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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."
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
The fundamental principle of the CANDU reactor design is the use of heavy water as a neutron moderator. Because water vaporizes at low temperatures, the reactor has a negative void coefficient, which means that overheating the reactor causes it to be inefficient at slowing neutrons, which reduces the reaction rate. This means that the CANDU reactor has an inherent negative feedback system and will effectively shut itself down if it overheats. This is not a control system, which can fail, this is a, quite literally, fail-safe design. If you crack the containment vessel and leak all the heavy water out, the reactor will shut down.
It makes no difference when you live in a land ruled by greens.
Well, if Germany wants to go down that route to be Green then so be it, but they should also enshrine in law some massive (punitive) tax on any energy they import from technologies they abandoned, otherwise surely they're just encouraging other countries to be un-green to meet Germany's energy shortfall!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
"These include building new coal and gas power plants, although Berlin is sticking to its target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, and by 80-95 percent by 2050.
It also signed off on expanding wind energy, in a bid to boost the share of the country's power needs generated by renewable energies to 35 percent by 2020 from 17 percent at present.
Germany is already far ahead of most of the world in alternative energy and this SHOULD force them to accelerate progress in the area, which will benefit all of us. The question is whether they stick to the road map.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Your parliament is not phasing nuclear power out in favor of wind or hydroelectric energy, they are phasing out nuclear power in favor of coal. Coal is one of the deadliest energy sources around. It doesn't take a disaster to make coal power deadly -- it spews hazardous gases and heavy metals as part of its normal operation.
I'd take nuclear power over coal any day of the week.
Palm trees and 8
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.
I'm not sure if any power generation reactor can be 100% resistant to meltdown.
However, modern reactor designs ARE much more resilient and in fact nearly every failure mode encountered at Fukushima has already been addressed in them.
For example, the latest generation BWR (ESBWR) uses heatpipes to pools on the reactor building roof to provide passive core cooling. No intervention is needed for 72 hours, after that all you need is a fire truck to refill the pools. (no special generators, etc.) The next refill will likely be significantly later since decay heat is significantly less after 72 hours. Since these pools are fully isolated from radioactive materials, they're a lot easier to top off than the SFPs at Fukushima.
Modern reactor buildings have catalytic hydrogen recombiners that prevent hydrogen buildup, eliminating the explosions that have made management and cleanup MUCH more difficult.
Obviously SFP management needs to be revisited - I think it simply didn't get the attention it needed, but none of the SFP thermal management issues are insurmountable or even difficult to solve. Most of the SFPs are only dissipating about as much power as a tractor-trailer engine, with Unit 4 being the exception. (That pool is rather overloaded with a full reactor load of freshly spent fuel. Lesson learned - don't pack pools so densely with fuel.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yeah, there's a couple, but I think the best design is the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (Molten Salt Reactor)- it's super efficient, inherently safe, affordable, scalable, and very flexible. It's potentially so cost-efficient that we could synthesize carbon-neutral fuels for all of our transportation needs, and definitely for less than $2/gal (and longer term, significantly less than that). The high operating temperatures mean that water cooling would not be required, so it safeguards our shorelines, rivers, and aquifers. This isn't a theoretical design, as it has already been shown to be feasible by a prototype built in the 60s (the program was shut down in the 70s because it competed with the uranium/plutonium fuel cycle, and it didn't easily produce plutonium for weapons). Really, this is amazing technology for which I believe the "Green Nuclear" label is very appropriate, and the anti-nuclear movement ought to take a very close look at this.
In fact, "farming" energy through renewables is a terrible choice by comparison, and will not be able to generate the cheap energy we need in order to sequester the CO2 that threatens Civilization and end the water shortage (via desalination). China already announced this year that they are pursuing this technology (something the US pioneered the development of), so nearly everyone else in the developed world is lagging in the Thorium Race. I guess after another decade or so of suffering, we'll just go further in debt as we try to buy Chinese-made LFTRs.
This could be our greatest moment, commercializing perhaps the greatest machine ever conceived, ending our economic problems, revitalizing our manufacturing base, ending poverty- so much is possible with cheap energy. Are we instead going to go the way of the Amish, shunning such potential out of fear and ignorance?
Every nuclear accident has its own beauty. The next will be as unexpected as the tsunami.
Every nuclear accident has its own beauty. The next will be as unexpected as the tsunami.
As opposed to deaths related to coal power, which are ugly, expensive, frequent, and utterly predictable.