The climate models speak for themselves. If you look at 10 year old and 20 year old models, they couldn't predict current temperatures - which stopped rising 14 years ago. If you look at arctic ice models, they neither predicted the decline in 2007 before 2007 nor did the post-2007 models predict the absence of further decline. Quite the contrary, according to the opportunistic papers (based on linear trend extrapolation, no doubt) published at that time, the arctic ought to be ice-free next summer. According to the IPCC report 2007, the glaciers ought to have melted in 2035. Thousands of climate science peers couldn't muster the common sense necessary to doubt that figure. Today, we know that even the revised figure is a figment of distorted data, taken from about a dozen out of thousands of laciers in the area, selected not by randomized sampling, but by the convenience of measureing them. In fact, the amount of water is Himalayan glacies stayed the same over the last 10 years.
None of that changes anything about the fact that coal and tar sand mining, oil drilling and shale gas are destroying huge tracks of nature and have severe consequence for human health. It doesn't change the fact that it is a good idea to replace fossil fuels wherever possible, if only to get away from the political troubles that Middle Eastern and Russian oil are causing, or the fact that reserves are running out.
Overstating your case only makes you look silly in the end, even if you currently enjoy a lot of public support.
Try and read about the real science, it wasn't just a couple of uranium miners, not even close (and those 2000 pages are just a dense selection of research done until 1980). Also, ten times the average background radiation can be naturally found in several places (e.g. in Cornwall or Denver, Colorado) with relatively high thorium/uranium concentrations in the soil, without detectable effects.
Finally, the approach of diluting toxins has not been followed for decades. These days the general approach is concentration and indefinite storage - as most of those toxins know no such thing as a half-life. (Germany is storing more than 2 mio tons at just one site in salt caverns. But nobody cares, because it's not radioactive.)
The health cost of 20.000 dead is incalcuable - vanished in minutes, not even a chance to say good bye. There is a health cost of two oil refineries and a chemical plant burning uncontrolled for a days. Thousands of tons of benzene must have contaminated the area. There were problemes with supply of naphta, benzene, xylene and toluol (all important to plastics and chemical industry) worldwide after the earthquake and tsunami brought down a dozen chemical plants or so.
Carcinogenic effects of benzene are known to require mere micrograms. You can't smell it, you can't see it, taste it or detect it in any way not requiring major analytical equipment in those quantities. There is no Geiger Counter for organic molecules and no Star Trek tricorder will tell you were some minute trace of the stuff is. Radioactivity, for all its dangers, is at least easy and very reliable to detect, at levels that are not dangerous (you can detect differences in the level of natural background radiation).
Sure, it's not cancer unless it's caused by radioactivity. But have a look at cancer mortality in the USA and tell me why Mississippi, Louisiana or Delaware haven't been evacuated despite cancer mortality being 12% higher than US national average and 25% higher than in states like New Mexico, Arizona or Colorado? (Even here I'm treating the two lowest numbers in Utah and Hawaii, as well as the two highest in Kentucky and West Virginia, as outliers.)
[sarcasm]What is the health cost of not evacuating everyone to Hawaii?[/sarcasm]
Of course, there were no dead people from the nuclear accident - unless you're counting the one man who died from a heart attack in the aftermath. (One crane operator died in Fukushima Daini because of the earthquake and two people were swept away by the tsunami in Daiichi. Not even the explosions killed anyone, because people were warned of elevated hydrogen concentrations by instruments dedicated to just that purpose. The hazard was known, but the Japanese decided not to do anything about it by upgrading their plants.)
The earthquake and tsunami was the disaster, not the accident at Fukushima. There were dead people from the nuclear accident and 50,000 evacuated (not counting those in the evacuation zone whose houses have been destroyed by the tsunami) is a lot less worse than the earthquake's and tsunami's 20.000 dead + 500,000 evacuated.
