Germany shutting down nuclear reactors

[Wombat]

The cost-efficiency of solar power will pass the nuclear power sooner or later

I was speaking about the risks

all speculations. right now wind and solar energy sux. it requires too much space, solar panels use tons of water to stay clean and work at 100% efficiency, technology is expensive.

stop talking about speculations, seriously. come back with some real facts.

[Teutooni]

Nuclear Power has been widely accepted and knowledged as transit-technology because of it's hazardous waste and high risks of egolocial catastrophies.

This.

Nuclear fission is not a long term solution. I don't know exact figures, but global uranium supply is not endless. That alone would limit it. Solar, wind, geothermal or water power are not viable everywhere, however. There are definite advantages in nuclear and fossil fuel power plants you can station strategically where the transit power loss is low, and they produce energy consistently regardless of weather or time of day. For the global economy to continue its growth, we need such power stations with enough fuel to last for the forseeable future. That is, AdvFus.

[PicassoCT]

Thorium? Uranium was a transit technology used because of coldwar-strategys...

[Satirik]

Scientific knowledge is the only logical body of knowledge to believe to.

But yeah i know many people prefer fairytales :)

global warming because of human made CO┬▓ is more a religion than a scientific knowledge im sorry

[PicassoCT]

Yeah, scientific infighting, go for it bitches- if you dont mind while you do the mudwrestling, i will start my little promiscurity& money for eternal-happiness cult in the appalled audience...

[Licho]

Cost efficiency is really strange measure in free market economy because externalities are often not included..

=> cost of long term nuclear waste storage, environmental side effects of uranium mining and enriching etc, finiteness of resource (uranium wont last forever, at best few more decades then it has to be switched to fastbreeders and use U238 or Thorium).

Similar can be said for coal generation etc..

Im sure wind has also some unaccounted externalities but they are far smaller and even now its cost effective in many locations against nuclear power.


More techhy look at technology is energy returned per energy invested. Which takes into account energy needed to produce, install, run and dismantnle energy source vs. energy produced by it.

In this measure wind is pretty efficient:


Note that fossil sources used to be more efficient, oil used to be mined at EROI 100, now its probably around 20 worldwide - because it has to be extracted from harder places using more and more complex technology.

Of course you need much bigger EROI than 1 or you are just wasting energy instead of getting new one. Biofuels are often energy sink instead of energy resource, because they have EROI 0.2-3 - fossil fuel inputs put into their production are not outweighted enough by photosynthetic gains. (This does not mean biofuels are useless, its good to have source of oil, its just not energy source).

Graph displaying rapid decline of EROI (of mined resource,not of full powerplant):

[Jools]

Solar and wind are ok, but storing the energy they generate to be used when it's wanted is hard.

How about estores?

[KDR_11k]

The cost-efficiency of solar power will pass the nuclear power sooner or later

I was speaking about the risks

all speculations. right now wind and solar energy sux. it requires too much space, solar panels use tons of water to stay clean and work at 100% efficiency, technology is expensive.

stop talking about speculations, seriously. come back with some real facts.

You try real facts instead of made-up ones. Solar panels don't need a lot of space, you can place them on rooftops which are otherwise unused space.

[Gota]

advestores are more efficient.

[nightcold]

The cost-efficiency of solar power will pass the nuclear power sooner or later

I was speaking about the risks

all speculations. right now wind and solar energy sux. it requires too much space, solar panels use tons of water to stay clean and work at 100% efficiency, technology is expensive.

stop talking about speculations, seriously. come back with some real facts.

do you have actual have facts to back this claim of space up???, the state i live in has a ridiculous amount of open fields, i can't think of any nations/states that have comepleatly uban-ed every square inch

u also said some thing about wind makeing to much noise????i have news for you mate, they are not gana make the wind farms in your backyard.....

it is true, green energy is right now not efficient enough to be cost effective compared to fossil fuels(all this means is that we cant count on markets to save us from global warming)

All you eurofags/ hippies need stop making up all that nonsense about global warming, everyone knows it is a conspiracy to get us hard working rednecks to stop beating our wives...yeeeee haww!!

