Germany and Switzerland to phase out Nuclear Power.

No, because it is not cleaner, it produces a different kind of waste.

One has worse short therm effects, which can be overcome faster, while the other will still be problematic several generation after the energy is used.

edited 31st May '11 2:20:43 AM by Osmium

Nuclear waste we can contain. Yes, it's a problem, but the actual volume of nuclear waste produced by nuclear power plants in all of history is still relatively small. Furthermore, it's not a forever thing. It will be radioactive for a long time, yes, but it gets less and less dangerous over time (you're exposed to some natural, low-level background radiation on a regular basis).

Global warming affects the whole planet, and slight changes in temperature can have catastrophic knock-on effects, which means consequences the entire human race will have to deal with and could still be dealing with for centuries to follow.

Well, at least, nuclear power doesn't kill a few tens of thousand people each year, so I think that's a pro. OK, the waste will still be there in a long time from now, but at least, there will be people to solve the problem, while, with other main power sources (read "fossile fuel that can provide continuous and reliable power"), we'll just demolish our ecosystem as a whole in the short and medium term.

edited 31st May '11 2:26:22 AM by RufusShinra

Mainly because we have a somewhat free power market, and neither the German nor the European government would look to kindly at a monopoly. And most of our power providers are already Europe-wide companies.

Like Uchuujinsan and I have said already, this is nothing new, and our economy is well-prepared doing that without raising CO2 that. Say what you want about the former red/green-government, they handled the nuclear phase-out quite well, and the big power companies played along happily. The amount of 'green' energy has nearly tripled here in the last ten years - most of it wind power, and we haven't even started the big offshore windparks yet. The R&D concerning energy storage is really impressive - a lot of research has been put in compressed-air-energy storage, pumped-storage hydroelectricity and quite a lot other concepts. Being one of the first industrial countries going green gives our economy a massive advantage in selling all this worldwide. So don't worry. We'll cope. Ever since the original phase-out plan, our power industry is booming. They don't need nuclear power plants. (Which are quite expensive, if you factor in security measures and long-term storage costs.)

And while fossil fuels will remain for quite a while, they, too, have gone through some changes concerning the CO2 output. Like modern nuclear power plants aren't little Chernobyls in making, new coal plants (that slowly but surely replace all the old ones here) are a little different from 1930ies technology. CO2 storage is another huge R&D field here. Still, there is luckily no (total) increase in fossil fuel plants intented, and there will be no raise in CO2 output from power generation here.

As I said before, in the last month (with seven NPPs spontaneously offline), Germany generated 20 percent more power than needed on its heaviest usage day in 2010. (And power consumption is slowly decreasing.) Over 30% when all NPPs are online. Keeping in mind that they produce less than 25 percent off the total energy output, we can shut them all down, built no new power plants at all, and still have more than 5 percent surplus.

edited 31st May '11 2:31:35 AM by kurushio

After reading that, I'm agreeing even more with the decision to continue the process of quitting nuclear power.

According to the Spiegel, it isn't quite the case, since those seven powerplants were switched off:

"RWE said the country's power imports from France and Czech have been amounting up to 3,000 megawatts and up to 2,000 megawatts respectively. Three quarters of France's power supply comes from nuclear energy while the Czech Republic relies on reactors for 34 percent of its energy needs.

Hildegard Müller, head of the German Association of Energy and Water Industries also said on Monday that power imports were up. "Since March 17, there has been an increase in imports. Flows from France and the Czech Republic have doubled," she said.

[...]

Merkel's nuclear U-turn was widely regarded as a ploy designed to avert defeat for her Christian Democratic Union in a key election in the southern state of Baden-Wurttemberg on March 27. But the CDU and its junior allies, the Free Democratic Party, were voted out of power in the state."

@Nuclear waste dudes: Nuclear waste will not be here in 10,000 years. Yes, it would be if we allowed it to decay, but I would bet strong money we'll make a nuclear plant that can use it sometime in the next 10,000 friggin' years.

Besides that, depleted uranium is barely radioactive. It's only dangerous way later in the decay chain.

By which point it should be safely buried or something.

Yeah, uranium does leave that waste sitting around. Admittedly, even if we weaned off uranium plants in the eventual future, we’d still be paying to house that stuff for...well, longer than any of us would be alive for is the main point.

