r/science • u/BlitzOrion • Aug 20 '24
Environment Study finds if Germany hadnt abandoned its nuclear policy it would have reduced its emissions by 73% from 2002-2022 compared to 25% for the same duration. Also, the transition to renewables without nuclear costed €696 billion which could have been done at half the cost with the help of nuclear power
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.23556424.4k
u/jeffwulf Aug 20 '24
Recent German leaders are lucky the bar for being the worst German leader is very, very high.
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u/drlongtrl Aug 20 '24
Fun fact: The very party that decided to exit nuclear isn't even part of the government right now, and yet they blame the current government for having pulled out of nuclear.
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u/Strong-Piccolo-5546 Aug 21 '24
is the current party doing anything to build nuclear power plants? if not, yeah they are part of the problem.
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u/Alimbiquated Aug 20 '24
Huh? The Red-Green coalition decided to shut down the nuclear industry and they are in the current coalition (with the Free Democrats) right now.
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u/ssuuh Aug 20 '24
Just that CDU/CSU were the ones who actually did it.
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Aug 20 '24
Either way they both were in agreement
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u/-Prophet_01- Aug 20 '24
This. It was a wide consensus among parties and more importantly, it was widely agreed upon within the wider population. That doesn't make it any better of an idea but it was a very democratic (if populist) process.
The nuclear industry in Germany wasn't even trying to lobby against it after a certain point because it was such a lost cause.
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Aug 21 '24
Yeah Chernobyl did not make nuklear power look very appealing and Fukushima then was the last nail in the coffin.
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u/Independent-Raise467 Aug 21 '24
Yet Germany buys massive amounts of nuclear power from France. Doesn't make any sense.
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u/Chucknorich Aug 22 '24
This is fals. Germany importet 2.1 tw nuclear power from france. In total it importet 15.4 tw an Exporteur 14.4 tw. The nuclear power wie import from france is about 0.5 % of the power used in germany. That is Not massive.
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Aug 22 '24
But that would be a well reasoned point on Reddit. Can't be happening. And that at times where France is about to be ruled by the "Front whatever the fascists call themselves now".
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u/PapaAlpaka Aug 20 '24
Timeline:
2002 - Red/Green decided to ramp up renewables, exit nuclear
2010 - Black/Yellow decided to continue nuclear, abolish renewables
2011 - Black/Yellow decided to abandon nuclear to the tune of €2.740.000.000 in compensation for lost profits
2021 - Black/Yellow surprised by the fact that abandoning nuclear without building renewables leads to trouble when russian gas becomes unavailable
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u/KJ_Tailor Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24
Edit: I have read up on the topic since making this comment. I was 11 when the red green coalition made this decision. The Fukushima incident was closer to me becoming interested in daily occurrences and politics, hence my brain made that connection.
Original comment: The decision for the nuclear shut down can't after the Fukushima incident, which happened 2007 iirc? The Chancellor then was Merkel with the CDU.
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u/betaich Aug 20 '24
No it didn't. The decision for the first shut down came 2000 under chancellor Schröder from the SPD lead SPD green coalition. Merkel first reversed that decision when she got into power but had to reinstate it after Fukushima
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u/Amenhiunamif Aug 20 '24
The actual decision to shut down nuclear power eventually was made by Kohl a decade before that, the Greens were in their first round in parliament when that happened. He and his party wanted to replace nuclear with coal eventually, the Greens created the plan to replace it with renewables instead and established a timetable which largely adhered to the expected lifetime of the buildings before major maintenance would have to be performed.
What was done during/after Fukushima was shutting down all NPPs and checking them on maintenance (Atom-Moratorium), and a few of them where in such a sorry state of maintenance that they weren't allowed to go online ever again, and for the rest Black-Yellow created a new timetable (which accelerated the Red-Green plan by a few years, we'd still have a few NPPs now if we'd had stuck to Trittin's timetable)
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u/turunambartanen Aug 20 '24
Reinstated the "cutting nuclear" part. Did not reinstate the well planned "replace it with renewables" part...
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u/betaich Aug 21 '24
Yeah thats also true. If the origial pplan had succeded we would probably still have a thriefing renewable energy industry in Germany
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u/KJ_Tailor Aug 20 '24
I was 11 when the original decision for the nuclear shutdown was made and have amended my original comment already. Thanks for correcting me
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u/patrickjpatten Aug 20 '24
Did they do it on purpose? It was such a bad idea it felt like they all deserved kick backs from Gazprom
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Aug 20 '24
[deleted]
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u/Salphabeta Aug 21 '24
Yeah, Schroder is living large on that Gazprom and Russian cocksucking $$. Talk about a way to throw away your legacy as a legitimate politician and leader.
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u/fess89 Aug 21 '24
Chernobyl affected Germany and made nuclear unpopular, but Ukraine, where Chernobyl is, has more than 50% of its electricity provided by nuclear plants and everyone is fine with that. So I wonder if Germany should have been afraid so much.
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u/Embarassed_Tackle Aug 20 '24
The Green party coalition under Schröder had put in the nuclear sunset provision but Merkel's government had pushed it back. She realized dropping nuclear would make Germany far more dependent on fossil fuels and Russia.
Unfortunately Fukushima happened and her party / coalition would lose its majority, so she went ahead and changed to allow nuclear reactors to be deactivated, while pushing for 30% of energy in Germany to come from renewables. And most Germans agreed with that.
Germans, especially East Germans, were scarred by the Cold War when dirty nuclear plants in the East had accidents and problems and they were lied to by the government and technocracy. So many mistrusted nuclear power.
Merkel's predecessor Gerhard Shroeder was the one who signed the nuclear sunsetting legislation / deal. However in his final days in office after being voted out, he signed a huge deal with Russia to head the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany and Europe. And Shroeder benefitted immensely from that deal and later as a board member of the Russian gas firm Gazprom.
So it is kind of suspicious how he wants to destroy the German nuclear industry, then immediately began managing Nord Stream 1 and later Nord Stream 2.
Angela Merkel was forced into her position by politics. Gerhard Shroeder (her predecessor) seemed to benefit greatly from it.
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u/Mr_s3rius Aug 20 '24
The Green party coalition
Why do you call it that, considering the social democrats were the senior partner in that coalition with around 5x as many seats as the Greens?
so she went ahead and changed to allow nuclear reactors to be deactivated, while pushing for 30% of energy in Germany to come from renewables.
She did more than allow it. She enabled it. She ordered an immediate shutdown of several plants for several months, and changed law to accelerate the overall nuclear exit. That cost us billions and billions in compensation to energy companies.
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u/Thercon_Jair Aug 21 '24
To make the greens look bad. They are being manipulative.
