I’m all for use of nuclear energy, and mining uranium from seawater, however, there are externalities that need to be addressed, at least in the USA, there are serious issues with on-site storage in pools, with no plans on what to do with the waste. This is a serious issue that needs considered.
I’m personally a fan of investing in thorium which is cheaper and safer. Thorium reactors also happen to use molten salt for cooling meaning that you don’t need to build them next to large bodies of water. The only reason uranium is used traditionally is because it doubles up as weapon material.
Yes, that’s a great point. 100% pro thorium. China is leading commercialization of thorium reactors. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/thorium-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-china
I’m really excited about this tech too.
Meanwhile fly ash from coal is MORE radioactive than being near a nuclear plant.
Yeah but the aura coming from the nuclear reactor might turn everyone in the vicinity into tankies. Bet you didn’t think about that
that’s right, what Germans really fear is that GDR will make a comeback.
Idk why they’re worried though, seems like a great time to me
sure better than the shit show that’s currently unfolding in Germany if you ask me
Meanwhile Fukushima still uninhabitable and currently as we speak dumping tritium into the ocean
Sure but fossil fuels about to make the whole planet uninhabitable… And massive oil spills in the ocean are much too common
But solar and wind don’t. Why must we use nuclear. We could weatherproof houses and paint rooftops white. There are a million solutions that don’t require me to get radiation poisoned
Because not all places are sunny or windy, and solar requires copious amounts of lithium which needs to be extracted from the earth, which has its own consequences. That said, Japan should look into developing their ability to harness the kinetic energy from tidal forces. It’s wise to diversify the power grid.
You’re not going to get radiation poisoning from a nuclear plant, unless you’re planning to personally planning to break in and turn off all the safeties to cause another Chernobyl (also there are more safeties now, since, y’know…). You don’t have concerns about nuclear, you have baseless fears. With current battery technology we can’t fulfill energy demands just off solar and wind, so it’s coal or nuclear. As much as it does have legitimate downsides, you are at about as much risk from radiation as you are from a windmill falling on you.
Love how I’m getting downvoted for promoting solar and wind lol
Hexbear doesn’t have downvotes, so there’s no point complaining to me about it, but you’re not being downvoted for promoting solar and wind, you’re being downvoted for fear mongering over nuclear. We all want more solar and wind, and hydroelectric and all the other renewable energy sources, but we don’t have the technology to run the world on them yet. Until we do, we have to use nonrenewables, and nuclear is by far the least damaging of the nonrenewables we have access to. The naturally occuring radioactive isotopes in coal result in coal plants release more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear plants, so screeching about how nuclear energy is going to give you radiation poisoning and we should just use renewables shows you to be deeply ignorant about both.
These things are certainly going to be part of the solution. We want multiple sources of power and we want to improve the efficiency of our energy usage. But we are still going to need ways of generating power when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. And here nuclear is one of the safest options.
dumping tritium into the ocean
Despite what Chinese propaganda keeps saying, it’s very safe amounts. Less than just safe… negligible. The IAEA has been monitoring levels in the area and tritium levels haven’t even gone up detectably. Tritium also has a fairly short half-life of 12.5 years.
But after that half life it turns into checks notes
Helium! How scandalous!
Try ingesting it. Literally 4 members my family died from cancer and there are correlated numbers
Imagine thinking a negligible amount of helium in the ocean would cause catastrophic health concerns.
I am sorry for your loss, but just because cancer cause their death, doesn’t mean that radioactivity caused the cancer
Piss decomposes into harmless elements in much less time but I’m still gonna be mad at the guy openly pissing in the pool.
the fish are gonna talk in a squeaky voice
Ahh yes, because being concerned that the idiots who keep leaking radioactive water into the environment might be less than competent is muh CPC propaganda.
You can be pro-nuclear power while still criticizing the company that keeps mishandling nuclear power.
Why do I have to be pro nuclear
Because it is one of the absolute least environmentally harmful sources of energy available to us, because base load isn’t going away and by using nuclear energy we stop polluting fossil fuel plats, and hydro power that ruins eco systems in rivers.
You don’t.
I’m generally pro China but this whole spat is little more than a premise for protectionism of China’s fishing industry. If they really cared about tritium they would do something about their own runoff which far outweighs Japan’s.
Many Fukuahima residents and the Japanese national fishermen’s association opposing the release of contamination of contaminated water isn’t based on Chinese protectionism. English language news media has painted this as a China vs Japan issue when in fact many people inside Japan also oppose the release of contaminated water into the ocean. Especially since the plan was rushed through from announcement to implementation on the span of about a week, specifically so that domestic opposition couldn’t mount until it was already too late.
Even when you consider that disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are going to happen once in a while, nuclear power still causes less death and disease per megawatt than coal does. And unlike coal that you really can’t make less lethal unless a wizard comes and conjures large-scale carbon capture into existence, nuclear power is still developing and becoming safer and less lethal.
They get many tsunamis in Germany?
The ocean water off Fukushima of sufficient concentration to be a health risk?
Lol
That’s because Tsunamis are the only risk to a nuclear reactor? I’m sure you have the capacity to think of other hazards as well.
