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 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 with much smaller subventions for 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.
So basically the reason Germans got rid of nuclear energy is that they don’t trust Germans to do it. Makes sense.
If nuclear really wants to make a proper comeback, in my opinion the first thing they need to solve is the waste.
Could buy expert assistance in nuclear energy from Russia instead of gas (partially laundered via Azerbaijan, as if that were better than Russia). Or from France. Or from USA.
I mean, Russia is better than them due to the culture of kickbacks and bribes. That makes deals more likely to happen and makes German politicians happy.
I’m not especially anti-nuclear power overall, but temporary storage sounds like a terrible idea. Transporting nuclear waste twice means twice the possibility of something catastrophic happening.
Please research the term nuclear flask
Redd… err Lemmy believes in the doctrine of safe, clean, wasteless nuclear. Even if there was waste it is completely harmless, not a big deal, please look the other way. They can be no other
God… I mean viable alternative for generating energy. Also, did you knowthis straw man… I mean coal spreads nuclear isotopes too?
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.
And because it’s politically controversial, you can expect delays of many, many years for new builds in most democracies. Which is precisely why conservatives have been pushing it, because it allows coal and gas to dominate for a bit longer.
The high cost also means that it’ll take away funds that could have otherwise been used on much cheaper renewables. Nuclear energy is a terrible deal.
Nuclear is only expensive and slow to build if you’re building reactors from 1960-s.
There’s various nuclear reactors that have been built in Europe in the last 10-20 years. They’ve all gone crazily over budget. Yet every time the answer is that it was the wrong technology and other excuses. Nuclear is NOT cheap.
It’s worth noting that even counting in all the damage from Fukushima and Chernobyl and all the issues with storing nuclear waste long term (which isn’t nearly as hard as people make it out to be), Nuclear is still as safe as wind and solar energy.
Now follow the link and look at the numbers for the (mostly brown) coal that replaced it (much of who’s damage is caused by the nuclear materials in it’s ash), and the picture is pretty damn clear. Coal kills at 1000 times the rate of nuclear.
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.
Good for you. Once you actually do that, report back how its going. Its easy to post a statement like that in an anonymous online forum.
Literally go fuck yourself with a spent fuel rod. Your idea of a gotcha is that you can state that I wouldn’t do it and then when I say that I would do it, you tell me I’m a liar.
Mind your language. I can likewise say you only responded to “gotcha” me yourself.
That said, in this case I definitely feel a “put your money where your mouth is” is very much warranted. Because I have not heard of anyone anywhere doing exactly what you are offering. But I knew posting my opinion on this is going to end me up talking about this topic, so that’s all I got to say to you.
Good luck getting your personal radioactive waste storage, would earn you a pretty penny. Best of luck to you!
If it’s so simple, why did a highly developed nation find no solution for it over the course of decades? There are no perfect containers that don’t leak, there is no perfect storage location that doesn’t have a chance of contaminating groundwater. The real world doesn’t work like that.
It’s not considered worth undertaking such an initiative when most nuclear power plants have no problem just leaving the heavy (solid concrete and steel) casks as they are. They are not some looming threat, and they just sit there, outside, taking up a pretty small amount of space on the plants’ property. Nothing else is done because there is no real incentive to move them; no one cares.
Just sitting outside, exposed to the elements, changing temperatures and humidity? What a brilliant idea.
There’s a reason we aren’t doing this.
Thankfully we have this miracle invention called paint . You can hit one of these things with a train and you’ll kill the train. The flask will be fine. https://youtu.be/1mHtOW-OBO4?si=_VEjko6YDyKfnz31
We do do this all the time. This is currently the solution. We put it in giant flasks and store it on site because ninnies like you won’t let us bury it
Those people compare the waste from nuclear and the storage compared to the waste of coal and that storage (which is in the local area and global atmosphere).
Compare the waste amount per GWh produced how the waste is stored and you will see why some thinks nuclear is better than coal
Just so you know, the ash particles in soot from coal power plants, regularly spewn into the atmosphere and stored in open-air dumps represents a far more real radioactive danger than nuclear waste does.
I know, which is why I said that the damn ash piles are shite. Have no love for coal or how it is handled.
IMO a lot of this had to do with Schroeder’s and Merkel’s connections with Russia and running the country’s manufacturing base on cheap gas and oil.
It was also a geopolitical attempt to get some economic leverage on Russia iirc. Obviously massively backfired when it turns out tyrants are willing to sacrifice profit for power.
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.
