Partly because our infrastructure is fundamentally unmaintainable.
In many cases, we've simply tried to "upgrade" ancient track sections, so our trains have to deal with curves no other high speed rail systems do. This puts extra stress on the trains and rails.
In many cases our passenger rail is shared with freight - horrible performance-wise, great cost-wise. Everyone says we have a shitty rail system in the United States - I've heard from numerous sources that in terms of freight capability, we have the best rail system in the world. It is just that passenger rail infrastructure and freight rail infrastructure have vastly different requirements. (Apparently freight rail in many other countries that have great high-speed passenger rail is rather poor.)
In every other country, they build special track for their passenger rail lines that makes it easier to maintain.
This is the first time outside of the Soviet union a civilian reactor has resulted in offsite radiation levels going beyond more than a few bananas worth. It took a massive disaster that killed over 25,000 people to trigger the situation, and it's a failure mode that would not have affected modern reactor designs.
In some ways, you could even say this is the first time a civilian power reactor has ever released anything with more than a negligible offsite effect - The nature of the Soviet Union was such that "civilian" reactors weren't quite civilian - RBMKs had clear safety design compromises made to improve their usability for weapons production. (The longer fuel is in a reactor, the more plutonium-240 is generated - Pu-240 is detrimental to bombs and nearly impossible to separate from the "good stuff", so reactors intended to produce bomb material are designed to be refueled frequently.)
Pretty impressive safety record for 40+ years of nuclear power generation, especially considering that the safety design of modern reactors is greatly improved. Fukushima has taught us some lessons in facility planning (keep your generators on high ground if they're safety-grade, large high density plants are a bad idea - releases from one unit can make managing others difficult, resulting in what effectively appears to have been some cascading failure scenarios.)
They might have improved this too - not sure. There are significant changes to the spent fuel pool architecture with ESBWR.
Spent fuel residual decay heat is on the order of 200-400 kW at most of the Fukushima pools, with the only significant outlier being Unit 4, which had rods from a freshly defueled reactor. 200-400 kW isn't that hard to passively remove, especially if you reduce the packing density of the pools.
Worst case - cooling tower + heatpipes = problem solved. Cooling towers + heatpipes would also let the isolation condenser system go from "needs an occasional fire truck after 72 hours" to "needs little to no intervention".
Unfortunately cooling towers make the NIMBYs go bonkers.
Note, Three Mile Island (a 5 on the INES) rates only 4 on your scale in terms of exposure to anyone outside of the plant boundaries. Maybe not even that.
No, even in Japan there is intense opposition to new reactors. The government has been able to push past that opposition better than ours, but it's still there.
This was a contributing factor in the Fukushima accident in two ways: 1) These units were at or near the end of their designed service life, but had been service life extended because that's a HELL of a lot easier in terms of public opinion, even though in reality it is more dangerous to the public. 2) Reactor operators were more reluctant than they should have been to inject borated seawater, which in an older reactor like this means writing off the reactor.
Unfortunately I've got to disagree with you here. They're all original BWRs, not ABWRs. The fact that units 1-3 are having problems has nothing to do with their age and everything to do with the fact that Unit 4 was defueled and Units 5/6 were already in cold shutdown, so far longer along the decay heat management curve than units 1-3 which SCRAMed when the earthquake hit.
Most of that renewable in Norway is hydro. Sweet! You're ditching nuclear for a technology that has, in a single incident, killed at least five times as many people as Chernobyl did, and has had quite a few other incidents with deaths on par with Chernobyl.
"Problem number three. Nuke power plants have a fundamental flaw or at least a design weakness. They REQUIRE an outside source of electricity and a connection to the grid in order to function. If you cut the connection to the grid, they will immediately shutdown. They have to, they can't function without a load and they need power to run the plant when they do shutdown. If you also disable the backup generators, you get what has happened in Japan. There are so many ways that this could happen besides an earthquake and tsunami."
No, you're wrong. Yes, this is applicable to the BWR and ABWR. Not applicable to AP1000 and ESBWR, which are both designed for passive cooling without any electrical power.
Something needs to be done about it though. TMI was a 5 - what, other than political consequences, were "wider"? Almost no measurable contamination was recorded offsite, and no contamination exceeding any legal limits was measured.