Oh I thought we were bluntly applying everything to Fukushima, as the person I replied to did
Fukashima is not uninhabitable, neither is Chernobyl/Pripyat, you won’t just die from entering the area without any protection.
Very few health issues have been detected as a cause of the Fukashima nuclear disaster:
It is the fear of radiation that makes us call it uninhabitable, this is an older documentary, but it is still valid and is still important:
and then their radioactive dust ends up in france, the german truly are ruthless against my country
The dominant wind in Europe is very very clearly west to east. Few german dust lands in France.
Francia Orientalis vs Francia Occidentalis for a thousand years
This is what happens when planning beyond the next financial reporting period is verboten and there are political points to be scored in the theatre of liberal “democracy”.
Meanwhile Germany has more than twice the renewables than the US (and still more than their renewables and nuclear combined), and is set to quit coal entirely by 2038. Still too slow, but how about instead of shilling the dangerous¹ technology that is nuclear, you start pointing fingers at those doing next to nothing to change for the better?
¹ not necessarily during regular operations to regular people. But since Germany doesn’t have uranium it would introduce foreign dependencies, nuclear power plants are high value targets both for terrorism and state warfare, as seen in Ukraine. There is no safe way to store nuclear waste long-term. Mining of uranium is furthermore massively harmful to workers and the environment.
The UK hit zero coal in 2020 without even trying. 2038 is actually a piss take. If you used nuclear like France and China you would be able to do it much sooner lol.
Oh, it’s bullshit, don’t get me wrong. But nuclear is not changing that, the UK has less than 10% as well.
Besides, nuclear power station take a minimum of 20 years to construct, so even if we reversed course, we wouldn’t have them running until the 40s. Contrast that with less than 5 for most renewables. Nuclear is also really expensive, so we could instead invest the money into a better and more flexible grid.
Nuclear is not the answer to climate change. Let existing plants run until coal is gone, then shut them off in favor of renewables.
But nuclear is not changing that, the UK has less than 10% as well.
What are you lying for? It’s around 16% as of 2020. They are building more as well
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
I was using the live data from today, no need to accuse me of lying. It has risen from 9.7% to 12.2% in the meantime, however: https://grid.iamkate.com/
You could have scrolled down and hit the year tab to get a more representative number, which is around 14%. Taking the daily value doesn’t make much sense now does it?
If that’s the level of pedantry you want to argue about, sure. It doesn’t change the fact that nuclear isn’t the backbone of the UK grid, and that it is not feasible to bring it back in Germany, and that it never was and likely never will be economically competitive, especially not with renewables getting cheaper every year.
That is to say nothing about security risks, political dependencies and environmental impacts.
Everything we do is harmful. Using more coal is even worse. The very dirty coal that Germany is using worse worse. Depending on the method of mining coal, it is massively harmful to the workers. I don’t think the method Germany is using is as bad as say the method the Appalachian miners used.
That’s why Germany wants to phase out coal next after nuclear energy production has been phased out in 2023. In 2038 coal is planned to be completed passed out and be replaced by climate neutral energy consisting of renewables and green hydrogen gas power plants until 2045.
BTW mining uranium is in no way better than mining coal: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-health-and-environmental-impacts-mining-and-enriching-uranium
I understand that it’s supposed to be a shitty comic and not a balanced, reasonable take, but if you’d like to hear a German perspective anyways:
I’m not aware of any official representative lobbying other countries to end nuclear, except of course in nations that build their totally safe reactors near our border. I’m also not aware of us being awarded or recognized for our stance. Individual Germans, like me, will of course have been fed different propaganda than you and will argue accordingly.
No one here likes the coal generators. And with how much cheaper solar is these days, they’re definitely on the way out. But we don’t have a dictatorship anymore, luckily, so even obviously good paths will face pushback, like from entire regions whose jobs are in the coal industry.
We’ve just been able to get a consensus on abolishing nuclear much more quickly for multiple reasons:- Chernobyl directly affected us, including the people running our country. Russia also attacked nuclear reactors in the Ukraine, which certainly reminded people of Chernobyl.
- At the start of the Ukraine war, it was unclear whether Russia might also launch attacks on us, including our nuclear reactors.
- Russia also cut off our natural gas supply. We have practically no own Uranium deposits either, so reducing dependence on foreign nations was definitely in our interest, too.
Just a couple of sidenotes
At the start of the Ukraine war, it was unclear whether Russia might also launch attacks on us, including our nuclear reactors.
RU attacking Germany is as unlikely as RU shelling London, NY, or Tokyo
Russia also attacked nuclear reactors in the Ukraine, which certainly reminded people of Chernobyl.
I think the news was that someone shelled Zaporizhzhia “Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for shelling the Russian-controlled plant.” Now, I’m not Hercule Poirot, but if RU controlled the plant at the time, wouldn’t that make UKR the most likely culprit?
Russia also cut off our natural gas supply.
Surely Russia turning a tap is less pertinent than USA literally bombing the pipeline?
We have practically no own Uranium deposits either,
So where are you buying from the rest of your resources? Surely nuclear is more feasible than coal from a purely geopolitical/economic point of view? I guess good luck with the solar panels.
You seem to be a bit confused about the situation.
It’s a bit more likely. Eastern part of Germany was USSR back in the days. Germans share common fears with Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, … for good reason. They’ve had this happen before.