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
This safety comes at a cost, literally. It’s fucking insanely expensive to keep it safe. Yet it can and has failed. Also, fissile material needs to come from somewhere. Guess where that is? Also, how much of it is still available? Nah, fuck nuclear power.
Yup. A significant amount of the fissile material in Europe used to come out of Russia. France, who is commonly held up as the arch-defender of nuclear power, is now fighting basically colonial wars in Africa for this stuff. There’s a finite amount of it, it’s costly to extract, costly to refine, costly to transport. Even before you’ve generated a single kilowatt of power, you’ve already done a lot of damage to the environment just for the fuel.
Gee whiz, I wonder what’s worse for the environment open pit strip mining entire mountains for coal or a few smaller mines targeting uranium deposits. As for thorium, we don’t even need to mine it. It’s fucking everywhere.
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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I don’t really like new YouTube front ends I just use youtube revanced but I don’t care if people use other stuff I’m just like a arch user telling you I use arch but I tell it to you nicely and dont force it on you Before people say hey this is a bot I know
Just block the bot if you don’t like it
Yeah, it’s safer than coal, on the same level as solar and wind. But it’s fucking expensive to achieve that equality! You can build 5 times the solar or wind capacity for the same price!
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
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.
Possible, but it isn’t and it hasn’t been since the 1970is. Given that reality I think it has been going into a sensible direction, because coal has been steadily falling since early 2000. The push for renewables has been a very direct result of the anti-nuclear movement, without it there might not have been any wish to transition towards them.
Without it there wouldn’t have been much need to transition towards them. Nuclear is almost carbon neutral itself.
Surprisingly the title is not: Germany ditched coal and did went back to it.
did went
“did go”, right?
Or just “went”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Instead, activists championed what they regarded as safer, greener, and more accessible renewable alternatives like solar and wind, embracing their promise of greater self-sufficiency, community participation, and citizen empowerment (“energy democracy”).
This support for renewables was less about CO₂ and more aimed at resetting power relations (through decentralised, bottom-up generation rather than top-down production and distribution), protecting local ecosystems, and promoting peace in the context of the Cold War.
The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.
This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party—today the world’s most influential—which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats.
Indeed, the very book credited with coining the term Energiewende in 1980 was, significantly, titled Energie-Wende: Growth and Prosperity Without Oil and Uranium and published by a think tank founded by anti-nuclear activists.
That lasted until the 2011 Fukushima disaster, after which mass protests of 250,000 and a shock state election loss to the Greens forced that administration, too, to revert to the 2022 phaseout plan.
The original article contains 651 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The tldr bot summarized only page one of a two-page article. That summary is missing a lot of context.
You see, it’s so much safer for Germans that Germany has been slowly poisoning itself by burning coal for the last few decades breathing in radioactive nuclei from the combustion of ionized compounds in the coal. By slowly breathing in lethal doses of carcinogens, they’ve completely avoided a nuclear meltdown.
Obviously this was the safer route than a potential failure of a reactor. You know those things that are exceedingly governed or regulated and managed. Because Germany is such an active seismic zone with so many natural disasters that are constantly a present threat to its reactors.
Now tell me again about this oceanfront property in Colorado you have for sale.
The problem wasn’t potential reactor failure but the non-existant space for nuclear waste
Nuclear waste isn’t nearly as much of a problem as it has been made out to be. The danger from nuclear waste is due to its high energy levels. But, reactors exist that can be fueled with the waste products of older, less efficient reactors. They can “burn” high-level waste products, producing energy and low-level waste.
And meanwhile nobody talks about coal ash, what is toxic and needs a lot more space for storage.
There is no storage problem. You are just simply uninformed. . We can process about 95% of the fuel into usable energy. That remaining 5% would end up buried. We have the technology and materials to process it safely and entomb it in solid glass and then bury that glass a mile deep in the Earth. This is proven technology. We know for a fact that this would be a viable long-term storage solution as we have investigated naturally occurring reactors and found that their own fissile material that was encased in magma is still there multiple million years later while being in the middle of an active fault zone. The material naturally and safely decayed and did not spread or disperse through ground water contact in an unmanaged environment over millions of years. The only true obstacle is convincing luddites that. It can be done easily and with fully understood horizontal drilling technology pioneered in the 1950s for oil drilling.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disappearing-pod/the-worlds-only-natural-nuclear-reactor/#:~:text=In reality%2C the French had,French authorities’%20eyes%20was%20tiny.
Missed opportunity to put solaire on the dinosaur.
Might I add a point on the cost from MMT perspective. So long as there’s enough people and materials to build nuclear plants so that we aren’t competing for them with other industries to any significant extent, we can print the money needed to build the plants without any significant effect on inflation. This of course is also true for any other plants or installations.
