German poll: Majority for return to nuclear energy
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There's a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover.
And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
Fukushima is a bit different
Yeah. And what's stopping other stuff to be "a bit different"?
And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.
Japan got damn lucky the wind blew everything seawards. If the fallout had hit Tokyo, this would have been a very different story.
replacing their energy output with coal
And who did that? Nobody. There were no new coal plants to replace anything. That statement is straight up misleading. The old plants were kept running, yes, and they kept emitting, yes. And that's always the thing that's being brought up, "they could have taken the coal plants offline sooner had they just kept the nuke plants running a little longer". But that's an entirely different thing than "they replaced nuclear with coal". Nobody did that. Had they not tanked the German market for renewables, the coal plants would have been taken offline earlier, too, but for some reason that's never the sob story. Instead, people keep bringing up nuke plants time and time again, which is just weird. Yeah, coal and nuclear both destroy the planet. Let's not see which one's marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that's actually good for the planet?
And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
Here's a list of one type of that kind of disasters where, despite of insurance, various kinds of environmental damage has been left behind which may or may not completely heal, or at least it takes a long, long time.
Here's a pretty public different kind of disaster which I guarantee was not 100% covered by insurance either. Here's another. I'm not building a comprehensive list, there's just too many and their impacts vary wildly.
Then there's the waste management in poorer countries which also cause immeasurable damage to the environment all the time by using a nearby river as a sewage for everything. Here's one example which made into the headlines back then. And here's a list of similar examples.
“they replaced nuclear with coal”
Go read yourself:
A 2020 study found that lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately €3 to €8 billion annually, mostly from the eleven hundred additional deaths associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.
And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it's also radioactive.
Let’s not see which one’s marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that’s actually good for the planet?
That would be really nice. We just don't have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet. Here in Finland, on a good day, renewables produce more than nuclear, but those are exceptions. Feel free to look up the data in finngrid service. There's currently over 7000MW worth of turbines around but it's pretty common to have even less than 200MW of wind power in the grid and that unreliability needs to be stabilized with something else.
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Power to gas, water pumps, heat storage and battery storage are viable alternatives. There are many days already where we over produce green energy. Why sink hundreds of billions into nuclear plants when we could use the energy we already produce instead?
Nuclear power is all but efficient.
You keep seeing these as "alternatives", despite the shortcomings.
I say they are complimentary, and as far as providing power to address these shortcomings, nuclear power is a good solution. How can you look at something that can single-handedly address all power requirements in some area, while providing supports to other, and say "nah", seriously.
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once you disregard polution
Including radioactive waste, which coal produces significantly more of than fission power.
Who cares when the commoners living next to the coal plant breathe radioactive dust? Its cheaper to run for the industrialists short term.
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You keep seeing these as "alternatives", despite the shortcomings.
I say they are complimentary, and as far as providing power to address these shortcomings, nuclear power is a good solution. How can you look at something that can single-handedly address all power requirements in some area, while providing supports to other, and say "nah", seriously.
I can say that because we neither have the time nor the money to sink it into nuclear plants. We have green tech. It's cheap, we're building capacity like crazy.
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What do you mean? The cost of an old nuclear reactors' MWh is 40-50€, that's really competitive.
And unlike solar and wind, it produces anytime. As a French person, not only do I think we were right to build them in the first place, I'm annoyed we stopped in the 2000s after the Chernobyl scare campaign, it's safer than Germany's coal, which also produces radioactive waste and isn't properly regulated, unlike nuclear.
Look at the desaster that is Flamanville 3, for instance.
The cour de comptes is pretty clear about it, too:
https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2025-01/20250114-La-filiere-EPR -une-dynamique-nouvelle-des-risques-persistants_0.pdfI agree that coal is important to phase out, even moreso than nuclear power. Germany was wrong to leave nuclear before coal.
But building new reactors is an utter waste of time and money. -
Look at the desaster that is Flamanville 3, for instance.
