarding the alleged expensiveness of green power, here's a Bloomberg article which claims it's keeping the power price down: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-21/solar-doubling-gas-glut-drive-down-german-power-prices-energy-markets.html
There are plans to have Germany completely on green power by 2050. Should be possible.
Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said the plan would uphold four priorities: Germany's standing as a top global economy, an affordable and sufficient energy supply, climate protection and independence from energy imports.
Think you could pick a more partisan source next time? I like to get my information from the most biased websites I can find, and that one doesn't quite make the cut. Maybe if they had a big hammer and sickle on the front page, and talked about the overthrowing of the proletariat through free energy for all ....
Anyway, Germany already has some of the highest energy prices in Europe, and that's even with the government already subsidizing "renewable" energy. Unfortunately, they've recently decided to cut some of those subsidies, so the average price of electricity is expected to shoot up nicely over the next year. I can't WAIT to see the prices when they reach the kind of "renewable energy" levels you're talking about. I admit I'll be experiencing more than a little schadenfreude while watching Germans chose between keeping the lights on or keeping the fridge running.
It's interesting to see so many comments here which express a huge amount of narrow thinking (non-competitive sissy couch syndrome).
I'm totally with you! Maybe, as an encore, Germany could switch their entire food industry over to producing caviar. I'm sure that it would take a lot of getting used to, and might cuase some problems along the way, but it would be an ambitous project and the road to ending the meat-grains-and-dairy status quo being enforced by monopolistic Big Farmers. Perhaps you will fail, but then you can proudly say you tried! After all, some idiot once said "I chose to think, not because it is easy, but because it is hard!".
That's fine and dandy, but Chernobyl's design specifically allowed this to happen. Even with known design issues, the GE Mark I BWRs can't spew so much stuff around. Your argument is similar to arguing that driving cars is horribly unsafe because they all blow up when hit from the back. Well, Pinto did, after all!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
A Federal Environment Agency (UBA) report revealed that a rapid phase-out of nuclear energy would have only a modest impact on Germany’s economy.
Daily Frankfurter Rundschau reported on Friday that an assessment by the agency found that if all nuclear power plants were shut down by 2017, electricity prices would increase by just 0.6 to 0.8 cents per kilowatt hour and there would be “no significant loss” in economic growth.
A shut-down would “have substantial benefits and outweigh the modest increases in electricity prices,” the report said.
The report also said the withdrawal could be achieved without the risk of electricity blackouts because “sufficient surplus reserve capacity” exists.
It added that new power plants would need to be built to support the withdrawal but that Germany could rely on the rapid development of renewable energy sources as well as ultra-efficient natural gas-fired power plants.
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20110527-35293.html
I feel like it does need mentioning, though: hydro can be pretty nasty when it goes wrong, too. Nuclear meltdowns may not be a barrel of laughs, but a burst damn would ruin your day too.
http://disasterhistorian.blogspot.com/2010/03/bursting-dams.html
I know you didn't actually argue on that point, but I though it needed mentioning all the same.
Generating 17% from renewables is "leading the world"?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The problem is they are saying "Chernobyl killed a million people so we must have no nukes!" which is setting themselves up for the (insane) reply, "No, it only killed 5000 people so nukes are OK."
Coal mining alone kills 20,000+ people every year, never mind the deaths caused by other factors. I don't see what's insane about pointing out that 5,000 deaths over the 60+ years we've been building nuclear powerpleants is no big deal. I think it's insane to latch on to a number without bothering to look at what kind of harm is caused by the alternatives. Even if we had a chernobyl every 20 years, it would still cause less death than conventional methods.
Yes because coal is so clean and doesn't cause serious health problems for the people who mine the coal. It doesn't cause serious problems for people who live around the coal plant. Coal doesn't drop tons of crap in the air. Coal doesn't drop tons of crap around the plant making it nearly impossible to live around one and definitely impossible to farm or have a water plant or a whole list of other things. Yea let's switch to wind power that there is no way in hell it could provide enough power for the whole country let alone an entire state. Yea lets switch to tidal power that hasn't proven it can generate a decent level of power compared to the level of energy and cost to build a tidal plant. We could always go to solar power that won't work in a large number of states because of the low number of clear sunny days to provide a level of power to power any significant portion of a state or even a city. Don't even talk to me about hydro power in the US. The west and south west have droughts. Everyone else is getting flooded from too much water on a semi-regular basis and a hydro dam that blocks up the water would make things even worse, not to mention seriously screw the ecosystem by changing the amount of water that flows and frequency of it. Hydro power is not realistic for most of the US and causes more problems than it solves. You screw with the water system in the mid-west and you are seriously screwing with food production for most of the US. You start damming up rivers and now you are messing with shipping too.