A decentralised network with many different production sites for solar, wind, water etc is in many ways less vulnerable than a network with fewer very centralised production facilities.
The goal is moving away from coal and nuclear, clearly, it’s just taking too long. EU will start importing massive amounts of hydrogen overseas the next few decades, possibly also funding the green pduction itself in southern countries.
The only real german stupidity was investing in and relying on nordstream 2, because that was after Russia pulled the crimea and donbas.
Russia also cut off our natural gas supply.
I think you mean America cut off your natural gas supply when they blew up the Nordstream
No, Russia had already stopped delivering natural gas at the end of August 2022. The pipelines got blown up on the 26th September 2022.
Yeah… Suppliers tend to do that when you stop paying them.
That’s not the case though. Russia stopped supplying gas to 5 countries in May because those countries refused to pay in rubles.
The stop of supplying gas to Germany at the end of August/start of September was not at all related to that.
No one here likes the coal generators. […]so even obviously good paths will face pushback, like from entire regions whose jobs are in the coal industry.
This in itself is contradictory but even despite that, there’s 20.000 people left with jobs in the coal industry. You could give everyone over like the age of 50 their pension as if they worked till the regular pension age and then re-train everybody else with very generous benefits for the interrim time of like 5 years and it would be orders of magnitude cheaper than keeping that system rolling.
Well, if you’ve got a plan worked out for that, maybe you’d like to present it to our government. That sounds like something they would love to know about.
So immediately snippy.
Yeah, this whole comment section annoys me. So many people who don’t get that likely all of us have been fed propaganda. And even if you believe that you’re the one person who knows only the truth, then still the absolute worst thing you can do, is to ridicule others who’ve been told a different story.
The only winning strategy is to share what you’ve been told and listen to what the others have been told. That’s what my initial comment tried to start off. And like, I agree that the guy’s comment wasn’t even bad, but it was just immediately back to “Here’s the absolute facts!”. Like, what the hell am I even supposed to do with that comment? There is no reason provided why I should believe it, so honestly, they could have just not written it.
Well we at Hexbear like to assume, rightly or wrongly, that shame is the best to convince some sorts of people to rethink. People have wasted much energy trying to nicely convince these types when it turned out they were entirely unwilling to consider that they are misinformed. Your comments have mirrored how those look with a very reddit-like demeanor. If you’re sincere, consider commenting as if you’re not on reddit and looking to figure out what’s true and people will engage happily. I’ve learned a lot by doing that.
Remember, the US have spent tens of times more money on propaganda around the world than any other country (remember, US propaganda is different in form than e.g. USSR, but mostly because their way is MORE effective). Europe+the US has spent more in 40 years than the rest of the world ever. Imagine the impact this has on your worldview before reading any news or positions taken in politics around the world.
I personally ridicule people on the Internet because it’s funny. I don’t think I’m going to change any minds and I don’t care. I do stuff in real life when I want to change people’s minds. I go online for catharsis.
Plan’s right there mate. Early retirement at 0 loss after an age cutoff, 5 year former wages for the rest, have some of the boffins at the Wirtschaftsministerium calculate where the cut-off makes sense economically, done. Fuck just reuse the plans from when you dismantled any given organisation in the 90s - 2000s, I’m sure they’re still around, could be used for good for ones. This is not a hard thing to do, logistically.
It’s not cheaper for corrupt politicians who receive bribes from the coal industry, however
What does Chernobyl have to do with Germany deciding to appease a few billionaires and burn more coal?
I’m not aware of those billionaires caring whether they get paid to burn coal or paid to build solar farms.
Well they own and are currently profiting from coal mines, they don’t own solar farm construction companies.
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Foreign dependance is just false. In own country produced coal is clearly less foreign dependant than importing uranium.
All your other points are up for debate and by far not as black and white or right and wrong as you seem to believe.
We are yet to see these fancy schmancy super reactors online in Europe. Just about every new nuclear construction site in Europe in the past 15 years has become nothing short of a financial bottomless pit.
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British new reactors are by now more then a decade overdue and budget is spiralling out of control massively. So massively it’s causing the need for diplomacy between France (EDF) and Britain to get involved.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cost-edfs-new-uk-nuclear-project-soars-40-bln-2023-02-20/
Same tendencies are in all European countries that tried nuclear project recently: way over budget and massive delays. Only France is somewhat better exception. Belarus is a dictatorship, if they say reactor go, reactor go. This is exactly what is meant with some fears surrounding nuclear energy. Chernobyl was real. It’s not a coincidence it happened in the USSR.
If I say ALL other points you made are not so black and white, I do not have the obligation to specify nor to elaborate. Things are rarely binary good vs evil in this world. Every energy source has advantages and disadvantages. Pro-nuclear voices are often blind for the risks, they are very tiny in possibility and very large in potential consequences at the same time.
Thorium, smr etc is still a pipedream at this point.
It is a valid strategy for a country to invest into proven technology like better insulating homes, optimising network, supporting more wind and solar and combining it with importing foreign hydrogen. This choice does not make Germany or other European countries retarded as is often portrayed. The mistakes are make in the timing, and in the reliance on 1 single foreign supplier (Russian gas), not in the fundamental choice itself to move away from nuclear. The move away from nuclear was very widely supported in German democracy. And it is valid to say this was an environmental choice: no, we don’t know what to do with the small fraction of very long lasting waste in the long term, a fact still ignored all the time by the pro-nuclear voice.