Half a million were evacuated from utterly destroyed houses in an area now prohibited from permanent human habitation because of the tsunami hazard... and the unwillingness of the Japanese to raise tsunami protection of cities, which reasonably enough was the same height for cities as for nuclear power plants, from 6m to 16m. Strangely enough, there was no finger pointing and no complaints about lacking tsunami protection of cities, where... well, you know, people live (and died) and didn't get an advance warning of 2 days to evacuate before the tsunami hit.
Stop building a brand new probe each time you want you carry a new instrument to Mars, Venus or some asteroid. Just make a design that fits most needs and build a dozen of them. Launch four at a time or a dozen to cut down on launch costs. Smaller probes like Hayabusa or Smart-1 are quite effective and light enough that you could easily put a dozen of them into space using a single Delta IV or Ariane 5 launch. Even the mars rovers like Spirit and Opportunity wouldn't need a dedicated Delta II launch each, four or five could be launched at a time. Sure, instrument choice will be limited, but so will be the price and effort of building it and sending it to space.
1) Yes, the USA are in many (though not all) regards just as vulnerable as Japan was. There were some improvements in American plants (like hardened, but unfiltered, containment vents, reinforced condensation chambers, hydrogen igniters (of doubtful value if you ask me) etc.), but certainly not enough in terms of redundant power supply and especially the lack of filters. None of which are discussed in mainstream media for political (and entirely wrong headed) reasons - either to avoid the cost of implementing additional safety measures or to avoid talking about their existence. (Which is the case in Germany, where the media are now entirely anti-nuclear - to the point that the fact that laws were issued a quarter of a century past to install filtered containment vents and catalyzers for hydrogen hasn't been mentioned in any of the larger media during the past year, while pretending that the behaviour of nuclear reactors is entirely unpredictable.)
2) The main problem of spent fuel storage is that spent fuel must be reprocessed before any responsible storage is at all possible - an impossible suggestion in the ever paranoid USA. Unreprocessed fuel is a mixture of Uranium (which is neglible compared to either tailings or "natural uranium" in the earth, which is Uranium mixed with tailings), fission products (which decay below the level of the tailings within 200-300 years) and activation products. Activation products from moderated reactors are mostly plutonium, which is responsible for projected storage times of 10k to 1mio years depending upon whom you ask. In short, it is impossible to store activation products in a waste dump in any responsible way whatsoever.
3) Activation products can be split and turned into fission products with fast neutron reactors. This is a straightforward process that consists of switching the reactor on and letting the neutrons do their work. (It depends on neutron cross sections and the neutronicity of the reactor, but it is only slightly more complicated than this.) Those reactors are not new. They are technology over a decade older than Sputnik. (The reactor "Clementine" was build and finished in 1946.) The Russians used lead-cooled fast fission reactors to power their Alfa submarines (of "Hunt for Red October" fame), they also still run the BN-600 (sodium cooled) reactor and have been doing so for decades. The Americans ran the EBR-II for over 30 years until it was shut down by the clinton administration in 1994. (Along with most nuclear research.) The French build and ran the 300MW Phoenix and 1650MW Super-Phoenix plant. (The latter shut down in 1998 IIRC because power was supposed to be too expensive: 4-6ct/kWh. Cheaper than any of todays renewables... and you can switch them both off and on!)
That's the greatest misconception of them all - we're not talking about hypothetical processes using newfangled, untested, unpredictable technology. This is really old stuff, it just needs doing.
The problem were the safeguards that failed to exist in the first place. Enough emergency generators, sufficient distance between those to ward off common cause failure (you may notice research going on in that area for decades in nuclear power), filtered containment vents (aka safety valves, as you would find them in any pressure cooker) and passive autocatalytic recombiners to prevent hydrogen explosions, no matter if the vents work or not (as they also vent the hydrogen from both the containment and the building). And that's before considering such things as reinforcing the condensation chambers that were found to be too weak (and fixed) decades ago.
Japan, at least with regard to nuclear power, is anything but a modern country. That's part of the result of losing two decades of economic development.
