German poll: Majority for return to nuclear energy
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Due to an absolutely comical amount of disinformation on the topic. People are absolutely clueless about the potential costs in time and money.
The costs in both time and money are due to regulations and NIMBY legal stuff, and not actually relating to the technology itself being built
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Building, running, maintaining and decommissioning fission plants is so unfathomably expensive on the taxpayer its not even believable. They are also super prone to war issues because they are so centralized. With a few attacks you can take out most of the energy supply of a country relying heavily on nuclear power. Good luck trying to take out all the island capable solar installations and every wind turbine.
Yeah but this is for areas that don't get enough sun or wind to meet their energy needs. The make small scale nuclear reactors as well. And cities themselves, being supplied by nuclear plants, are juicy military targets too. If a bomb lands anywhere near a city including the plant, it's bad
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There's no good reason to be against nuclear power. It's green, it's safe, it's incredibly efficient, the fuel is virtually infinite, and the waste can be processed in a million different ways to make it not dangerous.
This, it's also pretty much the ONLY technology we have that can be near carbon neutral over time (mainly releasing carbon in the cement to make the plant, then to a lesser extent, mining to dig up and refine material, and transport of workers and goods).
The cost associated with nuclear is due to regulation and legal issues and not relating to the cost to build the actual plant itself so much. There are small scale reactors and many options. Yes it should be used wisely but we can't keep burning fossil fuels.
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Yeah but this is for areas that don't get enough sun or wind to meet their energy needs. The make small scale nuclear reactors as well. And cities themselves, being supplied by nuclear plants, are juicy military targets too. If a bomb lands anywhere near a city including the plant, it's bad
There is basically no place in the world where you cant use either wind or solar.
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Yeah but this is for areas that don't get enough sun or wind to meet their energy needs. The make small scale nuclear reactors as well. And cities themselves, being supplied by nuclear plants, are juicy military targets too. If a bomb lands anywhere near a city including the plant, it's bad
Yeah but this is for areas that don't get enough sun or wind to meet their energy needs.
Which is almost nowhere. There can be intermittent issues, but those can be overcome with a larger network and grid-level storage.
The make small scale nuclear reactors as well.
Which are less efficient, so even more expensive.
And cities themselves, being supplied by nuclear plants, are juicy military targets too. If a bomb lands anywhere near a city including the plant, it's bad
Not sure what your argument here is, because no matter what kind of energy production you're using, bombing a city is always bad. But it's much easier to cause great harm with nuclear than renewable generators.
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Summary
A new Innofact poll shows 55% of Germans support returning to nuclear power, a divisive issue influencing coalition talks between the CDU/CSU and SPD.
While 36% oppose the shift, support is strongest among men and in southern and eastern Germany.
About 22% favor restarting recently closed reactors; 32% support building new ones.
Despite nuclear support, 57% still back investment in renewables. The CDU/CSU is exploring feasibility, but the SPD and Greens remain firmly against reversing the nuclear phase-out, citing stability and past policy shifts.
For those who understand German, I would like to leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmixpDsrKR4
Sorry everyone else.
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Three Mile Island was a partial meltdown, which may sound close to an actual meltdown, it's not even close in terms of danger.
Fukushima failed because the plants were old and not properly upkept. Had they followed the guidelines for keeping the plant maintained, it would not have happened.
That's not really the fault of nuclear power.
Chernobyl was also partially caused by lack of adherence to safety measures, but also faulty plant design.
I'd say, being generous, only one of those three events says anything about the safety of nuclear power, and even then, we have come a very long way.
So one event... Ever.
Chernobyl shouldn't have happened due to safety measures, yet it did. Fukushima shouldn't have happened, yet it did. The common denominator is human error, but guess who'll be running any other nuclear power plants? Not beavers.
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Yeah but this is for areas that don't get enough sun or wind to meet their energy needs.
Which is almost nowhere. There can be intermittent issues, but those can be overcome with a larger network and grid-level storage.
The make small scale nuclear reactors as well.
Which are less efficient, so even more expensive.
And cities themselves, being supplied by nuclear plants, are juicy military targets too. If a bomb lands anywhere near a city including the plant, it's bad
Not sure what your argument here is, because no matter what kind of energy production you're using, bombing a city is always bad. But it's much easier to cause great harm with nuclear than renewable generators.
But renewables aren't being replaced with this, fossil fuels are. The grid level storage is significant and requires significant mining and upkeep for that, and it's very inefficient. We need blended energy sources for safety, with a mix of water, wind, wave, solar, geothermal, and nuclear
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There is basically no place in the world where you cant use either wind or solar.
Yes, there are, especially if you don't want to deforest land. And wind and solar and not constant sources. A mix of sources are needed. That you havent mentioned geothermal or wave energy shows that you're kinda out of your depth here. I've gone to many engineering seminars about this, we must have a mix of energy sources and we must use nuclear if our goal is to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions. Other sources of energy all emit too much carbon.
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No, nuclear is awful as a baseline since you can't turn it off and back on quickly
You're absolutely correct, and few people realise this. They think "baseline = stable power", but that's not what you need. You need a quick and cheap way to scale up production when renewables don't produce enough. On a sunny, windy day, renewables already produce more than 100% of needs in some countries. At that point, the 'baseline' needs to shut down so that this cheap energy can be used instead. The baseline really is a stable base demand, but the supply has to be very flexible instead (due to the relative instability of solar and wind, the cheapest sources available).
