As a German this is quite bizzare to me. Here, our politicians take Fukushima as an example why we should stop nuclear energy. People are scared of nuclear energy.
And now Japan goes max nuclear.
For one: Japan has no natural resources. Fuel for power must be imported. Materials for solar panels (or the panels themselves) must be imported. Nuclear is by far one of the most efficient /and/ effective forms of power generation humanity currently has.
For two: Fukushima was a result of human incompetence, nothing to do with the reactor itself or nuclear technology thereof. The meltdowns at Fukushima #1 could have been completely avoided had the government of the time not been a bunch of worthless fools (hint: TEPCO wanted to scuttle the reactors before they melted down).
For third: Japan needs power /today/, not tomorrow. Even assuming a transition to non-nuclear forms of power, that will not happen overnight. Using nuclear power is a concern of practical necessity.
For fourth: Nuclear fearmongering is patently ridiculous. Nuclear power plants are not atomic bombs, for crying out loud. The same people who cry their hearts out about radiation proceed to fly on airliners and eat bananas. The answer to nuclear fearmongering is not shunning nuclear technology, it's to teach and bring more awareness about what nuclear technology is.
I'd add, terrifying as Fukushima was, the actual damage seems far far smaller than the outcry. Actual death toll seems dominated by people evacuated through excess caution.
See this link for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di... there is one confirmed fatality due to radiation, 2k or so due to evacuation, and an upper bound on future cancers in the 100s due to prolonged low-level radiation.
The earthquake's and tsunami's death toll is 20k.
So dangerous as it is to do statistics on human lives, it's a bit if a rounding error.
> actual damage seems far far smaller than the outcry.
Yes.
> Actual death toll seems dominated by people evacuated through excess caution.
Yes. Fear of nuclear is far more dangerous than nuclear.
> one confirmed fatality due to radiation,
I thought so, too. But apparently this was a worker at the reactor plant whose cancer death was classified as work-related, but not actually linked to the accident.
> For two: Fukushima was a result of human incompetence, nothing to do with the reactor itself or nuclear technology thereof. The meltdowns at Fukushima #1 could have been completely avoided had the government of the time not been a bunch of worthless fools (hint: TEPCO wanted to scuttle the reactors before they melted down).
Surely there is no reason to believe that couldn't happen again.
The reactors in Fukushima and their protection against flooding and cooling failure would have never passed German safety standards.
Japan’s nuclear safety standards were way too lenient before the Fukushima accident happened.
All the changes that were implemented in Japan after the disaster have been standard in Germany for decades such as hydrogen recombiners, bunkered emergency generators and a filtered containment depression system.
If any German nuclear reactor had been standing in Fukushima, there would have been no accident!
I think his point is that even with the current levels of vigilance and competence (which unarguably can and should be improved) the actualized impact was "minimal".
In other words, the expected scale of "disaster" here matters when assessing risk vs current operational fitness.
I am talking about actual effects, not effects due to overreaction.
If you count effects due to overreaction, you can also count Germany's Atomausstieg, which almost certainly materially contributed to Putin's decision to invade Ukraine...
I was under the assumption we were taking about what was required to operate a nuclear power plant while trying to prevent accidents. If accidents are no issue then I agree that the vigilance/competence bar needn't be very high to operate a plant. I don't see how you would sell that to the general public though and I'm not sure I get your point in that case? It's technically right but not really applicable to running a nuclear power plant in society. Society wants a safely operated plant without serious accidents.
Germany did not get out of chemicals production afterward, or after Seveso or Flixborough, even though the case for that was a lot stronger than for getting out of nuclear.
But of course this does not imply it is fine to run a chemical plant this way.
Separate issues.
> trying to prevent accidents
Key word is trying. You will never be able to prevent all accidents and being 100% certain to prevent all accidents cannot be the standard, and it is not a standard applied anywhere else.
And Fukushima showed that a lot of idiocy has to be stacked on top of each other in order to get to an accident, and even then the actual effects of the accident are fairly benign.
> If accidents are no issue
No. Accidents are issues. But the response to those issues has to be appropriate and proportionate.
> Society wants a safely operated plant without serious accidents.
Society also wants and needs energy, and nuclear energy is one of the safest/cleanest forms of energy we have, and the safest/cleanest form of reliable energy we have. Not having reliable energy would be a far greater disaster than any nuclear accident to date. In fact, the net effect is highly, highly positive even for fossil fuels.
Chemical plants serve a different purpose than a nuclear power plant. You can produce electricity in a lot of different ways, you usually can't produce chemicals in a lot of different ways. They're a prerequisite to produce other chemicals or products so not producing them damages your supply chain. Sometimes you can subsitute them for another chemical, usually you can't. Chemical accidents such as the ones you mentioned have for that matter resulted in a lot of new safety precautions.
> And Fukushima showed that a lot of idiocy has to be stacked on top of each other in order to get to an accident, and even then the actual effects of the accident are fairly benign.
A lot of accidents are considered unlikely, but it doesn't stop them from happening. Even if we accept that the impact on humans has been limited, we still cannot ignore the $100+ billion in additional costs costs.
> Society also wants and needs energy, and nuclear energy is one of the safest/cleanest forms of energy we have, and the safest/cleanest form of reliable energy we have.
If only it was flexible, that would be something. Unfortunately OpEx is pretty much unchanged when you vary the output.
I never claimed there were no differences between these accidents...but we could simply ban those chemicals, or ban the industry from making those chemicals in that way. The point is not that this didn't happen because, after careful deliberation, it was found that this wasn't possible.
The point is that it wasn't even considered, despite the very many accidents having vastly more severe consequences. And it's not just this one industry. How about cars? How many people die every year? Do we ban cars? We could. Do we require cars to never go faster than 10 km/h? We could, and in fact that was what Carl Benz wanted. And one of the reasons his company effectively failed and was bought by Daimler. But we do not, because we consider the benefits to outweigh the (substantial) risks.