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I’ve heard that Germany today has problems with expertise to operate nuclear sites. Not sure how much of a problem that would be, though.
At the start of the Ukraine war, it was unclear whether Russia might also launch attacks on us, including our nuclear reactors.
Russia hasn’t attacked any nuclear reactors in Ukraine for obvious reasons. The notions that Russia would attack nuclear reactors in Germany is pure absurdity that no sane person could believe.
Russia also cut off our natural gas supply. We have practically no own Uranium deposits either, so reducing dependence on foreign nations was definitely in our interest, too.
That’s a straight up lie. Russia never cut off gas supply to Germany, and in fact has repeatedly stated that one of Nord Stream pipelines is operational. German government is choosing to buy Russian LNG through third parties instead of buying pipeline gas directly.
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Russia stopped delivering gas to 5 european countries in May 2022 because those countries refused to pay in rubels.
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Then they announced in June 2022 that they would only deliver half of the agreed-upon volumes to Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia and Italy.
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In September 2022 Russia stopped gas transfers via Nord Stream 1 completely, “because of technical difficulties”.
Those are facts. Russia stopped these gas transfers. No one else.
Russia stopped transfers because Europe refused to pay in a currency Russia could use. Funny how you forgot to mention that the west froze Russian foreign assets there.
Now, Europe is still buying Russian gas, but via resellers while lying to the public.
Those are the actual facts.
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Well, I don’t know what to tell you. These things have been broadly reported here in Germany. Whom of us was mislead, doesn’t matter for explaining why us Germans have a different stance on things.
Here’s two random articles, but I can send a whole list of links, if your search engine isn’t turning up anything:
Ah yes, “Ukrainian officials say”, very credible source. Weird how IEA never found any evidence of Russia shelling ZNPP though. And yeah, once you stop paying for a product the delivery stops. That’s how business works.
The lobbyist groups involved are very PRO-nuclear, hence why there’s so many nuclear posts on literally every single social media platform.
“we should use nuclear because coal is bad” flawless logic
Yes, because nuclear is significantly cleaner, safer, and provides more power than any alternative.
I don’t think that it’s safe. I do think having sixteen intermediate storage facilities on the surface with high level nuclear waste is a massive security concern that we should address immediately. As long as we don’t have a long term solution in Germany, we should not produce more nuclear waste. That’s why it has been such a long running open question: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management
Nuclear is hundreds of times safer, cleaner, and more efficient than coal. Coal kills around 350 times more people per terawatt hour.
It’s making fun of Germany shutting down nuclear plants and then making up the difference with coal and other worse polluting options
Setting aside the usual discourse around STARTING to use a nuke plant: shutting one down to be replaced with coal or similar is objectively the bad environmental move
surly the solution is green energy sources and cutback on energy consumption and not nuclear.
Because
- it takes 10-20 years to build a nuclear powerplant, so it doesnt solve anything today.
- it cant be run profitable unless the taxpayer pays for the construction and the deconstruction and the disposal of the waste,
- it needs a huge amount of river water for cooling which is not safe for climate catastrophe, because the rivers dry up at least temporarily, e.g. france
Very glad that representatives from Exxon-Mobil could make it here to lemmy to let us know how bad nuclear power is.
I LOVE DEAD OCEANS I LOVE DEAD OCEANS
You get polluted water and ground with nuclear waste too. These barrels tend to leak
What barrels ? Nuclear waste is stored in massive concrete and steel cylinders and burried deep underground. It’s not the green goo inside barrels everyone seems to imagine
https://www.dw.com/en/radioactive-waste-leaking-at-german-storage-site-report/a-43399896
… there are hundreds of barrels of low-level nuclear waste at an interim storage facility in the town of Leese, in Lower Saxony, that have to be examined for leaks and possibly re-packed and resealed in new barrels.
Low-level nuclear waste is stuff like used golves.
It’s like saying “let’s close hospitals because they produce a lot pf hazardous waste” when in reality it is mostly used masks.
I’ll inform the state of Saxony that your backyard is avaible should they run out of space :-)
The fate of this planet is going to based entirely on the artificial sun being completed, isn’t it?
Yes that’s right. Your ability to succinctly summarize that down into a single sentence is incredible.
I understand and support the idea. Even though nuclear power can significantly reduce carbon emissions, it might put lives of millions at risk
It might out millions of lives at risk (extremely low risk) whereas we know that CO2 from burning coal is putting billions of lives at risk.
carbon emissions put lives of billions at risk
The cartoon is not really about building twice as many new nuclear power plants, but using and maintaining and upgrading the ones we already have.
You’re right too. That’s why it’s a difficult question. But putting lives of millions at the risk of immediate death to save billions’ long term health is ehh kinda bad too. It’s my personal opinion though
Your personal opinion is wrong, I’m sorry I am being so brash but I don’t know how else to say it. The fly ash from fossil fuel combustion contains radioactive material that’s spread over an enormous area when it’s burnt. The amount of radioactive exposure we receive everyday from burning fossil fuels is orders of magnitude more than all the nuclear accidents combined. As counter intuitive as it is, closing nuclear power plants exposes the general public to more radiation not less.