Just to add one more thing: The kinetic energy of a hypothetical 10t final stage is 2e14J, equivalent to complete fissioning of 3kg Uranium (of course, efficiency will not be 100%, more likely 0.1-1%).
Nope, just getting there. Think of it as a beeping monument in the sky.
A beeping monument with telescopes. The main justification would need to be astrometry, which you could do a hell of a lot better if you had a good telescope several hundred or thousand AU away from earth. Currently, we're doing all our triangulation with a 2AU long base (twice the distance earth-sun). Using the same 29cm telescope as Hipparcos, we could easily get 1000 times more accurate ranging data within mere decades.
It would be a revolution. True trigonometric measurements all the way to the other end of the galaxy, even the nearest neighboring galaxies, instead of the current guesswork based on guessing how bright a certain star is and thus how far it would need to be away in order to appear as bright as it does.
The watt count doesn't matter. It's exhaust velocity (more means more energy use, no matter what technology) of the engine and the total amount of energy carried by the reactor (more energy means more mass, means less speed). 0.1-1% of the speed of light should easily be possible, but I haven't done the math to the point of calculating multiple stages, optimizing the energy budget with respect to the trade-off between exhaust velocity and energy consumption and so on and so forth.
Hydrogen-Oxygen fuel has an exhaust velocity of about 4500m/s for a final speed on the order of 20km/s with multiple stages (for any significant payload). Simple ion engines can reach 30,000m/s, but final speeds will be less than expected, as the empty mass of the stages is higher. Something on the order of 100km/s with 2-3 stages should be possible. (Let's say 12,000 years to Alpha Centauri.) More sophisticated engines can reach up to 200,000m/s in exhaust velocity (2000 years to Alpha Centauri), but somewhere the energy limitations will kick in and I don't know whether before or after that point. (That's when the Uranium/Plutonium makes up a very significant part of the deadweight - even if you throw some of it over board in the process.)
Just build some of space ships and a couple of pyramids in a desert to remind people they are on their way.
Erm, wood plantations *are* clear cutting whatever forest you have and treating trees as something like grain or whatever. The "trees" (mostly poplar, but also birches, willows) don't grow for more than 5 years, they are harvested (clear cut) as soon as possible for their fuel value. There is not the least resemblence between those and what Europeans enthusiastically call forests (which themselves are often trees standing on rectangular grids, true forests are exceedingly rare e.g. less than 1% of all German "forests").
No such luck in rightpondia. People are using twigs and litter, growing fuel wood plantations (3-5 year growth period) and other things for wood pellets. They were mostly made from scrap a decade ago or so, but there wasn't enough of that to meet demand.
Erm, google: "medivial forest management" - you'll find out that sustainable forestry was invented in Europe and Japan independently (because it was unsustainable before). And both coincided with the introduction of coal as fuel. But don't worry, thanks to wood pellets being used as a replacement for heating oil, sustainability is just one of those quaint old concepts going the way of the wooly mammoth.
Trees are about as effective in doing photosynthesis as any other plant. You can't get more energy out of a system than you're putting into it. Any bells ringing?
The USA is already burning a quarter of the world corn harvest for bioethanol and it doesn't make a dent in its energy budget. Even ignoring the amount of energy used in the process, it amounts to little more than 1% of the total energy use in the USA. Even if all the worlds grain harvest were to be turned into ethanol for the USA - starving the rest of the planet in the process, but we already see that the US couldn't care less about this detail - it would account for less than one third of the US energy consumption.
Who are you kidding? Wood for heating and charcoal for iron smelters was responsible for deforestation of large parts of Europe long before the industrial revolution. People turned to burning coal and lignite for lack of trees in the comparably sparsely populated countries of the 17/18th century. What exactly do you expect this around, with 8 times the size of population and much larger energy needs?
I chose the word "most" specifically because I'm aware of that minority in the USA. (Hint: I'm a regular follower of the Long Now Foundation seminars.)