With nuclear, we don't seem to be capable of making such an informed decision, balancing the risks with the rewards. Instead, we demand that the risk be zero. This is obviously irrational.
The cost of the Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami was $235 billion. Do you also count the cleanup costs of all the other technology that was destroyed by the earthquake and Tsunami against that technology. Or do you do that only with nuclear?
The $100 billion cost you claim against nuclear was caused by the Tsunami, not by nuclear power, and of course the number is massively inflated due to the overreaction to the accident. So thank you for further proving my point of the massive cost of irrational overreaction to nuclear.
Fear of nuclear power has killed more people than nuclear power. And in fact, the number of lives saved by nuclear power is in the many millions.
> The point is not that this didn't happen because, after careful deliberation, it was found that this wasn't possible.
That is indeed the difference between the two that I explained to you. It is why nuclear power generation isn't strictly necessary since there are alternative ways of generating electricity.
> With nuclear, we don't seem to be capable of making such an informed decision, balancing the risks with the rewards. Instead, we demand that the risk be zero. This is obviously irrational.
There are plenty of countries that have nuclear power plants and all countries in the world use nuclear radiation in some way or another for other purposes than electricity production so I don't agree with your assessment.
> Do you also count the cleanup costs of all the other technology that was destroyed by the earthquake and Tsunami against that technology. Or do you do that only with nuclear?
It seems only logical to do that for other dangerous substances as well. If a dangerous chemical was leaked as a result and this needed to be cleaned up then that's on the dangerous chemical. Depending on how it was stored, you could shift the blame more towards the people that made the decision to store it like that or to external factors like an earthquake. Context obviously matters.
> The $100 billion cost you claim against nuclear was caused by the Tsunami, not by nuclear power, and of course the number is massively inflated due to the overreaction to the accident. So thank you for further proving my point of the massive cost of irrational overreaction to nuclear.
Decontamination costs $35 billion, costs for interim storage of radioactive material $14 billion and costs of decommissioning reactors $69 billion and this gives us $118 billion. [0] What exactly is inflated about these numbers? And what about them isn't related to the nuclear power plant? I left out vague costs such as "victim compensation".
> For one: Japan has no natural resources. Fuel for power must be imported. Materials for solar panels (or the panels themselves) must be imported. Nuclear is by far one of the most efficient /and/ effective forms of power generation humanity currently has.
How is nuclear fuel any different in this respect? Sure it's more compact, but it has other complications regarding transport. They're still going to be reliant on other countries. Solar panels, even if imported, do not require the ongoing importation of fuel.
> For third: Japan needs power /today/, not tomorrow
I don't see how nuclear solves this problem. New plants have a very long lead time.
I'm not trying to fearmonger, and I think that had we adopted a lot more nuclear in decades past we could be in a much better position regarding climate change now. But I'm not convinced that the arguments stack up for nuclear right now.
>How is nuclear fuel any different in this respect?
We're already talking about what we will do once major reserves of coal and oil run dry. It's obviously not going to happen any time soon, maybe even not this century, but I'm not aware of similar sentiments being thrown around about nuclear fuel such as uranium and plutonium.
Nuclear power also does not belch out greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere unlike coal and oil. If we want power generation without greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear power is one of the answers.
>I don't see how nuclear solves this problem.
Keeping currently active plants active for longer means the immediate need for power is better satisfied and the need for /more/ power in the short-term is delayed.
This plan also calls for new plants which will replace the generation capacity lost from outgoing plants (coal/oil or nuclear) and hopefully satisfy power demands today and tomorrow.
The original argument was that Japan imports all of its energy; nuclear is no different to fossil fuels in this regard. You raise plenty of other interesting issues, but don't address the question of energy sovereignty.
> How is nuclear fuel any different in this respect? Sure it's more compact, but it has other complications regarding transport. They're still going to be reliant on other countries. Solar panels, even if imported, do not require the ongoing importation of fuel.
Nuclear requires a tiny fraction of the material that any other generation type needs. We’re talking about a factor of one million more energy dense compared to fossil fuels!
Solar and wind do not provide baseload and can therefore not replace any conventional power plant.
There is a reason why Germany just returned 7.3 GW in coal-fired power units to the electricity market:
Agree that nuclear fuel is a lot more dense, but still has the same geopolitical problems as any imported fuel, just fewer (and probably more specialized) ships to transport it.
Also agree about the base-load issue, but that's a different argument (and there are some ways to lessen it without always resorting to conventional power-plants; see how Australia has performed over the past decade with crumbling coal infrastructure and no ability for long term planning due to policy paralysis - our base-load has been crumbling but through some clever grid manipulation there have been far fewer blackouts than anyone expected)
The size is an extremely important benefit. It means a country like Japan is able to stockpile a domestic fuel supply sufficient for multiple years of electricity generation.
> Solar and wind do not provide baseload and can therefore not replace any conventional power plant.
Think about a hospital, the ultimate baseload requirement. Would a hospital be OK with just power from a single nuclear reactor? Of course not, it would still have a generator for backup power. Nuclear power plants don't run 24/7/365, they have scheduled maintenance and unexpected downtime.
Baseload power is ensured through diversity and spare dispatchable power.
> Baseload power is ensured through diversity and spare dispatchable power.
