Slashdot Mirror
Siemens To Exit Nuclear Power Business
jones_supa wrote in with a link about the future of nuclear power in Germany. The story reads: "German industrial giant Siemens is turning the page on nuclear energy, the group's CEO Peter Löscher told the weekly Der Spiegel in an interview published on Sunday. The group's decision to withdraw from the nuclear industry reflects 'the very clear stance taken by Germany's society and political leadership.' Along with abandoning nuclear power, Germany wants to boost the share of the country's power needs generated by renewable energies to 35% by 2020 from 17% at present."
This kind of thought is too bad for the Earth, because baring fossil fuels, there is really no other source that can provide the need of our modern society. The actual unblemished truth is that the popular âoerenewableâ sources can not supply but a minority proportion of the worldâ(TM)s needs for energy. The truth is: Itâ(TM)s either coal / oil, or nuclear energy.
And the sad thing is that today, as in right now, the nuclear technologies have never been safer, so much safer than any of the currently operational nuke plants, and much more relevant to this discussion, much more safe and indeed cleaner than any, ANY, of the alternatives.
Simply the truth, folks.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It's not that they fear (or already know about) more security holes in their SIMATIC and the ensuing fallout from it. Nooooo...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Importing power from France is like importing it from one US State to another. The distances are short, Germany can be nuke-free, and can purchase electricity without building expensive infrastructure it doesn't need.
Germany may as well pay France as dump billions into constructing and maintaining reactors.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
What the guy says is they will continue to build power-generation equipment, just not be involved with paying for and managing nuclear operations. Looks like a case of general business fail and sour grapes more than something forced by Germany's decision to move away from nukular.
I do not fault Germany for wanting to increase their reliance on renewable resources for power generation. However, I do fault them for wanting to phase out nuclear power, since it is really the only viable generating method for the future-at-large.
Think about how much coal and how many coal plants will be required to replace their nuclear plants. I'd rather run the tiny tiny chance of an accident at a nuclear plant than the very large risk that I'll be coughing up black spit and dying at 35 from lung cancer when I've never smoked.
France, on the other hand, will be making a killing selling their nuclear power to Germany..I bet they're scrambling to build a couple of plants for it right now..
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Thats OK, The Germans can rely on their good friends in Russia for a cheap reliable supply of natural gas to fire their power stations for the next century or so while they work on alternatives. What could go wrong?
Been spending alot of time looking at gay porn lately, fag?
At first I thought the German government lost it and were overreacting about Japan. But now a company who does business world wide is dropping nuclear power I'm asking myself: is there too much lead in the water over there or is the country just fucking crazy on their own?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
If instead of trying to increase renewable capacity desperately - I'm doubtful about the execution of a very large ramp-up in renewable energy generation capacity in itself - the German government would try to decrease fossil fuel use, they'd save at least 25k lives per year as compared to shutting down nuclear plants and letting fossil fuel based ones operate.
Based on deaths per TWh(which includes Chernobyl for nuclear), it takes about 160 lives to generate one TWh by coal and 0.04 lives per TWh by nuclear fission. Germany in 2008 generated 291TWh of electricity from coal, that's about 47'000 lives lost in one year.
Keeping all the nuclear capacity and spending the ramp-up in renewables to shut down coal plants would save tens of thousands of lives. Shutting down nuclear plants forces Germany to open about 20 new fossil fuel based plants, because even with a substantial increase in renewable capacity they cannot meet demand.
This is nothing short of mass murder through ignorance.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
If they were making money hand over fist, they would not be exiting nuclear power. Because they decided to exit nuclear power, they take the opportunity to make it look like they're concerned about society.
This is not much different than companies saying "we're going green" and getting rid of postal-mail bills. They're "going green" because it saves them money. If it it was more expensive to send email than paper, you can be certain they would still be sending paper.
Advice: on VPS providers
your mildly interesting reply was ruined by you're own faggotry.
fagot.
Such posts will get 5 Insightful just because they support the nuclear industry. It has been a peculiar experience to see just how slanted the community is, especially since I was directly impacted by the Fukushima accident.