The "Greens are keeping us from having safe reactors" mantra may be the stupidest damn thing I've ever heard, and flies in the face of all history and evidence.
Sorry, but this flies in the face of basic logic. Most greens are against all nuclear reactors and all includes safer reactor designs.
Or maybe the water-based reactors would have been replaced by liquid metal / liquid salt cooled reactors. Just to give you the idea: the only thing reactors can make is heat. They don't make explodium. Heat is a very benign kind of energy. So benign, in fact, that just 400 years ago nobody knew how to use heat to do any kind of mechanical work whatsoever.
And then Denis Papin invented the pressure cooker... and the safety valve... in that order.
Unlike water, metals and salts don't usually tend to turn into steam (which creates the pressure required to do any sort of damage) when you heat them up to 1000 degrees or more.
At this kind of temperature, the heat easily gets dispersed by the coolant and removing decay heat from fuel rods is almost trivial (with a large area and large temperature difference to the environment, heat radiation is enough to cool the reactor vessel - heat radiation increases with the forth power of temperature). And such temperatures are managed routinely in steel smelters and aluminium production, so there is no reason an appropiately designed reactor vessel could not withstand them in an emergency, especially since there is no pressure in the system. At no point will any heat be turned into work. Better yet, all holes in the reactor vessel can be in the lid of the reactor. No possible leak can drain any of the coolant from the reactor - which is at least as wide as it is tall and stands perfectly stable on the ground.
Without the bat shit idiots batshitting their batshit in all the media, there could actually be something approximating an informed public. So long as the shit-flinging keeps going on, there will be nothing of the sort.
How is this relevant? You need 100 million tons of such high-tech gadgetry for a country as small as Germany. All that with a technology so expensive that even buying 1ton of those things is a virtually impossible thing to do for anyone less than a major corporation. And you're telling me this is not relevant?
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The climate models speak for themselves. If you look at 10 year old and 20 year old models, they couldn't predict current temperatures - which stopped rising 14 years ago. If you look at arctic ice models, they neither predicted the decline in 2007 before 2007 nor did the post-2007 models predict the absence of further decline. Quite the contrary, according to the opportunistic papers (based on linear trend extrapolation, no doubt) published at that time, the arctic ought to be ice-free next summer. According to the IPCC report 2007, the glaciers ought to have melted in 2035. Thousands of climate science peers couldn't muster the common sense necessary to doubt that figure. Today, we know that even the revised figure is a figment of distorted data, taken from about a dozen out of thousands of laciers in the area, selected not by randomized sampling, but by the convenience of measureing them. In fact, the amount of water is Himalayan glacies stayed the same over the last 10 years.
None of that changes anything about the fact that coal and tar sand mining, oil drilling and shale gas are destroying huge tracks of nature and have severe consequence for human health. It doesn't change the fact that it is a good idea to replace fossil fuels wherever possible, if only to get away from the political troubles that Middle Eastern and Russian oil are causing, or the fact that reserves are running out.
Overstating your case only makes you look silly in the end, even if you currently enjoy a lot of public support.
Try and read about the real science, it wasn't just a couple of uranium miners, not even close (and those 2000 pages are just a dense selection of research done until 1980). Also, ten times the average background radiation can be naturally found in several places (e.g. in Cornwall or Denver, Colorado) with relatively high thorium/uranium concentrations in the soil, without detectable effects.
Finally, the approach of diluting toxins has not been followed for decades. These days the general approach is concentration and indefinite storage - as most of those toxins know no such thing as a half-life. (Germany is storing more than 2 mio tons at just one site in salt caverns. But nobody cares, because it's not radioactive.)
The health cost of 20.000 dead is incalcuable - vanished in minutes, not even a chance to say good bye. There is a health cost of two oil refineries and a chemical plant burning uncontrolled for a days. Thousands of tons of benzene must have contaminated the area. There were problemes with supply of naphta, benzene, xylene and toluol (all important to plastics and chemical industry) worldwide after the earthquake and tsunami brought down a dozen chemical plants or so.