And this - how in hell can it be considered ten times worse than blowing 70-80 tons of mixed high-level radioactive waste into the air? (Kyshtm disaster at Mayak - the only 6 on the scale.)
So far nearly all offsite contamination at Fukushima has been Iodine-131, with a half life of 8 days and proven methods for preventing health effects.
Cs-137 and Sr-90 are more worrisome, but haven't propagated significantly past the plant boundary at Fukushima based on everything I've been able to find.
So far only two nuclear accidents to date have significantly contaminated more than a few square miles - Kyshtm and Chernobyl. Both were in the Soviet Union, where the attitude towards nuclear safety was "huh what's that? we don't need containment, too expensive". Fukushima has that potential, but it hasn't yet.
Containment buildings and not using a graphite moderator make contaminating the surrounding area a lot harder.
Using Chernobyl as an example for why all nuclear power is bad shows how ignorant you are, and makes you lose all credibility.
First two BIG Problems with Chernobyl (and most other RBMKs): 1) Significantly positive void coefficient of reactively. It is illegal to build a reactor with ANY positive void coefficient in the United States (even the slightly positive void coefficient of CANDU - at least CANDU has a long time constant of reactivity making it easier to control, and the heavy water moderator is MUCH easier to remove.) 2) No containment building whatsoever. No power reactor in the United States has ever been built without a containment building.
Those were just two factors, the others: 3) Chernobyl was not an accident, they were executing a dangerous experiment. 4) The culture of "results OR ELSE" in the Soviet Union caused the experiment to continue past when it should have been shut down, with at least one automatic SCRAM being overridden by the operators
Chernobyl is best compared to buying an old decomissioned school bus, removing the swaybars, removing the shock absorbers, cutting the brake lines, filling it full of kids, drinking a fifth of vodka, and driving down a twisty mountain road in a snowstorm.
No, "nuclear huggers" are well aware of that fact, and are frustrated that the anti-nuclear lobby has been shooting themselves in the foot.
We need the electricity. If no new nuclear plants get built, there's major pressure to place old plants into service life extension.
In fact, the difficulty of getting new plants built is likely a contributing factor to Fukushima, in addition to the fact that Unit 1 was originally scheduled for decommissioning this month, reactor operators held off on borated seawater injection for what is likely longer than they should have because in a first-gen BWR, borate injection = plant writeoff.
We can't decommission the old plants until there is generating capacity to replace them. Wind/solar - we don't have the energy storage technology to make more than 10-20% penetration feasible yet. Maybe in 50 years (which happens to be the service life of a new nuke plant), but not now Coal - spews lots of toxins and radiation into the air, but the radiation isn't tracked as well since it's not actually a nuclear industry. However China has pilot efforts to mine their coal ash for uranium! Natural gas - The plants are clean, but the drilling process has contaminated more groundwater and sickened more people in the past 5-10 years than the entire history of nuclear power in the United States. I live above the Marcellus Shale formation, so my opinion on gas-fired power plants is HELL NO.
For the next 50 years, modernized nuclear is the safest solution. We should start investing in wind/solar, but we aren't able to make the transition yet, especially since grid demand is going to go WAY up as our transportation industry moves from fossil fuels to electric propulsion.
Except that the design lives of these plants were 40 years, and those original design lives were exceeded.
Unit 1 was originally supposed to be decommissioned the month of the earthquake, and the remaining affected units not long after that. They all received service life extensions.
At some point, instead of just a service life overhaul, you have to accept that major safety improvements have been made in the past 4-5 decades and build a new plant.
ABWRs have an additional gas turbine as backup electrical power. This incident would not have happened if units 1-3 were ABWRs
ESBWRs don't even need backup power - they can be passively cooled for 72 hours, and beyond that all you need is a fire truck to refill the isolation condenser pools. (Note: Since no hydrogen explosions will occur in that 72 hours, you won't have the pool refill problems they had at Fukushima.)
You could probably run some heatpipes from the ESBWR IC pools to a cooling tower and have indefinite passive cooling - but cooling towers send the NIMBYs into a frenzy.
