That's right, the application is submitted using Form I-131. At a stretch here means a 2 year absence from the U.S. (without traveling back to the U.S.) and 5 year total means you could live abroad for 5 years without losing your green card (by getting reentry permits which can be issued for a total of 5 years).
I have a GC and left a few months ago to Canada. Is it too late to get a reentry permit? I don't know if I want to return but having the option for 5 years would be nice.
You can only apply for a reentry permit while in the U.S. so if you wanted to get one, you would need to return to the U.S. and apply and then wait to be fingerprinted or depart and return to be fingerprinted. You then can remain outside while your reentry permit application is pending.
I still think the clients need a coordination server to discover each other (won't use multicast/broadcast traffic). You could probably make a browser that does this, but if they already do then I am not aware of it.
That statistic is only about deaths. You still have to deal with nuclear accidents leading to evacuation of huge areas happening once around every 30 years (unknown unknowns and what not).
Germany has a high population density. Such a catastrophe happening in Germany would lead to millions getting evacuated.
Another issue is the safe disposal of nuclear waste. It might seem like a low risk, but over the huge timespan nuclear waste needs to be safeguarded that risk adds up. Of course there's also other sources of nuclear waste, but it's best to keep the amounts low.
Last, nuclear currently in the west runs into economic problems. New reactors are plagued by enormous cost overruns and struggle to compete with renewables. But also old reactors are starting to become prohibitively expensive to keep running.
That's a good point, maybe we should also be evacuating huge areas around dirty power plants considering we are aware of the harm they cause to the nearby population?
Nuclear waste is a non issue. If you want to make it perfectly safe and untouchable to most bad actors, you can always dump it into a trench in the ocean. The radioactivity will not penetrate far through ocean water and will be less than other sources of radiation in the ocean today. The only reason why we do things like keep it stored on site, is because its still useful material that can be used in future reaction designs, and throwing it into the sea would be a waste of resources we worked hard to extract from the earth in the first place. I also have not seen any examples in history of people taking waste from a powerplant and turning that into a weapon against other people. So far in history, the only time nuclear weaponry has been used against humans was when it was built by an American arms factory, which is pretty remarkable considering the inherent violence that many of the elite of our species rely upon to maintain their power.
Particulate emissions are a solved problem nowadays For coal plants at least in Germany (see the purple bar in this graphic https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...). Traffic, wood burning and dry goods like gravel are the biggest sources currently.
The bigger issue is the CO2-emissions.
You’re not thinking far ahead enough for nuclear waste. Bad actors aren’t the only issue.
It’s entirely possible that people don’t know what they have in front of them, as can be seen with the Goiânia accident. Places for storage can turn out to be unsafe, for instance in Asse, an old salt mine in Germany there was a water breach leading to the creation of a radioactive salt slurry.
We have to safeguard nuclear waste for thousands to millions of years. So far states have only existed for hundreds of years in a consistent form. 30000 years ago Neanthertals still roamed the earth. It’s not impossible that societal collapse somewhere hinders safekeeping leading to containment of large landscapes.
Nuclear waste is disposed of by being buried underground in a region with impermeable bedrock. Short of deliberate excavation, or a direct meteor impact, there is no scenario in which this waste gets brought back to the surface.
Here are three arguments that I personally find both reasonable and convincing.
1) Nuclear fuel and waste are clearly dangerous. Your linked article makes a logical fallacy in that it claims a dangerous activity is safe because few people have died from it. But we know things are dangerous even when nobody dies from it. The level of security surrounding nuclear is beyond anything else, and it's required to keep it safe. These security measures are expensive to maintain but are dwarfed by the expenses when they fail.
2) Nuclear is much more expensive than we are led to believe.
This is quite clearly deduced from official writings from nuclear agencies, international treaties controlling who will actually pay if things go south, and also demonstrated in the market where nuclear operators are deeply in debt after selling nuclear power for unrealistic prices for decades. (See France).
Nuclear energy is most likely many times more expensive than any numbers presented to date from anyone operating nuclear power plants. This cost is covered "in blanco" by governments, meaning taxpayers now and in generations to come. I am convinced that the energy we consume from nuclear today will be paid for by our great-great-great-grandchildren and theirs too.
3) Renewables are better long-term so all efforts should be spent on inventing and implementing systems to make renewables the source of all energy. (Storage implied).
Money spent on nuclear is not available for renewables so it's reasonable to be opposed to nuclear for that reason too.
All that being said, it is of course very reasonable to keep plants running for a while longer given the current circumstances. :)
These are all valid. However, if only nuclear can get us past "bottleneck events" (e.g., oil supply chains falling apart due to deglobalization or the world's oil running out, either of which would (or possibly will) cause catastrophic effects), then that supersedes #2 and #3, and probably #1 as well in most analyses.
I'm not well-versed enough in hard evidence to assert that we absolutely need nuclear to make it through bottleneck events. But it's plausible that we do. And so we shouldn't rule it out unless there is high-certainty evidence we don't need it.
In other words: I think the burden of proving that nuclear is unnecessary is on the anti-nuclear crowd. I've heard plenty of arguments that wind/solar will be enough, but haven't seen an analysis that seems to prove it based on numbers. (If you know of any such analysis, please share!)
