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German Parliament Backs Nuclear Exit By 2022
fysdt sends this quote from an AFP report:
"The German parliament sealed plans Friday to phase out nuclear energy by 2022, making the country the first major industrial power to take the step in the wake of the disaster at Japan's Fukushima plant. The nuclear exit scheme cleared its final hurdle in the Bundesrat upper house, which represents the 16 regional states, after the legislation passed the Bundestag lower house with an overwhelming majority last week. Germany's seven oldest reactors were already switched off after Japan's massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, causing reactors to overheat and radiation to leak. A further reactor has been shut for years because of technical problems."
...we going to see an earthquate and tsunami in Germany to justify this fearmongering?
Prior to the disaster I had heard of improved reactor designs that supposedly could not melt down.
Anyone know if these designs are limited to the small scale versions (the size of a semi trailer) Toshiba has designed, or can they be scaled up?
Hey Germany- you buy much of your electricity from France...they have nuclear reactors- are building more, and are right next to you. Good luck with this experiment in futility. You're probably going to kill more people in the long run with such knee jerk reactions.
Quit posting news from the Onion. Oh, wait. Germany did what?!!
building new coal and gas power plants
So, instead of nuclear energy -- which has killed only a handful of people over the past few decades -- they would rather have coal, which has killed at least hundreds of thousands of people in that same period of time. Never mind the long lasting environmental hazards created by coal mining and the toxins that coal fired power plants spew as part of their normal operation -- nuclear is obviously a much greater concern.
Palm trees and 8
importing your energy resources from the other side of the world is not the greatest idea in the world.
Deleted
Some people are smart enough to realise that while the earthquake/tsunami was the initial cause the same end result could occur via some other event causing cooling failure at a nuke plant.
Completely junking nuke plants seems a rather short sighted reaction, but what it has to do with Japan is obvious to anyone with at least 3 brain cells.
*if* they were replacing their nuke plants with other sources of clean energy. If you knock down one source of clean energy and replace it with another one, this really affects nobody other than the folks paying the bill.
But they're not -- they're replacing them in part with coal/gas plants, according to TFA. This ought to be regarded by non-paranoid people as a step backward.
Japan's nuclear disaster has proven to me that neither the companies responsible for nuclear power plants, nor the people responsible for ostensibly regulating them can be trusted. I think Germany's decision is absolutely correct until we can come up with a better political/organizational technology for regulating nuclear power plants.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Common Germany, your engineering is some of the finest. Think long term and if nothing else, put money into research of "Thorium" or "Travelling Wave" reactors, the type championed by Bill Gates. Both of these are completely safe and the waste is minimal.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
From what I can see, I hope the European Union survives till then (with Greece, Portugal and Ireland in it), but if it does, most of the new nuclear reactors in France would be powering the industrial complex of Germany.
In some sense, that does make a lot of sense to have a single nation throw their weight behind a tech and sort of specialize in it. On the other hand, naming Fukushima as a cause is just political pandering of the lowest kind.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
No, but we also have occasional earthquakes. Oh, and the Fukushima meltdown had started before the tsunami hit.
A record earthquake followed by a tsunami would junk most buildings - more people died in their offices than as a direct result of Fukushima. By the same logic the German government is applying here we should tear down office blocks because some other event could conceivably cause them to fall down (and again, more office blocks have fallen down than nuclear plants have melted down).
If any country has the engineering capacity to move off of Nuclear for base-load power, it is Germany. Blast Germany all you want to, but I hope they make it work. Maybe America could use a little more vision.
Unless you have lived in Germany, you probably aren't aware just how controversial nuclear power has been, especially since the 1970s. Germany was planning on quitting Nuclear power once the useful life span of their reactors expired, but Chancellor Merkel reversed this decision in what was derisively known as the "Ausstieg aus dem Ausstieg" or in English, the "Exit from the Exit" from atomic energy. Then Fukushima happened on the eve of provincial elections in Baden-Wuertenberg. So she reversed course just in time, but her Christian Democratic Union still lost the election to the Green Party for the first time since the end of WW 2.
I don't agree on Merkels U-Turns every time public opinion shifts, but I am in favor of ending Nuclear energy. The contaminated (evacuated) zone around Chernobyl is the size of Switzerland. If something similar happened in Germany, they would loose a major chunk of their country. Just food for thought.
