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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.
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
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.
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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
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.
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!
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.
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?
-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.
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!