I think this is basically evidence that the INES scale is WAY too subjective and meaningless.
Three Mile Island at a 5. "Accident with Wider Consequences" - What were the wider consequences? Nothing outside of the plant boundary had a radiation increase higher than around 1/75th of a banana a day. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Radioactive_material_release Of course, if the "consequences" include political and psychological effects, then TMI would be a 7. It was a political and psychological disaster.
Fukishima at a 7 - At this point, there has been enough radioactivity outside of the plant boundary to be "wider consequences". Now based on the logarithmic scale and TMI being a 5 - probably is pushing a 6. However I still question, as above, whether TMI really deserves a 5.
However, in terms of a 6 - so far as far as I can find, there is one known incident rating a 6 on the INES, and that is the Kyshtm disaster at the Mayak reprocessing facility. This disaster blew 70-80 tons of high level radioactive waste (with a significant portion being medium-lived fission products) into the air - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster. So how is Fukushima worse than this by a factor of 10, considering that the bulk of the Fukushima releases have been short-lived fission products with well established preventative measures in terms of human health effects?
That L1 charger won't work away from a power outlet.
A gas can will.
The point is, anything that actually STORES energy and allows it to be transported a significant distance away from a wall socket is going to have a far worse energy-to-weight and energy-to-volume ratio than gas.
A portable generator MIGHT do it - but these are rare nowadays. 1-2 decades from now this might change as EVs become more commonplace and standardized, but not right now.
The GPS satellites have accurate atomic clocks, but I believe they aren't of the most accurate type available.
The master clock on the ground is of a different type that is even more accurate, I think. I'm assuming it is probably derived from NIST-F1, which is of a design that is likely impractical for use on a sat.
The closest to "Chinese piece of crap Android device" I've experienced, other than the noname Android tablets, has been my Huawei S7. It's not a piece of crap, but it definitely has its issues and is proving to be mostly unsupported by the manufacturer. (Docking connector but no dock, somewhat buggy firmware, GPL noncompliance for a while, etc.)
However, while I've seen a lot of reports of people returning S7s due to being unhappy with them, it didn't sour them on Android. Most of them were saying, "Ditch this and get a Galaxy Tab", not "Ditch this and get an iPad".
It sounds like France is the primary country driving this proposal.
75% of their energy is nuclear, and they don't seem to have any plans to change it post-Fukushima.
It just means the French get to laugh at the Germans as they charge them an arm and a leg for French nuclear to replace the German nuclear that went away.
Germany is shutting down something on the order of 7 nuclear plants. That is basically the equivalent of their entire installed capacity of wind power once you take capacity factor into account. (Germany has about 27 GW of nameplate wind capacity, but has only been achieving around a 17% capacity factor, putting the actual output about equivalent to 5-6GW nameplate worth of nuclear, since nuke plants typically achieve a 90% capacity factor.)
"Wind plants don't store energy. That makes no sense at all." My point exactly. Almost no wind plant in the world has any provisions for energy storage included. Without energy storage, the output variations can't be evened out, and the plant becomes useless for baseload generation.
Once you take into account the storage problem, wind becomes far less economical.
And still, what the hell is a "water plant" - you keep on talking about "water plants" for storage but you don't say what they are. Now the only thing I can think of, which I have already mentioned, is pumped-storage hydroelectric (when there is excess power production, water is pumped into a reservoir, and when power is needed, the reservoir drains through a generator.) - The problem is that pumped-storage hydro requires a place to put this reservoir, and in the United States, we pretty much have a pumped-storage plant in every location where it is feasible to build one. If we had places remaining to build pumped storage plants I'd be more inclined to agree with you, but the fact is - we don't!
Compressed air - Again, show me a plant that uses this approach successfully that is anything but a small-scale pilot plant or proof of concept. Also, for the purposes of scaling the technology, show me even one that does not use an existing cavern that was created for other purposes. Compressed air storage is pie-in-the-sky idealism that might be ready in 50 years, but isn't ready now and isn't anywhere close to being ready.