As I suspected. Conservatism is the reason we can’t have nice things. Again.
What the fuck are you talking about? Did you even bother to read the article?
"The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.
This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party—today the world’s most influential—which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats. This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022, and passed a raft of legislation supporting renewable energy.
That, in turn, turbocharged the national deployment of renewables, which ballooned from 6.3 percent of gross domestic electricity consumption in 2000 to 51.8 percent in 2023"
Ah yes, the arch-conservatives, the Greens and Social Democrats.
The activism of 1975 is the conservatism of 2015.
What do you mean? Don’t you think transitioning to mostly renewables while coal and gas go down are good things?
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.
What is the toxicity and half life / storage requirements for each waste type?
Toxicity I believe is about equal. Storage requirements are a bit stricter for nuclear in terms of storage container requirements, but much much much less in terms of storage space.
Note: radiation is not toxicity.
Thanks for this picture-perfect post of a nuke-stan / nuke-bot
FYI: There are generally five types of toxicities: chemical, biological, physical, radioactive and behavioural.
Toxicity I believe is about equal. I generally try to respect other peoples religion but yours is threat to the ecosphere. I believe you know your statement is bullshit.
Storage requirements are a bit stricter for nuclear in terms of storage container requirements People opposed to nuclear know this already but why do you think that is?
Follow up: How long does it need to be safely stored? Please note the number of years.
Humanity is about 300.000 years old, the Pyramids of Gizeh were build about 4600 years ago, the Vandals sacked Rome 1569 years ago, WW2 ended about 80 years ago. Now compare the those times with the time radioactive waste needs to be safely stored (and it definitely isn’t at the moment).
Note: radiation is not toxicity. FYI: There are generally five types of toxicities: chemical, biological, physical, radioactive and behavioural.
To be fair radioactive toxicity stands a bit out because it is (in your wording) much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much more toxic than anything else possibley including ‘forever chemicals’.
Nuclear energy is not cheaper nor safer, you’re just kicking a toxic, radioactive can down the road.
FYI: There are generally five types of toxicities: chemical, biological, physical, radioactive and behavioural.
Toxicity at least in scientific literature only refers to chemical toxicity. What even would be “physical toxicity”?!
To be fair radioactive toxicity stands a bit out because it is (in your wording) much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much much more toxic than anything else possibly including ‘forever chemicals’.
If you went to eat unenriched uranium, you would die sooner from chemical poisoning than radiation damage. People not educated about the actual dangers of radiation tend to over exaggerate its dangers.
Follow up: How long does it need to be safely stored? Please note the number of years.
For how long do you need to store toxic (by your weird definition I guess chemically toxic?) substances like lead?
Since they don’t have a half-life, until the heat death of the universe. So why does storage time only suddenly matter for nuclear waste?
Nuclear energy is not cheaper nor safer, you’re just kicking a toxic, radioactive can down the road.
Nuclear energy killed fewer people per kilowatt than hydro, wind, gas, and coal. Its just people like you spreading misinformation. If I remember correctly, solar is slightly safer.
Here is a good video why nuclear waste is not the issue people like you make it out to be: https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
All coal from the Earth has a radioactive component to it. Burning coal releases more radiation into the atmosphere than a properly functioning nuclear reactor ever does. Fly ash from coal fired power plants contains 100 times more radiation than nuclear power plants emit.
The idiots on here apparently also think that burning coal somehow doesn’t create waste that will last for longer than humanity has existed.
Nobody brings up coal but nuclear stans and bots. You definitely put your favorite straw man to work.
Germany could have eliminated coal a decade or more ago. That’s an important point to bring up.
I agree it’s too late now for nuclear to make sense, but that was a lost decade of coal emissions.
It would be of the discussion was nuclear vs coal - which it isn’t.
You’re bringing up the straw man because you want turn away the discussion from renewables.
There’s good discussion to be had on the (complex) situation in Germany but it’s immediately flooded by the nuke-bots.
The discussion may not have been nuclear vs coal, but the reality was. That’s the whole problem.
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.
That wasn’t my question
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.
Where have they been built?
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
My man probably played too much Fallout.
They already had it and it was working just fine. They tore it down and went full coal and some gas. Now wind and solar are taking over slowly, but it’s been years with more pollution and more radiation than any already working nuclear plant would have emmited.
this ignores the key issue that in Germany, there was already an extensive and perfectly functional nuclear industry. In other countries with no nuclear infrastructure, renewables are definitely the better, cheaper, more scalable choice - but countries which invested big many decades ago are in a different position, and Germany’s deliberate destruction of their nuclear capabilities has left them dependant on fossil fuels from an adversarial state - easily a worse situation than small amounts of carefully managed nuclear waste while renewables were scaled up.