Unfortunate, though. Slashdot is usually a great place to find opinions from those with first hand experience. However, when it comes to nuclear power, it might as well be a site for the nuclear lobby. Those with first hand experience are either too intimidated to post or accused of being liars when they do.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I'll add my voice to the chorus of people supporting nuclear power as the only currently viable solution to meet the growing energy needs of the future. It's just madness at this stage to suggest that any other technology can be:
A) As environmentally friendly.
B) As cheap.
C) As reliable.
D) As adaptable (goes anywhere in the world).
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Bummer. All those SCADA exploits and default passwords in Siemen's products won't be available anymore to run the local power plant from home. Oh wait... maybe that means "nucular" power will be safer now along with more uranium available for the rest of the world. Win/Win.
Maybe the German government and Siemens are privy to information you are not. Might be a bit more reasonable than to assume that they are all "just fucking crazy." But perhaps I am just fucking crazy for proposing a contrary idea?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
But thanks for supporting my point about Slashdot.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
This information will be *invaluable* for Germans as they enter their new era of energy:
Oui, je vais pencher pour votre énergie nucléaire. Me pénétrer sans pitié. (Yes, I will bend over for your nuclear power. Penetrate me without mercy)
Laissez-moi le plaisir de votre pénis grenouille. (Let me pleasure your frog penis.)
Or be accused of mass MURDER!
Nuclear Slashdot propaganda at its finest . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
But only when things go wrong. That is why companies get governments to "insure" them in case things go bad. With Germany pulling out, perhaps Siemens had to start internalizing some of the costs (especially, liabilities) they had previous assumed that the government would "help" them with back when the government was pro-nuke.
It is funny how Slashdot has so much contempt towards the finance industry when the nuclear industry is so similar in structure. Both take on risks that require government "backing" when things go wrong (and could do enough damage to bring down entire nations). Both result in powerful lobbies that manipulate entire governments. Yet you find very few posts here fighting tooth and nail in order to defend the finance industry . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Fukushima was a very unfortunate incident that was allowed to occur. People around the world are left thinking "well if the Japanese can't do nuclear safely, then nobody can".
Fact is, those plants were shoddily maintained, of old design, and sited very poorly.
In fact the location in which they were put, and both the design and location of the backup system beggars belief.
TEPCO have done the world a great disservice.
Alright, I take your post as a legitimate testament for plants working within business as usual conditions. However, you have only established that nuclear is the cleaner energy when things go as planned.
Unfortunately, things do not always go according to plan and your experience seems somewhat lacking in that department. How about I compromise and say that you are free to build all the nuclear plants you like, as long as the technology is deemed safe enough that you can actually get private insurance companies (without government intervention) to cover for potential accidents?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Siemens always left me with a bad taste in my mouth
No, the advertising and PR has been better funded, so much better funded than ANY of the alternatives. The cutting edge on the US side is the Japanese derived 1990s design of the AP1000 - thus vast amounts more hype than substance.
Elsewhere there is hope, but you've really been sold on bullshit instead of reality if you think nuclear stands way ahead of everything else in all situations. In reality a mixture instead of a monoculture works a lot better than some fanboy fantasy.
I'll support no nukes thanks. Not for any hippie bullshit reasons.. But just because the worst case failure modes for nuclear is so bad. And humans and nature have a long established history of fucking things up.
Yeah coal is bad. Only because we refuse to clean the output or put any modern technology into mineing it. Another fine example of humans fucking something up. There's no reason coal mineing could not be 100% automated. And theres no reason coal output can't be 0 emissions output 100% clean. Except for costs.
And if you're going to spend money... Why not spend it on wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and work tward fusion too. You get more out of it than nuclear and then cleaning up a disaster maybe. And the hippies like it too.
Until humans are smarter and less prone to fucking things up. And we can build things to withstand nature... Nuclear power is a bad option. We've just been damm lucky this far.
Did anyone know they were actually *in* the nuclear power business?
This sounds like a case of bad PR...
It will be interesting how Siemens will divest itself of their nuclear business assets. Dumping it all into an independent company that can be "retrieved" and reintegrated into the Siemens group later when Germans get fed up with Russian natural gas power plays is the obvious solution. Maybe force it into E.On under the stipulation that Siemens can get it back at firesale prices?