You make a good point, and I like the term "bottleneck event". :)
I think a case could be made that nuclear itself causes a bottleneck event in that we get addicted to the energy since it's deceptively cheap for current generations (as long as nothing goes south).
It will also cause a problem that vastly outlasts the bottleneck itself. We will have to actively maintain nuclear waste for longer than humanity has used oil as fuel for example.
But to be fair, we already have the problem anyway, so keeping existing plants running makes sense to get through the bottleneck. A few more years of operation won't make a big difference.
But the amount of money needed for new plants, that will be operational 10+ years from now, should in my mind clearly be invested in things like green hydro, pumped storage etc.
> 2) If it's too expensive it will not happen, no need for the government to step in.
The government steps in for every second of operation of every nuclear reactor on the planet.
Feel free to pay for your own insurance sans liability caps, find your own loans (without government enforced payment from end users for projects that produce no power), pay for the overruns in decomissioning, and pay for the labour of the regulatory bodies stopping the industry from rendering entire countries uninhabitable.
While you are at it you can control the pollution from uranium mine to the same standard that you'd want in your own back yard and pay for security.
Electricity is a utility and a natural monopoly. The government is always involved and they need to make decisions for what is best in the long term. If you don't have your own enrichment and processing industry then that decision isn't 'become dependent on russia for fuel'. We just saw how well that went.
2) The only reason nuclear power exists is because governments have stepped in to support it and cover most of the expenses.
If you remove that support, it can't exist. No organisation of any kind anywhere in the world can afford to run a business where income is generated for 50-60 years but expenses continue for 1000+ years after. France recently learned this: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-keeps-edf-buy...
3) There are a lot of viable energy solutions with better tradeoffs than nuclear, and it seems reasonable to build them instead of building nuclear power plants. Heat storage, gravity storage, synthesized fuel, hydrogen gas to name a few.
The costs of a nuclear power plant invested in any of these concepts would go a long way.
1) It is dangerous yes. That is the nature of the energy being so concentrated. But this concentration is a blessing because you don't need to mind nearly as much material, and it is far far easier to keep an eye on the waste. Where does the waste from coal/gas go? Into the air. It costs way more to try to contain the harms of those substances because they are the opposite of energy dense.
Nuclear waste is such a tiny tiny amount that we just keep it on site. It's solid. It's not going to leak out of its containers. It just sits in concrete casks on site. Even better, it still has 98% of the energy in it so you don't really want to get rid of it. It can be used in breeder reactors to extract more energy. I quote this too much, but all the nuclear waste the US has ever generated would sit in a single football field, 10 yards high.
2) Nuclear is capital intensive AND the only energy generation that is forced to pre fund its own decommissioning and cleanup. The increased operating costs of nuclear plants is largely due to intentional mismanagement b/c of politics. For example, in France they force nuclear plants to stop outputting power when renewables are generating. They prioritize renewables because that's what politics dictates. They also mandated a cap on power allowed to be generated by nuclear plants, forcing the closure of perfectly good and already paid for plants, so they could buy more renewables. These privatized energy markets don't want stable cheap energy because there's no money in it.
In addition, the US has largely forgotten how to build big things. But it can be done. The UAE just finished 4 1250MW reactors in 10 years. It will generate a quarter of their electricity, (basically) carbon free for 60+ years. Cost was 6B per reactor. Over 60 years, it's a steal. Renewables are only "cheap" in LCOE because the storage costs and capacity factor costs are often not included. Even if you build a megawatt of solar/wind, you really only get 20 to 40% of that peak capacity on average. In Virginia, we are building a wind farm for 10B that is 2640MW. And it is intermittent, off shore is usually 40%. You could get a 1250 MW stable nuke for that much. And it would last twice as long.
3) The main issue with solar/wind though, is that we literally don't have enough material to build enough of it. Not to mention the battery storage. It's not a matter of we can't mine fast enough, we literally don't know of the mineral reserves needed. Here's a presentation going over a report that find this: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2403
> I quote this too much, but all the nuclear waste the US has ever generated would sit in a single football field, 10 yards high.
Well you couldn't because you'd have a stew of fissioning soup. But once you include all the concrete and steel and low level waste that needs decades of storage it's about the same size as a 4hr battery for the entire country.
> But this concentration is a blessing because you don't need to mind nearly as much material
> 3) The main issue with solar/wind though, is that we literally don't have enough material to build enough of it. Not to mention the battery storage. It's not a matter of we can't mine fast enough, we literally don't know of the mineral reserves needed. Here's a presentation going over a report that find this
False. If it's a problem for PV it's a much worse problem for existing nuclear plants.
Olympic dam is one of the world's largest uranium mines. It produces 7.5g of silver and 30kg of copper for every kg of Uranium.
You need 10kg of natural uranium for 1kg of PWR fuel.
PV is made of sand, copper, and silver.
70g of silver is enough for 3.5kW net of solar at 5mg/Watt (after needing 5g for the fuel and control rods which you have yet to supply indium, cadmium, and zirconium for).
The solar panels will produce ~1.8TJ in their lifetime and be recyclable. The nuclear fuel will produce 500GJ and require large quantities of steel and concrete for storage and transport.
