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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 article is badly researched.
The red-green coalition did not announce the 2022 date. They (Greens/SPD) announced a soft phase-out between 2015-2020 in conjunction with building renewables. This planned shift from nuclear to renewables was reverted by Merkel (CDU = conservatives) in 2010. They (CDU) changed their mind one year later in 2011 and announced the 2022 date; but without the emphasis on replacing it with renewables. This back and forth was also quite the expensive mistake by the CDU on multiple levels, because energy corporations were now entitled financial compensation for their old reactors.
I'd like to add, my view. I'm from Lower Saxony and in an area nearby they tried for years to establish a temporary storage for the high nuclear waste. I never trusted the notion that the temporary storage will be save, properly maintained and kept from leaking into the local water supply.
Add to that, that we have had very old reactors who were constantly extended rather than properly renewed. Further emphasising that they won't care proper for the waste products.
Then Fukushima happened, the movement for anti nuclear gained massive momentum. I assumed of course that the lack in energy will be compensated by building renewables and subsidising homeowners to build their own solar on their roofs. Why wouldn't we, we were already talking about increasing renewables to safe the climate.
The announcement came that atom is being phased out. Big hooray for everyone who had to live next to the old plants or in areas where end-storage 'solutions' were.
Aaaaaaaand they increased the god damn coal which is way worse and really no one wanted but the lobby for coal and fossile fuels.
Now lots of ppl. on the internet always advocate for nuclear, but never address the fears of the ppl. properly.
The thing is, having a high nuclear toxic waste storage in your local area is shite just as shite it is to have the damn ash piles from coal.
If nuclear really wants to make a proper comeback, in my opinion the first thing they need to solve is the waste. We have too much of it already and have solar, wind and water (tidal preferably over damns because those fuckers can break if not maintained proper) who do not create any nasty waste and by products.
Nuclear is also very expensive and takes a long time to build. Meanwhile the cost of solar reduced by almost 90% in the last decade.
And because it's politically controversial, you can expect delays of many, many years for new builds in most democracies. Which is precisely why conservatives have been pushing it, because it allows coal and gas to dominate for a bit longer.
The high cost also means that it'll take away funds that could have otherwise been used on much cheaper renewables. Nuclear energy is a terrible deal.
Just so you know, the ash particles in soot from coal power plants, regularly spewn into the atmosphere and stored in open-air dumps represents a far more real radioactive danger than nuclear waste does.
I know, which is why I said that the damn ash piles are shite. Have no love for coal or how it is handled.
The real problem is that there are no renewable solutions for base load, nuclear is the best we've got. Renewables are good, but they're spotty, you can't produce renewable power on demand or scale it on demand, and storing it is also a problem. Because of that you still need something to fill in the gaps for renewables. Now your options there are coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. That's it, that's your options. Pick one.
If we can successfully get cold fusion working we'll finally have a base power generation option that doesn't have (many) downsides, but until then nuclear power is the least bad option.
So yes, if you tell them "no nuclear", you're going to get more coal and gas plants, coal because it's cheap, and gas because it's marginally cleaner than coal.
How about... Hydro?
Hydro is good when it's available but also has some significant problems. The biggest is that it's an ecological disaster even if the reach of that disaster is far more limited. The areas upstream of the dam flood while the ones downstream are in constant danger of flooding and drought. In the worst case if the dam collapses it can wipe entire towns off the map with little or no warning. It is objectively far more dangerous and damaging to the environment than any nuclear reactor. The only upside it has is that it's effectively infinitely renewable barring massive shifts in weather patterns or geology.
All of that is of course assuming that hydro is even an option. There's a very specific set of geological and weather features that must be present, so the locations you can power with hydro power without significant transport problems are limited.
It's certainly an option, and better than coal, oil, or gas, but still generally worse than nuclear.
Hydro also creates methane releases as the flooded forests rot in the water.
We also shouldn't just focus on generation, but also on consumption. If we had a smarter grid that could shift demand to fit the dynamic power generation of renewables better, that should reduce the required capacity for backup power generation quite a bit.
Base load is not the same as back up power.
Base load is the lowest amount of power that gets used throughout the whole 24 hour period of a day, usually between 02:00 and 05:00. This usually runs hospitals, data centres and other critical infrastructure. The pick-ups during the day, peaking in the mornings, midday, and the biggest one in the evening is consumption by businesses, homes, schools, and basically everyone else.
This increase in demand draws more power from the generation side of the grid and drags the grid frequency down (50 Hz here in the UK & Europe, 60Hz in North America).
So the base load needs to increase output to accommodate these slower pick-ups to balance the frequency and if there is a sudden spike (like everyone boiling the kettle at halftime during a football match) then an quick response power system like hydro storage is used to quickly deliver power.
And when demand lowers, the grid frequency increases so you need to reduce the amount of power being generated else you'll burn out the equipment being used to transmit and distribute the power.
Now technically it is possible to balance the grid frequency using just renewables if you have enough of them, for example you just apply the breaks on wind turbines you don't need to generate power.
However, and this is the kicker, peak power generation from renewables like wind and solar won't align with the demand for the power.
And changing people's habits based on what power is available would be practically impossible. "Sorry lads, no football today the wind isn't blowing fast enough", "Sorry madam, we can't perform an MRI today, it's overcast and still and we've already used our carbon credits running the emergency coal/gas/diesel generators we have on site and we can't spare the power" etc.
A smarter grid helps balance the supply by better predicting the demand through data collection and work out which areas are consuming more power than others.
If we have enough energy storage to store excess power from renewables to be used during high points during the day then great, we can do away with base load power stations.
But all of the technologies for grid-scale power stages are still in the research and prototyping stage. And no, Lithium Ion batteries are NOT suitable for grid-scale storage because their capacity is effected too much by temperature variations and they can't be deep cycled (fully discharged and fully recharged).
So the result is we will need some form of base generation in the near term. This is why a lot of Europe has switched to Gas Generation. Because it produces much less pollutants than coal or oil burning (though only slightly less CO2) and they're much quicker to build, a year or two, than traditional nuclear power stations which take about a decade.
Oh yeah, I kind of skipped over that, but I actually meant that more flexible consumption helps bring down baseload demand, and in turn the need for backup generation as well once we reach that point where that matters.
Really good explanation of the issue though. Personally, I'm a bit more optimistic about being able to be more flexible demand. Particularly EVs and heat pumps are two areas where a smart grid can help shape demand without even being noticed by the people (apart from cheaper tariffs) as long as the car is fully charged in the morning and the room temperature is maintained.
Those are both good points.
Yes a smarter grid with dynamic control over high powered devices like heat pumps and EV/Hybrid Car-to-Grid chargers to actively control consumption would be a good idea.
Heck, there's even been trials for micro-grids with local power generation being distributed out with something called Open Energy Monitor to schedule in things like washing machines and dryers for members of the small community co-operative that run the micro grid.
The biggest cost with EV Car-to-Grid is the cost of the vehicle and then after that, if your house / business premises is older than roughly 30 years, the power cables into the house are not rated for the power delivery and will have to be replaced.
With heat pumps you again have the issue of the cost of the heat pump itself and the installation.
Both are solvable but it will require large amounts of government grant money to do so.
the viability of all your opinions are now immediately called into question
Why? It's an active area of research with several companies and universities trying to solve the problem. There's also a chance hot fusion succeeds although to my knowledge nobody has actually gotten close to solving that particular problem either. Tokamaks and such are still energy negative when taken as a whole (a couple have claimed energy positive status, but only by excluding the power requirements of certain parts of their operation). I guess maybe I should have just said fusion instead of cold fusion, but either way there are no working energy positive fusion systems currently.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not claiming that anyone has a working cold fusion device, quite the opposite. Nobody has been able to demonstrate a working cold fusion device to date. Anybody claiming they have is either lying or mistaken. But by the same token nobody has been able to show an energy positive hot fusion device either. There's a couple that have come close but only by doing things like hand waving away the cost to produce the fuel, or part of the energy cost of operating the containment vessel, to say nothing of the significant long term maintenance costs. I've not seen evidence of anybody getting even remotely close to a financially viable fusion reactor of any kind.
Yeah the difference is hot fusion works, see: the sun. Cold fusion would require a fundamental change in how we understand physics works. It's junk science.
Hmm, it's true that cold fusion would need some kind of physics breakthrough, although I think it might be going too far to call it junk science. To be entirely fair energy positive hot fusion also requires some kind of physics breakthrough though, although potentially a far less extreme one.
The Sun works because of its mass which generates the necessary temperature and pressures to trigger the fusion. Replicating those pressures and temperatures here though is incredibly energy intensive. In theory, on paper the energy released by the fusion reaction should exceed those energy requirements, but when you factor in that doing so requires exceedingly rare and expensive to create fuel most if not all of that energy surplus vanishes. Nobody has been able to prove that they can get more energy out of the reaction than the energy cost of creating the fuel and triggering the reaction, so until that happens hot fusion is far from proved either. There's a few research projects that look promising, but it's far from guaranteed that they'll pan out.
Cold fusion doesn't work. It's self contradicting once you learn the very basics of fusion. It was billed as a solution to dealing with the difficulties of material science and the heat generated by hot fusion.
Also, the simplest solution dealing with energy demands is to reduce our demand, but the people in the media demand perpetual growth.
I'm not especially anti-nuclear power overall, but temporary storage sounds like a terrible idea. Transporting nuclear waste twice means twice the possibility of something catastrophic happening.
You wildly overestimate the danger nuclear waste represents.
First, transportation is done in small amounts at a time, completely encased in concrete and steel, and is of no risk of exploding: the only danger would be spillovers, which would call for expensive cleaning operations.
Next, storage. The whole waste produced by 60 years of nuclear waste in France amounts to only a few swimming pools of dangerous material. If this material was actually fully useless, we could ditch it in geological layers underground where it would become soon unreachable and dispersed, posing no discernable danger for the upcoming few billion years.