Carcinogenic effects of benzene are known to require mere micrograms. You can't smell it, you can't see it, taste it or detect it in any way not requiring major analytical equipment in those quantities. There is no Geiger Counter for organic molecules and no Star Trek tricorder will tell you were some minute trace of the stuff is. Radioactivity, for all its dangers, is at least easy and very reliable to detect, at levels that are not dangerous (you can detect differences in the level of natural background radiation).
Sure, it's not cancer unless it's caused by radioactivity. But have a look at cancer mortality in the USA and tell me why Mississippi, Louisiana or Delaware haven't been evacuated despite cancer mortality being 12% higher than US national average and 25% higher than in states like New Mexico, Arizona or Colorado? (Even here I'm treating the two lowest numbers in Utah and Hawaii, as well as the two highest in Kentucky and West Virginia, as outliers.)
[sarcasm]What is the health cost of not evacuating everyone to Hawaii?[/sarcasm]
Of course, there were no dead people from the nuclear accident - unless you're counting the one man who died from a heart attack in the aftermath. (One crane operator died in Fukushima Daini because of the earthquake and two people were swept away by the tsunami in Daiichi. Not even the explosions killed anyone, because people were warned of elevated hydrogen concentrations by instruments dedicated to just that purpose. The hazard was known, but the Japanese decided not to do anything about it by upgrading their plants.)
The earthquake and tsunami was the disaster, not the accident at Fukushima. There were dead people from the nuclear accident and 50,000 evacuated (not counting those in the evacuation zone whose houses have been destroyed by the tsunami) is a lot less worse than the earthquake's and tsunami's 20.000 dead + 500,000 evacuated.
... and the unwillingness of the Japanese to raise tsunami protection of cities, which reasonably enough was the same height for cities as for nuclear power plants, from 6m to 16m. Strangely enough, there was no finger pointing and no complaints about lacking tsunami protection of cities, where ... well, you know, people live (and died) and didn't get an advance warning of 2 days to evacuate before the tsunami hit.
Half a million were evacuated from utterly destroyed houses in an area now prohibited from permanent human habitation because of the tsunami hazard
Stop building a brand new probe each time you want you carry a new instrument to Mars, Venus or some asteroid. Just make a design that fits most needs and build a dozen of them. Launch four at a time or a dozen to cut down on launch costs. Smaller probes like Hayabusa or Smart-1 are quite effective and light enough that you could easily put a dozen of them into space using a single Delta IV or Ariane 5 launch. Even the mars rovers like Spirit and Opportunity wouldn't need a dedicated Delta II launch each, four or five could be launched at a time. Sure, instrument choice will be limited, but so will be the price and effort of building it and sending it to space.
You know the drill, any increased risk of cancer = dead zone, mandatory evacuation.
1) Yes, the USA are in many (though not all) regards just as vulnerable as Japan was. There were some improvements in American plants (like hardened, but unfiltered, containment vents, reinforced condensation chambers, hydrogen igniters (of doubtful value if you ask me) etc.), but certainly not enough in terms of redundant power supply and especially the lack of filters. None of which are discussed in mainstream media for political (and entirely wrong headed) reasons - either to avoid the cost of implementing additional safety measures or to avoid talking about their existence. (Which is the case in Germany, where the media are now entirely anti-nuclear - to the point that the fact that laws were issued a quarter of a century past to install filtered containment vents and catalyzers for hydrogen hasn't been mentioned in any of the larger media during the past year, while pretending that the behaviour of nuclear reactors is entirely unpredictable.)
... and you can switch them both off and on!)
2) The main problem of spent fuel storage is that spent fuel must be reprocessed before any responsible storage is at all possible - an impossible suggestion in the ever paranoid USA. Unreprocessed fuel is a mixture of Uranium (which is neglible compared to either tailings or "natural uranium" in the earth, which is Uranium mixed with tailings), fission products (which decay below the level of the tailings within 200-300 years) and activation products. Activation products from moderated reactors are mostly plutonium, which is responsible for projected storage times of 10k to 1mio years depending upon whom you ask. In short, it is impossible to store activation products in a waste dump in any responsible way whatsoever.