The green energy people are morons who are freaking dreaming. Green energy can not replace any significant level of power production for the US without putting a large portion of the country in the dark and raising the cost of energy to 20 times it's current level. We might as well go back 50 years technologically and medically. Nuclear power is a rational and reasonable power source that has far few problems than any other form of energy we have today and at a much lower cost. But hey if you want the cost of everything to rise due to increased energy costs and a serious economic downward trend then go ahead and push for green power but when the people riot in the streets because of seriously increased costs don't say I didn't warn you. Oh and in case you didn't catch it during the campaign Obama said energy was too cheap and we needed energy to cost more at least 5 times more than it does so we can add green energy to the mix. Yea way to hose the economy over by wanting energy costs to skyrocket. Obama is an idiot and should scare the hell out of you if you really listen to what he says and what he wants everything to become.
With Social Democrat schemes in Germany, grid powers you! .....?
Less-geeky computer repair alternative for Lansing, MI
Yes, and you don't have to mine uranium at all, it just magically appears in the fuel elements. Not.
Uranium mining is much worse than coal mining because of radon, radioactive dust and contaminated water. And since uranium is not quite a common element you've got to go through a lot of rock to extract a bit of uranium.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The ironic thing about Germany, is that other European nations with less regulations (and some with equal or more) will be building more nuclear power plants.
For example, take Ukraine. Currently, about 50% of all electricity in Ukraine is nuclear power. Ukraine is the site of Chernobyl. Yet, Ukraine is planning on renewing and expanding their nuclear fleet in the next decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Ukraine
The largest nuclear power plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, is located in Ukraine. In 2006, the government planned to build 11 new reactors by the year 2030, in effect, almost doubling the current amount of nuclear power capacity.[3] Ukraine's power sector is the twelfth-largest in the world in terms of installed capacity, with 54 gigawatts (GW).[2] Renewable energy still plays a very modest role in electrical output; in 2005 energy production was met by the following sources: nuclear (47 percent), thermal (45 percent), hydroelectric and other (8 percent).[3]
So why is Ukraine going to build more nuclear plants? Energy security. Once the gas pipeline from Russia is built under the Baltic sea, Ukraine will get cut off unless they pay same rates as rest of Europe.
So, Germany may just kill its nuclear plants. But lots of the neighbors will not be killing theirs. Keep in mind, that Germany also had plans to kill their nuclear plants after Chernobyl, then they flip flopped and now they flip flopped again.
Does this mean Germans trust Ukrainians or French more than they do themselves to run these plants safely??
Statisticly they are indeed relatively safe, however if something happens it happens on a big scale.
That is just one part....
(albeit not an un-important one)
I have some wories about peak-uranium for one thing. Not all studies give the same answer (basicly anything from 1980 to never) but it is something to take into account.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
So tell me exactly how much farmland was in use, how much was going to fall out of use because of farmers going bankrupt? Exactly how much production did they have and how much production do the larger farm conglomerates that now exist that didn't exist back then? What is the total production rate of current farms and how does that compare with total production rate before? How much farm land is lost each year due to population expansion so it really doesn't matter to count that amount since it would have been lost anyway?
Your making blanket statements without any facts to back them up. Your also trying to reduce a very complex issue in to a simple one. Your taking an emotional stance of see that's bad, rather than a reasoned and well thought out argument. I will gladly take, lets be generous, 1 million deaths under an accident compared to coal industry reports of 500 a year dead just in the US from the mining of coal, and thousands per year in China let alone the rest of the world. Not to mention the average of 10,000 a year in the US dying from the burning of coal and that is when the plant is working correctly with no problems. There is also the amount of damage coal mining does to the environment around it. The burning of coal really screws up the environment around the coal plants as well. Nuclear power averages 400 a year world wide based on the accidents so far. I'll take those numbers any day.
That doesn't even bring in to account the coal mine fires either. There is an area in the US that is basically unliveable because the coal mine below ground still burns to this day that started back in 1962.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
You can then throw in the huge number of coal mine fires that China has. So by and far Nuclear power is far safer and cleaner than coal could ever be and it is the most common source of power. If you added up the total amount of environmental damage done by ever nuclear power accident and then compared it to every coal mine and coal power plant disasters and accidents and all the environmental problems coal mines and coal power plants produce, you would find nuclear power is a far better deal than coal and far better for the environment.
Do the research yourself and see. It will surprise you the serious issues with coal.
The number of people killed by nuclear power is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people killed by coal production and burning. The amount of damage that nuclear power does to the environment is again a drop in the bucket compared to the damage that coal production and burning does to the environment. If nuclear power is bad then coal power must be the greatest evil on earth that must be stamped out immediately. Your reacting from an emotional position and not a well thought out logical and reasoned position. Do the research find out for yourself.
