God dam people are fucking stupid nuclear is safer then coal wind and solar and better for the planet https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU here is my source and if you want his ask him
The problem is the waste. Germany has radioactive waste and it couldn’t find a suitable place to deposit it for over 30 years. I think it’s still somewhere on rails or in temporary storages. It’s horrible and they don’t want to collect more of it.
Here is more about the problem that no one talks about: https://youtu.be/uU3kLBo_ruo
Nuclear waste is a potential issue. Fossil fuel waste is a major issue right now.
The fact that the waste for nuclear is entirely contained is very good. It allows us to place it in permanent storage location like the one in Finland from your video, and perhaps even launch it off the planet in one or two centuries. There is no containing co2, only reducing.
Putting highly radioactive waste on a rocket is a bad, bad idea.
And guess what: solar and wind have neither CO2 nor nuclear waste as a product, and are cheaper to build and operate as well. Nuclear is comically expensive, and only gets by with massive state subsidies
And guess what: solar and wind canot take care of base load. Only oil, gas, coal, or nuclear can be run 24-7 with varying output in response to demand. Choose one.
As I suspected. Conservatism is the reason we can’t have nice things. Again.
What do you mean? Don’t you think transitioning to mostly renewables while coal and gas go down are good things?
Nuclear is affordable, efficient and proven. Abandoning it instead of promoting it was a dumb, conservative move that hurt everyone involved. Except Russian billionaires, of course.
Nuclear power is expensive and slow to build. Wind and solar are much, much cheaper and quicker.
Nuclear is only expensive and slow if you’re building reactors from 1960-s. Modern micro- and nano-reactors can be put in every yard in a matter of months if not weeks.
I don’t understand, you think we can build miniature nuclear plants for every single house in weeks?
More details here, with proof links, etc https://lemmy.world/comment/9744519
I wish you were right, but you are not. Those reactors don’t exist.
Except they do exist. Almost. First SMRs were scheduled to be deployed right about, but the pandemic fucked it up. The project is back on track though.
MNR study was finished in 2019, right before the pandemic. Feasibility was also finished during the pandemic and the development grants were awarded.
Nano-reactors are still a future, sadly, but if the investments will keep up it won’t be long.
It won’t have been long for a long time now. It’s not a feasible concept to rely on a maybe. We need massive amounts of clean energy now and the way to do that now is water, wind and solar. If these wonder reactors are one day reality that’s great.
Where have they been built?
The idiots on here firmly believe that nuclear creates zero waste. In their deranged head there is no nuclear waste that will last for longer than humanity existed.
Compared to renewables, nuclear creates pretty much zero waste. The whole story of nuclear energy created less waste than one year of waste from solar panels alone.
Predictions that the nuclear exit would leave Germany forced to use more coal and facing rising prices and supply problems, meanwhile, have not transpired. In March 2023—the month before the phaseout—the distribution of German electricity generation was 53 percent renewable, 25 percent coal, 17 percent gas, and 5 percent nuclear. In March 2024, it was 60 percent renewable, 24 percent coal, and 16 percent gas.
Overall, the past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide, a 60-year low in coal use, sizeable emissions cuts, and decreasing energy prices.
This is my biggest take away from this article.
Yeah but if Germany hadn’t been so anti-nuclear, by 2023 it could have been (for example) 53% renewable, 5% coal, 17% gas and 25% nuclear. Comparing the dying tail end of nuclear to just after it finally died is not useful.
The article is badly researched.
This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022
The red-green coalition did not announce the 2022 date. They (Greens/SPD) announced a soft phase-out between 2015-2020 in conjunction with building renewables. This planned shift from nuclear to renewables was reverted by Merkel (CDU = conservatives) in 2010. They (CDU) changed their mind one year later in 2011 and announced the 2022 date; but without the emphasis on replacing it with renewables. This back and forth was also quite the expensive mistake by the CDU on multiple levels, because energy corporations were now entitled financial compensation for their old reactors.
I’d like to add, my view. I’m from Lower Saxony and in an area nearby they tried for years to establish a temporary storage for the high nuclear waste. I never trusted the notion that the temporary storage will be save, properly maintained and kept from leaking into the local water supply.
Add to that, that we have had very old reactors who were constantly extended rather than properly renewed. Further emphasising that they won’t care proper for the waste products.
Then Fukushima happened, the movement for anti nuclear gained massive momentum. I assumed of course that the lack in energy will be compensated by building renewables and subsidising homeowners to build their own solar on their roofs. Why wouldn’t we, we were already talking about increasing renewables to safe the climate.
The announcement came that atom is being phased out. Big hooray for everyone who had to live next to the old plants or in areas where end-storage ‘solutions’ were.
Aaaaaaaand they increased the god damn coal which is way worse and really no one wanted but the lobby for coal and fossile fuels.
Now lots of ppl. on the internet always advocate for nuclear, but never address the fears of the ppl. properly.