Furthermore, the only reason we don't ditch this nuclear waste right now is that this material can still be useful for plenty of uses that are not yet economically viable, but could be in the long term, such as energy generation with low-yield reactors.
I don't know, it sounds like it's dangerous to me if it can explode sometimes...
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump-20160819-snap-story.html
Note that they present the issue only as a financial problem rather than an actual threat to the environment or people.
Since your articles behind a paywall, I cannot read it. However, I can guarantee you as what you're describing was in a barrel. It was low level waste. So likely a mixture of propellants or other chemicals that had been exposed to a reactor environment and then disposed of in a sealed barrel. High-Level nuclear waste is solid metallic-like substances that are encased in glass, steel and concrete. There's nothing to explode.
Not paywalled for me, but here you go-
The information you provided was not sufficient so I googled
The suspect drums contain nitrates and cellulose, which are thought to have reacted to cause the explosion in February
It was low level waste mostly americanum dissolved into the mixture of nitrates and cellulose. The barrel did not explode as much as the lid popped off.
Waste from nuclear weapons is not the same as waste from commercial nuclear power plants.
WIPP is for low level transuranic waste from DOE projects, just FYI. Not super toxic stuff. They ship it in these super tough containers that they test by dropping on a spike and putting in a furnace. Wild to watch.
Redd.. err Lemmy believes in the doctrine of safe, clean, wasteless nuclear. Even if there was waste it is completely harmless, not a big deal, please look the other way. They can be no other ~~God~~.. I mean viable alternative for generating energy. Also, did you know ~~this straw man~~ .. I mean coal spreads nuclear isotopes too?
Please research the term nuclear flask
So basically the reason Germans got rid of nuclear energy is that they don't trust Germans to do it. Makes sense.
Could buy expert assistance in nuclear energy from Russia instead of gas (partially laundered via Azerbaijan, as if that were better than Russia). Or from France. Or from USA.
I mean, Russia is better than them due to the culture of kickbacks and bribes. That makes deals more likely to happen and makes German politicians happy.
It's worth noting that even counting in all the damage from Fukushima and Chernobyl and all the issues with storing nuclear waste long term (which isn't nearly as hard as people make it out to be), Nuclear is still as safe as wind and solar energy.
Now follow the link and look at the numbers for the (mostly brown) coal that replaced it (much of who's damage is caused by the nuclear materials in it's ash), and the picture is pretty damn clear. Coal kills at 1000 times the rate of nuclear.
Careful. You are waking all the people telling you that it isn't much waste that those power plants produce and its so easy to store it long term.
The same people that likely would oppose a storage like that in their own neighbourhood. I feel often people from outside Germany forget how densely populated it is, it is very hard to find area not somehow close to anyone.
And I would also never trust the promise that this storage next to my home is very definitely going to be so so safe an great.
I will happily sell the land under my house to let you store sealed vessels of nuclear material. There permanently. I can do that with 100% confidence because I understand the science involved in the matters. If it's buried deep enough in a proper container, there is no risk.
If it's so simple, why did a highly developed nation find no solution for it over the course of decades? There are no perfect containers that don't leak, there is no perfect storage location that doesn't have a chance of contaminating groundwater. The real world doesn't work like that.
It's not considered worth undertaking such an initiative when most nuclear power plants have no problem just leaving the heavy (solid concrete and steel) casks as they are. They are not some looming threat, and they just sit there, outside, taking up a pretty small amount of space on the plants' property. Nothing else is done because there is no real incentive to move them; no one cares.
Just sitting outside, exposed to the elements, changing temperatures and humidity? What a brilliant idea.
There's a reason we aren't doing this.
I mean, the containers are steel filled with concrete. We also leave our bridges and buildings outside, exposed to the elements.
The place in the world you are most likely to know the exact amount of radiation you are receiving at any moment is probably at a nuclear power plant. Its not like they just abandon them and never check on them or anything. They sit out in the open just... chillin. Being generally monitored but mostly just.... chillin.
Thankfully we have this miracle invention called paint . You can hit one of these things with a train and you'll kill the train. The flask will be fine. https://youtu.be/1mHtOW-OBO4?si=_VEjko6YDyKfnz31
We do do this all the time. This is currently the solution. We put it in giant flasks and store it on site because ninnies like you won't let us bury it
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/1mHtOW-OBO4?si=_VEjko6YDyKfnz31
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good for you. Once you actually do that, report back how its going. Its easy to post a statement like that in an anonymous online forum.
Mind your language. I can likewise say you only responded to "gotcha" me yourself.
That said, in this case I definitely feel a "put your money where your mouth is" is very much warranted. Because I have not heard of anyone anywhere doing exactly what you are offering. But I knew posting my opinion on this is going to end me up talking about this topic, so that's all I got to say to you.
Good luck getting your personal radioactive waste storage, would earn you a pretty penny. Best of luck to you!
Those people compare the waste from nuclear and the storage compared to the waste of coal and that storage (which is in the local area and global atmosphere).
Compare the waste amount per GWh produced how the waste is stored and you will see why some thinks nuclear is better than coal
fuck that shit man I'll drink the stuff, gimme the static shock superpowers