In my personal opinion, globally humanity should not be building very many new nuclear reactors. Admittedly there are certain applications that nuclear energy is the responsible choice. Renewable energy sources are the clear winner, safe, reliable. Closing the nuclear power plants we have will only accelerate climate change and in a roundabout way expose us to more radiation. I realize that nuclear energy is scary but the dangers we don’t immediately see from fossil fuels are worse.
It’s not a question of either coal or nuclear. We have to get rid of both and that is exactly what’s happening in Germany at the moment. 2023 was the end of nuclear power production. 2038 is scheduled to be the end of coal power production and 2045 is scheduled to be the year of climate neutrality. Germany is one of eleven countries to have made this a law.
I will not argue. My personal opinion is not worth more than yours and vice versa
It’s not a “personal opinion.” And your “opinion” is NOT of equal worth to factual information. You’re just trying to save face because you don’t like admitting when you’re wrong. Maybe find some factual information that backs up for perspective rather than just baselessly claim that nuclear reactors put “millions at risk of immediate death” and run away when you can’t back it up. All it takes is a quick google search to disprove how it puts “millions at risk of immediate death.”
https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-effects-of-nuclear-accidents.aspx
I have other things to do rather than “saving my face” on a random political forum. I commented using my own personal opinion and I didn’t ask for a discussion. Of course most of the people are going to disagree and they do have the right to do so. Also, everyone has their own moral beliefs and value of facts. Mine are just not common
You’re commenting on a political forum and you’re NOT looking for a discussion?
Look, if your personal opinion of the moon is that it’s a hologram, it’s definitely worth less than, say, Buzz Aldrin’s opinion of the moon being made of rock.
I don’t know who told you a personal opinion is worth exactly as much as someone else’s, but they were wrong.
Giving value to bad opinions like “Oh Trump won we gotta storm the capitol” or “Vaccines cause autism” or “Nuclear is worse than coal” and refusing to engage with all evidence of the contrary and just leaving the conversation by saying “Mine are just not common” is an extremely unhealthy way to be a part of society. I live in Australia and the bush fires are getting worse. There’s a noticeable cost of lives and livelihoods. You’re not saving millions of lives from a nuclear meltdown by tearing down nuclear plants. You’re putting millions of lives in danger from climate disasters by tearing down nuclear plants.
I hope you change for the better.
Happy cake day Hestia! Doing the good work in the posting trenches
No, their opinion is worth more than yours because it’s better supported by material facts
Makes sense
Reddit brain
putting lives of millions at the risk of immediate death
I’m not pro nuclear but this is a bit silly
People are really bad at calculating risk. Everyone will die from climate change. Some people might die from a radioactive leak.
Climate change is this nebulous thing that feels impersonal and a lot of people kind of don’t even really believe in so they think it’s an acceptable compromise.
It’s literally safer than wind
This is the list of the thirty worst accidents in civilian nuclear power plants. These have all been categorised as having caused substantial health damage. There is a definite risk in using nuclear energy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents
The above data include accidents. You are literally killing people by not going nuclear. Nuclear accidents are highly publicized but if (hypothetically) one person dies for every wind installation but they never make the news, it’s a death by a thousand cuts, and nuclear comes out ahead. That is hyperbolic but it’s emblematic of the situation, look at the fucking numbers. Nuclear is safer.
It’s not a choice either nuclear or coal power. We have to and we as a society decided to phase both of them out. Because of the concerns regarding nuclear energy production and the waste being produced, Germany opted for phasing out mucker power production in 2023 and aims to phase out coal power production in 2038 in order to get climate neutral by 2045 by using renewables energy in conjunction with green hydrogen power plants, of which forty are planned to be build in the foreseeable future.
Nuclear power production is not risk free, and there have been massive contamination of ground water in Germany in the old storage facility “Asse”. The situation in there is so horrific, that it has been decided to get all the nuclear waste out again and store it on the surface again.
I don’t think the effects of mistakes like these in handling nuclear waste are included in the before mentioned data. As are the possible horrific scenarios with high level nuclear waste stored on the surface.
“Massive contamination”, “horrific”, and yet the article points out most of the seepage is radiologically harmless. It is important to clear out the mine and it will be really expensive, I won’t deny that, but let’s not scaremonger and act like it’s Chernobyl 2. As well, let’s not pretend that new nuclear projects would suffer the same problems. A functioning country would see this mistake, regulate how waste can be stored, and that would be the end of it. As many other countries have done.
Let’s be clear: nuclear waste is a solved issue. We know how to store it safely, we know how to reprocess fuel to make it safe within hundreds instead of thousands of years. Whether or not we do that is an entirely political question.
Regarding the safety of surface level waste: https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU
And what then is the alternative? Wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine. Battery storage would be prohibitively expensive and the amount of lithium required to be mined to supply an entire country’s electricity storage needs would be horrendous for the environment. Hydroelectric storage is ecologically devastating to a scale the public is largely unaware of and geography-dependent.