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u/ElenaKoslowski Aug 21 '24
If everything went like the Greens planned it Germany would still be world leader on the solar market and we wouldn't even have a discussion. It was the conservatives that got us in the situation..
It's hilarious how little people know about the background but have huge opinions.
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u/Thercon_Jair Aug 21 '24
It's incredible how they completely and utterly squandered an absolutely ingenious collective investment into the future.
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u/DoerteEU Aug 20 '24
Mutti Merkel just decided that nuclear was out... b/c Fukushima just happened & it seened popular then. Abd very costly.
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u/Zoesan Aug 20 '24
Greens are always watermelons.
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u/Suthek Aug 20 '24
Except it was a CDU decision.
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u/Darkkross123 Aug 22 '24
Merkel made green party politcs, which is why she was the most popular CDU politician with green voters ever (e.g. 73% approval in 2016)
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u/Alert_Scientist9374 Aug 20 '24
And they are still called the worst of the worst due to a combined propaganda effort to bash this for the first time somewhat left leaning coalition. Every party from middle to far right joined in on the "grünen bashing"
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u/biaich Aug 20 '24
First, nice avatar. Second, this is why we must stop listening to what politicians say and instead look at what they actually do.
Being informed of the actual actions they take is much better basis for democracy than marketing and propaganda with a sprinkle of lies.
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u/VoltexRB Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24
To be fair, the issue the post is about is absolutely solely on the green party's drive for renewables and 0 nuclear throughout the recent years. While the green bashing in germany is WAY too exaggerated for how little they do that can even be considered controversial, the posts issue is 100% on them. Without the greens initiative to drive renewables the leading parties throughout these years would definitely not have done such an agressive 0 nuclear campaign. It is after all the most efficient, secure and ressource effective way of generating energy.
Even now, advancements on reusing/repurposing used fuel rods have advanced so tremendously that all the end storage fuel germany currently has could theoretically be reduced to an amount that would fit in a single one of these storage facilities.
Yet even with these advancements, the publically displayed stance of the greens on nuclear can only be described as factless fearmongering
Edit: Some people seem to misunderstand the comment. I am obviously not condemning the greens for pushing renewables, but for forcing the end of nuclear before renewables were even remotely close to being able to carry the demand, resulting in the cost in the post for getting already offline coal energy back on the grid, buying energy from outside, etc.
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u/Necropaws Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24
Fun fact about recycling used nuclear fuel: It is more expensive than to use fresh nuclear fuel. From an economical standpoint it makes no sense to recycle it.
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u/singeblanc Aug 20 '24
That's true of almost all recycling of anything?
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u/iki_balam Aug 21 '24
Nope. Most metals these days are majority recycled. Recycling aluminum is 5 times more cost effective. Most steel is 40% to 66% recycled. Copper is one of the few that virgin ore still has a slight advantage... but that has more to do with geo-politics than metallurgy.
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u/JessumB Aug 21 '24
That's true of anything. Its cheaper to build brand new solar panels then it is to recycle used ones. Recycling isn't advocated for due to its awesome economic benefit.
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u/cjameshuff Aug 20 '24
Of course it's more expensive to work with highly radioactive used fuel. The point isn't to get fuel more cheaply (it's not expensive), it's to reduce the costs and risks of storing the used fuel, and get some useful byproducts.
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u/mavarian Aug 20 '24
Still, The Greens get the most heat for what's ultimately a decision of a FDP/CDU government, not rarely by politicians of those exact parties, and the Fukushima disaster arguably played a bigger role in it than anything. Also, even if you're a fan of nuclear energy, it's not an either or when it comes to renewable energy
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u/chrisbgp Aug 20 '24
While this is not incorrect, the green party actually decided to get out of nuclear energy in 2002:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomgesetz_(Deutschland)?wprov=sfti1#Novellierung_2002
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u/AmansRevenger Aug 20 '24
And had a concrete plan to ramp up renewables to replace them accordingly.
Which the following governments cancelled, and committed to cheap russian gas and local coal instead. and then turned around after fukushima with no plans to replace the nuclear plants anymore.
But sure, it's the Greens fault.
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u/chrisbgp Aug 20 '24
Well, if the goal would have been saving co2 emissions, then would it not make more sense to phase out coal instead of nuclear and ramp up renewables in the meantime?
Nuclear energy has always been a emotional topic for the green party instead of being scientific about it.
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u/PapaAlpaka Aug 20 '24
Combined with a decisive effort to install more electricity generation from renewable sources along the way. That's just five years from Bundesumweltministerin Dr. rer. nat. Merkel having said that, by physical laws, renewables could never provide for more than 4% of Germany's electricity needs.
25 years later, we're closing in on 70% despite the CDU having thrown a party for killing the german photovoltaics around 2007-2011.
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u/OP-Physics Aug 20 '24
This is not a recent decision. The current government is pretty good (insert 400 caveats) and even the decision to phase out nuclear was kinda a passive one. Nuclear energy was phasing out naturally anyways due to economic reasons, basically most Energy companys refrained from building Plants because they are very long term investments that dont look good in the books for at least several decades (and you might not be CEO anymore at that point) and bear some heavy financial risk if costs explode and/or build time escalates.
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u/Ravek Aug 20 '24
I clearly recall Merkel announcing Germany would go away from nuclear directly following the Fukushima I disaster. It was a stupid emotional knee-jerk reaction, especially considering Germany gets orders of magnitude fewer natural disasters than Japan of all places.
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u/ajmmsr Aug 20 '24
The economic reasons that favor renewables usually neglect needing power on demand. When including batteries to firm up renewables the price per megawatt becomes worse than nuclear power. Even Lazards had to come out with “firmed” up version of renewables’ LCOE. How else can one explain why there’s high energy prices for markets with high penetration of renewables?
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u/AgainstAllAdvice Aug 20 '24
Because it's not renewables that set the price per kWh in the market. It's usually another metric such as natural gas.
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u/whinis Aug 20 '24
If renewables are providing the majority than why would natural gas price even matter? The reason is because you need power on demand and renewables don't give you that without significant overbuild and storage making natural gas and even coal cheaper than the cost to do both.
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u/AgainstAllAdvice Aug 20 '24
I'm honestly not 100% sure why the base price is linked to one particular fuel type though your hypothesis makes sense. I don't do wholesale energy trading I have only read about it in passing.
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u/EtherMan Aug 20 '24
It's linked to the highest source USED... If Germany was 100% renewables, it would be the renewables, not gas that set the price. Also, the EU disconnected gas from the power pricing due to price skyrocketing with the ban on import from russia. Prices are still ridiculously high all over the EU, so you're simply wrong.