You get triple the net energy from a uranium mine compared to nuclear.
The silicon, glass, frame, and power electronics take less resources than the rest of the plant.
The story for wind is not so hilariously one sided (for example it uses more concrete than nuclear), but it's still fine. The blades of a >3MW turbine have about the same energy density as packaged nuclear waste. There are also at least 3 storage technologies undergoing commercialisation that use abundant materials.
> False. If it's a problem for PV it's a much worse problem for existing nuclear plants.
There's basically unlimited quantities of uranium in sea water. Plus you can breed it from thorium if you want to.
> But once you include all the concrete and steel and low level waste that needs decades of storage it's about the same size as a 4hr battery for the entire country.
I highly doubt it but I'd love to see the math on that.
The author of the report I linked concludes that fission cannot be main power source of the future because of the limits of mineable uranium. However he completely ignores the ocean as a source of uranium, which is basically inexhaustible. We don't get it from there today because demand is low and it's cheaper to get it from the ground but ocean uranium capture has been demonstrated.
Solar panels by themselves don't require a lot of rare material but they do require tons of high heat and carbon to "bake". A large part of how cheap they are today is due to the fact that they are made using coking coal in China. But of course the material constraints of the storage needed for solar/wind is the main obstacle. Until we demonstrate cheap storage at scale, wind/solar won't cut it.
> I highly doubt it but I'd love to see the math on that.
It was very rough hyperbole/fermi estimate. Can't find figures for the US, so using europe.
Europe has 2.5 million m^3 of low level waste and 1.5 million m^3 that's fairly imminent from refurbishments/decommisioning and replacement (an array of 6 by 6 football fields stacked 20 yards). This is only about ~50 years, so it will go up over time.
Europe uses about 2660TWh/yr or 300GW
At 500Wh/L (high but existing) that's 4 hours for the 2.5. At 300Wh/L it's 4 hours at 4 million m^3
A lot of that waste probably doesn't need containment after a decade or two, so it's only a ballpark. (and a real battery can't be that densely packed without overheating). Conversely 5% or so of it needs multiple centuries or millenia so it would accumulate much higher.
> The author of the report I linked concludes that fission cannot be main power source of the future because of the limits of mineable uranium. However he completely ignores the ocean as a source of uranium, which is basically inexhaustible.
In addition to ignoring sea uranium mining which does not exist in any meaningful way he also ignores a bunch of things which actually do exist like LiFePO4 batteries, the last 10 years of PV research, trains, LEVs and affordable offshore wind.
It also ignores things that are much more likely to exist than uranium sea mining like prussian blue batteries, AlS, iron air, perovskite solar panels and affordable tidal power (all of which are presently undergoing large scale industrialisation).
It doesn't exist industrially because there's no need for it. Uranium has been incredibly cheap for decades. But the cost of fuel is such a small factor in the cost of nuclear energy that you could 10x the fuel costs and the LCOE wouldn't move much at all.
LiFePO4 batteries still need lithium, and any wind turbine > 1MW requires literally tons of copper. These solutions are simply too material intensive, ie not energy dense enough.
> It doesn't exist industrially because there's no need for it. Uranium has been incredibly cheap for decades. But the cost of fuel is such a small factor in the cost of nuclear energy that you could 10x the fuel costs and the LCOE wouldn't move much at all.
That's a great way of saying 'I believe the capital and operational costs for nuclear are at least 5x as much as renewables and will stay that way'.
This is $5/MWh in an AP1000 and $10/MWh in lower burnup models. Once the cheap Uranium goes, that doubles. If Rio Tinto or Kazatomprom actually cleaned up their mess properly, that doubles again. Your proposed 100000km^2 sea mining operation is unlikely to be cheaper. There are subsidy free solar farms already at around $13/MWh with more normal prices being in the $30-50 range.
A vestas 660kW turbine uses around ~500kg or 3t per MW net of copper (less than a nuke plant) in the nacelle, busbars and cabinet https://www.copper.org/environment/green/casestudies/wind_en... everything else including transmission can be made from Aluminum. Bigger turbines are more mass efficient as are ones placed offshore. If you wanted to scare monger about wind, focus on the permanent magnets as that's not solved commercially yet.
PV already uses less than a tenth of this. A TopCon or Perc cell uses about 5-10x as much silver as an AP 1000, but silver plated copper metallization reduces this by a factor of 10 and is already being used in demo plants. There are also Aluminum foil backed cells being trialled commercially.
> LiFePO4 batteries still need lithium,
SIB, Fe-Air, AlS and NaS batteries do not, and supply chains for them are better developed than those for PWRs or for still-fictional mining methods.
> That's a great way of saying 'I believe the capital and operational costs for nuclear are 5x as much as renewables and will stay that way'.
Yes, and it still ends up being a better energy source IMO because you don't have to build millions of individual machines. Further, I'd argue that those costs can come down much further and easier than trying to reduce material cost of renewables.
This source (https://help.leonardo-energy.org/hc/en-us/articles/360010919...) puts offshore wind at 6 tons per MW and nuclear at 0.7 tons per MW. I'm not sure if that is accounting for the fact that the location of wind farms are determined by where the wind is vs nuclear plants can be placed wherever. SMRs will help place generation even closer to demand.