But as Bobby said, we do know how to deal with it safely, and there’s far less efficient things we could sink money into, despite the costs.

As for how safe nuclear actually is, this is the main reason to be concerned about old power plants being replaced. Unless Germany really believes it can replace the nuclear plants with energy that isn’t something nasty like coal, then promising not to build new plants while keeping older ones that aren’t as potentially resilient seems shortsighted. If that’s what’s actually going to happen. Which it might not. But anyhow...

Most coal plants do indeed produce more radioactive pollution than nuclear does, and even if the plant design can be made less emissive, that coal still has to come from some place. Uranium requires mining as well, but there are still other issues to consider for coal. The plant can be pretty environmentally unfriendly to make, since more of them need to be built to equal one nuke's output, and making cleaner facilities can get expensive. I’m not sure how well one could ever call coal an optimal choice over nuclear unless we were totally out of uranium. Even then there are other nuclear options.

Hell, even if you run out of nuclear, and still want to use cheap fossil fuels, most places have viable natural gas plants, that run both cheaper and cleaner than coal. Although that really depends on the availability of gas, and I think the facilities are more expensive. I am kind of tired right now, so if someone else knows more about this, especially in Germany where this is relevant, feel free to add...

...

The main focus with nuclear replacement here is safety. To put it simply, the reason behind building new plants, and decommissioning old ones isn’t because new uranium plants are that much more efficient. Instead it’s because it ensures an available energy source that is as reliable and effective as the old plant day-to-day, that basically can’t ever become an enormous safety hazard if even the mother of all disasters were to hit it. It would still take something ridiculous to place most of the world’s nuclear plants in any real risk of catastrophic meltdown (like one of history's five largest recorded earthquakes). But leaving old plants is to leave some risk, while replacing them, or shutting them down is to leave none.

So hopefully Germany is not half assed about whatever they are doing...

But you know what? Even if we stay on uranium plants a little longer, there are other viable nuclear plants, that aren’t even the ever-distant fusion, that could be switched to without too much hassle. Methods that have actually been tested, and proven to a fairly extensive degree, have been known for quite some time now. There are even other nuclear fuel sources that are much cleaner, and more abundant than uranium is.

But the military likes using a metal that’s even heavier than lead, and that actually catches on fire when launched at high velocities, causing it to emit tiny, poisonous flecks into the air, that any survivors or passersby who did not have the advantage of firing from a tank several miles away, are now breathing in, with the dust leaving traces of radioactivity on top of all that.

So uranium plants got all the R&D greenlights and funding. Yeah, yeah, there were a few more reasons, but almost all of those happen to be weapons too.

(I’m mostly referring to Thorium based reactors, if you didn’t guess by now, although I haven’t kept up with India’s progress on them)

To sum up my ramblings, I'd agree that if there was any country that could achieve an infrastructural engineering miracle, Germany would be the top three out of my mouth. So whatever they do, as long as they don't half ass it, it will hopefully be progressive.

edited 31st May '11 5:26:03 AM by Toodle

Also, another factor to consider is that under the old system, nuclear plants were taxed in order to subsidize renewable energy development. Without nuclear power, those funds won't be there anymore.

@FF Shinra
The problem is, that it's not done because it has no economic advantages. Unless forced to energy companies have no incentive to upgrade security. It's not a question of being able to upgrade security, it's a question of cost. The longer those plants operate without serious incident, the less is done for their security. Normal human behaviour. As long as the energy sector is private, there are strong reasons to avoid the cost for security measures, especially if nothing has happened so far.

On a different note, I do wonder whether phasing out coal first and nuclear second might have been a better variant. But I don't think it would have been politically feasible.

With full processing of the fuel, the amount of actual waste from nuclear if it powered 100% of the US's power needs, would be somewhat less than a pound a year.

But reprocessing is also a proliferation risk.

IIRC, depleted uranium isn't just dumped underground, it's used in various applications where high density is useful. Weapons is the best known usage.

I saw, somewhere I don't recall offhand, a figure of 1.5% of Germany's power coming from "renewables" (hydro, solar, wind, and maybe geothermal [not sure on the last, not that familiar with German geography), compared to ~22% from nuclear.