I'll probably go down in flames from the nuclear fanboys, this being /. and all. Sometimes, I think they are more afraid of someone finding an alternative than they are of an actual mishap. Maybe Nuclear power makes sense in a larger country such as the USA, or Russia in an isolated location. But in Germany, a mishap would be catastrophic and affect the livelihood of tens of millions of people. Yes, I do live in Germany.
Sadly, I have to agree with what they're doing. For a long time I was all for nuclear power since it seemed to be the only realistic source of clean energy. However, as we have learned, corporations and government agencies simply cannot be trusted with anything as important as making sure nuclear power is produced in a safe manner. There will always be some level of incompetence, laziness, or greed that will make 100% safe nuclear power impossible.
giggity
Do they have a lot of problems with tsunamis in Germany?
yes the one that will hit the government if they don't do something to please the people
No, because collapsed office blocks don't spew radioactive material into the environment.
Dead people are irrelevant. Living people scared of evil magical radiation are what matters.
Wat.
The problem was in the plants' design. If you don't want to modify your existing facilities or build redesigned ones, and would rather invest that money in wind & solar or just buy energy from another country that will update its nuclear power plants, then sure, it's reasonable to phase them out in ten years.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
"France's Nuclear Energy Sector predicts strong growth in French Electricity Exports"
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
No, they won't implode -- they'll simply choose one or the other, and if the United States is any indication, they'll choose their economy over the environment.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
Strohdumme Amis halt...
Since the first halt, Germany became a net power importer from France -- whereas it used to be the other way around. And of course France generates 80% of its power from nuclear. So yeah, they aren't really doing anything except shuffling the plants around.
France is going to make out pretty well from all this, probably going to end up as the major electricity producer on the continent. They are already reaping major economies of scale, having the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing electricity prices in Europe.
A man has a pool in his back yard, but the neighborhood kids keep sneaking in at night and peeing in it. The man decides to expand his house around the pool and hire a small squad of 24/7 security personnel for $250,000/year. While the man is at work, a very dedicated psycopath with explosives and automatic weapons takes out the man's on-shift security team, kills his wife, rapes his kids, and pees in his pool. The man's neighbor (Germany) hears about all of this and says "good god, I'm getting rid of my pool now, it's just too dangerous."
Some people are smart enough to realise that while the earthquake/tsunami was the initial cause the same end result could occur via some other event causing cooling failure at a nuke plant.
I disagree. I'd say that some people are smart enough to realise that while the damage to the nuclear plants in Japan was unfortunate, it was a casualty of the earthquake/tsunami, not the tragedy itself. Nuclear plants may not be perfect, and they can cause a small amount of harm in incredible circumstances. Things like record-breaking earthquake+tsunamis, acts of war between advanced nations, meteors falling in unfortunate locations... these kinds of incredible circumstances are far worse for the populace than the anything nuclear plants can do. Perspective is important, and the German populace and politicians seem to be lacking it right now.
what are we going to say cohorts of nuclear energy geeks who were ...... doh nevermind.
Read radical news here
Oh, and the Fukushima meltdown had started before the tsunami hit.
Citation needed.
An AC looking for a citation. Look it up yourself.
Here's a power plant in California on top of a fault line, and close to another one. There are lots of them, look them up yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
What is the deadline for phasing out organic beansprouts?
Nuclear power became very unpopular after the Chernobyl accident. This lead to a nuclear power plant exit strategy in 2001 implemented by the red-green coalition (liberal and progressive) government. The exit date was around 2020/2022. Just recently the autumn 2010 the black-yellow coalition (conservatives) changed that plan to something in the 2030ies. then the Japanese had that bid disaster and the black-yellow coalition became very, very unpopular, because of their recent gift for the energy oligopoly. So in panic they changed it back to 2022. The only difference is, that seven old plants and one new one (which was broken for years now) are offline. The old one are so secure that you can built you own Fukushima-accident in Germany with a sport plane.
However, it is very interesting to hear that there are so many people telling Germany: You don't make it. It is not possible to switch. Lets say your're right. We never know until we've tried. But, when you are wrong then what will you do?
There are people who would say that Fukushima is the result of incompetent management, complete disregard for security, letting a company with a tradition of lying about security continue to operate nuclear power plants and similar failures that all have happened in Germany already.