If they dump it directly onto one of the other big players though (such as Westinghouse/Toshiba, Hitachi/GE, or even Areva)(possible political factor to guarantee gas prices is selling assets to Rosatom) that probably means they are out though. Real sellout is dumping to the Chinese conglomerates building the AP1000's from Westinghouse/Toshiba as a fuck you gesture to the rest of the industry, and certainly the chinese using this as a leverage point to commit to buying German and EU euro bonds would make this intriguing.
Please, if we are going to have a witch hunt on fission .. let's at least put some money into nuclear fusion research. Yes Nuclear Fusion research has been progressing slow .. and yes some approaches to fusion have turned out to be much harder that previously anticipate (IEC, laser based fusion) however we shouldn't give up. There was a time when people who tried to build airplanes were ridiculed .. hell even one of the wright brothers sent a letter saying "airplanes will someday fly, but not for a thousand years" .. that was in 1901. Three years later, they built a working airplane.
They didn't give up and they followed the science. Until the idea of nuclear fusion has been falsified by a consensus of scientists, basic research into it should be funded.
Now you may ask why government should fund it and not private investors. It's because the huge development time involved doesn't make it feasible for private investors. For example, if they build a large tokamak or laser facility .. the design specifications would have to be based on parameters known today. So to ensure others cannot copy their invention (in case someone leaks the innovative ideas), they would have to patent it. But then the patent clock of 20 years will start today .. and by the time the plant is built they will only have 5 years to recoup their investment cost. Meanwhile others who didn't have to do all the hard research will be able to make great profits. Extending patent terms will not resolve this issue because then you have the issue of other people not doing work in the field and also you may be giving extended patent terms to technologies that are esential to fusion but may stifle advancements in other fields if their patents were valid for long periods --for example if the fusion plant required advanced magnets ... magnets are used in electric car motors as well. The other problems is that it provides a strategic advantage over enemy or potential enemy nations for the US to have leadership in all aspects of the technology. For example, the USA had to invest in rocket technology because the Soviet government was dumping huge amounts of capital into it --> and leadership in the space race was essential for victory in the Cold War. One other reason is that it's in the public interest that a corporation not have control of the fundamental technology.
So there are plenty of reasons why the USA should invest in fundamental technology. However the USA should not invest in the commercialization aspect of the technology (unless it's in the form of a loan for a capital intensive project like building the first few fusion plants).
Seriously. They don't understand that so-called "renewable" won't cut it right now, likely never will, but at the same time they won't want to cut their use of electric power. They'll whine about how the "government isn't doing it's job", but they will NEVER get it out of their heads that "nuclear power plant" != "nuclear bomb". Seriously, the average person is a complete retard when it comes to subjects like this.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
..and adapt.
According to IEA, nuclear amount to 6% of the worlds energy usage. Renewables are at 13%.
(International Energy Agency (IEA): Energy Statistics Division 2010)
Is it really so hard to believe that the other sources can be ramped up by 6% to replace nuclear?
It appears Siemens has been taken over by helicopter soccer moms.
OK, so it's "nuclear".
But is there any real reason it should be?
Check out the etymology for nucleus:
Now compare to "nucule"
Since nucleus and nucule are both from nucula, how is nucular pedantically wrong? In fact, pedants being wont to go to "original" pronunciations and "back to the Latin", nucular should actually sound better than nuclear.
Nucular is actually more faithful to the Latin than nuclear.
Nucular power. Sic.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
when the rivers you use for cooling your nuclear power station are running too low or too warm to work?
And, unlike your scenario, we've actually had that. Ask France and San Diego.
If you covered 2% of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara with solar PV,
How much would that cost?
You need how many panels? Let's take this one, for example. $400 for 185W, 1.25 m2 surface. Those 2% of the Sahara will be covered by a total of 158 billion panels, costing a total of 63 trillion dollars..
That's the cost for the panels alone. Now you must install them, they are spread over a wide area of desert. You need to build access roads, you need to maintain them. You need to build special fences to avoid sandstorms. How will you keep those panels clean? Wash them? Where do you get the water in the desert to wash the panels? Who will do the maintenance on 158 billion panels?