3) Activation products can be split and turned into fission products with fast neutron reactors. This is a straightforward process that consists of switching the reactor on and letting the neutrons do their work. (It depends on neutron cross sections and the neutronicity of the reactor, but it is only slightly more complicated than this.) Those reactors are not new. They are technology over a decade older than Sputnik. (The reactor "Clementine" was build and finished in 1946.) The Russians used lead-cooled fast fission reactors to power their Alfa submarines (of "Hunt for Red October" fame), they also still run the BN-600 (sodium cooled) reactor and have been doing so for decades. The Americans ran the EBR-II for over 30 years until it was shut down by the clinton administration in 1994. (Along with most nuclear research.) The French build and ran the 300MW Phoenix and 1650MW Super-Phoenix plant. (The latter shut down in 1998 IIRC because power was supposed to be too expensive: 4-6ct/kWh. Cheaper than any of todays renewables
That's the greatest misconception of them all - we're not talking about hypothetical processes using newfangled, untested, unpredictable technology. This is really old stuff, it just needs doing.
The problem were the safeguards that failed to exist in the first place. Enough emergency generators, sufficient distance between those to ward off common cause failure (you may notice research going on in that area for decades in nuclear power), filtered containment vents (aka safety valves, as you would find them in any pressure cooker) and passive autocatalytic recombiners to prevent hydrogen explosions, no matter if the vents work or not (as they also vent the hydrogen from both the containment and the building). And that's before considering such things as reinforcing the condensation chambers that were found to be too weak (and fixed) decades ago.
Japan, at least with regard to nuclear power, is anything but a modern country. That's part of the result of losing two decades of economic development.
Just to add one more thing: The kinetic energy of a hypothetical 10t final stage is 2e14J, equivalent to complete fissioning of 3kg Uranium (of course, efficiency will not be 100%, more likely 0.1-1%).
Nope, just getting there. Think of it as a beeping monument in the sky.
A beeping monument with telescopes. The main justification would need to be astrometry, which you could do a hell of a lot better if you had a good telescope several hundred or thousand AU away from earth. Currently, we're doing all our triangulation with a 2AU long base (twice the distance earth-sun). Using the same 29cm telescope as Hipparcos, we could easily get 1000 times more accurate ranging data within mere decades.
It would be a revolution. True trigonometric measurements all the way to the other end of the galaxy, even the nearest neighboring galaxies, instead of the current guesswork based on guessing how bright a certain star is and thus how far it would need to be away in order to appear as bright as it does.
Who turned what into an emotional issue? http://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_on_averting_climate_crisis.html
The watt count doesn't matter. It's exhaust velocity (more means more energy use, no matter what technology) of the engine and the total amount of energy carried by the reactor (more energy means more mass, means less speed). 0.1-1% of the speed of light should easily be possible, but I haven't done the math to the point of calculating multiple stages, optimizing the energy budget with respect to the trade-off between exhaust velocity and energy consumption and so on and so forth.
Hydrogen-Oxygen fuel has an exhaust velocity of about 4500m/s for a final speed on the order of 20km/s with multiple stages (for any significant payload). Simple ion engines can reach 30,000m/s, but final speeds will be less than expected, as the empty mass of the stages is higher. Something on the order of 100km/s with 2-3 stages should be possible. (Let's say 12,000 years to Alpha Centauri.) More sophisticated engines can reach up to 200,000m/s in exhaust velocity (2000 years to Alpha Centauri), but somewhere the energy limitations will kick in and I don't know whether before or after that point. (That's when the Uranium/Plutonium makes up a very significant part of the deadweight - even if you throw some of it over board in the process.)