Nuclear has the lowest fatality rates of any power source, and is the only true green technology with no emissions whatsoever. No it's not perfect but it is the best source of power we have today.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
The pro-nucular bias of the Slashdot audience is always amazing - technocratic and enomically ignorant.
Germany's government effectively reinstalled the former agreement which hasalready been set up with the German nuclear industry years ago, today. There is nothing new here so stop standing and looking. Germany is researching ways of substituting the meager 22% (before the most recent de-plugs of the older plants) of its Atomkraftanteil. There is a chance that other economies will ask for what Germany has to offer someday - not just on the field of renewables but also how to get rid of defunct plants and other still unsolved problems of nuclear power generation.
What the country is doing now has a grounding, or do you really think the Germans with their fetish realationship to their industry production would do such a thing head-over-heels?
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Strommix-D-2010.svg&filetimestamp=20110323124037
While personally I would prefer a nuclear over a fossil fuel plant, I read that nuclear reactors are too slow to react to the highly variable energy production by wind turbines and photo-voltaic installations which make up an increasingly large percentage of the energy production in Germany.
If this is true, keeping the existing reactors running for an extended period would not be beneficial towards the goal of migrating to renewable energy sources.
The only source I can find for this at the moment is http://www.taz.de/1/zukunft/umwelt/artikel/1/so-bleiben-sie-atomkraftgegner/ (in german) - I would love to hear someone with a better understanding of the subject matter than me address this (and maybe to the other claims in the article).
The excess cancer deaths from Chernobyl alone are expected to be between 30,000 and 60,000 http://www.chernobylreport.org/?p=summary
Looks like nuclear power is doing its durndest to catch up with coal, which has been around longer and so has quite a head start.
Right now we know that mark 1 reactors are flawed. At the time they built until the first major accident, no. There is a excessive hubris that makes people to believe in all new technologies and marking as '-1' comments that try to point it out.
A full 17% of their energy is provided by renewable sources, well on track to meeting their 18% goal by 2020.
Nuclear comprises only 11% of Germany's energy generation as of 2009.
For a value of 11% that is supprisingly close to 27%
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Current temporary storage facilities don't all 'leak'. That's just nonsense.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
I think I'm investing in Finnish nuclear plants. I bet they are useful in the future europe.
tlax says: "Lol".
Does Germany have some secret plan to replace all their their nuclear power plants with a huge pile of Bloom fuel cells stashed all around the country taking a load off the main power grid? I would love to see mass production of these fuel cells so that everyone or at least every apartment complex would have one and reduce the load on the power grid and reduce the miles of power lines needed to provide power. The amount of power lost due to power lines over a large distance isn't insignificant. Not to mention in the US so many power lines are not buried, so weather and other disasters cause problems with the power lines.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1557348/bloombox-bloom-box-fuel-cell-60-minutes-kleiner-perkins-kr-sridhar-green-energy-google
They are not pie-in-the-sky. E-bay, Google and a few other silicon valley companies are already using them to help reduce their load on the power grid. Not to mention I would assume reduce electrical costs as well.
Yes, and you don't have to mine uranium at all, it just magically appears in the fuel elements. Not.
1 kilogram of natural uranium ore results in as much energy production as 14,000 kilograms of coal. That means you could reduce the number of workers by a factor of 10,000 at least. Assuming accidents scale at the same rate, you would have 2 deaths per year instead of 20,000. These numbers reflect the fuel-usage in modern reactors; reactors capable of fuel-reprocessing would reduce the fuel usage - and, therefore, the death toll - even further.
Uranium mining is much worse than coal mining because of radon, radioactive dust and contaminated water.
Irrelevant. Please examine the above quoted figures. Even if uranium mining causes accidents/death at a 100-to-1 ratio compared to coal, the annual 20,000 worker death rate would be reduced to 200. Even a 1000-to-1 ratio would result in an annual reduction of 18,000 deaths. Given the 5,000 deaths previously attributed to Chernobyl, we can conclude that nuclear power caused as many deaths in 60 years as could be saved in just 3 months if we eliminate coal as a source of energy. Over the course of 60 years, human stupidity and fear of The Atom has lead to 1,000,000+ deaths which could otherwise have been avoided.
And since uranium is not quite a common element you've got to go through a lot of rock to extract a bit of uranium.
It's common enough in sea water that, for all intents and purposes, we'll never run out. Current seawater-extraction methods aren't viable for large-scale use, but they work, and they produce uranium at prices which are low enough to be viable given the current market value. It goes without saying that sewater-extraction carries far lower risk than coal miners face on a daily basis. However, even if seawater extraction turns out to be unworkable for industrial use, I'm not overly concerned about the difficulty in extracting uranium from soil; as I've shown above, the numbers clearly aren't on your side.