Batteries - What battery technology do you suggest? The most economic battery technology out there is lead-acid for a fixed storage problem like this (since energy/weight ratio doesn't matter for a fixed installation) - However there's the problem of fairly nasty battery acid, undisputably toxic lead, and the fact that we just don't have that much lead available for the hundreds of tons of batteries per city.
"In germany wind/solar plants are expensive because building them is subsidized." That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Subsidization makes things cheaper, not more expensive.
"and we would be able to get enough if you f*cking idiots would permit drilling" - 5-10 years of gas drilling using hydrofracturing techniques has contaminated more groundwater and sickened more people than the entire history of non-Soviet nuclear.
False - Just because they were Communists, does not mean they were not concerned with costs.
First, Chernobyl (along with all other RBMKs of its era) had no containment vessel because it was deemed too costly. Russian RBMKs are, to this day, the only reactor type that has been used for electrical power generation without any containment vessel.
Second - read the Chernobyl timeline. There were multiple cases where the shift supervisor, a "good Party man", ordered the reactor operators to continue the experiment despite them indicating that it was time to give up and shut it down. In at least one case, the reactor's automatic shutdown systems were going to kick in but were overridden by the operators, because they were living in an era of Soviet "success OR ELSE" pressure.
The same shift supervisor reported to his superiors for hours that there was a "minor radiation accident" and refused for at least an hour to even believe that the reactor was not intact.
In the Soviet union, the government could ruin you for life even without throwing you into a gulag for being a dissident, hence the government could exert far greater pressures over the reactor operating crew than simple profit margin concerns.
But you are correct - one single hydro incident (Banqiao in China) killed 26,000 people directly, a few thousand more due to disease, and left almost a million homeless. That's significantly more than the total of 4-10k over the entire history of nuclear power generation, nearly all of which was the result of a dangerous experiment gone wrong, conducted on a fundamentally unstable reactor which had no containment provisions.
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Partly because our infrastructure is fundamentally unmaintainable.
In many cases, we've simply tried to "upgrade" ancient track sections, so our trains have to deal with curves no other high speed rail systems do. This puts extra stress on the trains and rails.
In many cases our passenger rail is shared with freight - horrible performance-wise, great cost-wise. Everyone says we have a shitty rail system in the United States - I've heard from numerous sources that in terms of freight capability, we have the best rail system in the world. It is just that passenger rail infrastructure and freight rail infrastructure have vastly different requirements. (Apparently freight rail in many other countries that have great high-speed passenger rail is rather poor.)
In every other country, they build special track for their passenger rail lines that makes it easier to maintain.
I don't think they threw away the entire 590 mill here.
For example, they might have obtained some valuable patent assets.
Heatpipes and increased SFP size are cheap.
Release probability is constantly going down.
This is the first time outside of the Soviet union a civilian reactor has resulted in offsite radiation levels going beyond more than a few bananas worth. It took a massive disaster that killed over 25,000 people to trigger the situation, and it's a failure mode that would not have affected modern reactor designs.
In some ways, you could even say this is the first time a civilian power reactor has ever released anything with more than a negligible offsite effect - The nature of the Soviet Union was such that "civilian" reactors weren't quite civilian - RBMKs had clear safety design compromises made to improve their usability for weapons production. (The longer fuel is in a reactor, the more plutonium-240 is generated - Pu-240 is detrimental to bombs and nearly impossible to separate from the "good stuff", so reactors intended to produce bomb material are designed to be refueled frequently.)
Pretty impressive safety record for 40+ years of nuclear power generation, especially considering that the safety design of modern reactors is greatly improved. Fukushima has taught us some lessons in facility planning (keep your generators on high ground if they're safety-grade, large high density plants are a bad idea - releases from one unit can make managing others difficult, resulting in what effectively appears to have been some cascading failure scenarios.)
They might have improved this too - not sure. There are significant changes to the spent fuel pool architecture with ESBWR.
Spent fuel residual decay heat is on the order of 200-400 kW at most of the Fukushima pools, with the only significant outlier being Unit 4, which had rods from a freshly defueled reactor. 200-400 kW isn't that hard to passively remove, especially if you reduce the packing density of the pools.
Worst case - cooling tower + heatpipes = problem solved. Cooling towers + heatpipes would also let the isolation condenser system go from "needs an occasional fire truck after 72 hours" to "needs little to no intervention".