Unless I’m missing something, solar and wind are not diverse energy sources though. If one plant is generating less energy because the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing, then all the nearby plants have the same problem. If you take one nuclear plant offline, the others aren’t impacted. Seems like a completely different scenario. You can get some diversity through geographical separation but I’m not sure it’s that much, especially on a small island like Japan. Also, long distance energy transmission has proven expensive and problematic (eg HVDC is not the norm because it remains phenomenally expensive to deploy)
Japan is quite long (North-South). It's comparable to the East coast of Australia, which has a single grid/energy market. Also, wind and solar are often (not always) complementary energy sources.
Is whether the sun is shining in the north sufficiently decoupled from sun shining in the south? Is the wind blowing in the north decoupled from the wind blowing in the south?
I’m suggesting that the distance is not large enough for that to be the case. Which makes it a very different situation to a nuclear plant taken offline for maintenance. Not to mention that afaik they don’t take the entire plant offline. They’ll take offline one reactor and work on it and bring it back online before working on the next reactor.
In Australia that distance is certainly enough for completely different weather. But local geo-climactic conditions in Japan might be completely different; it's probably not the distance as much as prevailing winds, geography, etc.
Interestingly for any type of generation - Japan runs two different grid frequencies, which limits cross-flow from one half to the other half. They do have HVDC interconnects, but are rather limited (they're building more, in no small part as a result of Fukushima)
The solar panels have to be replaced at some too, don't they? And how many of them are being made in China?
Diversification will be key for the future - including nuclear, solar, wind, storage.
France took 10 years to go from very little nuclear to most of the energy coming from nuclear. It can be done if activist don't stop it and put up ever higher requirements to make nuclear less attractive.
Imagine the sheer volume of solar panels needed to supply even a fraction like 1/5th of the energy demand. You don't manufacture and ship that to Germany in a few big orders, that's a decades-long process. By the time that's done, the oldest panels are up for renewal. Any country that is not producing solar panels (and that isn't a place like Norway or Iceland with hydro or geothermal plentiful) is effectively relying on foreign 'fuel' as well. It's almost as though we're going to have to learn to live together on planet A.
Demanding "fail-proof" is FUD. Even a windmill can fall over and kill someone.
What is good design and planning is "fail-safe" which is to say that any failure mode means the plant shuts down gracefully and with as little damage as possible. In the case of windmills, that means sticking them in fields or on open water where people aren't likely to be around. For nuclear plants, that means the whole thing is self contained and designed to stop reacting without direct human control. Every failure mode ends in the nuclear reaction ending with the radioactive materials contained.
> For one: Japan has no natural resources. Fuel for power must be imported. Materials for solar panels (or the panels themselves) must be imported. Nuclear is by far one of the most efficient /and/ effective forms of power generation humanity currently has.
Nuclear has a much larger total material requirement than wind and about equal to solar.
> For two: Fukushima was a result of human incompetence, nothing to do with the reactor itself or nuclear technology thereof. The meltdowns at Fukushima #1 could have been completely avoided had the government of the time not been a bunch of worthless fools (hint: TEPCO wanted to scuttle the reactors before they melted down).
How do you perpetually guard against human nature?
> For third: Japan needs power /today/, not tomorrow. Even assuming a transition to non-nuclear forms of power, that will not happen overnight. Using nuclear power is a concern of practical necessity.
This nuclear would come online in 15-20 years, how is that today?
> For fourth: Nuclear fearmongering is patently ridiculous. Nuclear power plants are not atomic bombs, for crying out loud. The same people who cry their hearts out about radiation proceed to fly on airliners and eat bananas. The answer to nuclear fearmongering is not shunning nuclear technology, it's to teach and bring more awareness about what nuclear technology is.
Their risks are subsidized by the governments, and it still on top of that, require enormous subsidies. This move will essentially banish Japan to become an energy starved country in the face of massive renewable build-outs.
The problem with nuclear is that it's very expensive and new nuclear plants take forever to build. Japan has lots of solar and wind power potential, but renewables are not very compatible with nuclear power for economic reasons.
Let's not make policy out of unfounded fears. Let's look at some simple facts:
1. Fewer people have died from nuclear reactor meltdowns than from any other form of electricity generation. It is by far the safest form of power.
2. Even with the price of renewables dropping quickly, we will not be able to decarbonize quickly enough to prevent the terrible climate change outcomes. We need an all of the above solution to non-fossil fuel energy sources.
3. Germany decommissioned several nuclear plants out of fear and have both increased their reliance on fossil fuels as a result and increased dependency on Russia. It was a very foolish decision
Nuclear power is the safest and most environmentally friendly way to produce reliable and consistent base power. No renewable can do that yet.
In theory they can, but in practice it's still either prohibitively expensive or highly location-dependent.
Pumped storage works, but it needs natural formations to be cost-effective, you can't just build a mile high lake in the middle of a desert. Hydrogen electrolysis+on-site storage is a decent option, but still very expensive and not very efficient (energy loss is around 50% give or take depending on the scale).
We needed nuclear 5 years ago, maybe when the current gen generators are EOL we have gotten good enough at storing renewable power that we don't need nuclear any more.
> 1. Fewer people have died from nuclear reactor meltdowns than from any other form of electricity generation. It is by far the safest form of power.
To extend this - this includes renewables.
Dam failures usually kill a lot of people (I think the estimate for Three Gorges failing was 10 million dead and 100 million displaced or something?) and a lot of people get hurt due to accidents while installing solar panels and wind turbines. The accidents don't happen that often, but you need a lot of solar panels and wind turbines to replace one nuclear power plants.
As someone in Germany but not German, this aspect of Germany is bizarre to me. You have green energy already and instead of maintaining it or building it out, you build extra coal plants, mine more villages, but shut the green energy down? Huh, interesting choice.
I understand the principles behind closing it. The old reactors are not the latest and greatest, there is this fear similar to the fear of flying (you're not in control and it has large consequences) even though it's the safest thing to do, and of course it's not technically renewable. What baffles me is that people don't see that this is still better than the alternative coal and gas plants that kill people on an ongoing basis from air pollution and global warming.
But you also have higher Linux, PGP, Threema, OpenStreetMap, etc. usages than any other country I know of. The "only the purest ideal is good enough, shut everything else down" mentality has its upsides in many (most?) situations.
> The "only the purest ideal is good enough, shut everything else down" mentality has its upsides in many (most?) situations.
Unfortunately, I have come to see this differently. For example Threema. It turns out it wasn't a great choice, at least from the cryptographic side. Maybe it's still a good choice from a data protection standpoint. Or the high Android usage. Is buying e.g. Huawei phones really a good idea?
Even if we could say there is a way to go from ideal to the practical "best", so much time is wasted in endless debates about the "best". This only works for issues where time isn't of the essence. Sometimes, pragmatism is required.
Weather-related events has killed people since the beginning of times, but I was under the impression global warming was still about predictions of catastrophies.
A consequence of a higher global temperature is that the frequency of natural disasters will increase and their severity will ne amplified, but that's not the same as predicting anything.
An argument can be made that it's already killing people, as both frequency and severely of fires, heat waves, draughts, floods, etc has significantly gotten worse within the last 20 years. That doesn't mean that all deaths to natural disasters can be attributed to global warming for obvious reasons, but logic dictates that by increasing the severity of the event, at least some of the harm can be attributed to climate change. Singling anyone out is gonna be impossible however.
For the record: the increased frequency and magnitude of disasters is a pretty tame side effect of global warming. There are much bigger long time issues for farming, biodiversity and toxicity in water.
The "air pollution" part is measurable enough but it's obviously impossible to attribute the death of any individual that was caused by, say, a natural disaster or extreme heat event bolstered by global warming to any particular source of carbon emissions. Especially because you can very reasonably argue that those carbon emissions were a by-product of providing the energy needed to maintain first world standards of living, including the medical care etc that comes with it (I would totally agree that if we shut down all fossil-fuel- based energy generation tomorrow, it would result in significant excess deaths - far more than would be saved. Of course if you extend the period over which you count such deaths - say, to the next 50 or 100 years - the reverse is likely to be true, especially considering how much the earth's population is likely to increase in the next couple of decades).
>Our politicians take Fukushima as an example why we should stop nuclear energy.
And the Japanese (to say nothing of the rest of the world) are taking Germany as an example of what happens when you depend on cheap resources from your geopolitical adversaries for your economy to be viable.
>People are scared of nuclear energy.
Perhaps they should be more scared of having no energy at all.
"The proximate cause of the disaster was the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which occurred on the afternoon of 11 March 2011 and *remains the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan*. The earthquake triggered a powerful tsunami, with 13–14-meter-high waves damaging the nuclear power plant's emergency diesel generators, leading to a loss of electric power. The result was the most severe nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, classified as level seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) [...] and thus joining Chernobyl as the only other accident to receive such classification. [...] the INES ranks incidents by impact on population, so Chernobyl (335,000 people evacuated) and Fukushima (154,000 evacuated) [...]" [2]
Man, nuclear's weak. Worst two disasters end with just a few dozen people dead at most and merely a ton of economical damage? A single dam failure and you've got 100 thousand people dead. Coal alone kills 100 thousand people a year. Nuclear needs to step it up.
As far as I understand, the FUD campaign was actually orchestrated by Russian gas companies to make Germany more dependent on Russian gas, and it seems to have worked.
- The reason we only use less than 5% of the Uranium fuel, so throwing away 95%, is that the fuel is so cheap (= abundant) that it is cheaper to just throw it away
- Fuel costs are basically a negligible component of the lifecycle costs of a nuclear reactor
The hard facts are that Russia processes half of the world's uranium and no country, not even the US, could sanction their nuclear energy sector. This is the reality, not your fuel efficiency and breeder reactor hopium.
He leaves completely open how the US electricity market would replace the missing nuclear energy. For all we know, he might expect the US to crank up their gas power plants. I fail to see how this is a win for nuclear energy.
Also, it's an US-centric article and as it's states, the US only has a 15% dependency on Russia. So you are already looking at a very favorable outlier that makes the situation look better than it actually is. Most other countries have a much greater dependency.
To be fair, the amount of money in uranium and refining is orders of magnitude less than the amount of money in natural gas (which is one of the arguments pro nuclear), so your counter argument isn’t so strong either
Whether or not you support nuclear power, being “scared” of it is an admission of ignorance and indicative of short-term reactionary thinking. It ought to be a source of national shame, not pride.
With apologies to Yoda, fear is the path to the dark ages.
Do you think we evolved fear by accident? If I were handling a venomous snake I'd be scared to be bit and rightly so. There's no reason to be proud of being heedless of risk.
And what if it was a non-venomous snake, and all the experts tell you it is a non-venomous snake, and it is literally safer than a pet dog. Would you still be scared of handling it because of a pathological fear of snakes? In what way is that adaptive and helpful in a modern era of scientific knowledge?
Well, the setup was you told me people should feel embarrassed to be scared whether or not they support nuclear power. If they accepted the premise you are setting up now — that it is utterly risk-free — why wouldn’t they support it?
> the premise you are setting up now — that it is utterly risk-free
That is a fairly egregious misrepresentation of what was said. And it completely misses the point of the (rather good) analogy.
Economies need energy. The only question that matters is whether a proposed source is overall better or worse — per unit of energy — than the status quo or the fallback. Remember, the choice isn’t nuclear power or no nuclear power. The choice is to utilise nuclear power or continue burning coal/oil/gas.
How was I meant to interpret “a non-venomous snake, literally safer than a pet dog” as an analogy if it didn’t mean that nuclear power was extremely safe?