I am very skeptical about green hydrogen because it is far too politically easy to sweep the source of your hydrogen under the rug under bureaucratic obfuscation and the most economically viable method to produce hydrogen is to use fossil fuels and emit CO2 in the process, making it not really green.
“Every day, 13,000 liters of water flow into the Asse II nuclear waste storage facility in Lower Saxony, which is in danger of collapsing”
“There are quite a few quantities. If you just think about it: these 102 tons of uranium, 87 tons of thorium, then these 28 kilograms of plutonium. And then we have a mix of many different chemotoxic agents and pesticides. We have about 500 kilograms of arsenic. And plutonium is not only radioactive, it is deadly even at the size of a grain of dust. You shouldn’t even think about what would happen if this shaft were to flood, that would still be possible. And the mountain really pushes upwards due to its pressure. Into the groundwater. That’s a catastrophe.”
“These are waters that have direct contact with the radioactive waste, they run through a storage chamber and there we obviously have different pollution than with this water, which we collect up here…”
“We have pictures from the chamber where we see, among other things, a yellow metal barrel that was squeezed between a concrete barrel and a chamber wall, meaning it was completely destroyed by the rock mechanical pressure. And we have also seen damaged lost concrete shields.”
Source: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/marodes-atommuelllager-die-wachsende-gefahr-von-asse-ii-100.html
There is no long term storage site for high level nuclear waste in Germany. So the issue of nuclear waste is clearly not solved.
Intermediate storage facilities for high level nuclear waste are a security concern:
https://www.bund.net/themen/atomkraft/atommuell/zwischenlager/
Google translation: https://www-bund-net.translate.goog/themen/atomkraft/atommuell/zwischenlager/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
As stated before the idea is to employ renewable energy to produce green hydrogen for use in gas power plants. If you have no more coal power plants which is the target for 2038, you can not use it for hydrogen production. Germany wants to be self sufficient with regard to energy production, so we will have no other way to produce the hydrogen.
You are right in being sceptical, but IMHO the strategy is viable and can be implemented. And producing zero nuclear waste and be climate neutral at the same time is something we will have to achieve in the near future.
That’s an american vision. Let’s see what you’d say if half of your relatives were victims of the Chernobyl
What does Chernobyl have to do with modern reactors. Not to mention that even Chernobyl was a result of a poorly thought out experiment as opposed to some inherent flaw in the reactor.
That’s objectively untrue. The RBMK reactor type as it was used in Chernobyl has a design flaw. It’s called the positive void effect:
This positive coefficient was another key aspect of the RBMK in reactor unit 4 of the Chernobyl power plant. In the events of the accident, the excess production of steam (meaning an increase of voids) caused the void coefficient to become unsafely large. When the power began to increase, even more steam was produced, which in turn led to an increase in power.[2] This led the reactor to produce over 100x its rated power output, causing extreme temperatures and pressures inside the core, and causing failure.
What caused the accident?
The positive void coefficient was directly responsible for the disaster: During low power operations the effect caused water vapour bubbles to be created in the reactor. Because of the lower density of the vapour the moderation of the reaction did no longer work and the reactor spiraled out of control. All the while there was no feedback to the control room about the increased reactivity, so the personal had no chance to assess the situation correctly. This lead to the uncontrolled chain reaction and the explosion of block 4.
After a while Nikolai Steinberg conducted an experiment in the other blocks of Chernobyl which showed that the positive void coefficient was causing the reactor to spiral out of control in low energy production scenarios.
Sources:
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28271/chernobyl-chapter-i-the-site-and-accident-sequence
There’s a really good documentary about that, but alas it’s in German: https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfinfo-doku/tschernobyl-die-katastrophe-paradies-100.html
Nikolai Steinberg also coauthored a book about the accident: https://www.perlego.com/book/3418623/chernobyl-past-present-and-future-pdf
To sum up, there was an experiment conducted that caused the disaster, as opposed to it being a result of normal operation of the reactor.
That’s right but Chernobyl wasn’t the only incident. There was one in Japan too…
Ah yes, I totally forgot about all those land tsunamis Germans have to worry about.
There are other hazards as unlikely as Tsunamis.
do tell
Those are global death rates not death rates in the United States.
The data include accidents. You might feel differently about wind if a loved one died doing a wind turbine installation. The logic goes both ways. I will reiterate: it’s literally safer than wind. Look at the fucking numbers and not your feelings.
Not just Germans btw. Danes are the same. Being anti-nuclear is considered a standard leftist view here and the fight against nuclear power was considere one of the 1980’s environmental movement’s greatest wins. Being pro-nuclear is coded as a right-wing message around here that you mostly have to trigger the left.
Same 9000 km (5600 mi) away, here in Taiwan. The left-leaning party here is also anti-nuclear.
In the UK the Green Party are dead against nuclear power. I have absolutely no idea what the problem with it is supposed to be but they don’t like it.
Being anti-nuclear is one of the most bizarre positions the western left has internalized.
I have that little suspicion that it was intentionally (efficiency) planted by USSR when it had connections to western leftists (all those “progressive youth summits” and so on), via emotional association with possible devastation of nuclear war etc.
Stop pretending that nuclear is squishy fat face spongebob meme.