The cour de comptes is pretty clear about it, too:
https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2025-01/20250114-La-filiere-EPR -une-dynamique-nouvelle-des-risques-persistants_0.pdfI agree that coal is important to phase out, even moreso than nuclear power. Germany was wrong to leave nuclear before coal.
But building new reactors is an utter waste of time and money.I have two answers to give you.
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Flamanville is a new generation of reactor that we are testing out after regretfully stopping the large-scale production of reactors in France. Therefore the welding sector had been lacking work for 20 years, many retiring. The same issue goes for many other highly-specialized skills in the field. Americans had to be brought in to fill in for these positions, at high cost. So the left hadn't been corrupted by Russia into being against nuclear power in the first place, Flamanville would like gone about as well as developing a fundamentally different design can. I will grant you, however, that this isn't the design I would have liked to see deployed: France used to be developing the Phoénix and SuperPhénix fast neutron reactors until protesters made them stop. These kinds of reactors are cleaner, more fuel-efficient (by several orders of magnitude!), some variants can even consume previous nuclear waste, although I don't think these two French designs could. These would have been wonderful to have access to. Russia and China have already developed these designs, in large parts with our researchers when they lost their jobs, and we'll eventually just buy them from them again. Nice plan.
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What would you replace these with? Batteries? Once again? Coal? Renewables? How would you deal when, all over Europe, every winter, there are weeks on end with next to no wind nor sun? Should we create new mountain ranges and rivers to store more energy hydraulically? Shift demand? Nuclear is the worst system except for all the others.
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numbers prove that around the plants the number of kids with cancer did indeed exceed all expections.
Do you have a source on this? Not to be contrarian, I've just never heard this to be the case.
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from ukraine war we all learned nuclear ia stupid.
Isn't that what prompted this - Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons, and then everyone needing an energy source that isn't Putin?
"would you like a powerplant and final storage near you"?
Why would they put final storage near humans and not inside a mountain or something?
ask the dutch and the swiss who plan to out them next to the german border.
dutch dont have mountains to be fair. -
Not sure how much I'll get out of this, being that it's in German, but I appreciate the follow up!
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I can say that because we neither have the time nor the money to sink it into nuclear plants. We have green tech. It's cheap, we're building capacity like crazy.
And you're just gonna ignore all the shortcomings and hope they evaporate, I suppose. Nice plan you got there.
The whole point is that this alone is a risk for the short-medium term that could have been mitigated if not for blind and outdated policies. Look at what a single nuclear power plant could produce continuously, with little variation related to time of day or weather. Saying "we can do without that" today is just foolishness, ignorance, or wilful degradation.
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And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
Here's a list of one type of that kind of disasters where, despite of insurance, various kinds of environmental damage has been left behind which may or may not completely heal, or at least it takes a long, long time.
Here's a pretty public different kind of disaster which I guarantee was not 100% covered by insurance either. Here's another. I'm not building a comprehensive list, there's just too many and their impacts vary wildly.
Then there's the waste management in poorer countries which also cause immeasurable damage to the environment all the time by using a nearby river as a sewage for everything. Here's one example which made into the headlines back then. And here's a list of similar examples.
“they replaced nuclear with coal”
Go read yourself:
A 2020 study found that lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately €3 to €8 billion annually, mostly from the eleven hundred additional deaths associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.
And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it's also radioactive.
Let’s not see which one’s marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that’s actually good for the planet?
That would be really nice. We just don't have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet. Here in Finland, on a good day, renewables produce more than nuclear, but those are exceptions. Feel free to look up the data in finngrid service. There's currently over 7000MW worth of turbines around but it's pretty common to have even less than 200MW of wind power in the grid and that unreliability needs to be stabilized with something else.
I have no idea how you get the idea that oil spills aren't covered by insurance. In fact, denying insurance is the easiest way to keep vessels out of your waters because they just won't go where they aren't covered. If something isn't cleaned up properly it's certainly not because of the lack of insurance.