(it's not worth filling in the blank as I expect it to change the next time there's an election or when the higher power bills start arriving - whichever is the sooner.)
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
We have to remember that Germany is able to have interminent source of electricity through renewables due to the fact that it has many interconnects with neighbouring countries like france etc and is able to import electricity when required and export electricity when wind is at it's max... So in a sense it is made possible by the fact that France has nuclear power at base load and has capacity to export electrcity..
No debate with your points. But here are some other insights...
Did you know to this day 20% of Belarus's farmland is unusable?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus
The problem is that nuclear has serious longterm issues like this. Sure there are less immediate deaths, but the longer term deaths related to nuclear are much higher. This is the fault of humanity that can't look beyond the next Apple announcement.
So tell me how do you plan on making all of the land usable again? Oh wait I forgot you are not near any of these disasters and as such could not shive a ghit. Until it happens in your backyard!
Compared to the alternatives, coal or even hydro, that's still pretty good. Especially when you consider Chernobyl was a freak accident that absolutely can never happen again because nobody uses graphite control rods anymore. There was an actual meltdown at Fukushima, care to tell me just how much farmland was lost there? You'd be surprised to find out that the impact is minimal, and that's pretty much as bad as it can get with a nuclear reactor these days. More modern designs with passive cooling can't even get THAT bad.
Yeah. Right. Total non-sense. German overreaction and wimpyness.
The last time I heard that it was as german funds, banks and privateers were hesitant to invest in the US housing market.
Listen:
This is the nation that had a significant influence in the invention of nuclear power. THEY INVENTED THE F*CKING STUFF! Nuclear plants all over the planet are run with german hightech. And yet, in this nation of Über-technologist, the effing government party, the CDU, well know to lube up and bend over for the industrial complex in general (and the gridpower giants in particular) whenever the occasion arises
has concluded that
a) The risk is to high.
b) The long-term costs hugely outweigh the benefits of nuclear power.
c) Nobody, and I mean *NOBODY* can take on responsibility for their deadly toxic garbage for a time period of 50 000 years.
d) There are no eternally safe storages for nulear waste.
e) The existing safe storages for nuclear waste are leaking as we speak and the Atomaufsichtsbehörden have a huge f*cking problem on their hands. Which taxpayers will have to pay up for.
d) It's easier than we thought to cover all power needs with renewable sources, *excluding* the burning of coal and/or oil.
They've shut down Kalkar, before it even was finished.
There wasn't even a particularly huge protest wave about that one, compared to AKW Brokdorf. And yet they shut it down *after* it had already become the most expensive building in the history of mankind. (More expensive than the Pyramids in Egypt measured in GDP equivalent!)
They shut down the reprocessing plant WAA Wackersdorf. Not the protesters, which were quite vocal I might add. Some beancounter in the fricking ultra conservative techno-romantic Bavarian state-government figured the numbers just didn't add up and canceled the damn thing with the stroke of a pencil. .... And on and on and on ...
Believe me, I too wish it were different. Harnessing the power of the sun and universe here on earth to do great powerful things, Foo Foo Wah Wah. And all that 70ies technocratic romanticism. I'm all for it, really. Heck, my Grandpa worked with Grumman on the lunar lander, as did my dad. I'd love to have a working technocracy, I'm a nerd-kid of the 70ies, for crisakes!
BUT:
The current state of net-positive nuclear power is to risky, to expensive to build, to expensive to maintain, the waste can't be stored safely for the required amount of time, etc. pp.
And nuclear power thus IS NOT FEASIBLE!.
Those are the facts. End of story.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Your valid points are obscured by your citing of 64 confirmed Chernobyl deaths. Even though you clarify yout point, why cite that number?
Did you also know that a second explosion there might have rendered half of Europe uninhabitable? Care to address that?
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
But there's a smaaaaaal issue.
The nominal power output is about 4 times the average output. Yep, inland wind farms typically work at 25% of their nominal power. Offshore wind powerplants can reliably produce about 50% of their nominal power.
That's a dirty little secret of wind power.
Most of these so called 'studies' assume that:
1) There won't be growth in electric power consumption.
2) There'll be significant improvements to the whole grid.
3) There'll be significant improvements to the generating technology.
4) Capital is unlimited.
5) Optimal circumstances for their particular brand of renewable power are universal.
I haven't yet seen _any_ report which doesn't make at least two of these assumptions.
Realistically, it's either fossil fuels or nuclear power for the next 50 years or so.
Yeah, but what happens when you pummel transistors with ionized radiation? Oh....
Only that you don't find one kilogram of natural uranium sitting around just like that. You've got to separate it from the actual rock by chemically dissolving it with acid, then extracting yellowcake from that solution, and then extract natural uranium from that.