Nuclear power is literally more expensive at this point than renewables. No, you can’t keep using the shitty, cracking, deadly waste producing nuclear plants of the past, not even the power companies want that, and building new ones takes over 10 years, not counting all the planning and beaurocracy you have to go through. And to become CO2 neutral after all the excavation, construction and mining necessary takes another decade. Nuclear power plants are MASSIVE engineering undertakings.
Meanwhile modern windmills can be mass-produced right now and take like 5 years depending on their placement to be both cost and CO2 neutral. After that it’s LITERALLY free energy for a good 30 years. And they become cheaper and bigger and more efficient every single year. And btw if you ever pull out an article or a calculation that is older than a year for any comparison, you are dealing with OLD data. They have become far more efficient and flexible in their placement and will likely continue to do so.
The anti-nuclear protests were completely right. Stop playing the people who wanted a safer world without nuclear waste and incidents against the modern climate movement.
TL;DR: Wheels on windmill go brrrr, nuclear power is not a short term solution and never has been.
Jesus Christ you’re so uneducated it’s ridiculous.
So you’ve got a point nuclear power is considerably more expensive than renewables but that was never the argument. It has always been more expensive than renewables, who possibly thought it wasn’t, that’s literally never not been the case, even 30 years ago.
The reason to use nuclear power is a base load. Renewables cannot generate the necessary level of energy demand in their entirety with the reliability that we need. It’s called base load Google it.
So you need something to provide constant reliable sources of energy, so you’ve got two options either we build a Dyson sphere and have solar panels all over it, or we have nuclear power stations. And I think you’ll agree that a dysons sphere might be a bit beyond us at this point.
If one thing is more expensive by some criteria guaranteeing something necessary and another thing cheaper by the same criteria not guaranteeing that, then the latter just doesn’t exist.
So nuclear energy is cheaper than alternatives for the same purpose.
Just like an active volcano may suddenly let out a lot of magma which is going to be quite warm, but one can’t just project as if that amount of heat is distributed over the average period between eruptions, while considering it for heating houses.
That’s clearly not true. Nuclear energy is quite expensive in comparison to other sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Of course I’m literally looking at the same graph and as far as I can tell nuclear energy is equivalent in price to gas.
Can you also see the trend of the two graphs for nuclear and gas?
Did you see how much cheaper renewables are?
And do you think the cost for the long term storage of nuclear waste is included in the calculation?
Statistics and even graphs in general are not applicable in the “look, I’m right and you are wrong” way.
First, that LCOE likely doesn’t account for what I described. Because when wind turbines production is down (no wind), you don’t buy from the same source 10x the same price, you buy from another source, and because grids are centralized and have tariff agreements etc complex to just mix this way. It’s a bit like working with Soviet stats on Soviet economy - stats for centralized systems should be mixed carefully with what is intended to evaluate market mechanisms.
Second, in any case your picture shows cost of nuclear growing significantly. This might be because, say, of quite a few big sites in construction which will return the expenses like 10-15 years later at best, a nuclear site is a long-term investment, which is fact. This might also be because of a few sites being shut down in Europe due to ignorant idiots.
Statistics and even graphs in general are not applicable in the “look, I’m right and you are wrong” way. I don’t think that’s right. Statistics are a very important tool in assessing the current situations anddrawing conclusion. Here’s an article about that: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5037948/
Here’s an article by dbresearch about the cost of energy production from different sources which IMHO clearly shows that nuclear power is already among the most cost intensive forms of energy production. And as I stated before it still completely neglects the cost of storing the nuclear waste for thousands of years to come. https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/Costs_of_electricity_generation%3A_System_costs_matt/RPS_EN_DOC_VIEW.calias?rwnode=PROD0000000000435629&ProdCollection=PROD0000000000528292
Can you cite a source or present research data to support your second point?
Please keep the discussion civil and cite sources instead of succumbing to personal attacks. Calling the opposition ignored idiots does in no way contribute to proving your points.
Pump water to height when it’s windy , let it down when it’s not. Load balanced. Not so hard eh?
Compare the cost of a new water reservoir and dam that can output the same as nuclear, with enough storage in the reservoir to store energy during renewable blackout periods.
More not bigger. This is economically viable in contrast to nuclear that only are making bank since they are funded by tax money. One of the reason he former is constructed. And there are no blackout periods. There is always production of renewable energy just more or less. Nuclear on the other hand goes down all the time.
A reservoir is only “economically viable” with government action. Nobody is going to be able to acquire all that land without using eminent domain to force people to sell.
Nuclear has one of the highest capacity factors. Meaning it actually goes down less than fossil fuels and especially renewables.
Sure that would work in theory but you would struggle to get any kind of capacity with that system, and of course reservoirs are actually quite damaging to the environment, since you have to flood large areas of land.
No, you can’t keep using the shitty, cracking,
They can be safely renovated, just informing you.
deadly waste producing nuclear plants of the past,
Don’t think people are stupid. That deadly waste naturally becomes less deadly over time. There are procedures for nuclear waste processing and burial sites and when those can be reused. The cycle takes many years, but that’d be the same with keeping forests, for example.
I don’t think that’s true. We will have to store our nuclear waste safely for geological timescales: possibly millions of years. Currently only two working reprocessing plants exist in France and Russia and they can be employed to produce weapons-grade plutonium. In France currently only 10% is recycled.