Time for napkin math. If we want to convert half of our 490 exajoules of global annual fossil fuel energy to offshore wind energy (let's say all offshore so we can use a generous 50% capacity factor). Then we need 5.22 million offshore wind turbines (3MW each), which will require 94 million tons of copper. That's 11% of all the copper we think exists on Earth. For one generation of wind turbines that will maybe last 25 years. Maybe. This is before we build ANY battery storage, which also needs large amounts of copper, not to mention lithium. It just doesn't make sense to me.
The same calculation for nuclear says we need 6 million tons of copper to replace that same 245 EJ, at a 95% capacity factor. Just 6% of the copper compared to wind. And those plants can go for 60+ years.
Solar PV is even worse than wind for utility scale energy because of its abysmal capacity factor. The main drawback for PV will be the amount of storage or overcapacity needed. So unless we get a miracle breakthrough in energy storage soon, I don't see how wind/solar can scale to replace most of our fossil fuel energy. I'm not against using wind/solar in numbers that make sense. They will definitely be part of the solution, just not the main components IMO.
> Time for napkin math. If we want to convert half of our 490 exajoules of global annual fossil fuel energy to offshore wind energy (let's say all offshore so we can use a generous 50% capacity factor). Then we need 5.22 million offshore wind turbines (3MW each), which will require 94 million tons of copper. That's 11% of all the copper we think exists on Earth. For one generation of wind turbines that will maybe last 25 years. Maybe. This is before we build ANY battery storage, which also needs large amounts of copper, not to mention lithium. It just doesn't make sense to me.
State of the art offshore turbines are 15MW each (so about 5-8MW net). There are commercial 3MW turbines which only have a relatively tiny amount of copper in the nacelle. 6t/MW is high for the turbines alone, but low if including substations and cabling, so I don't know where they drew the boundary. Worldnuclear uses 27t per MW net.
Bus and internal cabling is sometimes Al in smaller turbines as well.
Connecting cables and transformers can also be done with Aluminum. It doesn't happen very often yet because the wind industry lives in the real world where a $1/MWh O&M increase means something won't happen unless it has a commensurable reduction in capital. The second copper rises in price by 50% or so the industry will swap. Al coil substation transformers are already viable.
This cuts out about 80-90% of the copper in onshore wind and 50% or so in offshore (transmission is extremely copper intensive)
Subsea Al transmission cable exists in demo projects but has maintenance issues. It has been tried at scale but would increase costs substantially.
> Solar PV is even worse than wind for utility scale energy because of its abysmal capacity factor. The main drawback for PV will be the amount of storage or overcapacity needed. So unless we get a miracle breakthrough in energy storage soon, I don't see how wind/solar can scale to replace most of our fossil fuel energy
We've had the 'miracle' in the form of sodium ion batteries in about 2018 -- niche safety critical applications for aqueous chemistries are on the market and multi GWh/yr scale factories are presently being built. $60/kWh cell cost is a reasonable expectation (at which point 48hr storage is viable and all PV+battery production is cost competive with nuclear at ~45 degrees north). There are also various projects to radically reduce the cost of brine mining.
Fe-Air is highly promising for 100hr storage but still building out a demo project. AlS and molten salt NaS are undergoing initial commercialisation steps but there have been other technologies at this level that never materialised.
Re. The 480EJ of fossil fuels. There are only 800EJ (2400EJ thermal -- which has relevance for heating and hydrogen) of commercially viable Uranium ore for use in a PWR (even if all the lower efficiency ones are decommisioned immediately). BWRs are a little more efficient, as are Candus (which can use about 4kg of natural uranium where a PWR would use 1kg of enriched). Even in the existing FNR plants (which have resource constraints, cost, reliability, and safety issues to work through before they can be commercial), a closed fuel cycle has never been demonstrated. Reprocessing via MOX and existing designs only adds another 200EJ (600EJ thermal).
Sea mining might be possible, but a world where we can extract the 8kg of natural uranium for 1kg of fuel is a world where we get several thousand tonnes of copper from the same water.
The problem is immense, and the role nuclear energy can provide is only small. Reduction is the primary tool we have.
How do we make sure we don’t do this again? What are current things that are unpopular today but will be regrettable in 10-20 years? We need to eradicate the root cause, because we will make costly mistakes like this over and over. That means taking an extremely rational approach towards problems regardless of their popularity and allow opposition to emotion-driven zeitgeists that thrive through oppression and curbing speech.
We need to take a stern look at what went wrong with a few things like this 1) Deindustrialization of the west and rampant globalization with not much thought given to national security 2) Manufacturing loss 3) Rise of China through subsidies and unchecked betting by companies like Nike and Apple. 4) No one in Silicon Valley wants to work on defense and military ventures.
The machinery that enables immunity is allowing unpopular but rational opinions in the society. Newspapers wouldn’t print uncomfortable truths.
What can users do to get certainty over which one is the correct fork? In POW you can check the POW. Is there a trustless solution for this in POS? Or is the only solution essentially to ask around and hope that people aren't lying to you?
In practice, it's the same as with Bitcoin: you have to get the correct, current software. It's just that the software will include a block hash from a few months back.