And mostly it is a way to avoid discussing the nuclear waste, where the only "suitable" place they found for it is leaking it so they must all get it up again except they realize the way they packaged it it's going to cost them a huge amount of money.
Plus Germany doesn't even have any installations to recycle the waste so even for that they have to ship it a long way with a lot of political and practical issues. And huge costs, which btw. the tax payers pay, just like they did for the nuclear reactors, and the storage/recovery of the wast and basically anything else. Which is why nuclear energy is "cheap", it's pre-paid with insane amounts from tax money.
I admit I am not convinced it isn't silly to quit, particularly in such a haste, but on the other hand it doesn't seem silly enough that you can't take the risk of trying. Particularly when you can be quite certain that France will have nuclear power you can fall back to in the worst case (thanks to insanities like electric heating France can't that easily switch away no matter what).
Kind of a bit of a risk of losing but also good chance of winning a lot by it.
No Germans do not like nuclear power since the Chernobyl accident. Even before that, they did not like it very much. But since then between 60% to 80% of the population do not like that power source. The exit by 2022 was already in place by a previous law from the previous government. The big thing is, the present government changed that plan to 203x and no changed it back after the accident in Japan, because they lost many regional elections. So the conservative government just tried out to be more popular. However, it didn't work, as everyone knows they are just liars.
There is still a long way to go until 2022, and such "decisions" are likely to change - more than once. This looks more like a "decision" that is designed to make politicians look better rather than an actual exit strategy.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
BTW: the problem in Japan was not the tsunami, it was the greedy company operating the plants which caused the disaster. German energy companies are greedy too. That's why the had a small explosion of oxyhydrogen gas in plant in Germany just a year ago. Completely without a tsunami or earthquake just by bad practice.
You are right. Nuclear plants are not perfect. I'm german, and I support the exit from nuclear. The city where I live is Munich, with 1.3 Mio inhabitants and lots of industry, including BMW, including big BMW production facilities. Our electricity sources will be 100% renewables by 2025.
So, with the exit from nuclear at 2022 (not now, by the way) we will simply implement that as planned. Lots of work, but 11 years is a long time. There will be use of natural gas before we are fully based on renewables, but that will be less than at places where nuclear is still active but efficient use of energy has been forgotten.
I invite you to check back in 2022 and 2025 hand see how we are doing. Gorgonite
I think it took two months for the following news to leak out and it appears it still hasn't reached you:
Some of the reactor cores melted even before the tsunami shut down the backup power systems.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Our electricity sources will be 100% renewables by 2025[...] There will be use of natural gas before we are fully based on renewables
The best case (without nuclear) for Germany is that by 2025, you will be getting 25% of your energy from renewables with the remaining 75% as gas "backup" from Russia. Furthermore, your electric bills will be 5-20 times the countries as economically developed as Germany. Do you think all that work on the longest sub-sea gas pipeline in the world will be for nothing after another 14 years?
I'm sorry, but while I appreciate the tone that you provide in this conversation, your comment seems quite delusional to me. 100% renewable is a physical impossibility. A high of 35% capacity factors that are all tied to uncontrollable sources can not possibly power your country. You have a serious fossil fuel industry that not only has significant resources invested in supplying the fuels, but also burning them. That industry isn't just going to say "OK, we're going for wind and solar now." They will fight to the bitter end. Your country's hatred for nuclear will have to turn to a hatred of coal and gas, and even then I doubt your government will roll over and force them to do the "right thing".
In the article mentioned above (regarding France also considering eventually abandoning nuclear power) is this quote: "While the center-right UMP party mostly supports the extension of the nuclear program, the opposition Socialist Party has called for a moratorium on new reactors and promised a national debate on energy transition if elected in 2012."
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-Cost for a 100000 years mainenance of the waste was never in calculations when people argued prices
It's folly to claim that the "waste" that is 95% re-usable won't be reclaimed well before the "100000 years" that you claim it is dangerous. The only reason so few countries have bothered with reprocessing said waste is because it isn't economical right now, and it's actually dirt cheap for us to store it since there is so little of it. As uranium becomes harder to find in a few decades, do you honestly think scientists and engineers won't be looking at the spent fuel and say "hey, I bet we can reprocess that economically"? Side note: once reprocessed and run through a reactor again, high level radioactive waste is only dangerous for ~300 years. Surely that's manageable, compared to fossil fuels that dump poisonous gasses and heavy metals into the atmosphere at thousands of times the quantity that do not decay.