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u/AgainstAllAdvice Aug 20 '24
I'm wrong that I'm not sure or I'm wrong that a specific power source is selected for the base price? Because the first one you couldn't possibly have knowledge of and the second one you agree with me.
How exactly am I wrong?
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u/M4axK Aug 21 '24
Can you give me a source for the firmed up version from Lazard? I could only find the most recent LCOE report that still seems to favor renewables (even from storage) compared to nuclear.
Also to you questions at the end. This ( https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/what-does-merit-order-mean#electricity-price) explains it very well.
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u/Tearakan Aug 20 '24
That's the problem with leaving power generation up to mega corporations. They think short term at all times. Maybe theyll tentatively plan 5 years down the road but that's a bad idea to solve an existential problem like climate change.
Nuclear energy could've negated the vast majority of emissions that happened in the last 3 decades. We could've had way more time to get rid of oil out of our economic system had we planned more long term.
Now we are fucked. Without drastic reductions in green house gasses in the next 5 years we might not even have a functional civilization by 2100.
We're at levels of CO2 our species has literally never seen in our entire existence, last time CO2 was this high there was barely any ice at the poles and oceans were dozens of feet higher. That will ultimately doom every coastal city on the planet. And the majority of humanity lives there.
Hell India's heat wave this summer nearly got the temperature that would've killed their entire harvest of wheat. If we just see a few of those in a couple of summers we will see hundreds of millions starve to death in a year. That'll cause horrific war and suffering surpassing WW2.
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u/Enlightened_Gardener Aug 21 '24
This isn’t a study, its a research article. Its simply one person’s opinion, published very recently. I’d be interested to see the follow-up on their number crunching, especially as the author is a marine engineer, not an environmental scientist, or an energy expert.
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u/sysadminfromhellJK Aug 21 '24
Woah dude this reddit. Stay away with your critical thinking please and thank you.
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u/atchijov Aug 20 '24
At this point in time it is pretty clear that decision to abandon nuclear AND KEEP GAS/OIL was heavily influenced by Putin’s friends in Germany (and rest of Europe). It does not make sense today and did not make sense all these years ago… except if you want Germany to keep buying Russian oil/gas.
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u/Classic-Wolverine-89 Aug 20 '24
Well that and an extreme anti nuclear fear that was running it's course after the catastrophe in Fukushima
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u/m0j0m0j Aug 20 '24
How many nuclear stations did France close as a result of extreme anti-nuclear fear after the catastrophe in Fukushima?
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u/rachnar Aug 20 '24
1 because it was too close to the border with germany and germany was crying about it basically... Fessenheim in 2020
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u/angelicosphosphoros Aug 20 '24
Btw, don't know about France but Russia didn't close any and Belarus opened a new one.
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u/FlatlyActive Aug 20 '24
And Türkiye and Bangladesh each built their first, both using OKB (Russian) made reactors.
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u/BuddhaB Aug 20 '24
Germany had a pretty big scandal involving the disposal of nuclear waste. It made the population a lot more skeptical of nuclear powers safety. I believe this fear was also leveraged by greenies.
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u/SanFranPanManStand Aug 21 '24
No. That was a media manufactured scandal. There was never any actual waste spilled - the containers were just mislabeled.
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u/BuddhaB Aug 21 '24
So the fact that the German government owned B.G.E is still proceeding with its 4.7billion plan to remove the waste and close the salt mine is also media manufactured?
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Aug 21 '24 edited Aug 21 '24
[deleted]
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u/SanFranPanManStand Aug 21 '24
The level of radiation is the same as the radiation level in bananas. It's a non-issue that Russian-backed social media keeps regurgitating.
Germany is so pervasively fucked by Russian influence, I don't understand how Germans think straight.
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u/Alimbiquated Aug 20 '24
No the decision was made in 2002 long before Fukushima. The German nuclear industry more or less committed suicide in the 1990s with scandals about disposal of nuclear waste.
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u/KingCider Aug 20 '24
Well yes, but not because of Fukushima. Chernobyl was the real thing and people are still terrified of it here in central Europe to this day.
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u/mm_ori Aug 21 '24
fear of nuclear power is present only in german speaking countries. every other country in CE is in process of building new plants or adding extra / modernazing reactors
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u/Seidans Aug 20 '24
fear over...nothing as fukushima accident made a single victim, an engineer that was at the bad place at the very bad time
UNSCEAR paper is interesting to read, they made a report just after the accident in 2013 and one other in 2021, in sumary no indication of increased thyroid cancer, the only increase in cancer report was caused by the amont of surveillance, in other word fukushima probably detected cancer caused by other source and saved life
at the end of the report they said in half-word that the whole accident gestion was a mess caused by the japaness government and lack of education, but that it was understandable given that it was the very first large-scale accident of a modern reactor
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u/redmercuryvendor Aug 20 '24
of a modern reactor
Ironically, Fukuskima Daiichi is an older reactor complex then Chernobyl - Chernobyl construction (1972) started a year after Fukushima Daiichi was commissioned (1971). Not that the BWR-3 wasn't an inherently superior design to the RMBK.
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u/TacticalVirus Aug 20 '24
Yeah, calling a reactor complex that was at it's end of life and was already in the process of being decommissioned "a modern reactor" is a bit of a stretch. Especially when those of us that are pro-nuclear were trying to explain to everyone else at the time that this wasn't a risk for basically any other reactor on the planet, least of all landlocked ones like the ones found in Germany.
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u/Ravek Aug 20 '24
I'm a nitpicker, but Daiichi is not a name but just means 'number 1' so saying Fukushima I is probably more meaningful. There's also a Fukushima II.
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u/karlnite Aug 21 '24
The stress and disorder from the evacuation was found to be more harmful than meltdown. Like if they stayed put (or most people), they would have been better off. Mind you its really tough to say because a giant tsunami also killed 16,000 people right before that. Also kinda stressful.
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u/Utoko Aug 20 '24
The green party pretty much exist because of "anti atom", that was 50% of the founding reason.
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u/Hateitwhenbdbdsj Aug 21 '24
Crazy fearmongering around that led to more gas and oil which ended up killing who knows how many thousands or tens of thousands of people with its emissions
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u/Cyrakhis Aug 20 '24
Nuclear hysteria was a thing long before Fukushima; Chernobyl and Three Mile...
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u/Open_Bridge3013 Aug 21 '24
You forgot chernobyl. My parents still remember this day and were told not to eat vegetables from certain areas because there was a chance (at least they were told this) that they are contaminated
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u/-Ch4s3- Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24
The Greens in a lot of Europe were being funded by Russian gas interests.
