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The view I share with a majority of Germans: Costs of nuclear energy are very much a burden that future generations will have to carry. A hundered thousand year

• kensai 5y ago
  There are so many solutions for the safe storage problem and very little research. I believe if we think out of the box, the problem will be solved relatively easily and effectively. Just bury them to hell: https://www.deepisolation.com/ https://www.deepisolation.com/
• silexia 5y ago
  Oil and gas plants are far worse. They kill tens of thousands TODAY and produce long lasting poisonous waste that affects everyone now. Nuclear waste is easy to store and not voluminous compared to oil and gas waste. The US for example designated a waste mountain in Nevada that could store all of our waste but is not using it yet due to politics. Nuclear is FAR safer than oil and gas and even the worst tragedies like Chernobyl or 3 Mile Island did a tiny fraction of the damage oil and gas to every year.
• izacus 5y ago
  The Germans have switched from nuclear to coal. Can you cut this "future generations are going to have to carry the cost" when the alternative is literally helping destroy the whole planet's ecosystems? Not to mention they spew up significantly more radioactivity in the air than nuclear powerplants. A 30x30m pool of radioactive fuel is nothing compared to what their powerplants are doing to the future of young generations. Is cancer caused by coal particulates really something you wish on people around you?
  • aagd 5y ago
    In Germany renewables are at over 42% in 2021, despite a 'conservative' government that for decades has blocked the development of windfarms and solar for the benefit of the coal and nuclear lobby. That kind of lobby-work is the actual problem here. The way forward is renewable energy. The huge difference is that the source of renewable energy is free and basically limitless.
    • himinlomax 5y ago
      You don't get points for using Nice Green power, you get points for not releasing more CO2 in the atmosphere. Right now, France's electricity is at 30g CO2 per kW.h (the figure includes the whole lifexyle), while Germany's is at over 400g. Sure, we have to deal with the waste ourselves, but you're just dumping yours in everyone's air.
    • tarsinge 5y ago
      And despite 42% of renewables Germany CO2 emissions have increased in the last years, and Germany will obviously miss its 2030 target (which is already not enough). Just look at electricitymap.org to see how that strategy is going. Also nuclear is kind of renewable too so that distinction is not really relevant regarding climate. That view needs to be updated with 2021 reality, we need a baseline production that always work, and choosing fossile for that like Germany (Coal, Gas) is irrational (nuclear issues pale in comparison of climate change for future generations).
    • earthnail 5y ago
      The problem is that only a fraction of power consumption is electric. The rest is burning fossil fuels. In order to get away from these, we have to increase electricity production significantly. And we have to build a better electricity grid. It is completely unclear how renewable energy should provide this in the short or medium term (i.e. until 2050). Without nuclear, we’ll just continue burning fossil fuels.
      • WhompingWindows 5y ago
        Renewables paired with batteries can improve grid resilience, actually. Distribution of generators means less loss in the wires travelling, batteries paired with renewables to provide overnight power and load-smoothing, these are good things. Renewables also are very predictable, so you can use a little natural gas to supplement at night while you build out batteries and more wind. Solar will take care of our day-time needs no problem, it's the overnight stretches and the wind-less winters where nuclear would really shine.
• UncleOxidant 5y ago
  Aren't there newer nuclear technologies that use alternative fissionable materials that have much shorter half-lives?
  • loeg 5y ago
    To risk oversimplifying: the really harmful stuff has very short half-lives, and the stuff with long half-lives isn't especially harmful.
  • eecc 5y ago
    If you’re referring to Thorium and pebble bed, they’re both not proliferation safe and have their issues with ecological confinement of highly active waste. So unfortunately they never managed to overcome the initial “should we even seriously try it” cost/benefit analysis
    • andbberger 5y ago
      is the oil lobby performing the cost benefit analysis. because...
• asdff 5y ago
  The costs of the status quo are also beared upon by us and future generations. Instead of the waste product being contained in a controlled environment, it is dispersed into the atmosphere and breathed in by millions of Germans, where it will continue to warm the world for future generations to attempt to right our wrongs before its too late. Even if emissions stopped globally today, temperatures would continue to rise due to greenhouse effect just from what is already present in the atmosphere. I fear for a world where climate change advances faster than our ability to adapt our foodstocks to it, that world is not as far away as you might think, especially with the left's resistance toward species saving technologies such as nuclear power and genetically modified organisms.
• ars 5y ago
  > A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price. It's completely unnecessary to do that. So many people have this misconception. If you combine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor you burn up everything, leaving very little waste.
  • xg15 5y ago
    From your very own linked Wikipedia page: > In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries".
    • ars 5y ago
      Like many energy things, this is a money question, not a technology question. (There are functioning breeder reactors today, but they cost more.) If it was important enough we could do it. The government could also mandate it, and we could feed them all the existing nuclear waste.
  • freemint 5y ago
    But radiated concrete from the reactor housing doesn't burn that well.
• wazoox 5y ago
  Nuclear energy kills about zero person per annum. Coal itself kills at least 50000 Europeans every year. Even taking into account the worst case scenarios such as Chernobyl, coal (and fossil fuels generally) is several orders of magnitudes more dangerous than nuclear. I just don't get this mindset. People prefer killing literaly millions of persons right now while there's a safer alternative. That's incredible, really.
  • suetoniusp 5y ago
    There is a safer alternative in the short term. The two are comparable in the long term for safety. Also "Coal itself kills at least 50000 Europeans every year." is far from a truth. Coal may have increased the chance of death by some amount for at least 50000 Europeans every year is more correct.
    • wazoox 5y ago
      In fact recent estimations are much worse: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-pollution-responsible-for-1-in-5-deaths-worldwide/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p...
    • titzer 5y ago
      I believe that statistic. Air pollution is a killer. That causality chain is more indirect and longer than dying of acute radiation poisoning, but that radioactive coal fly ash is a stochastic killer; roll 400 million dice (the population of Europe) and just bias them a tiny bit (.01%), and a number like 40,000 easily pops out.
• znd 5y ago
  The marginal cost of storing a few years worth of spent nuclear fuel doesn't seem that high, as you have to find a place to store the waste already generated anyway. I for one would accept other countries spent fuel to be stored in Finnish bedrock. Might be hard politically, though.
• titzer 5y ago
  A typical large nuclear plant will produce 3 cubic meters of solid waste in a year. That's a little bigger than a refrigerator. A lot of solid waste can be reprocessed, though doing so requires regulatory and logistical challenges to be solved that apparently only France has figured out. Nuclear waste, comparatively, is not the problem. The risk of accidents, proliferation, and the generally higher cost of engineering are. Every energy technology produces waste, too. As others have mentioned, coal-fired plants produce literally thousands of times the radiation of a nuclear plant, blasting that right into the atmosphere in the form of radioactive fly ash, as well as huge amounts of CO2 and particulates. The production of solar panels is not waste free. Nothing is waste free. The nuclear waste argument is a distraction. Nuclear power, of all the options, all things considered, leaves the smallest scar on the planet of all the options available to us. Solar panels, wind, hydro, they all require land use changes that are a big impact on the planet. Uranium mining is comparatively small in terms of its impact. So IMHO nuclear is the best option.
  • drran 5y ago
    Do you include atomic station itself after EOL into your calculation?
    • titzer 5y ago
      I think we should, and yes, it's a lot to be sure. This is why I think small modular reactors offer some hope for a smaller footprint future. We should do calculations that include all parts of the production pipeline for parts--factories, mines for raw materials, the trucks, the fuel, all of it, as well as the opportunity cost of not using that infrastructure for something else.
• Ensorceled 5y ago
  This is a like a preposterous version of the trolley problem ... "The trolley can continue down the nuclear track and maybe, perhaps, kill people far into the future or you can switch to the coal track and continue to kill thousands now and maybe destroy the planet" And people are choosing to switch.
• Ericson2314 5y ago
  The background issue is that Germans, with their harmful surpluses, all this talk about costs, seem to completely misunderstand economics. ---- I get that the Cold War hurt a lot in Germany. I've met my distant relatives stuck on both sides of the iron curtain, for example. That would have made issues of proliferation and whatnot extra salient. But the fact of the matter is that the environmental problems we face now completely dwarf whatever environmental problems were being chased after then. You have to realized that when you thought you were fighting the end-game boss, but you were actually fighting the mid-game boss which is the minion and now the big boss has shown up, everything changes. ----- Please connect those necessary readjustments to thinking more critically about economics and whole-system things in general, to connect my two points, and we'll all be very happy.
• michilehr 5y ago
  Totally agree. "Der Graslutscher" has written 6 parts about "Energy transition in 10 years". Sorry it is in german but it is worth reading. https://graslutscher.de/how-to-energiewende-in-10-jahren-teil-1-wo-soll-denn-die-ganze-energie-herkommen/ https://graslutscher.de/how-to-energiewende-in-10-jahren-tei...
• rib3ye 5y ago
  The "hundred thousand years" argument is one I hear a lot, but why do we all assume 1. our civilization will last more than 1,000 years. 2. there will be no new tech to address the issue in the future? The estimated time until catastrophic climate change are MUCH sooner than that.
• gjhh244 5y ago
  Nuclear is problematic, but it should not be phased out as long as there's fossil fuel used in energy generation. All efforts should go into replacing fossil fuels for now.
• 627467 5y ago
  So, 100 thousand years is not long enough to find a use of disposing nuclear waste but it is enough to try to terraform earth to undo the changes enacted from NOT using nuclear?
• louissm_it 5y ago
  I’m sorry but no. The future costs of nuclear are comparatively irrelevant if you consider the immediate doom our climate and thousands and thousands of species are facing because of burning fossil. If a 100 nuclear disasters happen in the next 5 years it will still do less damage than coal. There is simply no more time, the only option is to stop burning at any and all costs.
• janmalec 5y ago
  The view is based on some false assumptions. Nuclear reactor fuel can be efficiently recycled. Besides, the reason why storage of nuclear fuel is expencive is because nuclear industry actualy takes care of biproducts of operation, unlike other industries that produce equally or more dangerous chemical waste. It is also not true that a system failure would "devastate huge territores". No PWR accident had major consequences on human health, even in Fukushima there were no fatalities from radiation. Statistically nuclear power is the safest form of electricity. The largest storage battery (Australia) can replace a NPP for about 10 seconds. In winter you might have no sun and wind for weeks. This is why you are, and will continue burning fossil fuels in Germany.
• deleted 5y ago
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• beeboop 5y ago
  How is something so entirely wrong the top comment on this? Waste storage is not even close to a problem for nuclear and even having the option to store the extremely minimal waste is basically a miracle compared to the disaster that is coal, which stores the waste literally everywhere, including the air we breathe
• Valakas_ 5y ago
  Storing nuclear waste for millennia? How long ago was the first nuclear reactor activated? Do you really think in one thousand (!) years we will be using 2020's technology? In a thousand years nothing we see today will be even vaguely familiar.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  The only advantage is the reduced CO2 emission, economically nuclear energy isn't viable. Sure, safety regulations play a huge part here, but they aren't optional. Every form of energy production has disadvantages, but I cannot really say that ending nuclear was a mistake if it isn't just exchanged for coal and I don't believe this is the case. Maybe we could have opted to let remaining plants run for longer, but Germany actually never had that many of them anyway. Uranium isn't available anywhere and some say it may deplete at some point. I think this problem is not in focus because nuclear is still a small part of overall energy production. But it could very well be a problem, especially if countries increase nuclear. edit: A bit disappointed in Theo Sommer here. I think he got swept up by wrong information about costs and benefits here. Otherwise a great writer. edit 2: They just argue to keep plants running, that might be a sensible decision, depends on the numbers.
• rb2k_ 5y ago
  > A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price People always mention that as an argument. I'm pretty sure that we could figure out a solution if we actually worked on it. Given how far we've come over the last 100 years, I don't see this as a problem that we couldn't solve over the next 100 years.