Unfortunately cooling towers make the NIMBYs go bonkers.
Note, Three Mile Island (a 5 on the INES) rates only 4 on your scale in terms of exposure to anyone outside of the plant boundaries. Maybe not even that.
No, even in Japan there is intense opposition to new reactors. The government has been able to push past that opposition better than ours, but it's still there.
This was a contributing factor in the Fukushima accident in two ways:
1) These units were at or near the end of their designed service life, but had been service life extended because that's a HELL of a lot easier in terms of public opinion, even though in reality it is more dangerous to the public.
2) Reactor operators were more reluctant than they should have been to inject borated seawater, which in an older reactor like this means writing off the reactor.
Nope, all were shutdown when the quake hit.
Interestingly enough - if they had kept running, we might not have had all these problems caused by loss of offsite power to manage decay heat.
Unfortunately I've got to disagree with you here. They're all original BWRs, not ABWRs. The fact that units 1-3 are having problems has nothing to do with their age and everything to do with the fact that Unit 4 was defueled and Units 5/6 were already in cold shutdown, so far longer along the decay heat management curve than units 1-3 which SCRAMed when the earthquake hit.
Or better yet, design the backup generators out of the picture a la ESBWR or AP1000.
Most of that renewable in Norway is hydro. Sweet! You're ditching nuclear for a technology that has, in a single incident, killed at least five times as many people as Chernobyl did, and has had quite a few other incidents with deaths on par with Chernobyl.
Banqiao, my friend... Google it.
Note that our one "major accident" resulted in no significant offsite contamination.
Significant meaning "potential for health effects". Insignificant meaning "measurable but less than eating a banana a day for a year".
"Problem number three. Nuke power plants have a fundamental flaw or at least a design weakness. They REQUIRE an outside source of electricity and a connection to the grid in order to function. If you cut the connection to the grid, they will immediately shutdown. They have to, they can't function without a load and they need power to run the plant when they do shutdown. If you also disable the backup generators, you get what has happened in Japan. There are so many ways that this could happen besides an earthquake and tsunami."
No, you're wrong. Yes, this is applicable to the BWR and ABWR. Not applicable to AP1000 and ESBWR, which are both designed for passive cooling without any electrical power.
I don't know about an 8 for Chernobyl.
Something needs to be done about it though. TMI was a 5 - what, other than political consequences, were "wider"? Almost no measurable contamination was recorded offsite, and no contamination exceeding any legal limits was measured.
And this - how in hell can it be considered ten times worse than blowing 70-80 tons of mixed high-level radioactive waste into the air? (Kyshtm disaster at Mayak - the only 6 on the scale.)
So far nearly all offsite contamination at Fukushima has been Iodine-131, with a half life of 8 days and proven methods for preventing health effects.
Cs-137 and Sr-90 are more worrisome, but haven't propagated significantly past the plant boundary at Fukushima based on everything I've been able to find.
So far only two nuclear accidents to date have significantly contaminated more than a few square miles - Kyshtm and Chernobyl. Both were in the Soviet Union, where the attitude towards nuclear safety was "huh what's that? we don't need containment, too expensive". Fukushima has that potential, but it hasn't yet.
Containment buildings and not using a graphite moderator make contaminating the surrounding area a lot harder.
Using Chernobyl as an example for why all nuclear power is bad shows how ignorant you are, and makes you lose all credibility.
First two BIG Problems with Chernobyl (and most other RBMKs):
1) Significantly positive void coefficient of reactively. It is illegal to build a reactor with ANY positive void coefficient in the United States (even the slightly positive void coefficient of CANDU - at least CANDU has a long time constant of reactivity making it easier to control, and the heavy water moderator is MUCH easier to remove.)
2) No containment building whatsoever. No power reactor in the United States has ever been built without a containment building.
Those were just two factors, the others:
3) Chernobyl was not an accident, they were executing a dangerous experiment.
4) The culture of "results OR ELSE" in the Soviet Union caused the experiment to continue past when it should have been shut down, with at least one automatic SCRAM being overridden by the operators
Chernobyl is best compared to buying an old decomissioned school bus, removing the swaybars, removing the shock absorbers, cutting the brake lines, filling it full of kids, drinking a fifth of vodka, and driving down a twisty mountain road in a snowstorm.