You might argue that Bitcoin is defined as the chain with the most hashpower, period. That would remove all subjectivity from Bitcoin, but it would mean that a 51% attacker could arbitrarily change the rules and steal people's funds. That's not how it actually works; a 51% attacker still has to follow the rules of the protocol for their blocks to be accepted by the non-mining nodes, and that means there's social consensus on the correct software to run the protocol.
That's not how it works. Hashpower decides the canonical chain, not the rules of the system. Hashpower makes sure that the blockchain can't be rewritten. Hashpower can't change the rules of the system, because those blocks would be invalid and rejected by the network.
There's no consensus needed on which rules to use. Everyone can use whichever rules they want, by using different versions of the software. Different rules define a different currency, like euro or dollar. Using the best currency with the best rules is just a game theoretic focal point. Everyone chooses to use the best version of the software, because they assume that everyone else does so too, even in the absence of communication. There is no "correct, current" software in Bitcoin, because it would be a single point of failure.
There's no objective protection against long-range attacks in PoS, because there's no hashpower to prove the canonical chain. It requires the provider of the "correct, current" software to decide which chain is the right one.
>>Hashpower decides the canonical chain, not the rules of the system.
No, hash power and the rules decide it. If you have invalid signatures in your blocks, it doesn't matter how much hashpower your fork has, it won't be accepted as canonical by other forks.
51% attacks can not arbitrarily change the rules nor can they steal funds. They can double spend or prevent finality. Nodes enforce the rules of the network by rejecting blocks they deem invalid.
- wait a bit to make sure that you can talk to different people on the network and see what each of them see
- check checkpoints on twitter or websites like etherscan (are they seeing the same thing I’m seeing?)
In projects like Mina, since you do not download the history of the chain (there’s a single zero knowledge proof of a few kB that covers the whole history) you must rely on a marker for “chain quality “ to differentiate potential forks.
Note that there was also some research on how to get signal from the transactions you see that you’re on the correct fork (from some ex colleagues working on libra): https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1440.pdf
Do you honestly believe that is a fair summary of the article?
The decision to shut them down happened long ago. They voted against a proposal from the opposition to revert that. The plants were planned to shut down since a long time, there is a lot of unsolved issues around keeping them running, like fuel and personnel. The plants also would impact gas usage only by 1% and electricity isn't a great replacement short term for all the gas used.
In hindsight I think the decision to get out of nuclear was wrong, especially before getting out of coal. But keeping the last 3 running for some more months isn't really a solution for anything.
It seems irrational because that's not what's happening.
Those power plants can't be run next winter.
Contracts have been terminated, replacement parts with long lead times haven't been ordered, maintenance windows have been shifted in anticipation of the shutdown. It's possible to write new contracts and order new parts, so they could be back in operation, maybe sometime late in 2023.
But that would still leave them them down precisely in the period that matters most: Next winter.
I'd be way more worried about the general populations ability to buy groceries and keep the house warm in the winter.
Globally a lot of harvests are falling through because of floods and heat waves. Combined with the inflation that's just starting to take off... Paying for life's necessities will be challenging for a lot of employed workers
A government is a law unto themselves. They have power to do what they need in times of war. Germany shouldn't be pulling a Chamberlain moment while Russia is hot to commit genocide in Europe and roll over whoever they want.
The first person who said words like yours was probably a chieftain long ago who went to his smiths and said "I need my new sword NOW, hurry up with that hardening!"
> Contracts have been terminated, replacement parts with long lead times haven't been ordered, maintenance windows have been shifted in anticipation of the shutdown.
"Excuses"? If you know that your company shuts down one year from now, why would you be ordering spare parts for five years into the future? Especially if you've known that date for twenty years like Germans did?
Sure, sure, but I find difficult to believe that an industrial superpower such as Germany can't find a solution in a couple of months.
The the usual politicians' way of speaking. If there was the political will of having the nuclear power plants works, they would go and find the spare parts in a second. There's no political will (thank you Greens!) so they make up excuses.
Germany is an industrial superpower without military industrial complex and command vertical, meaning that the government is not set up to do such things quickly (in fact, I don’t think even China would be able to move that fast).
Germany's shutting those down because of the Fukushima disaster.
A lot of Germans believe (rightly or wrongly) that Japanese are as quality-conscious and dependable as they themselves. Corollary: if the Japanese can fuck up in the ways that led to Fukushima, then the German operators can fuck up in similar ways.
Now, these people may be wrong. But they made the decision. Until Fukushima, there was a net pro-nuclear vote, after, against, because these people switched.
If you want to argue about safety, I think you might do well do focus on the safety issue that made the significant voter segment change their opinion.
Well, people were evacuated in time. The big question is: can they come back, like ever? The threat isn't so much people dying from radiation if evacuated in time, it is that large regions of densely populated central Europe can become uninhabitable and not usable for agriculture.
AFAIK, the Union/FDP government reversed that decision, made new contract with the plants, changed their opinion again after Fukushima and we now have to pay breach-of-contract fines to the nuclear power plants.
If twenty years ago it was decided in law that X would shut down about now, and X is shutting down now, then I don't see a reason to not say that the decision to shut down X now comes from a law twenty years ago.