-90% of German (or American) plants would not withstand impact of a plane bigger than a Cessna.
In that event, what would the damage be? I'd imagine the worst case would be a plant that is incapable of running again and cost quite a bit to clean up, so it would be an economic disaster for the company that runs the plant. But would anyone be harmed outside of workers at the plant? Psychologically, maybe, but physically no. A much better "use" (in terms of damage/effort) of a terrorist hijacking a plane is to aim it for skyscrapers and highly populated areas.
What in the world is going to create ground accelerations of 0.56, 0.52, 0.56 g and 15m waves other than an earthquake and tsunami?
Nuclear strikes, an asteroid impact maybe.
No, this decommissioning of nuclear plants has nothing to do with science, and it's all about knee jerk politics. One of the most powerful earthquakes of the last 1600 years occurred, do we really expect every system and structure to survive? Of course not, now areas without a chance of earthquakes this bad are bailing for no real reason other than pure politics.
When it comes to healthcare and economics Germany is held up as a standard to emulate, but in reality they make moronic decisions like everyone else does.
You can't put a 'made in Germany' sign on the lack of something.
I'm happy enough letting you guys ban nuclear, and then seeing how our respective economies compare three decades from now. I'll wager that your decision will be eagerly reversed, once the results become clear. (And results will become clear.)
It's pretty easy: the power plants in question are merely replacements for the aging, already existing coal plants. There is no need for new coal plants to replace the shut down nuclear power plants because Germany is a net exporter of electricity and can largely compensate the lack of nuclear power by not exporting electricity anymore. The rest can be easily covered by green energy.
Please stop speaking out of your asses if you have no clue how Germany produces energy.
importing your nuclear energy from across your border with France is, however, brilliant.
Until the day after you shut down the last German reactor and find France has just raised the price of power by 600x...
Relying on anyone else for fundamental resources like power is idiotic.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's politics following the people's will for a change. I have to applaud that and I'm glad about it.
There have been plenty of serious incidents and thousands of direct and indirect deaths and many more injuries or negative effects. Huge areas are uninhabitable for many years because of this and the costs are enormous. No country has a working and safe way to contain the remains for the necessary time or an idea how to finance that.
Nuclear power is expensive, dangerous and by no means clean. It's limited and even coal plants can be run with less pollution if investing the same amount of money.
I invite you to check back in 2022 and 2025 hand see how we are doing.
Do I have to wait that long? I haven't visited the Hofbräuhaus and other smaller establishments since 2007 and I'm starting to miss them. :-)
Great! I will sell you my house within 100 miles of Fukushima with a nice discount! (you know, I have offered this many times to nuke fanboys, and they never seem to take up the offer . . . Could BS travel more easily from the mouth than the wallet?)
Nuclear power is cleaner than coal power in a perfectly predictable world. It only takes one significant nuclear mishap to completely change the situation. At least with coal, the level of pollution is predictable, and you never have a large density of contaminants focused in a small but highly populated and vulnerable region.
Drop the hubris. Until we invent a way to clean up a mess like Fukushima, we are not ready for the technology. Face it, we screw up all the time, so we should only pick technologies that can be cleaned up after a screw-up. Anything else is a bunch of geeks self-gratifying themselves.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
There is not much of a difference here.
Yes there is. What you don't understand was the Chernobyl design was essentially a controlled bomb - when they lost control, off went the bomb, thus irradiating a huge area.
In any accident you can dream up, exposure would be measured in tens of miles, not an area "the size of Switzerland". Yes, even a plane hitting it... a well built reactor simply cannot contaminate a huge area. That was true in Japan and is true for Germany. They have just chosen to end prosperity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
because collapsed office blocks don't spew radioactive material into the environment.
Neither do modern reactors even with very bad accidents.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bill Gates drops bid for a German Parliament seat.
Natural gas is rather used for heating than for power plants. People heating with electricity are in minority here. "Nordstream" is being built for the sole reason of going around the "Bratstvo" pipeline, so Ukraine cannot steal gas anymore. If "Yamal" had enough capacity, "Nordstream" would be superfluous.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I was referring to the electricity sources for the city of Munich. Numbers fo other places will differ.
This has nothing to do with hatred, by the way.
There are communities and towns (like Marburg) where every house newly built or renovated has to be equipped with mandatory solar roofs (water or electric).
http://www.marburg.de/de/73351
They won't have any problems to reach the goal.