[PicassoCT]

Brilliant Plan B: We install a airconditioner for the planet, problem solved. Neeext!

[dansan]

We have been talking about the power plants all the time, but forgot that this is just one part of technological changes.

The energy change is not only about exchanging power plants. For the last 10y Germany had a program that made credits from banks for house-building and house-renovation cheaper when you installed warmth insulation. New houses by law must be built really energy efficient.
Normal light bulbs have been prohibited last year, you can only buy energy saving bulbs now.

I am in the process together with some people to build a house for us (~20 adults and ~10-15 children) that will produce more thermal _and_ electric power than it consumes. The cost will be the same as other houses of the same size (we are not rich, just smart )

Thermal power (consumption is _much_ higher than electric power) will be produced by solar thermal panel (not PV) and ground warmth. Electric power will be produced by PV in summer and wind in winter.

All of this in a city (Berlin) - a house for ppl with medium to low income.

The energy change is about small power plants. Nowadays everyone can have a power production in its cellar. If you produce heat, you can always make electricity from what gets "lost" - cogeneration (MicroCHP/MiniCHP).

There is a "green" power producer in Germany (Lichtblick) that sells you for just 5000Ôé¼ a MicroCHP (with gas) to heat up your house. All they want from you is 70% of the profit you make from the surplus electric power production.

The biggest challenge in Germany today is not the change of the big power plants, but the change that the power grid needs. More energy must be transported from the wind mills in the north (in the sea) to the south, electricity gets produced more and more in a distributed way and energy from renewable sources is not so steady as from nuclear or coal power plants, so you need a broader mix of producers to compensate more dynamically.

[dansan]

maybe it is dangerous, but once there was human mistake, and second time tsunami wave. more ppl died in airplaines crashes than due to nuclear powerplant.

That doesn't mean anything. If there were as many power plants as airplanes it might be reversed.
Also: a technology that means catastrophy when there is a natural event or a human makes a mistake - totally safe.

United Nations Scientific Committee on Effects of Atomic Radiation

Fun fact: it has become public, that there is a secret contract between WHO and IAEO from the year 1959 that prohibits the WHO to publicize any scientific research without prior approval by the IAEO :)

The workers in Fukushima were exposed to 250 Millisievert. 100 mS means to have a high probability to get cancer.

The Price Anderson act makes them pay for insurance, but there is a liability cap which gets anti-nukes riled up. It's set at $US2 Billion.

$US2 Billion is not near the cost of the waist disposal, let alone of the cost of an accident.
(What does "gets anti-nukes riled up" mean (sorry, my bad english)).

Once the waste has been decaying for about 300 years it's pretty harmless - plutonium and uranium have long half-lives but low activity over our lifetimes.

Half-life of Plutonium: 24.000 years
Half-life of Uranium: 703.000.000 years
The "low activity" you are talking about is the temperature that has fallen due to having the rods cooled and separated. But the radioactivity is still high and dangerous. Only after its half-life the activity is half.

Good that there is plenty of experience with long time storage of nuclear waist. I feel totally safe.


BTW: Does anybody really think that one of the biggest industrial nations of the world would radically change its power production if it wouldn't calculate a netto win from it?

The "green party" is so succesfull here, because there is a consensus in society that they will bring the needed change for future prosperity. (No hippies, just modern capitalists.)

Sorry for the long posts, today I seem to have this defect -> http://xkcd.com/386/

[Licho]

Radiation 100mSv meaning "high probabality of cancer" WHAT??
Get your facts straight man - its the lowest dose when increase is measurable...

100mSv = additional 1% risk of cancer .. big whoops when some 20+% people normally get a cancer in their lifetime.. out of which 30-35% are caused by diet, 25-30% to tabacco, 15-20% infections .. so yeah the dose could be equivalent of couple of junk meals..