Por que no los dos?
(en Alemans, por supuesto)
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.
The best thing to do when you fall off a horse, is climb straight back up on it. Rejecting almost limitless power because of an accident almost 40 years ago is foolish to me. Luckily research didn’t completely stop and modern plants are a lot safer with a lot of medical applications for the waste.
But the horse still has a broken leg (End-Storage) and noone really knows how to fix that at the moment. Maybe give the horse some drugs to make the leg stronger (Transmutate the materials from long to moderately-long half-lifes), but we still need to support it in the end.
The move to coal was absolutely stupid, the CDU (which is currently gaining some traction… again), dialed back on renewables which should have replaced some of the capacities lost to nucelar… and then decided a new coal plant was a great idea too.
Probably some corruption… sorry “Lobbying”-work behind that… its not like the Experts (which were paid pretty well) told them that was a bad idea…Maybe some more modern nucelar plants might work… but its unprofitable (probably always was, considering the hidden costs on the tax payers already), so needs to be heavily state-funded, same with storage (plus getting all the stuff out of the butchered storage Asse, putting it somewhere else)
I am open to it, but dont see it happening. And storage… no hopeful thoughts about that either, i dont think the current politic structures are well suited to oversee something like that from what we have seen from other storage-locations that are or were in use.I’d also love some more plans for big energy storage aswell as new subsidies for the energy grid and renewables. The famous german bureaucracy is obviously also not helping any of this.
All of the nuclear waste produced by all of the nuclear power plants ever produced could fit on the area of about the size of a football pitch. Storing nuclear waste, isn’t the massive problem. People say it is. It could be easily disposed of by digging a very deep hole and sticking it in it.
It’s not ideal, sure, but it’s not exactly a huge problem either.
And that hole would of course not deform at all or release the products into the environment over some amount of time?
We already have that problem… They tried more or less simply burying it in Asse, which spectacularly failed and now has to be brought back up… paid by the government (so us) of courseNot if it’s deep enough and properly encased. And even in the extremely rare occasion there are mistakes made with improper storage or unforeseen environmental changes that require re-storage, the environmental impacts are still negligible.
The fear mongering around this is absurdly overblown.
Subsidizing reactors to run off waste would be fine. Better than burying it. I’m actually against building new nuclear for general power (for economic reasons), but support reactors for this purpose. The waste is sitting right there already, and we have to do something with it.
which is funny because fossil fuels are everywhere poisoning the air and environment in general, not different from the nuclear radiation bogeyman
Actually coal plants which are in use, spew thousands of times of nuclear material into the air what any nuclear plant ever has.
Including Chernobyl and Fukushima?
Especially when coal rejects a lot more radioactive materials in the air than nuclear power
There are still large parts of southern Germany where you’re not allowed to eat wild mushrooms and every boar that is hunted must be tested for radiation. That is because of the fallout from Chernobyl 35 years ago and 1400 km away.
For sure, but there are places in Germany and everywhere in Europe where you shouldn’t be eating or drinking anything that comes out of the ground because of coal emissions, and places you can’t do anything in because of the gigantic coal mines. And that’s still currently happening and will keep happening for the foreseeable future.
Which is mostly due to fear(mongering) and not real residue.
And see another comment about coal emissions which are happening right now.
Just in case anyone is taking you serious: Please beware and adhere to the official warnings of the BFS (Federal Office for Radiation Protection). Contamination of forests with Caesium-137 is a serious health risk in many Bavarian forests. It’s half-life period is 30 years. The disaster was in 1986. That means it’s still roughly half of it there and the layered forest grounds preserve radiation well. If you’re a mushroom forager on vacation in Bavaria - just don’t do it.
OK, thanks. That ends the argument on South German forests, but doesn’t end it on nuclear energy being more or less harmful than coal.
The author is wrong. It is only a matter of time before Germany goes back to nuclear. Physics won’t change regardless of short-term opinion.
I’m not going to pretend I know what Germans are thinking but I thought the author made a strong case about why they’d dislike nuclear. Doesn’t matter how great it is when it’s unpopular.
I’m from Germany and I’m pretty sure we won’t go back. I do think that the decision was populistic and blindly actionistic in the light of Fukushima (like almost all political decisions in the last decades) and we’ll reap the rewards of that in the coming years.
