Slashdot Mirror
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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 :-)
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.
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"
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?
Well, German words can sound very powerful!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Oh yes. Excellent news. Because nuclear power is the cleanest, most dependable, most regulated, and lowest impacting power source on the planet right now, lets shut it down for no realistic reason. "Spinal sublexations which cause ill health?" Ah, you're a chiropractor. Sooooo, your position is that mythical twisting of the vertebrae (Oh yes, sorry, chiropractors have co-opted the term 'subluxation' to mean whatever they think might be wrong, rather than an actual anatomical definition. Convenient) ... which you say causes ill health, is due to radioactivity, that no one has ever sensed? That's quite a reach my friend.
The short version is nuclear power is the safest power we have. (Xref: http://climatesight.org/2011/03/15/nuclear-power-in-context/ ) That chart shows direct-impact deaths, and does not show the number of mine workers who die yearly mining coal, or the oil rig operators who die, or the VAST environmental impact directly from burning fossil fuels. In 40 years of nuclear power, there have been THREE nuclear plant failures. TMI, Chernobyl, and fukujima. TMI resulted in negligible radiation release. Chernobyl resulted in 64 confirmed deaths (though there is ENORMOUS variation in forecasts for 'potential deaths'), and Fukujima has, we've noted so far, had ONE death. One.
I can already hear the raising of the "But, it's Radiation! Radiation is BAD!" - yes, of course it is, but it must be taken in context. The levels talked about around these plants varies wildly, and your random "because we have nuke plants, people are getting more colds because of mythical undefineable spinal shift" is a textbook "Correlation proves Causation - a logical fallacy.
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
If I had to choose between burning coal and fission reactors, I'd keep the nuclear.
Yeah, I know people are scared because of what have happened in Japan, but I STILL rather have 100 nuclear plant in my backyard with a 0.0001% chance of killing or making me sick than one coal plant that are 100% sure to be bad (1) for my health.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station: The combustion of coal contributes the most to acid rain and air pollution, and has been connected with global warming.
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"
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.
Much higher than what? Deaths from burning dirty brown coal? I doubt it.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Firstly, nobody "invented" radioactivity.
Actually, Henri Becquerel invented it. A good thesaurus (such as Oxford Thesaurus of English) will show you that invent is, annoyingly, synonymous with discover.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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"
The plan is to replace all nuclear plants with renewables, not with fossil plants. However a few fossil plants that where planned to be decommissioned will likely get an extewnded runtime.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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??
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).
Excellent news. News . Watch the pro nuke shills go ballistic with their ususal lies now. (: