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Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
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The best thing to do when you fall off a horse, is climb straight back up on it. Rejecting almost limitless power because of an accident almost 40 years ago is foolish to me. Luckily research didn't completely stop and modern plants are a lot safer with a lot of medical applications for the waste.
But the horse still has a broken leg (End-Storage) and noone really knows how to fix that at the moment. Maybe give the horse some drugs to make the leg stronger (Transmutate the materials from long to moderately-long half-lifes), but we still need to support it in the end.
The move to coal was absolutely stupid, the CDU (which is currently gaining some traction.. again), dialed back on renewables which should have replaced some of the capacities lost to nucelar.. and then decided a new coal plant was a great idea too.
Probably some corruption.. sorry "Lobbying"-work behind that.. its not like the Experts (which were paid pretty well) told them that was a bad idea..
Maybe some more modern nucelar plants might work.. but its unprofitable (probably always was, considering the hidden costs on the tax payers already), so needs to be heavily state-funded, same with storage (plus getting all the stuff out of the butchered storage Asse, putting it somewhere else)
I am open to it, but dont see it happening. And storage.. no hopeful thoughts about that either, i dont think the current politic structures are well suited to oversee something like that from what we have seen from other storage-locations that are or were in use.
I'd also love some more plans for big energy storage aswell as new subsidies for the energy grid and renewables. The famous german bureaucracy is obviously also not helping any of this.
All of the nuclear waste produced by all of the nuclear power plants ever produced could fit on the area of about the size of a football pitch. Storing nuclear waste, isn’t the massive problem. People say it is. It could be easily disposed of by digging a very deep hole and sticking it in it.
It’s not ideal, sure, but it’s not exactly a huge problem either.
And that hole would of course not deform at all or release the products into the environment over some amount of time?
We already have that problem.. They tried more or less simply burying it in Asse, which spectacularly failed and now has to be brought back up.. paid by the government (so us) of course
Not if it’s deep enough and properly encased. And even in the extremely rare occasion there are mistakes made with improper storage or unforeseen environmental changes that require re-storage, the environmental impacts are still negligible.
The fear mongering around this is absurdly overblown.
Subsidizing reactors to run off waste would be fine. Better than burying it. I'm actually against building new nuclear for general power (for economic reasons), but support reactors for this purpose. The waste is sitting right there already, and we have to do something with it.
You forgot the latest one at Fukushima just 13 years ago. The costs of this catastrophe are estimated twice as high (~0.5T USD).
I forgot Germans get tsunami and earthquakes.
The Germans have Russians. :-/
Even the Russians aren't making nuclear disasters. They attacked and took control of the Zaporizhzhia plant, but there was no impact to nuclear safety.
Not saying it'll always be like this, and we might be less lucky next time, but at this point it looks like they're not trying to have Chernobyl 2.0.
There is some nuclear waste that Germany wasn't able to bury for over 30 years, because not a single site is safe. Maybe earthquakes and tsunamis aren't the only problems.
Cars are also not safe, especially at 200+ km/h but somehow it's OK to drive them this fast in Germany.
Edit: What I want to say is that there is no absolute safety.
If the car is safe (checked every year), you know the rules (that are in the law) and behave safely (keep the rules), not much can happen.
Also 300 km/h is quite rare. 200 km/h is not.
It's basically the same as with nuclear plants. They weren't safe to run, because the rods were old and they couldn't prove that storages are safe. And people voted for parties that support clean energy, especially doesn't produce harmful waste.