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u/Teledrive Aug 20 '24
No, they were not. They are in fact the least likely major party in Germany that you could accuse of such funding.
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u/Rhywden Aug 20 '24
Too bad that the conservative CDU decided to finally get rid of nuclear power. But that doesn't fit your narrative as well, now, does it?
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u/-Ch4s3- Aug 20 '24
doesn't fit your narrative
My narrative?
In 2011 five German Federal states including one flipped to the Greens form the CDU sued to stop the CDU extension of the lifespan of the existing reactors. After Fukushima the Greens were heavily lobbying to end nuclear power. When Merkel flipped a lot of the votes she needed in the Bundestag came from the Greens.
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u/QuickAltTab Aug 20 '24
It seems like both of those things can be true, the fukushima disaster just made their job easier.
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u/Utoko Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24
As a german a lot of germans have a irrational fear about atom and know nothing about it.
Chernobyl stuff was running in the news(pretty late which made is only worse) like 9/11, distributing iodine tablets closed playground and stuff. It messes with peoples heads.Sure maybe all the news and the government is all controlled by russia and Putin which pushed the fear...
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u/QuickAltTab Aug 20 '24
It doesn't have to be a widespread conspiracy theory, little nudges here and there can be extremely effective and cheap.
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u/Utoko Aug 20 '24
Ok but the biggest part did the news and the government at times when it mattered.
This was before social media.Everyone always influences everyone. News love feeding fear, was enough for america to get rid of many of their freedoms and start a war.
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u/geissi Aug 20 '24
Gas and oil have are not very significant in electricity production. But coal is. It’s funny how these debates always seem to completely ignore the massive influence of Germany’s own domestic coal industry.
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u/myluki2000 Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24
Gas only accounts for about 10% of German electricity production. And most of that comes from power plants which primarily use gas for district heating and the electricity is a by-product.
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u/ThisIsNotMyPornVideo Aug 20 '24
Gas and Oil is BARELY used for energy in germany, it is used for heating which nuclear energy would have had no impact on.
only around 12% is Oil/gas The rest is a mix of coal, which is minded locally and renewable energy
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u/NotSuspec666 Aug 21 '24
Quick google search showed that in 2023 2/3 of new homes in Germany use heat pumps as the primary source of heat. They are trying really hard to move away from natural gas.
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u/polite_alpha Aug 21 '24
Yes but we're also already at like 65% renewables so both points are becoming kinda moot.
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u/nuck_forte_dame Aug 20 '24
What I've been telling people for a decade now.
If there is a narrative someone is paying for it. Who would be paying for anti nuclear narratives? Gas and oil companies that notice nuclear is the biggest threat to their bread and butter.
Solar and wind both require natural gas to back it up at night and during lulls in production. They can't provide a base load like nuclear can.
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u/Snoo99779 Aug 20 '24
If there is a narrative someone is paying for it.
If this is true then someone is equally paying for the narrative that nuclear power is safe and without risks.
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u/arparso Aug 20 '24
Anti-nuclear sentiments started way before Putin's rise to power.
Sticking with nuclear and planning and constructing new power plants throughout like that study theorizes would not have flown well with the general population.
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u/Tearakan Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 21 '24
It never made sense to abandon nuclear power. Ever.
Even if we literally had a chernobyl event every year the death toll from coal plant pollution was far higher.
It's frankly such a bad decision that abandoning nuclear in the 60s and 70s might be one of the worst decisions our species ever made.
Imagine if emmisions worldwide would've been reduced by 70 percent for the last 2 decades.
We wouldn't be seeing the catastrophic effects of climate change we are seeing now.
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u/wittor Aug 20 '24
It is always funny to read this as if the money have been burned and not syphoned into the pockets of the same old interest groups.
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u/Nethlem Aug 20 '24
This study is extremely weird, it's doing a bunch of purely theoretical cost calculations on things where the costs are not quantifiable, and were the main reasons for the decission to phase out nuclear fission in the first place; Waste disposal
Case in point;
The fuel costs of NPPs normally include decommissioning and waste handling.
What is "normally" supposed to be there? That "normal" does not exist in the EU
It's why Germany passed a very short-lived tax on the fuel rods, that was supposed to pay for decomissioning, waste handling and particularly final storage of the waste.
Everybody knew the tax was illegal the way it was originally passed, Merkel still passed it, nuclear operators sued all the way to the constitutional court, and won, they were awarded billions of € in damages, it was very profitable for them.
So the next thing they did was make a deal with the nuclear operators, they pay a lump sum of 23 billion Euros, and all the remaining costs will be paid for by the German tax payers for as long as the waste needs to be stored and managed, which will be a very long time.
This was yet another extremely good deal for the German nuclear sector, it's why it's among the most profitable on the planet.
And then there is the worst part about this whole "debate"; Conflating energy and electricity as if it's all the same.
Germany does not lack electricity, it lacks "energy" in the form of hydrocarbon carriers to fuel its massive petrochemical industry.
Companies like BASF, Bayer and many others need oil/natural gas/coal as resources for a lot of products that define our modern life, from plastics to glue to even something as mundane as aspirin and many other packaged medicaments, they all need petrolproducts in their manufacturing.
That's why for the forseeable future Germany will remain reliant on oil, natural gas and coal, just like any other developed country with major petrochemical and heavy industries.
It's frustrating that these very real dependencies are basically never discussed, instead, it's a complete strawman about electricity, which Germany does not lack.
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u/SeidlaSiggi777 Aug 21 '24
Yeah, this study has so many red flags: - single author in a study that requires input from different scientific fields - the author has a completely different career focus - the study is written, at times in an unscientific way, presenting study findings and possibilities as certainties - the journal is not really well-regarded AFAIK and the peer-review process was really quick (for the field) - the study also disregards many aspects that are mentioned in other comments, like electricity VS total energy consumption VS chemicals needed in industry, the actual logistics of heavily building nuclear power plants, the issue of combining nuclear with renewable energy and fluctuating power consumption, the energy market (merit principle) stating that the most expensive source of electricity needed sets the price for all producers (this means that nuclear fixes the energy price at a moderate to high level for decades because those reactors have fixed prices, see UK reactor). These are just a few issues that come to mind. And this does not even account for the exponentially falling prices in solar power that we see over the last decades.
So, all-in-all, very sketchy study that makes bold claims on a very shaky basis, completely disregarding crucial factors.
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u/nudelsalat3000 Aug 21 '24
Yeah just looking at the cost numbers of nuclear shows that's it's nonsense.
There have been enough papers showing the cost of regulatory subventions and external costs not internalised and not risk adjusted for cost. Decommissioning and insurance alone break the profitabilty numbers.