Nuclear power is "extremely safe. It is arguably the safest form of energy we have, unarguably one of the safest and unarguable the safest reliable form of energy.
The majority of Germans want nuclear power back. But politicians don’t want to. Green party has always been against nuclear power. It’s their ideology. And the Merkel’s party who shut them down (CDU) and changed their mind now is no longer on power. German politics bas been ideological madness for the past 18 years or so…
> The majority of Germans want nuclear power back.
Not the ones I talk to. It's not like they're energy or nuclear experts, working in a security consultancy, but they're also not uneducated or unfamiliar with looking things up on the internet. Every single one of them will, when directly asked, say "yeah okay coal first but then nuclear should close too!". Not a mention of the reliance on gas (until one year ago, of course), let alone that they would say "as soon as there is enough renewable energy available, we should close nuclear". The indoctrination runs deeper than the fundamental knowledge that we should build out renewables before we can turn off things we don't like without losing the power grid.
I think AfD wants it (the local racism party), which is possibly the worst kind of advertising one could do, regardless of who's actually right.
Germany cannot rely on renewables entirely. It is not possible. You need to have coal/gas or nuclear for the base load. Gas is out and coal is harming the environment. Germany’s “greenest” day in electricity was producing more CO2 than France’s worst day in 2022.
I know that there is a decent amount of well-educated highly paid individuals in Germany that just don’t feel like facts and data for some topics. The Green party is very popular with the “rich and affluent” that “greenwash their conscience”.
Accusing the Greens of being ideology driven when they have shown to be pragmatic is a joke. Not sticking to any ideology is the reason their politicians top the popularity polls.
And wanting something back is one thing, getting something back another. If you want nuclear power back, you must build new plants - good luck, it will only take 20 years!
The Green-led BMWK explained in detail the many real hurdles that come with prolonged use of nuclear power. Strangely, I have never seen any oh-so rational nuclear power lover dissect their arguments.
The Green party is the third/fourth most “popular” party in Germany slightly ahead or en par with the AfD (https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/). I will not comment on the incompetence of the Habeck (Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action). It’s cringe what he states publicly and his incompetence is beyond comprehension.
There is no “green-sustainable” alternativ to nuclear in Germany. The only alternatives are relying on coal or deindustrialisation. Not sure whether gas will be a viable option going forward.
Take a look at Berlin - the capital is a sh*t show of incompetence and failure - funnily enough they can only survive thanks to the payments from the much frowned upon states that have conservative parties in power and a positive economy…
When you have party refusing nuclear power plants out of fear from radiation and then same party agrees with extending coal mines and coal power plant, which are spitting radioactive waste around environment in uncontrolled manner from ash, then they are purely driven by anti-nuclear ideology.
> How do Germans feel about all those nuclear power plants next door in France?
You should see the stickers on restaurant windows, cars, street lanterns, etc. I think that's for a plant in Belgium since I'm from the Belgium-bordering area, but not sure. I'd boycott those restaurants but it's absolutely everywhere. I assume that whoever prints those but not also "close <some brown coal plant>" stickers must also be printing 5G stickers and buying armbands with radioactive dust (what are they called again, 'negative ion' or 'positive energy' wearables or something?) to protect from cell tower radiation.
As a Pole I always found the German politicians’ stance suspicious. It has so obviously played right into over-reliance on gas from the east. Which is a far more dangerous and scary perspective than a single potential accidental melt down. And straight up corrupt considering the sheer scale of eastbound cash flow.
This news does go to show that perhaps the Japanese have managed to set fear aside. It is an engineering problem, might as well be scared to fly.
Would you say stances have changed at all in Germany from your POV since last year?
So the topic was basically about extending nuclear only in response to the short-term situation? Not about reevaluating it as a valid green energy source?
> Germany wants to safe the whole world by "going by example". So instead of thinking pratically and realisticly "we" try do to things ideologically.
This is so strange to me because my view has always been that Germany is this rational pro-engineering actor. Narcissistic and superior, but nevertheless logical and calculating.
The idea that a bunch of windmills are going to power all these factories? That all the gas is somehow greener? I mean we know how this discussion goes - the amount of energy needed for that level of industrial output is just too big for non-greenhouse gas emitting sources. How exactly do they respond to that?
> So the topic was basically about extending nuclear only in response to the short-term situation? Not about reevaluating it as a valid green energy source?
The Green Party sees nuclear energy as the evil. Never they consider it as green energy. Extending nuclear was a short-term compromise.
I don't know how they want to supply the industry with only renewable energy. I'm not deep enough into that topic.
As a German, my country's reaction to Fukushima was and is bizarre to me.
There was a natural disaster, a Tsunami, that cost upwards of 15000 lives, almost certainly a good number of them when various pieces of technology failed due to the Tsunami.
One of the pieces of technical infrastructure affected was a nuclear power plant of an old, already inherently not great design, safety wise, that we now know was not built to regulations. Despite all that, there have been 0 deaths attributable to that accident so far.
Zero.
Germany's reaction: OMG WE NEED TO GET RID OF NUCLEAR POWER.
Utterly bizarre.
For me, Fukushima was what convinced me that nuclear was much safer than I had previously thought, a fact confirmed by the data: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy
The politicians did not "take Fukushima as an example why we should stop nuclear energy". They knew better. They just triangulated the public's irrational fears.
And those irrational fears are stoked, maximally, by the press. See the recent reporting on the anniversary:
"Am 11. März 2021 jährt sich zum zehnten Mal die Tsunami- und Atomkatastrophe von Japan, die bis zu 20.000 Menschen das Leben und rund 160.000 Japaner ihre Heimat kostete."
March 11, 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, which claimed the lives of up to 20,000 people and displaced around 160,000 Japanese.