It is far easier and cheaper to mine and burn 14 tons of coal than one kilogram of uranium. Which is reflected by the price: one kilogram of unprocessed pitchblende costs around EUR 100. For that money can get up to 5 tons of coal - depending on the quality, amount of stored energy and sulfur content - ready to burn.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Quebec is a net importer of electricity from Ontario in the winter, when demand is higher (electric heating) and capacity is lower (low reservoir levels - it doesn't rain in the winter - unless you count ice storms).
Also, the history of the James Bay project is instructive - it was supposed to cost under $4 billion, not $16.7 billion. If it hadn't been for the energy crisis, James Bay would have been a white elephant.
So now Charest (Quebec premier) wants to propose an $80 billion northern development? Quebec's economy lags almost every province and state in North America already (hint: it ranks 53rd out of 60 - even Newfies make more money per capita). Tax rates to support this are already the highest in North America (hint #2 - a quebecer making minimum wage pays as much tax to Quebec as an ontarioan making $50k a year pays to Ontario).
The money simply isn't there. The solution is simple: Kick Quebec out of confederation and revert the borders of Quebec to what they were at confederation, well before the Feds gave control of northern Quebec to the province. This ends the $8 billion a year equalization payments fiasco as well. It also ends the problem of politicians sucking up to separatists (like Layton in the last election).
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Only that you don't find one kilogram of natural uranium sitting around just like that. You've got to separate it from the actual rock by chemically dissolving it with acid, then extracting yellowcake from that solution, and then extract natural uranium from that.
You can feel free to provide some numbers and/or references, any time you're ready.
It is far easier and cheaper to mine and burn 14 tons of coal than one kilogram of uranium. Which is reflected by the price: one kilogram of unprocessed pitchblende costs around EUR 100.
Wow. So market value is an accurate reflection of how difficult something is to mine? Damn! You learn something new every day.
In that case, gold must be REALLY hard and expensive to mine! It must be WAY more dangerous than uranium! All those videos I saw about people panning for it in rivers must just be government propaganda. And the thought of how bad the diamond mines must be ... it just makes me shudder.
If you discount the very first accident (at a testing center, and having nothing to do with the core), then the first "real" (read: injury, death, or radiation leakage) accident was in 1975. The warnings about Mark I reactors began in 1972.
Yes, of course, no one in their right mind would ever consider allowing critical systems to trust any data that matters from potentially creaky, cranky, or otherwise afflicted PCs regardless of the OS.
More detail would be redundant.
Hardware failures are something that I'm sure is planned on, not something to be denied. Things like metal migration in semiconductors and dried out electrolytic capacitors are examples of long-term failure that don't show up in burn-in or as infant mortality. Good luck in finding a PC power supply that would be trustworthy after 40 years without maintenance. Redundant or stored identical spare supplies would tend to suffer from the same ailments. I'm sure they'd be freshness dated. Transistors do well but some fail. (of historical interest, some older germanium transistors would short out from tin whiskers growing inside even when not in use, see NASA analysis http://www.vintage-radio.info/whiskers/ )
It's easier to trust someone that has designed a system and expects, accommodates, and acknowledges failures than someone who claims they've built something that won't fail in 40 years.
Partisan? Ofcourse, it's a politicised issue! Do you cry "partisan!" if i link to Dawkins in a creationism vs. evolution debate? No? Obviously what matters is if the arguments are valid not that some people are "partisan" to the arguments.
Hammer and sickle and the proletariat? please grow up beyond the mind of a cold war victim. ("overthrowing of the proletariat" made me laugh though, next time try "the proletariat overthrowing capitalism" or similar to avoid embarassment)
If you had spent half the time writing this drivel to actually research this issue, you would know that fossil and nuclear have been subsidized through the roof for half a decade now, right from R&D to purchasing guarantees to insurance. Subsidized renewables? On an absolute scale sure (and we should have more of that), on a scale relative to non-renewable energy, renewable subsidies are a joke.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
Partisan? Ofcourse, it's a politicised issue! Do you cry "partisan!" if i link to Dawkins in a creationism vs. evolution debate? No? Obviously what matters is if the arguments are valid not that some people are "partisan" to the arguments.
It's nice of you to assume that my answer would be "no", but you happen to be wrong. Debates are pointless. Trotting out the newest poster boy for either side isn't particularly convincing. I want to see hard data from a non-partisan source, not talking points repeated ad-nauseum.
Hammer and sickle and the proletariat? please grow up beyond the mind of a cold war victim. ("overthrowing of the proletariat" made me laugh though, next time try "the proletariat overthrowing capitalism" or similar to avoid embarassment)
It's true, I'm not up on my double-speak. Never needed it much. Thanks for the lesson!