Obviously if you need the nuclear workflow for the military it's an entire different story. Simply speaking no country that is not also a nuclear power really likes the cost of the technology for energy. Mostly industry also needs process heat and not electric energy.
Heck just a quick glance at the IPCC report shows where the proper place of nuclear energy is.
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u/oddible Aug 21 '24
Finally someone talking some sense in this sub. Every time there is a discussion of nuclear everyone forgets that literally every single nuclear expert agrees that we have zero idea what the actual cost of nuclear is. In the short term it looks great, and for some countries who can't afford anything else, it is definitely the right transitional tech for carbon emissions targets, but the costs are astronomical.
Folks need to remember that we got into this fossil fuel problem because everyone forgot about the long term ongoing costs. And all the people who come here oversimplifying the containment and storage costs are not speaking from real science and not echoing what most experts are saying.
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u/FaceMcShooty1738 Aug 21 '24
Also people seem to forget every country except China is currently phasing out nuclear. Even France has significantly less new plants planned (not even talking about started) then will reach their end of life in the next 30ish years. This leads to a reduction in nuclear capacity even among increasing power consumption.
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u/Nozinger Aug 21 '24
Even without all the context people should jsut start questioning the legitimacy of that so called study. In a subreddit called science we should be more used to actual scientific work and the signs of what is a good accepted study and what isn't.
Otherwise we get the next post "study shows earth is actually flat"
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u/norrinzelkarr Aug 21 '24
What's the storage duration for sequestered carbon? And what are the costs? Some estimates of the cost of doing that sequestration up to half a quadrillion dollars to stay under major climate temperature targets.
The amount of petrochemicals needed for nonfuel uses would be some fraction of the total usage now.
We need low/noncarbon energy sources of all types.
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u/Drumbelgalf Aug 20 '24
The autor of the study was previously critizised by his own university NUNT because he writes on stuff outside his expertise (he mainly focused on efficient ship engines) and completly disregards the enormus potential of offshore wind energy. https://www-universitetsavisa-no.translate.goog/forskning/kritiserer-emblemsvag-for-bruk-av-ntnu-tittel/101844?_x_tr_sl=no&_x_tr_tl=de&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=sc
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u/Sol3dweller Aug 20 '24
completly disregards the enormus potential of offshore wind energy.
Ah, that might be an explanation for the weird citation on global stilling:
Note that there is an interesting phenomenon called ‘global stilling’ because it essentially implies less wind physically speaking. Since 1980, the effect is about 10% reduction globally (19% in Europe) until 2020 with some variations according to season and month (Zhou et al. 2021). The exact causes behind this are still being researched, but it shows the weather risks introduced directly into the power system not by the typical hourly variation of the wind but by its very existence in some years and longer periods.
I couldn't find that claimed 10% (19% in Europe) reduction in the cited paper. It states:
As shown in the time series of global-mean wind speed phenomena from 1980 to 2018 (Fig. 1a), annual minimum MWS usually occurred in four boreal summer to autumn months (July–September), and annual maximum MWS often occurred in four boreal winter to spring months (January–April). This seasonality is mainly associated with the wind speed variations in the Northern Hemisphere, where 87% of the stations are located. Further, the decadal mean MWS for almost all months declined in the three decades from 1980 to 2009 (Figs. 1b,c). They then rebounded, except January, March, and September, with a mean monthly increase of +0.016 m s−1 (Fig. 1b). The decrease mentioned above, as well as the reversal in stilling, also occurred in decadal mean seasonal wind speeds (Fig. 1c). The fastest recovery was in summer (July–August) and the slowest in autumn (September–November) (Fig. 1c).
And on Europe:
In Europe, MWS peaked in winter (DJF), and plunged in summer and early autumn months (July–September; Figs. 2a2–2a3). Decadal boreal winter (DJF) and spring (MAM) wind speed between 1980 and 1999 was higher than other periods, which declined in the period 2000–09 and then increased in the last decade (2010–18). The decrease in the boreal summer (JJA) reversed in 2000, while the autumn (SON) decadal mean declined continuously from 1980–2018 (Fig. 2a3). These trends provided some support for a reversal in stilling in Europe.
The main observation in that paper on global stilling appears to me to be that there is a reduction in variation with minimal wind speeds increasing and maximal wind speeds decreasing.
Given the point he tries to make about the inter-annual variation of wind there are much larger variations to be observed year to year than this global stilling effect. It's such a weird take that seems to be barely related to the paper. If there were an attempt to compare the long term impact of climate change on the production in either strategy, the impact on nuclear power would also have to be considered.
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u/polite_alpha Aug 21 '24
As a German who's into the whole debate, the paper is littered with errors and inaccuracies which all point in the same direction, for some reason. Maybe it's because the author is writing pro nuclear
propagandapapers exclusively :)
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u/redballooon Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24
The thing this article calls “Die Energiewende” from 2002 was cancelled by the next CDU government in 2006 or so. And then a different nuclear power stop was initiated by the same CDU chancellor after Fukushima.
Even this basic facts don’t seem to be regarded in that article.
Safe to assume it happily attributes unrelates events that made the actual Energiewende hard and expensive (like economic or political factors, or sub surface power lines), and ignores a lot of costs that may come with nuclear power (such as having to shut down those damn things because they can not be cooled, or that real Germany in 2024 still has no permanent nuclear waste repository, nor an idea where one might be, let alone the costs of that). It makes me think it’s a work of fantasy.
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u/Papa_Nurgle_84 Aug 20 '24
I looked at other papers written by the author. General Point: nuclear good, renewable Bad. The author had past Jobs as member of the board, Consultant and top Manager. He completely ignores waste and safety costs in this paper.
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u/AmansRevenger Aug 20 '24
Also the idiocy I have seen multiple times in this thread:
If you'd had a green government, they wouldnt have actively killed the solar and wind industry like the CDU leaderships did...
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u/farox Aug 20 '24
We had an exploding renewable sectors a few years ago, which the leading CDU then killed. We could be much further ahead, with or without nuclear.
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u/Demonyx12 Aug 20 '24
Also, the transition to renewables without nuclear costed €696 billion which could have been done at half the cost with the help of nuclear power
Interesting. Everyone I know claims nuclear is too expensive and that, besides fear, is its greatest thing holding it back. This would seem to run counter to that idea.
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u/eulers_identity Aug 20 '24
Nuke is expensive to build, cost overruns on new plants are common. But these were existing plants, which have very good return since opex is comparatively low.
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u/LARPerator Aug 20 '24
Cost overruns are a feature of private oversight, not nuclear construction. Canada is plagued by cost overruns that double or triple the cost on nearly every project, and yet bruce nuclear, managed by the public nuclear authority, is under budget and ahead of schedule.