Mine is that the decision to stop was taken by a government with a parliamentary majority in general, but narrow popular backing in this specific case. So the law at risk of revision if the right/wrong parties won an election. Some politicians thought revising it might be a good campaign issue.
The reacter lifetimes were extended after such an election, and I think it was a first step. If that had gone well, one of the parties in the coalition would've proposed revising the law before the next election. But it did not go well: "Fukushima ändert alles", said Merkel, and I think she was right. From that point on, the law aligned well with a broad majority of voters. Noone proposed a revision as a campaign issue after that point.
Right. There is no dispute that the Bavarian forests are still strongly contaminated from the Chernobyl disaster and will be for many decades. You still have somewhat to be careful to eat mushrooms from there and especially wild boar.
The problem with nuclear is simply that it is irrelevant to the current situation. Won’t add enough energy to the grid, won’t solve the problem of gas demand at all, so it really doesn’t matter if Germany was right or wrong about it.
No, nobody will admit to that or change their minds, the end of nuclear in Germany will be celebrated as a success for the environment.
No, changing the opinion now would not matter. Germany killed its nuclear industry decades ago. Being right about this would have mattered in the 80s and 90s. You don't get the CO2 or methane that has been emitted back into the ground or the people that died out of the ground by being right in 2022.
It very much matters over the timespan of several decades. That is enough time in which many more nuclear power plants could have been brought online. Just because Germany made the gross error of not building out enough nuclear power to provide for their needs doesn’t mean it is impossible.
No, it doesn't. The nuclear plants were never a substitute for residential gas heaters and the chemical industry consuming copious amounts of natural gas. Any shortfall from the nuclear shutdown can be covered by the underutilized coal plants. It's temporarily inconvenient but doesn't necessitate gas imports in any way.
Uh...are we still talking about Germany? Because in Germany they clearly weren't, unlike in case of France. And Norway's absolutely prodigious consumption of electricity (quadruple amount per capita) even underlines it: electrical heating is absolutely not the way to go forward -- efficient building codes are.
They weren't because of Germany's energy policy, not because nuclear is a bad fit for residential heating. We're talking about "[nuclear on] the timespan of several decades".
Germany has neither a nuclear military-industrial complex like the French do nor the opportunity to waste copious amounts of energy the way Norwegians do, so I fail to see how references to those countries are in any way relevant for Germans' situation. No amount of energy policy will compensate for their different circumstances to the extent of turning Germany into a second France or a second Norway.
Even if you think that's insurmountable problem there's an easy solution: Pay the French to build and operate them, they already do that for other foreign customers.
But look at France's portion of nuclear at the start of the 70s, then the 90s. There's no reason except political will that Germany couldn't do the same.
Perhaps. But saying with 20/20 hindsight of the 2020s that people of the 1970s should have made momentously different decisions for the future of whole national industries for decades to come doesn't feel any less arrogant to me. And that's even assuming that the international situation decades ago was the same as one of today, which it wasn't either.
I'm talking about what should be done today, not crying over the milk spilt in the 70s. I only mentioned the 70s to show how rapidly nuclear could be built to replace other energy sources.
If you look at any longer term projections on the German or EU energy mix in the next 10-30 years, natural gas will still be critical to the energy mix in 2050 if current plans continue. E.g. [1] shows a nice summary of that.
Thus arguments like "efficient building codes" are a red herring. You'll still need to heat your efficiently insulated buildings.
The current plans for doing that are fundamentally still those spearheaded by Germany and others before 2014. If the EU has a serious commitment to longer term sanctions on Russia those plans need to change.
I don't think they will. I think we'll still be buying Russian gas then, and that Germany et al will find some way to sell out Ukraine in the next couple of years. But one can always hope for better.
If you're suggesting a reaction today, then I need to point out that globally, over the past decade, new renewable generation was being installed roughly 15x faster than new nuclear generation. So even that is yet another difference from the situation from the 1970s that makes the experience of 1970s inapplicable: we have choices today that we didn't have back then.
> natural gas will still be critical to the energy mix in 2050 if current plans continue. E.g. [1] shows a nice summary of that.
Being critical and being a large component are two different things -- and it's not that difficult to source smaller amounts of natural gas than what Germany uses today. As far as predictions for distant future are concerned...well, we know how e.g. IEA was able to botch those. So I really wouldn't take any predictions about 2050 for granted.
> Thus arguments like "efficient building codes" are a red herring. You'll still need to heat your efficiently insulated buildings.
Decreasing the energy required by a factor of five or so is not "a red herring". That's a massive change. Likewise, there's apparently a chance that by 2030, this will have been amended to require zero-energy buildings in the future.
What is "enough"? If any solution has to solve all the problems to be considered at all, you're going to have trouble noticing solutions that chip away at the problem until it's solved.
The answer for the war is coal and this is exactly what Germany is doing. It is simpler and cheaper to run the existing coal plants at the full capacity or even increase it than try to maintain the nuclear plants long past the original design lifespan and that were planned to be stopped for years.
In retrospect it would be better if Germany did not decide to shutdown the nuclear, but presently this is a rational decision.