The thing is, having a high nuclear toxic waste storage in your local area is shite just as shite it is to have the damn ash piles from coal.
If nuclear really wants to make a proper comeback, in my opinion the first thing they need to solve is the waste. We have too much of it already and have solar, wind and water (tidal preferably over damns because those fuckers can break if not maintained proper) who do not create any nasty waste and by products.
Nuclear is also very expensive and takes a long time to build. Meanwhile the cost of solar reduced by almost 90% in the last decade.
Nuclear is only expensive and slow to build if you’re building reactors from 1960-s.
The real problem is that there are no renewable solutions for base load, nuclear is the best we’ve got. Renewables are good, but they’re spotty, you can’t produce renewable power on demand or scale it on demand, and storing it is also a problem. Because of that you still need something to fill in the gaps for renewables. Now your options there are coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. That’s it, that’s your options. Pick one.
If we can successfully get cold fusion working we’ll finally have a base power generation option that doesn’t have (many) downsides, but until then nuclear power is the least bad option.
So yes, if you tell them “no nuclear”, you’re going to get more coal and gas plants, coal because it’s cheap, and gas because it’s marginally cleaner than coal.
If we can successfully get cold fusion working
the viability of all your opinions are now immediately called into question
Why? It’s an active area of research with several companies and universities trying to solve the problem. There’s also a chance hot fusion succeeds although to my knowledge nobody has actually gotten close to solving that particular problem either. Tokamaks and such are still energy negative when taken as a whole (a couple have claimed energy positive status, but only by excluding the power requirements of certain parts of their operation). I guess maybe I should have just said fusion instead of cold fusion, but either way there are no working energy positive fusion systems currently.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not claiming that anyone has a working cold fusion device, quite the opposite. Nobody has been able to demonstrate a working cold fusion device to date. Anybody claiming they have is either lying or mistaken. But by the same token nobody has been able to show an energy positive hot fusion device either. There’s a couple that have come close but only by doing things like hand waving away the cost to produce the fuel, or part of the energy cost of operating the containment vessel, to say nothing of the significant long term maintenance costs. I’ve not seen evidence of anybody getting even remotely close to a financially viable fusion reactor of any kind.
Yeah the difference is hot fusion works, see: the sun. Cold fusion would require a fundamental change in how we understand physics works. It’s junk science.
Nuclear is not an option since it can not be scaled up and down fast enough to follow changes in demand (or the changes in very predictable renewable output) , so you’re left with pumped storage, grid interconnectivity , and demand shifting until we can cheaply use the excess in renewables to make synthetic fuels.
What kind of crack are you smoking? The entire point of the nuclear is so that it can take the base load that we rely on Fossil fuels to cover so that we can use renewables and battery storage in combination with nuclear power to meet peak demand.
Careful. You are waking all the people telling you that it isn’t much waste that those power plants produce and its so easy to store it long term.
The same people that likely would oppose a storage like that in their own neighbourhood. I feel often people from outside Germany forget how densely populated it is, it is very hard to find area not somehow close to anyone.
And I would also never trust the promise that this storage next to my home is very definitely going to be so so safe an great.
I will happily sell the land under my house to let you store sealed vessels of nuclear material. There permanently. I can do that with 100% confidence because I understand the science involved in the matters. If it’s buried deep enough in a proper container, there is no risk.
ITT the church of nuclear energy strikes again.
Let’s skip renewables, pretend there’s enough fissionable material and start a straw man discussion about coal my brothers in nuclear. Atom.
Because there was a massive coal lobby and Merkel was complete garbage. Next.
Try reading the article. Coal went down drastically.
Interesting. I read many articles about Germany doing the opposite and investing into coal mines the last years. Maybe I am misinformed. I recalled some big anti coal protests last year
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/26/german-windfarm-coalmine-keyenberg-turbines-climate
When I was a kid, Chernobyl happened. We weren’t that far away and although I was very little I still remember the fear and uncertainty in my parent’s faces. The following years were marked by research about what we can no longer eat, where our food comes from, etc
I also remember the fights about where to store nuclear waste.
I don’t want to burn coal. I am pretty upset about what happened to our clean energy plans. But I will also never trust nuclear again. And I think, so do many in my generation.
Sorry but this sounds like: A car crashed when I was young because the driver was drunk. I will never trust a car again.
…Which is a perfectly normal thing to feel. Car crash happended that affected them, now they try to avoid cars.
It’s emotions, not logic. Especially to protest the existence of cars and trying to rid the world of them. In exchange for, say, horses which would kill even more people. All because of a drunk driver (better analogy would be a drunk driver that had a blow device but managed to bypass it).
Yeah, and? Are you discounting how powerful emotions can be versus logic? There’s an entire industry (psychology) around this and they still haven’t solved it.
That’s the thing. When it comes to nuclear they think it’s logic, when in reality it’s emotion.