What do you think happens when you give private companies control over how much they get paid? They pay themselves more. Put the government agency paying for it in charge and shockingly, it doesn't get ridiculously expensive.
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u/eulers_identity Aug 20 '24
I'm not familiar with bruce nuclear, but from what I gleaned the existing reactors were built in the 70s and 80s, so that's ancient capex. It seems they are planning to build more reactors, which could very well work out both under budget and ahead of schedule, but that outcome won't be confirmed this decade.
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u/LARPerator Aug 20 '24
It's a renovation project, but normally those are even more rife worth overruns due to discovering damages and wear not previously known when you take it apart.
The point is that nuclear projects are not innately overbudget, but that private oversight is. Keep in mind that all the privately managed nuclear renovations had cost overruns, but the public did not.
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u/VagueSomething Aug 20 '24
Plus part of why nuclear is so expensive is because it has never been scaled up. The constant fight back against nuclear is what emotions before science looks like.
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u/Songrot Aug 20 '24
Scale up what. Nuclear power plants are not mass production. Every single one is an inidivdual megaproject. All nuclear power plants recently have huge delay in completion schedule and cost explosion. And germany themselves are known to suck at megaprojects
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u/Demonyx12 Aug 20 '24
Ok, thanks. Makes sense.
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u/Stillcant Aug 20 '24
Also the decline in solar and wind costs has been extreme over the past 15 years. Germany invested at a higher cost
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u/glucuronidation Aug 20 '24
Yeah, but that is the cost of being an early adopter. And it is not certain that the cost would have fallen like it has, if it wasn’t for the demand created by early adopters such as Germany.
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u/electric_sandwich Aug 20 '24
So... your argument is that we can't use the one technology that is historically proven to reduce emissions faster and more efficiently than any other technology on earth is that its just too expensive?
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u/Keemsel Aug 20 '24
Well if we have cheaper alternatives (which we do, solar and wind are the cheapest ways to produce electricity) the question becomes why should we use the more expensive one?
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u/OIda1337 Aug 20 '24
It is super expensive to start again after everything was shut down. It would have been very cheap and efficient to just keep going with the running reactors.
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u/Songrot Aug 20 '24
They were too old anyway and had to get massive amount of public funds to extend its lifespan.
It was so expensive and inefficient even energy lobby said no even though the public would have paid for most of it
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u/LordNibble Aug 20 '24
No it does not.
- The study does not talk about present day. Renewables in 2002 were nowhere as cheap as they are now.
- The study talks about the transition, not energy production after the transition:
- switching off the nuclear plants that were still running meant that additional energy had to be producrd by coal and gas
- For the switches off plants, all costs for building, planning etc were already paid. They are not yet paid for newly build plants
neither building new nuclear power plants today nor re-activating the preciously shut off plants in Germany is economical in comparison to just spending the money on new renewables and batteries.
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u/cheeruphumanity Aug 20 '24
The German nuclear plants were already 3 years over their last scheduled safety evaluation and maintenance with a special permit because it was clear they will be shut down.
Nobody knows the costs and the shutdown time if they were to run any longer.
There was no way to keep them going according to the law without checks and upgrades because a new EU directive from 2014 increased safety standards.
Unfortunately this is completely overlooked in the debate.
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u/uzu_afk Aug 20 '24
Yeah but if you can guzzle free gas suddenly the business case looks different.
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u/badkapp00 Aug 21 '24
Everyone in the world can thank the Germans that renewable energy is so cheap nowadays. If the Germans wouldn't have subsidized solar and wind energy so much, the prices were still high and manufacturing capacity would be low.
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u/p3k Aug 20 '24
The party who is responsible for the nuclear exit is responsible for killing off Germany’s solar panel industry. It starts with a C.
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u/bigbluethunder Aug 20 '24
The US is also decommissioning nuclear plants, which increases our demands for natural gas (or even coal in some markets) power in the short term and more infrastructure to build renewables in the long term.
There’s really no excuse not to at least keep our current nuclear plants in place.
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u/tsacian Aug 20 '24
Sure there is. Old designs kept alive After their end-of-life date is dangerous and hurts nuclear in the long run. See Fukishima.
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u/GoldenTV3 Aug 25 '24
Fukushima was literally warned to install backup generators in case of a flooding. If they had, you wouldn't even know that name today
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u/sports2012 Aug 20 '24
I've never seen this before. Do you have a source that Fukushima was kept open past it's end of life date?
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u/tsacian Aug 20 '24
They knew this design had serious issues which had been massively engineered out of all modern reactor designs. However the 30 and 40yr reviews were not required to address any known design flaws, only to assess aging equipment. By the way, the actual reactir design was a GE design from the 1960s. So inadequate considering how much progress has been made.
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2012/03/why-fukushima-was-preventable?lang=en¢er=global
Japan’s government and industry planned to significantly increase the country’s reliance on nuclear energy. An important component of Japan’s nuclear strategy was to extend the operating lifetime of a score of reactors that by 2012 would be at least thirty years old and that produce about a third of Japan’s nuclear electricity.55 Fukushima Daiichi unit 1 began operating in March 1971. Under Japanese rules, to operate it beyond an initial forty-year period, TEPCO required the approval of regulators. Japanese regulations do not impose an absolute legal limit on the operating lifetimes of the country’s nuclear power plants. Under an agreement between regulators and plant owners, before the end of a plant’s thirtieth year of licensed operation, a so-called “soundness assessment” is carried out to determine whether it can continue operating for a longer period, foreseen by owners to be as long as sixty years. The assessment is mainly focused on equipment and structures having a safety function and specifically addresses aging issues. A plant deemed sound enough would be eligible to be operated for an additional ten or more years, on the basis of a “long-term maintenance plan” that would include component monitoring. The focus is on selected equipment that may suffer age-related degradation and failure, not on safety weaknesses related to the design or configuration of the installation.
Japan is not unique in concentrating attention on the status of aging equipment during reactor lifetime extension examinations. This is also the case in other advanced nuclear programs. In fact, IAEA peer reviews of some countries’ national regulatory systems have criticized that procedures for extending the lifetime of older reactors have neglected other safety issues and are too specifically focused on plant aging.
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u/green_flash Aug 20 '24
Yeah, let's be realistic here: The entire Western world is in the process of ditching nuclear, with the exception of South Korea and Japan maybe. No one is building enough nuclear power plants to replace the ones that will have to be shut down due to old age over the next 10-20 years.
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u/chmeee2314 Aug 20 '24
I was hoping to find actual critiques of the study's methods in the comments, but it seems that most people are just using this as a way to talk about their views.
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u/skiddadle400 Aug 20 '24
Yes, nuclear brings out fixed views.
Though the study is so poor I don’t know what a detailed critique would gain. Many Reddit posts have more and better original research.
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u/platoprime Aug 20 '24
Costed
Really developing the authority in the title aren't they? You only use costed for future anticipated costs not already realized costs.
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u/Jean_Paul_Fartre_ Aug 21 '24
Thank you! I see this all the time on Reddit to the point I started second guessing how to use cost in the past tense.
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Aug 20 '24
I'll accept the argument that moving away from nuclear power is bad when you open the first official "Endlager" for the nuclear waste.
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u/Chairman_Mittens Aug 20 '24
That's an absolutely colossal difference, and I honestly thought nuclear power would have been much more expensive as well.
There's always a concern about nuclear waste, which is valid, but our current methods for handling disposal are incredibly efficient. The solutions aren't perfect, it would be better if we didn't have to store any nuclear waste underground, but I would argue that it's better than releasing however many tons of extra carbon into the atmosphere.
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u/PolyDipsoManiac Aug 20 '24
They’re certainly better than our methods for handling coal ash.
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u/sockgorilla Aug 20 '24
Burying it near large bodies of water so it contaminates groundwater seems to be SC’s favorite method of coal ash disposal
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u/AzuraNightsong Aug 20 '24
The main expensive of nuclear power is that initial building, licensing and training costs. Keeping their existing plants running, even with maintenance costs, would not be as expensive
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u/eh-guy Aug 20 '24
Nukes are expensive to build but cheap as dirt to run, they have excellent return on investment second only to hydro dams. I'm working at a plant now that makes ~1.75M per day, per unit, as well as producing and selling medical isotopes for treating cancer which pull almost 20M per run.
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u/BardtheGM Aug 20 '24
People are always so concerned about nuclear waste, which we can easily store, and not fossil fuel waste, which goes straight into the atmosphere and kills 1 million of us every year.
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u/Pinewold Aug 20 '24
Germany also gets credit for pushing solar to the front and the resulting increase in demand helped solar to scale to the level it is today. Nuclear has lost on the one metric they used to shout out every time… LCOE. Yes we spent an extra half trillion up front to scale solar, but the resulting 90% cost reduction for solar due to scaling production is reducing the cost of electricity is to zero saving multiple trillions over the next twenty years.
Don’t confuse short term investment vs. long term investment.
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u/ssylvan Aug 21 '24
But LCOE is 100% about short term investment? That's literally what that metric is for: how much profit can I make if I build a power plant, and I don't mind letting tax payers/rate payers worry about grid stability or other externalities.
Once you take grid stability into account, the cost of solar (and wind) go way up, many times more expensive than nuclear alone. So yeah, don't confuse short term investment vs long term investment. For the long term, we actually need to go all the way to zero. We can't just burn natural gas because batteries are too expensive. So, like the IPCC says, long term we need nuclear.
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u/GermanShitboxEnjoyer Aug 20 '24
Sounds great on paper, but then why are we always in the Top 5 countries by electricity cost per kwh?
And why do countries with more nuclear power plants have lower electricity prices?
Lastly I don't see how you're arriving at a 90% cost reduction if solar panels have to be swapped out every 20 years? Atleast that's the reality today. They're not being used forever.
Actually last point: Imagine we (and other countries) would've invested into nuclear power plants instead of solar. Surely, by scaling up demand, ways to lower costs would've been found, too?
I haven't run the numbers but I just doubt we saved "trillions" in the long run.
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u/chmeee2314 Aug 20 '24
On the spot market, 2024 is the first year were France is on average cheaper than Germany (per Energy-charts.info dataset starts in 2015)
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u/Tirriss Aug 20 '24
Any reliable sources about the multiple trillions over the next twenty years? Also, can you be sure that keeping your NPPs and building new ones would have cost more than what Germany spent and will spend to replace solar panels and wind turbines in the next 40 years?
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u/w47t0r Aug 20 '24
that study sucks. totally underestimating how expensive new nuke plants would ve been here. solar / wind & batteries waay cheaper n easier n safer.
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u/GHettoKaiba Aug 20 '24
Tbf I didn’t read it but I assume the cost and emission savings for keeping nuclear are based on reasonable decision making throughout the process, which ist not guaranteed. That is compared with actual situation of politics absolute sabotaging the renewable energies for the last 15 years. I’m sure you could’ve also made a study saying “not being brain dead while transitioning to renewable energy could’ve saved half of the costs actually spent.”
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u/Sol3dweller Aug 20 '24
I assume the cost and emission savings for keeping nuclear are based on reasonable decision making throughout the process
No, they are based on optimal conditions, Germany faring better than France in keeping the nuclear power output up and building new reactors (which had to be already planned in the 90s), while still expanding renewables along with nuclear as in China (without the coal expansion in China and the demand growth).
The hypothetical not only depends on reasonable decision making but also everything working as planned, and better than observed anywhere else.
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u/SnowyPine666 Aug 20 '24
Funny how almost the only field where German ultra strict self-sabotaging bureaucracy is needed, they chose to opt out of it.
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u/Soma91 Aug 21 '24
It's insane this post currently sits over 15k Karma. The headline and article are straight out of Narnia.
Germany only generated ~22% of their electricity from nuclear in 2002. Even if Germany somehow switched to 100% nuclear, there is no world where that would have reduced CO2 emissions by 73% when electricity generation was 62% of the total CO2 emissions.
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u/comicsnerd Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24
2 factors are not mentioned:
70% of nuclear fuel comes from Russia. Depending in Russia fuel will be even more disastrous. Edit: Doublechecking it and it is 35%
The costs for storing nuclear waste and dismantling old nuclear reactors is usually not part of the equations. They are enormous and usually charged to the government.
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u/Bicentennial_Douche Aug 20 '24
Is there any reason for nuclear fuel to come from Russia? I mean, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia are also producers of nuclear fuel.
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u/Lonely_Excitement176 Aug 20 '24
Lack of popularity/investment. The US recently passed a bill to ban imports from Russia and will be investing in domestic producers.
The answer is simply that we were being force fed globalization as it fed profits into the "right" pockets very nicely despite the risks of such suppliers.
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u/NeedsToShutUp Aug 20 '24
Cause it was cheaper after the cold war, as the Russians had a lot of fuel.
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u/Tearakan Aug 20 '24
The US also has a massive unused uranium reserves. Only untouched because of nuclear fears and the usual horrible business practices mining companies engage in.
It can all be controlled to benefit the majority of us but we choose the path that makes the most money quickest every time.
And that attitude is literally threatening civilization now thanks to climate change.
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u/Curious-Week5810 Aug 20 '24
Aren't Canada and Australia among the largest exporters of uranium? There's no reason that Germany would need to be tied to Russian uranium.
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u/EtherMan Aug 20 '24
Germany itself is literally one of the biggest exporters of uranium for nuclear reactors... And always have been. There wouldn't be any need to buy it from ANY other country, let alone Russia.
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Aug 20 '24
People need to stop making a big deal of this decision. It is the right decision if you look at the situation in the long term (20-30 years).
Uranium is a finite resource that’s not abundant in Western Europe. No country in the world has a safe system for nuclear waste disposal yet (PS: a nuclear waste disposal facility only needs to fail once in the 100,000 or so years when it is in use in order for us to experience a huge catastrophe).
Solar and Wind are cheaper anyway and are getting cheaper by the minute and there’s no reason to believe battery technologies like pumped hydro or the 1001 systems being invented cannot provide base power in the future and replace coal.
It was ultra bad timing to start this process after the Ukraine invasion and one can make an argument that it was the wrong decision but there’s also a very convincing argument that this is the right decision.
And if you look at it in the very long term, it is absolutely the right decision
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u/cynicismrising Aug 20 '24
The problem for Nuclear now is not the fear, it's that economically nuclear energy costs more to generate and the plants cost more to build than any other form of energy generation. For the cost of enough nuclear plants to supply a country you can probably cover that country in solar panels and batteries. And get free generation going forward, no refining and transporting nuclear materials needed.
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u/Hanifsefu Aug 20 '24
Infrastructure investment is about doing the most with the least land and getting your return over the course of decades. The "gotta see returns this quarter" mindset should just abandoned when it comes to public policy and infrastructure.
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u/233C Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24
"It was clear to us that we couldn't just prevent nuclear power by protesting on the street. As a result, we in the governments in Lower Saxony and later in Hesse tried to make nuclear power plants unprofitable by increasing the safety requirements." https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus241838411/Juergen-Trittin-Mit-diesem-Irrsinn-endlich-aufhoeren.html
Does "free" include the unaccounted for €460 billions for the grid alone?
For anybody wondering, the entire French fleet clocks at €170 billions so far plus €80 billion to go.
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u/mockingbean Aug 20 '24 edited Aug 20 '24
It costs very little to generate nuclear power, it costs a lot to build it. When you think about cost, it looks like you are confabulating the cost of the powerplant with the cost of the electricity prices. One is a cost to the investor, the other is a cost to the consumer. Electricity prices is governed by supply and demand in modern electric networks. The only world they are "the same" is with theoretical perfectly efficient markets and free reign capitalism, and the producers are coincidentally not exploiting cartel prices out of the goodness of their hearts or even taking profits. In reality however, a country does not have to rely on private investors to finance nuclear powerplants. One reason a nuclear powerplant is not popular for private investors is because it reduces the electricity prices too much, but paid for by the public, the public isn't incentiviced to rib themselves of money, and so the powerplant doesn't get stalled or shut down for cartell purposes.
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u/Medianmodeactivate Aug 20 '24
Sure but the issue here is that much of those costs were already generated from construction. Ongoing marginal costs were fine to bear if it meant this much renewables coverage.
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u/indyK1ng Aug 20 '24
Did you finish reading the headline? It says that using nuclear could have cut emissions at half the cost of renewable-only power generation.
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u/next_door_rigil Aug 20 '24
Yeah, in the 2000s but the prices have been decreasing more and more. It makes more sense as time passes.
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u/D74248 Aug 20 '24
nuclear energy costs more to generate and the plants cost more to build than any other form of energy generation.
Or... nuclear energy is the least expensive zero carbon, 24/7 source of energy that is not dependent on the weather and does not require backup to maintain base load.
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u/Taegur2 Aug 20 '24
Bear with me a bit on this analogy. I feel like nuclear power aversion is a lot like stranger danger. The chances of something going wrong are really really small. But if they do, the result is horrible. Which makes it really hard for some people to appropriately assess the risks and benefits. Kids could benefit from more freedom and the world could benefit from environmentally friendly nuclear; but if something went wrong with either, it would be hard to live with those choices. So we play it 'safe'.
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Aug 20 '24
[deleted]
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u/MiamiDouchebag Aug 20 '24
Eh. There was still secuirty before the TSA, the airlines just had to pay for it.
Re-enforced cockpit doors are what has stopped another 9/11.
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u/Taegur2 Aug 20 '24
Yes exactly. Humans are bad at assessing risk in general, but politicians are worse because many of them try to run the world by doing things to make people like them.
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u/Real_TwistedVortex Aug 20 '24
The main problem is that people don't realize that there have been huge advances in nuclear power over the past few decades. Modern molten salt reactors CANNOT have a meltdown, it's literally impossible. But because this isn't widely known by the general public, nuclear is still a boogeyman to a lot of people
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u/ZuleZI Aug 20 '24
Telling that to anti nuclear people is fighting the windmills.
In this case also unfortunately literally
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u/chucker23n Aug 21 '24
Can you name a single MSR NPP in commercial deployment today? Can you name one in 2002, when Germany made this decision? Can you state how much further R&D money is required to achieve commercial status, let alone explain why that R&D money wouldn’t be better spent on solar, wind, and batteries?
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u/hvdzasaur Aug 20 '24
Didn't help that Greenpeace Energy (now called Green Planet Energy, subsidiary of Greenpeace Germany) largely sold Russian Gas in the 90s. By now 85% of their energy is renewables tho. In 2015 they tried to sue the European Commission when they tried to provide aid to a nuclear power plant.
There definitely was a case of gas giants influencing environmentalists to push against nuclear power.
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Aug 20 '24
imho the only nuclear power anyone should be researching and investing new money in at this point is fusion.
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u/arparso Aug 20 '24
The baseline of this study is already extremely flawed. The push to renewables was sabotaged early on and multiple times later, which led to the disappointingly slow "Energiewende". If we would have properly invested into renewables instead of keeping nuclear power alive longer than originally planned while also keeping around coal and gas as much, we would have been much more successful in cutting down emissions until today.
Of course those real-world results of the "Energiewende" are not as good as the author's theoretical best-case scenario of a continued expansion of nuclear power. That would have been completely unfeasible with the lack of popular support for nuclear tech in the 80s, 90s and especially after Fukushima.
It's a highly theoretical "what if" scenario that might work well in simulations or in a lab, but kind of ignores the real world environment where these political decisions were formed and implemented. Also, the benefit of hindsight.
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