If you had spent half the time writing this drivel to actually research this issue, you would know that fossil and nuclear have been subsidized through the roof for half a decade now, right from R&D to purchasing guarantees to insurance. Subsidized renewables? On an absolute scale sure (and we should have more of that), on a scale relative to non-renewable energy, renewable subsidies are a joke.
Now that's funny, right there :)
Nuclear is a great power source. Sometimes stuff blows up but it is almost always because of human error.
Even if you were correct, that age is the most important factor, then why is that the fault of nuclear power in general, and not the governments for a fire-and-forget attitude?
It's easier to dump nuclear power than get rid of corrupt and lazy regulators, arrogant and secretive companies and a huge cloud of deluded online denialists.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
'ASPLODE' - scat reference?
Jonathanjk.com
You do realise designs and operating procedures like Chernobyl's would never be adopted for either regulatory or financial reasons. You are showing your ignorance of nuclear power if you bring up crap like Chernobyl. By your logic skyscrapers shouldn't be built because thousands of people died in some on 9/11. You are merely skimming the surface of what happened at Chernobyl, conflating several incredibly-different concepts and technologies, and vomiting up your ignorance for everyone to see.
The media is so sensationalist that it managed to make people seriously believe that nuclear plants were very dangerous, to the point of forcing Germany, the main power behind the EU, to throw its economy and society down the gutter, depend more on other countries, and pollute more?
Nice.
It's easier to dump nuclear power than get rid of corrupt and lazy regulators, arrogant and secretive companies and a huge cloud of deluded online denialists.
Well that's a pretty generic argument. Seems you could substitute just about anything for "nuclear power": "coal power", "privatized health insurance", "the military-industrial complex", "Soylent Green", etc.
Joking aside, the only "deluded online denialists" are the ones screaming to keep all current nuclear power plans operational (this, sadly, makes up most of the "huge cloud"...people just as uninformed as most nuclear opponents). But the fact remains that the modern nuclear reactor designs cannot produce the types of runaway reactions that led to the major meltdowns of old. No delusion, just physics.
Yeah, now you really have shown yourself to be a troll (as if there was any doubt). Can't you find a more constructive use for your time? Why not jerk off more like the rest of us?
simple fact is that modern civilization in it's present form is unsustainable. am i saying modern civilization will collapse? no. worst-case scenario, life becomes very wretched and expensive as the Earth becomes less able to sustain modern civilization. how bad will it get and how soon? i don't know, but i'm glad i won't be alive 100 years from now.
what can be done to make modern civilization sustainable?
1. Population control
2. lots of directions to go here...
a.
- move power generation and manufacturing to the moon or other lifeless bodies in space.
- find cheap methods of transporting energy and goods from those extra-terrestrial locations.
- find cheap methods of reusing waste on Earth or transporting it off Earth
b.
- practical fusion
- find cheap methods of reusing waste on Earth
c.
- improve and rely solely on solar, wind, hydro, and other forms of clean, natural energy generation here on Earth
- improve energy efficiency of all devices
- find cheap methods of reusing waste on Earth
Please note that while there are many options for #2, Population Control is a required part of the solution. The more successful #2 is, the less population control you need.
If this goes off, Germany won't have much trouble shutting down their nuclear plants.
Solar has the potential to power the entire world, even with current efficiencies. Direct conversion of solar to eletricity is good for small devices only, if you want to generate MWs with low cost and environmental impact you want to boil water and use the good ol turbines.
What we need is good transmission lines (those guys want to do it with DC lines, but a hot superconductor would be ideal), political stability, and people willing to work in desertic areas.
As for the night time, there are ways of storing the thermal energy generated during the day.
Renewables are more expensive and pesky than oil, and it is not the magic bullet of fusion power, but yes, we can stop burning oil and coal and live just fine.
Suicide pacts? Rubbish, Europe has has co2 trading for 5 years and is still alive.
Someone has to act for the selfish morons that refuse to do anything about C02 emissions.
Excellent news. News . Watch the pro nuke shills go ballistic with their ususal lies now. (:
And also back in reality (instead of nuclear reactors run on magic beans land) nobody has yet seen any of those "radioactive particles" coming out of the stack despite the technology to do so being available since the 19th century (spectroscopy). They haven't put up since the wild claims of 1978 so it's time to shut up.
Coal kills a lot of real people in real ways without making shit like this up. This radioactive coal bullshit was part of a stupid 1970s PR campaign to attempt to make the general public worry less about nuclear waste from civilian nuclear power plants. It should be buried and forgotten like all other old lies in advertising. There's almost a weekly death toll of coal miners in accidents let alone the other problems with coal - it's a pity idiots like the GP poster don't focus on real things like that instead of a failed PR fantasy.