How, exactly, do they expect to make up the difference, given that hydro and geothermal are limited by geography, and solar and wind barely qualify as the punchline to a badly told joke? Germany is already, as I understand it, easing away from coal generated power, and seeing as European natural gas production is on the decline◊ even as their NG consumption is on the rise◊ and a large chunk of the German natural gas supply is Russian in origin◊*

Maybe they're hoping to find a mine of pixie dust and unicorn farts?

edited 31st May '11 2:34:21 PM by Nohbody

They will use the untapped power of Bier!

Former Warsaw Pact members such as half of Germany.

Just thought it might be a good idea to point this out.

One things for certain; we have to get off oil as a species. So no, I'm not in favour of this, not if it means more oil use.

^^ Well, yeah, but I was referring more to the countries between Germany and Russia, most of whom have had various unpleasant dealings with Russia within the last decade or so.

I saw, somewhere I don't recall offhand, a figure of 1.5% of Germany's power coming from "renewables

This number is simply wrong, the amount of energy coming from renewable energie (15 %)is nearly the same as the amount of energy coming from nuclear power (20%) I am to lazy to search for the exact numbers. No need for pixy dust and unicorn farts

Dismissing solar and wind as some kind of a punchline to a joke is about as smart as dismissing nuclear power as a plot element in a sci-fi/horror story.

Wind and solar are both great options for renewable energy, especially now that the energy storage issues are getting more tested solutions than they had before.

Could you give some infos about those energy storage solutions? I mean, those able to store a sizeable quantity of energy to cover the inability of solar powerplants to provide power during the night and a good part of the day, or wind powerplants when there is no wind (so, for the case of the solar ones, which will all be off during the night, we're talking about power storage for all of their power capacity during up to 12 hours - each day). As an engineering student, I'd be quite interested to know how this "little" problem has been solved.

edited 31st May '11 3:37:03 PM by RufusShinra

@Deboss’ post

To put it rather bluntly, lots of it ends up fired all over the Afghan landscape.

I know my last post was too long already, but I think I will reiterate. Uranium rounds are denser than lead, but more importantly, catch on fire upon impact with a target, and after they’ve destroyed the presumed target, there is now dangerous dust floating in the area for quite some time afterwards; not just fragments sitting around posing a slight danger to people willing to pick them up, but particles emitting radiation that will be breathed into the body.

But hey, a tank round that catches fire on impact is pretty sweet, right?

—-

^^^The Wiki article, for whatever it's worth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

Estimates already see Germany's onshore wind power as maxed out. Wind power has already proven fairly unreliable in weather it's going to have to be exposed to, with plants from Britain to even Texas failing in various kinds of cold weather. The problems of power storage, and how to keep power available when the wind isn't going makes the matter much harder to deal with, and usually means you need fossil fuel plants on hand to cover for what they're supposed to be providing anyway. It might work as a small supplement, but to a nation with larger power demands, it's not looking like the most viable thing right now. Like I said, though, if anyone can get the best out of it, it's probably the Germans. It's a good place to find out how viable it can be for nations with similar power demands and technological capability.

Commercial solar power cells are as of now, so inefficient for what they cost to make that it's a little silly, especially considering the environmentally unfriendly materials that must be used to create them. Development promises to change this, of course. But it doesn't look like it'll happen anytime soon.

If you haven't read up on thorium, then here's another wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium

Like I said, I haven't been keeping up with what India's doing, so I don't know how much testing they've actually started lately.

Actually, the density is a more important factor than the flammability as that's what provides the APFSDS rounds with such great penetration power. I believe the other material they were looking at was a Tungsten compound with similar carcinogenics effects. The radioactivity isn't that important of a factor.

I can't find where I saw that 1.5%, but on further research it is obviously wrong. As of 2008, renewables are 15.1% of total power generation in Germany, compared to 43.6% by coal (both hard and lignite varieties), 23.3% nuclear, and 13% NG.

As for wind and solar (the former being the biggest source of energy from renewables for Germany) not being jokes, in addition to what Toodle pointed out, above, how far do you think they would have gone without massive subsidies from the government, both direct and indirect?

(And, unsurprisingly, some of that money comes from taxes/fees put on non-renewable plants. When you start to eliminate those plants, guess what else goes away?)