It “really goes wrong” only because we've set a really high bar for safety when talking about nuclear risks compared to most other carcinogenic risks: air pollution, pesticides, alcohol, tobacco, etc. If people where living in Prypiat right now, most of their cancer would come from other sources.
Because of the cultural stigma associated with radiations (which itself comes from the very real fear of a world-ending nuclear war during the early cold war) most smokers would refused to live around a nuclear accident site, even though it's quickly (after the most radioactive elements, namely iodine, has decayed away) much less dangerous than the cigarette they knowingly smoke all day.
Fun fact: did you know that in Germany alone the area of what has been destroyed by coal mining is comparable in size to the exclusion zone of Fukushima. This is when things go alright with coal: https://nitter.42l.fr/autommen/status/1538496930262704128#m
And yet we’re all still here and given the number of nuclear power plants and how long we’ve been using them compared to the tiny number of accidents it shows that it is truly the safest form of large scale power generation.
It is also a lot safer today if new reactors are built. The problem are the old reactors need to be shut down because they're based on older designs. We need to start building Pebble Beach reactors where even if there is a containment break, safe small carbon balls with a thin sliver of fissile material just spill out on the floor. These spread out and reduce their combined temperate averting a meltdown. Individually the balls themselves are not dangerous, they're lukewarm and could be held in the hand (not that you would). I think there are some even newer designs that go beyond this in safety. The problem with the anti-nuclear argument is that it is based on the old rod reactors like the one that failed in Fukushima prefect, Chernobyl or 3 mile island. Of course we shouldn't run those older models anymore. You need to start building the new safer reactors before you begin shutting down the old ones so you can logistically switch, however. Instead we're unfortunately heading for a future where we eventually just shut down these old reactors for safety without a real plan for replacing them. Or, we keep running the old models until they become the very cautionary tale that makes everyone nervous about nuclear.
At the moment it seems that the CO2 problem is more pressing and of greater magnitude than the problem of nuclear waste. It sounds like a relevant tradeoff.
You are misjudging the mood regarding nuclear power in Germany completely. You would have to expend so much political capital to keep those running, it‘s simply not worth it. Not for the benefit they provide, not for any communication goals you might have.
It really seems like a foolish decision. Is there any good explanation for why they are shutting these down other than anti-nuclear fears? I mean, it's Germany of all places so I can't imagine they have any concerns about costs to refuel, refurbish or maintain these reactors in the future--it's likely a rounding error in their GDP and budgets.
they stopped maintenance of these nuclear power plants 3 years ago because they "knew" they were out of life. Thus, they don't have the people or the safety measurements in place to go on with nuclear. Also, if the greens have no problem going further with coal, they wouldn't have a problem going on with nuclear (for a little while). So, it's definitely based on facts and not on idealism.
Also (I still don't understand HN's hype for nuclear), let's not forget how often and much the nuclear plants have to stand still because of xyz (e.g. too little cooling water, which was the case in France in the last months).
Sure but this is Germany, a financial and manufacturing powerhouse in the world. If they decided they wanted these plants to keep running I can't imagine they would have any trouble at all doing so.
What you can imagine isn't all that relevant though, once the decision to mothball an installation of this size is made it isn't as though you decide to run your car for another year. This is a massive infrastructure project, with all kind of regulatory hoops they need to jump through to operate safely, including training of employees, gear certification and so on. Starting things back up again could well be a multi-year project.
Germany's GDP is 4 trillion dollars, its government budget is over 400 billion. Refurbing 3 nuke plants is nothing with those resources. The entire manhattan project that pioneered nuclear power only cost about 50 billion in today's money, but they aren't even starting from scratch like that. If they wanted it to happen I can't see any financial or technical blocker.
Sure, but why bother? These 3 plants would only add a tiny bit to the German electricty production. They really won't be missed. And they cannot be used to replace gas, as gas power plants are used for quick responses, not base load.
But it isn't a problem of money. Sure we could pay for it. But that doesn't make things with a 1.5year lead-time appear in 3 weeks. You can buy _more_ but you can't buy _faster_.
So sure, in a year or two we can get these reactors back online. In 10 or 15 years we can even get new ones. But these time scales don't help in the next winter and on those time scales we can come up with solutions that are even better and not at risk at making eating shrooms you find in the forest killing you..
That article is about the Stasi infiltrating the German Green Party.
> Indeed, far from being an indictment of Stasi infiltration of the Greens, Gieseke and Bahr's study is a portrait of a largely failed attempt by the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) to co-opt the nascent left-wing party on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
How did a few Stasi cooperators the 1980s Green Party translate into experts recommending Germany's nuclear power plants be shut down in the late 2010s?
OK that's a lot of reading (HN equivalent of a Gish Gallop?), but only one seems to be about Germany and it doesn't mention experts advising on the closure of nuclear plants, so I'm just going to assume there is indeed no source for your claims that any of them were on Russian payroll.
Germany still does not have a solution for the nuclear waste. Nobody wants it. All the pro nuclear people turn into anti nuclear people once their region is looked at for a nuclear waste disposal site.
Recently a former conservative minister got an award for fighting against wind power which is named after a former key figure of the early green movement in Germany, wo later dropped out to figth against wind turbines.
