Germany shutting down nuclear reactors

[TradeMark]

What's wrong with storing it on site?

I wonder what happens when someone decides to bomb that area... do they have AA turrets online 24/7 ?

[HeavyLancer]

Same thing that happens when you try to blow up some cylinders of concrete. It's a shitty terrorist target - if you want to take out a power station, go for the transmission lines or switching yards. If you want to cause terror, go bomb an airport, train station or stadium.

[Wombat]

_no_ secure storage for radioactive waste anywhere in the world

erm, barrels + old mining shafts ? there is ton of them.

in Japan there some engineers were badly wounded, you don't know what that means for their future lives

they call them samurai now in japan. they were volunteers. and tyes they are pretty much fkd.

the region around Fukushima needs 20y of decontamination (see Chernobyl)

area around fukushima got smaller radiation than regular 'huge' city.

why would you not want to replace a very dangerous

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.

russians are laying a pipe called Nord Stream

they already did, and they are hardly depended on anyone coz of that.

i like what heavylancer said about cancer :D

[Licho]

Yeah and while global warming does not get any better yet more pressure to burn more dwindling fossils.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... clearpower

Get ready for more droughts, crop failures, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, mass immigration, loss of arable land.

[Wombat]

woah, didnt know anyone except hipps still belive in global warming.

[Licho]

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

But yeah i know many people prefer fairytales :)

[PicassoCT]

Once upon a time, there was alot of god in the gutter, and he was singing, and rumbling, and it was dark. And he said: "Let there be light!"
And there was Licho, at the window yellin: "Shut the fuck up, there are photons, you old boozer, and people are trying to sleep here. Ill call the phd cops!"
And so it was done and god was arrested for causing civil unrest. True Story.

[KDR_11k]

_no_ secure storage for radioactive waste anywhere in the world

erm, barrels + old mining shafts ? there is ton of them.

You throw barrels down there, they decay and release their waste into the aquifer. Fun.

Radioactivity can decay stuff like concrete over time and we're talking about several millennia.

When talking about nuclear safety we don't just have to take the unavoidable risks into account but also the fact that these things are run by corporations who have a strong incentive to cut corners. Look at the gulf oil spill, that shit happened because companies got complacent about risks and just cut too many corners, assuming that the risk created by that was too small to matter. That's pretty bad for things where a catastrophic failure affects huge areas of the planet.

[Wombat]

no actually they do not.

less hollywood plz.

[KDR_11k]

no actually they do not.

less hollywood plz.

Says the guy who just dismissed global warming.

[dansan]

Note that they didn't sustain injuries from the radiation, too.

Workers at the plant had _direct_ contact with heavily contaminated water - they had heavy burns from the radiation, I guess cancer is knocking on their door now.

If you live long enough you're bound to get cancer. You're more likely to get cancer from eating red meat, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, living near a fossil-fuel power station... Need I go on?

Please stop this discussion style. If your point is proven wrong you just derail or try to ridicule the others point. That is bad style and not helping a discussion.

[smoth]

What's wrong with storing it on site?

I wonder what happens when someone decides to bomb that area... do they have AA turrets online 24/7 ?

yeah I know, tell me about it. WWIII isn't going to kill us from the weapons it is when we start targeting the waste dumps of the enemy power supply. The world will not end in fire or ice. It will be as we all die from cancer and are unable to birth proper children due to genetic mutation from radiation.

[dansan]

The USA has the highest nuclear power costs because of the regulatory environment. It's heavy-handed and surrounded in a bureaucratic quagmire. The fact that most of the plants are unique designs doesn't help - First Of A Kind projects of anything are expensive. Look to France and China for more realistic costs.

An example from Germany: Here we don't have the "Polluter pays principle", meaning "the party responsible for producing pollution [is] responsible for paying for the damage done to the natural environment." (wikipedia). That leads to:
Plant operating companies have only payed 900.000Ôé¼ until today for radioactive waist storage, while only the _closing_ of mining shafts "Asse" and "Gorleben" will cost est. 4-8 Billion Ôé¼!! (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioaktiver_Abfall) Sorry... site is in german, the english wikipedia site does not even mention costs (!?).
Also there are the costs for the transports of the waist, amounting to 3 Billion Ôé¼ - also paid by state - meaning citizens.

BTW: "secure storage": http://www.fr-online.de/image/view/-/35 ... 5%2529.jpg

[SirMaverick]

They've essentially outsourced their power generation so that they can pander to the batshit-insane Greens.
Ah well, the French will be happy :)

France imports energy from Germany regularly in winter because their rectors break.

http://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/aussti ... en100.html

[HeavyLancer]

Note that they didn't sustain injuries from the radiation, too.

Workers at the plant had _direct_ contact with heavily contaminated water - they had heavy burns from the radiation, I guess cancer is knocking on their door now.

Have some numbers and facts, too.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter5.html
I'll quote from that above link on radiation and life expectancy:

How dangerous is 1 mrem of radiation? The answer can be given in quantitative terms, with some qualifications to be discussed later, but in most situations, for each millirem of radiation we receive, our risk of dying from cancer is increased by about 1 chance in 4 million. This is the result arrived at independently by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Committee on Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation11 and the United Nations Scientific Committee on Effects of Atomic Radiation. The International Commission on Radiological Protection has always accepted estimates by these prestigious groups, as has the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, the British National Radiological Protection Board, and similar groups charged with radiation protection in all technologically advanced nations.