No, "nuclear huggers" are well aware of that fact, and are frustrated that the anti-nuclear lobby has been shooting themselves in the foot.
We need the electricity. If no new nuclear plants get built, there's major pressure to place old plants into service life extension.
In fact, the difficulty of getting new plants built is likely a contributing factor to Fukushima, in addition to the fact that Unit 1 was originally scheduled for decommissioning this month, reactor operators held off on borated seawater injection for what is likely longer than they should have because in a first-gen BWR, borate injection = plant writeoff.
We can't decommission the old plants until there is generating capacity to replace them.
Wind/solar - we don't have the energy storage technology to make more than 10-20% penetration feasible yet. Maybe in 50 years (which happens to be the service life of a new nuke plant), but not now
Coal - spews lots of toxins and radiation into the air, but the radiation isn't tracked as well since it's not actually a nuclear industry. However China has pilot efforts to mine their coal ash for uranium!
Natural gas - The plants are clean, but the drilling process has contaminated more groundwater and sickened more people in the past 5-10 years than the entire history of nuclear power in the United States. I live above the Marcellus Shale formation, so my opinion on gas-fired power plants is HELL NO.
For the next 50 years, modernized nuclear is the safest solution. We should start investing in wind/solar, but we aren't able to make the transition yet, especially since grid demand is going to go WAY up as our transportation industry moves from fossil fuels to electric propulsion.
Except that the design lives of these plants were 40 years, and those original design lives were exceeded.
Unit 1 was originally supposed to be decommissioned the month of the earthquake, and the remaining affected units not long after that. They all received service life extensions.
At some point, instead of just a service life overhaul, you have to accept that major safety improvements have been made in the past 4-5 decades and build a new plant.
ABWRs have an additional gas turbine as backup electrical power. This incident would not have happened if units 1-3 were ABWRs
ESBWRs don't even need backup power - they can be passively cooled for 72 hours, and beyond that all you need is a fire truck to refill the isolation condenser pools. (Note: Since no hydrogen explosions will occur in that 72 hours, you won't have the pool refill problems they had at Fukushima.)
You could probably run some heatpipes from the ESBWR IC pools to a cooling tower and have indefinite passive cooling - but cooling towers send the NIMBYs into a frenzy.
I think this is basically evidence that the INES scale is WAY too subjective and meaningless.
Three Mile Island at a 5. "Accident with Wider Consequences" - What were the wider consequences? Nothing outside of the plant boundary had a radiation increase higher than around 1/75th of a banana a day. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Radioactive_material_release
Of course, if the "consequences" include political and psychological effects, then TMI would be a 7. It was a political and psychological disaster.
Fukishima at a 7 - At this point, there has been enough radioactivity outside of the plant boundary to be "wider consequences". Now based on the logarithmic scale and TMI being a 5 - probably is pushing a 6. However I still question, as above, whether TMI really deserves a 5.
However, in terms of a 6 - so far as far as I can find, there is one known incident rating a 6 on the INES, and that is the Kyshtm disaster at the Mayak reprocessing facility. This disaster blew 70-80 tons of high level radioactive waste (with a significant portion being medium-lived fission products) into the air - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster. So how is Fukushima worse than this by a factor of 10, considering that the bulk of the Fukushima releases have been short-lived fission products with well established preventative measures in terms of human health effects?
That L1 charger won't work away from a power outlet.
A gas can will.
The point is, anything that actually STORES energy and allows it to be transported a significant distance away from a wall socket is going to have a far worse energy-to-weight and energy-to-volume ratio than gas.
A portable generator MIGHT do it - but these are rare nowadays. 1-2 decades from now this might change as EVs become more commonplace and standardized, but not right now.
The GPS satellites have accurate atomic clocks, but I believe they aren't of the most accurate type available.
The master clock on the ground is of a different type that is even more accurate, I think. I'm assuming it is probably derived from NIST-F1, which is of a design that is likely impractical for use on a sat.