And now, installation. Will they track the sun? I guess not, because then you would have the added cost of installation and maintenance of 158 billion tracking systems. How will you get power at night? You need batteries, plenty of them. How much will those batteries cost?
Let's face it, solar isn't scalable. Without some future technology that's still several decades away solar is not the answer that will replace nuclear power.
Good for them for being able to take a stand for what they believe in and show the world they are more then just what their past decrees them to be.
I support fully the "not" use of nuclear products
The world will be without power when it's night time in the Sahara, and that we'll lose most of our electricity any transmitting it to Hong Kong.
The Sahara Desert contains 9,400,000,000,000 square meters. Two percent is 188,000,000,000 square meters.
You can get decent solar in bulk for $200 per square meter, but I'll give you one quarter that for serious bulk (which is probably below cost, but I'm being nice). That's still $4,700,000,000,000. Add actuators, cabling, etc., and you're well over 5 trillion dollars.
But the price tag isn't the hardest problem. The average panel is about 1.5 square meters, meaning installing over 125 billion of them. Okay, we need larger panels, say 14 square meters each (fit two side by side in a 40' shipping container to get them there quickly), 13,428,571,428 panels, If we have high-speed panels that last 25 years, you must install 537,142,857 panels per year, every year, for 25 years to make your target, and that many every year thereafter to keep production up.
Install over 500 million solar panels installed per year indefinitely.That's one hell of a project. And then after year 25 years add 500 million solar panels uninstalled and disposed of per year -- that's a lot of industrial waste.
Ha. I believe they are getting out of the nuclear business because stuxnet ruined their reputation.
Just keep in mind that disposing of the radioactive waste, as well as the entire structure of a plant (which inherently is classified as radiation waste as well) will cost billions in the long run, and just with this in mind. It will make nuclear energy to be the most expensive form of energy harvesting ever. Not to mention the dangerous byproducts. Of course (I think) most power plant carriers aren't liable for the disposal/safekeeping of nuclear waste, so in their books, it is of course the cheapest form of energy currently available. I expected more from the /. crowd, than just mindless rants and praise about this form of energy. The American nation has brought quite a lot of havoc upon this world by "applying" nuclear energy. And yet people seem to still believe that that 20th century brainwash propaganda .. I'm from Germany and I'm glad that the Germans finally have come to realize (at least I do hope so), and that germany might come up with a new course for energy harvesting which will lead the world into a new future that could eventually solve our energy crisis, even to an extent when energy could one day be freely available and distributed for every human being. But I might just be a dreamer about that, who really knows what the future will bring.. But really, AMERICANS, FRENCH, wake up, think about the nuclear waste and the disposal of it. That stuff costs more than you could possibly imagine, just make up your mind and stop that mindless propaganda. tnx, and about Siemens, well .. I was never particularly fond of Siemens, since I think to recall that they were involved in exporting building obsolete/insecure nuclear tech equipment/plants which did not meet EU security standards into third world countries just to provide a basis for the greedy nuclear power energy politics of old and sad men. With that in mind, and how ruthless and irresponsible the people in this industry act, I think it's fair enough that we finally turn this ship around and find real solutions. Anyway.. We'll see what the future brings :> Post Scriptum, I have my fingers crossed for ITER, which is about the real tech stuff called fusion ;> Since the planet has enormous amounts of hydrogen and quite a few tons of, err what was it again, Lithium? http://www.iter.org/
And yes, it is on its way! \o/
That's the wittiest Slashdot dept. line I've seen in a while :)
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
The control systems that Stuxnet attacked were siemens- this really can't be a coincidence.
A) As environmentally friendly.
Sure, if you ignore the potential results of an accident, the environmental problems that uranium mining poses, and the fact that there is still no operational waste disposal facility for highly active nuclear waste. (And even though Finland is working on a kind of cemetery for it, nobody is really sure if the security concepts are really fit for the kind of time periods we're talking about here, i.e. up to a hundred millennia.)
B) As cheap.
Sure, as long as the taxpayer foots most of the bill for building the plants, disposing of the waste, and cleaning everything up.