Additionally in Germany everybody eliminated their incandescent lighting a decade ago and now changes it to LED very fast.
The 'old' lighting has only a few remaining niches in the Home Improvement markets, while LED gets the lion share.
The GP isn't offtopic. The problem with Fukushima wasn't so much the plant's design as the exceptional circumstances (record-breaking earthquake AND tsunami) that caused the failure. It doesn't mean we should be abandoning nuclear, that's just blaming the wrong thing for the issue.
I agree with you that Gen II plants are outdated and should be scrapped, though.
Yep. It's called democracy. You should try it some time.
Three Strikes and Germany is out of electrical power!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
LOL! makes me think... it isn't the nuclear power that kills you, its the cancer!
There is no real nuclear industry. Its a massive corporate welfare program that doesn't even produce that many jobs. Decades of justifiable repression and regulation have weakened their influence over the political process.
Also, they have a big big image problem. Safe for 30 years in-between disasters that cause problems that last for a millennium is REALLY hard for even a good P.R. firm to sell to the public. The IAEA is the biggest thing they've had and apparently it can't stop the germans-- FYI, the IAEA isn't just for regulation and safety its purpose is ALSO to promote nuclear power. So their big win over other industries is they got their industry promotion organization merged with the regulatory body!
Germany is better positioned and advanced than anybody else on this issue; you don't understand where germany is coming from. They are in a STRONG position to kill off nuclear and coal as well as make a big dent in oil, largely because of decades of forward thinking and a more functional political system--- where the conservatives are not insane or complete sell outs hiding behind a false ideology. (not to say there is no corruption.) Germany has been creating a green economy so there are bigger economic interests involved; its not just idealism they have real money pushing things in a good direction. The solar industry will become a big powerful lobby in the future; it just needed to get a jump start all these years AND it never got what nuclear had...
Germany is upgrading their grid as well; they will be able to transport power long distances cheaply -- there is sun or wind somewhere... the more distributed the system the more it will level out which lowers the need for a baseload generation plant.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It has nothing to do with Japan. It has everything to do with fear-mongering sensationalist news organizations, and political cowardice.
Comment of the year
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False:
In the United States, the design and thickness of the containment and the missile shield are governed by federal regulations (10 CFR 50.55a), and must be strong enough to withstand the impact of a fully loaded passenger airliner without rupture. http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part050/part050-0055a.html/
Oh, and the Fukushima meltdown had started before the tsunami hit.
Oh, and that statement needs a source.
no one cares about modern reactors, they care about the reactors they actually have.
What are they going to use for base load?
You sound like a green politico that slept during the few physics classes in his curriculum (that's a diminuitive). The goal of power generation is generating reliable power, not jobs. This is Germany's STRONG position.
I'm not a coward by any name.
And when has this regulation been instituted?
(+1, Disagree)
Right -- And when he was running, George W. bush threw the bone of regulating CO2.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
And how much different would that be with nuclear? We never had much nuclear power production to begin with, whether those plants keep running or not won't impact the gas need much.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
>>>
Nuclear energy is one of those things - very easy to dismiss out of hand but the only sane choice if done right...
>>>
If you think some countries did it right, please list them. Otherwise you are just hoping and guessing.
But the real problem is not reactor design, it's the storage of the goddam nuclear waste!
That problem has not been solved (and is inherently unsolvable, some say).
Also, nuclear power is another example of "socialize the losses, privatize the profit", as the utilities can never be held accountable for losses from radioactive disaster - it's the state who has to pay. The sums set aside by the companies themselves are ridiculous.
The reactors themselves are usually built with subsidies (because it's so expensive) and the deconstruction is also assumed to be paid by the taxpayer.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
You know, I'm personally more interested to see what Japan will do after this then other countries. While other countries are screaming like ninnies, as are their sheeples, I bet they're going to tear down their old reactors and build new ones in their place... push for newer designs... invest in what caused a massive accident, research it, and make sure it never happens again all the while never forsaking a course of action they thought was prudent in the first place.
Amateurs. North Korea is not only phasing our nuclear-generated electricity; they're phasing out electricity altogether! This is great for astronomers in the country, and leaves a much smaller environmental footprint.
Oh, and the Fukushima meltdown had started before the tsunami hit.