Your next example was the Beirut explosion. First, I'm pretty sure there was somebody there who was liable. The issue is, though, that if that event wasn't covered by insurance (which I guess it wasn't, just because it was a shitty country where you maybe didn't have to have insurance) I'm pretty sure it serves as a good example that that was an idea that was dumb as fuck as this single event essentially tanked the country's economy for years or decades. I'm not sure what exactly your point is in this case except showing that there are some underdeveloped countries where you don't have to make sure your shit gets cleaned up after you and if it really hits the fan you take down the whole shithole with you. I'm not sure if that's how you want industries to operate where you live and I'm also not sure of that's your idea how nuclear plants should be operated. But, and that's my point, that's how they fucking are. Every single one of them.
The derailed train I don't get at all. There's a whole chapter on that page that deals with how they spent hundreds of millions on the cleanup and settlements. I'm sure a lot of it is covered by insurance companies. What makes you assume something else?
Your last counter example is sewage being fed into rivers covertly and possibly illegally. Like... Yeah, so? If you're willing to break the law I guess you don't care about insurance either. Still not how companies should be run.
Go read yourself:
A 2020 study found that lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately €3 to €8 billion annually, mostly from the eleven hundred additional deaths associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.
And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it's also radioactive.
Now that really got me curious. Seriously. It's the first time I ever heard about that, so thanks for the input. However, I couldn't really confirm it. First of all, just a look at the graphs of how energy sources developed...
It's just not there! Even more curiously, Wikipedia writes it differently on another page:
As they shut down nuclear power, Germany made heavy investments in renewable energy, but those same investments could have "cut much deeper into fossil fuel energy" if the nuclear generation had still been online.
So, that's already much less drastic on its wording and more in line with the data above and my prior understanding of the situation. Still, that makes it weird... So I looked at the source your Wikipedia page cites.
Our novel machine learning approach combines hourly data on observed power plant operations between 2010-2017 with a wide range of related information, including electricity demand, local weather conditions, electricity prices, fuel prices and various plant characteristics. Using these data, we first simply document that production from nuclear sources declined precipitously after March 2011. This lost nuclear production was replaced by electricity production from coal- and gas-fired sources in Germany as well as electricity imports from surrounding countries
Emphasis mine. But fucking hell...
Did you take a look at that paper? I mean apart from the fact that they put all their figures into the appendix, which makes it extremely annoying to read... Instead of looking at the data how power was actually produced, they just say their data doesn't have that info but they just came up with an algorithm that pulls the information out of its random for-ass and says it was probably coal. Subsequently, they use their made-up data as if those hallucinated junk tables were given facts:
The largest increases, both in absolute and percentage terms, are from hard coal and gas-fired production. Specifically, annual average production from hard coal increased by 28.5 TWh (32%) while gas-fired production increased by 8.3 TWh (26%). Finally, the phase-out caused net imports to increase by 10.2 TWh (37%) per year on average.
Just look at the graphs that trace the actual production further up in this post... One third more hard coal? It's just not there! So, no, that source doesn't hold up and I really wonder who'd think that such a source should be used in the Wikipedia.
We just don't have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet
I disagree. Look at the gross electricity production graph. Just install more capacity than required and be done with it. As renewables produce electricity that's cheap as fuck, you can just install three times the capacity you need. Subsidise home and large scale batteries to even out energy usage and install large scale batteries and gas plants to hop in if required. Use the excess energy from your overcapacity to produce hydrogen. Push people and industries into hourly updated tariffs so they have a reason to not use electricity if it's scarce (and thus expensive). There are lot of methods. In Germany, an industry-heavy country, renewables are already delivering more than 60 percent of the electricity, up from essentially nothing thirty years ago, and I haven't heard a good argument why this couldn't be increased further. We have the alternatives and they are right here, right now, and they work.