It's worse than that - it wasn't a study but a newsletter article by a guy better known for his books about cars and moonshining. Near the end of the article it goes on about how OMG terrorists! can make an OMG nuclear bomb! from the ash heaps at power stations. Getting an idea of the bullshit level yet? Meanwhile using the data from his references you can show that it would take more than 220,000 tons of the most radioactive coal he could find to equal enough material to give you the famous banana dose! Work it out for yourself from his numbers and googling banana dose in equivalent units if you like. The article citing the bullshit in the newsletter article was very much a low point for Scientific American.
Coal kills real people in real ways without this PR driven fantasy of "coal is nuclear too".
That's energy, not electricity. It includes oil for transport and coal for heating,
Everyone else is talking about electricity.
(It's also out of date - Germany currently generates about 17% of it's electricity from renewables, not the ~3% wikipedia shows).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
International Atomic Energy Agency
Another good example of Mass Hysteria by the idiotic crowd. People are afraid of nuclear power because of what happened in Japan. Well, there was a 9.1 earthquake in Japan (which didn't even damage the powerplants) followed by a massive tsunami. What Germany got do do with it? Italy is going to a referendum and it's said that close to 90% will vote against nuclear power. People are stupid, but here on /. we already knew that.
I did not see any numbers about the amount of radioactive substances in that footnote, just "among which". Care to provide a link to actual numbers that support the claim in the GP's link?
EPIC FAIL!
30 x 50 is not 15000!
Germany wasn't going to be spending a lot of money maintaining those nuclear plants and building new ones unless there was going to be a similtaneous Greek, Spanish, Irish and Icelandic economic miracle.
Civilian nuclear power is finished unless viable reactors of a small size (for safety) and small cost are produced which will reduce the huge upfront capital expediture pain that has been preventing construction just about everywhere. There are some options but they need a bit of R&D.
You see, real safety, not mickey-mouse make believe duck-and-cover safety is much too expensive to the folks in the executive class that get to become rich with this type of projects. So they prefer to allow for the occasional meltdown.
This my friend is where you show a complete lack of understanding behind the principles of process safety. Safety is NOT expensive. Please repeat that after me, Safety is NOT expensive. Safety comes in good design.
So Fukushima nuclear plant melted down because the cooling water systems failed after getting hit by a tsunami. How about simply not building them in an area where they can be struck by tsunamis or hit by earthquakes. Your German reactor had issues with the cold? Why not locate buildings indoors and heat the room through waste heat of the reactor.
You see fundamentally designs have changed a lot to go for inherent process safety. There exist reactors that can't possibly melt down, reactors that can dissipate to a safe state on a complete loss of power to all parts simultaneously, reactors that can run on the waste of other reactors without requiring re-processing. These designs have 40 years of process safety experience in them and cost not a cent more than the reactors of 40 years ago.
Retrofitting safety into an outdated reactor limping on its last legs is expensive these should be shut down. But the fundamental problem with nuclear is people like YOU, people who think because the dinosaurs are unsafe and economical that we should not invest in future technologies. Did you also cry from the hills that cars didn't have seatbelts, airbags, or ABS and that the only logical solution is to shut down the entire card industry? If not, why? After all more people die in car accidents in a single year than the nuclear industry has ever killed even if you take into account the bombs.
> Germany is pushing hard on the green front, entire towns are off the grid now.
Now, now, let's not spread such bullshit. Not a single town allegedly powered by "renewables" is capable of doing so without grid connection. If they go offline, they will go dark.
Out of curiosity, what makes you opposed to the modern iteration of nuclear reactors? The major accidents have all been Mark I reactors, which have been known to be unsafe since 1972 (warnings ignored, thank GE in the U.S.). For modern reactors, "real science" reveals mostly positives, with almost no chance of a critical meltdown.
Well, as you wrote: "almost no chance...". The thing is, the probability estimates in this regard have a habit of turning out wrong; somehow something comes up that was not included in the estimate. In Chernobyl, well, it was a Russian plant, well, of course communists can't build proper plants. In Fukushima, it was either (a) the reactor design is outdated, or (b) the scale of the natural disaster was so unexpectedly large.
What will it be next time? How about maybe, "My bad, the reactor design was absolutely safe, but of course we didn't anticipate a terrorist attack / software glitch in the controls / human error."
I think it is not too convincing to keep hearing, "of course, in the past we were too stupid to prevent such disasters, but now we got the hang of it, honest"
I wouldn't call it knee-jerk reaction. The decision to phase-out nuclear power by 2020 was made about ten years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#Germany
Any ones that are left powered on. Transistors last apparently indefinitely if you leave them powered on, it's only when cycling the power that you have a chance for them to blow (after the "infant mortality" period of a few weeks/months anyway).