Bavaria is holding back the construction of a crucial north-south connection for electricity, which would bring the power from the wind-rich north to them. But they don't want the power lines messing up their landscape.
Everyone wants electricity, nobody wants to see the infrastructure that makes it.
Freezing to death this winter because your source of fuel oil is now your geopolitical enemy seems like a more pressing problem than the tiny amount of waste 3 plants will generate decades from now.
Please inform yourself before you say things like that. This discussion is already hard even without the constant interjection of uninformed opinions.
The decision to keep these 3 plants running or not is not about the waste, but about the fact that they were planned to shut down for years now, and there is some real hurdles to reversing that now. The impact of keeping them on is also rather small. The effort and money is more effectively spent elsewhere.
To prevent "freezing to death" would require heating, not electricity, which Germany has enough. It is the house heating that is powered by gas. And no one is going to freeze to death, the question is only the impact onto industry.
Sure. And it can. We are talking about 3GW of nuclear on a grid which has like 100GW capacity vs 60-80GW consumption. Much more, if the sun is shining or wind is blowing. Yes, it is absolutely annoying to bring back some coal plants into service and using them more overall, but those 3 plants are only a small drip into the bucket.
If they would be easy to run longer, I would be all for it. But big money is better spent into reducing the gas dependency overall.
1. As already noted by other posters, the decision to decommission these plants was made years ago.
2. As a consequence, the plants are in no shape to be run much longer without major refurbishment, rehinring and training personal. Also, the fuel rods are basically spent, new ones would have to be ordered and manufactured which takes quite some time. Want to guess where most fuel rods came from? (spoiler: Russia)
3. Yes, running them longer would have saved burning some coal which would be good for the climate.
4. They wouldn't have saved much, if any, gas burning. Gas power plants are "fast" plants, vs. nuclear plants, which are the slowest to change power output. Nuclear power plants consequently cannot replace gas power plants. On top of that, there are a lot of combined electricity/heating gas plants. They cannot be replaced by nuclear power either.
5. Electricity production is just a small fraction of gas usage, the biggest part goes to private home heating and of course, industrial usage.
So, yes, bad timing. Woulnd't have been a problem but for Putin attacking and utterly destroying parts of the Ukraine. But as things are, the best way to deal with is, to press forward with renewables instead of sinking more money into nuclear. (By the way, the real crisis is that only 50% of France nuclear powerplants are operating. Between heat and repairs, French power supply is under much greater pressure, actually often enough supported by Germany)
> They wouldn't have saved much, if any, gas burning
Compare to coal (that seems to be the tradeoff in Germany) nuclear energy kills 820x more people per produced energy unit. 820x the number of human lives lost.
> Can you back that up? To me it looks like only 5% of uranium is in Russia
It's not about mining. You need to enrich uranium first, and a massive portion of world's industrial capacity for that is in Russia: https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/research/commentary/re... - "Russia had around a 46 percent share of global enrichment capacity in 2018".
You are linking to uranium production, not the production of fuel rods.
And yes, the nuclear power plants produce less CO2 than coal. No doubt about that. But that is the consequence of a decision over 10 years ago. Unfortunately, the same government who decided that, didn't built up renewables at the required speed, actually slowed down the buildup of renewables.
And? What is the relevance of that? Not shutting them off wouldn't in any way influence the industrial and heating heating usages of natural gas in Germany which are the main problem.
You won't heat homes using electricity more efficiently than with direct heaters without significantly redesigning them, so all this would do would be using even more primary energy than before. This is going to happen over time as nZEBs according to the 2010 and 2012 EU directives are going to replace old buildings in the building stock, but you can't make that happen overnight.
Also, since the origin of the electricity doesn't matter in this case, to say that you'd need to not shut down those nuclear plants is clearly wrong since you could just use the currently underutilized coal plants to get exactly the same effect -- except the lack of electricity is clearly not a problem.
We're literally going into an era, where politicians are advising their citizens to "wear a warmer sweater" at home, in one of the strongest economies in the world. Every killowatt of energy helps, and if you're able to switch a percent or two of your people to use electricity for heat, that can save a lot of gas for areas, where there are no alternatives.
Yes, long term we can talk about many alternatives, but it's july... august, september, and it's already cold, space heaters cost ~10eur (2kW) and are still available (atleast more available than the alternatives).
It turned out that "strongest economies in the world" are like that by literally destroying the world's ecosystems. If you have any idea how "wear a warmer sweater" is a bad suggestion until we make it so that the destroying of the world's ecosystems is not necessary, out with it. Energy-efficiency-wise, wearing appropriate clothing is one of the best ideas.
And 30 nuclear reactors are still offline in France. Of the 28 still available, 5 are partially down. Many of these reactors are out of order because of technical issues (mostly unexpected corrosion).
I love the fact that this language has a short and readable interpreter. However pure functional languages are hard to use for many programmers. I've been looking for a language with a short and readable interpreter that supports some minimal form of object orientation. Something like a mini OCaml. Does someone know of such a language?
How would that work? Are we gonna host petabytes of photos on a blockchain? Maybe many exabytes even? Maybe in the future, but even then, as storage capacity increases I think file sizes too will keep growing for the foreseeable future as well.