Not sure it is technically a lie, but suggesting this strongly that the 20000 deaths were caused at least equally by the Tsunami and the reactor accident is certainly not truthful reporting.
And this isn't an isolated incident, pretty much all the reporting was this way.
And of course this has the desired effect. And while I am not sure that the German public would consciously say that the 16000-20000 deaths were caused by the reactor accident, it is certainly how they feel, and the feeling gets reinforced time and time again.
And so we turned off our cleanest and safest form of energy, spent trillions in order to miss our emissions targets and become ever more dependent on fossil fuels, in the process prompting a dictator to miscalculate our dependence and embolden him to start the most brutal war in Europe for almost a century.
And there's a lot of homegrown insanity that plays into it. While I am pretty sure Russian operatives "helped" as much as they could, they didn't have that much to do.
I once read somewhere that every country has its own "crazy" that just doesn't make any sense to outsiders, but internally just can't really be addressed. The US has guns, the UK has Brexit and Germany has its nuclear phobia.
Well, you know Japan is just acting like that because they didn’t have a Fukushima like Germant. Oh, wait!
On a more serious note:
Since the beginning of the Ukraine-Russian war, Germany fully returned 19 coal-fired power units with a total generating capacity of 7.3 GW to the electricity market:
Germany had only three nuclear power plants in 2022, so 4 GW. And since they could only serve about 0.5 GW of peak demand, Germany needed to reactivate coal power plants regardless.
Furthermore, the NPPs were planned to be shut-down years ago, you can't flip a switch and keep them going. They have no fuel, no staff, no certifications. Refueling the last NPPs would have required to take them offline for several months, right at the time Germany needed electricity the most. And the other NPPs that were decommissioned are gone forever, even if they weren't in deconstruction, there are countless of obstacles that won't ever bring them back.
* Japan's access to oil is via ship, which is expected to become more difficult as China is anticipated to tighten the screws in the South China Seas even further in coming years and Russia is unlikely to offer favorable terms since Japan is aligned with the West. Japan has past trauma of being cut off from oil by America and England, so they're particularly sensitive about this.
* The Ukraine war has highlighted how fragile the world energy sources actually are, and everyone is hedging however they can.
* Japan is following the general world trend towards isolationism and nationalism that flows from a sudden decrease in stability (COVID and the Ukraine war), and although this phase will pass, it's still having an effect on decision making now.
* A declining population and economy that basically will continue doing so means that big investments make more sense now than later (even though they still won't be able to pay for it).
* The LDP has defacto ruled Japan virtually unopposed since the end of WW2, and Japanese people rarely seriously question the government's judgment beyond a bit of localized murmuring.
Japan needs energy security, and its options are very limited.
The way I see it is that nuclear disasters are terrible and costly, but they don't threaten the existence of mankind or our way of life. Global warming, on the other hand, is threatening our way of life and well-being slowly but very directly. This is the real danger, and I believe that the green movement has been very misguided in its anti-nuclear stance. They are achieving the opposite of their goals. The carbon footprint of Germany has been much worse compared to France in the past 50 years.
We've had two major disasters in 30 years. Even if you assume that you get a Fukushima/Chernobyl-sized event three times per century, which is bad and should not happen with modern designs, it still doesn't threaten mankind as a whole because they are localized events. Global warming, however, is making Earth a less habitable place everywhere.
I don't think the green movement is anti-nuclear, it is nuclear reluctant but given two choices, e.g. coal vs nuclear, green would always choose the lesser of two evils.
Come on. So you think political ecologists have no role in the fact that very few nuclear plants were built in Europe since 1990 ? Even France, the nuclear plant country(tm) has forgotten how to make them (look at Flamanville EPR fiasco). Now, everybody realize we actually need nuclear but we can't make anymore quickly and are stuck extending the life of the existing plants like Japan is doing.
Nuclear plants don't live forever. Refusing new nuclear is tantamount to eliminating nuclear.
Also, there are certainly green activists against ALL nuclear. I don't have a formal survey handy, but based purely on the opinions of those that I know, far more are anti-nuclear than are neutral on the matter.
> Refusing new nuclear is tantamount to eliminating nuclear.
IT IS NOT. Refusing new nuclear but understanding that current nuclear plants can't be shutdown (yet) until there's more renewable replacements for energy generation is a good compromise.
It was Ms Merkel who captured the Green Party's long standing stance of zero nuclear power after the Fukushima event - like she did with political positions of other opponents as a general strategy.
Today, it's Mr Habeck who'd be responsible for extending lifetimes of nuclear power plants. But of course his investigation into viability of doing just that was bound to come to negative conclusions - everything else would be political suicide for a member of a party that started life out of the "Atomkraft? Nein danke" movement late 70s/early 80s.
Decisions elsewhere in the world, even in Japan, don't matter, co2, geopolitics, energy-intensive industries, and emobility at stupid prices be damned - the fundamentalist Green Party and their dangerously half-educated electorate are afraid of "the rays."
The ministry led by "Mr Habeck" wrote five sober pages on all the obstacles of keeping the nuclear power plants running. I don't see you or anyone else here countering any of the arguments they gave.
No, it's always the same with these comment sections: They are a circle jerk of people who claim to be on the rational side, while they are only spreading unfunded claims, conspiracy theories and lies.
So, we don’t keep nuclear - what is the alternative? Coal? Gas? You are aware, that the majority is still non-renewable and as an industrialized economy we do have a base load for consumption that we cannot just lower when there is no sun or wind.
I’m all pro renewables in general, but they aren’t a 100% solution for our grid or economy. Moving away from nuclear to gas furthermore supported Russias aggressions against Ukraine.
> They are a circle jerk of people who claim to be on the rational side, while they are only spreading unfunded claims, conspiracy theories and lies.