Ah, I’ve just mixed up things a bit. I was thinking of fast-neutron reactors. Waste from these is less cumbersome, and the existing waste can be partially reused with them.
But they still do produce radiactive waste, which has to be taken care of. Its true that the amount toxicity and long lived waste is reduced. But we still need to take care of the rest. And as there is no long-term storage facilty to safely deposit the waste, I do think the risk of storing nuclear waste on the surface is too high.
I’m no expert on this topic, but reading this, it also sounds like the currently running Fast-Neutron Reactors do not recycle their fuel at this point in time.
Fast-neutron reactors can potentially reduce the radiotoxicity of nuclear waste. Each commercial scale reactor would have an annual waste output of a little more than a ton of fission products, plus trace amounts of transuranics if the most highly radioactive components could be recycled.
And as there is no long-term storage facilty to safely deposit the waste,
Yes, we don’t have things until we purchase or make or in this case build them.
but reading this, it also sounds like the currently running Fast-Neutron Reactors do not recycle their fuel at this point in time.
I’m not an expert either, what I meant is that waste from dirtier kinds can partially be used as fuel for these, and I think I’ve heard they already do that.
After that it’s LITERALLY free energy for a good 30 years.
If you ignore the other environmental costs, you mean. Just like solar, which causes untold damages from the disposal of mining refuse, but that gets conveniently ignored by first world nations, because most of the mining doesn’t happen where you live.
The issue is battery storage. Our current battery technology is terrible both ecologically and in terms of what it does to the people mining it and living in those countries.
Nuclear and renewables are complementary technologies, renewables are a much more volatile source of energy. Also, when people say renewables are cheaper they’re not counting the total lifecycle of things like wndmills and solar panels.
Complimentary is irrelevant. Coal and solar are complimentary, you can have a grid using both of those technologies. Renewables aren’t really that volatile. Batteries exist.
Maybe spend more time educating yourself on the realities of the situation.
Maybe use arguments rather than succumb to ad hominem fallacies
Your username checks out
If reading wikipedia pages is the height your knowledge on the subject that explains a lot actually.
Yes coal and solar are complementary. But nuclear pollutes less than coal so it’s a better choice.
when people say renewables are cheaper they’re not counting the total lifecycle of things like… solar panels.
Yeah the LCOE of solar is likely ridiculously low because they still work decades after th started 25 year life used in levelised cost calculations
Nuclear in the west is so tremendously expensive we may as give up until China makes SMRs cheap
I mean China is already making all the solar panels at this point, so we might as well wait for them to role out nuclear globally.
Good news, the Chinese artificial sun has reached 403 seconds of stability. Up from 100 seconds 7 years ago. Once it reaches 1000 seconds at 50,000,000 Kelvin, it would mean it produces more energy than igniting the “sun” would cost.
I do think it’s very likely that we’ll see fusion working within our lifetimes. If China manages to get a fusion plant online then that really will solve all the energy problems for the foreseeable future.
Eh. Fission is in fact a terrible power source. Eternally deadly leftovers, critical failures have the potential to devastate whole regions of the planet for decades or more.
Mining and refining the fuel is similarly harmful to the environment as processing coal. It is also not much cheaper than to go for the actually best solution called renewables. Wind and solar are both reasonably cheap at this point, and for example China was recently in my news feed for building an insane amount of solar in the last year (something like more than the U.S. in the last 10 years combined).
Obviously this is the correct choice for the future, likely paired with fusion power, which when it eventually works, comes with all the advantages of nuclear fission and none of its drawbacks or dangers.
China is indeed a great example of what actual transition from fossil fuels looks like. China is building nuclear reactors faster than any other country right now because they realize that renewables like solar and wind are insufficient on their own.
Eternally deadly leftovers,
Somebody doesn’t know the bare basics of physics involved.
Im sure we can argue semantics here about reprocessing the stuff, eternal not actually being eternal and so forth, doesn’t really change much.
It does change everything, when people fear nuclear waste, they talk about literally eternal. Otherwise we could say that reforestation is not possible, because it takes 70 years (if you are not just growing wood for fuel, furniture and mulch, but restoring a system).
If it’s not literally eternal, then it’s a working cycle which can be used and be more efficient.
EDIT: I’ve realized that the thing I’m remembering was written about fast-neutron reactors, which most are not, so you are right usually. It’s actually funny that Russia makes more ecologically clean reactors than USA. Stupid, but funny.
It’s sadly perceived emotionally by many people as those enormous concrete things with death inside. While burning something is more normal.
Nuclear plants are uneconomical and produce nuclear trash we dont have the storage for. It was the best decision we could do shutting them down. Lemmy and reddit are so far into nuclear power propaganda they dont even see the actual mistake we made. It was not to shut down nuclear. It was stopping investing in our very successful solar tech.
produce nuclear trash
If by “trash” you mean “free energy”.
we dont have the storage for
Dig hole -> put stuff in hole -> cover hole -> wait a few years -> dig stuff out of hole and use in newer, more efficient reactors
in our very successful solar tech.
You mean the solar tech that requires rare earth minerals and causes untold damages in mining?