This risk corresponds to a reduction in our life expectancy by 2 minutes. A similar reduction in our life expectancy is caused by:

[list][*]crossing streets 5 times (based on the average probability of being killed while crossing a street)
[*]taking a few puffs on a cigarette (each cigarette smoked reduces life expectancy by l0 minutes)
[*]an overweight person eating 20 extra calories (e.g., a quarter of a slice of bread and butter)
[*]driving an extra 5 miles in an automobile[/list]

Please stop this discussion style. If your point is proven wrong you just derail or try to ridicule the others point. That is bad style and not helping a discussion.

Sounds like you need to chill out. Address the argument, not the poster. I'm not trolling, there's already too many on this forum.

An example from Germany: Here we don't have the "Polluter pays principle", meaning "the party responsible for producing pollution [is] responsible for paying for the damage done to the natural environment." (wikipedia).

All nuclear power reactors in the Western world have decommissioning built
into their costs. In the US it's paid into a Department of Energy fund, so that if a company goes under the plant will still be taken care of. 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.

Waste is easy to sort out. Once the spent fuel comes out of the reactor it gets put into a pool where it cools down. Once it's done that it can get reprocessed or they can just skip ahead and stick it in dry cask storage (that picture I posted above) on site. When the reactor is due to be decommissioned you can bury it on-site (modern power plants have areas allocated to do this) or send it to a central repository. 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.

BTW: "secure storage": http://www.fr-online.de/image/view/-/35 ... 5%2529.jpg

Got context for that picture?

[TradeMark]

Yeah, there isnt anything secure... i find it quite weird to expect people to understand & remember where all our waste is after 100000 years. Not that i believe human kind will even survive that long though... thats probably why everyone doesnt much care either.

The world will not end in fire or ice. It will be as we all die from cancer and are unable to birth proper children due to genetic mutation from radiation.

True, but i dont think we need radioactive materials to cause these birth problems as we are already making birth unnaturally more each year... not to mention preserving life that should not be preserved etc... its not gonna be pretty in the year 102011 im sure about that... our genes degrade each year... what happened to bulldogs will happen to human race too. See it yourself:
Before:

After:

HOLY SHIT ITS UGLY.

These mutants cant even walk properly, nor breath at hot summers, nor can they reproduce naturally, every moment of their life is a pain, they probably scream inside: "kill me, kill me!", so if you see one of these mutants walking around, make him a favor...

[SirArtturi]

Solar and wind are ok

u sound like a greenpeace fan... obviously, they are not. terribly expensive technology with shitty efficiency. not to mention its noisy, looks shitty, kills a lot of insects and birds (what gp forgots to mention for some reason)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-2 ... -says.html

And, sounds like you are just ignorant and arrogant buffoon with these "woah, didnt know anyone except hipps still belive in global warming." stigmatizing and false statements.

Clearly nobody shouldn't deny global warming. It would be like closing your eyes from empirical facts. It's the causes, whether man-made or not, that are still under debate.

Germany is going to abandon nucler power by the end of year 2022 and Switzerland year 2034, and trust me, rest will follow. By that time nuclear power will be too expensive while renevables highly cost-efficient. It's the demand which determines the prize today.

It's good way to go. Nuclear Power has been widely accepted and knowledged as transit-technology because of it's hazardous waste and high risks of egolocial catastrophies. Do you deny this?

[Wombat]

Solar power may be cheaper

lold, and ?

clearly u know nothing. go read some... ignorant ^^

Do you deny this?

yes i do, its just chernobyl ,which was human mistake and huge tsunami wave. its safe and very efficient. show me some facts about more nuclear powerplants casualties (or more like, show me some accidents that prove powerplant failed).

for now, u just hate nuclear power just becouse u are scared of something that MAY happen. there is bigger chance u will get hit by a car.
------

what happened to bulldogs will happen to human race too. See it yourself:

u do realise that ppl pick weakest dogs from the litter (proper word?) and this way they get small fugly shitz, like tinkerbell.

u are safe as long as u dont have sex with midgets D:

[jK]

BTW: "secure storage": http://www.fr-online.de/image/view/-/35 ... 5%2529.jpg

Got context for that picture?

That's `Asse`. An ultimate disposal place for chemical waste. It's not usable for nuclear waste. And still some dumb politicians gave their okay to put medium and low radiant waste in there (w/o informing the public) and one of those politicians is Merkel!
And oh wonder ~20 years later there is water coming through the salt that should isolate the mine from the environment. And yeah, they didn't just really stored the waste like shown on the picture, but they closed the whole rooms (build a wall at the entries). And now the salt from surrounding expand in the free space between those barrels making it nearly impossible to evacuate them from incoming water ...

Again as said it wasn't planned for nuclear waste, still it shows the extreme problems with salt mines - the planned storage for nuclear waste `Gorleben` has the same problems (incoming water). And many other countries still prefer those salt mines, too. Showing that those politicians are either extremely dumb or ignorant (perhaps both).

[SirArtturi]

Considering the amount of meaningless and hasty topics and replies he does, you really should set a post-count limit for this guy.

The cost-efficiency of solar power will pass the nuclear power sooner or later, this conclusion can be made of the already existing statistics of supply and demand.

yes i do, its just chernobyl ,which was human mistake and huge tsunami wave. its safe and very efficient. show me some facts about more nuclear powerplants casualties (or more like, show me some accidents that prove powerplant failed).

for now, u just hate nuclear power just becouse u are scared of something that MAY happen. there is bigger chance u will get hit by a car.

I was speaking about the risks

And did I ever say I hated it or was personally scared of it? I'm just bringing your empty statements into critical light, while you're setting straw men and ad hominems.