Just build some of space ships and a couple of pyramids in a desert to remind people they are on their way.
Erm, wood plantations *are* clear cutting whatever forest you have and treating trees as something like grain or whatever. The "trees" (mostly poplar, but also birches, willows) don't grow for more than 5 years, they are harvested (clear cut) as soon as possible for their fuel value. There is not the least resemblence between those and what Europeans enthusiastically call forests (which themselves are often trees standing on rectangular grids, true forests are exceedingly rare e.g. less than 1% of all German "forests").
No such luck in rightpondia. People are using twigs and litter, growing fuel wood plantations (3-5 year growth period) and other things for wood pellets. They were mostly made from scrap a decade ago or so, but there wasn't enough of that to meet demand.
Erm, google: "medivial forest management" - you'll find out that sustainable forestry was invented in Europe and Japan independently (because it was unsustainable before). And both coincided with the introduction of coal as fuel. But don't worry, thanks to wood pellets being used as a replacement for heating oil, sustainability is just one of those quaint old concepts going the way of the wooly mammoth.
Strangely enough, people who aren't mixing up average and peak efficiencies get wildly different results.
Trees are about as effective in doing photosynthesis as any other plant. You can't get more energy out of a system than you're putting into it. Any bells ringing?
The USA is already burning a quarter of the world corn harvest for bioethanol and it doesn't make a dent in its energy budget. Even ignoring the amount of energy used in the process, it amounts to little more than 1% of the total energy use in the USA. Even if all the worlds grain harvest were to be turned into ethanol for the USA - starving the rest of the planet in the process, but we already see that the US couldn't care less about this detail - it would account for less than one third of the US energy consumption.
Shut up you monster.
Who are you kidding? Wood for heating and charcoal for iron smelters was responsible for deforestation of large parts of Europe long before the industrial revolution. People turned to burning coal and lignite for lack of trees in the comparably sparsely populated countries of the 17/18th century. What exactly do you expect this around, with 8 times the size of population and much larger energy needs?
I chose the word "most" specifically because I'm aware of that minority in the USA. (Hint: I'm a regular follower of the Long Now Foundation seminars.)
The "Greens are keeping us from having safe reactors" mantra may be the stupidest damn thing I've ever heard, and flies in the face of all history and evidence.
Sorry, but this flies in the face of basic logic. Most greens are against all nuclear reactors and all includes safer reactor designs.
Or maybe the water-based reactors would have been replaced by liquid metal / liquid salt cooled reactors. Just to give you the idea: the only thing reactors can make is heat. They don't make explodium. Heat is a very benign kind of energy. So benign, in fact, that just 400 years ago nobody knew how to use heat to do any kind of mechanical work whatsoever.
... and the safety valve ... in that order.
And then Denis Papin invented the pressure cooker
Unlike water, metals and salts don't usually tend to turn into steam (which creates the pressure required to do any sort of damage) when you heat them up to 1000 degrees or more.
At this kind of temperature, the heat easily gets dispersed by the coolant and removing decay heat from fuel rods is almost trivial (with a large area and large temperature difference to the environment, heat radiation is enough to cool the reactor vessel - heat radiation increases with the forth power of temperature). And such temperatures are managed routinely in steel smelters and aluminium production, so there is no reason an appropiately designed reactor vessel could not withstand them in an emergency, especially since there is no pressure in the system. At no point will any heat be turned into work. Better yet, all holes in the reactor vessel can be in the lid of the reactor. No possible leak can drain any of the coolant from the reactor - which is at least as wide as it is tall and stands perfectly stable on the ground.
Without the bat shit idiots batshitting their batshit in all the media, there could actually be something approximating an informed public. So long as the shit-flinging keeps going on, there will be nothing of the sort.
How is this relevant? You need 100 million tons of such high-tech gadgetry for a country as small as Germany. All that with a technology so expensive that even buying 1ton of those things is a virtually impossible thing to do for anyone less than a major corporation. And you're telling me this is not relevant?