Oh, and that statement needs a source.
The grandparent had repeated as actual fact a mid-May story from Reuters where Fukushima officials speculated that the meltdown might have started started before the tsunami. Said story had its own full Slashdot article, but I have yet to hear of anything along those lines since.
They'll just invade France again.
They won't do that... they wouldn't get any power, since as soon as France was controlled by Germany, they'd be phasing out the reactors in (the former) France as well.
-- Terry
No, I dont think thats what that particular article was saying at all. I dont remember the details, but if memory serves it was another example of slashdot summary sensationalism.
The greater death rate from coal is manageable because we have systems which easily handle it along with other common causes of death in the modern world. Coal is a "non-disruptive" killer like nicotine.
Nuclear accidents are extremely rare but their effects are concentrated and highly disruptive even when they don't cause many casualties!
The disruption is the problem, not the dead people!
As an aside, that's what makes "terrorism" so effective. If Al Qaeda transparently added several thousand deaths to "accepted" causes of death it wouldn't be "scary" and wouldn't accomplish their goals.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The mind boggles.
Think rationally please. Let us even ignore the facts and deaths that will be caused by global warming. Let us even ignore the future. The facts are that the safest form of industrial power generation per watt that we have ever used is nuclear power even if you include Chernobyl and Fukushima. Cola does not cut it because of pollution caused deaths. Solar doesn't cut it because of the pollution caused in making them (and the coal burnt to make them). Only tidal power has a lower deaths per watt. So what you are saying is that it isn't SANE to use any form of power generation. Well, guess what, that puts us back in the caves with a life expectancy of forty if we are lucky. No medicine, no industry, nothing. So, not having power will cause even more deaths. If we want to opt for the lowest death rate then it isn't SANE to use anything except nuclear power.
Operating (or building) any infrastructure as a business is just insane. Infrastructure is there to support other activities. Hospitals, parks, planes, railways, roads, power distribution systems, communications, none of these should be for profit enterprises. Int the past and in many places these have gone from public to private hands at great cost to consumers. A for profit business requires efficiency and there are places, particularly in infrastructure, where efficiency is not necessarily the best way to go. Safety is more important than efficiency.
If you recycle the nuclear fuel you will get another twenty-fold increase, so you can make that 400 to 660 times less.
repeating this nonsens doesn't make it any more true. It won't happen much more than in the past. Germany is currently producing a lot more energy than it needs. All we need to do in the future is to stop electricity exports and upping the renewable energy production a bit further - and that's already work in progress.
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Just imagine what we might have by 500 years! I say go for IFR's NOW! They are the ONLY economical way to do carbon-free baseload power without bankrupting the economy.
This was the law from 1971 to 2007.. no mention of plane's or aircraft. Thus none of our currently operating reactors could survive an impact without melting down.
P.S. As the reactors in Fukushima demonstrated, the pilots don't even have to target the reactor building to achieve their objective.
.
I wasn't aware Fukushima was hit by a Cessna. I'll have to try my Google-foo to find more info on that.
Germany produces energy mostly using coal. They buy the biggest mobile machines ever made to dig it out of the Earth and move whole towns to get at it. Brilliant ecological move, there, dumping nuclear power for coal. Wonder if their coal barons had something to do with tipping that political scale. It's not as if the Germans are gullible when their leaders start making impassioned speeches pushing irrational goals.
Are just pulling this out of thin air or why are people spreading complete crap here? Just because Germany has such machinery it doesn't mean most of the electricity is from coal.
Here that's last year's energy mix in Germany: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F7%2F74%2FStrommix-D-2010.svg
Yes, that's 43% coal in total, but not the majority. It's a huge share, too huge if you ask me. But it won't increase significantly next years. The coal plants that are planned to be build until 2022 are mostly replacements for the old, aging and really dirty plants that are currently running. They were planned to be build either way, no matter if we shut down the nuclear power plants or not. So that share won't be affected.
What will be affected is the 22% nuclear energy share (it will drop to 0 by 2022) and the renewable energy share (currently around 17% if I calculated right) which is supposed to exceed 30% by 2022. Calculate in the saving by not exporting as much electricity and you'll see that there is no need to produce more electricity from coal.
Now put that into perspective with China (78% coal, 2% renewable energy) and the US (50% coal, 9% renewable energy) and then you'll see that you better think twice before telling anyone how to produce electricity.