I think you're getting confused with valves or something, though even those don't last indefinitely. Transistor-based designs are a bit different - the longer you run them for (and the higher the voltage and temperature you run them at), the more likely the transistors are to die.
The Fukujima plant saved lives. Did you see the area around it? Not too many people survived that tsunami. But those working in the plant at that time did.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
In that case, gold must be REALLY hard and expensive to mine! It must be WAY more dangerous than uranium!
As it happens gold mining is fairly dangerous, yes, though unlike uranium most of the cost is due to scarcity of the gold itself.
And here I thought I was done with this discussion...
In Chernobyl, well, it was a Russian plant, well, of course communists can't build proper plants. In Fukushima, it was either (a) the reactor design is outdated, or (b) the scale of the natural disaster was so unexpectedly large.
Couple of things: first, Chernobyl was built without any sort of containment, and was operated with all controls disabled. It was like driving a truck through rough mountains with a nuclear bomb in the back on a hair trigger. And they were running experiments to test the limits of the thing!
In the case of Fukushima, yes, the reactors were outdated. Very outdated. Criminally outdated, considering that nuclear advocates have been screaming about that particular design flaw since 1972.
but of course we didn't anticipate a terrorist attack / software glitch in the controls / human error
As I pointed out earlier, the new reactor designs (the ones that we should be building, while demolishing Mark I (and some II) reactors) are invulnerable to those three. Why? Because modern reactors are designed to only keep and accept a small amount of fissionable material critical. In this sense, the controls are not required to prevent a disaster, because the reaction would simply fizzle, with all potential radiation leakage coming from the core being stopped at the containment. In fact, the controls are only required to keep the reaction going (and you can always shut everything down with control rods, but again, you can just let it fizzle in an emergency).
What this means is that human error and control failure would only cause a power failure, not a dangerous overload.
As for terrorism: the only way to possibly make an inherently-safe reactor design experience a far-reaching accident would be to detonate a nuclear bomb inside of it (this is the only thing the new containments cannot necessarily withstand). To do so would be a waste of a nuclear bomb, since the resulting disaster (if containment was even breached, and all fissionable material went critical) would be less devastating than, say, detonating the device at a sports stadium, or even a city street.
I think it is not too convincing to keep hearing, "of course, in the past we were too stupid to prevent such disasters, but now we got the hang of it, honest"
Since reactors have been built, we have had 50 years to pick apart every design aspect. We now know the physics in great detail, and can rationally design reactors. That we still have designs from the 70s in operation and causing disasters boggles the mind, but the new ones are safe. There's no delusions about it, just the physics behind it.
sad new for you, California now gets 60% of its energy from natural gas, up from 40% in just 3 short years. Fossil fuels are one viable alternative to nuclear, California chose that. Enjoy your fossil fuel future.
In which part of your scientific training did they teach you name-calling?
Do you insist on scientific proof before you do anything? Do you repeat the tests yourself to verify their accuracy? If so it must take you a long time to do anything. The rest of use realize that we have to make decisions less rigorously. Should I go get breakfast at Restaurant A where an acquaintance claims he saw a rat , or at restaurant B that has a Dept. of Health notice on the door? Hmmm... I really don't have time to test both places myself. It's not a question of science, it's a question of who I trust. Do I trust that the Dept. of Health used proper science methods? That they're not just a political agency that punishes people who don't donate to the right party or who fail to pay their bribes on time?
Science is wonderful, but we don't get to make most of our decisions that way. Even decisions that should be based on science sometimes depend on which scientists we believe.
Do you smoke? I understand that science has shown again and again that smoking is not harmful to your health. By your standards, you shouldn't consider the fact that the scientists were being paid by the tobacco industry to be "strong evidence" of anything.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
http://www.off-grid.net/2009/10/17/german-village-goes-off-grid-ready/
As an example.
You might want to check the last election results. The BQ got wiped out by the NDP.
Me, obviously!!! :-)
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
How many species would be killed due to environmental disruption and alteration?
I find being offended by me offensive.
Merkel's spokesman says whatever it takes to get votes. By the time the shit hits the fan, Merkel is out of office and doesn't have to worry about it anymore. Remember, this is the same woman who said that it didn't matter that here defense minister lied and had copied almost his entire Ph.D. thesis from other sources.
Germany's CO2 emissions and energy consumption are currently no better than many other European countries on a per capita basis, despite its claims of being so environmentally conscious and successful at managing its energy usage.
Getting rid of nuclear power means one thing for Germany: a large increase in gas imports from Russia. Now, what could possibly go wrong with Russia being able to shut down the German economy at the touch of a button? Heck, Russia doesn't even need an army anymore to pressure Germany (not that Germany would fight back), they just need to hint at "slight technical problems with the pipeline".