Frankly, your discussion style sucks. With your "everybody who's not my opinion is a liar and conspiracy theorist" attitude are you sure you're at the right place here?
Maybe both the German and the Japanese approaches to nuclear are both wrong except in opposite ways.
The Germans can afford to be needlessly picky about nuclear in their own country since if they have an electricity shortage they can simply buy the deficit from the European grid or they can kill themselves slowly by burning their lignite reserves, the nastiest, dirtiest type coal in existence.
Japan, being an isolated island nation that's poor in natural resources, doesn't have this luxury so they're YOLOing it on old nuclear plants.
FUD is generally frowned upon. The fact there are only single instances of nuclea incidents speaks highly of the technology.
Japan probably has no heavy government influence by the likes of Lukoil, either.
That’s why Germany created a dependence on Russian oil, despite being warned by both sides of politics that this would enable Putin, at the whole of Europe’s expense, and kept sending billions to Russia for oil even after the invasion. Trying to keep within the HN guidelines and not writing how I actually feel about Germany for this.
The German way - turning off nuclear power to replace it with coal and gas while running token amount of renewables which will never cover the base load (because the required amount of storage would be insane), is very much the dream of traditional coal, gas and oil industries. Yet the Germans argue it is the best way because "what about the waste?!!!111"
It is a shame that whole country managed to get coopted, brainwashed and corrupted this way, especially since they try to push this evil on EU level as well, but it is what it is.
The worst part is how everyone is allowed to block deployment of renewable energies like the Windmills, because it is not nice for the landscape, it is noisy or whatever.
In other EU countries it is done, period, no one gets asked for their opinion.
Stop spreading disinformation. Germany not only switched off nuclear plants but reduced its coal use drastically compared to levels 10 years ago. I've posted data on this a billion times, and am too lazy to do it now -- checking the actual data for once before posting an opinion should not be too difficult. Sorry, but this is beyond pitiful.
Reduction has been minimal, and now that we no longer have the Russian gas that we used to substitute coal, we are turning coal plants back on. While at the same time shutting down clean nuclear.
The mind boggles.
Go to https://www.electricitymaps.com On almost every day, Germany is the 2nd least green country in Europe, only after Poland.
In 2014, Germany was the largest producer of CO2 emissions in Europe, by a wide margin.
Coal are the bottom two things on the chart (brown and gray). Drastically down. Gas use percentage wise is pretty much the same as 10 years ago. Obviously you're making things up.
Germany is also not turning coal plants back on: there were about a dozen coal plants put on stand by this year as an emergency, but they mostly stayed off. The funny part is that the emergency was mostly related to the collapse of nuclear in France where most of the surrounding countries suddenly needed to support it. But in the end renewables made up most of the difference. Here's a Twitter thread with the data https://mobile.twitter.com/CoalFreeDave/status/1620360558255...
Europe needs to get off fossil fuels and it's about to do that really fast. Unnecessary hurdles were removed to make renewable deployment easier. As a consequence there's been a huge uptick in nuclear lobbying and astroturfing - this industry is scared it's about to be made officially irrelevant. All sort of plans are being made but there will be so much new renewable generation by the time this plans are finalized, let alone the decades it will take to get anything done with nuclear, that it will not matter at all.
"Ab Oktober werden insgesamt zwölf Kohlekraftwerke mit einer Leistung bis zu knapp sieben Gigawatt zusätzlich Strom für das deutsche Netz zur Verfügung stellen."
From October, a total of twelve coal-fired power plants with an output of up to almost seven gigawatts will provide additional electricity for the German grid.
> Gas use percentage wise is pretty much the same as 10 years ago.
The very chart you cite has gas use almost tripling from 1990 to 2020, from 36 to 91.
> the collapse of nuclear in France
There was no "collapse" of Nuclear in France. This counter-factual talking point has been corrected so many times it isn't funny any more. What happened was that France scheduled maintenance work that had been deferred during the pandemic. This was planned, because with nuclear power, you can plan things.
The reason that it was planned for summer is that that is when both energy demand is at its lowest and otherwise not-so-stellar renewable production is at its highest.
Unlike renewables, which are mostly unpredictable, and the little that is predictable is bad: that they produce far less energy when it's needed most.
And even the Twitter thread you cite (which also incorrectly speaks of French "outages"), admits that a whopping 1/3rd of the reduction in nuclear production was due to Germany turning off plants.
Also, you might want to take a closer look at the chart you cited. The still very modest drop in coal you spotted mostly coincides with a drop in total energy consumption, making the relative reduction even more modest than it already is. So we just used less energy overall. Whoop-dee-doo. And coal use rose again even in 2021 in absolute terms, so before the war.
Read the Twitter link I posted: only a 1/6 of the deficit caused mostly by the nuclear failure in France was replaced by coal. Those plants were put on stand by because wishful thinking is not a good policy, but they were mostly idle.
A quarter of France plants were out unplanned, another quarter were in planned maintenance. This was all documented extensively, we should not debate facts. On top of that the EDF kept blowing its own deadlines all year. Summary from the NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
"A record 26 of its 56 reactors are off-line for maintenance or repairs after the worrisome discovery of cracks and corrosion in some pipes used to cool reactor cores."
Shutting down a quarter of your fleet because of worrisome discovery of cracks, causing panic on the energy markets across the continent does not sound like predictable to me. Renewables on the other hand are extremely predictable and pretty much always deliver on the prediction because they are so distributed.
The chart says Germany produced 165TWh from coal in 2021 and roughly 250TWh in 2010. I believe you should check the dictionary for the words "modest" and "predictable".