As it is, the taxpayer is the only "insurance agent" that is willing (well, not any more in Germany) to actually insure the risk posed by nuclear power plants. If companies had to fully insure their nuclear plants, nuclear power wouldn't be quite that cheap any more.
C) As reliable.
An atomic power plant is not per se more reliable than other plants.
Case in point would be Krümmel, among others (down for maintenance from 2007 to 2009, had more incidents therafter and was shut down again for maintenance within two weeks, still down).
Then there's also the question of "where do you get your fuel from", of course...
D) As adaptable (goes anywhere in the world).
Iran, for example, and if you are serious about using nuclear energy to solve the world's energy and environment issues, it should go to many other countries I'm not sure I want to see using nuclear power. Proliferation being a key concern here...
Their idea uses solar thermal plants. And no, the questions are not answered. Even they admit that more traditional sources of energy will be needed to keep a baseline load, since solar is not reliable 24/7, even with heat reservoirs.
They mention Nevada Solar One as an example. That produces 64 MW nominal, or 134,000 MWh per year. World electricity consumption in 2007 was 17,780,000,000 MWh. That means you need 132,686 of these plants.
Solar One took 16 months to build (remember, this is 182,000 mirrors and over 18,000 receiver tubes). Even if you shortened that to 12 months and had 2,000 installations going concurrently, that's still 66 years before they're all built. Even then, I'm not too sure world production of 364 million mirrors per year is possible. That's also over 35 trillion dollars, half the current world GDP.
They state a hypothetical 250 MW plant that takes two or three years to build, let's say two, and a thousand people on the job. Nevada Solar One put out 24% of its rated capacity over a year, so it will probably put out 525,600 MWh per year. That requires 33,828 of these to be built. Let's say a million people on the job making 500 a year, that's 68 years to completion.
And that doesn't even count for increasing energy needs. Our requirements will skyrocket once electric cars become the norm. It would be at least a hundred years and scores of trillions of dollars to complete this at these fantastic rates.
Good luck.
...they'll be focusing on all the new coal-fired generation that Germany is deploying to replace its nukes.
....to the up-coming "Freeze In The Dark" scenario....
Regards;
There's a difference between being impacted and being scared. More people are impacted by coal and petroleum pollution, more people are scared of nuclear.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
And why it is inherently flawed. Making separate LVs just protects the stockholders and management from having to report when things go wrong (SPVs). It does not protect the citizens impacted by the damaged economy, or say, the Tokyo residents downwind from the plant. This is how "limited liability" is being used to destroy modern society.
Instead, how about we do not allow banks to become too big to fail or power plants to become so powerful they can make large areas uninhabitable forever?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
There's this thing called "capital cost" you really should look up before insulting the intelligence of people that know better than to just listen to a sales pitch from some English Literature graduate that works in advertising. Besides, the total lack of private investment in civilian nuclear power speaks for itself. As for your lovely strawman of complaining hippies driving the price up, why then is it still very expensive to build a reactor in China where they could have such complainers shot if they wished , or in France where they actually did shoot some of the protesters?
You could read up a tiny bit on nuclear power generation or thermal power generation in general, but I'll try to give you enough here to explain what I was writing about.
To get the best bang for the buck nuclear is run as hot as it can without requiring truly ridiculously expensive materials everywhere in the steam loop. Oil and Coal would be run that way as well if they didn't have a lower hard limit with maximum flame tempertatures. Because nuclear CAN be run hotter it IS run hotter because the temperature difference in the steam determines how much energy you can get out of it. If you have lots of heating then you need lots of cooling which means you site nuclear plants on big freshwater lakes or rivers if you have them and seacoasts if you don't. Since a full scale nuclear power plant is so big you don't really need a lot of them anyway so that location constraint is not really a big deal. Thus point D above (goes anywhere in the world) is a demonstration of ignorance parroted from some advertising fool or something and not really important anyway - there is going to be somewhere within range of a HVDC transmission line where a nuclear plant could go since those things can run for thousands of miles with very little loss.
It's just the way it works, large nuclear plants need vast amounts of water for cooling but all it does to the cooling water is warm it up a bit, it's still there to be used for other purposes later.
Of the nuclear business for good?