The closest to "Chinese piece of crap Android device" I've experienced, other than the noname Android tablets, has been my Huawei S7. It's not a piece of crap, but it definitely has its issues and is proving to be mostly unsupported by the manufacturer. (Docking connector but no dock, somewhat buggy firmware, GPL noncompliance for a while, etc.)
However, while I've seen a lot of reports of people returning S7s due to being unhappy with them, it didn't sour them on Android. Most of them were saying, "Ditch this and get a Galaxy Tab", not "Ditch this and get an iPad".
It sounds like France is the primary country driving this proposal.
75% of their energy is nuclear, and they don't seem to have any plans to change it post-Fukushima.
It just means the French get to laugh at the Germans as they charge them an arm and a leg for French nuclear to replace the German nuclear that went away.
Germany is shutting down something on the order of 7 nuclear plants. That is basically the equivalent of their entire installed capacity of wind power once you take capacity factor into account. (Germany has about 27 GW of nameplate wind capacity, but has only been achieving around a 17% capacity factor, putting the actual output about equivalent to 5-6GW nameplate worth of nuclear, since nuke plants typically achieve a 90% capacity factor.)
"Wind plants don't store energy. That makes no sense at all."
My point exactly. Almost no wind plant in the world has any provisions for energy storage included. Without energy storage, the output variations can't be evened out, and the plant becomes useless for baseload generation.
Once you take into account the storage problem, wind becomes far less economical.
And still, what the hell is a "water plant" - you keep on talking about "water plants" for storage but you don't say what they are. Now the only thing I can think of, which I have already mentioned, is pumped-storage hydroelectric (when there is excess power production, water is pumped into a reservoir, and when power is needed, the reservoir drains through a generator.) - The problem is that pumped-storage hydro requires a place to put this reservoir, and in the United States, we pretty much have a pumped-storage plant in every location where it is feasible to build one. If we had places remaining to build pumped storage plants I'd be more inclined to agree with you, but the fact is - we don't!
Compressed air - Again, show me a plant that uses this approach successfully that is anything but a small-scale pilot plant or proof of concept. Also, for the purposes of scaling the technology, show me even one that does not use an existing cavern that was created for other purposes. Compressed air storage is pie-in-the-sky idealism that might be ready in 50 years, but isn't ready now and isn't anywhere close to being ready.
Batteries - What battery technology do you suggest? The most economic battery technology out there is lead-acid for a fixed storage problem like this (since energy/weight ratio doesn't matter for a fixed installation) - However there's the problem of fairly nasty battery acid, undisputably toxic lead, and the fact that we just don't have that much lead available for the hundreds of tons of batteries per city.
"In germany wind/solar plants are expensive because building them is subsidized." That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Subsidization makes things cheaper, not more expensive.
"and we would be able to get enough if you f*cking idiots would permit drilling" - 5-10 years of gas drilling using hydrofracturing techniques has contaminated more groundwater and sickened more people than the entire history of non-Soviet nuclear.
False - Just because they were Communists, does not mean they were not concerned with costs.
First, Chernobyl (along with all other RBMKs of its era) had no containment vessel because it was deemed too costly. Russian RBMKs are, to this day, the only reactor type that has been used for electrical power generation without any containment vessel.
Second - read the Chernobyl timeline. There were multiple cases where the shift supervisor, a "good Party man", ordered the reactor operators to continue the experiment despite them indicating that it was time to give up and shut it down. In at least one case, the reactor's automatic shutdown systems were going to kick in but were overridden by the operators, because they were living in an era of Soviet "success OR ELSE" pressure.
The same shift supervisor reported to his superiors for hours that there was a "minor radiation accident" and refused for at least an hour to even believe that the reactor was not intact.
In the Soviet union, the government could ruin you for life even without throwing you into a gulag for being a dissident, hence the government could exert far greater pressures over the reactor operating crew than simple profit margin concerns.
But you are correct - one single hydro incident (Banqiao in China) killed 26,000 people directly, a few thousand more due to disease, and left almost a million homeless. That's significantly more than the total of 4-10k over the entire history of nuclear power generation, nearly all of which was the result of a dangerous experiment gone wrong, conducted on a fundamentally unstable reactor which had no containment provisions.