> only a 1/6 of the deficit caused mostly by the nuclear failure in France was replaced by coal
1. Once again: it was not a "failure". It was scheduled maintenance/inspection.
2. Yes. The French were able to schedule this maintenance/inspection in the summer, when energy demand is at its lowest and renewable production at its highest. It is so helpful to be able to schedule these things. Unlike renewables, which you you can't schedule at all, and the only thing you really know is that they will produce the least energy when you need it most.
3. Once again: this was scheduled maintenance/inspection. And during the scheduled inspection they found some cracks. This is something that happens when you inspect things. That is why you do the inspections: so you find stuff that you then fix.
[The regularly scheduled car inspection found some problems with the engine that were duly fixed. Germans: OMG!!! WE MUST IMMEDIATELY BAN ALL CARS!!!! ]
5. "Modest". Yep, that's fairly modest, particularly when compared to considering a tripling of gas use as "unchanged". And that reduction went hand-in-hand with an overall reduction in demand in the last years. Also, you need to look at the lignite coal numbers, because lignite is the worst polluting kind: hardly changed at all. We did reduce the hard-coal a bit more due to shutting down the mines (by removing subsidies).
No. The EDF did not schedule maintenance of half of its fleet. A quarter yes, a quarter went out unplanned. This caused a huge energy crunch across most of western Europe. When it became clear the EDF doesn't have the situation under control the futures prices exploded everywhere but especially in France. At one point the futures prices there reached almost 2000$ per MWh. I've posted one link that documented the problem from a reputable source, and posted a quote directly here. That you choose to ignore reality and live in a constructed world is a testament to the wishful thinking mentality of the pro nuclear crowd.
But like I posted elsewhere it doesn't really matter -- Europe needs to remove fossil fuels and this will happen a lot quicker than most people assume. The ink on the plans for new nuclear plants won't even dry.
> No. The EDF did not schedule maintenance of half of its fleet
Yes it did.
> A quarter yes, a quarter went out unplanned.
Great to hear that you are backing off from your "collapse" narrative. But still not quite correct. These were planned shutdowns for planned maintenance/inspections. Some of these inspections found problems, as inspections sometimes do and therefore the plants were offline longer than just the original inspection period and some additional checks were performed and problems were found that had to be remedied.
And once again: these checks were scheduled for the summer (extended to fall), and even with some of the extended maintenance required most plants were operational again in winter.
> Renewables on the other hand are extremely predictable and pretty much always deliver on the prediction
LOL. I would really like to be able to schedule our "Dunkelflauten" for the summer ...
The only thing that is predictable about renewables is when they definitely won't be available. Which is when we need energy the most. Yay!
> This caused a huge energy crunch across most of western Europe.
LOL. Attributing the spike in energy prices mono-causally to the scheduled maintenance (taking slightly longer than planned) of a part of France's nuclear fleet that you yourself write didn't take that much to replace is ... cute. Do you think there may have been other events in that time that could have had some impact on energy prices? Like maybe the largest disruption of Europe's energy supply in the last half century? Nah, that can't be it.
And it is also important to remember that these are water pipes running under high pressure. Cracks are an expected feature of this system, ask any plumber. Of course they need to be fixed in time, which is why there are regular inspections, but it's not as if there's some catastrophic flaw that was revealed the way it is presented in the press (particularly the German press, though the NY Times article is also pretty bad).
And of course you can expect more leakage/cracks as these plants reach the end of their service life, and especially if you defer the needed inspections/maintenance as was done during COVID.
It should also be noted that the extraordinary success of the French nuclear program has led to complacency and underinvestment, as that success was increasingly taken for granted. Fortunately that is starting to change, the French are taking their nuclear industry seriously again, and not killing it off in favour of renewable dreams that don't (and didn't) pan out.
There was a collapse of nuclear output in France because half of its plants were at one point offline. Of those, about half were unplanned and unscheduled because of "mysterious stress corrosion". Normally a net exporter, France became a net importer of electricity. The surrounding countries kept it on life support all year. The EDF kept postponing deadlines throughout the year because they could not solve the problem. The prices were skyrocketing across western Europe, but at one point (I think late summer, but not sure) they blew up in France only, after yet another delay, reaching almost $2000 per MWh on the futures market. My guess because it became clear that the EDF doesn't have a grip on the issue, and the neighboring countries maybe can't provide enough support in the winter. The government was preparing for blackouts, and pleaded to conserve energy. The situation overall with EDF got so severe that it had to be nationalized.
All of this is easily verifiable, and well documented, but only for people that are willing to read and look at facts. For some, you included, this is mostly a religion so I realize it's difficult to get far. It's like telling a person of faith that we have no proof a god exists -- this will not work. So take care.
My guess is that it's because the Japanese are so much used natural disasters such as typhoons, floods, landslides, volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, a nuclear meltdown is the last thing of their worries.
This is the "fuck it, we're too broke for caring"
plan.
Basically since Fukushima it's been a downhill rollercoaster, covid and the Olympics being the latest blows. Energy bills are planned to rise by 25+% for next summer, while salaries are already wildly behind inflation.
Building a new state of the art reactor now could be done experimentaly, but wouldn't help to get out of current situation.
An aging plant that is poorly maintained and not up to code which was built on a fault line gets hit by a record earthquake and kills a person, as in one (1) person?
>Japan will also change the rule that limits the operating life of reactors basically to 40 years but tolerates an extension to up to 60 years upon regulatory approval.
>Under the plan, Japan will allow power companies to operate reactors beyond the 60-year limit by excluding periods when reactors are halted for safety inspections or other reasons.
In short, instead of running more modern, more safe nuclear power plants, the plan is to extend the life of dangerous old designs.
Also, it appears that you are lying through omission:
“The basic plan calls for building next-generation nuclear reactors to replace decommissioned ones within the premises of the nuclear plants, ending a freeze on any projects to add, expand or replace reactors.”