Nuclear reactors can shut down quite quickly these days, but starting them back up is slow. But worse, nuclear is quite expensive, and maintaining a plant in standby mode not producing anything is just not economically feasible. Ergo, nuclear is terrible for a baseline power source (bar any future technological breakthroughs).
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It’s just more FUD trying to keep away from it. We’re still a ways off of 100% renewables and nuclear can very much help fill in that gap without reliance on foreign oil or fossil fuels.
Nuclear can't be built fast enough to fill the gap. It's likely better long-term to invest in additional renewables + gas plants instead, until the gas can be phased out as well. It's still fossil for a bit, but since nuclear nearly always is over time and well beyond budget, it's likely to be a net greener option. Gas is pretty cheap and above all very flexible, making it more suitable for baseline power than nuclear.
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How is a nuclear meltdown not the fault of nuclear power? Of course you can prevent it by being super careful and stuff, but it is inherent to nuclear power that it is super dangerous. What is the worst that can happen with a wind turbine? It falls, that's it.
if we were to either replace all power on earth with nuclear, or replace all power on earth with wind, more people would die from- idk, falling out of wind turbines- then from deaths due to nuclear.Fukushima had a fucking earthquake and a tsunami theiwn at it, AND the company which made it cut corners. It was still, much, much less bad than it could have been and the reactor still partially withstood a lot of damage.
In the United States at least (and i assume the rest of the world) nuclear energy is so overegulated that many reactors can have meltdowns without spelling disaster for the nearby area. Nuclear caskets (used to transport and store wastes) can withstand fucking missle strikes.
Im not going to pretend that there arent genuine issues with nuclear, such as cost and construction time(*partially caused by the overegulation), but genuine nuclear disaster has only ever resulted from the worst of human decisions combined with the worst of circumstances.
Do i trust humans not to make shitty mistakes? No, not with all this overegulation, but still, even counting Fukushima and Chernobyl, more people die from wind (and especially fossil fuels) then nuclear per terawatt of electricity production. -
There's no good reason to be against nuclear power. It's green, it's safe, it's incredibly efficient, the fuel is virtually infinite, and the waste can be processed in a million different ways to make it not dangerous.
I'm not the kind to hate on nuclear power itself, but let's not assume it's perfect either. There are good reasons against nuclear power, its just not the usual reasons raised by people.
The cost and time effort needed for building one plant is one drawback.
The fact that you can't say "let's turn off the nuclear reactor now that we have enough renewables and later today we start it again when the sunlight is over". It's a terrible energy source to supply for extra demand needed without perfect planning.
Nowadays, nuclear is not so worth it in general, not because of fearmongering about the dangers (an old plant badly upkept is a danger, independent of what energy source you use, but specially for nuclear plants). Ideally a combination of different renewables would be best, with some energy storage to be used as backup, plus proper sharing of the resources between different places. There's always sun somewhere, there's always wind somewhere, ...
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Nuclear can't be built fast enough to fill the gap. It's likely better long-term to invest in additional renewables + gas plants instead, until the gas can be phased out as well. It's still fossil for a bit, but since nuclear nearly always is over time and well beyond budget, it's likely to be a net greener option. Gas is pretty cheap and above all very flexible, making it more suitable for baseline power than nuclear.
Which is why they should never have been decommissioned in the first place.
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Summary
A new Innofact poll shows 55% of Germans support returning to nuclear power, a divisive issue influencing coalition talks between the CDU/CSU and SPD.
While 36% oppose the shift, support is strongest among men and in southern and eastern Germany.
About 22% favor restarting recently closed reactors; 32% support building new ones.
Despite nuclear support, 57% still back investment in renewables. The CDU/CSU is exploring feasibility, but the SPD and Greens remain firmly against reversing the nuclear phase-out, citing stability and past policy shifts.
They asked 1000 people - not that representative and most of the German don‘t want a return to the 60s or 70s - at least no people voting for the backward-looking CDU or the Neo-Nazis AfD. And well - Southern and Eastern Germany. No miracle, unfortunately.
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Even before nuclear power was the most expensive type in the energy mix iirc.
yes even coal is "cheaper" than nuclear once you disregard polution
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They asked 1000 people - not that representative and most of the German don‘t want a return to the 60s or 70s - at least no people voting for the backward-looking CDU or the Neo-Nazis AfD. And well - Southern and Eastern Germany. No miracle, unfortunately.
️Statisticians have found that for many types of surveys, a sample size of around 1,000 people is the sweet spot—regardless of if the population size is 100,000 or 100M.
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Now list all the fossil fuels related incidents.
Nuclear + renewables is the way to go to stop the climate crisis in the foreseeable future.
People really don't understand that climate change is worse for life on this planet than a million Fukushima accidents.
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The costs in both time and money are due to regulations and NIMBY legal stuff, and not actually relating to the technology itself being built
The locations have all outlived their life spans already. Also there is no more expertise in Germany, the old operators went to retire. Also it would take more than a decade to obtain new nuclear fuel. Also also also
It's a wet dream of conservative politicians that want bribes from the electricity company ceos for implementing the worst kind of unneeded centralized power plant
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Yes, there are, especially if you don't want to deforest land. And wind and solar and not constant sources. A mix of sources are needed. That you havent mentioned geothermal or wave energy shows that you're kinda out of your depth here. I've gone to many engineering seminars about this, we must have a mix of energy sources and we must use nuclear if our goal is to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions. Other sources of energy all emit too much carbon.
How are you so uneducated?
With minimal storage, gas peaker plants that only run like a day per year and a grid spanning several countries it is a breeze to have wind and solar only. Probably not even all of the above are needed.