And half life of uranium being long is not really a big deal - it also means its not very radioactive. (Of course unless you get chain reaction like in reactor).

Also in the waste there should be not much U235 not to mention plutonium which is not produced by civilian reactors. U235 is primary fuel, waste is mainly decay chains of U235.


Oh and wind plants are barely audible. I stood right below gigantic vestas 3MW tourbine at high winds (i calculated tips were moving at over 500km/h) and it was barely audible..

[Gota]

why are people coming here to confuse everyone with hard facts?

[REVENGE]

Terrestrial solar power is not capable of sustaining current power usage levels.

[HeavyLancer]

Also: a technology that means catastrophy when there is a natural event or a human makes a mistake - totally safe.

Everything is risky. Nuclear power has a very low risk. Remember that

Code: Select all

Risk = Probability of an event occuring * severity of event

Fun fact: it has become public, that there is a secret contract between WHO and IAEO from the year 1959 that prohibits the WHO to publicize any scientific research without prior approval by the IAEO :)

If it's 'secret' then why have you heard of it? Got proof?

$US2 Billion is not near the cost of the waist disposal, let alone of the cost of an accident.
(What does "gets anti-nukes riled up" mean (sorry, my bad english)).

Price-Anderson is accident insurance - if an event like Fukushima occurs to a reactor the most likely outcome is that after shutting the plant down safely the reactor in question will be decomissioned. That money comes out of the decomissioning fund.

And what gets anti-nukes riled up? The mere existence of nuclear power and scary radiation.

Good that there is plenty of experience with long time storage of nuclear waist. I feel totally safe.

They've been working on these problems for the last 50 years. THere are solutions, but every time they go public with them people cry "No! It's not safe enough! Go back and return with another one!", despite the solutions being perfectly reasonable. Let's recap the solutions (and they're all compatible with each other!)

• Reprocess spent fuel into Mixed-Oxide (MOX) fuel that can be put into a current generation nuclear reactor (a Light Water Reactor)
• 'Burn' spent fuel by putting it into a Generation IV reactor such as the IFR or LFTR (new nuclear technology that will be deployed from 2020 onwards)
• Dispose of what's left by putting it into dry cask storage and burying it on the site of the nuclear power plant.

We already do #1 and #3, and #2 is coming along, provided that environmentalists don't block it on the grounds of merely involving fission or radioactive decay. Technical solutions to technical problems. The political one is unsolved, so long as people continue to use emotive language when they talk about the dangers of nuclear power.

BTW: Does anybody really think that one of the biggest industrial nations of the world would radically change its power production if it wouldn't calculate a netto win from it?

France did. They got shafted by the 1973 oil crisis and had hardly any coal reserves. They went for nuclear power, haven't looked back.

Sorry for the long posts, today I seem to have this defect -> http://xkcd.com/386/

I feel like that too :)

[KDR_11k]

if an event like Fukushima occurs to a reactor the most likely outcome is that after shutting the plant down safely the reactor in question will be decomissioned. That money comes out of the decomissioning fund.

That's what happens with the reactor. Who pays for relocating all the people in the now uninhabitable zone?

[Teutooni]

The energy change is about small power plants. Nowadays everyone can have a power production in its cellar. If you produce heat, you can always make electricity from what gets "lost" - cogeneration (MicroCHP/MiniCHP).

I raise you an SMR.

[HeavyLancer]

if an event like Fukushima occurs to a reactor the most likely outcome is that after shutting the plant down safely the reactor in question will be decomissioned. That money comes out of the decomissioning fund.

That's what happens with the reactor. Who pays for relocating all the people in the now uninhabitable zone?

It's not going to be uninhabitable. They'll move people back in a year or so, once the steam and water leaks are plugged it should be pretty safe. Hell, Hiroshima wasn't rendered uninhabitable, Chernobyl is blooming. Just clean it up, give the ecosphere a little bit of a rest and it's all sorted.

SMR

These will be great. Batteries of these will be even safer and easier to deal with if they ever go wrong, most are walk-away safe too.